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Comment by kareemsabri | Hacker News Reader

Lot of anti-car folks on here. I'm inclined to agree we should discourage driving into city centers, but it's a tough ask when we've been driving forever and everyone owns cars. Telling my elderly father, who lives in the suburbs and drives everywhere, to take a train into the city to visit me is a non-starter, as another commenter pointed out. Habits are hard to break.

However, I work in downtown San Francisco and live in Oakland, and I would NEVER drive my car over the bridge into the city, because of congestion. Banning cars outright seems to be a heavy-handed move and overly restrictive of individual choice, and you should just "price in the externalities" as the economists say. High tolls or expensive city driving permits for non-residents seems a better move to ease the transition as well as fund public transit options. They have to build up really, really good public transit infrastructure if they're going to make it more attractive than driving.

To me the plethora of rules reads overwrought and complex, and "occasional visitors" seems ridiculous.

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The healthiest old (or old-ish) people I know are the ones who use public transport the most.

Two of my grandparents drove everywhere for decades, retired, still drove everywhere, then had huge trouble with their joints etc. When my grandmother lost her license (worsening eyesight), she was very isolated.

My other grandparents had nice cars, but also made good use of their pensioner's discount/free transport pass. My grandma would take the train across a large English city to visit her sister or friends. She's in her late 80s, and still very mobile, although no longer independent.

I prefer a ban, as it's fairer to everyone. There are externalities that are very difficult to price (pollution, accident risk), and just being rich doesn't give people extra rights to poison the air and kill/injure people. It also ensures rich people use public transport, so they have some incentive to make sure the service is good.

I've you've ever spent significant time in Europe, or more specifically, the Netherlands, you will see people of advanced age have no problem getting around on bikes and public transport. In fact, I can't help but smile every time I see someone who is clearly in their 80s/90s biking down the Amsterdam streets in fantastic health.

I feel that if people are used to moving around their lives, they can continue to do so even in old age, like taking stairs every day on a 4th story walk-up with bags of groceries and goods.

Anecdotally, I feel the rise of the automobile coincided with the fall of general health and mobility of senior citizens.

There’s a false impression there, though, because the people you see around on the streets are by definition those that are capable of getting around. Even fit young people sometimes break bones or injure ligaments in a way which makes getting around difficult. If you damage your ACL and need to get into work, how can it be done?

You need a system which has at least a rational level of support for people who are elderly, infirm, or otherwise physically disabled.

This argument comes up every time. Walking or biking improvements can make life easier for people with disabilities too; especially those who don't own a car or whose disability precludes them from driving. Some examples I've seen in the last few weeks: an amputee using a bicycle as a mobility device to compensate for a missing leg and someone in a motorized wheel chair using a bike lane.

> "But what about disabled people!"

We already exempt them from various driving rules, such as parking restrictions. We already have special transport services just for them. No one is suggesting removing these.

I genuinely am just making that simple point. But it does follow that under such a scheme you couldn’t totally ban cars.

> I prefer a ban, as it's fairer to everyone. There are externalities that are very difficult to price (pollution, accident risk)

That's a fair argument. I think a car-less future for urban centers is a good goal, but you need a huge transit infrastructure that I don't think most (any?) cities have right now to support it. Permitting is a transitional tool to enable a gradual phase out while letting the polluters/accident-causers etc. pay for the costs they're putting on the rest of us.

Banning vehicles is not inclusive of people with disabilities. Does this mean they should effectively be banned from cities?

Presumably you'd have some publicly-funded wheelchair accessible vehicles driving them around.

I don’t think any proponents of this would have any issue with allowing disabled people access (probably including disability caused by aging).

A ban on vehicles could be restraining even to those with a special exemption because the infrastructure will adjust for the ban. What use is a car when the place you need to get is only accessible by bike lanes and sidewalks?

Lots of places use small vehicles like golf-carts in that situation: hotels, nursing homes, walking communities, etc.

False causality (I believe post hoc fallacy). Maybe healthy people take more public transportation, or maybe your sample size is so ridiculously tiny you can't draw significant conclusions. And the fact that some healthier people ride public transportation may be because they are healthier, not the other way around.

