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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

This headline really overstates it. Anywhere outside of a major metropolitan center you are gonna be hard pressed to deal with day to day things like getting groceries without a car. The nearest grocery store to my house is about 5 miles. I can bike it but that really limits how much stuff I can get.

Similarly if you're a family with pets, particularly big dogs like mine, I can't take them anywhere without a car.

There is no public transportation of any kind that comes to my neighborhood.

So while yes, more and more people in cities may be abandoning cars because they have gotten more and more expensive over the last decade, there is no near future where America as a whole is able to live day to day without a car.

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Exactly. I lived outside of the US for fours years and never needed a car. Even though I moved back to a city with public transport, and a single regularly rail line, it pales in comparison to the type of transport available is much of the developed world.

Self-driving cars are a terrible solution. They will ONLY solve the last-mile problem, but not the missing American infrastructure. Russia is larger, less dense and has better public rail infrastructure in terms of both commuter rail within cities and inter-city rail including high speed expansion. The US only has the California high speed system currently being constructed. Nothing else.

I've written about the self-driving car problem before:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...

I disagree, I think self-driving cars will help motivate American cities to improve public transportation. The easier it is to get to from home to the transit station and from the transit station to work, the more people will use public transportation. Ditto for cross-country rail.

Our entire system is kinda broken with how roads/parking are relative to size. So it's not an easy problem to fix overnight. With an our established and spread out infrastructure. But self driving cars will eventually lead to smaller pods or smaller vehicles. Potentially fewer lanes or even allowing non standard road shapes and straightaway and fewer parking lots. I think autonomous vehicles is a stepping stone to a better infrastructure and community

I think the actual problem is a political one. Too many industries need highways to get bigger and to have more Americans buy cars.

The problem is definitely political, but I don't think it's a corporate conspiracy. Americans just don't like paying taxes, and aren't willing to pay taxes at the rates that would make Euro-style public transportation (with a mix of buses, trams, commuter rail, intercity trains, etc.) viable. Even in the cities that have marginally-decent public transportation systems, they're chronically underfunded.

You could probably build a hell of a public transportation network if people were willing to pay what they currently spend on average on automobile-related expenses (or even a substantial fraction of it) towards a shared network, but people have been making that argument to the American public for the better part of a century now and it's not gained a lot of traction.

I'm not sure that self driving vehicles really change the underlying political calculus that makes Americans unwilling to pay for that sort of public infrastructure. But they could still be an improvement, in safety and resource consumption, vs the current status quo.

I agree and I don't think it's a conspiracy any more than I would any other powerful lobbying group. Autonomous vehicles, in my opinion, have the potential, if not high probability to make things worse. Instead of increasing population density in areas like the Great Lakes region, it'll make it easier to commute and build expensive, no poor people allowed, suburban enclaves filled with chain restaurants and a replica of an uptown or downtown where people can pretend they live in a city.

Even when State or local governments have funds available, they opt not to build out other options. I think the USDOT offered many billions to states like Ohio to build out rail connections, but they didn't want the funds. To add to that, the states and local governments know about things like induced demand, but they just keep building out these giant highways any way. They could have taken the funds and poured it into public transportation. There isn't much politics cost to it. Traffic is always bad, and people are going to be angry before, during and even after construction because it never solves the traffic problem.

It makes me so sad and drives me crazy that we're doing this to ourselves.

Airlines solve the intercity transportation problem just fine. The only advantages rail could have are lower cost and the absence of the TSA. We're one train bombing away from the same screening system, and the cost is not lower (and if you value your time, it's much higher).

Compare the places you have lived to Texas, Arizona, Utah, and all of California in terms of population density and square miles/kilometers. The rest of the world are generally "fucking tiny" in comparison.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+big+is+texas+compared+to...

I don't mean to side-track a very valid point that you are making, but stepping back a little, isn't it amusing that humanity has reached such an advanced state where a strong argument for owning cars is to ship dogs around?

