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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

These are all solved problems. Cold? Wear a sweater. Raining? Carry an umbrella, or wear a raincoat. Have luggage? Wear a backpack, or pull a wheeled suitcase. Mere walking makes you sweat? Go see a doctor, that shouldn't happen - you probably ought to do more walking, not less. Too old or infirm to walk? You need a wheelchair or an electric scooter. Dangerous neighborhood? Well, I'll grant that's a trickier one, but the solution certainly isn't to usher the wealthy through it in motorized sedan chairs so they can ignore the problem.

Granted there's some infrequent edge cases where you need to move a sofa. Maybe we still allow occasional delivery vans. And bonus - they'll be able to get there more efficiently, because the road won't be choked with cars.

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I think you are oversimplifying things. I can tell you that merely walking in the sun when the temperature is in the high 30s (Celsius), makes me sweat, I hardly think that I should seek medical advice over this, to pick on one of your solutions.

With a good public transportation system in place, you don't need to walk further than a few blocks to reach your destination.

Not everyone lives downtown in Megatropolis...

This type of comment really make me think humanity peaked a few decades ago. When did we all became lazy snowflakes that can't handle any kind of hardships ? Humanity spent millions of year hunting shit in the woods and eating raw meat to end with what? People who can't walk in the sun or work in an office that doesn't have AC.

Walking in the sun is too much effort and makes you sweat ? Buy sunscreen, bring an extra t shirt and stop making excuse. Sweat is a perfectly normal response to heat, your body knows how to deal with it. God damn it, some kids in africa run 10km to go to school every day while eating 5 time less food than you and they probably complain less.

Rain is a viable excuse for burning fossil fuel and moving 2 tons of steel to transport a 80kg meat bag ?

Unless you're disabled or commute 30+km a day you're better off with good gear and an electric bike. It's cheaper, better for your health, better for local and global pollution, &c. ICE vehicles have nothing to do in city centers. Good public transport + a fleet of government owned electric taxies would solve every issues.

I hardly think that sweating while walking in the sun in 30°+ weather is not being able to handle any kind of hardship. In fact, it is quite the opposite: My better half sweats very little and she very nearly had a heat stroke when we last visited The Living Desert in Palm Springs.

As it happens I commute by bicycle but that's by the by.

The core thing is that people don't think about how many assumptions are baked into their "need" for cars. The assumption that you have to live in a suburb, that public transport must needs be terrible forever, that you absolutely must be able to do this or that unnecessary thing at a whim, that nothing about the American car-dependent lifestyle should change.

Don't think about this in terms of your immediate personal situation, think about all the variables that need to change to build a future largely without cars.

>think about all the variables that need to change to build a future largely without cars.

It can be done by changing but a single variable: cost. Make driving more expensive, and people drive less. Make driving cheaper, and people drive more. With a sufficiently high cost, the majority of people will seek alternatives.

This is, unfortunately, so politically unpalatable that will only happen when it's too late.

> Make driving more expensive, and people drive less.

"If we tax the poor, they'll decide to be less poor"

It won't work. The suburbs are predominantly filled with people who could not afford to live places with functional transit in the first place.

If you make driving more expensive, the few people who are wealthy enough to choose the city, will do so (driving sky-high prices even higher). And for the 99% of suburban people who already can't afford cities, these people will have even less money for housing, so they'll be forced to buy cheaper housing, which will be even further away from the city, and you'll exacerbate even more sprawl than already exists.

It's not so much an "assumption" as a true fact of life today

Suburbs today (not 1950, but today in 2019) exist almost exclusively because of failures of their cities, mainly in housing, education, and transportation. To suggest "people shouldn't assume they have to live in a suburb" is to suggest that people should assume they'll be allowed to live in a city.

And that's simply not true. That's never a safe assumption, effectively that's impossible for most people in the US. Just in housing alone, they're already priced out for at least the next decade or more. (Even in "cheap" cities, even in the South or the Midwest, etc)

> think about all the variables that need to change to build a future largely without cars.

Manhattan residents would have to be ok with all property losing 90% of it's 'fair-market value' overnight. Same for Seattle, and San Francisco, and Boston, and Minneapolis, and every other city on earth.

Oh, no one in Manhattan is OK with that? Then, effectively Manhattan residents are guaranteeing "car-dependent" (read: cheap/affordable) lifestyles for everyone else, are here to stay for a while.

Don't be rude.

Because today we have higher standards for how "put together" we appear in public.

I cannot be in the office with pit stains and BO and expect to be treated with respect and have the same career advancement and pay as if I show up fresh, with hair combed and no BO or visible sweat.

Today, our hygiene standards are higher and for many of us, driving to work is part of "the cost of doing business" because of this.

The same goes for if it's snowing..walking around in soggy or salt-stained boots is not a thing I can get away with doing.

People do it, but I have a job where I have to meet certain (yes, partly self-imposed) expectations on appearance and hygiene and I can't meet those expectations if I walk 20 minutes to work in 80 degree, snowy, or rainy weather.

I'm not a dandy or a snowflake or whatever. I love sweating and I love hiking. Being outside in the rain can be a sublime experience. But that's just not compatible with a trip to work.

I don't like it but as I said, it's part of the "cost of doing business" in society.

Um... I know a lot of people who bike to work, including several co-workers. They bring a work shirt, wet wipes, and deodorant with them to work in a bag. Get to work, change shirts, wet wipe the pits and apply deodorant in the restroom. Good as new. I didn't even know which co-workers were bike commuters when I first started.

If you worked in a formal environment you'd probably have to bring extra pants too. But most people bring a change of clothes to the gym anyways, so it's not like it's a completely outrageous concept.

