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Comment by calt | Hacker News Reader

> That or just let car people (majority) have these areas that are good for cars and

The idea is that a well planned city/suburb will turn car people into people that also enjoy safely not using a car some of the time.

> let the anti car people have their crowded little streets with no parking elsewhere.

Bleh. Such an us vs them mentality. I'm suspicious of cars because I have literally gotten hit by them while cycling (edit: multiple times, thank you very much). I'm not "anti car."

Try getting hit by 2 tons of metal and see how that makes you feel about safe infrastructure.

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> Bleh. Such an us vs them mentality.

Doesn't the "us vs. them" mentality come from the fact that most of Strong Towns' ideas will make life worse for everyone who needs to drive, without giving most of them an alternative to driving?

> Strong Towns' ideas will make life worse for anyone who drives into the city, with basically no advantages for them, and without creating a viable alternative to driving for most of them?

That's not necessarily a given:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k

TLDW: A city that is less reliant on cars actually reduces congestion and makes it more pleasant to drive in a city.

Fewer cars on the road means less competition.

Bike lanes have more capacity to move people.

Well designed intersections and bike lanes mean that you aren't competing against cyclists and pedestrians for road space you're coexisting along just fine.

I was just tracking down this exact link. Thanks for sharing.

The whole point is to provide better alternatives to driving such that most people don't need to drive. Having better alternatives to driving also makes driving better as you get less congestion, licensing standards can be raised, there's more money for road maintenance, well designed roads are simply better to drive on, etc.

> such that most people don't need to drive

I disagree that they'll accomplish this for most people. In particular, what about all of the people who live in suburbs but work in the city?

Urbanists are extremely critical of the type of zoning that plonks suburbs in the middle of nowhere away from cities too. "R1 Zone" is practically a swear word.

Mixed-use zoning is much more effective. We do this in Europe, it's pretty nice being able to cycle to work and walk to the shops (not that I cycle to work personally, but almost all my jobs have been within cycling range).

But those suburbs already exist. What should we do for all of the people who already live in them? (And keep in mind that there's usually a good reason that people chose to not just live in an inner city in the first place.)

Strong Town's argument is that some of these suburbs will be successful in encouraging mixed-use development and in doing so will expand their tax bases. But most of the others will fail and decline.

ST are quite explicit that they mostly don't think that retrofitting suburbs should be a focus, because they believe that most of these will go bankrupt anyway, given a sufficient amount of time (because of too much infrastructure liability compared to the tax base), and indeed this is starting to happen all across the US. Hence their focus on areas with a solid core already, that should then be strengthened and encouraged to expand organically from there.

But that's just it. If someone likes suburban living, and your family home is in a suburb, how do you think they'd feel about something like "suburbs are probably all going to fail anyway, so let's do a bunch of things that will definitely and quickly make them fail, and then await the glorious day when your house gets torn down and replaced by apartments, and your neighborhood becomes a replica of the inner city"?

I don't understand your reasoning.

The only thing ST says here is "let existing suburbs be what they are", which sounds like what you want as well.

Even if they're not directly changing the suburbs with this proposal, the changes they want made to the city will make life worse for people who go there from the suburbs.

That's what commuter light rail is for, is Strong Towns against that?

Sure, I'll acknowledge that that could fix this problem. My complaint then becomes that they want to make everywhere hostile to drivers before commuter light rail gets built, when there's a chance that it never will.

I mean, if you're in a growing city and you do nothing, things will eventually get shitty for suburban commuters. At that point, you might have a choice between expanding the road system or building the rail.

Okay, but let's not reduce the capacity of the road system in the meantime.

Bus systems can work well to move commuters to rail-based mass-transit that bring them into the city. If the suburbs sprawl too far out, you can also plop down park-and-rides at the terminal stations of the mass transit system.

Why do you specifically need to drive and park at the exact location you're going to, especially when the land cost of the storage place of your empty car is prohibitively expensive (as they tend to be in urban CBDs)?

I have no need to park my car at any particular place. I do have a need to have the commuting experience be safe, reasonably convenient/predictable, and time-efficient.

I live in Cambridge on the Boston subway system. It’s probably (barely) in the top 5 in the US and it sucks compared to European cities I’ve visited or lived in.

In places that have good mass transit for their suburbs, sure. But what about all of the places that don't?

Because sometimes I have to go to work in weather conditions like hailstorms, thunderstorms, or freezing rain.

I recommend watching through the "Not Just Bikes" back catalog.

He has a bunch of videos that address common complaints that people who've only known car-dependent lifestyles bring up.

Here's a good example of how to design functional bicycle infrastructure for a seemingly hostile climate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

Build mass transit. It's one of the best ways to increase economic activity.

I'm fine with this, but I don't like the plan of making it harder to drive first, and then maybe later adding an alternative.

Most of strong towns's ideas come down to making it legal to build with anything except stroads. Give people options instead of forcing it on everyone except the most wealthy who can afford a house in the pre-car cities.

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