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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

How do you propose getting around quickly in car-free city centers? Electric scooter services? I was in NYC the other day, and it was like 1 am and we were several blocks northwest of Times' Square, it was freezing and raining and public transportation was on late night service which would have required 20+ minutes of waiting around shivering for a bus, or a long-ish walk to the nearest subway station and another longish walk to the hotel. Instead we got a Lyft to pick us up in 3 minutes and were curbside at our hotel in no time.

I'm just trying to imagine what my (and my pregnant wife's) options would have been with a car-free version of NYC

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Walking. That’s how you get around quickly. It’s quicker to walk in downtown SF than take a car for a good portion of the day.

Also maybe you don’t need to get around so quickly. That’s kind of my point about how much damage the car has done to society.

> Walking. That’s how you get around quickly.

You either have a limited definition of "quickly" or a limited definition of "around".

> Also maybe you don’t need to get around so quickly.

Or maybe you do.

> That’s kind of my point about how much damage the car has done to society.

There have been positives as well.

While I think the comment you were responding to was being somewhat snarky, urban design specifically to accommodate walkability is a thing. Cities that are high-density and mixed-use allow for many of the things people need to do on a daily basis to be close to where they already are, which makes "around" smaller for most purposes and consequently makes "quickly" more achievable on foot. Cities that have lots of parking lots place the actual stuff people want to visit farther apart, or who entirely separate offices from retail from food from residential, require vehicles.

You missed the whole point. Raining, cold, pregnant wife. Or maybe he was accompanied by his elderly father. Or young kid.

Not everyone is a healthy 20 year old.

take a bus. or tram, metro, or train. When there's no cars on the road to compete with and enough demand to make 5-10 minute departure intervals viable, public transit can be a very efficient and convenient option.

Making the city center car free and making the city center motor vehicle free are not the same thing.

I live in Norway, and have for 5-6 years now. I'm 40. One of the things I noticed about the city I'm in - Trondheim - was that it was a walkable city. Between busses and walking, I'm usually set for transportation. We use the car once or twice a month for convenience (cat litter, for example). I don't have a valid license, so I don't drive at all and we didn't have any car the first 2-3 years I lived here.

I commonly see people walking in all sorts of weather - rain, snow, freezing weather and sun. Proper clothing makes these things tolerable in addition to simply getting used to it. I see pregnant women walking. I regularly see mothers with young infants in strollers. I regularly see elderly folks, sometimes with canes or walkers. In fact, I did some language practice in a nursing home and somewhat regularly went for walks with a few residents. The folks that did language training in a preschool were outside daily. The elementary schools have sleds and buckets for snow.

The combination of walking and public transportation usually works out well, and you do not need to be a healthy 20-year old to deal with it.

Get some exercise? It’s just rain. Has CA weather made everyone here soft?

To put it another way, how did you get there? If it was by car, then yes you'd probably need a similar way to get back. If you'd settled on walking, then returning by walking would naturally be more viable. Obviously, what I'm saying is you'd have chosen a closer destination.

Hard to talk about public transportation without getting into statements that sound like judgments. Definitely not judging your actions. But it's not really a useful analysis to insert a particular solution midway into a situation when the solution wouldn't have allowed the situation to happen in the first place.

Believe it or not, there were old and pregnant people before cars! We even had cities before cars!

Venice even had old people, pregnant people, and children! The trifecta. Rumor has it these people still roam Venice today, although in smaller numbers.

Most city centers that go "car-free", especially in Western Europe, only do so for a few blocks. Imagine the entire area around Times Square becoming pedestrianized.

And yes, as much as they seem to clutter city streets, electric scooters and the like are seemingly becoming a viable last-mile transportation option.

I think this comment is actually so key and apt in this entire discussion. It almost sounds like some of the comments in this thread are like BAN all cars. But in reality, these efforts are really small, subtle fixes and actually probably make a lot of sense. And if we were to look at the maps of Oslo, the pregnant elderly people can still live, with a car, somewhere in Norway where they can still park AT the grocery store.

Baby steps instead of basically saying themagician is trying to kill my pregnant wife on a 20 mile hike in the forest and openbasic is going to run over my kids!

> It almost sounds like some of the comments in this thread are like BAN all cars.

There are a lot of comments in this thread assuming that everybody else wants to ban all cars (like Mr "I can't sit on a train because I have arthritis" above), but I have yet to see one that actually suggests that cars should be disallowed altogether.

The complaint is that cars are overemphasized in city planning. In New York City, something like 90% of street surface is devoted to the use of drivers, in the form of lane space and free parking, who make up only 35% of the population (not including Staten Island, where rich white suburban people bring it up to 45%).

> Imagine the entire area around Times Square becoming pedestrianized.

We have those. That's called a Shopping Mall.

Insightful. By advertising, lobbying and bribing their way into dominance, the car industry has created demand for private walkable city center substitutes.

I feel it’s a situation that happens because you count on taxis running around.

I can’t otherwise imagine being pregnant and stranded outside at 1am in freezing cold nowhere near other transportation. It still could happen, but you’d call an ambulance to help you out.

Here's the best way to get around in the car free parts of Oslo: https://oslobysykkel.no/en

Other than that, there's plenty of public transportation.

And you don't even have to make the entire city center free of cars, i.e. make every 5th street available for cars (limited, like 1 open lane). As long as you can walk a couple of blocks you'll be able to grab a taxi.

I agree with your point in theory, but it’s somewhat ironic that the Oslo bike share you link to is closed for the season. There are ways to move around without cars, but it becomes far more challenging in winter climates

They're currently piloting winter bikes: https://oslovintersykkel.no/en/

We've the same (next generation) bikes here in Bergen, open 365 days a year: https://bergenbysykkel.no/en

Your question presupposes the poor transit service you experienced in NYC (greatly reduced late night schedule) which which is no doubt a function of budget constraints.

There is a mode of point-to-point private-vehicle transport that is quite fast at dense urban scales: bike share. Oslo has it as do many/most European city centres.

When you get to truly late night, NYC is one of the few cities with any subway service at all. The MTA has a lot of issues but in general NYC isn't a great example of a city without good transit coverage.

I live in NYC and only ever take cabs when I am with a group that insists on it. I have no problem whatsoever with walking, cycling, or waiting a little longer for a train. And at all times of day.

It really is just a matter of shifting your expectation. Waiting for a train with friends late at night can even be a really fun experience that you can share with the other groups of tipsy people that are on their way somewhere. You might even meet someone new and special. To me, this is what city life should be, rather than the isolation of swiping on your phone in your ride-share.

I won't say I never take cabs/Uber/Lyft. But, on business travel, I'm constantly struck by the number of people who, confronted with going somewhere more than a few blocks away, their automatic reflex is to pull out their phone.

Your post is run through with faulty assumptions. You're assuming public transit would remain in its current under funded and under performing state in a world where we ban cars and can, thus, stop paying to maintain car infrastructure. In a world where everyone relies on public transit, there's that much more incentive to ensure it remains high functioning.

I don't think making the entire island of Manhattan car free is on the table, but there are certainly sections of Manhattan that could be made so that at this point are already de facto off limits to cars, like the narrow lanes of Lower Manhattan.

> raining

IMHO I think with all the money we save on road maintenance, cities would start should look at ways to improve sidewalks. One interesting improvement might be some way to cover them like is done in parts of Seattle or Las Vegas.

(Electric-)bicycles are usually the quickest way to get around in a city.

Light rail, cabs, buses et cetera

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