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Comment by justinator | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy to think: you design a city for people, rather than cars, and the city becomes more livable.

Many European cities are a bit lucky in that regard, they are much older than US or Australian cities. The European cities are built on top of plans that were made for pedestrians and horse carriages, with city walls and small streets.

Muenster, for example, has a beautiful bike circle around the inner city because that's where the city walls used to be. US and Australian cities are much younger and don't have such 'restraints' to work with, so they become car heavy automatically.

One nice example of a city that did not have that but where things worked out wonderfully is Helsinki, there is a bike path through a large chunk of the city on what used to be a railroad. It's totally out of the ordinary traffic recessed in the ground so out of the wind (not unimportant that far North).

But one other example of an entire country not being designed for bikes post WWII is the Netherlands. It took a lot of change to make it is what it is, today. I think the moral of the story is that that change was explicit, and wasn't just happenstance. In visiting the Netherlands, you would think all that bike infrastructure was obviously just always there.

NL has historically had bikes in large numbers since bicycles were a thing.

If there was one thing the Dutch were pissed off about very long until after the war it was that the Germans took all the bicycles (or at least large numbers of them) to toss them in the smelt for their weapons factories.

When I was a kid - not all that long ago, say 1971 - German tourists were routinely told that if they wanted to get directions they first had to return some bikes... Since then the sentiment has fortunately changed a lot but there definitely were tons of bicycles here prior to WWII.

Even the Dutch version of the road-side assistance was originally called the 'Algemene Nederlandse Wielrijders Bond', which is as much as the Dutch bicycling association. They were instrumental in marking the roads and providing help for stranded cyclists. Over time they morphed into the more car centric entity of today.

That makes no sense... US cities are super lucky to have such wide streets.

If they WANTED to they could easily make dedicated bus and bike lanes that are safe.

It easy they have so much space. European cities have to almost ban cars, to make room for bikes...

This is a political issue, where Americans choose not to do something.

The US has plenty of space for bikes and pedestrians, but being a cyclist or pedestrian makes less sense there because the cities are so spread out. All the space taken up by those highways and parking lots mean that the places people actually want to go to are much further apart.

People who vote in municipal elections despise anything that looks like density. If it weren’t for freeways and parking lots, there would still be massive lawns and open spaces dotted with sparsely packed low rise and mostly single family buildings.

Parking contributes, but it’s mostly that American towns have at most a few blocks where European-level density (3-6 story buildings directly adjacent to each other) is permitted.

Good luck prying the detached house with a backyard out of the typical American family’s hands. Good luck getting them to consent to a multi family structure next door.

> That makes no sense... US cities are super lucky to have such wide streets.

Unless you're a pedestrian that wants to cross those wide streets. My stays in Salt Lake City are sometimes harrowing.

Giving cars preferential treatment is a political choice.

You can choose to use your streets differently. I see wide streets in SF that could have been closed and turned into pedestrian only streets.

Union comes to mind, there are shops and restaurants on both sides, close it to traffic and you have nice shopping street.

You can pry my 8 lane roads and acres of parking lots surrounding a mall full of chain stores from my cold, dead hands /s

No one in history has designed a city for cars. People driving cars over other people perhaps, but for a subset of people regardless.

AI is nowhere near the level of needing space.

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