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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

My home city (capital of the country) did exactly that and it brought a huge amount of life and new businesses to the city center. Not to mention that tourism exploded as well - the city center is now a very pleasant place to go out and grab a coffee next to a river or on a street with no loud and smelly traffic to be seen (picture during summer: https://files.stocky.ai/uploads/2019/01/image-Preseren-squar... )

Of course, the locals were throwing an absolute fit when the change came: "We won't be able to move furniture!", "What will the emergency vehicles do?", "How will old people cope?", "It will ruin the real-estate market!", "OH the humanity, who will WALK all the way from a parking spot?!"

Turns out - it worked exceedingly well. We need more of this.

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It is exactly the same story each and every time. The same old objections, the same old fears and the same old success.

You would have thought by now the pattern was well recognized and we could skip the middle part, but no, it seems like we have to go through the same ride over and over again.

All politics is local. Nobody ever believes that experiences elsewhere apply to their polity, which is different and special.

Having lived in a few places I've seen it again and again.

Unfortunately in the US most of the major cities have essentially been designed (or redesigned) around private vehicles, so banning them is not going to happen. However you are absolutely correct - walking through Times Square in NYC is a pleasure (aside from all the guys in Batman costumes) with traffic removed compared to turn of the millennia. I don’t care to bike but the bike lanes squeezing out all the auto traffic have been a benefit also. But would it work in Houston or Denver? Not unless they built a massive public transportation infrastructure and moved the businesses and housing closer together, essentially rebuilding the cities.

The most recent part of Manhattan to be designed was still over two centuries ago in 1811, so we're not going to have that problem at least.

But I think you're over-estimating how hard it would be to get rid of traffic in many other urban cores in the US. You don't need to do the entire city; you can just do the densest parts. It's not that hard to beef up a city's existing bus services and use them to totally replace cars.

FYI, Battery Park City is part of Manhattan and was designed in the 1960s to 1980s, with the land created during excavation for the World Trade Center.

To be fair, BPC, at 92 acres, is 0.4% of the total land area of Manhattan. It's a rounding error.

There's been a lot more reclaimed land than that added to Manhattan since 1811, but they mostly slotted into the pre-existing established grid system.

There are many old, great US cities that have been converted from dense, manhattan-like landscape into 90% parking lots.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Pxtl/status/1180325377996201985

I've seen this image before (and many more like it), and it's truly sad what we've done to our cities.

But the good thing is, parking lots are huge opportunities for developers. I'm from DC, and the city has radically developed itself over the past few decades in turning what used to be entire blocks of surface parking lots into massive apartment and office buildings up to ten floors tall. It's very easy to develop a parking lot; that land tends to be relatively cheap to acquire and demolition costs basically nothing.

They had to really look hard to find a part of downtown that looks like that. If you zoom out a bit you can see how all that parking came to be - the nearby stadiums / conference centers.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Forsyth+St+%26+Trinity+Ave...

Atlanta's pretty run down in parts, but downtown really isn't that bad.

But you can compare to, say, Baltimore, where there's barely any surface parking around the convention center there, despite the fact that it's right next to a major sports stadium.

Sure, you can make that comparison, I just don't know what useful conclusion you'd get from it. Maybe property rights are stronger there. Maybe nobody offered enough money. Land in Atlanta has historically been relatively cheap compared to New England.

I have a pet theory that states that land values are higher on the coast mainly because sprawl doesn't have as many places to go, so it concentrates in smaller areas. Atlanta was historically a rail hub, exacerbating sprawl because transport could always move people farther outward. Picture pouring money onto a map, and walls are anywhere it's infeasible to develop the land. The money will spread out where there's no natural barriers. It will pile up if there's a lot of them. Money piling up means increased property values.

>"The most recent part of Manhattan to be designed was still over two centuries ago in 1811."

That's not correct. Battery Park City was developed in the mid 1970's.[1] And that development is particularly significant here as it includes a car-free green space in the form of Hudson River Park which begins there. Hudson River Park itself also being significant in that it won out over the proposed Westway Project which would have placed an interstate highway there instead.[2] The extension of Hudson River Park all the way up to the 72nd St Boat Basin is also a very recent and significant development.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_Park_City

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Highway#Westway

How are they moving furniture, though? No joke, really curious how they coped with the downsides.

You just ban the most common forms of car throughput. Moving vans would be allowed.

You can also move most, if not all, furniture that fits through a house’s door or elevator on a small electric van or even a (three-wheeled) bicycle.

