Here’s the study. Not your fault, OP, but because social media users are chronically too lazy to read articles past the headline, you may want to specify for their benefit that this happened in 2018.
Cars makes sense in rural areas, not in city centers.
100%
Here in Kansas City our streetcar extension opened in October, and it’s been a massive success. Millions of riders, and it’s clean, frequent, and almost always full.
People love it.
I love driving, absolutely, 100%, being able to get around and visit places that are out of reach of public transport is fantastic, driving on fast narrow roads with plenty of bends through the woods is awesome, visiting farm shops is great!
But I absolutely will not drive in the city unless I have to, I hate it, slow, annoying, expensive parking and just a bad time.
Here in Stockholm we have fantastic public transport, I have only taken my car to work 3 times in the last decade, that was only due to other circumstances forcing me to do so, and I hated it every time.
Nice!
My city tries to find a happy middle, but most people I think end up driving. We have ‘Park and Ride’ lots at the ends of the streetcar route.
In most suburbs here we have several “Infartsparkeringar” basically parking for when you connect to public transport.
I only use them when I need to get into the city during weekends as I live along a relatively slow railroad that “only” (yes I know I am spoiled) departs every 20-30 min to get in and out from the city, so I park by the metro.
That’s common in European cities. In some places, the park-and-ride lots are even free, or at least dirt-cheap. I recall it was 1.5 Euro per day in Antwerp. City centers tend to be really dense, lots of them have low-emissions zones and/or congestion charges, so it’s far nicer to park at the edge of town and take a tram or bus to the old city, which was originally designed for walking anyway.
In the city I live in, merchants whinged and moaned about pedestrianization, but business improved. I suspect they knew that it would, but wanted to try getting a subsidy from the city if they could, too.
