Cars don't belong in cities, says Top Gear's James May
Cars don't belong in cities, says Top Gear's James May
TV star has idea for Hammersmith bridge - and calls anti-cycling council ‘tw*ts’
James May added: “The thing that really bothers me is road sectarianism. Quite a few people in cars seem to be somehow offended by people riding bicycles because they’ve paid all this money for a car and think therefore they should be rewarded for it, but often they’re just not using the car very intelligently.” 👍
Obviously TV stars are the right people to ask about city planning. Because city planners and architects have given up the concept of automotive cities as recently as 1970 and nobody has been giving a fuck since then. On of the fathers of the original idea, Le Corbusier, declared the automotive city as failed because of the sheer number of cars . The automobile revolution had, in his opinion turned into an automobile explosion and no reasonable concept could handle the volume of traffic that were far beyond the estimations the original idea was based on. Nevertheless reasonable political reactions on the total failure of dealing with permanently increasing inner city infvidual traffic are still an exception. Because Hans Wurst and Joe Moron must have their car an arm's length away from their sofas or they'll either die from exhaustion walking to the convenience store or from acute lack of beer and potato chips...
Bit too absolutist imo, people with mobility issues exist, i'd say most cars don't belong in cities, and it would be solved by good design, traffic restrictions etc.
when I was a kid almost all kids took the bus and walked to school, now I live opposite of an elementary school in a "socialist block" in middle europe and in the morning there is a huge line of cars dropping off kids, the school literally has a roundabout in front of it's entrance to make it easier, it's awful design, not to mention there is literally a bus stop on the other side of the school.
There is 0 reason for kids to be driven to school.
I regularly transit between Heathrow and downtown. It's about 13 miles or so. Regularly 45 minutes to an hour and a quarter, and as much as an hour and three quarters if there was some event letting out at the time. For such short distances I don't think I've seen any US city compare. Sure, some have bad hours or short segments of regular congestion, and I've driven from one side of the country to another, but London takes the cake for shitty driving most any hour of the day for such a short transit.
We could learn from China as they've been solving this problem with EVs. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AomxytSwrkY
Cars will never go away due to the current city landscape, but things like these would significantly improve transport and livability.