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Comment by jonasvp | Hacker News Reader

[citation needed]

Cars are a net negative for societies (see e.g. https://tu-dresden.de/bu/verkehr/ivs/voeko/ressourcen/dateie...). Just imagine having most (80%+) of goods transported by cargo bike: lots of (local!) employment, lots of new technology needed, etc.

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Like sofas, armchairs, refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, flat-screen TVs and oak beds?

Great idea, but how would you feasibly transport them?

The deliveroo boxes are going to have to increase in size...

Been there, done that :) Just buy a good trailer. You get 10 top notch bikes plus trailer for the price of a car.

Most of these could be transported on bike trailers. The bed will probably need to be shipped in disassembled form, but then again, I've never seen beds shipped in one piece.

That said, there are certainly things that you absolutely have to transport with some sort of automobile. But there's no problem with exempting such transports from a possible car ban.

In the Netherlands bakfiets (http://img.tweede-hands.net/pics/00/13/08/63/97/3c.jpg?d0cc3...) can be easily used to transport this kind of things.

Also, realistically, do you need to transport these things on a daily basis? Can you not rent a (electric) truck whenever you need this kind of things?

Heck, a car in the netherlands is also very, very expensive. Especially if you live in the inner core of a relatively old city, which are not designed for cars and where parking space is at a premium.

I'm fairly sure most people working normal office kind of jobs could easily live without a car, especially if cities use that money to make public transport available to more "remote" regions easily.

My employer actually used this reasoning and has an office next to the train station, which makes traveling with public transport from other cities a breeze and prevents the company from having to pay massive fees for parking space.

Western-European capital city here. I can indeed absolutely get-by without a car, as I have for literally all my life.

There are certainly instances where a car is necessary, or sufficiently convenient. For example, I rent a truck when I move homes or get new furniture, and I get a taxi after surgery or a night out, and rent a car when doing something time/convenience-sensitive like hopping between locations on elaborate wedding days that involve a ceremony, food, drinks and after-party all around the city. But all in all, about 5% of my trips need to happen by personal vehicle, at most. Everything else is can be done via public transport or bicycles.

Nowadays we have ride-sharing and electric 'public transportation' mini-cars available that you can rent for 15 minutes or a few days. The costs are about twice that of a normal car, but as I only use it in 5% of my trips my total expenses are barely affected, while giving me the convenience of a car when necessary.

There's no real reason to keep a personal car myself. Actually I've never owned one, but it's become easier and more convenient over time. Borrowing a car from a friend or traveling far to a car rental, or expenses of renting aren't problems anymore.

Having kids or working very far from home changes the incentives quite a bit. But I think there's a lot of value in optimising for distance. As a species we spend way too much time on mundane travel, even to the point of inefficiency. I've seen people chase a job that pays $300 more for $250 in self-paid traveling costs per month. These are people who will pay $10 for delivery of groceries instead of spending 30 minutes to go to the store, but are willing to travel 20 hours more each month for a $50 net benefit.

> But I think there's a lot of value in optimising for distance.

i definetly agree to this, spending time on travel is pure waste. One of the best decisions for my personal health and my career was getting a job which is located 10 minutes from my home by bicycle. The amount of free time you have left because you spend a lot less time traveling should not be understated. Also, i find commuting very boring and stressfull, and living close to work has done wonders for my mental health aswell.

No bakfiets, but fietsaanhanger :

https://hollandbikeshop.com/fietskarren/bagage-fietskarren/

English : bicycle trailer.

Yes, actually. All of those things can be transported by cargo bike.

There is a place for automobiles, and vans, in cities (ambulances come to mind) - just like there is a place for helicopters, but what we have now is a gross distortion that came as a result of more or less legalizing killing people with your car (as long as it was an accident) and giving people ample free asphalt and parking.

What do you mean, free asphalt and parking? I'm paying huge taxes and this stuff is built from taxes.

Edit: To the people downvoting: We're talking about Europe. The US apparently works differently, but that's not how it's in the EU.

You don't pay enough taxes to cover the cost of land in a big city. See for example this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/business/economy/15view.ht...

Grandparent probably doesn't mean "free", but "sunk cost".

