Yes, you are right. You are talking of moving people inside cities. I am talking about a) getting in and out of the city and b) moving goods into and out of cities. None of the usual demands in this group ever even starts to address this.
Yes, of course delivery trucks need access to cities, some goods are not practical to move by cargo bike. As do emergency services and buses. Nobody disagrees with this. The problem in many cities is that streets are clogged with useless private cars. So the obvious solution is to ban private cars.
Just because you have no need for a car, private cars are not necessarily useless.
Private cars in general are not useless, but private cars in the center of cities should be useless if the city is designed well. The space-transportation trade off does not make sense.
What usually works better for moving people in and out of cities is park-n-ride setups where you setup a giant parking lot in the suburbs next to a metro station. People can just ditch their car outside the city and proceed using public transit. I often do this in Montreal, for example.
For goods, it’s a similar setup but with big trucks transferring cargo to smaller trucks; this is already pretty common.
Just use busses and trams
And once people use bikes all over and you can get rid of the 10.000 parking spots, you can build much more local small shops. Nobody loves going to Walmart and nobody will if there are small local shops around the corner where you can simply walk to
Bikes ain’t gonna work for people coming from far outside the city. I’m not talking about commuting distance, I’m talking about people who live in rural areas 2+ hours away from a city that need to come in occasionally. Having them make the whole trip by car necessitates maintaining car infrastructure in the city center, which will soon be co-opted by suburbanites. This use-case needs a bi-modal strategy.
In theory, P&R is fine.
But my experience with P&R is that they are generally so far out of the city and the bus/tram/tube/whatever connection is a normal “outside the city” link which goes every 30-60 minutes if one is lucky (during the weekdayday, evenings and weekends are way worse), and then stops at every lantern on the way to the city center. And still costs a fortune.
Additionally, the tram stop at our next P&R is not exactly handicapped-friendly. So I have to get my wife somehow into the tram, which involves a number of high steps at the trams’ doors.
