Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #300 – 2023-12-23, 19:20:13

European rail network by 2040, including new lines to Narvik, Odesa and Mariupol.

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #301 – 2023-12-24, 08:50:30

Here's a section of allegedly completed Rail Baltica proudly presented on the website of Lithuania's Ministry of Transport.

https://sumin.lrv.lt/uploads/sumin/news/images/852x536_crop/5302_a68ffd7ccf3316728f5199bbd7f64086.jpg

Note the single track and the combination with local rail gauge on the same track. And I note that in jax's chart there is no seamless connection from Tallinn to Berlin. Nothing is as was advertised to the public and nothing looks the way the CGI plans were drawn.



So the time to take another look at the status of this nonsense is about 2040 now? Okay.

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #302 – 2023-12-25, 23:15:10

The latest video by Not Just Bikes is more to my taste than other videos on the channel or on "urbanist" channels in general. Namely, a recurring theme in the latest video is that urbanists are wrong and they have eyes only for some shiny hipster elements, not for the whole picture. The video is about Montreal where the bike infrastructure is patchy, so it does not deserve as much praise as (other) "urbanist" YT channels have given to it. Those "urbanists" should really get some more critique!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yDtLv-7xZ4

I'd go even further. An enormous problem with all "urbanist" channels is the disproportionate focus on bike infrastructure. The obvious major problem with bike infrastructure is two-fold:
1. It is for bikes (and not for other traffic, such as walkers or wheelchair people)
2. It is infrastructure, meaning it needs to be built and maintained. It is not something naturally arising from the landscape.

The point number two I direct against Not Just Bikes himself just a few videos back when he lavishly praised the Driebergen-Zeist train station in Netherlands. The huge problem that I have with Driebergen-Zeist train station is that it took lots of bulldozing to rework the landscape around the station. In the latest video he repeatedly denounces bulldozing, but in the train station video he did not notice that the landscape around the station used to be perfectly flat and it took lots of bulldozing and infrastructure constructing to give it its current design.

I am more radical than he is. I am anti-industrial in general. I prefer a more minimal infrastructure where everyone can coexist on the same road with necessary special infrastructure only for trains such as here.

Other good points in the Montreal video:

Walkable Islands

Every city has some nice patches to walk on. The real test is whether these nice patches are connected to each other. In Miami conurbation, generally a quite destitute car-centric wasteland, has some lovely walkable beach parks and cozy shopping centres, but when you try to walk from one such place to another, you definitely end up stranded on a sidewalkless road somewhere.

The reason for the walkable islands problem is political or administrative. An area, a block or two, is given to a single developer. This ensures a more or less coherent design for that area. It may be a good or bad design, but it will be more or less coherent as envisioned by the developer. At the same time it often also ensures that there will be no cohesion with anything around that area.

A related political problem is the current hype of bike infrastructure. When a city expresses willingness for bike infrastructure projects, they get funding more easily. In reality the city councillors are always far more concerned about preserving the car infrastructure: Talk about bike infrastructure is just to get the funding. So when it comes to actually building for bikes, the bike infrastructure is either placed incoherently in quiet streets that do not strictly need any special bike infrastructure or alongside highways that lead into bushes outside the city centre. The do *not* build infrastructure in busy highway-like central city streets where it is needed the most and where it would effectively moderate other traffic. And whatever bike infrastructure they build is uncontiguous and disjointed; there will be no unified network of bike lanes ever. All this is in evidence in Montreal and I have not seen "urbanists" take proper notice until very recently.

Hauptbahnhof test

This test involves walkability starting with a city's main railway station. I have mentioned earlier on this forum the walkability of airport surroundings for the same purpose. If main stations, ports and transport hubs are not approachable by pedestrians, then they are not meant for travelling. But main stations, ports and transport hubs are definitionally meant for travelling, so they should definitionally accommodate pedestrian travel also.

Privatised underground city

Sometimes in city centres traffic is deemed so dense that some of it is moved underground, be it rail, motor or pedestrians. When people are moved underground, it is rather hostile to let them walk in plain tunnels, so it is considered friendlier to surround them with some shops and the like. Moving pedestrians underground can be bolstered with the argument of saving them from weather, but plans of this kind transparently award a single firm a construction of what is essentially a massive underground shopping centre. This can have poor outcomes such as leaving the surface traffic unfixed or being even detrimental to it, if the entire idea is that constructing an underground shopping centre is in and of itself the fix. Shopping centres tend to hit smaller shops in the same area, meaning that the commercial atmosphere on the surface street may suffer. And finally, shopping centres tend to be closed outside shopping hours and in those times pedestrians would have to face the situation on the surface as it has become, even though the underground infrastructure was supposed to spare them from it.