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Comment by mantas | Hacker News Reader

And then Berlin is rather car-friendly by Euro standards..

Yes, but Berlin is car-friendly AND pedestrian-friendly. And getting close to bike-friendly as well. The thing is, Berlin has a huge area for a relatively modest amount of inhabitants.

This allows the city to "breath" a lot more and there is not so much competition for the space between cars, bikes and people.

Compare that to dense cities like London, Paris or Barcelona, and there is a lot more to fight for.

Berlin is the most car friendly city in Germany, both east and west (and the united city) spent a lot of money on car friendly streets - and still is.

It's funny that the German political party SPD which is responsible for most of this now wants to rebrand itself as bicycle friendly. But the largest sausage producer in Germany is now also the largesg vegan 'meat' producer. And soon pigs will fly.

Times change and mentalities with them. I think many European cities had a "cars everywhere" mentality during the post-WWII "renaissance" (maybe inspired by the USA) but then we realized that we hit a limit and started scaling things back starting sometime in the early 90's I'd say. Many projects from the 70's that were hailed as the future of transportation are now seen as huge warts we don't know how to replace now. Take the Boulevard Périphérique around Paris for instance: a nuisance for people living nearby, often gridlocked, super dangerous and atrociously ugly.

People realized that this approach wasn't sustainable and now more and more work is done to undo it, that's a good thing IMO. Ancient European cities simply were not built to accommodate cars, they don't fit.

> Take the Boulevard Périphérique around Paris for instance: a nuisance for people living nearby, often gridlocked, super dangerous and atrociously ugly. People realized that this approach wasn't sustainable and now more and more work is done to undo it, that's a good thing IMO.

Do not worry, we still go on building ring roads and bypasses around cities. Either where there were not yet any, or farther from the centre and the existing ones where there are already existing ones.

- But this time, they will be enough far away from the city, and they will make traffic jam disappear, we promise.

- Yeah, that's what you said 40 years ago about the first ones, and then urbanisation exploded around them and they quickly got swallowed by the city and its suburbs...

Bus yes, it is true that the fad of building expressways ending right inside city centres has stopped quite a long time ago.

What Paris could have looked like if Pompidou had his way in the 70s: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_autoroutier_pour_Paris

This hyperbole is obviously wrong or do you have any facts to show it?

I don't know anyone enjoying taking the car in Berlin and one is often faster with public transport or the bike in the city center.

> rebrand itself as bicycle friendly Shocking! Political parties changing course to adapt to change in popular opinion.

Well, there are plenty of cars in Berlin, so unless they're all masochists they probably enjoy that more than the other options. That I personally can't see why doesn't change that.

To add to this: I wouldn't call it "most car friendly city in Germany", either - but driving there isn't "hell on earth" either: I felt it's neither better nor worse than e.g. Kaiserslautern or the 10k inhabitants "city" I went to school - the traffic is just on a different scale due to the city being huge (compared to most other German cities).

(Disclaimer: I'm a relaxed driver; my experience might not hold for those who enter the full-rage mode when starting the engine)

Berlin built a very expensive tunnel in the city center, still expands the inner Autobahn ring, has large east/west streets (Stalinallee and 17th June), parking was free in residential areas until very recently, tickets for parking in the wrong spots are a joke and cars parking on sidewalks or bicycle lanes are pracically never ticketed. Bicycle police which was introduced to ticket cars and bicycles practically in the same way never tickets car drivers [1]

Compare this with the pedestrian infrastructure (many bad sidewalks in the East) or bicycle with no or chaotic lanes [2]. Also when houses are build or roads are maintained, car driver concerns are always prioritized above cyclists and pedestrians [3].

[1] https://rad-spannerei.de/2015/07/14/berliner-fahrradstaffel-...

[2] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/mediacenter/fotostrecken/berlin/...

[3] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/schild-soeren-dumpf/22966...

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