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Comment by bluejekyll | Hacker News Reader

I've experienced this same anecdote in similar situations for the past 20 years as well. There has been a long push by auto manufacturers to make anything other than cars that use the roads seen as both illegitimate and illegal. For example, see the history of Jaywalking laws: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797. Starting around 1920's the auto-industry encouraged laws around the US to make crossing the street illegal. These laws have the downside of making car drivers feel entitled to the road.

Cyclists and other non-car users of roads have a deep hole to climb out of to change these laws, and to change the perception that streets are only for cars. Infrastructure is probably the only real mechanism we have that can make tangible changes, that don't allow the personal feelings of car drivers to get angry at being inconvenienced by cyclists and other road users.

We need to slow down auto-traffic and encourage more non-vehicular use of the roads, while making those roads safer for pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders, skate boarders, etc.

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> We need to slow down auto-traffic and encourage more non-vehicular use of the roads, while making those roads safer for pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders, skate boarders, etc.

Is that the most efficient use of the roads? Especially in a place like Boston, where most people in the metro area don’t live in (and can’t afford to live in) the city itself. At a certain point doesn’t creating a preference for pedestrians and cyclists actually end up being a preference for wealthier people who can afford to live downtown, versus those who need to access the city but can’t live within walking or biking distance? (Note that bicyclists and skateboarders also slow down busses, which are what lower income people use to get around.)

It might not be as efficient, but it sure is better for the environment, for traffic, and for health, among others. In most of the US, the wealthier people live in suburbs, though your point still stands.

Many European cities are nicer places to live as a result of better cycling infrastructure and a culture of road-sharing.

You mean the roads downtown should be inaccessible to people living downtown so suburban people can commute in on 2 ton steel boxes that they then store for the day in downtown?

No, that is indeed not the most efficient use of the roads. The most efficient use of the roads would be to rip them out and use the space for vastly more efficient public transport.

(Bus transport is also not slowed down by cyclists, or of all things, skateboarders.)

> The most efficient use of the roads would be to rip them out and use the space for vastly more efficient public transport.

More efficient for who? The software developer who lives in a condo downtown, or the lady who cleans his office that drives in from the suburbs?

For both? This isn't policy, this is what you already mentioned: space is becoming rapidly more expensive downtown, and that doesn't stop with such mundane things as roads or parking spaces. These are not magically guaranteed their place, forever. This article and things like congestion charge in NYC are the natural consequence.

So the choice isn't some faux gentrification debate on optimizing roads for the strawman "cleaning lady from the suburbs" or the "downtown software developer", it's for the cleaning lady to be out of a job in 10 years because the only cars driving downtown will be worth a century of her yearly income - or taking the train...

In Boston? The cleaning lady takes the T. No way she can afford parking downtown.

But how does she get to the T? It doesn't go very far.

It goes to East Somerville. It goes to Chelsea. It goes to Everett. If you want to knwo how the night shift janitors in your office get to work, just hang around the Sullivan Square station at 6PM.

She would benefit most from more bus only lanes going into the city. Or perhaps rip out the parking garages and replace them with affordable housing downtown.

I lived next to a main traffic route in a bigger city for a few years. You rarely see a commuter that is not completely ALONE in their car.

Using a car in a city is not a human right, it is a luxury. That trunk and the four free seats are there "just in case" you might need it. There is no rational reason why it is that way. It is a whole culture that revolves around owning a car and I say that as somebody who was driving for a living once.

Commuting to a city boils down to using the cities advantages (well paying jobs, infrastructure, etc) while avoiding the disadvantages (noise, pollution, higher rents and criminality) at the cost of those living there (you take jobs people living there could take, you are traffic, space and noise). Could they get a space in the city? Sure. Only it would be tiny and substandard and they don't want that.

If you're committed to high quality public transport, it's more efficient for both.

Do you think there's a lot of cleaning ladies driving in and parking downtown in expensive major cities?

In Austin, a significant portion of the cleaning people work evenings/nights, and I believe frequently are given the option of parking in the garage of the office building(s) they're cleaning.

It's not all, but it's a part. Of course, Austin's no NYC. I assume NYC doesn't have as many empty parking garages at night, and it definitely has better public transit.

People who are 'reverse commuting' are unlikely to be hurt by this, since there's not much traffic pressure going that way at that time.

