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Comment by TomMarius | Hacker News Reader

Yes, of course. People from outside the city come to the city by car to buy goods and offer their services because mass transit is not available or not practical. It's impossible to make mass transit practical for everyone.

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It is practical to offer parking at train stations at the outskirts of the city so that people can commute to the train station and leave their car outside the exclusion zones.

That does happen in some cities - also to provide an alternative to exorbitant inner city parking costs - but it will add a lot of overhead to your trip, so for a daily commute it becomes unfeasible unless you're okay with adding 30-60 minutes to it. Every day.

(I did public transit to my assignment (working as a consultant) for five years; won't work with my current one as it's a 2 hour journey for just 60 kilometers).

That only works for large cities that can afford high density tram, underground and bus systems

Coincidentally the same places that contemplate banning cars. How convenient!

Sometimes people, you know, fill their cars with the “goods” that they are trying to bring into the city.

It’s fine to debate the merits of the policy, but don’t pretend it wouldn’t come at an enourmous cost.

It would come at a big cost, but lets optimise cities more for the people who actually have to live in them. The balance is too far from centre as it is.

So how does that stop economic growth of areas outside of the city? Sounds like it would ignite economic growth as smaller cities have to create their own services.

If it was better to have these services in the area outside the city, they'd already exist. These areas are too sparsely populated for these services to practically exist, and the ones that already exist depend on car traffic from the cities that would cease to exist if it was impractical to own a car in the city.

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