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Comment by zip1234 | Hacker News Reader

It still boggles my mind that, with a 15% car ownership rate, how NYC not only still allows cars, but subsidizes them with absolutely free parking on city streets. The real estate price for a single parking spot in NYC must be astronomical.

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If you go to any community board meeting, you'll hear old people rant for hours about how their cars are essential and bike are destroying the city. And for some reason, this is who politicians listen to.

Community board meetings in general are a problem that nobody has found a great solution to. Oddly enough, the pandemic has caused most of these to go virtual, which has nerfed a lot of the power of the highly motivated old people with too much time on their hands.

Honestly the easy solution is to ignore the CBs. Surveys show that the majority of people want more bus and bike lanes, so just build them and skip all of the "community input" aka "giving veto power to a small minority".

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-bike-lane-survey-dat...

A small minority who overwhelmingly votes and has lots of money. Of course the politicians listen to them.

Wow, the blatant hypocrisy of this comment. Imagine some cause or topic in your local government that you're passionate about and someone saying, "hey, let's just do what we want because f*ck what the other side thinks".

If you don't like that a group of people have more perceived power than you in your local government then find a way to fix it ethically. Don't bypass local democracy just because you think it's easier to take a shortcut.

Hmm, I think the problem the person you replied to sees is that sentiment community board meetings are not as good at measuring what the "average citizen" wants as opinion polls. Why do CB meetings have the moral high ground?

Because they are part of a local democratic infrastructure that is actually pretty good by global standards in the US.

> that is actually pretty good by global standards in the US

Citation needed.

From a European perspective, it is not my impression that the local democratic system is good in any US city.

But that could be my filter bubble, we only heard bad things because people shout the loudest about bad things.

What are the main problems you think of local government? I'm curious what the perception is in Europe. American cities aren't the pretty, walkable, public-transit oriented cities you have in Europe but that doesn't mean they're failures either.

So, the US actually has real local government, with elections at very low levels, relative to what is more centralised and formalised system in the UK & Ireland.

I'm not a big fan of the practices of a lot of these low-level elected groups (seriously, fuck you Palo Alto representatives), but the principle behind the existence of all the local town and county governance systems (and particularly the heavy reliance on elected people) are things that seem like really good ideas to me, and that I think should exist in more places (maybe they do, I'm sure the commenters here will alert me to such places ;) ).

I shared this link in a sibling comment, but here it is again: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neighborhood-defenders/...

A big problem is that local governments place a lot of weight on "community input," but the people giving input don't accurately reflect the community. People who show up to meetings tend to be strongly opposed to change and fit into demographic groups that have a lot of free time, i.e. older, richer, and whiter. This causes a lot of positive changes to be either outright vetoed or delayed indefinitely at the whim of NIMBYs.

This is kinda how democracy works, in all it's terrible glory. Apply your same logic to national elections, and you are essentially saying that the votes of some people should be worth less, and others more.

I don't disagree with you that this happens, but I'm not sure that removing the local democratic infrastructure is the right way to solve this problem.

But we are a republic not a democracy for a reason. We don't want a minority who has time to show up to make decisions.

Pretty good at what? They're good at giving outsized power to a small number of wealthy white old people, but I don't think we want that.

This is well researched: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neighborhood-defenders/...

Those are the people who vote.

45% of NYC households own cars, which is probably more indicative of how many people use them than how many individuals own cars.

I found this staggering though it is accurate. It's less surprising (though no less accurate) when you consider how the numbers skew by borough:

"Ownership is lowest in Manhattan, where only 22 percent of households own a car, while ownership is highest in Staten Island where cars are owned by 83 percent of all households. Queens (62 percent) is also above the city average, while the Bronx (40 percent) and Brooklyn (44 percent) look more like the city as a whole."

https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars

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