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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

We all have cars because cars are incredibly useful; Got 4 young kids and you need to get groceries for the week?

This only work that way because that's how your life is structured, not that it is a law of nature.

If you live near a grocery store, you wouldn't have to buy enough grocery to last you a week. You can just buy what you need.

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And then go back to the grocery store every day. What a waste of time. You can also wash your laundry but hand. The reality is we have these appliances (including cars) because they increase our personal efficiency quite a bit.

Going to the grocery store ever? What a waste of time when you can order groceries.

Those personal appliance have very real cost, especially in term of how much space it takes up on the roads and the amount of parking lots allocated. All of these increased the distance you have to walk to get somewhere and increased congestion.

I saw traffic in Sagion, Vietnam. Believe me, cars stick out like sore thumb compared to motorcycles and bikes, and if everyone uses car, traffic would basically grind to a halt.

With the way we use cars in America, it's very inefficient.

Nah, the suburban life was a strange fashion that took hold for a few decades but never really made sense, and thus it's now in decline as people return to the city cores. For the older generation owning a car was a status symbol, but the younger generation doesn't care.

Check back with us in 30 years. I bet suburbs will still be hugely popular in the US.

That trend lasted about 10 seconds: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/29/millennials-are-fleeing-big-...

I like living in the city. My wife and I did it with our daughter until she was 5. But the problem with American cities isn’t cars. It’s that they offer no solutions for parents who aren’t rich. (And almost everyone ends up becoming a parent at some point.) Schools, family centric activities, transportation, affordable housing. You need a million dollars to buy a house in a good school district in many major US cities (if one even exists). There’s not much in the way of other kids around. (Babies, maybe, but how often do you see 10 year olds in NYC that aren’t tourists?)

So, that CNBC article summarizes an article in WSJ that cites 27,000 people leaving some of the largest cities in the US. The problem is that the changes in each city are actually much smaller than the margin of error for the data that WSJ uses (I think it was ACS 5-year estimates).

This post goes into more detail on why that narrative is most likely noise: http://cityobservatory.org/no-youth_exodus_signal-noise/

Edit: 27k is approximately 0.25% of all 25-34 year olds living in cities with pops over 500k (which is what WSJ reported on). Not an exodus at all and it's really a bit of a nonsense narrative that WSJ has been pushing hard.

People are still moving to the suburbs. They're growing at rates comparable to the city core.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/05/25/early-d...

If you've got 4 kids all under 4yo, you're kind of screwed no matter what vehicle you drive. For biking, you'd probably be looking at a Bakfiets with electric assist plus a trailer.

Presuming we've sufficiently eliminated car traffic and the roads are safe for kids, it's also likely that at least one of those kids can bike themselves to the store with you.

4 kids will fit easily in a minivan or large SUV. Lots of families manage that.

4 kids will fit after everyone has been dressed, got their shoes on, got their shoes on again, been lifted/chased into the car/bike. That's what I meant by "screwed". The choice of vehicle doesn't really matter.

Once they're older, kids can bike themselves or walk. Families also manage that.

I've heard of one car-free mother that moved seven kids around by bike on a daily basis.

If memory serves, she got a shout-out in this book: https://seattle.bibliocommons.com/item/show/2862141030

That's pretty cool.

Funny enough, I saw a mother of 4 biking today in Boston. It was raining and 50F/10C outside. She had a bakfiets with 3 onboard and a kid pedaling behind her. I don't think they were going grocery shopping though.

How do you find a place within easy transit distance of your work, your spouse’s work, a grocery store, your kids’ school or daycare, your kids’ activities, and your kids’ friends’ houses? How do middle class people do all that in a country where cities have made it illegal to build new housing?

Used to be when I lived in a semi-civilised place that the grocers was a half block from my tram stop and three blocks from the house.

Trolley carts.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Easy-Wheels-Mini-Shopping-Cart-i...

When I lived in DC I was across the street from a grocery store and kiddy corner from my wife’s work. I was on the other side of town from my daughter’s preschool, and my office was between my daughter’s preschool and my house. (Dropping her off via transit would’ve taken an hour and a half easily.)

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