A parking spot uses about as much space as a mid-sized apartment if you build four stories above it. Fewer cars mean more room for affordable housing.

lower income people in nearly all major cities tend not live in the suburbs since that require owning an maintaining a car (or two), usually they live in high density housing in areas adjacent to larger metro areas and accessible by public transportation. These people would benefit tremendously if urban areas where restructure to have better, more efficient public transportation.

It depends on what you mean by efficient, I guess. I like the graphic on this article, https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/how-much-space-do-pe...

It shows how many more people can efficiently use roads while on bikes than in cars. So, if we define efficiency by that measure (obviously this matters more in cities and congested areas), then yes, it's more efficient.

I see that graphic a lot, but it's not a very useful one, because it ignores residential patterns. Most people can't use a bike. So if you displace one car, you're not going to replace it with one bike, much less than 5 that would otherwise fit in the same space.

The efficiency question is: what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make that worse, slowing down the majority for the sake of a tiny minority that can use a bike to get where they're going.

> it ignores residential patterns

I would argue that what we need to discuss more, is how do we make transit more efficient for the different residential patterns. Is driving to a parking lot, and then getting on a bike, scooter, skateboard, a more efficient option? Or transferring to a train/bus? Do we really want people driving into city centers?

> Most people can't use a bike.

I don't think you mean that exactly, I think you're extrapolating from your residential patterns comment. Most people can ride a bike, we just need to make it a better option in different areas.

> what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make that worse.

This isn't supported by my personal experience (live in a city), it's faster for me to bike somewhere, than drive and look for parking.

Here's a 538 article specifically on this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-t...

"This is an important point: Bike lanes don’t cause a lot more congestion if you put them on the right streets. If you cut down the size of streets that are already near capacity, you’ll create severe congestion. But if you start with roads that are well under capacity, you’ll only increase the congestion a little bit. And it may not even be noticeable."

Doesn't sound like you know Cambridge at all. There aren't many under capacity roads, especially when winter snow comes down. What this is going to do is make traffic slower, encourage more bikers who will ignore traffic rules and act unpredictably, and generally muck things up. Cambridge is actually probably a really great candidate for bike lanes with multiple colleges nearby, but let's not pretend this isn't going to absolutelymake commuting worse. Biking into work isn't an option for me. When I come into the Cambridge office it's 5 hours in the car round trip. Nevermind the jerk motorcycles who drive down center lanes, cut cars off, pop wheelies in the highway, etc. I can definitely say the animus bicyclists receive is undue. My wife and daughter have been threatened with vehicles, I've been hit in a crosswalk walking by a car, and I can't even get into how bad it is trying to follow the rules in Boston with pedestrians crossing against the signal while you've got a short green.

> bikers who will ignore traffic rules

Bikes ignoring traffic rules is a 1000x better than cars ignoring traffic rules. Since cars actually kill people. 40,000 a year in the US. Every year. But hey, you don't give a shit about that, right?

This is true, but it doesn't excuse bikes ignoring traffic rules. Also, bikes striking pedestrians can kill them just as dead as cars can.

> Most people can't use a bike.

Huh? What kind of people are you referring to? In my simple observation, most people can indeed use a bike. And in some countries, like Denmark, or China, it is my impression that most people do use a bike.

I think he means most people don't live close enough to the city that they could reasonably ride a bike to get where they need to go.

That is why you have park & ride concepts and trains. In many european cities you have places just outside the city where you can park your car or hop of and take your bike and take the last mile by bike or public transport.

Having all your commuters drive their car into the city is not at all a good idea. I lived for years at one heavy intersection in one of Germanys biggest cities and I can tell you, if you watch the traffic for half an hour you will see maybe one or two cars with more than one person in them.

I moved from their because the dust and the noise were having a huge impact on my health.

I don't think it is about banning cars from city centers totally. It is about finding acceptable solutions that work without forcing people. Encourage them. Have a working public transport system. Make it cheap. Make it so cheap that driving a car will cost you. Include all problems cars cause in a urban space in some kind of toll or tax.

Park & ride is a fine idea, but Massachusetts needs to invest in that sort of infrastructure before it will become viable for commuters.

Currently there's the commuter rail, which is hard to get to from many areas, is quite expensive, and doesn't run very frequently. It's not good enough to get people to stop driving.

If the commuter rail is not convenient they could park at the end of the T, e.g. Alewife, BC etc.

But now they need to pay for the car anyway, so you're left balancing the comparatively small cost of parking + extra gas + extra mileage against inconvenience of switching transit methods + cost of transit.

