Parkstrasse vs. Spitalului Str.

While I was biking today through the museum quarter in St. Gallen, suddenly a question popped up in my mind: how was that street that I was just biking on different from a secondary street in an 70.000 inhabitants Romanian town. And so I started to compare and contrast two similar streets in different towns.

I mainly looked at the following elements:

1) Houses - in St.Gallen - built in the first half of the 20th century, height: usually P+2 or P+3. We have that in Romania, too. So what is so special? The special atmosphere that they diffuse comes from the fact that they don't show off in your way, they rise there like discrete strangers who don't want to interfere in your way. Usually, they are partly masked by trees or bushes, which separates them from the rushing pedestrian or cyclist. There's no flashy pink, crazy green, or dark blue house to hypnotize you with their color.

2) Streets - it is designed to limit your speed to theoretically 30 km/h. Practically, no one drives with more than 15 km/h. Why? The street provides in both direction parking spaces for the residents. Blue and white lines indicate the teritorry meant for parking. As everyone there is conscious enough to respect the regulations and the others around him, everyone respects those drawings and no cars don't come up in your way because they are wrongly parked.

Furthermore, in order to reduce speed, traffic circles have been built every now and then and they are also a green area with trees and flowers. What is even more interesting about the secondary streets in the living areas of St Gallen is that the road and the pedestrian road is not clearly defined in some areas. There are some fragments of let's call them "third spaces" which both cars and pedestrians use. This is again not a breakthrough concept one could say. That's true, but the beauty is in how they (the Swiss which I don't usually praise) have succeeded to combine all these ubiquitous elements into a relaxing atmosphere.

3) People - not too numerous are walking on the street quietly. If you look at them, they politely return your look, but you don't feel at any moment that they are interfering in your life or that they judge your appearance. This is something which is quite different from Romania, where people tend to compare and judge each other by their clothing. I see this only as a transition phase for Romanian, too, which is mainly caused by their "materialism orientation". This "orientation" makes them judge people in a superficial way according to their: phones, cars and clothes. In Switzerland, it is the character that matters most and you don't usually pay attention to the material aspects.

To sum up, what I tried to do was to compare two streets in middle class residential areas in two countries. I compared and contrasted houses, streets and people. My overall impression is that what distinguishes streets here is that they allow each one: driver, cyclist or pedestrian to circulate without interfering in each other's way.

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I'm still looking for some pictures make it visually more clear what I mean.