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Comment by Toutouxc | Hacker News Reader

I'd just like to add some context:

People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas.

If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind.

I come from a rural European area, so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me, but you have to realize that some US/Canadian cities are absolute hellscapes compared to what we imagine a "city" to look like.

View on HN

I agree. I don’t see why we have to force ourselves to live with 2-3 car households, insane taxes to pay for the upkeep of roads, and dependency on oil, gas, plastic, car manufacturers, and all of this other stuff when we could just build better neighborhoods. It’s mind-blowing. Americans in particular go to Europe “wow it’s so awesome here I could totally live here!!” And then it’s like they land back home and their mind is wiped clean.

We don’t have to not have cars either. Why not 1 car per household for most people and most of your day-to-day activities within a few miles? You could bike, ride a street car, walk, any number of things. You can still live in rural areas and have a truck. I like trucks and acreage too! Just stop dictating that we have to have life this specific, obviously bad way.

In order to have neighborhoods where cars are not required, you need density. That means fewer single family homes and more apartments. Many Americans have underdeveloped social skills and don't want to be/live near other people.

Fortunately, in a country of 330M people, it is impossible for every household to be kings of their little kingdom, as house prices are teaching us.

And, yes, I attribute the desire of some to go out of their way to avoid the company of others entirely on underdeveloped social skills. We are humans, not wild beasts, and we should not shun our fellow humans.

Many Americans have noisy and inconsiderate neighbors.

I hated every apartment I ever lived in. Dear god, why do apartments allow dogs?

Or music at 3am. Or anything.

When I bought my first house, the first thing I noticed was the silence. I could finally relax.

Yea until spring time. Then it’s endless lawn mowers, leaf blowers, drag racing, dirt bikes, and all sorts of other loud noises. Can’t keep the windows open because it’s too loud.

HOAs get a lot of hate, but they were the only recourse I had against neighbors who became hostile when I tried talking to them politely about their 24/7 barking dog in the adjacent lawn.

It’s weird how socially acceptable it is to have a pet noisemaker in your backyard, and how socially unacceptable it is to have an issue with it.

Why can't that problem be something that local governments fix with actual laws? Why do we need organizations that have most of the power of a government, but none of the accountability or checks and balances?

My friend said that when he lived in Brisbane, the police will actually come out with a volume meter and log the noise, talk to the dog owners, and ultimately take action if nothing is done.

https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/community-and-safety/pets-an...

I doubt most would characterize the actions of US police as "accountable."

Regardless, police don't handle noise complaints where I live. Presumably they don't want to bother with the paperwork.

There's a fairly simple solution to the issue of excessive noise from neighbours in apartments: have rules for when noise can be made and when noise cannot be made, and enforce them with fines/eviction.

Evicting people for not paying rent has become a political issue. There's no way you'd ever get away with evicting people for not keeping their dog from barking at the wrong times.

If you can't prevent your dog from disturbing other people, then maybe don't get a dog.

Also building the apartments properly. It's amazing how good sound insulation can be, if whoever constructs the apartments bothers to put it in.

> In order to have neighborhoods where cars are not required, you need density. That means fewer single family homes and more apartments.

Yes but not in the way you’re describing. Apartments would be part of the single family home neighborhood. Which is good. People who are single for example can live in the community and meet people. Which brings me to the next point:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/37/9b/26/379b266652e0a2013c0c...

> Many Americans have underdeveloped social skills and don't want to be/live near other people.

Right. Because we choose to live in suburbs and make it so we are this way. We could just, ya know, not do this? It’s like saying well I’m not using Google because Ask Jeeves has conditioned me to use a crappy search engine. Well… just stop then?

I'd like to see some sources on the reason for having underdeveloped social skills. Sure, exposure to situations is necessary to an extent. You still have shy urbanites as well as kind/inviting rural people. I would venture a guess that much of it is culture based (eg southern hospitality, NYC has a reputation for being gruff/big personalities, etc)

I don’t even know that we do have “underdeveloped social skills” if I’m being truthful. But if we do I think “how we live” is probably a good starting point since so many people are just cooped up all day.

I attribute the desire to go out of their way to spend more money just to live in a cramped box among strangers to be overdeveloped social neurosis. Humans lived for millions of years in large open spaces, owned land de facto, and had ample space (think kilometers) for themselves or their children to run around outside.

If you want to live in a box and own nothing, go ahead. I can't imagine going back to living on less than 8k sq meters. The growing population is a virus encroaching on man's ability to own his kingdom, not something to be applauded and smiled about.

I don't even think there's anything wrong with 2-3 car households being the norm in suburbs. I just want single occupancy vehicles banned from city centers, at least in places like Manhattan (where I live). They're dangerous, they're a waste of space, and due to traffic and parking requirements they're usually not even an efficient mode of travel for their owners.

If we reserved a few roads in Manhattan for busses, large commercial delivery vehicles, and people with disabilities, and left everything else for bikes, scooters, and pedestrians, transit would be faster and more pleasant for everyone.

> I just want single occupancy vehicles banned from city centers

Why be so authoritarian? It's one thing to say "I think single occupancy vehicles are inefficient and bad, so I'm not going to use them", but it's another to say "I think single occupancy vehicles are inefficient and bad, so I'm going to take away everyone else's choice to use them".

Cars need roads and parking space, those take away other people's chance to have a quiet, safe, pleasant city center just as much.

It's not a matter of one side being authoritarian, there's conflicting interests.

> right to a quiet, safe, pleasant city center

Wait...these are rights now?

Who do I sue for not having any of these?

I didn't intend to enter that discussion with that word choice, so I changed it.

