• grue@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    How about we get that wish in, say, 10 or 20 years instead of your strawman scenario? Transforming cities to be walkable/bikable does not take that long, if you’re serious about it.

    • FishFace@piefed.social
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      4 days ago

      Personal cars are going to be here for way longer than 20 years, but 20 years is still long enough to build a lot of solar panels, so the same questions still arise. What will your answer be?

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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        4 days ago

        Tops of buildings, over canals, may be even over roads and rail.

        It isn’t that far out of reach that a car park gets covered in solar panels, then the next developer reuses them when redeveloping the site for denser development.

    • bufalo1973@piefed.social
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      3 days ago

      You forget that people live also outside of cities. If you live in a town away from any city you need a car.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        No I didn’t. First of all, forgetting and disregarding aren’t the same thing.

        Second, living in a small town isn’t an excuse. Small towns are inherently walkable (due to being, ya know, small) unless you somehow manage to design them spectacularly wrong. And contrary to American belief, it is actually possible to provide rail transit to them: the US itself used to do it 100 years ago, and Japan still does.

        • bufalo1973@piefed.social
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          3 days ago

          In Spain, where I live, there are town (<1500 people) that have the closest supermarket art 25 km of they are lucky. And no bus or 2 in the day with the schedule for the kids.

          • grue@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            First of all, how close is the closest non-super market? I mean, I could say “omg I’ve got to drive 20 miles to get to the nearest Costco” but that doesn’t give me an excuse to pretend the Lidl in walking distance doesn’t exist.

            Second, even if there really isn’t any way to get groceries without driving 25 km, just because some particular town is designed stupidly and lacks necessary services locally now, doesn’t mean it has to be that way in the future. It’s somebody’s fuck-up that needs to be fixed, not an immutable natural law inherent to how small towns work.