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Comment by crikli | Hacker News Reader

"But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society."

Don't assume that every place is like the place you know. Visit the US, particularly the Midwest, and you'll come to understand why privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are the only solution to this particular transportation problem. The major cities are too dispersed with countless small population centers between them for any kind other kind of transportation to provide a feasible solution. It's not a matter of "engaging in democracy."

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It seems that the city in this article strikes a great balance - parking on the periphery for people who commute in, but the city center is car-free. The same could work for the US midwest. You drive to the edge of Chicago and then take an (improved) subway in, for example.

Groningen, The Netherlands, has an almost identical approach. It doesn't hurt that the centre of the city is extremely compact.

You basically cited the only midwest city this would work in.

Not sure why this appears to be down voted. It's pretty true. There are 1000s of cities/towns in the midwest that having a car/truck makes more sense.

I agree with this wholeheartedly, but also know it would be an incredibly difficult uphill battle, culturally, to make such a thing work. Chicago residents not only love their cars but also seem to feel absolutely entitled to the idea that the roads are _only_ for cars.

I say this as a local who has gotten into countless arguments with friends and family on the subject. I probably believed it as well a few lifetimes ago before I moved to NYC for 13 years and have since been completely converted.

It would require an enormous investment in public transportation and real bike lanes - I mean protected bike lanes like they're doing in NYC, not two faded white arrows in the rightmost lane - and then a generational shift where we convince the younger generations that car-ownership is overrated, wasteful, and terrible for the local economy.

Or we could prosecute drivers who run over bicyclists (and motorcyclists) the way many states now do to protect road construction workers -- huge fines and jail time.

But Americans care too much about comfort and convenience to do that. SUVs rule here.

To use the Chicago example, The profiled city has a population of under 100,000. The Chicago-land area has nearly 10 million, if you look at just Chicago it's still nearly 3 million. The mayor mentions that you can walk from one end of the city to the other in under half an hour. In Chicago you could make a multi-day hike out of it.

In my head, Chicago seems like it could work if you subdivided it into smaller regions of no-car zones, and marked out specific high-volume streets to connect them on a grid with designated parking per-zone.

Why would a commuter want to drive only to connect to a subway?

To use an example from a German city: Because going from the park+ride spaces at the edge of the city to the center takes > 45min by car, but 4min with the train. And parking at the edge of the city is free, but downtown you pay 8,50€/h.

Because parking is presumably cheaper on the periphery and the subway may actually be faster than driving all the way in. When I worked in Boston, that's how I sometimes did it. (Other times I took the commuter rail but that was more or less useless if I was doing anything in the evening.)

It actually makes a ton of sense. Imagine a scenario where parking downtown were actually impossible.

You would then want to drive as far as you can, park, and take the alternative in.

It's made for people that don't live walking distance from a train/bus line, but also don't want to deal with the traffic/cost/overall hassle of going by car end-to-end.

There are 80 Park‑n‑Rides throughout the my metro area.

The design and density of cities will change even in the Midwest. Inter-city transport can and will change.

From Wikipedia: "There was a dense system of inter-city railways in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but after the decline of passenger railroad in North America in the 1960s, the inter-city lines decreased greatly and today the system is far less dense."

Wisconsin used to have inter-city rail servicing most/all of its population centers and even many of the smaller towns: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701p.rr006200/?r=0.514,0.298,...

Yes, today cars are the default, but that took a long time. Things will continue to change and it's hard to predict exactly how.

It's not going to change for the thousands of small towns where mass transit can't be realistically employed.

There is a huge difference between cities that have done most of their growth after 1940, when cars have been common, and cities that developed their physical structures before the car. The car-oriented physical structure has to be retrofitted for walking -- streets narrowed or replaced with housing, shopping, and offices.

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