Cities are older than most of the people living there. People know what they get when they move to a city and pay higher prices for that. For quiet there are better cheaper options, ones where you don’t have the noise of sharing buildings and walls with others above, below, and beside you. Obviously if one person wants cars and another doesn’t it will come down to how many want that, but moving to a city for quiet is like wanting to go swimming without getting wet.

Cities are also much older than the car infrastructure in them.

Cities can be changed: in Utrecht, Netherlands they removed an entire motorway to restore the old moat and a more pedestrian / bicycle friendly environment ( https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-remov... ). Many cities ban cars from the city center, restrict them to 30 km/h or one way streets, or make parking prohibitively expensive.

People come to cities because of all the other people there, not because there are so many parking lots.

Single occupancy vehicles take away my choice to bike safely in downtown Manhattan because most of the available space is dedicated to oversized cars.

What do you mean by "dedicated to"? Are there streets in downtown Manhattan where cars are allowed but bikes aren't?

You're also (in some cases) allowed to swim in the same rivers as alligators do. Yet that's not a good idea since the alligators make swimming there pretty dangerous. Same goes for riding a bicycle on roads full of reckless car drivers.

It's funny how banning single occupancy vehicles is out of the question for being overly authoritarian (you're downvoted on HN, but I bet you'll win most actual votes in actual American cities), but designing a city center with no roads so no vehicles can use them isn't usually considered authoritarian. People have weird intuitions about rights and commons.

Because a car is much more dangerous than a bike and regulated much looser than a bus or a truck. There's a high likelihood on an auto heavy street that as a cyclist I gravely hurt myself or lose my life while the driver only had to pay a fine and or higher insurance. I'd gladly support an alternative where any accident with a cyclist or a pedestrian results in immediate license seizure, but that's even more politically dead in the water than closing a street off from cars in the US. Cars in the US are very lightly regulated heavy machinery.

> I'd gladly support an alternative where any accident with a cyclist or a pedestrian results in immediate license seizure

If I'm going the speed limit, and a pedestrian on the sidewalk 6 inches away from me (because someone decided that narrow lanes are better) decides to step in front of me, not at a crosswalk, avoiding an accident would require me to have a negative reaction time. Are you saying I'd deserve to have my license seized in that case?

Yes and get it back after police/judge agrees that it isn't your fault. Right now damages are not proportionate between drivers and anyone else, so a rational actor will drive. If this is acceptable I'll take it and let cars gladly downtown. Elsewise, I'll take a ban on cars in downtown streets.

> get it back after police/judge agrees that it isn't your fault

You're advocating for a guilty-until-proven-innocent system?

If I need to accept the risk of maiming to play, the other side does not, and both of us are innocent until proven guilty, then I'm not playing unless I really have no alternative. Unsurprisingly this is what actually happens in the US; only a few people proportionally actually use non car modes on streets. The majority are those that have no other option, either because they cannot own a car for cost reasons or other physical or legal reasons (physical disability, suspended licenses, etc).

> You're advocating for a guilty-until-proven-innocent system?

Come on, stop putting words in my mouth. We're talking about city downtowns not the whole US. I'm for restricting car use there, which you claim is authoritarian. I proposed an alternative, one used in the Netherlands, to put the onus of harm on the less vulnerable party and balance unfair externalities. You complain that this is "guilty-until-proven-innocent". If you want to rules lawyer your way to a car hegemony be my guest, but I'll continue to advocate for decreasing the unbalanced harms to non-car drivers on American streets.

> > You're advocating for a guilty-until-proven-innocent system?

> Come on, stop putting words in my mouth.

Here's what you previously said:

> any accident with a cyclist or a pedestrian results in immediate license seizure

> and get it back after police/judge agrees that it isn't your fault

Are you saying you don't consider that to be a guilty-until-proven-innocent system?

The thing I noticed is you seem to be associating the seizure of the license as some form of guilt, where as sat least to be it seems like the equivalent of a “but don’t leave town” warning from the cops. You’re not guilty but you are under investigation to determine if you are guilty, so they politely ask you to not run away in case they have any more questions that could help prove you innocent (I’m obviously putting aside the fact that reality doesn’t work this way anymore for loads of reasons when it comes to the police). The same goes for your license, you are involved in an incident where you being an irresponsible driver is one possible result, preventing you doing further irresponsible driving is justified prior to the conclusion of the investigation and has nothing to do with innocent or guilty.

> you seem to be associating the seizure of the license as some form of guilt

That's because not being allowed to drive is a really harsh punishment. Harshly punishing innocent people is even worse, which is why I assumed you meant guilty-until-proven-innocent.

> it seems like the equivalent of a “but don’t leave town” warning

Not being allowed to drive doesn't keep you from leaving town, but it does severely reduce your ability to participate in society. Now you can't go to work, drop your kids off at day care, or bring home groceries.

> preventing you doing further irresponsible driving is justified prior to the conclusion of the investigation

That's exactly what guilty-until-proven-innocent is!

If you’re going to associate removing the ability to drive with a punishment, then naturally your going to have the viewpoint that you’ve been judged as guilty. However driving is a privilege not a right, you’re not entitled to it, if having it temporarily withheld is earth shattering, then perhaps that’s indicative of issues beyond the importance of driving to the individual and represents how dangerously dependent on cars society has become.

We can’t expect the status quo to change without some way to force it off the car dependent pedestal it’s perched on. Lawfare might be the best way. If it inconveniences people they might drive different or stop driving so much and then eventually we get urban change.

> If I'm going the speed limit, and a pedestrian on the sidewalk 6 inches away from me [...] decides to step in front of me

Which she presumably had to do to avoid the oncoming double stroller without diving into the pile of trash bags awaiting pickup.

