Starting out...

I posted a similar message to carfree_cities before the creation of
this group...

To paint a rosy image about how easy it would be to start a carfree
area, all we would theoretically need to do is:

- Find a transit-friendly city with good commuter rail lines leading
out--NYC, Philly, and Boston come to mind.

- Find a line with frequent service--a good rule of thumb would be to
say we want a headway of the length of the trip into the city. So if
the ride into our host city will be 20 minutes, we want a train every
20 minutes, preferably with 24-hour service.

- Find a few hundred undeveloped acres along this rail line, waiting
to be developed.

- Build a single carfree district similar to J.H.'s reference
district: half mile in diameter, centered around rail line.

- We would want basic vehicular access for deliveries, construction,
and emergencies. This would probably be handled by a parking lot on
the periphery. Pulling a number out of the air, I'll say that we'd put
in 1500 parking spaces for our town of 12,000. That's roughly the same
number of spaces around our college football stadium here, which has
nothing more than simple intersections for exits--nothing fancy like
interchanges required.

What are the problems faced here? Well...

- If I am not mistaken, developers get massive subsidies to do their
stuff--in many cases, a free Interstate or six-lane road running
there. The developer doing this project would probably not get such
generous handouts, since they're not building any streets.

- Would UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS, etc, be willing to make deliveries? I
used to work for DHL, and my boss got mad when a local university cut
a campus road off with bollards, forcing him to walk a bit or not
drive straight through. I would also not be surprised if a handful of
companies are not willing to do business with a place to which they
can not drive straight to the building.

- Would any local governing boards like city/county comissions try to
stop the development? Any plans by the university at which I work to
make streets carfree or cut them in the middle are met by screaming
opposition. In one case, the university's Women's Center said that a
street cutoff would slow the campus police down by two minutes
responding to a rape, even though the police had already made plans to
work around the cutoff and make sure there are always patrol cars on
either side of it. Coincidentially, the Women's Center building is on
this cut-off street, so apparently, someone there was inconvenienced
by their now-longer drive there. Basically, if someone tries this, I
have a feeling they'll be attacked for doing something that is either
obsolete, old-fashioned, un-American, or unsafe.

So, here we have it: a group of people with a desire to live in a
carfree city. If we picked NYC as our "host" city, we would probably
have no problem finding 12,000 people willing to do it. All we'd need
now is...well...the same edge that auto-centric developers get from
the local gov't. :-)

my two cents...anyone else's?

~matt