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Comment by jtdev | Hacker News Reader

Roads are made for large dangerous machines that move fast and can hurt you.

Cities are made for people; the number people outside of cars greatly exceeds the number inside cars in every city.

If what you say is true, then cities should not have roads.

Just because you live in a city, does not mean the city was "made for" you. Cities are a side effect of many people clustering around key resource points. Resources are almost always much more valuable in trade than they are remaining at a stationary point, which requires transport infrastructure and vehicles. The fact that you don't want to live in a city in which people drive vehicles is your problem, not society's.

Cities are no longer resource points as most economic activity in cities is generated by services and knowledge work. Even if you go by your logic of economic supremacy, society would want to protect the most valued economic assets in its cities: the people. The death machines are also noisy as fuck and generate pollution, take up valuable and scarce urban space … there is absolutely no need to have huge roads with unrestricted traffic going right up to dense urban centers.

What resources?

Almost every major American city is also a shipping port, freight train depot, major freight airport hub, etc., etc., manufacturing is still a thing (in fact domestic manufacturing is on the rise in the last decade). Good luck feeding, clothing, sheltering, etc. the millions of inhabitants in American cities without roads that accommodate large trucks and people who do real work.

That's so sad this sarcasm basically became fact after so many decades of going the wrong way.

It's also why cities are taking back whole roads from cars when they can, as it's so hard to preserve a middle ground in a lot of areas.

Roads predate cars. Cars took them over from people and far slower horses.

So what? Its a fact today. Nobody going back to horses.

The ‘so what’ is maybe they should be given back to the people they were originally built for.

Elitist cyclists??

We had roads before cycles.

Are you proposing that we turn roads over to foot and equine traffic only?

The air was co-opted by planes... should we turn that back over to avian only traffic?

I think it should be the default certainly in cities and much more the default in suburbs than it is now.

For the main point was that roads weren’t built for cars - cars co-opted them from people. It doesn’t have to be that way.

That’s why they should only have one lane for cars with a 25mph speed limit.

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