Cars like spread-out city layouts so that there is plenty of room for roads and parking areas, while pedestrians like dense city layouts to reduce walking distances. Does this mean that a city which is good for cars must inevitably be bad for pedestrians, and vice versa?

Or is there a way of making a city that is friendly to pedestrians without being hell for car drivers?

I'd say no in the vote, but it needs a bit of thinking. You need a city that has a decent centre with transport links, but each district needs good amenities within walking distance.

A good example of this would be MK... great for cars, and each area of town is nearly self contained and is served by paths and cycle tracks between each one.

I've lived in or near three cities (OK, large town in one case) which are very good or excellent for both cars and pedestrians.
i) Durham : dual carriageway from the motorway then throughpass taking you straight to multi-storey car parks close in to the pedestrianised historic centre.
ii) Milton Keynes : dual carriageway routes to and through the centre. Ample, cheap parking. Excellent, mostly covered central shopping centre. Direct pedestrian links from the centre to brilliantly planned green spaces.
iii) Brussels : Awesome subterranean GSJed expressways from the outer ring to the inner ring. Not so much traffic inside the inner ring, much of which area is pedestrianised and very beautiful. Reasonable public transport, too - a metro and trams.

It can be done.

It can indeed be done but unfortunately in this country the view seems to be anything that causes a vehicle to slow down for more than 8 seconds is perceived as 'bad'.

As Owen says, places like Brussels and, hell, even Paris, manage to feel OK for pedestrians despite huge volumes of traffic.

The problem is when pedestrians come into contact with traffic and what to do about it. The 1960's solution of pedestrian subways helped traffic but also helped muggers carry out their attacks. The 1990's and onwards answer is to replace subways with at-grade crossings but this means cars are affected. The answer in my view is to suppress major roads and have wide airy bridges that give pedestrians a feeling of space and security like the one at Paradise Circus in Birmingham. Narrow spindly footbridges are like subways in that they are vulnerable to attack by muggers.

In the end it comes down to cost. A £30k crossing will be seen as better value than building expensive structures regardless of the inconvenience to motorists.

Am I right in thinking that by "suppress" you mean "lower below street level"?

Probably not, but I can't think of good examples; certainly not the ones already given (out of the ones I know). I didn't find MK that good for pedestrians; it's too spread out for that, and the shopping centre design appears centred on getting there by car (although admittedly not as much as many others). It's less offputting walking around a traditional un-pedestrianised city centre (as long as through traffic has been removed from it), although they are usually much worse for cars.

Yes. You weren't thinking I meant suppress as in restricting or removing was you

That's how I normally interpret the word "suppress", but your post didn't make sense that way...

I think these two things aren´t mutually exclusive. I think that for it to work best though you have to keep the areas for the cars and the pedestrians separate, because cars don´t do well in areas where there´s lots of pedestrians, and vice versa.

Coming back to this thread, I'll bring up anti-car American Nathan Lewis (who I have already mentioned on the Nightmare from Sabre Street thread). He seems to think that a city can only be pleasant for pedestrians if cars are almost entirely excluded (by having most streets less than twenty feet wide from building to building). His logic goes like this.

If what he calls a "19th century Hypertrophic" city centre -- in other words, a city centre with more-or-less traditional buildings (but maybe rather taller) but wide streets capable of accomodating car traffic -- is surrounded by low-density suburbia, then there aren't enough people within walking distance of the shops to keep them in business. This means they must depend on drivers, but drivers will still prefer out-of-town shopping because out-of-town shopping areas can offer abundant free parking, while city centres cannot.

If the city centre is surrounded by high-density residential development, then there can be enough people in walking distance to make the businesses pay, but the overall environment would become so unpleasant (due to a huge amount of car traffic) that the residents will end up fleeing to low-density suburbia anyway.

That might be fine for historic quarters, but I suspect most people would regard it as creating a claustrophobic rabbit warren that was not an attractive place to live. And how does anything get delivered? Even the typical British street of Victorian terraced housing is at least thirty feet, usually more, between frontages.

