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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I've left Paris 12 years ago. I hate cars so much.

Glad to see they're realizing those things.

People should never forget how the car industry lobbied so that cars own most of the street. Biking and walking have become marginal things. How often do you realize you can't go from point A to B because it's impossible to street walk anymore? I've walked around cities many times, and I could not go in a direction because of how roads could not be crossed.

The "1-person car " meme is a real, real problem. Most people think that driving is a right, but we soon realize it's more a privilege and a source of problems.

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I’m another car hater. Living in London. Cars are everywhere. They park on the sidewalks. In some places you can’t even walk because the cars cover the entire sidewalk. Hammersmith bridge has closed due to constant, heavy truck traffic. Cars idle outside of schools in traffic all day as the kids play outside. Zebra crossings are incredibly dangerous as cars ignore them. Parents are afraid to let their kids go out and play due to the car traffic. I could go on and on. Dense urban cities are simply no place for cars.

One of the things I hate is when traffic ignores padestrian crossing indicators, including the ones with traffic lights, when traffic is backed up.

Yeah exactly. I’ve had a couple close calls with cars going right through zebra crossings where they had no visibility due to traffic. I’m extremely careful now but it’s still scary. It’s unfortunate that throughput is optimised over safety - otherwise these crossings on busy roads would all have traffic lights.

There were nearly 1400 serious injuries to pedestrians in 2017, 250 of which were children [1]. That means life altering injuries, like losing a limb. If you compound that with the health effects of air pollution, the only conclusion is that cars are disastrous in cities. Worse, most of these cars aren’t local and the majority of locals take public transit. So it’s a minority of people inflicting their personal convenience on everyone else. If you complain about this in public, you are seen as a crazy person.

1. http://content.tfl.gov.uk/casualties-in-greater-london-2017....

I left Paris 2 years ago.

I wish to go back there someday, especially if it gets greener.

Already, it is pretty easy to commute around Paris without a car in most cases. I actually had to buy a last mile vehicle only when I arrived in the USA.

If a large city gets serious about banning/severely restricting car presence, I would immediately consider moving there.

Madrid banned most cars from the city center a few back, and while the new mayor recently tried to overturn that, he failed: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/07/madrid-car-ba...

Mediterranean weather + no cars ? I am officially psyched !.

That will give me a good reason to learn Spanish :)

He. You are in for a disappointment if you think about moving to Madrid for the nice weather. Extremely dry, very hot summers, quite cold winters, Its more continental than Mediterranean.

On the flip side, I keep hearing about some software companies opening development centers in southern Spain, so check out job offers around Malaga, if you are really interested in the Mediterranean thing.

> How often do you realize you can't go from point A to B because it's impossible to street walk anymore?

Never. Literally never. I live in a European city though.

Edit: In the City I live in there are literally no cases where I can't walk if I have time and inclination. Norway has taken a different approach to city planning to the US.

I’m jealous. I’ve lived in California oregon and Washington my whole life. You basically can’t walk to most nearby locations because of freeways, interstates, etc. In my current city there’s only two stores I can walk to because I’m walled in by major streets/freeways

To be clear, there is no way to pass those streets/freeways on foot or by bike? As in no pedestrian crossing?

That's shitty planning. I've never seen such a place in Europe.

There's a lot of amusing YouTube videos of tourists attempting to holiday there without a car, here's a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEAVSGYuhCY

This sort of thing exists in Europe too, try walking out of an airport sometime, you can in some countries, but e.g. in Malaga I had to run across a highway because there was literally no way to get out of there otherwise, there simply aren't any footpaths.

In Copenhagen the airport has bike racks - its a 20 minute cycle to the city center.

Sure, and similarly you can easily bike to the airport here in Amsterdam. But let's not jump from "in Europe" to the two cities widely recognized as having the best bicycling infrastructure on the continent. I've spotted somewhat of a trend here on HN of Europeans generalizing about the whole continent based on experiences in a relatively small part of Western Europe.

My comment was meant more in the spirit, "It doesn't have to be like that. There are better solutions".

I was talking about a french city, so it still happens. Depends.

