376
[meme] What would cities be like today if we had never demolished our streetcar networks?
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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We have light rail in Denver, but it's not really the same as a streetcar system. Buses aren't, either. Imagine if I could just walk to the grocery store without running a gauntlet of trucks and commuters. The unfortunate thing with where I lived was the light rail station was on the other side of one of the most ridiculously pedestrian-hostile intersections I've ever seen. I guess I could take an Uber there...
This is half zoning, and half road design.
Too many areas in the US micromanage the built environment and force people to live unwalkably far from stores instead of having mixed-use zoning.
And then we have roads that are designed around the idea that the only people who matter are in cars.
I think I was dealing with one of those situations where racist/classist people in the 60s built highways to separate areas of town. There were small Asian and Central American grocery stores near me, where I had to cross 1 or 0 large roads... but the wealthier, mainly white area of town, with the Post Office and bar district, Safeway and Natural Grocers etc? Good luck. Good news is they're currently redesigning it. For anyone familiar, I mean the interchange of I-25, Santa Fe and Alameda in Denver.
Denver also had a street car network until the 1950s. There are still spots around downtown where you can still see the trails poking through the asphalt. They didn't even rip up the old rails. They just paved over them.
I used to live in a city in the northern Midwest that like many others had a street car network, until they took them out in the 30s for the usual bullshit “sell more cars” reasons. You could still go to a city lot and see the old street cars laying around, junked out. Such a regressive waste.