Cities around the world that are reducing car access

Reducing cars in the centre is public transport infrastructure, as is providing more walking and cycling facilities. Infact its the most impactfull public transport infrastructure you can build on a per euro basis, cheap as chips and it results in a radical improvement in the efficiency of buses and the uptake of walking and cycling.

Midweek its back, to a lot standing. Mo/Fri still quieter.

Still not as bad as pre Lockdown where people passing out and getting sick was a regular event. Counted 50 people crammed between the doors one day. No AC, No windows, smooth walls, no handles. New rolling stock is badly needed. Must get the finger out and get an eBike.

Not sure why. I don't find the London Underground as bad.

That does not really answer the question I was posing.

I don't live in Dublin, let alone Leinster - but the mindset of our current Taoiseach is what I was interested in. Is there more local insight that would not reach beyond the Natiaonl papers, info one would clean for local news papers.

Does the Taoiseach want things to stay the same in the suburbs he represents? The status quo. That is very much the conservative mindset, they do celebrate this aspect of their philosophy. If change is to occur it should not happen at the rapid pace of a melting glacier.

I'm seeing no real culture change. Car use is declining. But that not really due to change in culture.

There was a study that showed that recent cycling and walking was mainly at the expense of public transport. The rate of increase in cycling has slowed.

Car use though...."...According to the rush hour Canal Corden traffic counts, the number of cars entering Dublin City Centre has declined from 89,500 in 1997 to under 46,400 in 2019.."

It was the conclusion of the study, not mine.

But who knows for sure.

Maybe it was an old study.

people doing hybrid working (2 or 3 days a week in the office) are inevitably working from home on Mondays and Fridays. I know my office is dead on those days, which is a further disincentive to go in.

He's saying he won't be tasked to address the problem until someone makes it his (or his company) problem.

An American article about American regulations from a carmaker that no longer has any significant operations outside of the USA. In Europe, pedestrian impact regulations are far stricter, and there is extensive research on the subject, some of which he could look at, given that his company paid for it while it still owned Opel.

Pedestrian impact testing is a significant part of European vehicle-safety tests; it is not in the USA.

Visibility requirements are the same between the US standards (FMVSS) and the rest-of-world standards (UNECE). The only real differences are in lighting (where the US has almost wilfully codified a system that's incompatible with the rest of the world), and structural rigidity of certain parts of the bodywork.

If your concern is about vehicle weight, then there are moves afoot to address this. France has just introduced a weight tax on large vehicles (€10 per kg on weight above 1800 kg), and other member-states are watching to see how it goes. There's concern that the switch to EVs has allowed car-makers to abandon small cars in favour of heavier, more expensive (but more profitable) large vehicles. Large vehicles might make more money for car-makers, but they put additional stress on road and parking infrastructure, consume more energy, and are more dangerous to other road users.

I can see a weight-based tax replacing both VRT and the annual motor tax here: weight is actually a very good proxy for energy/fuel use and unlike exhaust emissions, it's really difficult to cheat a weight-test, and the homologation test for weight is so simple that it can be taken out of the hands of the manufacturers' pet laboratories (CO2 testing is done by specialist testing labs, many of which rely almost entirely on car-makers for their business).