Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

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Having traveled/lived a lot in Europe I have noticed that totally car-less city is something that actually is not necessary good, but 'limiting car travel' is.

Car based transportation is still needed for:

1. Shipping of goods/deliveries, etc....

2. Shipping of people (think elderly, sick, disabled, ambulances, taxis, etc..)

Best way to do this with blocks/chunks of the cities being pedestrian only, and roads with loading/unloading areas that come close enough.... but no parking, or maybe parking centralized underground in one place, with one clear entry exit (so people don't circle around to find parking).

Best solution I have seen is in Barcelona, where you have blocks cordoned off, and pedestrian only use, and still have streets that get close enough to these blocks... so you can do your deliveries as well....

Karlsruhe and Ulm in Germany do achieve this as well . (major areas are pedestrian only, allow cars to come close for loading/unloading, limited on-street parking, and parking in the center only allowed in some major underground place).

Most people can reach the center, if they really have to, but it discourages daily use of the car as it would be too expensive to park.

I've been in Australia from 12 years, though an ex-pat from the UK. I visited Barcelona for the first time in a decade less than a month ago and coming from a country that's so very car centric (Australia), I found Barcelona to be an absolute delight for just walking around as a pedestrian.

I agree with your sentiment wholly.

Have you been to Cronulla near Sydney? While not car-free by any stretch, it does have wonderful car-free areas that used to be crowded with cars many years ago.

I've not seen much of Sydney besides the inner city for travel got worj, the Northern beaches are beautiful but not for many years.

I'll be sure to check it out.

I’ve been to Cronulla recently and it’s nothing like Barca. We really liked Bundeena tho, which is where we took ferry to Cronulla tho.

Yup. London was actually fine, although still too many vehicles parked outside the City. One can set delivery times in the morning at 5 or 6 to 7 or 8. Pedestrian areas also need access for the fire departement, since they cannot carry the water/foam in buckets.

even though i'm currently living car-free, i'm with you on this. sure, i'd love to see cities invest more in human-centered design and planning, but include cars in that. they're useful! but i'm totally fine putting all the cars underground.

Call me the evil polluter, but I'm sorry I still find cars one of the best inventions humankind has come up with, and it could be a horse and a carriage for all I care. But the freedom of having your own horse/car won't be replaced with stuff like this imho.

If somebody comes up with electric cars that are small and standardized, small enough to carry you and your groceries, and not to be a victim of the elements (rain, heat, cold), then you can call me a believer.

Nobody is questioning the convenience of cars.

However, if you have ever had a no commute life- whether it be full remote, or a walkable commute- I think you may just happen to flip your tune. It is a simple delight. If we could build a world around this I think we could be doing something really meaningful and beneficial for society as a whole.

Think grocery stores, doctors, etc all within walking or public transport distance. Imagine if you only needed your car to go visit friends that were far away or to go visit some place that's hard to get to.

I have experienced the full spectrum. I've had a super commute from Olympia to Seattle. I've biked to the train station and ridden with my buddies down to Kent. I've walked 8 minutes to the library where I was an intern. I currently work from home. Cars are a burden on society- one I accept because I occasionally like to take the dogs to the beach or go hiking, but believe me, life is better the less car you can involve in it.

I also happen to enjoy having a cheap old truck as a hobbiest activity. Still, I only drive it on occasion and I love every minute of it. But it is amazing to not depend on it.

I lived a no car life, where I walked to work, the store, everywhere. I have also lived the drive a long distance life.

My favorite is my current life... easy parking right in my driveway, short drives to stores with ample parking, short drive commute to work with ample parking.

Walking is great, but lugging groceries sucks, even if the store is close. It sucked when I lived in an apartment where I parked in a parking lot and had to walk my groceries from the car up to the elevator to my apartment.

A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking.

> A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking

And that’s precisely the problem, because cars don’t scale well. Suburbs surrounding large growing urban areas in the US are often clogged with traffic. Just look at the Bay Area.

You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can have the light traffic car commute. Aside from possible environmental impacts (Who knows, there might not be any with all the reduced traffic from this scheme), I don’t think this is realistic right now; humans have clustered around cities for literally millennia.

