Given how many parking lots and empty spaces there are in Raleigh, could this be possible near us?
“Pete Adeney has teamed up with a Netherlands-based urban design consultancy to float the idea of a planned community in Colorado that would be car-free and bicycle-friendly. Situated between Longmont and Boulder, the proposed community – provisionally known as Cyclocroft – could be built in a one-square-mile plot, and become home to 50,000 people.”
Outside of the box thinking, that’s for sure…
Thank you for the post!
Short answer, no. Long answer, that town won’t even be possible there. That is pure fantasy. The moment EMS can’t respond due to reasons, and a person can’t make it to their local medical center there will be issues.
These ideas are pure fantasy. They are wonderful, but fantasy.
Sounds like they are building this from scratch on empty land. I could see it working out near Boulder. That place is very granola and could attack enough people to make it work. But it could just as well be a flop.
But to implement this in an existing city will be next to impossible.
2000 year old cities in Europe be like—‘…Americans.’
Let me rephrase…
But to implement this in an existing American city will be next to impossible.
Doesn’t have to be car free to achieve a lot of good things. This idea is akin to a horse-less town 300 years ago…there were none. Things still had to be transported. Amsterdam has space for some cars but is chocked full of bikes and pedestrians. The giant bike parking garage at the train station is absolutely like nothing at all in America. America as a whole will resist even after gas gets super expensive because hybrid and electric cars still enable sprawl. There might be enough people who want this to enable some of these communities to get built, but the wide open spaces here appeal to and are exploited by people wanting space. I think the commuting method of getting to jobs will need to be greatly reduced before carless communities become viable. Like, office workers only report on-site 1 day a week say. Manufacturing and trades will be the primary people driving about. While I think we can and should greatly reduce car dependence, there are both realistic/pragmattic obstacles and cultural ones.
Would this idea work for something like the Cargill site? It is close to DTR, so downtown or NCSU workers could telecommute or bike to work, it is a decent sized piece of land, and I am assuming there will still be streets of some sort for day to day services (trash pickup, deliveries [ie furniture/appliances], emergency services, etc). Some of the cities I visited in France had pedestrian only areas that went for blocks and blocks, but delivery trucks were allowed in at certain times (I think at night) a few days a week to deliver supplies etc. The big thing was that private automobiles weren’t allowed on the streets and they were virtually wide open for pedestrians and bikers. I can see this working for an area near DTR.
The guy behind the MMM is not “working with” anyone, to do anything. He’s a blogger who retweeted some pictures sent to him by someone who reads his blog (that’s about early retirement), and then someone wrote an article implying that a blogger is building an entire city.