Context: i am in Europe so might be irrelevant to US.
I was thinking : we already have a usable solution to traffic jams. It’s called parking lots, as the ones in airports. You drop your car, then you take public transport to go anywhere. So imagine doing the same, but on daily basis. Build many such parking spots outside of the city , irrigate with public transport, make the price reasonable for daily usage (fuck you Charles de Gaulle Airport and your 14€/day fee). Boom, reduces your traffic by X% every morning.
As someone who drives regularly from Reims to Paris, I d be glad if such option existed, so I wouldn’t have to drive on Périphérique.
The two reasons I think it’s not used is “planning” and “politicians”. The latter isn’t good at former.
We have two at the two major ingresses of Groningen. The thing with P+R is that they really only take away the traffic from visitors. People who work in the city will still take their car, people who live there will never use it.
The municipality is working hard to get rid of cars in the city which I can only applaud. You’ll still need your car to go to Ikea and the like but the infrastructure for that is great. As long as you stay away from the center you can pretty much manage by car.
Now, Groningen is still pretty much a walkable city. I think Hamburg is something like ten times its size, yet last time I was there we still walked a huge chunk over there. If I compare it to, for instance, Amsterdam, which is still smaller but closer to the size of Hamburg, you just take a tram anywhere and you’ll get to wherever you need to be.
City centers in Europe have no need for cars.
why would you need to drive to ikea? do other countries not do delivery?
Delivery from my nearest IKEA warehouse which is ~70km away in a completely different city costs 50 EUR, or 30 if you join “IKEA family”
Because driving to Ikea means you can take stuff with you without paying for delivery. Plus sometimes we just wanna walk through the store and that means either going by car or taking two busses.
okay so you don’t have to drive there at all, you just choose to do so.
Well yeah but most Dutch people are cheap as hell so paying for delivery is a bit much if you can drive there and have a huge amount of trouble fitting a couch in their 2001 Corsa.
You don’t buy furniture at Ikea because you’re rich. The delivery fee is quite high for some people. Plus sometimes you want/need something the same day. And it makes sense to look at the stuff IRL as opposed to ordering from the website. IKEA is one of the things that actually make sense to drive to.