Hacker News Reader

Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

To some extent, that's working as intended. If bike lanes reduce throughput for cars and decrease their utility, that pushes people towards using means other than cars, even if that doesn't mean biking.

View on HN

Except: I don't see any evidence that it has worked at all - at least not in the 2 years the lanes have been there. Nice idea, but data would be nicer. (aside: always nice to see downvotes for wanting observations and data - if the data belies my observations, I'm all for that).

This comes down to a tragedy of the commons thing. No data needed. Cars are using a commons (the roads and the air) and causing a tragedy.

This really comes down to a "moral health of the citizenry". In Germany and the Netherlands these programs work. In the US, less so. If you were to take a %100 data based approach, and not take into account the choices of people, you would no longer be studying sociology but rather mind control. If you have a way, that actually is effective at changing peoples behavior, regardless of what the people want then that is mind control. Do you think that mind control is what we need in order to fight global warming, or do we just need to become better people?

In this city's case, they've dragged their heels on public transport - nothing near what I found in Amsterdam, for example. Slowing down car drivers by 5 minutes will not get them to switch to the public transport that would add 30+ minutes. Include better public transport, and more people would switch. But throwing up obstacles without providing alternatives doesn't do the job (and based on my city, there would have to be some mind-control to get more public transport funded, unfortunately).

This is a difficult one. The selfish behavior of Americans does seem to be causing a real world crisis. Per capita, a few countries (the middle east and the US) produce significantly more CO2 emissions per capita than the rest of the world [1]. This is expected to cause everyone significant problems and is already taking a major toll on the forestry and fishing industries. Theres not a lot that the rest of the world can do to put pressure on the US. A war would only create more polution and wars suck. Trade embargos are difficult given the US's geopolitical possition. This may well be, in the end, a tragedy situation of game theory in which everyone loses and there is no way out. There is no real way to privatise the atmosphere to get rid of the tragedy of the commons going on there.

It actually kind of reminds me of the old "nuclear deterent" theory. The idea that if you attack me, I'll create nuclear armagedon. If there was a way for Germany to produce so much CO2 that everyone would die, then maybe Germany could tell the US, "if you don't stop producing CO2, we'll produce a lot of it ourselves". Really, I don't know though. So far, I'm not optimistic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com