I'd also suggest that efforts to try to "remove cars" prior to this technology are likely to amount to wastes of time. There's a lot of people who want this, which makes me somewhat suspicious that the studies are just finding what they want to find, and I rather suspect what Hamburg is going to discover is that they spend a lot of money making it so cars can't penetrate their "city", only to discover, oops, we can't actually remove them after all.
You may dislike passenger cars (and I detect more than a faint whiff of Puritanism around that whole attitude, but that's a discussion for another day), but to entirely remove roads requires you to also solve the problem that motor vehicles are also the general circulatory system of a city. Now I think there are solutions to that problem... but they're all about 10 years away, minimum. We aren't there yet.
And then, when we do get there, it won't need to be helped along by governments or modern-day Puritans... it'll just happen, faster and better than any premature attempt to make it happen before the tech is there ever could make it happen.
It's fine – I probably have a puritanical side. More than that though:
I believe cities just aren't the right place for cars. It's a tragedy of the commons that car usage creates a situation where public transport cannot be funded to an adequate amount and traffic conditions scare away people who would otherwise take a bike.
Cities also suffer because cars encourage a structure of big, centralised shops that are easily accessible by car, but nothing else. I do get the convenience of a mall (and the economics), but, wow, how much would I miss the social environment of a lively city.
It's possibly a cultural thing … you prefer whatever environment you grew up in, and that just happens to be 'old Europe' for me.
OTOH there's nothing better than a curvy mountain road or the Arizona desert in a convertible. I'm not a complete Luddite.
When I use the term Puritanism, it's not an ad hominem. It is a description of a mentality that the United States imported in quantity, and despite what people may like to believe, it is not isolated to one side or another.
This is still not the best summary I know, but one half-decent summary is that Puritanism is the fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun, or perhaps something more like, "I don't like cars and have no use for cars and therefore neither should anybody else."
Objective reasons that car traffic is "bad" is in short supply. It is more a taste issue than anything else. But the proles might be having fun with their cars, and we can't have that....
It is unreasonable to require a person, albeit implicitly, to justify their motives, when the thing they are objecting to has a material impact on their life. In this thread people are talking about noise, pollution, safety and more. Yet you side-swipe his/her motivation.
Your fun is yours alone. Their motivation is theirs alone. A vehicle's aforementioned externalities are common though. We can just focus on those.
> You may dislike passenger cars (and I detect more than a faint whiff of Puritanism around that whole attitude, but that's a discussion for another day),
Is this how Americans insinuate that they think someone is too old-fashioned and stuck up? heh.
Personally I don't see the connection between Puritanism and wanting to live in an environment with fewer cars.
You may dislike passenger cars (and I detect more than a faint whiff of Puritanism around that whole attitude, but that's a discussion for another day), but to entirely remove roads requires you to also solve the problem that motor vehicles are also the general circulatory system of a city. Now I think there are solutions to that problem... but they're all about 10 years away, minimum. We aren't there yet.
And then, when we do get there, it won't need to be helped along by governments or modern-day Puritans... it'll just happen, faster and better than any premature attempt to make it happen before the tech is there ever could make it happen.