This isn't even a Euro thing. Many elderly people ride the bus here in the US in my city. The divide is between the rich and the poor. If you're wealthy, of course they drive because society is built to benefit drivers, but many people, old, not able bodied, not seeing, not hearing, etc., ride the bus.

Go ahead and ask NYC if you can build a single-family detached home across the street from Central Park. It's against the zoning regulations, even if you bought the land to do that. Do people call that regulation anti-house? No. People accept the fact that a city like NYC is so starved for space, and SFDH is a massive waste of space.

But turn around and do anything to take into account that SOVs are the most space-inefficient form of transit, and you are immediately labelled anti-car. Congestion charges or adding tolls? Anti-car. Parking restrictions? Anti-car (especially because people complain there's not enough parking spaces as is). Charge residents for parking permits? Anti-car. Add bus or HOV lanes? Anti-car. Spend a dime on improving public transit? Anti-car (why are you wasting money on public transit no one uses instead of the congested highways).

Yes, banning cars outright is one of the most extreme options. But the sheer sense of entitlement among drivers means that all the other options that have been suggested have been resisted with as much force. The only acceptable compromise is to cater specifically to their whims, and maybe in tandem help public transit at the same time. Of course, if there's any budget overrun on such a joint project, all of the transit improvements are the first things to get axed.

I'm anti-car, for the record. I don't drive in cities, and I think the costs of congestion, parking, noise, and pollution should be borne by those who do.

Edit: I did, in fact, say "anti-car".

I never used the phrase "anti-car"

Somebody posting under your username did:

Lot of anti-car folks on here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18155579

Whoops.

> I don't drive in cities

A tiny proportion of any US metro area's real estate supports this lifestyle. Usually either the most expensive, or the most hurt by gentrification and displacement. It's not a generalizable strategy without huge changes in zoning, public housing finance, and public transit infrastructure. I think we should make those changes, I vote for every pro-housing candidate and every transportation funding measure, but they are prerequisites. You can't turn off the old system before the new one is ready.

Agreed. I'm anti-car personally, but I wouldn't force my choice on the entire nation certainly. Or even the entire city.

Not sure those areas really qualify as "metropolitan", then. The US has effectively no real cities. It has parking lots with mayors.

Hell, I'm not anti-car. I love cars. Been a gear-head all my life, have done various kinds of motorsports hobbies, autocross, offroading, etc.

Even still, the extent to which our society has become subservient to automobiles simply blows my mind.

Nah, I'm not anti-car. I'm anti-car entitlement and think the expectation that others should bear the external costs of an automobile friendly society is silly.

SOV - single occupancy vehicle

HOV - high occupancy vehicle

People vote against "pricing in the externalities".

"Banning cars outright seems to be a heavy-handed move and overly restrictive of individual choice"

Allowing cars is overly restrictive of my individual choice to cycle safely, breath clean air and have my children grow up in a world without climate change.

I'm afraid you don't have an individual choice to dictate the type of world your children grow up in, as far as the rest of us are concerned.

Same can be said for not having the individual choice to destroy the climate for the next generation. Right?

To some extent. It's a hard problem. As I mentioned originally, it's difficult to get a bunch of non-cooperating people to share things that are collectively owned (like air). People want to move themselves and their stuff around, which pollutes. I genuinely don't know the answer, but there are a lot of things that damage the environment for future generations (who, I agree, are not represented well enough in our decision making). If this is a climate change thing, there's a lot of things to do. If it's a congestion/quality of urban life thing (as I read it), it's a bit of a different discussion.

Here are a few options that would restrict individual choice to reduce air pollution.

- banning air travel more than 3 times per year (turns out propelling giant hunks of metal through the sky releases a lot of CO2)

- insisting all new cars be electric

- banning cars in cities

- limiting the purchase of meat to a low amount per person per week

- a limit on consumptive spending (buying newly manufactured goods) annually

Or.... just make all that stuff expensive.

Yep, as I suggested in my original comment.

Taxes (or tax credits etc.) to price in externalities

> options that would restrict individual choice

That's technically true but frames the conversation in a biased way.

Do tell.

I think you'll find that there are many individuals who share his opinion. And we're not interested in having your ilk dictate anything.

Lucky for you my ilk, whatever that is, doesn't want to dictate anything.

Lucky for your ilk, that you are happy with the status quo - with people dying in car crashes, people ill with respiratory diseases, and suffering from noise pollution.

