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Comment by stronglikedan | Hacker News Reader

As a pedestrian (or cyclist), you should always give way to cars, even being prepared to jump out of the way when you have the right-of-way. Unless the driver is intoxicated, they get inconvenienced with higher insurance premiums for a little while at worst, while you get stuck with life long injuries and pain at worst.

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Even a professional athlete would have difficulty “jump[ing] out of the way” of a vehicle (or anything, for that matter) traveling at 25 miles per hour.

It is unrealistic to expect pedestrians and bicyclists to avoid automobiles by yielding to them.

EDIT: spelling; more spelling

Which is a reason why cars have to vanish from cities.

Then cities have to radically change. I don't know how people can ever commute from the current urban sprawl to their place of work without them. Cities would need to build massive bus and rail infrastructures at the cost of billions or similar amounts are going to have to be spent to increase densification.

I chose where to live because of a desire to be able to commute easily - the bus is 10 minutes, walking is about 25 - but I paid for it, both literally and figuratively.

I've had three jobs where I commuted from 10-30 miles over public transit. All those long commutes were either suburb to suburb or from city to suburb via reverse commute. There’s no need to drive a car if you’re commuting to a fixed location and you live in the burbs or the city.

What were your long commutes? 1-2 hours? Why would people accept that when a car can do that in a quarter the time?

They will if car taxes increase.

And if ridership increases enough, then bus commute times will be reduced a great deal.

People will pay a lot for the convenience - I think of all my coworkers who need to go pick their kids up from school to take them to soccer practice after work - that's really hard to do commuting.

Is it? Robust transit systems are efficient and don't take much more time. If it's substantially longer, maybe we need to look at our work attendance policies to account for the increased transit time? (We already needed to do that anyway, considering how little of the average workday is spent on actual work, and how much less the average labor hour is worth today compared to a few decades ago.) And how old are the kids? Alien as it is to suburbanites, city kids often get around by themselves (often in groups) by the end of elementary school.

True. And even with public transit, activities like taking kids to soccer practice / music school requires carrying some equipment along. Not really convenient lugging duffelbags if there is more than one kid.

The kids need to be picked up in a car partly (largely?) because there's no alternative. Given increased public transit, they may be able to get themselves to soccer practice.

Kids could walk, bike, or use the bus/train if the infrastructure was there.

They can, and they have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o

I believe you're looking at a city that was historically traveled via footpath - try and apply that to a modern American city.

I'm not sure how much ifrastructure is really needed most places.

Could we just use existing roads, and try to replace every 30 cars on the road with a bus?

That's what I mean - if you assume 100,000 cars on the road, that's 3,000 new buses the city needs, as well as multiples of that more bus drivers.

Simple: they need to bulldoze most everything and start over, building cities the way they are in Europe with high density and public transit lines built in (and under). Add in either closed roads for anything except delivery trucks (you can't deliver goods to the supermarket with a subway), or huge tolls/taxes for personal vehicles to keep people from driving there and causing gridlock and get them out of the suburbs. But in addition you need to have lots of construction of residential units (in high-rises) so that housing costs stay affordable.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or you think that's actually feasible and simple.

You need to have the political will. There is nothing in the previous comment that is physically impossible.

...no, but it bears remembering that many cities in Europe were effectively bulldozed by two world wars, not to mention centuries of smaller wars.

Just because you can raze entire cities, displace their populations, and embark on "clean slate" urban planning projects doesn't mean you should. That's the civil engineering equivalent of rewriting the entire codebase from scratch.

>That's the civil engineering equivalent of rewriting the entire codebase from scratch.

And yet, "refactoring" is definitely a real thing in software engineering and is not uncommon, for good reason: many times you really do need to throw everything out and start from scratch.

Is there a version control for reality so you can rollback if things go horribly wrong? How many lives are ruined if the refactoring fails. That's an incredibly poor metaphor for actual, physical, events.

