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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> Slow traffic; prioritize human movement over auto mobility;

This will most probably bring extra gentrification plus damn the businesses that might need that extra road-traffic for recurring clients. Bicycle-ing in a downtown-ish area is mostly done by people like us (yuppies, more or less), the person who has to get tho his/her job at Walmart or at a logistics center at 5-6AM doesn't have time for this, and after his/her job is done most probably doesn't have the energy for taking a bike-ride just for pleasure. The same goes for walking.

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Redesigning infrastructure always produces winners and losers. Slowing down traffic will always make someone’s commute longer. Unfortunately, making these decisions is hard but necessary, because the trade offs are worth it.

Gentrification is when a place becomes more desirable to live. It’s caused by people enjoying themselves. Gentrification is wealth creation. If housing prices rise too much, you can build more housing. It’s something to be desired, not avoided.

> Gentrification is when a place becomes more desirable to live.

Yes, but the real problem here is that this term is also used to discuss an overlapping but different thing: the poor and otherwise vulnerable parts of society being displaced by raising rent. There should be two words to describe these things to ensure we don't talk past each other.

Anyway, the displacement issue is a problem solved by ensuring affordable housing through various means, not by ensuring the housing stays affordable due the location being a terrible place to live (as you already mentioned, I'm just putting it in the other "gentrification" context).

> Gentrification is when a place becomes more desirable to live. It’s caused by people enjoying themselves

Absolutely not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification

Redesigning always happens in little pockets though. And it often takes years due to how broken infrastructure planning is. So the first people to take advantage of it are the rich. And so shit without cars gets the stereotype of being only for the rich. And the cycle continues.

I've accepted it's just never going to change in the US. There's too many opposing forces all at odds with each other. Really makes you fucking mad how much the "Greatest Generation", in addition to their cancer boomer children, really fucked this country.

Idk man, how do you think people survived prior to 1945? We do not have to go far back into human history to see the alternative to car centric development. Were pre war cities and towns gentrified and devoid of commerce? Did everyone have no time for anything but walking? It’s always striking to me the extent to which people will take a 75 year old radical experiment (car centric suburban development) as the normal and the natural mode of civilization, and consider any deviation from that mode completely impractical. I guess people were entirely impractical for 8000 years or so?

People had cars before 1945. My grandparents were born in the 20's, their parents had cars by then.

They were farmers. Before cars, farmers had horse drawn wagons. Do you think they walked home with their groceries from the store ten miles away? Carried 160 acres of corn into town on their backs? Horses were noisy, expensive and polluting. Progressives back then whined incessantly about those, too. Some things never change.

Work horses shit about 30 pounds a day. Large cities would have had tens of thousands of horses. Hundreds of tons a day of shit on the streets. It was almost as bad as San Francisco.

Sure conveyances existed prior to 1945. What did not exist prior to 1945 was cities and towns designed such that the only effective means to get around was a car. Yes, I grant that the car is a useful invention for the rural farmer. It is not a useful invention for someone living in a town or city because it does not scale to a population the size of a town or city; the only reason a car may appear useful is that post war towns and cities are so badly designed that a car is the least worst option. The beauty of a well designed town or city is that everything you need for daily life is within a five minute walk of your home, a walk in which you often bump into friends and neighbors; work is a couple mass transit stops away at most, and a traffic filled commute is not eating hours of each day. A car cannot improve upon this mode of life; it can improve the life of a farmer, but it only detracts from the life of a town or city dweller. Unfortunately, people can’t imagine an alternative to the “convenience” and “freedom” of being stuck in traffic, fighting for parking, and paying for gas.

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