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Comment by educationdata | Hacker News Reader

No. Car is not just the "culture", car serves our need. If you are young without kids, it may not make much difference for you to ride a car, or take a bus, or a train, subway, etc. But if you have a family, it makes a huge pain without your own vehicle.

If the city of future requires families to abandon their own vehicle, it is not the correct city of future. Just design a better one.

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Millions of people around America get their kids around the neighborhood just fine without a car. If you continue to insist that cities be designed around your limited vision, then you should be forced to pay for the full externalities of your car-centric lifestyle. The rest of us are tired of paying so you can waste our resources.

You need to cite a source for that.

Infact if anything, despite the very very recent free-range kids movement to liberate kids from the dependence on parents, its the opposite - kids get ferried everywhere, from high school sports practice sessions to neighborhood store visits.

http://www.pedbikeinfo.org/pdf/Community_SRTSfederal_Trends....

How do you know they are "just fine"? How do you know their feeling? Have you asked them?

> If you are young without kids, it may not make much difference for you to ride a car, or take a bus, or a train, subway, etc.

We have a toddler and a large dog. We own two electric cargo bikes and get around perfectly well without owning a car. There's car/truck sharing and rental if I really need to transport something large and heavy (> 100kg).

> Just design a better one.

I'd very much prefer if all that parking space and all that space used by 4-lane roads would be used to make the city more dense and walkable. If I can walk to the kindergarden or school, there's no need to even take a bike, if close enough a kid can even walk on their own. The only things that makes such a thing infeasible are cars.

Maybe you live in SF? Not every city always has good weather. Cargo bikes are useless for most cities because of weather (rain, snow, winter cold, summer hot). It's useful for fun when the weather is great, but not as a main way of transportation.

I live in Berlin. It’s been raining for a week and cold. Bikes both have a canopy, I have suitable clothing. Granted, it’s less comfortable than sitting in a car, but OTOH I don’t have to go jogging after returning from work. Worst case there’s still Bus and Subway.

Cities like Oslo and Copenhagen aren’t exactly known for good weather either, but have substantial policies around clearing bikeways from snow first, before all other roads. It’s more of an infrastructure problem than anything else: good cycling infrastructure begets cyclists. Walkable cities conjur pedestrians. Look at the Dutch, living in the land of eternal sunshine and mild temperatures.

I would love to be able to walk or ride my bike regularly. However, in the southeastern US it’s 80F+ (27C) with 70F+ (21C) dew point for 4 months of the year. If you travel by foot or bike, you need a shower at each destination to wash off the stench and sweat. It’s so hot here, often times your clothing becomes sweaty as soon as you step outside.

I would gladly live somewhere like Denver, Seattle, or San Francisco if money and family ties to the East coast weren’t an issue. Many of the cities with comfortable climates in the US are very expensive. The remaining, affordable cities have undesirable climates.

How do you explain that cargo bikes are very popular with parents in Copenhagen? It's a wet windy city.

Pain starts at the third child. Ideally families should have over nine kids each. Unfortunately, we are a dying society that on average doesn't even reach replacement level of children. If you want to think about a city of the future, it might be worth thinking about whether anybody will be around living in those cities.

Many families in European cities live just fine without a car. My family never had a car and it wasn't "a huge pain".

In which country and city have you been living as a family with children?

I was a child to a single mother of two in Berlin without a car.

I asked because the ability to live without a car depends on where you live. In Berlin, which is one of the biggest european cities, it's definitely doable.

How many? How do you know they are "just fine"? How do you know without a car wasn't "a huge pain" to your mother when you were 2 year old?

Some things with kids are easier on the bus than on the car. For instance, you can just roll a stroller onto it, rather than dealing with the car seat dance which is so particularly annoying in the winter. And once they're past the stroller phase, the kids love not being strapped down in a 5 point harness and having a parent that can interact with them rather than concentrating on driving. And the train is cool.

But of course we do have a car, so can have the best of both worlds.

I imagine that if we didn't have a car we would be using delivery a lot more often. Hard to do a Costco run without one.

I can imagine life with kids but without a car. But of course that life would heavily rely on Lyft & taxis, so is that really car free?

Yes. We can certainly survive without a car, but that life will be different. Uber & taxis are difficult when you have small kids, because it is much easier to have carseats installed in own car. Also it is much much easier for a family to go out for picnic, riding bicycles, swimming, or doing all sorts of outdoor activities.

Where does the difficulty lie? I lived in SF fine with a toddler, taking public transit to local places.

1 kid who does not have his own schedule is relatively easy to manage. 5 kids who need to be in different places is more difficult.

Five kids is an edge case. Besides, it's impossible to shuttle five kids to different places simultaneously by car without five parents. Not so with good public transit.

I feel that with 5 kids special provisions and certain difficulty will be necessary no matter what. You would be moving around with all children a lot less in any case. But I don't see why it's impossible to go car free; specially considering some kids will be older than others (not 5 toddlers simultaneously).

Maybe try to have kids do stuff that are compatible with the schedule then, and not the other way round.

That's not typical though, nobody is saying that specific family can go without a car.

I know families in NYC, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, and even Pittsburgh that do great car free! It is 100% doable, even in the US.

It's a bit more difficult in Oakland if the places you are trying to get to aren't by a BART stop. The AC transit buses are slow, dirty, sometimes dangerous, and don't have 100% coverage.

I have lived in NYC for two years with 1 small kid. I know how painful it is. Many subway stations do not have an elevator, I had to carry the baby and stroller through stairs. Even with elevator, all elevators smell extremely bad. Would you call this "just fine"?

The US currently has about 50 million households with children under 18 and over 250 million cars. There is room for an 80% drop in the number of cars without families with children going car-free.

That is demonstrably not true. All over the world, people raise families just fine without cars. As a matter of fact, I saw a truly dystopian scene of a group of children, on some school outing I assume, crossing a road at a crosswalk, all holding on to a long ribbon with two flag-waving adults (teachers?) on both end. When I was the age of these children I was walking around and crossing the streets on my own because the city I grew up didn't have such patently idiotic things as unregulated cross-walks with 30mph speed limit. But no, we'd rather risk running over children and make them walk in a chain gang, than inconvenience the metal murder/fume box people.

Where did you get the "just fine"? You read people's mind on a mass scale, Professor X?

You see plenty of families with kids making it work on public transportation. I wouldn't have seen very much baseball growing up without the train.

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