bikes but while this is a very welcome change and hopefully a sign of better things to come from my much maligned hometown there's still a chance that this project could rise again just with a little bit of greenwashing while north american traffic engineers may talk a lot about complete streets the actual outcome is far too often a complete strode sure it's six lanes of car traffic with no dedicated transit right away but look there are bike paths in the clear zone and apparently a hydro pole too this is a plan so terrible that even the artist's interpretation looks like crap and then there's arguments like this one one london politician who was in favor of the plan was quoted as saying cars pollute the most when they're idling so by not widening we're simply increasing congestion and idling now this is nonsense of course because getting even a small fraction of people out of their cars and onto other modes of travel would more than offset any impact of idling due to congestion i do love it though when suburbanites suddenly care an awful lot about the environment as long as the solution is to let them drive everywhere and as fast as they want and finally there's the issue of transit there is no doubt that public transit is the most efficient way to move large volumes of people by far but not all transit projects are equal wonderland road has a bus route that runs the entire length of the area that was due to be widened but since the buses get stuck in the same traffic as the cars nobody will ever take the bus if they can afford to drive the fundamental problem is that most of london is sprawling car center developments of primarily single-family homes this kind of environment makes it almost impossible to build high quality transit accessible by enough people to make it worthwhile transit should be used as a catalyst to build great places not as a band-aid on top of car dependent infrastructure the city needs to build high-quality transit with its own right-of-way and then encourage the development of mixed-use walkable neighborhoods around those transit lines i'd really like to see london take this cancelled road widening project as an opportunity to change for the better but i'm not very optimistic the city had a bus rapid transit plan which itself was a downgraded lrt plan but they've recently chopped off two lines including the western one that would have intersected with wonderland the strode that apparently had such crippling traffic that they were about to spend over NUMBER_TOKEN million dollars on it the decisions london has made around their rapid transit project shows that there's still a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of transit in a city it's not just to move the people who live there today but for the people who will live along the transit network in the future induced demand isn't just about cars it works for transit too but climate emergencies and mobility master plans aside london needs to ask itself one important question why did it ever think it needed six lane strodes for a city of only four hundred thousand people and how can a city of this size not have any rapid transit of any kind what development patterns led to this problem in the first place and what needs to change so that this never happens again because if they don't resolve this fundamental issue they'll be constantly throwing good money after bad car infrastructure i'd like to thank my supporters on patreon who pay me to travel through the looking
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN i'd like to thank my supporters on patreon who pay me to travel through the looking END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN