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Comment by jackyinger | Hacker News Reader

As a former Portlandian I’m pretty stoked to imagine where this could take the city! A low altitude densification would beat what’s been done to the inner East side...

Here’s a fun thought experiment... Imagine if most streets became parks/plazas (aside from a few left for utility reasons) and everyone rode (electric) bikes, or similar relatively light transport options. To me that’s be idyllic. Imagine not being relegated to the sidewalk, not having to worry about being hit by some idiot driving way to fast in a residential area.

Edit: What’s with the downvotes? Geez have some imagination. Bikes don’t need to have right of way everywhere either... I guess vehicle-centrism goes far beyond cars.

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What you describe requires the elimination of residential zoning completely to allow for small businesses to mix in with the homes. You can't eliminate cars until you eliminate the need for driving to stores and you can't eliminate that without mixed zoning.

And you can't eliminate zoning as long as entitled busybodies are both complaining about other people's power tool usage and voting.

I agree with mixed zoning, but you still need to get supplies to the local stores and trash out of the area. Plus you need places for special construction equipment to get in as there is need.

Of course all of the above is a fraction of traffic that we have today. However don't pretend it doesn't exist.

Eliminating cars does not mean eliminating roads.

The imposition of residential only zoning all over the world is, in retrospect, a huge mistake.

This has been posted on HN before, but the Japanese zoning system makes a lot of sense: https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20191002.php

The big requirement for "more cycling", IMHO, is "more errands being within comfortable cycling distance". Mixed-use zoning makes this a lot easier.

(I have never learnt to drive, and rely on cycling, walking, and transit; I find I am generally a lot happier when I live with a lot of errands in cycling distance!)

> Imagine if most streets became parks/plazas

Before the massive efforts of the auto industry, this is basically what they were. Streets of small European towns still feel this way and the cars feel very much like the interlopers.

So, a return to normalcy.

That framing as a way to misrepresent the fact auto industry gave people what they wanted. Many newly developed parts of Europe are the same way, because that’s what people want.

People didn't want cars, they wanted what the gov't subsidized. Here in the US cars are subsidized and transit, biking, walking is penalized. These dials are turned differently in different countries.

I don't believe that for a second.

In the UK where I live the government subsidise rail. Rail is very expensive, slow and unreliable especially compared to my diesel car. I would rather cycle to the train station, get onto the train with my bike and then cycle the other side to work. However it costs me almost twice as much to do and takes me 3 times as long.

Even with all the taxes on fuel, emissions and the price of repairing what is now an old car (my Car is over 15 years old and has done many many miles). Driving is cheaper, generally gets me there quicker even when travelling across the whole country.

Rail tickets keep on increasing in price and the service never improves and the whole experience is unpleasant.

In the rest of Europe cars are just taxed heavily and people still buy them. This idea that people don't want cars just isn't true.

In the UK where you live the government ripped up half the rails, then privatized the rest. Oh, Doctor Beeching! Please, Mr. Branson!

The UK once subsidized a working system, then destroyed most of that system without any resulting cost savings, then sold it to billionaires who it now subsidizes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail

This old attempted gotcha. It doesn't prove what you think it does.

I am well aware of the story. BTW British rail stopped being profitable back in 1955 (7 years after nationalisation).

It proves that maybe you shouldn't let government take public ownership of companies. Government will frequently provide the worse of both worlds as it tries to appease everyone and ends up serving no-one.

The result for the UK is that we have a very expensive rail service that is horrible to use and it is simply cheaper to drive.

Think of the roads as public transit. It was never "profitable" and requiring profitability is a bad way to run a transit system.

That's one version.

Caro's The Power Broker details how Bob Moses was the agent of the powerful forces behind the automobile.

The only stakeholders not represented, or even consulted, were the average taxpaying citizens. Any dissent was ruthlessly squashed.

Urban planners and normal citizens have been critical since the very beginning. The debate really picked up after WWII, with the resumption of peace time economy.

By the 50s, the experts had enough real world data -- more highways creates more congestion, focus on cars to the exclusion of mass transit physically cannot work -- to invalidate the entire premise.

Eighty years later, here we are still clutching at pearls, trying not to faint. As if there's anything left to debate.

I shouldn't be shocked. But somehow I still am. Or maybe just disappointed.

The history of the automobile in America is longer. Until the 1940s you will struggle to find detrimental side effects of automobile adoption. The automobile did for the town what the railroad did for the city. The negative effects of the automobile on American society, as you rightly point, are an effect of the automobiles runaway success. We passed the point where the automobile was a net positive around the 1950s. This is when planners like Moses begin forcing further adoption, that was rightly opposed at the time.

Ya, Caro's summary is very measured, which I think older, calmer me now agrees with:

The problem was never the automobile per se, but the emphasis on the automobile to the exclusion of everything else. Starting with land use policies which only accommodate automobile centric development.

The biggest error in early auto policy, in my opinion, was the emphasis on straight-line speed over continuous flow.

The first cars were not that fast and did not accelerate easily, so it makes some sense that there would be advocacy to get every last bit out of the engine through highway design. Add to that the requisite hype for a new, impactful technology and you get the approach that paved the earth.

But we have gradually come to realize the point of traffic calming, roundabouts, transit-oriented design and other tools that make people stigmergically decide on appropriate trip plans and driving parameters.

I love this kind of theory, speculation. Thanks.

If it truly was about reaching a density point where cars no longer make sense we'd have built rail. Why didn't we?

Transportation is fundamentally about time and money trade-offs. Supply goes up and cost comes down or vise versa. If you want cost low you gotta have a lot of supply. It doesn't matter whether the wheels are steel or rubber you just need to have the supply. For an economy to flourish people need to be able to not be trapped going to a job or shopping at a particular store because the cost of getting there is workable but that is exactly the reality that transit scarcity creates.

