Gentle reminder: This site is basically a tabloid at this point and should not be used as a serious source. If you have to, at least use an archived version.
I can't read the article (paywall), but it seems to me that there might be a distinction between road and street that some people in this thread don't know about.
Not a horrible idea if you have solid, simple, and actionable plans to replace them with robust, simple, and effective public transport options. Otherwise… yeah, a bit too far.
Roads in the 21st century incarnation of English almost always refer specifically to car infrastructure.
Streets are not the same as roads, it describes the space between two rows of properties. Modern streets typically contain a road for cars, but also sidewalks, trees, gardens, lounge spaces, etc. There's a reason it's called street food and not road food, because they're selling on the streets and not in the middle of the roads where they'll get run over.
Every time something like this gets brought up, you always get Nimbys screeching how this will evict everyone from their homes or whatever, and I think it's because they think removing roads means also removing the streets themselves, when in reality it means the streets get restored and become much more welcoming and people friendly.
At this point, I'd settle for taking the 2-lane road segments in my town that turn into 4-lane nightmares and then merge back into 2-lane streets a dozen blocks later with bike lanes and parking, and getting rid of the 4-lane parts that often don't have sidewalks or bike infra.
Sure, these road segments funnel traffic away from the more-residential city grid streets, but they're also rife with speeding and they make it hard to navigate on a bike unless you happen to know which streets have any sort of infra
I think the ideal is an alternating block structure
Pedestrian Street,
Road,
Pedestrian Street,
Transit only Lane,
Pedestrian Street,
Road,
Pedestrian Street,
Transit Only Lane,
...
Where Pedestrian streets cross roads, have car traffic enter a roundabout sunk below the pedestrian path, when they cross transit lanes, have a gate bridge that closes off the lane whenever a tram or bus isn't near the crossing, same deal when car traffic crosses a tram or bus lane
Voila, maximum restriction of cross interaction between three separate modes of transport, a full 75% of which is dedicated to pedestrian and transit use, and the last quarter there mostly just for the benefit of last mile package delivery and emergency services, as well as the odd profession that legit has to use automobile transport for whatever reason.
To take this to its logical conclusion, once the streets are gone, there is no need for buildings anymore, so they can tear those all down and plant a forest. But then you wonder where you are going to put all the people who used to live and work there.
I wonder how he thinks how supermarket shelves or the storage of his favorite restaurants are filled. He might be in for a surprise when no trucks will be delivering anything in the city. Or does he believe his local Tesco is getting it's wares by tube?
So if a downtown business needs a new copy machine? a restaurant needs a pallet of vegetables? a hospital needs a new MRI system? what are grocery stores supposed to do to receive freight? Gonna build light rail to every loading dock in the city? Have an Amazon drone fly it in? Maybe we could drop frozen food off with horse drawn wagons.
Why is logistics an afterthought for... anyone with more than 2 brain cells?
Cargo trucks are the economy. Nobody has a replacement yet.
People are down voting, but nobody has a competent counterargument. Pathetic.
Have any of you ever tried to carry a box of books more than 10 meters?