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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

From an European standpoint, this text reads like a nightmarish dystopia. I find solace in the trend towards banning cars altogether inside the cities.

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Agreed, although for small communities, public transport doesn't always work.

Coincidentally, the author's bio says he now lives in Seattle, which has truly awful traffic. They could have banned traffic in e.g. South Lake Union when it was being developed and didn't.

Walking works for small communities (at least in Europe).

Unless you want to go somewhere outside those communities

Europe seems pretty happy with the train.

Because every village or even town has access to rail.. Yeah, right.

Downvoted? A friend of mine lives in a small village (because they had a child on the way and needed a bigger, cheap place to live). The bus leaves two times a day, not at all on sunday and the next train station is 20 minutes by car.

Is it still cheap if you factor in car cost + car maintenance?

He needs a car for his job anyway, so yeah. But even otherwise possibly, the rent in the city here would be twice as much for half the space.

I live in a small community in the rural American South, everything is too spread out to get anywhere quickly by walking. It's like a 7 minute drive to my post office. Lots of houses on my street living on pretty big parcels of land.

I wish, though! I hate how dependent I am on my car for transportation.

> for small communities, public transport doesn't always work

For very small towns, you can walk. For mid-size villages, you take the bike. For cities, there is a public transportation network. In exceptional circumstances you can take a cab or an uber. If you want a week-end in a remote site, you can easily rent a car. I see zero need of owning a car for the general population, and I have never had or needed one.

If you're lucky enough to be able to walk or cycle, great - I love living in places like that, and currently don't own a car.

But I grew up in a small, isolated village (in Europe, as the other comment notes). When your bus ride to school (on public transport, not a school bus) takes 40mins+, walking or cycling just isn't practical. So please, rural communities have it hard enough already without presumption or condescension. A bit of empathy goes a long way, although I guess it's easier to just assume everyone lives a certain way.

Unless automated cars really become good enough the need for self owned cars will always be there. I live in Singapore which has a very good public transport system and it's extremely expensive to own and keep a car so most people use public transport and 30-40min or more Transit time to work and school is common. So your 40 min time school commute doesn't sound that bad to me.

Fair enough, I'm happy to turn this into a Monty Python sketch. Frequency also matters. For my particular route this was roughly once an hour during business hours, and nothing after 8pm. This is not so rare [0].

[0] not where I grew up, privacy, but comparable: https://www.cumbria.gov.uk/elibrary/Content/Internet/544/931...

For those who didn't catch your (brilliant and well-placed) Monty Python reference:

Four Yorkshiremen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26ZDB9h7BLY

Well, I'll take it on good faith that this was bad for you.

But lets see my last few commutes.

* Now; walk 15 minutes (mid/small-size european city; population 350k)

* 4-8 years ago: 20-50 minutes on tube (living close to work was prohibitively expensive) (this was London, so, large city)

* 8 years ago: 40 minutes (Helsinki, pop: 1.4m)

* 10 years ago: 1hr 20m (mid-size UK city; pop 1m)

So although recently, yes I have had better commute times, it's not uncommon or insane to have commutes that stretch 40 minutes.

Of those commutes, the only one that would be improved by having a car would be the 10yr one (I was going to college and couldn't have a car then, it would be impossible to pay for it barring everything else)

The others could really not improve, London traffic is insane, the Helsinki train system moves significantly faster than traffic, I walk today, and if I were to cycle it would take me even less time.

I think we can safely say that different levels of urbanization can have different policies. Or we could unify it under land value taxes ;)

You assume everyone is living in dense cities of various sizes. But if you live in a rural area where distances are large and public transport is spotty, a car is almost a necessity to get from A to B in useful time.

It's tough not having a car if you have small children.

I have two kids. And yes, it is indeed tough, but not because I don't own a car.

So much of Europe also lives in climate easy mode. Try a harsh Canadian winter on your bike.

For very small towns

For very small towns the nearest X is probably at least a 4 hour walk away, in the next town over, for many values of X. For large cities the nearest X is probably a 4 minute walk away for most values of X. The smaller the town the less chance that what you want is within walking distance and the more important it is to have a car.

As an example I have personal experience of, for most of the west coast of Scotland the nearest collection of large shops, banks, etc is in Inverness - which is a 2 hour drive or 24 hour walk.

Smaller towns have more need of cars than large ones, to get out of the town.

I'd posit that we are going to have a very hard time fighting off climate change if we aren't allowed to do anything to discourage people from driving 40 minutes to a nearby town every time they want to go shopping. The transportation sector is the biggest carbon emitter, and at some point we have to come to terms with the fact that in order to reduce our carbon emissions, we are all going to have to drive a lot less.

The problem isn't just that people have to drive far to get anywhere, it's also that delivery vehicles have to drive far out of their way to deliver stuff to these places.

Then you can go there by car. But why would you need to use the car inside the town, once you are there?

For small villages, the necessary infrastructure, like grocery stores, hospitals, town halls, can be 2-20km away. In the winter, the roads might be completely impassable. That has car-related consequences for the towns where those amenities are.