Edit: I live within a few minutes’ walking distance from several grocery stores. Typically I just buy a bag’s worth of groceries at a time. Physical ability differs, of course - but that’s another argument for reducing car use in my view, so you can clear the roads for the people who truly need the car.

>You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can have the light traffic car commute.

You could also say that the solution is to get the government to stop micromanaging what people do on their own property thereby freeing people from the need to build parking when it is not economical to do so thereby creating the political will for good public transit.

I live in a place where that is actually a thing, and let me tell you what happens then is that a new coffee shop opens and suddenly a two-lane road becomes a one-lane road. So too much freedom in that sense also hurts.

Also the decentralize idea is not too far off. I think the DC metro area, Pennsylvania and the New York suburbia are great in that sense. You take your car to the commuter train station and off you go into the city. It is the best tradeoff without having to do something radical.

> Walking is great, but lugging groceries sucks, even if the store is close.

Are we talking 3-5 min walk close? Just want to establish whether you actually lived in the kind of place people are talking about here.

A 5 min walk with groceries shouldn't be burdensome. A 25 min walk would be.

He's complaining about having to carry groceries from the car to the elevator, so I don't think he would consider a 5 min walk with groceries "fine".

True.

This seems related to the general decline in fitness of the American population, assuming OP is American. Grip strength has declined massively since the 1980s.

A short walk with bags shouldn't be hard or even unpleasant for the typical adult.

I am shopping for a family of four, and often have two small children with me.

It was a lot easier when it was just for me. I now get enough groceries per trip that there is no way I could carry them all home by myself.

Fair point, I think most families of four might have moved out of my neighbourhood. There are a lot of families of three, but I think they move elsewhere once there is a fourth.

I don't think anyone is abolishing the suburbs just yet and I don't think most urbanites care that much about how you live your life out of the city.

It's most that for those who choose a fully urban life, when do we start to deemphasize these vestiges of auto centric culture that sort of took over before cities understood what they were doing.

The personal grocery cart is a thing.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Personal+Shopping+Carts

I own one of those. They are great. I can buy a lot of stuff at the market around the corner and I don't have to endure my hands getting cut by my bags. I stopped shopping with my car as it is easier to walk into the kitchen with my shopping cart than loading and unloading my car and the elevator (my cart goes inside the elevator, so I don't need to unload it like my car).

The world simply can't afford everyone living as you do. Cars are like villas on the coast: they're great as long as not too many people have them, and not everyone can have them anyway.

So now the question is: on what criteria would you deserve this privilege more than others?

I thought a lot about this comment and I don't mean to insult you but- I think you could constantly optimize towards the convenient and it wouldn't solve any problems. For instance, perhaps you would prefer to sit in a chair all day being fed by tube?

Ironically, I think it's being almost fully remote that's made me appreciate cars so much. Driving becomes a pleasant activity when you have the freedom to only drive at off-peak hours, avoid all traffic jams, etc. It is also a great multiplier to the freedom that remote working brings as well as a partial antidote to some of the downsides of remote working - you are not stuck to a walkable radius around your home.

Cars have obvious downsides, urban sprawl and the resulting commutes are obviously out of control and the extremes of car centric city planning are obviously bad for society. That being said, the opposite extreme of striving to completely eliminate the greatest mobility tool ever invented strikes me as just as insane and depressing. City planning should work towards sensible compromise and incremental improvement, not wildly oscillate between opposite extremes every few decades as every generation of planners gets stuck on a new fad.

The problem is that after growing up with cars, I went and lived several years in China. I lived car free and the public transit system was actually top notch, but again, having to withstand cold days, extreme heat, carrying groceries around (first with a bag, then with a small cart), it was just incovenient.

Sure you can live like that, just like you can survive without electricy, but I honestly do not ever want to do that anymore.

When everyone uses "their freedom"[1] every workday at the same time, suddenly no one (including those how choose the bus) has "their freedom".

I have an asthmatic child and I live in a big city, so yeah, on my list, somewhat curtailing your right to pollute around goes after my right to not have to bring him to ER with a crisis at 3 in the morning. That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.

