Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

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I wouldn't mind living in a smaller city (though honestly Tulsa ain't that small), but yes there's the cultural issues you bring up, and other problems as well.

For example, the US has generally awful land use/transportation setups even in progressive major cities, and in smaller/less progressive ones, it goes from generally awful to extra terrible. Walking for transportation is unpleasant and near-useless, biking is uncomfortable and dangerous, and public transportation is sparse, slow, and unreliable. Housing options are usually either a single-family home in a super low density area that exacerbates the above, or an apartment in a very ugly large complex in a neighborhood with terrible schools. Obviously generalizing here, but that's what you see most of the time.

To demonstrate that I'm not using these superlatives for no reason: I can't find stats for Tulsa, but Oklahoma City's combined mode share for commuters who use walking, biking, or public transit is a massive 2.2 percent, and Tulsa's is probably similar. I find that people are pretty rational when it comes to day to day transportation choices; if that few people are doing something other than driving, there's a very good reason for it.

Right now I live in the outskirts of Munich in a backyard duplex (there's a 6-unit complex up front), a type of housing option that largely doesn't even exist in the states. Plenty of people around here drive, but there's also a few different grocery options within easy walking distance (and a ton within easy biking distance), public transit is fairly dense and reliable (extremely dense and reliable by US standards), all three of those things feel safe even with kids. And Munich isn't some weird outlier in Germany, the other cities I've visited have felt quite similar overall. I wish US cities could stop being such a dumpster fire when it comes to land use and transportation, but there's so much cultural momentum there.

The thing that worries me about a thread like this is that of course HN commenters are going to have well-reasoned arguments for not moving to Tulsa, but no part of a plan like this involves convincing everyone to move to Tulsa; it's successful on its terms if it finds enough qualified people, even if the majority of all addressable candidates are ultimately incompatible with the current Tulsa environment.

So, for instance: lack of walkability or public transportation is problematic for a lot of us, but it's obviously not a showstopper for everyone; lots of remote-working knowledge workers in Southern California are already in the suburbs and already use cars to get everywhere.

Another perspective: most people in those towns live just fine with the lack of walkability or public transportation.

Which is enabled by cars, so it's really a non issue. People who fetishize public transportation fail to see that there are many community types in which cars make perfect sense. In big cities congestion is obviously an issue, but in smaller cities and towns cars are really great.

Reality is the the opposite of what you're describing.

The people talking about public transportation are still fine with cars for a large portion of trips. Tons of people still drive in Munich, or Barcelona, or Tokyo.

It's the "pro-car" crowd in the US that's unsatisfied unless public transit is completely crippled. Cars are so dominant and transit so hobbled in US cities that public transit rarely even breaks 5% mode share, but still many motorists insist that wanting to improve choices is "fetishism" or a "war on cars".

I don't think people who drive cars are "pro-car" in the sense your thinking of. They simply use cars because it's convenient for them, and in general public transport doesn't make much sense in their communities so they ignore it.

In big cities on the other hand many people don't have cars and you find people who both use public transportation and passionately advocate for it. They are "pro-public transit" in a political sense and have a deep seated dislike for cars for various reasons whereas the car people really don't have an opinion about public transport.

I encourage you to read the story of the Purple Line in LA before you assume that these pro car people don't exist. They managed to stall the completion of this subway line for nearly 25 years (the ball is rolling now thankfully) under the false narrative that constructing this line would lead to beverly hills high school becoming a smoking crater in the ground, a high school that they currently allow fracking to happen on the campus, and have used it's school funding to mount failed lawsuits against LA metro.

"Pro car" people really do exist, and they are batshit crazy.

> They simply use cars because it's convenient for them, and in general public transport doesn't make much sense in their communities so they ignore it.

There's really two overlapping categories here. There are absolutely some people who proactively hate public transit, biking, walkability, etc. if it in any way takes away from cars.

Then there are people who are, as you say, not really ideological about it, they just use cars because that's the way to get around that works for them. But, once there's a proposal to, say, reduce street parking and add a protected bike lane, or a bus lane, or something like that, often these people are suddenly very pro-car and anti-multi-modal transportation indeed, because they feel that their current lifestyle is threatened.

I don't totally blame this sort of person for how they feel: all their life, all they've seen is that driving works and other things don't. Because in the cities in which they've lived, that's how things are, because that's how things have been designed to work. Public transit has been terrible where they've lived, so why would they want money to go to public transit improvements? But, they're still wrong, it's just an understandable sort of ignorance.

