On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 11:49:45 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 4:19:52 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Tuesday, October 1, 2019 at 10:28:35 PM UTC-7, Chalo wrote:
I don't want special bike-specific infrastructure. I want the cars gone, restricted to special motorsports facilities during limited hours and with extremely heavy taxation to help mitigate their pollution and noise.


Well, you know that isn't going to happen. What's more, the entire civilized structure of the world is built around rapid high speed transportation via motor vehicle.

I agree that the planning COULD have been around high speed rails, small towns and bicycle transportation but there actually is no going back.

Chloe's plan got screwed by dumb oxen looooong before he was born. From a post by a mate in Utah:
'...the story goes that Brigham Young, who led Mormon settlers to the West in 1847, directed that the streets of Salt Lake City be made sufficiently wide so that a wagon team could turn around without “resorting to profanity”.'

Makes one wonder about Amish roads...

But it isn't only American roads. From a post elsewhere by me:
*I'm tempted to say, "Humane city planning takes bicycle commuters into account," but the fact is that, if it is true, it also appears to be irrelevant except in cities that were modernised largely from pedestrian walkways, like Dutch cities. Compare the British "New Towns", designed at a time in the 1950s when close living memory was of a poor prewar underclass which perforce cycled and could not dream of possessing a car, many of which offer interesting and in some cases exemplary cycling infrastructure -- which is mostly stands unloved, unused and empty."

From another post elsewhere by me:
Baron Haussmann* would be proud of whoever laid out that town [in Utah]: wide, arrow-straight roads running perfectly parallel to each other, crossing each other perpendicularly.

*Haussmann was the fellow who gave Paris the aspect it still bears, which was copied by cities around the world. He was arguably the most influential city planner of all time. Whether cyclists have anything at all to thank him for is a different story, as his prime motivation was to create wide boulevards specifically to speed vehicular traffic, precisely the sort of city planning one would perpetrate if the explicit objective was to kill pedestrians and cyclists (yes, I'm aware that Haussmann worked before the invention of the bicycle, but there were surely pedestrians in his time). Nor am I aesthetically all that keen on Haussmann's vision of Paris, all chill, inhuman scale and distance, a perfect prescription for the unlovable fascist cities Mussolini and Hitler created in the 1930's, which are also inhumane aesthetic disasters hostile to cyclists."

Andre Jute
Though, admittedly, the Musee d'Orsay is my second favourite art gallery in all the world, after only the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge (the one with the good university on the River Cam, not "the jumped-up missionary school outside Boston, Mass," as a literary protege would have it).

Salt Lake City is also laid out with North and South roads cut by East and West roads. I seem to remember that they are numbered in both directions so even Zen could find his way around.