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While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow

游客2023-11-07  29
问题     While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering applications to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear—to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.
    Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of "environmental zones" where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter.
    Likeminded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict the allowable number of parking spaces. On-street parking is vanishing. In recent years, even former car capitals like Munich have evolved into " walkers’ paradises," said Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University who specializes in sustainable transportation.
    " In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving," said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. "Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.
    To that end, the municipal Traffic Planning Department in Zurich has been working overtime in recent years to torment drivers. Closely spaced red lights have been added on roads into town, causing delays and angst for commuters. Pedestrian underpasses that once allowed traffic to flow freely across major intersections have been removed. Operators in the city’s ever expanding tram system can turn traffic lights in their favor as they approach, forcing cars to halt.
    Around Lowenplatz, one of Zurich’s busiest squares, cars are now banned on many blocks. Where permitted, their speed is limited to a snail’s pace so that crosswalks and crossing signs can be removed entirely, giving people on foot the right to cross anywhere they like at any time.
    As he stood watching a few cars inch through a mass of bicycles and pedestrians, the city’s chief traffic planner, Andy Fellmann, smiled. "Driving is a stop-and-go experience," he said. "That’s what we like! Our goal is to reconquer public space for pedestrians, not to make it easy for drivers.
    While some American cities—notably San Francisco, which has "pedestrianized" parts of Market Street—have made similar efforts, they are still the exception in the United States, where it has been difficult to get people to imagine a life where cars are not entrenched. [br] Which of the following statements is TRUE of Zurich?
选项 A、Bus drivers have priority over car drivers.
B、Commuters protest against Zurich’s measures.
C、Pedestrians are not allowed to use underpasses.
D、Cars are forbidden to enter Zurich’s squares.
答案 A
解析 细节题。由题干中的Zurich定位至第五段。根据该段末句中的电车司机可以将交通信号灯转换为让自己先通行的做法可以判断A符合文意。
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