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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

as a multimodal traveler, i generally agree with most of the changes that oslo implemented, but let's not make cars villians. fast personal, point-to-point, at-hand, energy-dense transporation is great! and so is having grass and trees with kids and dogs playing. but there's no need to pit them against each other.

so besides leaving some low capacity, slow roads above ground, let's put a few high capacity, fast roads underground (we could call them lowways!) along with a bunch of underground parking. sure, it's expensive but in a wealthy high density area like market street, we can afford it. and yes, price in the externalities and use the money to build/maintain. best of all worlds! (better solutions probably exist, so let's find 'em)

ps - dockless electric bikes in SF totally beat driving, ride hailing, or public transit for me.

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> but let's not make cars villians.

"Over half of all vehicle trips are between 1 and 10 miles." [1]

~35,000 people die on American roads each year. [2]

Let's call a spade a spade. Cars are the villains. The over-reliance on your fast, personal, point-to-point convenience is killing too many people.

[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/pl08021/fig4...

[2] https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

no, poor decision making is what kills people. cars are incidental to that (plenty of other machinery are involved in deaths as well).

if you want to reduce vehicle deaths (which have already been steadily declining) make getting a license much harder (e.g., demonstrate true defensive driving skills like both braking and accelerating out of trouble) and develop & enforce better safety laws (i.e., not some proxy like speed, but actually reduce behavior likely to cause death).

besides, we've long collectively accepted the tradeoff that we want fast personal transport more than a perfectly safe transportation environment. life is full of risks, and some risks will always be out of your control no matter what you do. hundreds of people die per year from bathtubs. are we over-reliant on those too?

> no, poor decision making is what kills people.

It's both. It's way harder to kill yourself or someone else if you and everyone around you is biking, and if they're just walking it's close to impossible.

Driving generates danger. Period. Sometimes that danger is worth it, but let's not pretend that it's not currently vastly more dangerous for others than other forms of transportation.

In the US, cars comprise 90% of land-based passenger miles traveled. [1] In Europe, it's 80-90% in most countries. [2] So if we in the US are "over-reliant" on cars, Europe is not far behind.

Considering that cars are the preferred method of transport for the vast majority of people, you could just as well say that "people who want to leave the house are the villains."

What really bothers me about the Urbanist attitude is that it seems to be based on shaming people for the ways they choose to live and comparing it with a mythical urban car-free utopia that doesn't exist.

I like transit and use it frequently but I detest the shaming and condescension.

[1] https://nhts.ornl.gov/person-miles

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/f/...

US pedestrian deaths are at a 25 year high. Be ashamed.

Or don't take the car for short journeys. Be part of a positive change.

Or don't take a job that requires long commutes. People want to live in location A and want a better job in location B and accept the fact they increase the risk of death in others, directly and through pollution, as a reasonable trade-off for their comfort.

I don't drive (34, Sacramento). Most people don't need to drive.

https://smartgrowthamerica.org/dangerous-by-design/

> US pedestrian deaths are at a 25 year high.

So is the population.

> Most people don't need to drive.

This is a depressingly provincial attitude. Public transit is not available within ten miles of a majority of the US population. Widen your perspective.

> fast personal, point-to-point, at-hand, energy-dense transporation is great! and so is having grass and trees with kids and dogs playing. but there's no need to pit them against each other.

Of course. The problem is externalities. If the people enjoying their energy-dense personal transportation aren't incurring the full costs of that transportation, then 1) there will be probably way more of it than there would be in a market with costs internalized and 2) the people who don't use it have a good reason to be upset.

> and so is having grass and trees with kids and dogs playing. but there's no need to pit them against each other.

If urban cores were allowed to be built high and dense, to accommodate all those people who prefer to live in dense urban areas, then the grass and trees and backyards of the suburbs would also fit closer to the urban core. Shorter distances even from the suburbs to the core.

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