I disagree with the GP, this isn't merely about penalties for drivers. We've allocated an inordinate portion of available space to large metal vehicles carrying just one or two humans each, and left the scraps to be shared between all pedestrians, skateboarders, outdoor restaurants, parking meters, trash bags, trees, and all manner of other things. Because of course, you can't put the trees in the middle of the street, what would all the cars do? And then the pedestrians also spend 20% of their time waiting at traffic lights that are only necessary because cars are death machines that can't stop quickly enough.

The fact that avoiding an accident "would require [you] to have a negative reaction time" is exactly why cars are inappropriate for busy city centers.

this is a good point. push away the poor infrastructure design, and subsidies. The cars will go!

> I don't even think there's anything wrong with 2-3 car households being the norm in suburbs.

I don’t either. I think the suburbs themselves are what is wrong. Having 2-3 cars is just the adaptation for a moronic building style.

And I’m sitting here in my European suburb and considering if we could get rid of our single car. When I still had to go to the office I always bicycled or took the bus. There’s a grocery store and pharmacy within 5 minutes walk, but we order most groceries online anyway. The kids daycare is 200 meters away, and when they begin school it will be a 10 minutes walk. The car is useful when we go on holidays the whole family or when I need to buy some lumber.

From where I live now it’s hard to fathom why any family would need two, or even three cars. Those suburbs that made that a necessity must be considering utter failures.

Most of my experience woth "europe" is Finland as I have lived there a couple years and married a Finn, so I don't dare say "european vs american suburbs" but I do dare say that what constitutes as a "suburb" in Finland is much different than what you can find in the US. Here, we have suburbs that just seemingly go forever, with nothing but houses. Usually when there is a suburb in the US, it is zoned such that it is only homes, and nothing else. It is the worst (imo)

In American suburbs it's typical for there to be nothing but houses within a 3 to 5 mile area. Any supplies or groceries must be transported a significant distance in a pedestrian hostile environment.

That would be hell for me. I have never lived more than 1km from a grocery store, even in our village 20 years ago. Most time, including now, about 100-200m.

> In American suburbs it's typical for there to be nothing but houses within a 3 to 5 mile area.

Can you name a few examples of suburbs where that is the case? Nothing but houses for 3-5 miles?

I've lived in the US east coast and west coast, always in suburban areas, and I've never seen that. It would take an immense neighborhood of houses to cover 5 miles. Do such ones exist? Let alone common enough to be called "typical"?

In every suburb I've lived, there has been at least a supermarket less than 3 miles away. In my current suburban house, there are two supermarkets within a 5 minute walking distance.

They’re wrong on the scale but correct in the essence. 3 miles away, no bike access, that means you’re driving. No shops, restaurants, or anything lives in the suburban housing area.

> there are two supermarkets within a 5 minute walking distance

That’s very nice and quite rare, especially for newer suburbs. Some of the older ones had a little Main Street or some grandfathered in stores and shops. Prices are extremely high accordingly compared with other suburbs.

> They’re wrong on the scale but correct in the essence. 3 miles away, no bike access, that means you’re driving. No shops, restaurants, or anything lives in the suburban housing area.

I'm still curious where all these suburbs are that have nothing but houses for 3 miles or more?

Was trying to find some examples and looks like Mesa,AZ is the worst in this sense in the USA:

https://www.planetizen.com/node/92835/americas-largest-subur...

Looking at it in google maps it is indeed sprawling with houses. But I couldn't find a spot in the various neighborhoods where one would be more than 3 miles walk away from a supermarket. The worst I came up with was 2 miles to a supermarket. But then I zoomed in and saw a restaurant only 1 mile away.

Not a thorough research for sure, just spent a handful of minutes on it.

But assuming the article is correct and Mesa is the worst of the sprawl and given I didn't find it easy to find houses more than 3 miles away from (food) businesses, I'm thinking the OP statement that "In American suburbs it's typical for there to be nothing but houses within a 3 to 5 mile area" is quite an exageration.

Am I wrong? Can anyone name a handful of these neighborhoods?

Take a look a the I15 corridor north of Escondido in San Diego county. There are neighborhoods there farther than 5 miles from services.

I looked at the mountainous (seems like it on maps) region between Escondido and Temecula.

That doesn't look like suburbs, although there are a handful of housing developments. But these are not in the outskirts of an urban area like a suburb, these are more rural and not attached to any city.

Yes, sure, once you go outside cities into semi-rural or rural regions, it's easy to be way more than 5 miles from shopping.

I blame government zoning laws. These prevent entrepreneurs from opening restaurants and markets near to where people live.

In a truly entrepreneurial society, anyone can operate a small business open to the public right out of their house. Not so in the US states/counties I've ever been to.

I wish that were the simple fix, but Houston exists. No zoning laws (I think/read) that would prevent better urban planning.

Houston doesn’t call what they have “zoning”, they just have a bunch of other laws on the books that have basically the same effect. It’s certainly not an urbanist’s paradise.

Zoning laws came to be because of the classic "tragedy of the commons" - enough people were too greedy and built polluting, noisy or traffic-intensive businesses right adjacent to people's homes.

Letting "the market" do whatever it wants will only lead to one thing, and that is greedy people scalp up the cheapest land they can find (usually, in quarters where poor people live) and build extremely polluting stuff there. Zoning laws exist to guarantee even the poorest of the poor at least a basic standard of protection - although I do admit that there exist a lot of cases where zoning laws are abused to protect the interest of the elites primarily.

Fun fact: Back in early Roman times and for a long time until the 18th century, that also had a public health aspect - burial sites, slaughterhouses and similar businesses were banned from the inner city and, if there was a river, placed on the downstream end so that the risk of pollution was reduced.