There's many other factors, too, which could influence things in either way: total time spent commuting, whether you hate crowded spaces and prefer to sit alone in your car, whether you can be productive (eg: phone call, working on laptop, doing email on phone etc) or want to be able to read.

But can they bike from a train station in the city? Can they bike around the suburb they live in? Yes, they probably can.

Can they find a parking spot in the train station? No, no they can't.

Many suburbs in Europe are set up with either lots of parking at the station, or such that people even in the suburb are within walking/biking distance of the station. I can show you examples if you're interested.

I don't think it's a problem that can't be solved. But Massachusetts needs to invest in that infrastructure before it will become viable. Just making the city more navigable by bikes doesn't solve the problem.

> Massachusetts needs to invest in that infrastructure

And that is the crux of the problem. Cities across the US don't have enough funding to maintain the infrastructure they currently have, let alone try to build anything new. Their only hope is to get a grant from the state or federal government.

None of this is sustainable.

If you always wait for complementary infrastructure, you'll never do anything. Sometimes a half-assed compromise is just an intermediary step on the way to a full-assed solution.

If your elderly or disabled. Although if you that level of elderly, you might not be able to use a car either, and the disabled often have motorized wheelchairs that could go as fast as bikes.

For people who say 'but the disabled need cars', I want to offer some ancedata: I know a retired couple that bought a house in SF years ago because they wanted a working transit system when they can't drive cars anymore.

But rayiner said “most people”. Most people are not elderly or disabled.

A third of people in the US can't (or can't afford to) drive. Bicycling seems much more democratic.

They said most people, and even many elderly or disabled folk can bike. I see some very old people biking around Munich. Almost never saw that in the US, almost like having better infrastructure has some kind of impact...

Elderly: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/tag/elderly/

Disabled: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/tag/disabled-people/

Less serious, but still a good demonstration of the inclusiveness of cycling: https://vimeo.com/131968609

Just building protected bikelanes is not enough for cities that were build over decades with a car-centric layout. You need to drastically reduce parking and increase the density. This is a process that will take a long time. Changing cities is hard.

Boston/Cambridge were built for horses not cars. A car centric layout would actually create way more space to accommodate the bicycles.

More space for traffic is generally bad for everybody since it increases the number of miles between the places where you want to be.

Take a bike on public transportation for longer-distance routes. I don't know what sort of barbaric backwater you live in, but in my bike-friendly city, all the buses and light rail have bike racks, and bike commuters regularly use them for the longer legs.

In a super-dense city like Cambridge, it's even more true. Less need for long travel, more need for bikes in the congested center.

The problem is the people who can't afford to live in Cambridge. There isn't much in the way of public transportation to get you to Cambridge.

How many of those people can afford a car?

> Most people can't use a bike.

This is simply false. Most people absolutely can use a bike. Maybe not for every possible trip, but for many of them, yes. Just look at the bike rate in the Netherlands, if you don't believe me.

There are a variety of possible modes available, and they can be mixed and matched as people need and want. Driving to a suburban park and ride transit station, taking the train into the city, and then using bike share to get to your final destination, is a perfectly sensible thing.

> Driving to a suburban park and ride transit station, taking the train into the city, and then using bike share to get to your final destination, is a perfectly sensible thing.

And if Massachusetts had that kind of infrastructure, it would work out fine. But it doesn't, and just making a city more bike-friendly doesn't solve the problem on its own.

I think you could arguably entirely remove non-commercial vehicles form dense cities like Boston and New York. You could build massive parking garages at the limits of the city and suburban commuter could just park and take alternate transit from there.

During peak traffic in both of these cities I've been easily able to walk as fast as traffic, forget how much faster public transit or biking would be.

If you displaced all the cars within a city, then transportation within the city would likely be faster and more efficient for everyone. City buses would be much nicer if there was virtually no traffic in the city. Biking would likewise be a more realistic option if was dramatically safer and had better infrastructure for storage.

of course that's a pipe-dream, but the obsessive car culture in the US is a nightmare so it's nice to have some contrast.

Not all of the mass transit in Boston is weather protected. Snow routinely causes train stoppages. The lines are also really old, being dug by hand when street cars and horse and buggy still existed. There's also the face of massive cost increases forcing people to take transit and park, not to mention the increase in commuting time by not getting directly to your location. I've been on some really great transit systems in places like Bucharest and Tokyo. Boston is an unfortunately poor comparison on some lines.