No, you're right - but to say it's simple is ridiculous. That will take the entire city being willing to be displaced for years - millions of people without homes - what does the political will for that look like?

Well you don't need to do it all at once, and you don't really need to bulldoze every building and road. It would be more realistic to just "upzone" as the other commenter said, and stop accommodating car transport so much and start aggressively redeveloping after adding public transit infrastructure (which would be a lot cheaper and easier if you bulldoze along the routes so you can do cut-and-cover instead of digging tunnels).

While you do that in the core, the outside of the city still grows, and that's all car based - there's no way around a city expanding and not building it for cars, unless you get the bus infrastructure out there before the people show up, which would appear to be a monumental waste when every city in the world's focus seems to be cutting taxes.

The cities in America grow because there's various incentives for them to do so, and nothing really constraining that growth in a way that favors cars.

Don't build new roads to the core, maybe even take out, restrict, or slap huge tolls on the existing roads, and you'll keep people from wanting to commute in by car. Also remove rules requiring parking spaces, and even encourage replacing parking lots with buildings or parks or anything else, to make car driving the most miserable experience it can possibly be

There's lots a government can do to make people stop driving cars so much, and stop moving out to the suburbs. There just isn't political will (in America) to do so.

Er, you definitely don't need to bulldoze everything. You "just" need to upzone everywhere and build lots of public transit. Upzoning has negative price (since you get more tax income). Public transit is expensive, and building new subway lines is even more expensive, but it could be less expensive if the US could build transit lines as cheaply as they are built in Europe.

It is hard, but it's mostly hard due to a population of motorists who have confused the privileges granted to them by the state with rights.

That's a great idea!

https://arcosanti.org/project/about-arcosanti/

I think you're drastically underestimating the ratio of benefit to cost for cars in cities. That's a pretty ridiculous thing to say.

Pedestrian culture in that area is weird. There's a general region which I think centers on Berkeley, but definitely includes Oakland, in which pedestrians have right of way (in some cases legally, in others just culturally/in expectation).

It makes driving pretty stressful because it makes people much less predictable. When I commuted to Berkeley I would often joke/not joke that Berkeley pedestrians were trying to make me kill them with my car.

But a different weird thing is that being a pedestrian in Berkeley turns you into one of those people who is trying to die by car. I was more cautious than average (read: acting like a normal pedestrian somewhere else), and it was annoying and maybe dangerous for everyone else.

That may not seem clear, but it's analogous to someone being "nice" at a 4-way stop and letting everyone else go even if it's your turn. It's not "nice," because it delays and confuses everyone who now has to cautiously navigate a potentially dangerous situation instead of just following a simple procedure.

Similarly, cars stop for people in Berkeley. That's how it goes. If you act like they don't, then you get awkward standoffs between people and cars each not trusting the other to go first, all while traffic piles up behind the cars, and other pedestrians are now interleaving in between the cars in the jam. If you're on foot, you should just step out into road and cross it, after a perfunctory check, otherwise you're gumming up the works.

I don't like it, on either side, but it's not possible to unilaterally do better. You just have to go with it.

Are you talking about outside of crosswalks? Because in all of California the pedestrian has the right of way at any crosswalk and even at unmarked intersections.

Pedestrians have the right of way in our state in general, but in most of the state they still wait until it's safe (i.e. no cars immediately arriving) before they cross. In Berkeley, especially in the two-lane roads immediately surrounding the university, pedestrians often walk out blindly wherever they please in the assumption that cars will stop. Getting through some intersections takes freaking forever because groups of pedestrians simply ignore the signals, causing traffic to snarl.

It may feel super cozy and normal when driving a car around– but the reality is that it's a metal multi-ton piece of heavy machinery. I'm sympathetic to your plight but.. really it _should be stressful._

Especially in a pedestrian-heavy center where walking should be (and thankfully is!) the norm like in Berkeley.

Actually higher insurance premiums stick around alot longer these days or indefinitely. Costs of everything has gone up.

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