And in a car centric society, even a supermarket becomes noisy and polluting since all their customers use heavy machinery (cars) just to get there. I certainly don’t want to live next to a large parking lot.

> Americans in particular go to Europe “wow it’s so awesome here I could totally live here!!” And then it’s like they land back home and their mind is wiped clean.

The "tourist" vs "working" views of a city to the side, I think the big solution isn't revamping existing cities at first, it'll be creating pockets of new development with different goals.

And there's lots of weird things that affect American suburbs - minimum road width is often tied to service vehicles (specifically fire and garbage trucks); these could be overcome with some thought.

I've often wondered if a "carmpromise" city could be built - let's assume a ten minute walk is half a mile. Imagine a strip of city a mile wide where cars are effectively banned. Parking garages at the edges provide car access for those who have them, and the rest is entirely built around walking/biking. Perhaps a tram line runs through the middle. Then those who want cars (basically everyone) can move in without fear, and if some? most? eventually realize they're not using them they can save money by eliminating them.

> minimum road width is often tied to service vehicles (specifically fire and garbage trucks); these could be overcome with some thought.

We have fire and garbage trucks in Europe too and we manage to build small scale streets in the suburbs and rural areas without compromising on emergency services. The key difference is we plan these streets for the expected amount of traffic which will be a couple cars per hour at the top and have regular intersections with other streets where, should there be the rare case that a vehicle comes up towards you, there is enough place to act as a bypass. Americans seem to plan all streets as if they would be used at capacity 24/7.

The main thing seems to be requirements to turn around - a normal street here is wide enough to park five fire trucks side by side. It’s way too wide for what we need.

To be fair the streets date from before the invention of the car, so maybe it’s something else.

I believe Utah’s street widths were designed to be wide enough to turn a wagon drawn by horses around.

At least Salt Lake City’s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Lake_City#cite_ref-66

"and their mind is wiped clean."

Or they realize that most public transit here is unreliable junk. It's almost never on time. This isn't a huge deal until you have to catch a connection/transfer and being late by 5 minutes mens you have to wait another 30-60 minutes for the next one. Or that they completely shut down after something like 1am. Oh, and I good luck to people not losing their job when the system goes on strike and you can get to work for a few days.

I would love to have great public transit. Much of these issues are policy or design issues. The policy issues need to be addressed. If only there was some accountability to the public...

Just for a fun story, my car broke down and I had to take public transit for a month. It was easier for me to walk 2 miles (no real sidewalk for most of it and busy roads) than to rely on the bus schedule. It took me 1.25 hours to get to work using two trains and a bus, when in the car it would take 20 minutes.

So as much as we want good public transit, we can't suddenly start using it if it doesn't exist. People have basically given up on it when schedules are a joke and the whole system can shut down for days or weeks.

It depends on the city, but in bigger cities it's frequently the traffic from cars that keeps busses from being on time.

Separately, there's a chicken-and-egg problem. In order to run busses every five minutes—which is what you really want—you need enough bus riders to fill all those vehicles.

True, but that's only busses. Rail lines were (are?) commonly 5-15 minutes off schedule depending on the time of day.

For people to use the system, they have to trust the system. Depending on the city, rail infrastructure can get you close enough to walk to many places. The stuff that crushes trust even then is the rail lines being off schedule and strikes. Safety can be a major concern too, like the woman who was raped on a SEPTA train recently (WTF). These should be simple asks. Maybe we just need to charge/tax more so they have more money (or maybe we need better people making the decisions with that money).

The easiest way to solve the problem, as I understand it, is to ignore the urge to cover the whole area in bus lines, because it's expensive and many of them won't have enough ridership to justify the cost. Instead, look where your density is highest, change zoning to let it get even higher, and build, like, 1 or 2 bus lines with very frequent service (less than about 12 minutes gap). That's the magic threshold where you don't need to look at a schedule -- if you miss one bus, a 10-12 minute wait won't make much difference. And that makes it an inflection point for ridership too -- you can get a lot more people with frequent service, meaning you get enough riders to make the whole thing worthwhile.

Best is if you can get a lane dedicated entirely to buses, and ticket cars that drive in it. You want buses to be a pleasant alternative to driving -- since you already have a walk at the beginning and end of your journey which takes time, it's nice if your bus can get priority over car traffic.

And from there, build up the areas with good bus service more and more, add more buses as needed due to population growth, lengthen lines, add new lines gradually as people see the success of the first ones. Incremental implementation is the trick.

> Best is if you can get a lane dedicated entirely to buses, and ticket cars that drive in it.

Counterintuitively this even is useful for people who have to go by car. A bus has a lot higher density in people transported. By making it attractive for people to use the bus they don't take away space on the road, which can increase the flow of the remaining cars, even if road space is reduced.

I really envision a hub/spoke wheel design. Run rail as the spokes. Once you get far enough out, the gap between the lines can be managed by a circular rail line and/or a couple bus lines. I guess I don't really like busses.

Buses are much easier to add in a city that's already built for cars. You just build some stations instead of having to dig up the whole road to add rails.

That's only really useful if you also get rid of enough cars to make the busses effective and not stuck in traffic.

If only there was a solution to this problem. If only we could make the public transit go from “sucking” to “not sucking”. Guess we can’t. Throw in the towel. I’m buying a truck and America better damn we’ll go bomb someone to make sure gas is cheaper than milk.

That's not a helpful comment, nor is that what I'm saying. People can continue to go to meetings and write their reps. But until the number of people doing that gets big enough, it's not going to change (ie a centralized system needs a significant number of supporters to overcome status quo).

