Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

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AmericanChopper

As I said:

> If somebody has managed to situate themselves in an ideal location for them specifically to live without a car, then they almost certainly only managed to do that by benefitting from the positive externalities created by car owners

I can, and frequently do, walk to my nearest supermarket. But I know for a fact that if cars disappeared for a day then it would be unable to open its doors. These small areas of hyper-convenience don’t exist without cars.

I live 9 miles away from my office though, so that would be a lot more difficult.

> In pretty much any pre-car city you can get everything you need on a daily basis within a 10 minute walk from home

I’m sure if you wanted to undo 80+ years of economic development, we’d be able to recreate that society… that economic development is of course one of the positive externalities you’re choosing to ignore. So if this is your agenda, I’d suggest you try to figure out how catastrophically devastating that would be for the economy first.

> These small areas of hyper-convenience don’t exist without cars.

That's completely backward. Here are two different takes on how cities subsidize suburbs and rural areas.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-rural-america-needs-c...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

That’s really a completely different topic. I’m talking about the positive economic externalities of private vehicle ownership. Those massively beneficial externalities exist for cities whether rural areas exist or not. Any analysis of the externalities of vehicle ownership is simply agenda-driven nonsense if it doesn’t account for that.

It's the same thing. Private car ownership requires suburbs and suburbs require car ownership. In properly dense city areas (not single family zones that technically are within the limits of a city) car ownership is impractical and there's very little of it.

The agenda is not manufacturing more vehicles than we need. Those privately-owned vehicles are idle most of the time. In rural areas, if you need a ride, book it in advance and it will arrive 5 minutes before you need it. In the city, walk 2 minutes to the nearest vehicle, and drive it to your home if you need to pick something up.

Public transit should include automobiles.

This seems obviously falsifiable to me. There are many cities worldwide where private vehicle ownership (and use) is a fraction of what it is in common US cities (though of course, NYC would be an example that is actually within the US). Are you suggesting that London, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul or NYC are in some way suffering because less people there own and/or use private vehicles for transportation?

As so many have pointed out in this sub-thread, and so many other places, the pattern of US urban and suburban development for the last 80 years has essentially assumed the predominance of private vehicle ownership and use. It's not a surprise, therefore, that within these patterns of developments, car ownership and use brings significant benefits (even if it also causes significant negative externalities). However, what is also true is that these patterns of development severely penalize lack of car ownership in a way that not even old world cities do. My sister who lives in London leaves her car parked for roughly 95% of the time and moves around by mass transit. If she had no vehicle (like her daughter, also in London), her life would change very little. By contrast, the resident of most US cities and essentially all suburbs who attempts to live without a car will be hamstrung in most areas of their life.

The entire topic of this sub-thread is that the supposed “true cost” of driving a car is imposed upon society via negative externalities. It is true that those negative externalities exist, however if you want to quantify the “true cost” of vehicle ownership, then you need to account for all externalities, not only the ones that support your point of view. The OP in this sub-thread makes no mention of those confounding externalities at all, and therefore their entire premise is without merit. Making reference to any of the small number of cities around the world where the economy is somewhat less reliant on private vehicle ownership doesn’t falsify that at all.

It falsifies to the extent that it demonstrates that you can build successful communities at scale, where people want to live, businesses want to operate, and things fundamentally work, without designing them around the positive externalities of widely owned and used private vehicles. More pertinently, in cities that meet the above concept (i.e. most cities in the world outside of N. America), there are few or no positive externalities associated with widely owned and used private vehicles, so "balancing" all the externalities essentially falls back to the negatives.

> small number of cities

Hilarious. The cities for which this is most obviously true contain a huge proportion of worldwide human population. And most cities in most of the world outside of N. America have this as a fundamental truth because of their history (in many of them, residents are coming to recognize the enormous downsides of superimposing private vehicles on a city infrastructure designed around other means of moving around).

So yes, it's true that if you design a contemporary N. American city around widespread ownership and use of private vehicles, there are some positive externalities associated with said vehicles, and they should be taken into account when quantifying the "true cost" of those vehicles in that context.

But if you for any reason do not want that to be a guiding force in the design, and maybe even worse, if you accidentally screw up the design, not only do the positive externalities vanish, but the negative externalities grow in scale and scope.

> Here are two different takes on how cities subsidize suburbs and rural areas

Rural, perhaps, but not suburbs. Most of those studies play fast-and-loose with the term 'metropolitan area'. Most metros include inner-ring suburbs, outer-ring, and generally the exurbs as well. It's only once you start talking about 1.5-2 hours out from a major city does it become 'rural'.

At least with the metro I'm familiar with (Philly), the surrounding counties (suburbs) vastly subsidize the city itself. The wealthy taxpayers live in those 'burbs and commute in to work. The explosion of remote working, and the commiserate loss of city-wage-tax from those that used to commute, is already straining the system. If remote work continues at this level, many downtown areas could implode.

https://vividmaps.com/map-of-largest-metropolitan-areas/

You're most definitely American. It's not like that where I live.

I don't know how to drive a car. I have lived in Canada, India, and now The Netherlands.

Structures giving preference to personal automobiles are a civic failure, pure and simple.

> You're most definitely American. It's not like that where I live.

I currently live in Auckland, New Zealand. Other cities that I have lived in for at least 1 year include Jakarta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Seattle, Ft Lauderdale, Wellington, Berlin, London and Nairobi.

Your comment is an ad hominem, which is a logical fallacy, and you should be ashamed of using it. But in addition to that, it’s an ad hominem based on and assumption you made, and that assumption is incorrect. I would honestly recommend that you set your standards for yourself much higher than this.

To be fair, Auckland is a massively car-centric city and I would imagine it’s on a par with most US cities in that sense.

To your later point: automobile availability could certainly have benefits. Park 8 pick-up cars and 2 pick-up minivans in a neighbourhood of 100 households and nobody needs to own a car.

Need to travel further? Public transit or your country is embarassing.

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