I can do most of my groceries by going downstairs and walking. I can get to the city center in 40 minutes using public transportation. During that time I can look up stuff on my phone without endangering anyone's life, I don't have to worry about finding a parking spot, and I don't have to worry about a bunch of expenses that a car brings. I think your car (and car-centric urban development) is making you less free than me.

[1] Related: Molecules of Freedom https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/29/energy-depa...

> That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.

"Moving it around" here generally means moving it to electricity generation sites - ie places where people don't live. That's a huge benefit already.

And moreover it's much easier to de-pollute electricity generation infrastructure than to de-pollute fossil fuel cars.

I'm no kind of electric car fan. I'd much rather see cars die off wholesale, leaving only well-invested public transport and personal transport for the less able. I don't own a car of any sort and plan never to live more than s 15 minute walk from my place of work. But electric cars are still a huge positive step for urban environments.

Just fyi the majority of particulate matter emitted by cars comes from brakes and tires, not gasoline (diesel changes the equation somewhat)

So electric cars still have a lot of particulate emissions, thought less so in environments where they have lots of opportunity for regenerative braking.

That's really interesting. Could you cite that for me? I had a quick look around but didn't see anything super reliable.

Sure. There's: http://www.soliftec.com/NonExhaust%20PMs.pdf (2016)

Study highlights:

A positive relationship exists between vehicle weight and non-exhaust emissions.

Electric vehicles are 24% heavier than their conventional counterparts.

Electric vehicle PM emissions are comparable to those of conventional vehicles.

Non-exhaust sources account for 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 from traffic.

Future policy should focus on reducing vehicle weight

Part of this is that we already spent a lot of deliberate effort on reducing emissions from engines. As the study notes:

> Before the introduction of air quality standards, exhaust emissions used to be a major source of PM, especially for diesel cars (Miguel et al., 1998). Since then, PM emission standards for vehicle exhausts have become increasingly strict and now all new diesel passenger cars are fitted with a diesel particulate filter (DPF). Bergmann et al. (2009) found that DPFs are very effective at reducing PM emissions, lowering the emitted mass of PM by 99.3%

>When everyone uses "their freedom"[1] every workday at the same time, suddenly no one (including those how choose the bus) has "their freedom".

So go early/late. I used to exclusively ride the train and subway before I moved out of the city and I assure you rush hour congestion is not limited to cars.

>I can do most of my groceries by going downstairs and walking. I can get to the city center in 40 minutes using public transportation. During that time I can look up stuff on my phone without endangering anyone's life, I don't have to worry about finding a parking spot, and I don't have to worry about a bunch of expenses that a car brings. I think your car (and car-centric urban development) is making you less free than me.

Good for you. Observation indicates that that there are no shortage of people who find cars worth the trade-offs. The better public transit is the fewer a proportion of the population they will be but as long as we have roads we'll have cars. Subways and trams didn't eliminate carriages and I don't see why things would be different today.

>That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.

The solution to pollution is dilution!

Electric cars would be a massive improvement.

"Stuff like this" you mean walking/biking/public transport? It's already replaced cars in many places, including what's in the OP.

I don't know if the personal automobile is one of the best inventions...it's built on the back of climate change and has led to less efficient infrastructure and less efficient society in the name of slight convenience. If carbon was priced properly based on its negative externalities, cars would be a LOT less attractive.

I think the personal automobile still is one of the best inventions. The failure is not the vehicle itself, but the fact that entire cities have been constructed to accomodate them, to the detriment of everything else (as discussed in this thread: pedestrians, cyclists, small shops, communities, health all suffer from car-centric city design).

Actually, replacing some cars with horses (though probably not horse-drawn cars) would solve some of the problems caused by cars, especially the damage they do to the environment.

Inside city bounds, small trucks could be replaced by horse-drawn carriages; they'd be clean (clean_er- horses still er, produce waste) and large trucks should never be allowed in the same areas as pedestrians and bicyclists anyway.

I'm not saying that the current pace of life in very big cities could be maintained in this way, but just the reduction in emissions would probably make up for any short-term financial loss.

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