Speaking as someone who likes rock climbing and also road trips, I'm not sure what the alternative is. Even in Europe (especially in Europe), you need a 4-wheel drive to access most of the climbing areas.

I live in Canada and currently just have a hybrid, but it does limit me in what areas I can drive to for climbing

Simple, we don’t optimize for edge cases. I live in the suburbs. You know how many people around here have 4wd Jeeps for their commute to the office that they have never taken “off road” a single time?

The solution is someone like you who does outdoor stuff may shell out for a 4wd vehicle. That’s OK!! You just park it in your neighborhood or in your garage like everyone else. The majority of people who don’t do these activities just walk and bike around and probably take their hatchback to visit someone once in awhile or pick up a larger piece of furniture.

If you don't go climbing daily, access to good car sharing will do just fine. It is probably cheaper, as you'll only need to shell out for a 4x4 when you actually need it.

I don't agree with that statement. Here is a list of top sport-climbing and bouldering destinations that will not require a 4-wheel drive (source: me and my car).

- Frankenjura - Elbsandstein - Margalef - Siurana - Chulilla - Albarracin - Finale - Osp - Kalymnos - Leonidio - Ceuse - St Leger - Gorges du Tarn - Les Calanques - Buoux - Fontainebleau

As for multi-pitch climbing: almost everything in the Alps is accessible with a normal car and the customary approach (or a cable car).

This isn’t the case here in the US. We have thousands of miles of off road areas that aren’t accessible to non off road vehicles. But I do agree that a large portion of people here in the US that have huge lifted vehicles never go off road.

I've climbed in Canada, Italy, Germany, and Greece (but not a ton in Italy), and it seems like Greece especially has many climbing areas that are hard to access without a 4wd. I traveled around in a rental and bottomed out so many times, but also had to just give up and turn around on several occasions.

It's been a while since I climbed in Italy, but I remember it being pretty similar.

Admittedly, the limited climbing in Germany I did had pretty good parking access.

I suspect there are many European countries whose climbing access is more like Greece though.

No need to suspect anything. My list included the major climbing areas of Europes major climbing countries and none of them require a four-wheel drive. Even some of the more secluded Swiss areas (Gimmelwald, Rawyl) are easily accessible in a camper van. And I know that for a fact, because I've been there myself.

In bc? the amount of climbing is insane, Most is non 4x4. But also depends what you mean by 4x4 accesses. Some better tires and then maybe a lift kit covers 99%.

Yeah, I'm in BC, and not having 4x4 limits you a lot. I got stuck trying to get up Mt. Maxwell (the climbing area on Salt spring) in a civic. Bottomed out a lot / damaged my car a lot on Vancouver island / Sunshine Coast, and just can't get somewhere remote like Eldred Valley in Powell River.

Of course, most of Squamish is accessible, and Skaha, so yes, there's tons of climbing, but the "well-traveled" areas are realistically <50% of all potential climbing, and not the same experience as climbing remote.

Again some better tires and a lift. The gambler 500 is a good indication of what a small shit box can do with better tires. I lifted my small old Subaru, and some at tires. was a nicer ride than most trucks, and snaked into more places they couldn’t

As a kid in the US it seemed silly that so many people had SUVs in a city, and as adult I wouldn’t buy anything but an SUV. Once you grow up you realize how nice the ability to transport more people and more things is. Picking up groceries, moving, buying even a TV or any type of furniture. Having to move every other year because your apartments rent went up and once owning a home the number of home improvements that require going back and forth to Home Depot.. then there’s bad weather, snow if your up north. If anything I’d be more inclined to remove cars and keep SUVs now because the utility is more than double and the price is only slightly more. A car is like a knife in your pocket, handy to have for various things, but an SUV is like a Swiss Army knife. Cross-over SUVs are perfect because they are literally just cars with bigger bodies.

What we really need are hybrid/electric SUVs and 4wds.

Obviously for electric the range would be pretty limited (afaik) with the current tech, but I'm sure even that would have a market.

It’s a bit of a chicken vs the egg problem. Charge stations in parks and at access point would really change the range requirements. There’s some parts of van island that kinda have this covered already. It’s pretty neat.

> wow it’s so awesome here I could totally live here!!

“It’s because they have walkable space and public transportation.”

— https://imgur.com/gallery/cuRG7lx

I'll second this advice.

https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes

I'm a longtime mod in the /r/bicycling subreddit and have been a transit-alternatives advocate for years in 3 major cities, I'm a member of the lefty SF bike coalition, and am also a fan of strongtowns that leans toward the right side of the spectrum. This shouldn't be a left or right issue. I'd be happy to answer any questions about this topic.

We a former football quarterback was killed today because of dangerous pedestrian infrastructure. We lose 100 people in America per day due to, trivial fixable, dangerous automobile infrastructure. It's a death toll we happily ignore, because it's better to just not think about it.

https://www.strongtowns.org/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/04/09/dwayne-hask...

Sadly WaPo article doesn’t mention that the quarterback was killed by a truck.

https://archive.ph/2022.04.09-161113/https://www.washingtonp...

The article does link to a local newspaper that mentions the cause of death. https://wsvn.com/news/local/broward/dump-truck-fatally-strik...

They apparently edited the article at some point to mention the truck in the lede:

> Dwayne Haskins, an NFL quarterback drafted by Washington and on the roster of the Pittsburgh Steelers, died Saturday morning after being struck by a truck in South Florida. He was 24.

