Comment by tjr225 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjr225 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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