Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

So the US has city layouts that were exclusively designed around cars since the 50s and never had any design change.

Put into that a maximally polarized society that for one half gets all woke and concious now, trying to navigate this maze by bike that was never meant for it — while the other half upgrades their housewive tanks to completely new levels of ridiculousness every year to assert their dominance over the helpless and celebrate contempt.

What could possibly go wrong?

EDIT: Putting some constructive criticism here: Effecting change is possible. It just takes the ingredients univerally loathed in the US: Coordinated city planning and lots of regulation plus one or two decades until the results are visible, „big government“ at its finest. Currently I don't see the slightest hint of buy-in possible for that.

I still remember photos of cars passing through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in the 90s, that would be unimaginable right now if you stood there.

Suburban sprawl and its roads are down to the finest detail, exactly as regulation require them to be. There is a deep and longstanding intellectual tradition behind the whole thing, why the roads must be so wide, the curves so gentle, the homes and the shopping so far apart, the parking lots so big. All of it lovingly crafted by planners and traffic engineers in the names of safety and quality of life. That tradition looks at any place which is compact and pedestrian-friendly and says, this is a backwards and inhumane relic of the past, progress demands that we never repeat it. Where will they park?! Any such place that you see is either grandfathered, or built on hundreds of variances.

The buy in for lots of regulation and coordinated city planning is so pervasive that you’re like a fish unable to see the water.

The good news is that you don’t really need to change the degree of the regulation or the bureaucracy responsible for administering it. You just need to replace every rule with its opposite.

> Coordinated city planning and lots of regulation plus one or two decades until the results are visible, „big government“ at its finest

I'm not sure this actually needs a significant increase in regulation or "government". The government already builds and maintains infrastructure on government-owned land, according to planning rules. The change that"s needed is a change to the existing rules and reallocation of that existing land and money to more diverse modes of transit. The tough part is convincing drivers that taking some of "their" lanes of car infrastructure and parking and dedicating them to bike and pedestrian infrastructure will benefit everyone because people who drive and walk to their destination aren't taking up space on the road.

And exactly what we don't need is an "us vs. them" to solve the problem.

The irony is that the American suburbs are some of the most regulated places for living I've ever seen. I mean many places tell you how long your grass has to be, when you put up Xmas decoration and how big it has to be, the color of your doors...

I guess when private organisations do it it's all fine, but god forbit government tries to implement regulations.

This is a neat vision but is it actually happening?

Lamenting that people only view things through the lens of politics, while only looking at things through the lens of politics

I can deal with my stuff without politics, but when I need cooperation like when sharing a road how do I avoid politics? Isn’t getting buy in to share the road inherently political?

Yes it seems to be happening. It’s happening way too slow compared to how fast Paris has revamped their streets. But bike lanes, bulb outs, road diets and what not are slowly being implemented in US cities.

There are bicycle advocacy groups pushing for more bike lanes in US cities. I'll strongly recommend the work and reporting by The War on Cars on this[0].

[0] https://thewaroncars.org/2019/10/04/the-problem-with-public-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com