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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

i'm on board with putting express roads and parking underground (even though the costs are high) and making the extra space available for humans, pets and lower speed transport like bikes and scooters.

i'd also advocate making licensing for vehicles much harder and increasing the enforcement and punishment of distracted driving.

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An alternative to underground is 'at the back'.

For example you can have a car free shopping street where cars can only park at the back sides of the shops.

Which quickly becomes the front for businesses advertising to passersby.

Those businesses would be foolish not to advertise on both sides. There is a kind of strip mall in Marina del Rey, CA that advertises businesses on the back entrances for cars driving by on busy Lincoln Blvd (with some parking back there, too), but has the main entrances on a pedestrian-facing side away from Lincoln.

Not with Boston's Quincy Market. The stores face two pedestrian streets. The back sides are for cars, and they're just utilitarian alleys.

I think if you want to build tunnels, you should put rails in them. It's a much more efficient use of tax dollars, since subways have a much higher capacity than roads.

how do you increase the enforcement of distracted driving?

Cameras overhead. There is a trial to catch drivers on their phones in Sydney IIRC.

Edit: found it https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/dec/17/drive...

in general I prefer not to lobby the government for even more surveillance, but maybe enforcement of phone use while driving is an acceptable situation. by the way, is "distracted driving" generally understood to mean "using a phone inappropriately while driving"? I took it to mean a much broader set of things that might distract a driver, which would require more invasive techniques to detect.

agreed that state-sponsored surveillance isn’t a great option. but there are companies creating in-car cameras/sensors combined with machine learning to identify distracted driving of all sorts (not just phone use). some insurance companies will lower rates for less distracted driving, for example (not that this is a great solution either). even just posting a distracted driving rating on your car as you drive might provide enough social disincentive not to do it.

> but there are companies creating in-car cameras/sensors combined with machine learning to identify distracted driving of all sorts (not just phone use). some insurance companies will lower rates for less distracted driving, for example (not that this is a great solution either).

while not perfect, I am actually a fan of this approach. in my ideal world, the government only administers sanctions to a citizen when they cause material harm to another person. let the insurance companies be on the hook (and possibly require the purchase of such insurance) for the actual penalties and have them calculate the risk. then excessively risky behaviors become de facto illegal because the insurance payments are not economic.

Bollards. Trees. High curbs. Feel free to drive like an idiot and send an auto shop worker's child to college.

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