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Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

If you're using a car for everyday short trips then, unless you have some kind of mobility impediment, you're doing it wrong.

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Or, you perception is only specific to your limited experience.

My "every day" short trips (I claim that's < 100 miles total) are, going to work (70 miles round trip), going out on the weekends (almost always < 60 miles, to get to the beach) going to the grocery store (5 miles, with ~40lbs of groceries, with steep hills).

Maybe this is a US thing, but I definitely can't do any of these things with my feet, in a reasonable amount of time. I also can't afford to live anywhere closer to work (getting within biking distance means a few million dollars, for a home, or my three bedroom mortgage for a single bedroom apartment), or next to a grocery store (there's no housing available there).

But, I can easily do all of this within the range of my 100 mile electric car, that I purchased for $8k.

Is it affordable to live close to work, in other countries? In the US, if you're in tech, you're paying a significant portion of your income to be within biking distance.

> Is it affordable to live close to work, in other countries?

Not really. Before COVID, I generally took a 15 minute run to the train station, then took the train for about hour, then took another 20 minute run to get to work at the local tech centre. If I had a fold-up bike, it would be a lot quicker, because there are bicycle paths. (In theory, I could've worked remotely, but it was easier to get stuff done with access to a whiteboard and the person in charge of systems architecture. I could also take a regular bike on the train, but if everyone did it that would be a mess, so I don't.)

I do stand by my “doing it wrong” remark – though I'll have to apply it to whoever designed your cities. That situation is awful (though good on you for using an electric car).

What kind of distance did you cover with your hour and a half commute? Also, what would your commute time have been if you had driven?

What electric car in the US costs 8k? I assume that is used, but even then that sounds cheap.

You can find used Nissan Leaf and used Fiat 500e for pretty cheap. I bought mine midway through this used car price increase (about one year ago). A year before, they were selling for $5k. People don't seem to want the low mileage cars, even though most people would be fine with a low mileage car, as a secondary vehicle.

Maybe not in today's market, but you could probably get a used Leaf for around that a couple of years ago.

Are you in the US? Because even if I wanted to walk/bus to the grocery store near me it would take almost 4x longer one-way (46 mins vs 12) and I’d also be subject to the maybe-once-per-hour schedule of the bus.

I'm not in the US, but I didn't know the US was quite that bad. Can't you cycle?

99% of the US by land area is that bad; somewhat less so by population since NYC is navigable without a car and that's 8M people alone. There are approximately zero cities outside of New York where public transit is viable competition to cars.

Weather permitting, cycling is doable in some places. Most places however have narrow (or no!) bike lanes with automotive surface traffic moving at least 48kph and drivers having zero clue how to drive around bicycles. In urban areas there are usually cars parked directly next to the bike lane, with drivers opening doors into the bike lane. Many commercial delivery vehicles park in bike lanes as well; in the places where that is forbidden (fewer than you would think) the laws against it are typically unenforced.

[edit]

To give you an idea, I drive my 13y.o. daughter to school. It takes about 10 minutes. This is ridiculous. However the other options are:

- Walk (no place to leave bike near bus stop) a bit over 2km to nearest bus stop, take 45 minute bus ride.

- Bicycle along a road with 72kph speed limit; bike lane is not separated and is as narrow as 20cm(!!) in places with cars that are alternating between going above the speed-limit and stopped (with cars turning across traffic in gaps while stopped; I have personally witnessed 2 car vs car collisions where the two cars couldn't see each other due to stopped lane of traffic between them. A bicyclist would have been killed. Most bicyclists (including me) avoid this road, though enough travel on it for one to get hit by a car roughly annually (only 1 fatality in the past 3 years that I can remember though).

- Bicycle an extra 3km (6 vs 9), crossing the above death-trap road, but not cycling along it. This still travels along a road with a 72kph speed limit, but traffic is much lighter and shoulders are much wider. There is one intersection that is a bit nuts, but can be traversed by hopping off the bicycle and using the cross-walks.

> There are approximately zero cities outside of New York where public transit is viable competition to cars.

Significant swaths of Boston.

But, except for that, completely agree.

A lot of people outside the US don't realize how new all our city layouts are. The majority of American cities were built out after cars came onto the scene. Did the cities exist before cars? Sure, but except for a few east coast cities, only with population numbers that could best be described as laughable.

Does the busses in your area have bike racks? The public transit in my city is pretty bike friendly. The busses all have bike racks in the front and the trains have bike hooks in the flat entrance train cars.

My city's actually been cutting busses to replace them with their own uber-like service. It's cheap, at only $0.75/person/ride (and no tips, drivers are salaried!), but the hours are the same as busses (so about 7a-7p) and wait times are generally > 20min.

>There are approximately zero cities outside of New York where public transit is viable competition to cars.

It's viable in San Francisco proper as well.

Cycling is normally very dangerous in North America (outside of certain urban cores and small towns), due to the road design and zoning laws. This channel is helpful in understanding the problem: https://youtu.be/M8F5hXqS-Ac

Most driving outside of hyper-local destinations (this includes going to my _preferred_ grocery store, versus Walmart) requires driving on the Interstate highway which is probably one of the most dangerous kinds of roads to cycle on with an average speed limit of 70mph (~112 km/h), inconsistent shoulders for cycling, and generally more aggressive drivers.

Oh yea - I actually got yelled by a truck in Houston for biking on a side street on a Saturday morning

Most places in the US don't have cycling infrastructure. i.e. bike lanes or shoulders.

Haha I drive my car to my San Francisco office for a quick 10 min ride. It isn’t that I can’t bike there (I have a carbon fiber aero bike with zipps and dura-ace throughout). I often take my motorcycle there because it cuts the commute to 6 min.

It’s just that I’m eager to not spend time not on the prime activity.

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