I don’t disagree with that at all—that’s the ideal. But I don’t know what version of the United States you’re living in, but in mine, most cities don’t have that infrastructure, are too politically incompetent to be able to build that infrastructure cost effectively, and most of the few cities that do have it (like DC and New York) have let it decay to the point where it’s not timely and reliable.

One of the things transit advocates fail to grapple with is that our municipal political systems in the United States are broken. When it costs New York City 5-7 times as much money per mile of subway as it does Paris or London, you can’t build enough subway to meet peoples’ needs. (The debate over transit would be totally different if, for what MTA spends now, it was building five times as much track to meet peoples’ needs.)

Who would run the transit that goes from the edge parking lots to the city in your hypothetical? It would be WMATA. The same organization that, despite ample funding, let DC’s Metro decay to the point that they had to turn off automatic train control—a feature that was designed into the system at inception in the 1970s.

That’s the political reality we have to design our transportation systems against. Looking over the pond at what they do in Amsterdam or Paris is foolish—it’s like designing a plane for earth’s gravity based on what it would take to fly a plane on Mars.

> Most people can't use a bike.

What? How do you figure? My observation is that most people absolutely can (and many would seriously benefit from it).

Maybe not for every situation, but for the rare ones where a bike won't do, a cab will.

Winter (ice, snow, freezing winds) Rain storms People who don't want to show up to work sweaty (my work never had showers and I'm the sort of person who creates a lot of sweat (and smell) even if I'm taking it easy on a bike People who live more than X miles from where they are going People who live up/down major hills etc.....

I lived IN Boston for a while, and actually rode my bike to work during the summer (didn't own a car) and just let everyone suffer through my sweat. But I couldn't do it in the winter (yes I know some people do). Aside from the physical cold/misery, the snow and ice made many roads extremely dangerous. The last few places I've lived were in the suburbs, commuting to other suburbs (luckily I've been avoiding the worst city traffic). The distances were too great to bike (unless you like a 3+ hour commute). shrug. Its great if you live somewhere that biking works for you, but don't expect everyone everywhere can just give up their car, jump on a bike, and carry on with life...

Wow, excuses? Ok. Yes, car driving is easier, it always will be. But how about you drivers start actually paying for what you use, the pollution you create, the roads that are paid for by taxes?

You mean gasoline taxes? lol

No, since that only covers a small amount of what you use. Think about the 40,000 deaths a year. Who pays for that? Not you. The 500,000 seriously injured? Not you. The pollution you cause? Not you. The 3m children with Asthma caused by drivers? Not you. The list goes on...

There's a difference between "can't" and "don't want to". I'm not going to tell anybody what they should or should not do for their transportation. If you prefer driving, for whatever reason, go for it! I'm not going to say you're wrong.

My main point is that a lot of people assume that biking is the worse choice for them without actually knowing.

I have noticed that most people I know who have tried bicycle commuting and gave it up didn't really give it a fair shake. They used substandard or the wrong type of bikes, didn't use the accessories and clothing that make it feasible (rain gear, panniers, trailers, etc), and so forth. They just grabbed their old bike out of their garage and hopped on. That can work, but it's not usually the best experience.

> I see that graphic a lot, but it's not a very useful one, because it ignores residential patterns.

Yes parking needed for cars would be several times bigger than what cars occupy.

> Most people can't use a bike.

This is a lie, most people can use a bike.

> At a certain point doesn’t creating a preference for pedestrians and cyclists actually end up being a preference for wealthier people who can afford to live downtown, versus those who need to access the city but can’t live within walking or biking distance?

Reducing the number of cars (and therefore traffic) on the roads will benefit everybody, especially if cars and bikes don't get in each other's way (such as in the case of dedicated and protected bike lanes).

> Note that bicyclists and skateboarders also slow down busses, which are what lower income people use to get around

I don't think this is true. Busy streets and traffic jams slow down buses.

  Reducing the number of cars (and therefore traffic) on the
  roads will benefit everybody

You seem to have a rose-tinted view of the world we live in.

  Have you ever had to commute in less-than-ideal 
  conditions? 
  Heavy snow? Sleet? Black ice? 
  Have you ever lived in places that are not 
  perfectly flat? or lived in places that 
  are hot that make bicycling unfeasible?
  Did you have sporting gear / work gear that
  you had to lug? Did you know some people have
  to fetch their own gear to work
  Did you have to take calls during transit?
  Did you know its common practice for employees
  to call into meetings during their commute and/or 
  help assist operations via conference calls?
  Have you had to shop for more than a baguette 
  or a bagel at a store? You know how cumbersome
  that gets for even a family of three? 
  Do you have the slightest clue how much casual 
  violence and crime happen on public transit?[1]

Not to belabor the point but there simply are dozens of cases where bicycles or public transit just don't cut it. Not to mention the hygiene, personal safety (from other passengers for example) and personal space aspects involved in someone choosing a mode of transportation other than public transit or bicycling.