I mean free at point of delivery. People using them don't necessarily pay for them (if I drive from SF to San Diego, I pay nothing to LA for the use of their roads, which doesn't really seem fair, though admittedly most of that drive would be on Interstate) I'd have no problem with tolled roads. Funny enough I would _love_ tolled bike paths - I'd pay several grand a year for them willingly - if I could even get them.

But I can't because we give roads to cars for free and that can't be questioned.

For that matter I'd love to lease some of the park and ride spots near transit so I could build an apartment on them (they're nearly free) but apparently I'm not allowed to do that. I can't even use them to park a mobile home permanently. How is that fair?

I disagree with the concept of toll roads, at least insomuch as they're effectively double-taxing us: we pay taxes for roads already. Now you want me to pay again to use the road?

But really, if roads were not free in the first place, toll roads would basically stop being a thing and the roads themselves would become the toll.

I think most roads should be paid for by tolls and taxes reduced accordingly. This is because roads tend to have a huge number of negative externalities.

In some cases the very act of having to pay increases the utility of the road to the user - see congestion charging. This ensures people who gain the most economic benefit from using the road are the ones using this precious resource.

Of course, your point could be applied to any government-provided service where there is a fee. The tram receives public funding but I still have to buy a ticket, after all.

It's a double tax because you're not paying enough for the road in the first place. I understand that there's this huge resistance to paying tolls for roads, but there's a valid reason for them for a variety of policy reasons (decongestion of city centers, insufficient funding to build out the road without private participation/tolls) that make it a valid tool for governments to lean on. In fact, the tolls allow for a more focused alignment of price vs usage (insofar as non-users of the toll road aren't tolled), which is a reasonable approach to take as a mixed pricing (taxes + tolls) model.

Speak for yourself. I'm referring to both, having spent most of my life in California and half a decade in Europe (ish - Ireland is peripheral in more than one sense).

There are some differences wrt property taxes, etc. but for the most part, roads are an all you can drive buffet, if you're in a car that is, so of course people use them without regard to cost. My taxes pay for roads but I only get a sliver of them as a bike lane on some of the thoroughfares in the city. Even the motorway tolls are laughably low; a few Euro at most barring one tunnel.

As always you can find exceptions. French motorways begin to cost enough to matter. Demand-priced parking and Express lanes in California have brought something resembling sanity to space allocation where it was obviously desperately needed. But for the most part my point stands.

A sofa can't be transported by bike. Especially not up hills, don't be an idiot.

A better solution would be to restrict traffic to commercial vehicles and only at certain times.

Haha I've done it, the Dutch are a bit crazy but yeah... we transport furniture on what essentially is a (frontloaded) trailer-bike.

That having been said, I think it's a silly solution to expect bicycles to take over logistics. I think we can all agree however that if the only vehicles on the roads were for logistics and public benefit (e.g. ambulance) that'd be a massive improvement already.

They already have in some of the most appropriate circumstances. Article is 2017 but these are still up and running.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/container...

It will please you to know that gears are fitted as standard on many bicycles.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_advantage

Honestly trying to convince people that a full life can be lived with a bicycle feels a lot like the problem of the cave.

There's a whole world outside the parking lots, but too many people have never even seen it; just pictures of it on travel blogs about Amsterdam, and don't really think it's real.

Edit:

In addition to gears, batteries and motors are a thing.

Ask your great great grandparents - horses! In the 19th century, cemeteries had railway stations for transporting the dead by steam train.

Oh no, people might actually buy less things!

Do we need to have personal cars just for delivery of those items? Or can we have trucks?

So let's take a different approach: Let's find a better solution for individual transportation that doesn't require human labor (e.g. pedaling) and offers the same benefits (ability to comfortably make 500 km per working day, for example - that's average daily mileage of a taxi driver).

You seem very much in favour of cars, but also imagining that cities without cars would look much like cities with cars. Huge amounts of land are given over to roads and parking. Get rid of these and you have much denser cities without decreasing usable space per inhabitant.

I assume you're talking about US cities. Because IMHO most European cities are already far too dense. You can hardly see the sky.

All cities with cars, and no, they aren't.

But if you make cities even densier, you'll have to restrict their height. People on the first floor still want sunlight for a reasonable time :) Meanwhile wide streets allow tall buildings..

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