This is what I deserve for thinking I could have an intelligent discussion on the internet without stupid hyperbole.

I think the person you're replying to is being very obnoxious about it, but how is it a hyperbole to say that people are "dying in car crashes", are "ill with respiratory diseases" and are "suffering from noise pollution"?

Those are three of the major issues with cars and if you're happy with them, I mean ... yeah, lucky you.

It's hyperbole to say I'm happy with those things if I don't support an outright ban of cars in cities.

In an attempt to rescue this conversation.

Per your other posts, you don't support it because it "restricts individual choice", yet you support increasing prices as if that doesn't.

By increasing prices you do restrict individual choice, except that you do it in a discriminatory way. For example, in many countries instead of banning smoking, its price has been marked up and increased 10-50x. This does restrict individual choice for people who can no longer afford it.

I think in certain cases (such as smoking), it's fine because we want to discourage it, but banning it outright isn't worth it, and it's something that people can and should be able to live without.

Incidentally, I agree with your original assessment that banning cars outright is too much in the short term, and would have other negative consequences that most likely outweigh the positive. But increasing prices has overall similar effects for people who don't have alternatives available.

I think your "restriction of individual choice" rule is highly misguided. For one thing, because your freedom ends where others' begin, and it's becoming pretty clear that car usage today is in fact encroaching on other people's freedoms. But also because in the cases where individual freedom is a requirement, price should not be a factor. This is similar to why (in the US and some other countries) "if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you", for example.

Well, I think my position is a little more nuanced than that. I think it's heavy-handed [given our current circumstances] and restricts individual choice [excessively]. Obviously we have no absolute freedom in society, and individual choice is constrained to varying extents. The question is what extent is appropriate.

Being discriminatorily restrictive is fine, in my opinion. If you can't afford to pay the costs for your action, you shouldn't do it. The smoking example is a tough one, because if it gives someone else cancer due to second-hand smoke I don't think you can put a price on that.

But let's say in the car case we are okay with a certain level of pollution (we must be), and we have a floating congestion and pollution tax that was assessed hourly (like surge pricing), based on both how many cars were on the road, and the global air quality level (just an impractical example). When roads are particularly busy, and a lot of CO2 has been released, let's say the cost of driving into the city that day spikes to $1000. In that case, if a rich guy wants to pay $1000 to drive into the city, that's just fine. That $1000 goes to building public transit infrastructure and environment cleanup or whatever else. Poor people will be restricted, but they're already restricted. They can't fly private jets, or helicopters, or drive Ferrari's that have 12 cylinder engines and 500 horsepower. Restricting the options down the level that everyone can afford is impractical in a market economy.

> for people who don't have alternatives available

Well, I've also said repeatedly that in order to restrict car usage you first have to build a robust (affordable) public transit infrastructure. My main opposition to an outright ban is most cities don't have sufficient transit to support it. A good way to fund such a project, in my opinion, is with the aforementioned taxes from rich people who want to drive private cars. However, I also think if the costs are appropriately priced, that everyone benefits from the individual who wants to drive a private car, as society gets the income to offset those costs, and he or she gets to drive a car. I may be in the minority here, but I don't see a future where there are no private cars as practical, or desirable.

> because your freedom ends where others' begin, and it's becoming pretty clear that car usage today is in fact encroaching on other people's freedoms

I don't know if that's that clear. Maybe we have a different understanding of freedom.

> The smoking example is a tough one, because if it gives someone else cancer due to second-hand smoke I don't think you can put a price on that.

I'm not sure what the practical difference is between second-hand smoke and city pollution, in terms of how much it restricts rights and freedoms, to be honest.

You don't see a meaningful distinction between transportation methods and smoking?

I know what the difference between a car and a cigarette is. I'm talking about the consequences of using it.

Nicotine is literally an addiction for a lot of people. They are dependant on it. So taking it away entirely, without an appropriate alternative, is similarly bad as taking cars away entirely.

I wouldn't say you're happy about said problems. I would say you sound content with them, since you are refusing a policy that would directly address them. After all, restricting car usage in certain areas is the best way to eliminate the related externalities (congestion, pollution, accidents) in those areas.