Also, only slightly related, but as someone not owning pets I always find it amusing (again, for lack of better word) to see people in the act of picking up dog-poop (I'm well-aware of the worse immediate alternative of leaving it on the ground). Still, isn't there some irony hidden in these small gestures, given mankind's (otherwise) complete domination of nature? etc. etc. etc.

And double basses, my situation. I commute to work, and could do most of my shopping, by bike. But playing music requires a car, for myself, and to schlep the kids to their music activities.

Still, I could see moving to a situation where I make much less use of a car. Maybe there's a way to request an Uber that's big enough for my instrument, and to pay a little extra for that. There are double bassists in NYC who get around by subway. And since most of my playing is local, I could get away with having an electric car with relatively low speed and range.

> Maybe there's a way to request an Uber that's big enough for my instrument, and to pay a little extra for that.

There is. UberXL in most cities with Uber.

This has generally also been true with taxis. There are usually van taxis you can request, but there are fewer so they take even longer to come than the cars.

The article isn't discussing abandoning of cars because they've gotten more expensive, it's discussing it in the context of public transportation and "last mile logistics" being on everyone's mind now not just the local governments.

In fact, the article explicitly mentions people who do have the luxury of being able to take public transport using cars on the weekends for grocery shopping, just like you mention. And it mentions that in many many parts of America solving the last mile problem isn't anything since people are driving a lot more than a mile.

Please don't judge an article by its headline.

Do grocery stores not do delivery?

In Germany this is picking up really quickly, you pay 4€ more and have everything delivered to your home in a time window that can be as narrow as two hours (when the service is well frequented). The app doubles as your grocery list, and at some point you just send it off. Great customer retention too ;-)

I'm in the UK. One of the companies here (Ocado) will automatically populate your shopping list for you based on your shopping history the day after each delivery, so you have about a week to adjust it. We often don't even bother checking the weekly shopping list any more, as it's generally "close enough" that if we're busy we'll just accept whatever they deliver. Just need the fridge to tell them what we still have enough of :)

The article is about moving beyond car ownership, not the absence of cars themselves.

Also significant is the partial reduction.

Plenty of families don't actually need N cars. They can probably get by with N-1 and summon another when needed.

Also, one car can do multiple errands without a driver, eg drop someone off at work, drop the kids off at school, and then go stage somewhere until needed.

In Europe entire families usually share just one car. Some cities like Jena, Germany (<100k) have 4 tram lines and three inter-city rail stations (1 that serves a high speed ICE train). That famous city from the song, Chattanooga, no longer has a (functional) passenger rail station at all.

>In Europe entire families usually share just one car.

Yet, in the case of France, the number of cars per household keeps rising; the share of households owning 2 cars, owning 3 cars, keep rising as well; in spite of the decrease of the size of households (the number of people per household).

To add insult to injury, car owners have become so lazy that don't bother parking their cars in their garage or their yard. Nope, that's out of fashion, now they park them on the public space: streets, roadsides, side-walks, etc. It's like witnessing an invasion, it spreads everywhere.

For now. Where I live, and in some other cities I've visited in the Great Lakes Region (like Pittsburgh or Cleveland), people are increasingly moving back to the downtown areas. For now it's primarily young people, but the difference is that it's a lot of young people, and the jobs and shops are following. Now this is not a dramatic change, but it is a change. I think it has the potential to turn into an increasing amount of people moving into the urban cores of cities that were previously car-only.

>This headline really overstates it. Anywhere outside of a major metropolitan center you are gonna be hard pressed to deal with day to day things like getting groceries without a car. The nearest grocery store to my house is about 5 miles. I can bike it but that really limits how much stuff I can get.

Self driving cars don't limit "how much stuff you can get", and you only need a few for a neighborhood of say 10 houses...

At least for grocery-shopping I find that a children's bike trailer can pack a surprisingly large amount of stuff -- of course it is not quite as convenient as a car.

I take my dog in Ubers. I call in advance to ask if it's okay; I also give a cash tip for it. Only one driver seemed ambivalent when I asked and seemed thankful when I said I would cancel and rebook.

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