Ride-sharing, autonomous vehicles and emission-free vehicles should all alleviate the issues we currently face with traffic, parking and accidents.

However doing away with cars or vehicular traffic is just pollyannaish madness.

[1]

Teen robbed at gunpoint at Fruitvale, BART officer says writing a report is a 'waste of resources'

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bart-police-refuse-repo...

> Have you ever had to commute in less-than-ideal conditions? Heavy snow? Sleet? Black ice?

Routinely. The only weather I have encountered that is really problematic is when it's very windy.

I would also note that the conditions you list are also the conditions under which you shouldn't even be driving.

> Have you ever lived in places that are not perfectly flat? or lived in places that are hot that make bicycling unfeasible?

I live in a very hilly area. I don't know how hot you consider "unfeasible", but we top 100 degrees pretty much every summer.

> Did you have sporting gear / work gear that you had to lug? Did you know some people have to fetch their own gear to work

Yes, I do all of that. An urban bike trailer (easily folds up to briefcase size when needed) solves those problems.

> Have you had to shop for more than a baguette or a bagel at a store? You know how cumbersome that gets for even a family of three?

Again, trailer.

> Do you have the slightest clue how much casual violence and crime happen on public transit?[1]

That's extremely dependent on where you live. Where I live, there is nearly no such problem.

Sending distance commuters underground is the best way to minimize big deadly metal boxes on the road, and thus the best way to make pedestrian use of the streets safer, more convenient, and faster. Transportation planning should be based on minimizing door to door times.

"Without tunnels we'll be in traffic hell forever" - Elon Musk

> Note that bicyclists and skateboarders also slow down busses, which are what lower income people use to get around.

Bicyclists are substantially faster than downtown buses (due to stop frequency). It seems unlikely that they are slowing down the buses very much. Push skateboarders use the sidewalk; electric skateboarders move at the same speed as bicyclists.

As somebody who took buses regularily at one point in his live I can assure you that the most slowdown I experienced was due to cars. It rarely ever happens that a cyclist is sustancially slowing down a bus.

Indeed. I am always faster than the bus. And, in the city, bicycling is usually faster than driving.

https://twitter.com/TheRicMan/status/1002373087424274432?ref...

I hate driving in cities. It's stressful because you need to pay attention to so much going in around the streets, and be prepared to slam the brakes at all times. But I also think that's how it should be. Driving in cities should be discouraged IMO.

A city is the perfect place for mass transit. Park the cars away from the centre, provide good public transport and municipal bike rentals, and you reduce congestion and free up space for urban development.

This idea of having multilane roads running through prime real estate so people can spend an hour or so driving a few kilometres in stop-and-go traffic is just nuts to me. There's nothing efficient about it, and I expect as we try to bring co2 emissions down to sustainable levels, we'll have to give up on designing cities around private cars anyway.

The next round of laws that criminalize non-cars at the expense of cars might be impending with the rise of autonomous cars. Cf this recent tweet where zoox called a law abiding pedestrian a "Jaywalker": https://twitter.com/zoox/status/1115622929192980480

I am really amazed they haven't deleted that tweet out of embarrassment for being so utterly wrong.

> Cyclists and other non-car users of roads have a deep hole to climb out of to change these laws, and to change the perception that streets are only for cars. Infrastructure is probably the only real mechanism we have that can make tangible changes, that don't allow the personal feelings of car drivers to get angry at being inconvenienced by cyclists and other road users.

The problem is that the infrastructure is often inferior compared to the actual road due to bad intersection management, bad surface conditions, significantly longer routes, or routes that don't take you where you need to go. Another approach would be to repeal the keep as far right as practicable laws and allow cyclists the right to use an entire traffic lane when riding and require faster vehicles to change lanes to pass.

> There has been a long push by auto manufacturers to make anything other than cars that use the roads seen as both illegitimate and illegal.

And the absolutely disgusting thing about this is we can't get away from roads. Every building has roads in front, and to get anywhere you have to cross a lot of roads.

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