>>1862195Zurichs good urbanism can be traced back to the early 20th century, and has mostly benefitted from simply not ripping up half the city to make room for cars, or not getting rid of trams. Many of these things were the result of a relatively conservative population, for example voting against the subway project in the 1970s. The high level of attention public transport gets in Switzerland is in no way limited to leftist governments, as cities or regions that are more conservative still tend the same policies.
Most cases of bad urbanism stem from undoing the good work of pre-WW2 era, rather than from progressive/leftist policies, which, though generally less car-oriented which is good, suffer from a lack of pragmatism. For example, Barcelona is working to reduce car-centric urban design, but all the while barely expanding public transit, which is extremely saturated within the city and very inconvenient on certain itineraries. Of course you're not going to get people out of their cars if the alternative to a 20 minute drive is an hour riding two buses. The result is that traffic has actually gotten worse in the past couple of years, and more and more people are using scooters which are then parked on the widened sidewalks, making the whole work of expanding those sidewalks pointless. Meanwhile a bunch of bike paths which only appeal to the yuppies who can still afford to actually live in the city center aren't resolving anything, either, just taking away space direly needed for wider bus lanes, because the existing ones are so narrow the buses still get stuck in traffic as they can't overtake the cars. So while the intentions are good, the implementation is abhorrent, because it's too far up its own ass and not taking account more practical considerations.
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