> I'm a longtime mod in the /r/bicycling subreddit

I was a Reddit mod for a while, but after I reflected on the fact that Reddit pulls in nearly $200MM in yearly revenue thanks part to my unpaid labor where I primarily deleted Youtube video spam posts and idiotic flame wars in comment threads, I decided to spend my time and energy elsewhere. The next logical step was to stop contributing anything at all of value to Reddit. So every once in a while I'll visit a few subreddits to see if anything new or interesting happens (i.e., sort by Top for the last month).

Unfortunately for r/bicycling I find the content to pretty much just be, "Hey everyone check out this picture of my bicycle!" If it's the goal of the sub to advocate for cycling infrastructure, I question how the top posts from just this past month accomplish that.

* Check out this picture of my bike in the Ukraine!

* Check out another picture of my bike in the Ukraine!

* Truck driver slows down and stays behind cyclist going through a rather long tunnel with no shoulder to keep said cyclist from what seems like certain death otherwise

* Cyclists near bike storage in the Netherlands lining up to leave the station

* Cyclist climbing a steep hill

* Cyclist forcing protesting trucks in DC to go slow

* Check out this picture of my bike! (And I'm depressed!)

* Check out this picture of my bike!

* Silly stationary bike that actually moves

* Check out this picture of my bike!

* Cyclist holding up a line of traffic on a remote mountain road

* Cyclists riding gravel

* Check out this picture of my bike I got for cheap!

* Check out this picture of my bike!

* Calvin and Hobbes comic about bike/car drama

* Video of flying down a remote mountain road

* Picture of a mostly-empty bike storage room

* 50-ish mile bike ride map

* Video of a cyclist riding around for 60 miles

* Tesla crashed into a shop with a sign against bike lanes

* Check out this picture of my bike! And I rode 100 miles

Anyway, you get the idea. r/bicycling could be so much more, but for some reason few visitors there seems to care much about anything except people posting pictures of their bikes, and for a lot of what gets upvoted, I just don't see why it's really even all that novel or interesting.

I don't know how to fix that, or whether it's even really worth trying to fix. Like I said, I'm a jaded former mod on Reddit who just doesn't see much anything virtuous coming out of that platform.

It's not a bike problem or a reddit problem but a people problem. Forums were the same way if not worse because people had so much rep tied to their username. It's the same thing with all my different interests, it's like you can take out all the topic-specific language from the flamewars to the constant posts suggesting you buy x brand that the community has ordained as the best product there is for y use, and the forums would be perfectly interchangeable whether people are arguing/showing off about bicycles or skis or ham radios. The hobbiest internet self validates a lot of gear acquisition syndrome too. It's uncanny how similar they all feel no matter the topic at hand.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m generally fine with it. I don’t see Reddit as a vehicle to serve my interests, and I generally only passively moderate. Automod does most of the work.

People like sharing pics of their bikes and I think that’s fun, even if I mostly don’t care.

Detroit has the concept of twenty minute neighborhoods and they've created several. The idea is the basics of what you need are all within a twenty minute walk. The idea is unless you're doing something out of the ordinary you won't need to use your car. Or even own a car.

They have executed pretty well with one glaring exception. Nearly everyone needs a weekly supermarket visit. Until fairly recently the city had no supermarkets for a population of 650,000 people. Recently a Whole Foods opened downtown as well as a couple of supermarkets on eight mile on the edge of the city.

Those eight mile supermarkets were created to cash in on a multi-million dollar incentive offered by the state. However it was poorly worded, so while they're technically in the city the suburbs are right across the street.

Many affluent highly educated people live in downtown Detroit and are forced to own a car so they can travel to the edge of the city to buy groceries.

https://detroitgreenways.org/twenty-minute-neighborhoods/

There's no intrinsic need to use a car for your weekly groceries, if the infrastructure is built accordingly. A lot of European families in big cities manage that without having a car.

Even framing shopping as a weekly activity is inherently car-biased.

A family of four consumes more in a week than could realistically be hand-carried in a single trip by both parents.

Better to do shorter and more frequent visits on foot or bicycle. Combined with delivery services which are much more resource efficient than private cars for this purpose.

Yeah, 1-2 trips a week with a cargo backpack do the trick, for the person carrying said backpack. Bonus: replaces some gym visits.

I regularly do large grocery runs by bicycle. I have a cargo trailer I can hook on to my bike and it lets me carry easily 2 weeks worth of food for two adults, probably more.

That seems like a pretty big oversight? All errands within a 20 minute walk except for the most basic and car-dependent errand there is

In Michigan we've got a Walmart style set of stores known as Meijer's. After Target built a small style grocery store in East Lansing Meijer's created one in downtown Lansing near the Capitol. Neither city had a grocery downtown in over fifty years. Locals just accepted you had to drive out to the suburbs to shop.

Both stores appear to have a very strong business. So why doesn't either company create one in downtown Detroit where the demand would be a multiple of that in Lansing and East Lansing?

There is a Rivertown Meijer. Different format but still.

Probably because there is an upper limit to how much grocery you can haul back to your house on foot/bus. It's a completely different lifestyle.

Living in downtown Vancouver, I would go to the grocery store every 1-2 days to get food, because it was close by so there was no reason to "stock up". However growing up in the suburbs, we would go to the grocery store once a week to get all the food for the entire week.

A large scale grocery store/costco style simply doesn't make much sense as the place you go shopping every 1-2 days. So its better to put it in the suburbs and have people from downtown go out of the city every few weeks to stock up on specific items.

It gets to be 0f in the winter in Detroit. That's a 20 minute walk I'd like to avoid

I don't see the problem with that, if the wind is not too strong, and it doesn't rain or snow. I've been on my bicycle for hours during the few days I had it that cold. It was fun!

There is no bad weather. There is only bad clothing!

