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Comment by vwoolf | Hacker News Reader

This essay is consistent with my feelings. In particular, the ending paragraphs: "Ultimately, my fondest wish is that I lived somewhere where I didn't want or need a car at all. I hate cars. I hate driving. I really hate other people's driving, and other people's cars." I wish the same, but those wishes seem not to be sufficiently widely shared for them to appear in local and state elections, and so we see the world in which we sadly live. In the U.S., L.A. appears to be the only city somewhat on the way to having a real, large-scale, and functional rail transit system, and even that is occurring with aching slowness.

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My pet theory is that driving is a viral system and this is why it has triumphed.

- Cars are a lowest common denominator for transportation. They do not require much infrastructure at first, and are a very easy way to get around when not many other people are driving.

- Once enough people are driving, the downsides start to become apparent. But roads can be upgraded incrementally and drivers become a powerful interest groups since people have invested their livelihood into it by moving somewhere you need to drive to.

- So it's a ratchet mechanism where people get locked into a transportation choice, and then force it to be expanded and catered to.

Public transit does not have this dynamic. While cheaper in the long run, train lines are very expensive to build at first.

> While cheaper in the long run, train lines are very expensive to build at first.

As much as I would like that to be true, I don't think it is. The safety-critical nature of railways, more so even than a coach/bus which might travel almost as fast as a slower train, means there are massive costs for maintaining railways, based partly on use but not always.

I asked my MP (representative) the other day about why it was so expensive to travel on trains when there should be a massive economy of scale but she didn't understand the question. A return ticket for an approx 150km journey might be around £100 in the UK, whereas the gasoline cost would be maybe £40 + some small percentage of my yearly insurance and maintenance costs.

True cost of driving a car is typically more than twice the fuel price. So the train ticket is not that bad value. The car is just hiding a lot of the cost away in the form of registration, insurance, depreciation, repairs and so on that you don't associate with a single trip. That makes the car trip seem cheaper than it is.

The train to commute from an outlying city into Boston is ~$400/mo.

On a pure cost basis that's just about equivalent to a compact car assuming you have to pay for unsubsidized parking in Boston or thereabouts and with the car option you also get a car that you can use wherever and whenever you want.

And if you're in an outlying city you probably need to own a car anyway.

That said, if I'm going in for a day, I usually take the train because rush hour driving is so painful.

The trouble is most people will feel they need a car so even those taking public transport or cycling and walking will still bear all those costs.

Get out of the city, the crowds, and the congestion. There's a lot of cool stuff out there that doesn't involve being shoulder to shoulder, and stacked on top of, a million miserable people.

Yea, great. You're going to "get out of the city" and get into nature (actually a sterile suburb). Now you're driving to work every day, making a million people in the city miserable with your exhaust, noise, danger, and huge expanses of wasted road space.

Cities are only "noisy, dirty and crowded" because of cars. The noise is self-explanatory, the dirt is also (car tires cover everything in a thin layer of black dust). Cars also make cities more crowded because of the immense amount of space they take up. Trains and bikes can transport people using 1/10th to 1/100th of the road space of cars. Reducing streets to train lines and bike paths would allow cities to reclaim around 75% of the road area (2 lanes of parking and 2 lanes of traffic reduced to one lane for bikes and deliveries).

>"Cities are only "noisy, dirty and crowded" because of cars"

This is hyperbole. Throughout history cities have always been noisy, dirty, and crowded. Even in very dense cities with limited car traffic there is still an abundance of grime.

Before cars, horses were pooping on the street. Nobody is suggesting going back to horses.

Why would getting out of the city mean moving to an awful suburb? With remote work, you can move anywhere with internet access these days.

But agreed: cars don’t work in cities. We need to create more bike and pedestrian paths and get rid of a LOT of streets, roads, and highways to fix US cities.

A lot of people want access to cities without living in a city. You can do that from relatively rural places but they're further out.

It is a function of population density. If the density is low, you need a car. Alternatives don't work.

If the density is high, cars don't work.

In between there is a bit of a choice, streets that are friendly to pedestrians and bikes encourage people to walk, cycle and take public transport. Streets only designed encourage traffic jams.

Cars create traffic jams in a way that doesn't seem to happen with other modes of traffic. In a medium density environment, if you like traffic jams, go for cars.

There is a also a bit of a question how much children can move around freely. In areas designed for cars, children tend to have very limited freedom. Their parents have to move them around until they get a driving license.

Interstate highways were also very expensive to build at first, but enough people thought they were a good idea that it got done.

I love LA but what? There are some plans but clearly NY and SF have better rail, to name a few.

SF's is pretty bad, too. To be sure, SF's is better than LA's, but LA's is a pretty low bar. BART and CalTrain provide good coverage to the cities directly around the Bay itself, but once you get to the outer suburbs, service falls off dramatically (and none at all north of SF, in Marin and Sonoma counties).

And don't get me started on the pathetic state of public transit in the city itself. Muni is disgusting, unsafe-feeling, unreliable, and slow. Even LA's metro buses are better than SF's.

Chicago, OTOH, has an outstanding public transit infrastructure.

I thought Caltrain was pretty good?

The problem with commuter rails in general is that they basically support, well, commuting. Where I live (well) outside Boston, my commuter rail line is a decent option to go in for a 9-5 job or event. (Decent. At least for now they've cut back some trains and eliminated the expresses so it's over 90 minutes door to door.) But it's pretty much useless for going in for an evening event. I'd basically have to hang around for an 11:30 train and get home after 1.

Caltrain itself is fine, though not the fastest. But the connections at the suburban end are terrible making it not as useful as it might be.

"I hate cars. I hate driving. I really hate other people's driving, and other people's cars."

heh why would someone who hates cars with the passion of a thousand suns review one?

I enjoy driving, I don't enjoy traffic but i do like road trips. I live in Dallas and regularly do weekend trips all over Texas, SE Oklahoma, and Arkansas. It's relaxing to me.

Those of us that hate cars still sometimes need them too, and a review from someone who also hates cars is more relevant than one from someone who lvoes them.

Not enough people appreciate the value of a reviewer with matching goals and needs.

> In the U.S., L.A. appears to be the only city somewhat on the way to having a real, large-scale, and functional rail transit system, and even that is occurring with aching slowness.

Huh? I've lived in NY for 25 years and have never owned a car.

The thing with NY is that it not only has an extensive public transit system but there's no cultural expectation for you to own a car. And even if you owned one, getting out of the city is a bit of a pain so I'm guessing people don't do it on weekends, much less weeknights, as much as they do other places.

Whereas somewhere like Boston, a lot of your friends probably live in the suburbs and do weekend activities in the mountains or wherever. You can get off without one--I'm sure people do--but, especially as you get older, it affects your activities to at least some degree.

>In the U.S., L.A. appears to be the only city somewhat on the way to having a real, large-scale, and functional rail transit system, and even that is occurring with aching slowness.

You misspelled N.Y. L.A. barely has a train system in comparison. L.A.'s train system is hot garbage and goes practically nowhere. L.A. is one of the most car dependent cities in the US.

Mixed-use developments are a thing. They are common on the East coast. Just move into one.

I live in one. I still have a car, but pretty much only use it on the weekend.

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