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Comment by damnyou | Hacker News Reader

So I totally support improving public transit, reducing the space allotted for cars, etc etc.

But after 15 years living a car-free in city apartments, I live in a suburb with roommates now and love it. Our home is bigger, we have a lovely backyard where we can sunbathe at whatever nudity level we're comfortable with, we have a nursery for herbs in it, and we can go outside at night and walk the dog without being catcalled. I'm still less than a 20 minute drive away from most of the things I care about. Car dependence is a minor loss compared to the major gains to my quality of life.

Whenever you look at countries that have great public transportation, they usually end up sacrificing space to achieve that. Homes in Japan are much smaller than in the US for example.

How does this square up?

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The article mention cities, you are talking about suburbs. Nobody wants to remove cars from the suburbs because it is the backbone of it. Remove the cars => no more suburbs.

Yes, but less auto dependence means less suburbs right? "Sprawl" is criticized a lot. A transit oriented suburb would be like Japan. The houses would be less big, there would be less space to suspend the normal rules of society around things like nudity, and so on.

I get why cities are great, but suburb living leads to a very different — and for me vastly better — quality of life.

I'm not sure why "less auto dependence [would mean] less suburbs."

Here's one alternative: If we get rid of cars in cities, have commuter rail from the city to each surrounding suburb, and allow cars in the suburb? Then... there you go. This is called a "hub and spoke" pattern iirc

There are plenty of suburbs in the US that operate like this— where most people who work in the city commute via rail, but most families also have cars, and there is a spread-out spacious feel (some towns in NJ come to mind).

You're describing the BART model, and parking is slowly being removed from it in favor of apartments.

We have a model for transit-oriented suburbs in America. Pre-WW2 streetcar suburbs are still spacious and have nice private backyards, but also have transit within easy walking distance. Transit-supporting density was generally achieved through smaller front yards, narrower streets, and less parking.

Older cities in the northeast US have a lot of transit friendly areas where residents still own a car. You just need to get to your town center to access the public transit system. That can be accomplished by driving if needed. It can also still be less sprawling that way, since the town centers function as transit hubs.

It's not even done particularly well in the NE US, and it still works fairly well compared to the situation in most places.

I don't think improving transit options in cities and maintaining a car-oriented existence in the suburbs are at odds with one another.

But the space next to a transit center is more valuable, so why would there be parking there and not apartments?

In practice the answer seems to be either (a) be subsidized and fill up early, as with BART today, or (b) be priced at market rate, so with BART people would have to pay $18/day for parking.

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