As much as we can rightly poke fun at Americans over here in Europe about this I've found Europeans really underestimate how much we're adopting American-style suburbs because they just haven't been to those areas.

Case in point, here's a 30 minute walk (5 minutes by car) for someone to literally cross the road in Oslo: https://goo.gl/maps/PFTnTrprKjiDrE7y8

Sure you can walk that if you have time & inclination, but unless you're willing to spend an hour just on crossing the street you're going to drive there.

This wasn't even hard to find, I just zoomed in pretty much the first freeway in the Oslo area I could find and saw what it would take to cross it for someone living on the other side.

Google maps routing is rubbish for walking and cycling in Oslo. There is a tunnel under that road...

where? can't see it

OsmAnd recommended a 15 minute walk that goes under the road.

That's a pretty peculiar example - the big box furniture store in your example is actually outside Oslo and you have farmland as the closest neighbor north and south of both locations.

Nobody is talking about banning cars from areas like that, just from the city center.

Some of Europe went whole hog on emulating US suburbs. Sadly Dublin is a fantastic, walkable city surrounded by seas of unwalkbale suburbia.

Convince Americans that have never lived in another city type that isn't strip malls this. Things like speed cameras, road diets, et. al. are considered attacks on people's way of life. The wealthy ones even resist every attempt to make our cities into a more walkable form whilst enjoying their trips to Europe to see such quaint towns.

In suburbs you will often have major boulevards, 6 lanes with 35 to 50 MPH (55 to 80 KPH approximately) speed limits and stop lights with half safe pedestrian crossings can be 1/2 a mile apart. It makes walking anywhere into anxious misery.

Cities in Europe are starting to build “bike speedways”. I am really looking forward to having them in my city

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_freeway

It’s fascinating how once you mentally open yourself to the idea that cars do not need to be the biggest beneficiaries of public space, how our current city distributions start looking so ridiculous. And how such a nicer world is imaginable, if more people started agreeing to de prioritize cars and prioritize humans.

> People should never forget how the car industry lobbied so that cars own most of the street.

Please stop with the conspiracy stories. I hate cars more than anyone, but all this "Big Auto" stuff just discredits the entire thing as a bunch of fanatics.

There is a documented history of this kind of thing. See https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

That is a vox article. It's fun to read and gets a lot of shares on social media. But it wildly exaggerates reality and wildly downplays that massive demand and growth in car ownership during that period.

The idea that everyone hated cars and the evil car lobby came in and forced it upon them is flat out incorrect.

I don't see the article claiming people hated cars.

What the auto industry accomplished was to push the government to favor cars to the eventual exclusion of almost every other form of transit.

Even if people didn't hate cars, this still wasn't a fair fight in an open market. It was an industry co-opting consumer and voter power.

> The idea that everyone hated cars and the evil car lobby came in and forced it upon them is flat out incorrect.

This idea is not present in the article and is a wild exaggeration of your own.

You'll probably convince more people by citing evidence to support your claims instead of using ad homs.

Literally and chart about automobile ownership from 1940 to 1980.

Such a chart would in no manner prove your point. Something can become prevalent could be because (a) it is the preferred option out of many equivalent and equally available options or (b) it is the chosen option due to having been given preferentially treatment. Given that your time period contains Eisenhower's expansion of the federal highway system, option (b) is the more reasonable interpretation.

We've seen the phenomenon globally.

Not in the way it is in the US...

Even Paris discussed in TFA is 10 times better than 99% of American cities... and most of European cities are even better walkability wise...

It's not a conspiracy story: they were quite open about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AFn7MiJz_s

Adam Ruins Everything - Why Jaywalking Is a Crime

Sorry, you need to wise up to the world. Conspiracy is not just about the BS stuff regarding aliens and illuminati.

It's also, and that's totally real and extremely common, big business interests, politicians, etc, working together to further their profits in covert ways, with under the table deals, bribes, trusts, price fixing, and several other ways...

Ever head of "conspiracy to commit fraud"? The real courts punish tons of cases of very real conspiracies every year...

Just because you've been conditioned by pop culture to associate conspiracies with aliens and illuminati and crazy people, doesn't mean actual conspiracies involving big car lobbies, big petrol, big pharma, big food, etc, don't happen every day...

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