The Only* Car-Free Neighbourhood in Canada (and why you can't live there)

Not Just Bikes
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2022–2024
YouTube
1.1M views · 4 years ago · explainer · evergreen

A Not Just Bikes video on a car-free neighbourhood in Canada, a place where people live without cars, and on why it is so hard to build another one. It asks what car-free living looks like and why it is nearly impossible to build.

HN people use it as a rare real example of a car-free neighbourhood, evidence of the demand for walkable places and of how zoning rules stand in the way.

“The real problem is that we couldn’t build another place like this if we wanted to.”
Urban design & public space
#car-free#walkable#urbanplanning#zoning#neighbourhooddesign#notjustbikes

6 comments from Hacker News

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@Mawr2023 · in “We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets”
Check out the Netherlands: • link • link • link • link • ▶ this video • link • link Freiburg, Germany is nice as well: link
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@axelfontaine2022 · in “The Only* Car-Free Neighbourhood in Canada (and why you can't live there)[video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@mitthrowaway22024 · in “The built environment and the determination of fault in urban pedestrian crashes”
> Cities are welcome to erect whatever barriers they like to private cars. ▶ this video "The real problem is that we couldn’t build another place like this if we wanted to. It’s not allowed. It’s literally illegal in Canada, to build something like this today."
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@Mawr2023 · in “Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians”
You're comparing living in a car dependant city vs living in car dependant suburbs. It's not going to be meaningfully different. You mention the constant noise, but what do you think causes it? To see what everyone means by car dependency, you'd need to see the few places that aren't. Here's what a 100% car-free island looks like: ▶ this video Here are some progressive European cities that have started to undo the damage that's been done by cars: • Freiburg, Germany: link • Haarlem, Netherlands: link • Paris, France: link Check out these background noise levels: • A very busy mixed-use street in Amsterdam: link • Exiting the train station in Delft, Netherlands: link • Cycling streets in the Netherlands: link You can even hear birds chirping at 4:29.
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@rhodin2022 · in “The most dangerous road for cyclists in America”
No just Bikes has an episode about a car free neighborhood [1], in Canada. [1] ▶ this video
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@scrollaway2022 · in “When cities treated cars as dangerous intruders”
> I’m not convinced that will ever change unless sprawl becomes unimaginably expensive. Right, but that's the core of my point: It is unimaginably expensive, it's just getting subsidized to ridiculous extents. (For the readers unaware of this: link) And saying the "vast majority" prefer it is wrong. They prefer it over the alternatives they have within the United States, not over the alternative possibilities. I'm absolutely not dismissing that some people prefer the suburbian lifestyle over EU-style walkable cities, but saying the majority of Americans do when so few even know what's possible is misplaced in the best possible read of it. The demand for car-free neighbourhoods is also obvious if you look at what exists, and how exorbitant the prices are due to the high demand and low offer. Another example: ▶ this video This song-and-dance of "Everyone likes suburbia because everyone wants to move there, it's illegal to build anything else because it would then be something else than suburbia, nobody wants the alternative anyway because it's too expensive, it's too expensive because it's in high demand, and it's in high demand because it's illegal to build something else" is like the definition of catch-22.
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