• snacks@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    I like the idea but is this not public land being sold to private property developers? A rethink of road traffic flows in a modern context is fine until we end up making neighbourhoods really crowded with shoebox investment portfolio options

    • mackwinston@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think the idea is to build houses on the wide roads, the idea is to build them beside the wide roads but remove space for private cars and instead repurpose that space for pedestrians and cyclists (in other words, have wide pavements ideally tree lined but instead of 4 wide lanes of cars maybe 2 narrow lanes with most of the space turned over as a public space for people).

      • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        I like your idea, but that’s not what the article says

        Needlessly wide roads should be torn up and replaced with boulevards of new housing

        Only housing is mentioned.

        • mackwinston@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          No, not just housing is mentioned but a boulevard and you cannot overlook that very important word and say the article only mentions “housing” because that is a seriously bad take on this article. By definition a boulevard is wide. It wouldn’t be a boulevard if they made the road narrow by building houses on the road rather than by the side of the road, so while the article doesn’t explicitly say it, by calling it “boulevards of new housing” implies that the thoroughfare does indeed remain wide, and becomes tree lined rather than car-lined.

          The Cambridge English Dictionary defines a boulevard as:

          “A wide road in a city, usually with trees on each side or along the centre”

          (And not only is a “boulevard” mentioned in the article, the article also includes a picture of what a part of Rochdale would look like. The housing is on the side of the road, and some of the car lanes have been converted to pedestrian/cycling space, and trees are added).