Post-car industry Detroit is such an interesting place. 20 minute neighborhoods exist naturally in some places around Denver where there are occasional 1 block sections of grandfathered in retail zoning.

But it is wild how easy it is to see Detroit's lack of grocery stores: https://www.google.com/maps/search/grocery+store/@42.4272993...

What about grocery delivery services in the city like Instacart?

I think bike lanes, pedestrian access, and other transportation options are great - I bike where I can these days for health - but ultimately most people /want/ to drive everywhere if they can afford to, otherwise cars wouldn't have taken off in the first place. They had bicycles through most of the 1800s and people generally chose to maintain a horse if they could. People seem to generally want to be able to go far, with little effort, directly where they want, independently. In this vein I think the improvements in ebikes will probably help drive more popular will for bike lanes. But I really don't see many people being convinced to give up cars.

I don’t want to drive everywhere, and I have chosen to live where I rarely have to drive. And I’m not alone.

The first bicycle that looks somewhat like a modern bicycle was from around 1880.

And many people prefer the car for the simple reason that car infrastructure has been prioritised.

I think many people /want/ to drive everywhere, but at the same time would prefer to live in the kind of place you get when /not everyone/ constantly drives everywhere (if they had some experience with such places).

There's a tragedy of the commons here.

Your comparison in the 1800s about horses vs bikes omits consideration of the condition of roads - it wasn't until very late that cyclists started succeeding in getting roads more paved. This development was also of course welcomed by motorists who also demanded more paving. Now both are competing for space on those paved roads.

You're neglecting the decades of government policy that built out infrastructure for cars specifically, and neglected other modes of transportation. Of course people are going to drive if the government is pouring billions into making driving fast and convenient while transit, bike infrastructure, and dense housing are either neglected or actively undermined.

I don’t think GP neglected that. They gave the example of bikes vs. horses in the 19th century. People preferred horses because they wanted to go far with little effort.

There was recently a thread on HN about why Europe had become so wealthy. Many opined that exploitation of other led to Europe’s wealth, but others observed that such exploitation was only possible because Europe was already wealthy. The same applies here. Yes, the government had many car-promoting policies, but those policies were tolerated because cars were already desired and that desire made the car lobby popular, not the other way around.

I mean, the bicycles they had throughout most of the 1800s were not at all as practical as today’s. The safety bicycle that you’d recognize as a modern bicycle wasn’t a thing until around the 1880s. I think the calculation would be different had people in the 1800s had modern bicycles.

Car culture is industry-engineered, not at all natural.

"go far, with little effort, directly where they want, independently" is bikes and public transit when the infrastructure is not car-centric.

Right, what's more independant than a bike? Cars, machines with thousands of moving parts that must be maintained with gas, oil, tires, insurance, registration, and other maintenance aren't in my view.

Not all natural is all the benefit.

It is not even go far with little effort. It is go far or close without having to mind weather unless it is really windy when trees fall on the roads.

When it is -15 degrees celcious or is pouring rain you don't care, have fun riding bicycle in such rain.

So not caring about weather/elements is not natural.

Most of the time I have to carry ~20kg of stuff with me, laptop, coat, umbrella, some food, some water. Getting groceries on my way back home.

Carrying ~20kg or even ~30kg of stuff around all the time is totally unnatural. Well going 50km away from your home on a daily basis is not natural at all. But a lot of people to make ends meet need to go even 100km away on daily basis.

Yes, going to your local shopping center with a car where you can walk in 10 mins and carry 5-10kg of goods is supper shitty and for 5-10 kg one could cycle with it. Going "all car culture" is bad is not the way to go, because for many people alternative is to "sit in one place and die" as they don't have shopping center available in walking distance.

As someone who has bicycled most of my life in Scandinavia, neither pouring rain or -15 degrees are much of a problem. You are dressed for the weather and you soon don’t even think about it. The only reason that I stopped bicycling in the winters for a while was because the car drivers tend to become “bicycle blind” when it’s snow on the ground. I’ve had drivers stare right at me and then almost hitting me because they obviously didn’t understand what they saw (a bicycle in the middle of the winter).

I don’t understand why you think you need to bring 20 kg of stuff every day. That is what I carry for a several day camping trip.

> but ultimately most people /want/ to drive everywhere if they can afford to, otherwise cars wouldn't have taken off in the first place.

I don’t buy it. People want cars since our infrastructure is optimized for it. But I seriously doubt that most people want cars specifically as the optimized transit solution for urban environments.

I'm one of those people. I LOVE being able to go anywhere I want, when I want. I'm willing to pay for the privilege. Do you know what happens when you take away parking and make it difficult for me to bring myself (and lets be honest what really matters--my money) to a place? I stop going. If you make it difficult for me to get to where I want to go I read that as a rejection of ME, and I don't go places where I'm not wanted. My money and my car will go somewhere else. I'm not going to fight with people online about it, I'll just abandon those spaces.

Please don't take it personally. YOU are still welcome. YOU are not a fast-moving, noisy, smelly, ugly, large, heavy metal box.

Other people who also self-identity as ME matter too. THEY will still welcome YOU. absent the brum-brum which, in aggregate with other brum-brums, is a massive annoyance to THEM.

The businesses will still be better off though, because for everyone like you who avoids them due to the lack of parking, there will be multiple people who visit them more on foot or by bike. Your money won’t be missed.

> The businesses will still be better off though

Depends on the downtown area.

If there is enough population living within walking distance of the shops to sustain those shops then the businesses will be fine. And the area will be more pleasant for those who do live within that area, so that's nice. It does become exclusionary for those who live outside the area as parent poster said but perhaps that's ok, as long as the population density there is high enough to keep it going.