If it was just about the cars they wouldn't have spent the 60s and 70s killing mass transit projects while also killing highways. Infrastructure development in the US ground to a halt because in the 60s the upper middle class managed to get far away from the poors for the first time in history and they wanted to keep it that way by keeping the cost of living outside the inner city from getting too low.

Moses' innovation was getting the poor to unwittingly fund the segregation, looting the cities to fund the suburbs. An innovation then copied nationwide.

I'd only be guessing, but I think the highways and freeways were then defunded in turn because those same financiers couldn't figure out how to profit from further investment. Or maybe they decided to end their partnership with organized labor. Or maybe cashing in other rent seeking opportunities, like ending usury protections enabling explosion of consumer debt, were more promising.

Who knows.

The automobile was the original "clean" transportation. The alternative at the time of its adoption was the horse drawn carriage or buggy. American cities were literally knee deep in manure. Exercise: Graph the adoption of the automobile to the prevalence of cholera in the United States.

> Imagine not being relegated to the sidewalk

Pedestrians don't mix any better with (electric) bikes that are trying to get places than they do with cars. Reasonably broad and well-maintained sidewalks are essential for everyone's comfort and safety.

In practice, they do. Bikes are much smaller, much nimbler and much slower than cars. Unless the street is completely packed with pedestrians, fully pedestrian streets work well with ebikes.

This is from experience riding bikes and having people ride bikes next to me in fully pedestrian streets as dreamt about by GP.

I have a very different experience than you. I ride or walk everywhere I go.

Bikes may be slower than cars, but -- when they're being used for commuting, not toodling around on a Sunday afternoon -- they are much, much faster than pedestrians.

When I'm walking, I don't want bikes whizzing by me at three times my speed. When I'm biking, I don't want to be constantly worrying about people on foot -- or their kids, or their dogs -- suddenly stopping or changing direction without looking.

There's one bike-and-ped bridge I used to cross for work, and as a cyclist I did find pedestrians very annoying--they take 90 degree turns across the trail without looking at all -- but that's only one very crowded section. (and as a pedestrian, the cyclists were never a problem for me there.)

But that's one crowded bridge. On most roads, people walking in the roads instead of the sidewalk wouldn't matter to me. You could 10x the number of pedestrians and it'd be fine in most of my city (Austin TX). Maybe that'd change if it were pedestrian-friendly and we ended up with 50x the number of people walking, but this is a problem I dream of.

"having a bell, ringing it when you overtake pedestrians, and waving and saying thanks" helps from both sides of this, IMHO. Bonus points if you maybe holler "cute dog!", "great hat!", or some other compliment instead of "thanks!".

I, too, ride or walk everywhere I go, and have several shared cyclist/pedestrian paths that I use a lot. My least favorite thing to encounter on the path, walking or riding, is that asshole with the multi-thousand-dollar racing bike and no bell who just blazes past me with no warning. Fuck that guy, "share the road" works both ways.

Yeah, I will go out of my way to avoid shared paths, so I guess we just have different tolerances for these things. :)

I do have a bell and a voice and I'm ready to use them if needed, but I'm happier when they're irrelevant. I take pedestrian priority and safety seriously when I'm riding (as I hope others do for me when I'm walking), so if I can ride in an area where I have less of that worry, I will.

I think you might underestimate how large streets are and overestimate the number of bikes and pedestrians.

We're in the context of "no sidewalks" that the first post in this thread opened up.

Sure. Getting rid of sidewalks means that the entire street becomes a sidewalk. This means that traffic becomes much more distributed amongst parallel streets, and that pedestrian density drastically falls as a result by an order of magnitude or more. The result is that cohabitation between pedestrians and cyclists becomes much easier, as I have noticed when my city did exactly this as a result of the pandemic.

Personal EVs such as scooters, EUCs, bicycles, and non electric options are smaller, have more throughput, and are less dangerous. Imagine a 2 lane road, turned into a park with smaller two lanes for 2 way bike traffic. Just beautiful.

Indeed, a two-way bikeway takes up the same space that car drivers consider to be one lane, so you can take a two-lane road and convert it to a bikeway with spacious sidewalks. As a bonus, such a road will have throughput that car drivers cannot even dream of.

https://twitter.com/Cycling_Embassy/status/12981531351276462...

When I'm walking with my 8-year-old, we both scramble right the hell out of the street if there's a car anywhere in our vision. Neither of us could care less about a bike somewhere. It sure doesn't feel like we're being irrational.

Well, I think bikers have a lot more incentive not to hit people from a personal damage point of view. I mean they’re about as vulnerable as a pedestrian in a collision. So I think you’re thinking right about the risks.

Not to mention the speeds and mass involved, and visibility that a cyclist has vs a driver (without even starting to consider the vehicles that are popular in the US).

Yes! Sidewalks have existed for literally millennia, for a reason. They are not a newfangled invention that is only necessary because of cars.

Yes, they do. Do they mix perfectly? No. But a person + 30 lb bike at 20 mph is safer for pedestrians in a collision than 4000 lbs of rigid steel and plastic at the same speed or faster.

Note also that bike paths and rights of way are not designed in mostof the US to prioritize bikes OR walkers.

Imagine if roads and roundabouts were designed exclusively for bikes and pedestrians.

I think it will be a long time before any existing cities ban cars. It would be faster to start a new car-less city. I dream of doing that someday.

Wouldn't that turn visiting even close by hiking areas into a multi hour one way trip?

Like Venice but with park-spaces instead of gondolas. I love it!

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