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Comment by magduf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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