Electric vans also could be the preferred method of supplying shops with goods. That need not be much more expensive if containers can be moved from larger vans onto such smaller vans at city boundaries.

If you have furniture that’s so large that you have to hoist it up and get it into the building through a window, you likely already need a permit to use the device that hoists up the furniture.

Can confirm, have moved king-sized mattresses, large dressers and cabinets, etc via a trailer on an ordinary bicycle. It’s really easy!

Where I’m from there’s a tradition in the bike community called a “bike move”. When you’re moving, you invite everybody to show up on a certain day with their trailers and cargo bikes. Everybody packs and moves you in a distributed manner! All you have to do is provide coffee and donuts in the morning and pizza and beer for after. Fun, community-building way to move.

That sounds awesome. Are you in Oregon?

Edit: Ah, I see your username now =)

How? I can't feasibly imagine balancing my UK queen in a bicycle.

If you strap the mattress to the box spring to stiffen the mattress you can set it on its edge and it won't sag. Then just set the box spring and the mattress on a flat bed bike trailer and you are good to go.

They make trailers like this for big and heavy stuff: https://www.bikesatwork.com/bike-trailers

Okay, I would consider transporting a mattress on a bike (with a trailer) easy, not just a bike!

The area can still be accessed with vehicles that have permits and a remote that opens it. Those are mostly:

1.) Delivery vehicles early in the morning (~6am) and late at night (~1am+) can come through to supply businesses in the closed area. They have a remote that opens the street blockages.

2.) If an oversized personal delivery needs to be made to a resident, it's possible to get a onetime permit that allows a truck to access the area.

3.) For people who have trouble walking the city has provided a few free electric powered golf carts/taxis that you can call and they come pick you up and deliver you to a destination (picture: https://www.visitljubljana.com/assets/Ljubljana-in-regija/Ka...). Since they're small and quiet they don't bother pedestrian traffic. I wonder if Uber/Lyft could provide such service in US - they're already doing electric scooters, so why not electric transport for car-free areas?

Note that this is strictly old town center which has relatively small amount of residents but it's mostly dominated by businesses, hotels and airbnbs these days. The area is small enough to walk across in ~15minutes by foot. Near the edges there are underground parking garages so you can reach it via car (since public transport in the city isn't that great).

> "We won't be able to move furniture!"

Also frequently used to justify buying a big SUV, just to learn that the average piece of furniture doesn't fit in the average SUV.

The average SUV is a fastback car with a few extra inches of ground clearance. Just modernized versions of the Tercel 4WD.

There's a big difference between "the average SUV" that you're talking about and "a big SUV" that the other person is talking about. A Ford Escape is just a taller hatchback, but a Ford Explorer or Expedition are a different story.

Body on frame SUVs are vastly outnumbered by the unibody models.

A Ford Explorer is unibody and is also definitely not a slightly taller car.

Besides, the statement was "big SUVs".

SUVs waste interior space on ground clearance and tend to have rather short trunks. They are not very suitable for transporting things.

Just for my own curiosity, since I don’t recognize the city from the photo, where is it? I’m wondering how it compares in size (both area and population) to Manhattan.

The URL gives you a hint...

Preseren-square-Ljubljana-capital-of-Slovenia

It doesn't and the closed-off area is relatively small. And yet the benefits are very clear - there's pretty much no reason why you can't create several such closed off areas in Manhattan and leave traffic/public transport flowing between them.

This pattern has started showing up in several European capitals these years - I know for certain of Vienna, Berlin, Zurich, London and I've seen some in Barcelona as well.

It doesn't have to be 100% closure obviously and it doesn't have to be a dumb implementation that just closes off full traffic to an area with 1.7mil people without addressing major downsides. There IS a place for nuance in this world ;)

How do they move furniture though? Was there some kind of exception made for delivery vehicles?

And the emergency vehicles? How do they get where they're going?

I could see something like this working out well if appropriate provisions were made for these things.

State St. in Madison WI is paved, but only allows mass transit, emergency, and local deliveries.

Yeah, presumably the same way they solve it everywhere, which is that police, ambulance, fire, and city all have the same keys to the same bollards. And when they don't, they just use their bolt cutters or drive up over the sidewalk. No biggie.

I was recently in Rostock Germany and I saw plenty of pedestrian areas closed to traffic but with signs saying "feuerwehrzufahrt" which means "fire truck access road". The pedestrian area was protected with bollards or fences that could be unlocked by emergency vehicles who needed access.

So many problems that we Americans fight about have been solved ages ago in other countries around the world with far less drama. We're not as unique as we think we are.

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