While I'd like for cars to be eliminated, it's not happening in sparse areas.

It's basically essential for rural living (e.g. most of Scotland outside the cities and islands). Cars are also a mobility aid; trying to go cycle-only can come across as abilist. Not all cities have usable public transport. At best there are some cities where you can get away without a car almost all of the time.

I love how whenever people talk about banning cars in cities everyone comes out of the woodwork and screams “but what about the rural towns?!?!”.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but rural towns aren’t cities.

In this case I was replying to:

"For very small towns, you can walk. For mid-size villages... I see zero need of owning a car for the general population"; so not just cities.

I think it's safe to say Scotland is more remote/rural than most of the regions being discussed.

But, if we consider Blairgowrie (a fairly typical farming town), you could get by without a car if you lived and worked in town. The Tesco isn't in the best location for walking (because it's surrounded by a giant underutilized parking lot). But, the large Co-op in town is walkable. And the small Co-op is walkable for the houses along Coupar Angus Rd.

My parents owned a house on the outskirts of town and I could walk to the Wellmeadow in 10 minutes or so.

There is regular bus service to Perth and Dundee, so you can get into the cities for doctors appointments and suchlike.

But, for a farmer who lives outside town, I agree, a car is going to be a necessity. And for people living in town, a car is nice to have, just not absolutely required.

HN is very US centric. In the US state politics are almost always dominated by one or a couple of cities. And the generally dominate in a ways that results in rural and suburban folk are basically told to screw off if they don't like it. The reason people come out of the woodwork to scream "but what about rural areas" is that the fear is that cities will get policies enacted at the state level that make it more expensive to own/operate a vehicle statewide rather than improve alternatives (costs money, whereas taxing cars makes money) or just raise costs in the city.

Basically people are worried about a lead balloon like NY-SAFE but for cars.

I'd be perfectly fine if the major city in my state made it more expensive to use a car in the city so long as there was an proportional increase in the quantity of park and ride lots at the ends of the rail network and reliability of that rail service. What would happen in reality is that they'd just raise the cost, the parking garages would all be full at 6am instead of 7am and the rail network would be even worse because it would be handling more volume and the money made would be used on pork and graft. Nobody's quality of life would be improved save politicians who suddenly have more money to spend on salaried government jobs they can appoint the friends/relatives of people they want on their side to and the people appointed to those jobs.

pjc50 and my post indicate the same happens in Europe, it isn't just the US. otherwise, agreed, I don't think anybody argued cities need more cars and less public transport.

But even in the relatively narrow scenario you describe, there is an immediate benefit for those living and working in the city, which is that there is significantly less car traffic, which means less noise and pollution and greater safety (also access for emergency vehicles etc). And, over the longer term, fewer cars within the city means that roads can be narrowed and sidewalks widened. And this is all without even considering where the increased taxes would actually be spent.

Until the mid / late 1960s there simply weren't individually owned cars in rural British villages beyond the doctor, vet and perhaps postmaster. In Donegal in Ireland it was like that into the 80s!

I assume the grocery stores back then were probably smaller and more centrally located.

And women were less likely to go out to work, so they could spend a day schlepping around the shops to buy what they needed. Yes, people shopped at the local corner store - which means a narrower range of goods at higher prices. A rather different world of pre-decimal currency.

But also significantly lower carbon emissions!

It depends on the population density more than city size, I think.

I grew up in eastern Poland - it's a region with few big cities about 50 km apart on average, but there's well developed public transport between them, because countryside is relatively densely populated (even if it's just a chain of villages - it adds up).

Half the population of these villages commute to the big city 20-30 km away every day. People still own cars because it's convenient for shopping and family trips, but they don't need to use them every day for commute.

On the other hand you can have medium or big cities with mostly empty countryside between them (like in western Poland), and a car is required if you happen to live between these cities.

For reference - Poland has about 120 people per square km and is near the average for EU. USA has about 35 people per square km.

Try having children without a car.

Millions of people do, dude.

I know, but very few of them do so by choice.

You probably haven't been to North Idaho - I live just south of Sandpoint. Sure you can get around town with a bike but the reason you live there is to get into the mountains via back roads (dirt, gravel) that have little up keep, and to be away from it all. Ski resort is 20 minutes up the mountain.

Moreover, the nearest city (45k pop) is 45 minutes south and the nearest major airport is 1.5 hours away. You will need a car, unless you are comfortable just bumming it in town all the time.

Northern Idaho is closer to small towns in Iceland.

Surely a town with a population of 6000 an a city with a population of 2 million can have different rules and norms.

Perhaps you are from NL, Denmark, Germany or Sweden. Traffic management in Italy, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Greece is insane (and you can't even take a right when it's red!)

And exactly why is insane in Spain?

You can't in Germany, either.

You can't anywhere in continental Europe it seems.

Not generally allowed, but there are signs allowing it almost everywhere.

Maybe 50% or less where I live. Never counted but certainly not even close to "almost everywhere"

The Grünpfeil (green arrow) traffic sign that allows right turns through a red light was actually invented in the GDR, so it's more common in East Germany.

Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%BCnpfeil

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