Last week, the site Futurism.com announced plans to ban vehicles on one of San Francisco’s busiest streets. As claimed, the restriction will affect absolutely all cars, including taxis based on the Uber and Lyft sharing platforms.
There аrе quoted the words of the Executive Director in charge of the non-profit organization Walk San Francisco: «Every day, about half a million people walk down Better Market Street. However, this is one of the most dangerous places to be when looking at the number of crashes occurring here. The new plan will finally change this situation, creating a nature-friendly environment and, at the same time, an incredible urban space».
San Francisco is not the only city to rethink the role of motor vehicles in the transport system. In April, New York City authorities banned the movement of cars in the area of Central Park, the center of Paris becomes a car-free zone every first Sunday of the month, in Bogota (Columbia) the roads with a total length of more than one hundred and twenty kilometers are closed to travel every seventh day of the week.
«Our main goal is to get the streets back to people,” says Anna Marcussen, Vice Mayor of Oslo for Urban Development. «This is how we want to use our streets and what we see their purpose in. In our opinion, the streets should become a place where you meet people, have a snack in an open-air restaurant, where children play and artists exhibit their paintings».
To date, the complete rejection of cars is an exception rather than a rule, which is not to say about the partial restrictions on entry to the centre, which are in force in most populated cities in Europe. Personal transport is either completely prohibited or allowed on condition of payment for traffic jams». The main purpose of such measures is to make the travel by car as unprofitable as possible. Laws aimed at this are in force in Vienna, London, Madrid, Milan, Prague, Rome, Stockholm and so on. However, traffic congestion continues to be a problem in all major settlements, both in the Old World and in the New World. Bans are expected to be more and more.
Faced with the obvious crisis of cars as a means of transportation, cities are forced to look for new mobility alternatives. But the transition from personal to public street transport cannot fully ensure the achievement of the stated goals: to «return the streets to people.». For this reason, we must also talk about innovative freight and passenger transportation systems, including SkyWay, which is one of the most advanced and promising one.
Anatoli Unitsky, the creator of SkyWay, has been talking about the fact that streets should be given to pedestrians and that all transport communications can be above the ground since the eighties of the 20th century. He developed in detail the concept of linear cities embodying this principle within the framework of the monograph of 1995 and works on grants of the United Nations 1998 and 2002. To date, most of the technical innovations required to create efficient transport communications on «the second level» have been implemented in practice. On the other hand, judging by the crisis trends described in this and other of our publications, demand for such solutions has increased more than ever. SkyWay offers a comprehensive approach to solving current problems in the optimization of transport systems and opens up opportunities for the development of the cities of the future so as to avoid problems in the future. Interest in the transport systems of the future is evident in many countries. The leaders of one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, the United Arab Emirates, are among the first ones.