How claustrophobic would it really be though, given the near-absence of car traffic? Or perhaps he was enraged by the wastefulness of American suburbia, and has swung too far in the opposite direction.
I get the feeling that Nathan is hostile to consumerism in general. He's a strong advocate of a renewed gold standard (it's the main topic of his website, other than reverting to old-style city design). To my mind, a gold standard is associated with no-growth economics (in fact, he even has an article called that). He seems to have been influenced by James Howard Kunstler (I link to an article attacking his doom-mongering in my sig).

I can't help feeling very sad about Kunstler. The Geography of Nowhere is really quite a good book for one written on the intellectual level of a journalist. The City in Mind, for all its all-over-the-place-ness, has its hits among its misses too. Then somehow he completely lost it and turned into a less funny version of Howard Harold Camping. At first his bonkersness was rather sweet: there is an absolutely hilarious episode of his podcast from a couple of years ago where he reminisces about talking to the late Jane Jacobs, how they were having a perfectly nice conversation, but how she wouldn't indulge his doom-mongering. Somewhere along the line it just got tiresome though.

Edit: I can tell the difference between James Harold Kunstler and Howard Camping, honest... (Thanks, GC_NEMan1 for pointing it out!)

From the pedestrian POV, it's not quite as simple as saying they want things close together to reduce walking distance. That is of course generally true, but people will grumble less/more depending on how far they have to walk to a given amenity and how often they use it.

For example, I imagine that most people shop for groceries more often than they do for clothes. Presuming they have to go to different shops to do this (a presumption that's being eroded by Tesco etc. stocking all manner of non-groceries these days), it's going to inconvenience them less having to find somewhere to park and then walk an appreciable distance to a clothes shop if they only do it once every few months, than it would if they had to do this every week to buy food.

Within groceries, I also imagine that most people do intermediate shops for things like bread and milk between fill-the-car-up-to-the-gunwales shops. For many of these intermediate shops, it may be a faff to drive off-route to get to the supermarket for one pint of milk, or if we're not driving, the supermarket may be an inconvenient distance away.

It's also true that you can buy a fair number of clothes before the weight becomes a hindrance to walking more than a few hundred metres, whereas groceries quickly become uncomfortably heavy even with relatively small quantities.

What I'm getting at is that a significant way in which cities could be made better for pedestrians is to supply the goods they want most often closer to where they live. It's well known that corner shops and those in semi-urban centres have declined over the last 50 years. Perhaps rather than spending millions on disruptive infrastructure changes that are often of questionable value when put into use, we should offer financial incentives, tax breaks etc. to people willing to open local shops with a competitively priced decent range of everyday necessities. That way, we cut down on car journeys in congested areas and reduce the amount of walking (and/or money having to be spent on bus fares) needed for pedestrians.

Just found an interesting article on the Pedestrian Observations blog, which compares contemporary gentrification to 20th century suburbanization.

Urbanism, Gentrification and Romanticism

Here's a table comparing the two trends:

	Suburbanization	Gentrification
1. Initial trends	Industrialization, rapid urbanization	Globalization, suburbanization
2. Social problems	Overcrowding, slums, industrial pollution	Sprawl, fractured communities, car pollution
3. Romanticized past	Preindustrial rural life	Traditional (19th-early 20th century) urbanism
4. Proposed elite solution	Suburbs, cars, home ownership, separation of uses	Urban neighborhoods, transit, condos, mixed uses
5. Solution for the existing urban form	Urban renewal: the city is turned into modernist towers and playgrounds for the suburbs	None yet identified, but proposals include demolition and ruralization, and redevelopment

I said no as we have no money to fix it.

I said no because of a certain couple of places in France called Mont-St-Michel and Locronan!!

I think that a city can be good for both. What causes problems in city centre is when road planning think that a high capacity road has to be grade separated. This is where the pedestrians end up getting the raw deal. A road can have 6 lanes but single carriageway, as long as there are plenty of wide crossings and is planted with trees etc its not that bad. The A61 Inner Ring in Sheffield outside the station is a good example of a high capacity road in a city which I think works well for cars and people.

http://maps.google.com/maps/myplaces?hl ... 0&t=k&z=19