| Comment | * Not enough people live in the city centre (A problem not exclusive to Glasgow. This is a global phenomenon in cities which depopulated in the mid-20th century).
* Although a majority of people in Glasgow don't own a car (and so you'd think surely the city centre has a client base that doesn't prefer out of town malls) the entire city was reconfigured to suit driving at the cost of the pedestrian experience, and to a certain extent the public transport experience. Public transport provision was also left to flounder for decades.
As an aside to this, there have been a few good studies recently linking the rapid expansion of car traffic in US cities to the loss of trams and trolley buses in the 1940s-1960s.
Essentially, the volume of street traffic made trams and trolley buses completely unviable and unattractive to the public. So increasing demand for cars. A bit of a spiral ultimately leading to the situation we're in now.
I beat this drum a lot but the design of our cities and the fact they have been built entirely around individual car use is a fundamental problem and base cause for so many problems we experience day to day. From material hollowing out of the city centre, to equitable access to job and learning opportunities, to health and wellbeing. |
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