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Originally Posted by pilotbob
Actually it is quite the opposite Zelda. Paris and also older New York neighboorhoods are organic... people lived there and worked there... so there is a good mix of residential, office, retail, etc in each area. While as urban planners like to have the Offices all in one area, the Retail in one area, the residential in one area. This is why US commute is so bad, in the AM 90% of the residents are streaming into the downtown office area. In the PM they all leave. If the major residential areas are all one direction the highways are terrible.
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this is an interesting point, however it's only partially true... first because Paris
as we all know it today is thanks to Baron Haussmann, who basically razed the city and rebuilt it in the second half of the XIXth century. He created the wide streets with many intersecting diagonals.
one main reason for these streets was to ensure that the army could easily get through in case there were more popular uprisings, because it's much harder to build barricades across a wide, straight open avenue than narrow twisting alleyways... however the *publicly* announced reason was to create a city where people and vehicles could easily circulate and to improve the overall urbanism and hygiene of the city. so in fact there is almost nothing organic about the paris of today.
and since then, the city planners have taken very seriously the regulation of zoning and building permits ; for instance, after the Tour Montparnasse was built (a huge glass office building, the tallest building in the city), they realized what a mistake that had been so no more skyscrapers are allowed. the government is also making a lot of efforts recently to tear down all the sinister suburban housing developpments built in the 60's and 70's and replace them with more "human scale" housing ; several smaller buildings instead of one monolithic one, with parks and open spaces and cafés and shops, and public transportation easily accessible. this is what i mean when i say urban planning.
Quote:
Originally Posted by aru
i think its because of the automotive lobby. AND because train rides are still more expensive than the gas for the car, however that may change ...
The good news about increasing oil price is that it may force the issue
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yes, it's completely because of the automotive lobby. like the "Great American Streetcar Scandal" i mentioned earlier in the thread. but that's a good point about the price of oil ; perhaps it will be the catalyst needed to finally make a dramatic change in the attitude toward travel and transportation. although i beleive i heard somewhere that the US government provide a tax decrease to people who buy hummers, which consume obscene amounts of fuel, but which seem to be astoundingly popular, so maybe there is still a long ways to go yet...