"It's easy to want to drive one of these cute kei cars. It's another thing to put your family in them and travel down the highway at 70 mph," one expert said.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40818280

If there’s anything we should take from Japan, it’s treating cars like second class citizens behind transit instead of the other way around. The cute tiny cars are more a side effect of that.

  • PedestrianError :vbus: :nblvt:@towns.gay
    5·
    22 hours ago

    @UltraMagnus @frizzo One thing we need to do is allow cities to ban personal vehicles over a certain size within their dense urban cores to cut down on crash danger, property damage, and congestion and other nuisances due to oversized vehicles parked where they don’t fit. That way someone who lives an urban lifestyle could choose a minimalist car with less concern about mixing it up with monster trucks on their daily errands.

    • UltraMagnus@startrek.websiteEnglish
      3·
      22 hours ago

      That sounds tricky to implement, but I’m not strictly opposed. I’ve always been more of the opinion that some streets should just be converted to people-only altogether, at least in my downtown (there’s one street that gets closed to traffic once/week for the farmer’s market anyways…).

      • squaresinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        In Europe there are quite a few cities that ban cars that don’t meet certain emmission standards. Most big trucks likely fall under these bans, but it would also not hard to ban cars larger than a certain size.

        These European citizens usually have exceptions for professional use and stuff like that, so that’s not too hard to do either.

        Same goes with pedestrian zones, which are also very common in most European cities.