> They are "pro-public transit" in a political sense and have a deep seated dislike for cars for various reasons whereas the car people really don't have an opinion about public transport.

Well, there aren't very many who dislike cars outright in general. They don't like how much resources cars get in the middle of cities, because cars usually have gotten far too much land and money relative to their utility and externalities there.

If you look at countries like Germany or the Netherlands, plenty of people still drive, but they have a saner, more diverse set of viable transportation options. That's what "pro-transit" urbanists in the US usually want, rather than the driving monoculture that is so common in most US cities and towns.

Personally, I'd love to see car 'bans' in city core areas like what's being worked on in Oslo or Barcelona (or was it Madrid?). Or the city quadrant division in Groningen, that's clever. Does that mean I hate cars? Nah, I actually love road trips, there are some things that cars are super great for. But cars don't belong for most trips in city centers, they make things worse, and even the people who currently do have to drive downtown aren't exactly loving it, right?

US city centers really have the worst of both worlds. They're still designed for driving in a way that makes walking, biking, and public transit some combination of inefficient, unsafe, and unpleasant. But driving there isn't fun either; the very nature of being dense means that parking and traffic are both major pains. So no matter what you choose, it still sucks. In contrast, taking transit into the center of Munich and walking around is actually pretty nice! And this is true for many non-US cities around the world.

Of course they do. The whole idea of these external costs are that you don't feel them yourself. Driving your car everywhere and having massive parking lots and highways connecting them feels great, your feeling is reinforced by 80 years of advertising and media that this is supposed to feel great, while hiding the fact that you are scarring the earth in the process for this lifestyle to be possible for you.

You never see what was underneath the highway before it was laid, what used to be where that parking lot is, where the metals came from that were used to produce your car, what oil field your gas came from that day, and how all of these pieces parts from around the world were moved to that spot in front of you in rural Oklahoma. It's all hidden from view by design, but that doesn't mean it isn't there, causing collective damage under the guise of a false idea of personal freedom.

Yeah, so, this has nothing to do with the story we're discussing.

America's average waistline would care to disagree.

It's not the only factor, obviously, but it's definitely one of them.

Sure. Nevertheless, it's natural for people to discuss what feels like blockers for themselves at least.

And in this case, it does seem like it's relevant to building up a tech scene. That's how preferences are starting to skew.

Right, people should spend some time in areas that they are considering moving to and decide for themselves.

I only commented because I recently took a long driving tour of the US looking for places away from major cities and near national parks/forests to move to, and Eastern Oklahoma sticks out in my memory like a sore thumb.

But the things I consider to be important in a new home are different from the things that other people might value. If there were a stipend for remote work in a town like Provo or Buffalo or Santa Fe, I'd be all over it. I also found the Ozarks to be very accepting and laid-back, and that's practically next door to Tulsa. But my experience is anecdotal, and peoples' perspectives and priorities are all different.

> If there were a stipend for remote work in a town like Provo or Buffalo or Santa Fe, I'd be all over it.

I suspect that's why they feel no need to offer you a stipend to move there!

I would argue that smaller metros in America have a much more diverse housing stock than what you say here - while there are certainly plenty of houses in far-flung, low-density neighborhoods and ugly apartments in massive complexes, there are also typically more appealing urban neighborhoods in the main city (and often in the larger suburbs) with a good mix of businesses, community buildings, transit, small apartment buildings, townhouses and single-family homes all intermingling. Though these neighborhoods are often desirable as a result and it can take some waiting for an appropriate listing to go for sale, rentals are usually in high supply.

In New England, what we call tripledeckers - three story buildings, usually with three or six apartments - are very common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-decker_(house)

Yes, New England is the biggest exception there, especially streetcar suburbs.

Well, that's not what I've seen. Townhomes and smaller (non-hideous[1]) apartment complexes -- missing middle housing -- certainly exist, but they're fairly uncommon. They make up a very small percentage of what housing stock is available.

[1] To explain what I mean by this, here in Germany it's very common to have smaller, say 8-12 unit apartment complexes that are not surrounded by a small sea of asphalt for parking; the parking is completely underground, so up front you have just maybe a small strip of greenery. And then they actually have a good-sized shared backyard, and the building itself doesn't look like it's trying its best to ape Soviet-era brutalist apartment blocks.

The urban core of most American cities are pretty hollowed out and artificial in my experience. It's changing slightly, but I encourage you to see some of these mid western cities that don't get much limelight yourself. Have a night out in Cleveland, Ohio, as I've done several times.

