Re: Starting out...

hi build a carfreecity members,

this is david ceaser, one of the moderators of the
group. right now i am still in the process of
inviting people to join. if you have knowledge of
people who might be interested, please let them be
aware of this group and invite them to join.

i would like to wait until next week, until people
have had a chance to join before we get started. 
thanks so much for joining and please spread the word.

i hope you are well


david ceaser

--- "Matt Hohmeister <matt-AYtI9dDbSWpWk0Htik3J/[email protected]>"
<matt-AYtI9dDbSWpWk0Htik3J/[email protected]> wrote:
> 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
> 
> 


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