• grue@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    You dont want to force people away from cars u want to make public transport a better more appealing alternative.

    It depends what you mean by “force.” It isn’t necessary to legislatively outlaw cars or anything like that, but you really do have to at least stop catering to cars if you ever want public transit to be good. More concretely, you have to change the zoning code to stop limiting density and forcing developers to build parking. That accomplishes two things: it allows there to be enough trip origins/destinations within walking distance of stations to make the transit viable, and it limits the available parking to only that which the free market is willing to provide (a lot less than zoning codes typically mandate now) which discourages driving by making it hard to find a place to park.

    That’s not actually “forcing” anything in reality, but a lot of car-brained people will tend to think it is because to people accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

    (Another related example: NIMBYs think “abolish single-family zoning” means “prohibit building single-family houses,” but it actually means “give property owners the freedom to build either single-family houses or multifamily buildings if they want.” It’s actually deregulation, but the people wedded to the highly-regulated status-quo will swear up and down that the proposed change is some kind of big-government communist plot.)