I wouldn't say I'm content with them. I want to improve them, and I suggested a method for doing so, which is force people to bear the true costs of their actions and use that revenue to build up alternatives like better bike lanes, bike only roads, better and farther reaching public transit, reduced congestion etc.

I think car-free zones are fine though, for the record. As I mentioned it just seems like you'd need a transitional period where you build up good alternatives. As an example, I ride BART daily, but I meet a lot of people who don't because they think it's dirty, smelly, and dangerous (in their perception). That has to be fixed before you ban cars entering San Francisco.

The problem with this particular discussion is that it is not rational. The notion that we continue bear the overwhelming external costs of automobiles in order to preserve the status quo is patently irrational.

Anyone that arrives at the argument without already drawn that conclusion is woefully misinformed.

If you'll accept that conclusion as granted, then we can begin to have an intelligent discussion about how the issue should be addressed. In the absence of that, getting greeted with hyperbole seems most likely.

In US car companies literally dictated road laws, pushed for car adoption, killed the train system, even made it illegal to jaywalk (it's not illegal in many other countries).

As a pedestrian I find the jaywalking rule quite irritating at times. Walking around would be much more convenient without it.

> Allowing cars is overly restrictive of my individual choice to cycle safely, breath clean air and have my children grow up in a world without climate change.

There are obviously alternatives that do not involve banning cars outright - like barriers between cars and bikes, and electric vehicles.

But, if you want to demote cars to second-class instead of first-class road users (and promote something else), it's definitely going to be tough to accomplish that. There's a simplicity to a ban.

>> we've been driving forever

I bet this will be something interesting to read about on future history books...

"We" is also such a small fraction of humanity. The only country I know where cities were built around cars is the US.

I don't think most Americans - who grew up driving since age 16 - realize just how weird that is for most foreigners. I was surprised the first time I tried to walk into a strip mall and I had to walk 200 meters to find a pedestrian path. It was also weird walking around places like San Jose and Sacramento where you don't see people walking on the streets.

Individual choice seems an odd thing to bring up in favour of cars. Clearly, this is all about balancing conflicting individual choices by making collective choices.

Clearly? How do you "balance individual choices" by making ONE collective choice? How do you balance individual choices by banning cars? Balancing individual choices would be the permitting and taxation system I described initially, to price in the costs one individual's choices have on the others.

I don't see how it's odd. It's the biggest problem with solving climate change - how much do you restrict everyone, and how do you properly balance the conflicting individual choices with people's ability to live their lives? Collective choices aren't really a thing. We approximate it with democracy, but obviously not everyone gets what they want (see Trump being in office).

What I find odd is that individual choice is frequently invoked when arguing in favor of unrestricted car use, whereas the restrictions imposed on everyone else in order to facilitate car use (or by car use itself) are rarely seen as restrictions on individual choice. But that's in fact what they are.

I certainly wouldn't argue for unrestricted car use.

Also, almost 90% of Americans own cars, so I'm not sure who "everyone else" is, but what restrictions do you mean?

Here in London 54% of households own cars and the number is constantly declining.

But "everyone else" doesn't necessarily exclude car owners. Car owners are also residents who need to breathe, sleep, play and walk. Owning a car isn't the same as using it all the time. And using a car occasionally doesn't mean you have to own it.

The restrictions are pretty obvious if you open your eyes, ears and nose. Large parts of our cities have become effectively and legally unusable for anything other than driving.

And that's not just because of polution levels that kill tens of thousands in the UK alone, it's also because of government enforced bans on using that space between buildings called roads for anything else.

If my choice were to do so much as walk on a road or use a bicycle on a motorway, I would be penalised and forcibly removed. Large swaths of the city are dedicated exclusively to road traffic in spite of a desperate lack of land for home building.

These government enforced rules and restrictions are what I call collective choice.

What happens when your elderly father in the suburbs loses his license?

Not sure why he would do that, I see people much older than him still driving. But he'll stay home, I imagine. Or get rides from his family members, or younger wife.

Vision degradation with age is a common issue.

Really though, public transit is vastly better from a heath, independence, financial, and safety standpoint for the elderly than driving.

Not to mention dementia, arthritis, diabetes, decreased articulation. Old people in rural areas and suburbs without mass transit are in a very vulnerable position.

It can be also useful for social contacts. I recently rode the bus in a small american city I was visiting. The main users were teens and old people. The old people mostly knew each other and chatted pleasantly during the whole ride.

