What it fails to mention is that this 11k is out of 265k on-street parking spaces, so it's less than one in twenty. Which is vastly better than nothing, but is not as much as I'd hoped for - there's been a very noticable uptake in the amount of cities talking about getting rid of cars in city centers altogether, and I was hoping Amsterdam would take the lead and get rid of much more parking space.
Well, I can imagine there's always room for them to take down more if conditions are right. The whole gradual draw down of parking spaces, the way they're doing it, seems pretty smart actually. It allows people time to get used to adjust to changes, which will help prevent shock and backlash in public opinion. In addition, it'll give the city breathing room to observe results, plan ahead, and make adjustments as they go. I'm curious to your thoughts about the whole method, besides the underwhelming number of spaces being removed.
It really depends on how you frame it. I think people living in rich, dense, historical public transit and bike path filled urban areas can be very open to the idea of significantly improving the living quality of their streets. You can't completely redo a street when you're only removing one, two, three parking spaces here and there. It's interesting to me that the news around this is framed in terms of how it will negatively affect rich people and their cars, instead of focusing on the benefits to everyone using the improved public space.
Yeah. That sounds horribly inefficient. The way I'd see something like this working well is if a city said " At the end of June, we're phasing out all of the parking spots on the block of Main between 12th and 13th Streets and the East side of the street will undergo preliminary preparation to have the bus stop expanded." If I had to guess, that's probably because we're still so far focused when it comes to city planning ski we're looking at how these changes effect that aspect. I agree with you though. If I had my way, I'd walk to work every day, rain or shine.You can't completely redo a street when you're only removing one, two, three parking spaces here and there.
It's interesting to me that the news around this is framed in terms of how it will negatively affect rich people and their cars, instead of focusing on the benefits to everyone using the improved public space.