All will seem pretty standard, you go to a bar on a street with four other similar bars, then you realize that these four bars are the only places with people in them in the entire downtown area. You leave the bars and walk a block and you can hear your footsteps and thoughts echo off of the empty blocks. You might be lucky to see another soul on foot. There is just a lack of life in a lot of American urban cores, and that's not a feeling but a fact backed with population data. Cleveland in the 1950s had nearly 900k people living in the city. Today it's a bit over 350k people living in the city, a large portion of it is literally hollow (or demolished and converted to surface parking lots) due to large swaths of the population moving to new suburban developments in the 1950s, and a lack of immigration back into the urban core. The overall metro population of Cleveland has been pretty stable, if declining, but the city itself only appears as a city from 9am to 5pm, and during the odd sports game, as a result. Restaurants and stores might only be open for weekday lunch because there isn't foot traffic otherwise.

This isn't true in every city, however. For instance, Los Angeles experienced a similar white flight effect with the development of their surburban neighborhoods, however in the wake of this population shift, immigration continued to occur and the population continued to rise at double digit rates every decade. Now, the former neighborhood of the Los Angeles elite of the 1920s, Westlake, is a thriving community of central american immigrants and the densest part of the entire city. The same cannot be said about the Cleveland analog, millionaires row on Euclid Ave, which used to count Rockefeller and Carnegie among their storied residents.

This sounds more like a Cleveland problem than anything.

See also: the hastily made Cleveland tourism video (parody): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysmLA5TqbIY

> biking is uncomfortable and dangerous

I live in a college town in Michigan and work for a company in San Francisco.

I don't find biking to be uncomfortable here whatsoever. In fact there are maybe a half dozen to a dozen coffee shops I can work from that are around two miles away from my house and I bike to them all the time- even in the winter if the roads aren't icy.

There are definitely confident cyclists who profess to be comfortable in some areas of the US. Ask them if they'd be comfortable with a relative who's 8 or 80 biking around independently in the same area and they usually become a lot less confident. Then look at what the actual data shows: how many people bike there? The numbers are nearly always dismal: even supposed cycling champion Portland has half Munich's numbers, and Munich isn't even trying very hard. Portland is quarter-assing things at best, and it goes rapidly downhill from there.

Or if you want something more concrete to work with: how many mile lanes of protected bike lanes or off-street bike paths are there in your town? How does that compare to the number of mile lanes for sidewalks or general vehicle lanes? What percentage of controlled intersections use a protected design? How wide are the roads? What's the speed limit, and how fast do people actually drive? How common are pedestrian islands? How sharp are the curb corners? How many of the painted bike lanes in the door zone? How common are walk/bike cut-throughs? What percentage of intersection lights have a marker for bikes?

Most cyclists who talk about how comfortable they are in the US don't realize just how bad it is there. Yes, you can still often get by; I certainly managed, in the bay area, and Seattle, and Utah, and even Alabama. But it was still total garbage compared to the places that take biking seriously (which is exactly why so few people do it in the states).

We live in an area that is, by most Americans' standards, fairly dense, and yet we started having our son bike to school a mile away, by himself, when he was 7, and he started biking alongside us to a kindergarten 2 miles away when he was 5. He's 8 now, and he sometimes bikes himself to a friend's house, or a park, or a grocery store or bakery for an errand. That kind of thing is almost unheard of in the US these days.

I realize how bad it is here, but I'm not really sure what you're suggesting? Throw up my hands and give up? Move to the Netherlands???

Some of the smaller American cities are also the best for bicycling. Davis and Madison come to mind. Most mid-sized or large cities are outright hellscapes, including most of the cities in the SF area and even most parts of SF itself. A good way to identify a decent bicycling city it to find demographic data on mode share and break it down by gender and age. If your bikers are all 25-year-old males, it’s probably not a great bike town.

Ann Arbor is a bit of an outlier in that as far as Michigan cities go, it's relatively bike-friendly. It's still remarkably suburban in most areas, though; good luck biking to a grocery store that isn't out in Pittsfield Township.

I don't live in Ann Arbor. This probably speaks to the number of bikeable college towns, though.

Biking is pretty routine in college towns. Assuming that's East Lansing or Ann Arbor, you probably have some 20k bike commuters. There is also a huge inventory of local used bikes to sustain the culture, and city councils will want to protect students and readily build bike lanes, especially if there had been accidents at tricky intersections. In other towns, not so much, and the absence is conspicuous both in seeing other riders on the road and the infrastructure to support biking.

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