Given that won't work that well in a large city, but even then it's still better to be under people than sitting alone in your car.

It sounds like your father has a good support network in case he can no longer drive, but that isn't really so common nowadays. Most elderly folks in his situation would either:

A. Continue driving past the point they they are safely able to.

B. Become shut-ins due to lack of transportation, accelerating physical and mental decline.

I guess I don't see how banning cars in cities solves that problem for the elderly (particularly outside of cities).

Banning cars in a city or some part of a city is a step in the process of making a city where you don't need a car. Removing the traffic, exhaust, & safety risk to other users helps make biking, walking, bussing, and rail faster, safer, & more pleasant.

Traffic is irrelevant for trains. It has some effect on buses, which can be mitigated with HOV lanes. (Usually the problem there is frequency and a lack of express service). At the distances most people need to travel to reach their workplaces from affordable housing, walking and cycling are never going to be pleasant.

Banning cars from a city is a straight-up transfer of quality of life from the suburban masses to the richest in the center.

Drastically increasing high-rise housing supply in the center is a much more meaningful step.

Drastically increasing high-rise housing supply in the center is a much more meaningful step.

What are you going to do with all those extra cars?

Traffic is irrelevant for trains

Not for trolleys!

Nothing. Developers can dig garages if they care to, or not if they don’t. We’ve already established that driving in the urban core is unreasonable, so congestion is not a concern.

Trolleys are just buses with fewer degrees of freedom.

You said that your dad's anti-BART habit is hard to break, but elderly should really be encouraged to use public transit. It is safer and healthier. I get that transit sucks in suburbs, but that is something that should be fixed.

People live in high density areas. The residents should have higher priority than folks from the suburbs who choose to drive rather than taking public transit. That means having usable and human-focused urban design.

I generally am very much for pricing in externalities, as you say. But when it comes to cars in very dense areas, there is a significant discontinuity in social cost between zero cars (pedestrians can freely use the streets, no traffic lights, etc) and a few cars (like in congestion pricing schemes). With even a few cars, walking becomes far more inconvenient, and there is much less public space.

In dense urban cores, a huge proportion of the land area is essentially vacant, only used by a small minority that choose to drive. It is really a bizarre way of doing things.

> But when it comes to cars in very dense areas, there is a significant discontinuity in social cost between zero cars (pedestrians can freely use the streets, no traffic lights, etc) and a few cars (like in congestion pricing schemes).

In my experience that's not quite the case. I lived in Barcelona's old town for about a year, and while it was technically legal to drive on many of the narrow, medieval-era streets, in practice it was enough of a pain that drivers rarely did.

Because of the high volume of pedestrians, the few cars that did come through were forced to travel very slowly and the burden was on them to avoid hitting anyone, not the other way around. So I don't think you have to go all the way down to 0 cars to get most of the safety benefits – there's a tipping point somewhere earlier.

Totally! The all-or-none option seems extreme to me, especially in America, where we have lots of roads that can handle quite a few cars.

I have walked and accidentally driven in such areas in Europe, but the street layout and dynamics are very different in the US. The problem is that in the US we have wide, straight streets. We don't have the same kind of built-in traffic calming. There is also much more driver entitlement here.

Turning some areas into woonerfs might be a solution. It's also worth pointing out that many pedestrianized areas still allow delivery vehicles.

> The residents should have higher priority than folks from the suburbs who choose to drive rather than taking public transit

This is straight-up regressive: the dense areas are most premium, with transit-connected suburbs a close second, and car-oriented suburbs the only places affordable to the masses.

The BART Transbay Tube and all the trains that traverse it during peak hours are fully saturated. Capacity can't expand until CBTC signaling ships in the 2030s. The Temporary Transbay Terminal bus bays are also fully saturated, and the buses that service them have little headroom. Saleforce Transit Center was supposed to pave the way for more Transbay bus capacity, but 10 years of construction bought us only a few weeks of service before structural failure.

In short: public transit alternatives to the Bay Bridge are already too popular. Shifting SF<->Oakland car trips to public transport is physically impossible in the short and medium terms. BART does not have space to accomodate the 270,000 daily Bay Bridge drivers, and there's a 0% chance of making that space in the next decade.

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