Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

My wife is from a small town in Italy. It doesn't have transit, but it's quite possible to get around it on foot or by bike, because it's compact.

View on HN

I think your point gets missed by many people.

Europeans tend to have cities that have been around much longer than cars have, and you can see it in the design - they were built back when horses were the fastest mode of transportation.

Many small American towns were built after the introduction of the automobile (or at least significant chucks of the towns were).

Trying to undo history, or even taking a new mode of design is extraordinarily difficult. The discussion threads on this post seems to highlight that difficulty, while many miss that root cause.

The town I live in now, Bend, Oregon is barely over 100 years old, which is pretty new even for the US. And yet the downtown is still fairly walkable, if perhaps not quite as much as an Italian town.

The really bad stuff only really started coming out after we got zoning and then accelerated with post WWII development.

Can we make something just as walkable and nice as those Italian cities? Maybe not, but we can certainly walk back some of the worst excesses of the late 20th century.

This site has a lot of ideas and discussion: https://www.strongtowns.org/

Oh, and it also turns out that much of suburbia is not very sustainable financially, and nor is it great for the environment.

> And yet the downtown is still fairly walkable, if perhaps not quite as much as an Italian town.

But I bet almost everybody has a car.

You give a great example - and raise an even better question:

  Can we "fix" cities to be more functional in a world dominated by autos?

I wonder if we can. It seems like inertia has become so great that it will take many decades to overcome this. In Houston, I think this easily could take 1/2 a century or more.

The suburb I lived in, in Italy was mostly built out after widespread use of automobiles.

And yes, it was walkable, because things were close to one another.

No, that's not the reason. Most surface area of european cities is modern. Zoning laws have been created on purpose to make cities walkable.

Although European cities do exists for way longer, for most cities, that's only true for the small city center. The larger newer parts have been built in about the same period as most USA cities: the 19th and 20th century. Since the 1940s the car has become the dominant mode of transportation in European cities as well, and particularly up till the early 1970s new city planning was quite car focused. You can still see that today by these large multi-lane roads through heavily populated areas in cities. But also a lot of industrial parks have been setup with only cars in mind. In the meanwhile these choices are in the process of being reverted by limiting through car traffic, adding bike lines, sidewalks, more green areas, and so on.

> Trying to undo history, or even taking a new mode of design is extraordinarily difficult

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

I'd bet anything that your wife's small town in Italy was mostly settled and developed before cars, in a time when being able to get around town by foot (or by horse, at the fastest) was important.

Obviously. But it still seems optimal to build cities this way today, and it is surprising we don’t.

With modern levels of obesity and pollution, why don’t we want walkable cities?

The (mostly American, mostly late 19th- mid-20th century) cities at issue were largely developed by people with cars in mind, before obesity and pollution were known issues. There's a lot of inertia to that kind of design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com