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While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow

游客2024-09-30  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] The best title for the passage is
选项 A、Worries of European Drivers.
B、Europe Discourages Drivers.
C、Contrast of European and American Drivers.
D、American Cities’ Efforts to Ban Cars.
答案 B
解析 主旨题。本文开篇由美国城市的做法引出欧洲城市对开私家车的态度。第二段和第二三段具体介绍欧洲各城市采取的限制私家车使用的措施。第四段引用Peder Jensen的话，指出欧洲和美国的不同之处，引出第五段至第七段对苏黎世采取的限制私家车使用的具体措施的详细说明，末段呼应文章开头，指出部分美国城市虽然采取限制私家车使用的措施，但总体而言还是鼓励使用汽车。可见全文主旨是围绕欧洲的限车措施展开分析，故B为答案。
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