Comment by digital-cygnet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by digital-cygnet | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure I fully follow "I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it", but I think there are two potential points of disagreement:

1) Living in dense cities is not for everybody, but given that large and (at least pre-covid) growing majority of people in the developed world do choose to live in cities, I think it's safe to say that there is a very sizable demand. For an example of the benefits of density, see [0].

2) I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a "means of escape", but getting rid of cars of course necessitates replacing them with other modalities. If you want to go skiing does it matter to you whether you take a train or a car? Or, for further afield trips, take a train to a car rental far from the city center? (If you mean escape in a literal sense, like "evacuate in the face of a disaster", then cars are clearly not fit for purpose -- if roads can barely handle rush hour traffic, mass evacuation is a recipe for gridlock)

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-01/how-densi...

The pre-covid world is kinda over. Density has very clear downsides that have never been more apparent. I don't know how often you do the train + car rental thing, but the friction is much, much higher than driving (especially if you have any sort of gear like you would for skiing). Not everyone wants to be so contricted both in freedom of movement and in living space.

The friction of owning a car is much, much higher than having to care a few times a year on how to carry your skis or sporting gear on a train and renting a car afterwards.

Personal anecdote: I was born, grew up and lived up to my mid-20s in São Paulo, Brazil. It's a city where a car is a basic necessity, much like in the US, public transportation sucks and is spotty, never on time. I owned cars, I loved the frictionless way to get out, getting the elevator out of my apartment, down to the underground garage, turning my car on and driving away, easy. But that car sat idle 98% of the time, I paid road taxes, maintenance, parking spot, etc. for the convenience of having a car ready to go at an instant time.

Nowadays I live in Sweden, I never need a car apart from moving houses or carrying some large furniture. A few times for a road trip here and there, I can just rent a car when needed and I come out on top of expenses still, the peace of mind of not having to take care of a car is another huge bonus.

The pre-COVID world will still exist, cities are a necessity if you want to have good public services, without higher density a city has no way to fund high quality public services.

I would like to know what clear downsides, apart from disease spread, has COVID showed from living in high density cities? And I mean cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, and so on.

It really depends on where you live and what kind of car you own. My car is very low friction. I can just walk out my front door and drive my car wherever I want to go. Fuel, maintenance, and insurance are all pretty cheap.

By contrast renting is extremely high friction. Even if I reserve a specific type of vehicle in advance that doesn't guarantee that it will actually be available when I show up.

I actually find renting a car offers me significantly less peace of mind, because while I don't care if my own car gets dinged, the rental agencies do. In my experience a weekend car rental costs about 3+ months of upkeep, so for me car ownership is an easy financial decision, even though I mostly walk and bike. I might have a different calculus If I had to pay for a parking spot, but this, along with other premiums for space, I feel is more accurately a cost of high-density living, not car ownership itself.

Some aspects of the pre-COVID world may make a comeback, but hopefully as a society we have realized the omnipresent threat of new diseases is very real. This will impact high-highdensity areas more than low-density areas. It is not just disease spread, but also the policies enacted to limit the spread. My friends in NYC tell me that exorbitant rents for tiny apartments they were forbidden to leave was not particularly enjoyable. Paris seems like an exceptionally bad place to be in 2020/21. Public services are nice when you have access to them and not-so-nice when you are dependent on them and they fail. Often access to services is limited based on economic factors in the best of times, much less in times of stress.

Blaming disease spread on density is kind of a cop out after how we saw the world respond to crisis. Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong, and most Chinese cities are super dense places that, for most of 2020, I would have preferred to be living in compared to the US.

You can look at San Francisco which did better than most places in the US. It was actually funny to watch tech bro's flee the city for places where the pandemic ultimately hit far worse.

The success of these cities is due to political action that is unpalatable to most in the west. Hong Kong in particular demonstrates what happens when even vestigial western ideals and the necessary political structures for this sort of action mix.

The US isn't gonna change much. Don't know about elsewhere.

I was in a supermarket last Friday afternoon, in Michigan, and it was "I don't want to be here" busy for normal times, never mind during a pandemic. There were people with no masks and people going through the motions of having a mask and so on. People are moving on before they should! Another couple of months is likely all it will be.

> The pre-covid world is kinda over

I really doubt this is the case. In fact people are placing large bets of the opposite. Just saw in the news that some texas developer is planning a new 23 story commercial building in Vancouver's downtown.

Cities have been the norm since humans started living together. They been been a success despite many, many pandemics. They are not going away.

People aren’t always choosing cities, there are greater work opportunities in cities and so that is where people have to go. This was true of factory work in the past when people migrated in droves from farms to work in factories because that was their only option and moving to work in cities for office jobs has just been the latest form of this.

Many people (although not all) would choose space in the countryside over dense in the city if they had a choice. I imagine this becomes even more likely as people have families and begin to prioritise other life aspects over and above work.

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