I see a lot of posts on here and on the urbanism subs saying that if you solve car dependency, cars aren't a problem any more. As long as you have the choice not to drive, it's fine, everybody's happy.
As someone who lives in a dense urban area that's not remotely car dependent ( loads of amenities in walking distance, loads of public transport etc), but is very badly affected by car dominance, I want to argue that this is very wrong.
Car dependency is obviously bad. I can understand that if you're stuck in a car dependent suburb and forced to drive everywhere, that's your main car-related concern.
But cars cause all sorts of problems even when you aren't forced to drive them. They pollute, they're noisy, they kill people and animals - indeed at least per mile they're a lot more likely to kill you if you aren't also in a car - and they take up masses and masses of space.
And here's the thing - to get rid of car dependency, you need density. And when you have density and allow people to use cars in it, you concentrate people together with cars and actually make loads of these problems worse.
Lots of people think that if you have density and low car dependency, fewer people drive (and they drive less), so these problems go away or shrink a lot, but while that's true for say carbon emissions, for localised problems that's not how it works. Yes there's less driving in absolute terms, but at the same time people are much more exposed to cars all the time when you concentrate them and people. I have family that live in a low density car dependent suburb and there is way less traffic noise and pollution and it's much easier and less stressful to go for a walk and get completely away from cars than in my dense inner city area (where it's basically impossible, and you're constantly forced to have stressful interactions with traffic every few dozen metres). Cars take up way more of the space here - only 30% of households where I live have a car, but pretty much all public space here is taken up by cars, even backstreets are constantly full of traffic and so on. When you don't have much space per person to start with and you let even a fairly small proportion of people drive in or through it, cars eat all the available space.
Is this an argument against density? No, density is good and important - but you need to keep cars out of it or at least minimise their presence and impact to a massive degree, as otherwise they ruin it in all sorts of ways. It doesn't solve the problem itself - enough people will still buy cars and use them to hugely mess things up if you allow them to.
Cars cause all sorts of problems even when you don't have to drive them - and to ensure lots of people don't have to drive them you need density that paradoxically can *increase* car dominance and all the problems it brings. We need to end both car density and car dominance, and that means simply getting rid of or heavily restricting the use of cars in built-up areas to a very large extent.
...not only does Brussels not have any outdoor swimming facilities, but the direct train line to one of the nearest large outdoor public swimming facilities (one of the countless such facilities in Flanders), Hofstade, exists to benefit commuters but doesn't run on weekends or holidays.
It is just crazy the extent to which this city and federal systems here are run to benefit commuters into Brussels while the people who live here can take a running jump.