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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

The EU is over 3x as population dense as the USA. Any plan to make the USA transportation system to look like the EU's is doomed to failure from the beginning.

You need to be realistic. You are never going to win hearts and minds by railing against cars - Americans love their cars, and for good reason. A bus is not going to pick you up at your front door the second you walk out, and it's not going to drop you directly where you want to go. Cars are a tremendous convenience. And they are not nearly as expensive as people seem here seem to think - they are certainly cheaper than city rent.

It may make sense to reduce the number of cars in city centers, but so few Americans live or go near city centers. You have to understand that HN is not a representative sample of the world population. Not everybody is a single, young person trying to start their own businesses.

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Cars kill ~40000 Americans annually. Is that cheap? Criticizing cars is the only way to wake people up to the damage they have caused in our society. Sure, cars are wonderful for people with mobility issues. For the vast majority of us to design our cities around two ton death machines is a tragedy.

Our cities would be dramatically cheaper to live in with fewer cars. Less parking and road space allows higher density. Transit is cheaper. Walking and biking is healthier and will increase life expectancy.

Not everyone is driving-age, can afford a car or can afford to have parking. Car drivers are not a representative sample of the world population.

> Criticizing cars is the only way to wake people up to the damage they have caused in our society.

It's a way to make you look like an out-of-touch loony, who therefore gets ignored. If you want to reduce car use in the US, dial down the rhetoric, and work on increasing the convenience of not using a car. You're going to win more hearts and minds by making available something better than you are by constantly carping about the existing situation.

Hard to mince words regarding the statistics on cars. You read and responded to the comment, so they clearly drive engagement.

Walking, biking, taking the bus, carpooling are incredibly convenient for anyone willing to try, and I certainly support efforts to improve the facilities for these at all opportunities.

There are uncomfortable truths that need to be addressed about cars, however, and you don't get anywhere by avoiding it. Imagine if there were an easily preventable disease causing ~40000 deaths every year that would actually save us money to solve and help the climate situation as well. Would you ask to temper the rhetoric?

Yes, because your rhetoric is counterproductive. People don't like being yelled at, and people don't like feeling forced. To get change, you need to persuade them to pull in your direction, not to give you the finger.

Look, you need to say that we can prevent these deaths. You really do. But don't say it the way you did. You don't get buy-in that way.

I'm not sure if "convenient" is really the right word for it. I recently moved to a new job, and my commute is now 20-30 minutes by car. My new office has bike facilities and showers, and isn't too far from public transit, and is generally about as optimal as you can get for non-driving commuting in this city.

I still drive because biking is A. pretty physically grueling in a number of common weather conditions ( greater than 100 degree or less than 32 degree temps for much of the year, carrying my bike up 2-3 flights of stairs... ) B. Going to take 2-3x the time per day, before time spent showering on each end of an hour-long ride in brutal heat... Public transit is a 1+ mile walk/ride on either end of it (same problems as above), means I can only get in/out of work at specific times, and still takes 2-3x longer than driving.

That's before we get into the 2000 serious injury-causing accidents that people get in on bikes per year in my state, many of which are in my county. I really hate cars, but I'm mostly driving slow and on low-speed roads. I'm very unlikely to die or be seriously injured. That's not something I can rely on on a bike commute.

I'm looking to move closer to the office so I can mitigate some of these because I earnestly hate driving this much, but I wouldn't claim that that's going to make biking/walking "incredibly convenient", just acceptably less inconvenient.

An e-bike would go a long way to materialize the convenience promised by biking. Prices are coming down quite a bit as well. Maybe look into that, they're fun too.

I'm not totally sure it would. Going 20+ MPH on a bike only makes the safety issues worse, without making the commute all that much faster in a way that would reduce how long I'm in the hot/cold/rain.

Except this isnt an easily preventable disease, nor is it an easily curable one.

Tempering the rhetoric in place of actually presenting facts and ideas in a non combative way that offers something of actual tangible value to people will vastly do more to accomplish the goals then trying to shame or beat down ppl.

There is value on both ends. If you are too kind and effeminate on the causes you care about, no one will listen to you either and will think it doesn't matter. You need a mix of both voices in any movement.

Uh, effeminate?

I meant effeminate as weak. Apparently it has a sexist connotation, I actually did not know that it meant that until you pointed it out.

I keep training equipment in my car which is not allowed in my workplace. Unless work changes to allow them, not having a car to keep them in just isn't tenable. I was informed in an earlier HN discussion that in some states, they would not even legally be permitted to make such a change.

And that's even assuming that it would be allowed on public transportation.

It would be good to hear some kind of solution, rather than just being swept under the rug. Or pushed under the bus, so to speak.

I am very against cars and very pro-biking, and yet I find your comment immensely simplistic.

You seem to be forgetting that buildings can't be moved and big infrastructure projects go into the billions. The USA was build with cars in mind, you can't simply undo all that and now ask people to simply get rid of their cars when everything was built specifically for cars.

