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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

It's hard enough being a pedestrian, let's not make it harder by limiting where people are allowed to cross (only intersections with dedicated left turn signals).

If you meant limit the cars, obviously that'll never happen, so I assumed the more realistic interpretation.

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I meant limit cars, yes. Not that I think it will happen in the US very soon, it's designed around them.

As a European, the concept of jaywalking is so bizarre. Cities are for people, not cars. You can ban people from highways, but shouldn't ban them from walking in their own neighborhood.

Cars don't drive themselves, they are driven by people. The same people who are also pedestrians at times. The solution is not to try and ban cars, any more than it makes sense to ban pedestrians. The solution is to design the roads for multiple modes of transportation so everyone can get where they need to go.

And well designed cities don't need much car usage. Thus my point about removing them. Not really just banning them, but making them obsolete by having better options.

Every time I get into a discussion like this, I feel like I meet a bunch of people who have only ever lived in very dense urban environments. Even in medium cities (using Portland, Oregon as a convenient example), cars make sense. The density just isn't there to support eliminating cars except for a few blocks in the densest area of downtown.

I think this highlights the best path forward. Large-but-not-Manhattan cities should eliminate cars in the densest areas of their downtown, where it makes sense. Jersey City did this in their downtown area, and it seems to be going well.

As people who want to live without cars move to the downtown zone, the area adapts to meet their needs (in terms of the types of stores etc). If the policy proves popular, the city has the option of spreading the "car-less" zone as the dense urban core grows. Similar to suburban sprawl, but inverted, I suppose.

I grew up in a city of 2500 people, with vast distances. Of course people used cars for much, and no public transport. But the city centre was designed such that you parked your care one place, and then walked between all the stores. No having to drive through a big parking lot and crossing a street to get to the next store. I lived about 2km away from school, and biked, skied or walked every day, since it was designed a path for that. That path/road was completely separated from any roads cars would travel. So very safe. No one I know of got driven by cars to school.

Ironically, those making it unsafe for kids to walk to school, are parents driving their kids being short on time.

Point being, I have not only ever lived in dense urban environments. Secondly, that even those non-dense are perfectly viable to make safe for humans, and use less cars.

And I wonder how deliveries (especially furniture), emergency vehicles, and people with disabilities are impacted.

The first two aren't cars, so that's easy. You don't need to absolutely eliminate vehicles. For disabilities it's more complicated but at the very least you've already cut 90% of traffic.

People are addicted to cars and will never consider using anything else if you let them. In Australia this is true also. I have never owned a car here, lived in 4 different cities. Never needed a car. But most others think they need to.

I grew up in a country town. No car = no life.

Now I live in Melbourne. We use the car very little but would never be without one. I have too many friends in the country and without a car you aren't getting to them without hassle and $. And so the balance of convenience vs cost means we keep the car.

There's much more to most countries than just cities, and completely changing traffic rules entirely when going into car-hostile territory will continue to cause suburbia and CBD's to exit city cores.

The US need to look at German or Dutch traffic regulations and road constructions. Optimized in an almost perfect form for both motorised vehicles and pedestrians. But I guess that's never gonna happen

Or we could actually test people. The drivers test is a joke here. Most "accidents" are really the result of someone making a bad choice - to look at their phone, to exceed safe speeds, to run a red light (impatience is probably the biggest in my opinion), etc.

Where I live, getting a driver's license takes a long time, money and involves lots of training. Still have many problems. Maybe the average driver is a bit better here, but what's needed is a systematic change. Can't rely on people behaving better, they never will. Design stuff better instead.

Systemic change could be good, but depends what it actually is.

The original suggestion was complete segregation of pedestrians and cars, which isn't completely feasible (only in relatively small areas and with exceptions).

You know that a car that is on the road has a person in it. Calling a motorist a car is objectifying that person and not recognizing their needs and existence. I'm all for nice pedestrian areas of cities, but the power of cities is allowing people to be able to meet and interact with lots of other people. Cars lets people do that better than any other device we have invented yet. Go where you want, when you want and can carry literally a ton of passengers and cargo, if desired. We just need to make cars work better, not ban them.

I think American pro and anti-car people should join together and support a massive tunneling project for major cities that would reduce traffic congestion by allowing cars, busses and trains to run in them. Convert the huge interstate highways in cities into low speed, one lane roads, separated bike lanes, and strip parks with pedestrian paths. Getting all that high speed traffic underground would be great. We should do that for an infrastructure bill instead of the one we got. Some actual new infrastructure that would help people out tremendously on the scale of the interstate highway system.

And I would agree, jaywalking being illegal is not so great (but it's not illegal on the small roads where peoples' houses are generally).

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