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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Bullshit: isn't incredibly impactful. Short low speed trips in city centers by electric vehicles have marginal contribution to global emissions.

What's really motivating policies like this is an aesthetic aversion to cars from a few loud people who think they can socially engineer a beautiful shining future for humanity whether we want it or not.

I like cars. I'm perfectly happy to talk about emissions, but I'm not willing to give up my car on some new urbanist's say-so.

You're right about one thing though: we should all expect a lot more of this top down meddling with our lives.

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Electric cars are still extremely polluting. Tire and break dust is the majority of pm 2.5 particulate pollution in US cities and there is a growing body of research that shows reducing these emissions is a huge impact on our general cognitive ability and happiness (particulate air pollution makes us statistically significantly dumber). As with anything, I’m pretty happy with allowing what the market will support. Accurately pricing parking and making people pay the market rate for parking will drastically reduce car use. This is the plan is Paris (reducing free parking) We don’t need to ban cars, we just need to stop subsidizing them.

There are also hidden costs in roads being clogged up with personal cars slowing commercial traffic.

These goalposts are moving at light speed. You'll always be able to find some negative effect of cars. What annoys me about new urbanist types is that they're so dogmatically anti-car that they won't even acknowledge the positives

You may like cars but you're not entitled to public spaces to park it. And without those, you may find that owning a car is rather cumbersome.

He is not entitled but (at least in my country) you pay a tax to be able to drive it (where the car is registered), so probably not "entitlement" but some right he does have.

But does that tax levied on that car / maintenance expenses cover the costs of road maintenance, excess utility infrastructure from the sprawl that driving infrastructure incentivises, negative health and environmental externalities. I highly highly doubt it.

I'd be perfectly happy paying for the public space my car occupies. I'm a fan of congestion charges and tolling every road. But bans on cars altogether? No way in hell.

Has anyone mentioned banning cars here?

I know people talk about it — I talk about it, semi-seriously — but I don't see any comments here mentioning banning cars (except yours), and it's not in the article.

I'd posit that adding a bunch of parking to a city center is also "meddling" in the lives of people who live in the city center.

The thing that isn't talked about is the function of a personal vehicle. A car is a major contributing factor to personal freedom. You are able to travel short to long distances on YOUR schedule, not someone else's. The biggest issue with a lot of public transpo is the lack of freedom. You dont travel when convenient to you and you dont get taken to exactly where you want to go. This of course has its pros that go with the cons, both environmental and cost (cost to a degree, not all public transport is created equal and I have a big problem with considering it savings if you spend 1.5 hours round trip to do a 30 min round trip commute, but that's a slightly different topic).

When people argue for the rights of cars, they are really talking about their own personal rights to large movement (grocery shopping is far easier with a car than by public transpo and foot as a quick example).

And as the caveat, yes I do believe we need to take steps to solving our pollution generation. In the same breath, I dont believe in taking away personal freedoms or independent abilities. Paris is literally an archaic city. The design is archaic and what city planners have to deal with are hacks due to legacy design. Then again, French culture is rather archaic as well. They still refuse to adopt loaner words as an example, something the rest of the world has been doing for the past few hundred years at least. Using them as a poster child for what the rest of the modern world should do to fix pollution problems is like trusting an Italian engineering firm to build a bridge... it's going to collapse :P Add to that, banning anything is a very buercratical answer to a complex problem. Tell me the last time banning/prohibition has worked well and never had 2nd or 3rd order severe consequences. Historical speaking, they're pulling ideas out of their ass and are going to regret this decision regardless if its "for the greater good".

A good public transport system is more convenient than a car. I see kids as young as 10 (maybe younger but I haven't seen it) riding my local city bus system alone - compare that to the other parents who drive their kids to school. When the public transport system goes where you want about when you want it is really nice to not have to drive.

Most people have never experienced a good transport system. Even in Europe most have not. Paris is good for some people, but not even everyone in Paris. It is even worse in the US.

I think maybe you need to leave your American cities and come visit a modern city like London or Paris that has excellent public transport.

Living in London I travel on my schedule everywhere on public transport. That because a bus or a train turns up at every station or stop every 4 mins. Very little need to wait, never any need to plan.

I live in flat with a parking space (and paid a hefty premium for it) but still don’t have a car. Not because I can’t afford one, but because it just doesn’t make sense. It quicker, easier and cheaper to take public transport everywhere than it is to drive. Trains don’t get stuck in traffic, and there’s more train crossings over the river than there is car crossings, making most trips more direct by public transport.

You view cars as personal freedom. I see them as noisy pollution machines that try kill me when I walk and cycle. Why the hell should i give up my personal freedoms to walk and cycle, just so you can drive?

Very well then, try to get to and from Heathrow airport by public transport, I dare you...

That there is some public transport rather than none doesn't make it 'excellent'.

In all fairness, Heathrow Express seems to work very well

Compared to a car or taxi it doesn't.

I've traveled between core London and Heathrow many times, and every time I've taken the train, I've had a faster, more pleasant experience that I would have had in a taxi. Maybe it's different if you're heading to Heathrow from outside Zone 1.

I guess we all have different definitions of best. Personally I'd much rather take a 15 minute train (leaving every 15 minutes) to the centre of London then a connecting tube (total £25ish, 30 mins) than sit in a taxi for at best half an hour, and often much longer, at a cost of £50-£100.

Of course, depending on timetables/connections the train could be a bit slower, and if one has a lot of luggage door-to-door by taxi might be better. But for me it would be hard to argue that fighting through London traffic in a car or taxi is superior to public transport.

I have, several times. The trains great, what’s wrong with it?

Soon it’s gonna be even better with Crossrail.

The world of urban centers is a world of a fixed amount of lane-miles of road. Cars are an extremely inefficient use of road space, they have some of the worst throughout in terms of people per lane-mile per hour relative to other transit modes. What cities like Paris are doing is reallocating lane-miles of road from cars to alternate mere efficient transit modes, which increases there throughout and decreases their commute times. In a world of limited resources (lane miles of road) how much of a penalty should bus riders pay (in terms of minutes wasted sitting in car traffic) to increase the freedom of a much smaller in number group of drivers. I don’t have the numbers offhand, but let’s say there are 5 unique passenger trips in a bus for every unique passenger trip in a car in Paris. It’s calculable, by saying “preserve car drivers freedom” you are also saying “increase commute times by 30% for a group of people that is 5x as big as those having their freedom preserved.

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