The more roadways you build to accommodate cars, the more cars fill up the roadways, as long as more people have cars in the city. [0] On the other hand, public transit can be designed to ease congestion and allow movement between densely populated areas. Moreover, cost of building public transit keeps on increasing [1].

The solution is not more roadways to magically reduce congestion. It's to build public transit today before it gets more expensive. See the success of the Delhi Metro in India, for example, where New Delhi was never built with a local subway system in mind. [2]

[0] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/09/citylab-unive... [1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/04/why-new-york-... [2] https://www.globalmasstransit.net/archive.php?id=26471

I do not disagree with anything you say. If I was in any position of power, getting rid of cars would be a top priority. My personal favorite country in the world is the Netherlands, specifically for its cycling and public transportation.

However, as I said, I believe you (and greenonion) are oversimplifying a complex problem. If you've ever been to any US city, you will see just how much influence the car has had in the development of the entire country. From the principles that you are stating, and that I believe are empirically correct, to the implementation of any viable solution there is a gargantuan gap, and I don't see any solutions being presented. Just "cars are bad, we should use public transport".

I am telling you that the problem in India was just as complex and the political system there is also democratic.

And yes, I have been to US cities multiple times, and I don't see why the challenges there are so very different. New Delhi is denser than New York. Its traffic situation was as bad as New York. I am not saying implementation is easy. I am saying implementation is feasible. It's a matter of public and political will. What's holding it back is not that somehow the problem is so complex that it can't be solved.

Adding to the point of induced demand on traffic, thankfully it works the other way too. The traffic situation does not get significantly worse when roads are reduced. The Alaskan viaduct highway in Seattle is an example of this.

Edit: And I have seen the transformation of Vancouver to accommodate bike lanes too, and while Vancouver is nowhere as dense, my point is that the traffic situation did not actually get worse when bike lanes were introduced.

There's no point in comparing the EU and the US as wholes. What matters is the density of a particular urban core. Many American cities have dense cores. Beyond the obvious big three off the top of my head some cities I have visited that could support some closed streets in the core: DC, SF, Baltimore, Philly, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Portland, Honolulu, Charleston, Dallas. No one is suggesting changing everything everywhere, but large cities do exist in every corner of the country.

How about we just stop subsidizing the shit out of cars? Let them pay their own way.

Also, we do not need 'one size fits all' solutions for the entire US. What's appropriate for Wyoming might not be appropriate for the California Bay Area, which is plenty dense.

They already do pay their own way. Gas taxes, tolls, vehicle registration, emissions fees, license fees, premium taxes on car insurance, traffic tickets, parking tickets, parking meters, sales tax on the purchase of a car. Very few things in the United States are taxed as exhaustively as private vehicles.

I'm not sure when "subsidizing" came to mean "giving people something back for the money you took form them in the first place".

I'd love to see a less auto-dependent society, but it's not accurate to say that drivers are subsidized. Perhaps one answer would be to get rid these myriad taxes and fees and just privatize the highways - make it fee for use. Right now, very few drivers ever see the true cost of their transportation choices because it's a little bit here, a little there, and so on.

No, they do not:

https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ &&

https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...

Drivers are heavily subsidized.

Those are pretty interesting links. Thanks for sharing.

I wonder if there's any way to come up with a net value overall for those subsidies? For example, pre-K education is fully subsidized in some states and it looks like the total economic results over a long time are very positive. How would you go about figuring out if those road subsidies are too high or too low?

Good question, and a tough one.

You'd want to look at total benefits (easier movement of people and goods) vs total costs (environment, sedentary lifestyle health problems, wasted space in cities).

I am under the impression that gas taxes (which is the majority of the money you stated) considerably fails to cover the cost of building and maintaining the roads.

Sure if you include rural areas. Some places in the US are just as dense as European cities, just woefully inefficiently managed. You can't fix LA traffic without getting people out of cars.

You can't have both, you can't complain about congestion yet talk about how Americans love their cars. You get both the congestion and deaths and pollution and GHG's with over-reliance on cars and there is no magic fix to it other than having less people drive.

And most people I know in Europe--especially those who are not just out of school--have cars. Europe is hardly some carless utopia even if public transit is, on the whole, better than in the US.

It becomes a 'right tool for the job' situation.

When we lived in Italy we:

* Walked to the grocery store, nearby pizza place, kids' schools, doctor and barber. Because it's not illegal (zoning) to build those things near where people live!

* Rode bikes downtown when the weather was decent

* Took the tram downtown with the kids.

* Took the car to go hiking in the hills or go visit my wife's parents in a small town 30 minutes away.

YMMV. Most of the people I know in Paris either don't have a car, or use it very seldomly (think once a month)

I think it's more about city vs countryside than europe vs US

That's probably fair. Most of the people I know in Europe are a bit older and mostly don't live in e.g. central London.

My experience as well from traveling to Europe. Plenty of cars, crazy traffic and no parking.

HN is definitely not a representative sample of the world population. But HN is definitely not all single, young people trying to start their own businesses.

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