It's really not that big of a deal. In formal businesses ladies have done this forever with having comfortable shoes for traveling and high heels for the office.

> Because today we have higher standards for how "put together" we appear in public

I find this historically inaccurate.

Wool suits were common middle class and upper class wears throughout the 19 and 20th centuries. Turns out that a jacket covers pit stains. Wool is also breathable, moisture wicking, and anti microbial/ anti odor.

And inaccurate by occupation - based off of understanding of clothing. Many landscapers and builders wear long pants and long shirts. In part for the physical protection they offer, but also because of the air volume they hold.

At the end of the day we can rationalise _everything_, even the most insane life styles. If the "cost of doing business" is slowly killing everything on earth maybe we should find a better way.

Do you really have no place to change at work ? No public transport at all ? Not even car sharing ?

I bike to the gym before work, change there and head to work on my bike, I'm perfectly presentable no matter the weather, and that's in Berlin where it rains 50% of the year.

I remember when I first moved to a city with real public transport. I was interested to try commuting by train/bus/bike. But I had lived my entire life up to that point in car-dependent areas and pictured the experience of getting to work without my portable metal shelter to be very close to what you're picturing, a battle with the elements. I figured it would be challenging and may be a bit crazy to live without a car.

To my surprise, it was a total non-issue. Hundreds of thousands of people got to work without a car in my city and still managed to get to work looking perfect. The vast majority of days, an extra 20-30 minutes outside was a blessing. The very few days it wasn't I kept an extra shirt and pair of shoes in the office. And if I got a little wet on the way to work, so did everyone else. And this is was in a city with rain, hail, snow, wind, heat, and humidity. It just wan't a problem and there was no way to justify owning a car while I had 2 working legs.

All that to say, I know where you're coming from. I've been in that head space myself. But if people in NY, London, and Paris can deal with a little weather and still make SVP, so can you.

I have seen the 'without AC Texas is not habitable' (or a weaker version 'large cities cannot exist in Texas without AC') sentiment, which is somehow related to what you are talking about, many times on this website. It absolutely boggles my mind. The climate of some of the most densely populated places in Asia are similar to Texas. Those places are densely populated before AC became a thing, and even now there are plenty of people who cannot afford AC.

> Mere walking makes you sweat? Go see a doctor, that shouldn't happen

Or maybe it's 100'F and merely existing makes you sweat. Hello, large parts of the United States right now!

Or maybe there's elevation.

Either way, walking is no longer feasible if the distance is more than a couple miles.

That's when you bike

Sweating isn't just a result of physical exertion. Have you never been in a sauna?

> Too old or infirm to walk? You need a wheelchair or an electric scooter.

The title of this article wasn't "Uber data reveals motoring slower than using a wheelchair".

Even with the most progressive, pro-active/public transport systems in the world, which we should totally aim for, there will be a need for some level of taxi-like service at a minimum.

This is one of the most self-righteous, narrow minded, inflexible, and delusional things I have read on this platform.

I invite you to walk at 1am, everyday, through the dodgy parts of London with your smartphone in your pocket. Please, report your mugged or stabbed rate in a year.

I've done this without being mugged, stabbed, robbed, etc. many times -but- I am a relatively big fella with what has been described as "resting murder face" which really renders my anecdotal experience fairly niche.

Again, the solution to "bad neighborhood" isn't "cars". Especially not in London, where it becomes "cars, for those who can afford parking fees and the congestion charge in addition to all the other expenses".

(If anything, by segregating neighborhoods and exacerbating wealth inequality, cars make the problem worse.)

I did this regularly for 2 years, with the additional factor of being in varying degrees of drunkness. The worst that happened to me, or anyone else I knew in the area, was dropping my pizza.

Try being an attractive and small 20 year old and report back. Experiences are not universal.

I did get beaten to a pulp in London but because I did not wish to have the police do anything I did not get into the papers. Once the adrenaline kicks in you would be surprised by how much blood you can lose and how knives, broken glass, boots, fists and relentless savagery just blur into one out of body experience.

If you get dragged into the dirt between parked cars for some extra brutality then none of those people driving by in their cars are going to stop and intervene. You are hidden by cars and in that peculiar filth that cars bring to the street. Plus noisy car dominated roads mean that everyone in residential housing shuns the street, so there is nobody looking out.

I felt sorry for the gang that picked me off but I felt a lot of anger and resentment thereafter to car drivers that expressed forthright opinions on the matter with an air of 'knowing best'. As if any of them had a clue or direct experience.

If everyone hides in cars because the area they are gentrifying is 'not safe' then you only end up with vulnerable people on the street getting preyed on by the more violent members of society. Everyone ends up terrified. Streets become walled off behind rows of tin boxes and there is no community. Excessive car culture is part of this climate of cowardice.

Bikes, buses, trains would work so much better in London without the tin boxes cluttering up the place. Kids could play in the street. They could know their neighbours. Regular taxis can work fine, there is no need for this gig economy Uber nonsense.

Oh, so what about the disabled? Well, people would be able to visit them for a change. Delivery vans, people moving houses and all those whataboutisms? All that can be resolved easily when we drop the mentality of people having to be in their own armoured tanks for security.

We have gone past 'there is no such thing as society'.

Arguably, when people shut themselves inside their cars for safety, they also become disconnected with the problems their society faces. They will have less incentive to fix the problems, so crime rises, and more people shut themselves in cars. A vicious circle.

Yeah, crimes in London is on the rise. And at the same time, people also keep getting hit and killed by cars. The diesel exhaust is filling people’s lungs, and the constant traffic noise is certainly putting a strain on people’s mind.

And instead asking Londoners to spend lots of money and get a car which they will have nowhere to park, what about reverse the police budget cut that left us with 22,000 fewer police officers?

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