“No street would need to be completely cut off from vehicular traffic; emergency services could get through and transport for the disabled, just as they do in places like Ghent, Belgium, where the city center has been car-free since 2017.”

Every street is still accessible by car. You simply wouldn’t want to go on the pedestrian streets until you absolutely have to because like in car free European cities today, you’d be intermingling with pedestrians with a speed limit of like 5mph.

You’d simply drive the vast majority of the way on the car streets, and then the last 20-30m on the 5mph street so you can take your stuff up to your doorstep.

If that's what you're proposing, there's no need to use clickbait words like "ban cars from Manhattan". You're just shifting the incentive structure so that people will be less inclined to use a car.

Yes, the article is horribly misnamed.

I did read that before I posted that comment, and the explanation isn't what I got from it. Things like productions (catering services come to mind too) fall into a very different category than emergency or humanitarian services. I could support something that allows exceptions for reasonable needs.

I think focusing on the history as justification perhaps results in an incomplete argument. What people care about is how is this going to affect my life, so to really convince people who currently rely on cars to do business and make stuff happen in NYC, one needs to explain the implementation and how it won't make their lives way harder. That being said, I love history, especially the history of the places my life is intertwined with, and I enjoyed the article in that regard.

Amusingly, I'm a bassist, and the subject of transporting a double bass in NYC emerges on the web forums from time to time. One thing I've learned is that jazz is performed at much lower volume levels in NYC. For instance, many NYC bassists insist that a bassist shouldn't ever need an amplifier. I wonder if the hassle of hauling gear has simply caused a shift towards less gear-intensive music.

In contrast, out here in the midwest, it's easy to throw a mountain of gear into a minivan, and parking is abundant. Venues also have more square footage and are designed to be louder -- big rooms with high ceilings and no materials to absorb sound.

I have a hunch that volume levels are killing live music.

Overall I'd give up my car and hump my bass on the subway, in return for a more pleasant performing environment.

Are you saying high or low volume levels are killing live music?

High volume levels. Performances are too loud, and venues are too loud to host performances at sane volume levels.

I lug around about 6/7 bags of video equipment around from time to time for interviews I do. I could never manage it on the subway. It would otherwise be awesome to have less cars on the roads.

Pedestrian zones in German cities habe exceptions for transportation to or from locations inside them. Otherwise, stores in these areas couldn't get their wares etc. This just prevents regular car traffic and creates a safe space for walking. I don't know if the concept can scale tonan area the size of Manhattan. Just the necessary level of traffic would probably add up to to a lot of vehicles entering and leaving.

I would assume that the solution would be to ban traffic on most steets, but leave a coarse grid of open roads for passing traffic. This should still cut down on commuter car traffic on these.

The assumption that cars are the only publicly available cargo carriers would also be ridiculous if cars weren’t so abundant that all other solutions are floored. There’s everything from cargo bicycles to autonomous delivery vehicles that could fill this role.

Well, let's get back to first priniples. You need to be able to transport goods, that is, put them on wheels. Beyond a certain mass, you also need some kind of drive train to move it. Muscles can't produce enough force. And you need the flexibility to reach any address. These are fundamental preconditions without which large cities cannot exist. You need all of this for construction, maintainance and providing basic supplies for people living there and removing their waste. These requirements lead to a system of streets and cars/trucks of some sort.

Modern society uses the same system for individual transportation, which makes it inefficient in densely populated areas. Banning individual car traffic works in cities works because alternatives can be more efficient and they are practical because of the short distances involved.

Autonomous delivery vehicles in a pedestrian-filled area sounds like sci-fi given the current state of technology.

The amount of gear required for even a small production can be significant. I also do sound for a wedding DJ, and the rig that we bring to any event even if they have their own PA requires multiple trips with a large folding cart to bring from the vehicle to where it's going. We currently handle this by finding the closest place possible to pull up, throw our hazards on, get all the stuff inside, and then go find parking. Requiring another mode of transportation to and from the venue would add a bunch of time and difficulty, no matter how convenient it is.

This isn't a hypothetical; we did a gig in Atlantic City last December that was at the end of a long pier into the ocean, and the closest we could get was a no-parking zone on the other side of the board walk (the venue actually told us this was SOP). After unloading we put the cars in a garage a few blocks down (when you're using muscle power to move hundreds of pounds of gear, you get as close as possible, it's a safety concern). Not only did it take hours in freezing temperatures, but we had to bring an extra person with us to stay with the cars to make sure they didn't get tickets. It sucked. Hard.

It would make a ton of sense for park-and-ride like garages to have rental stations for cargo bikes or small electric delivery platforms (more like golf cart than car, e.g. Gator 6x6 though electric would be nicer). That way someone coming in would have a last mile solution that wouldn't present a huge danger to pedestrians. Or every few roads could be set to allow limited vehicle access for deliveries in normal hours and all roads allow nighttime deliveries. This wouldn't be a substantial burden while providing all the benefits of a carless space.

The Velove Armadillo is a containerised last mile delivery cargo bicycle especially appropriate for dense city centers.

Its use is being expanded in Germany and the Netherlands, by DHL, the big German carrier.

https://www.velove.se/news/dhl-express-taking-the-next-step-...

This is certainly a nice idea. But this is only usable for transporting smaller goods in small or medium amounts. This would not suffice to stock a busy grocery store, for example.

Indeed. It won't replace the need for inner city car based transportation infrastructure, but it can shave off expensive peak car load.

Isn't delivery traffic in German pedestrian zones mostly limited to certain hours? I recall seeing trucks in the early morning, but almost never during the day. Not sure if that was due to regulation or because that's when most deliveries naturally happen.

Depends on the venue; I've played things like coffee shops that required us and the people putting the show on to bring everything inc. drums and a PA system.

That's also specific to musicians, like I said there's a bunch of things that have these same types of requirements. Catering comes to mind off the top of my head, and they have to worry about temperature control for their products as a safety concern. I've never seen a caterer on a subway lol.

That sucks about that coffee shop. It frankly doesn't sound like a good music venue if it provides no accommodations for musicians. I hope they paid you a lot for the hassle of having to bring in all that equipment. If they didn't, I'd say don't take those gigs in the future. That may be the reason they had to get out-of-towners to play it.

The catering example falls into the general delivery use case. Yes, there's still going to be a need for delivery vehicles. But they need to be made much safer (right now they're the #1 cause of death for cyclists, and they kill a lot of pedestrians too). And when we get rid of most of the cars, at least that'll free up a lot of on-street space for loading zones so you won't constantly see trucks that are illegally double parked or blocking bike lanes.

Specifically on the truck safety issue, we need trucks that adhere to pedestrian/cyclist safety standards, i.e. smaller, non-articulated ones that have full skirts all the way around that prevent people from being driven over in the event of a crash. Right now we have all the way up to full semi-trailers driving through the city (which are illegal but the cops don't enforce), which make super wide turns and can easily sweep people under the wheels and crush them to death.