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Comment by Piskvorrr | Hacker News Reader

...and won that one, big time: nowadays, just suggest that the road is not exclusively owned by cars, and watch the foaming-at-the-mouth flamewar.

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In the US, maybe, but for sure not in Europe. We don't even have a word for "jaywalking" in Germany.

I was an American expat in England for 2 years and can vouch that culture was much more cycling friendly. However, you still got the occasional "white van man" and this was his favorite argument: http://ipayroadtax.com/

Sadly white van man will be correct in the not too distant future [1].

[1] http://road.cc/content/news/156795-road-tax-back-chancellor-...

And there's no single word for Schadenfreude in English, but it exists there as well ;)

IIRC, it's a traffic offense in Germany, too (as well as here in Prague ;)). While city centers may be pedestrianized again, it's bound to be an uphill battle for some time.

I'm more partial to Fremdenschämen myself. Also fits in this situation :)

Great word, but lose the "en": fremdschämen

In Germany it’s a traffic offense if (a) you are less than 50m away from the next traffic light, or (b) you create a risky situation in traffic.

At 3am with no traffic light near you, or the traffic lights being off? just go.

Eh. Times have changed. In many cities you are the idiot if you are in a car.

Times are changing, thankfully; but it's not possible to just revert a century of car-centered city planning. This will still take decades :(

Of course it's possible. We reverted millennia of pedestrian centered city planning in a century; I'm sure we can figure out how to reverse the damage done to cities over a single century.

Tearing down is a lot easier than building up. We leveled massive neighborhoods and rewrote how transportation infrastructure works in the US due to the car. Not to mention everything is much much more expensive now than it used to be and the political will to fix things isn't their. You've also got decades of voters who think in terms of the automobile. People in their 60's, 70's and 80's remember denser more urban cities where cars didn't dominate, but those people moved to the suburbs in their adult-hood and raised kids in the burbs who then raised their kids in the burbs and so on. Car culture is going to be here for a long time and the damage it has done will be slow healing because the people who could speed up the change the most have had an auto-centric world view from childhood.

Some of it's also that the large-scale buildout of automotive infrastructure happened at a time when governments at all levels in the US had pretty wide latitude to "make things so." While there are some pretty bad examples of urban planning from that era, there are other things that are pretty much net positives. This includes much of the interstate highway system but also includes other projects like Lincoln Center in New York. Today, for better or worse, outside of extreme urban blight it would be incredibly difficult for a city government to just bulldoze an entire neighborhood.

The same flamewar that suggests that when someone with a gun shoots people, the fault lies with the victims who were not carrying their own guns for self-defense?

(ducks!)

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