But many downtown shop areas don't have enough population within walking distance to keep the businesses viable. Those areas depend on people from farther out driving in to spend their money. For those, making parking difficult (too far, too expensive) can quickly go into a downward spiral of shops closing, area decaying, becoming less attractive to visit, leading to even more shops closing, until the old downtown core is a ghost town.

So population density is key. If density isn't there one can't just slap a prohibition on cars/parking and expect it to work well.

If people had been buying cars out of necessity then why would be there so many expensive cars on the roads? My commute's traffic is more than 50% SUVs and trucks, which cost way more than small hatchbacks and sedans.

Mostly marketing, but also the bigger vehicle safety dilemma: if you drive a bigger vehicle and crash with a smaller vehicle, you will be fine but the smaller vehicle will not. Hence, to remain safe in a world where some drivers get SUVs/trucks, you more or less are forced to get one yourself.

An easy solution would be to tax vehicles in relation to how much road damage they cause. If drivers had to pay the weight of their vehicle to the fourth power, then they would all think twice before adding any more unnecessary (and lethal) kilos to their vehicles.

One could buy a 30K minivan for that, not a 100K truck. And that marketing seems to be very powerful if it can easily make people pay 10s of thousand dollars more for the things they don't want, I'd like to employ this marketing for my business if it had been real.

Are you critiquing the luxury goods market or am I missing something?

Probably missing. I respond to the post that explains that people drive expensive cars they don't want because they are big and well marketed with an example of cheap big cars and a request for a referral to a marketer able to oversell tens of thousand dollars of useless goods.

SUVs and trucks are a lot better for dealing with furniture and kids.

As a compact car owner I wind up renting a pickup pretty frequently, and it's already pretty cramped for my son in his carseat. Just owning one is ... alluring.

They are, also they are much more comfortable to drive. And they are not the only expensive cars on the road, just the most obvious. If the theory that people don't like cars en masse had been true then I'd expect car market to look more like, say, insurance market, which people are actually forced to buy and as the result most of the insurance advertisement is about the lowest price.

To summarize my post, _urban_ residents would likely prefer not to have cars. Someone in an earlier thread also made a good point that I should have written “high density urban”.

Some people want cars. Some people like cars. But everyone is forced to have them in most places in the US due to the feedback loop caused by investing in car infrastructure and sprawl.

Beyond that, though, even if something is a necessity, it’s rarely a race to the bottom. Your insurance example is actually an excellent instance of how markets tend to divide up: there’s the economical market (eg save 15% or more!) and the premium market (eg you’re in good hands). Same with cars.

Well, I understood your post, but I have not seen any evidence for that. Is "high density urban" something that does not exist in the US? I've lived in several big metros and everywhere people seemed to love their cars. In case it's not clear, I am doubting your "most" qualifier, I am well aware some people don't like and don't want cars, I just think they are a tiny minority.

Also I don't understand how the car market is as same as the mandatory insurance market. There is a race to the bottom on the, say, auto-insurance market while the vast majority of car promotions do not mention price at all, at most advertising preferable financial terms.

There are several studies that show that a significant portion of Americans hold a more conflicted view of driving than you believe here. A quick search gives me [0] which is cited by a ton of follow-up research. While I think this is a sociological issue and therefore difficult to pin down, I have a hard time seeing this research and thinking that “a tiny minority” of people want to do away with cars.

Re: cars vs insurance, used cars are the economical choice, so new car commercials are targeting the premium demographics.

0: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09658...

Cannot read the article but the abstract does not make any of your claims. From personal experience I've only seen people on the internet saying they don't want cars, if they had been any significant majority I am sure I've met one or two in real life over the years.

Why car manufacturers don't advertise to the "necessary" buyers at all? A new Kia Rio is still cheaper than a used MB GLS.

Absolutely, some people will do that. I personally know some that will drive 500 meters rather than walking (even in Europe) or that will drive instead of taking public transportation even when the public transportation is faster and cheaper.

But, many do due to the lack of alternatives. Especially in the US/Canada, but also in Europe (especially anything built recently). People will drive because they don’t feel safe cycling/walking, or because their destination is too far. Or they will own several cars while they could just go on with one.

I don’t think anyone is really advocating for completely removing cars from the street or cities. I personally don’t own one (and this is a priority for me - I don’t want one), but I do take rides with friends or a cab from time to time.

What most advocates want (including me) is to stop prioritising cars in every single decision. Mixed zoning laws will remove lots of car trips if you can just walk to the shop when you need a couple of items or a coffee. Making streets car free (bar few exception) will make people come out and enjoy the street. Making people pay a fair price for parking will avoid subsidising a huge amount of land for private use. Removing parking will add lots of space on the streets for things that people enjoy. Better public transportation will favour everyone, especially poorer communities. And proper ciclying and walking infrastructure will allow more and more people to do so safely.

If after that someone still want to use private cars, then be my guest.

This is 500m. You would actually walk this if you had a car right in front of you?

https://imgur.com/a/JKnghXG

I'd bike it for sure but otherwise I'd definitely drive.

Unless I'm in enough of a hurry to not be able to spend 15 minutes walking or I need to haul stuff, absolutely.

500m is around 6 minutes walk for a normal person (5km/hour or 3 mph). Perhaps 10 if you are a slow walker due to age etc. Any delay with parking or traffic means that driving won't save you much.

I just walked about 1km and back to a suburban market to get my lunch.

I do it all the time - longer, even. It’s really not that far.

This, again, comes to the cars popularity: laws and regulations "prioritize" cars because people who make them drive cars. The anti-car crowd to me looks as same as the anti-shoes types (there are people who insist on walking barefoot, I know a few) if[1] they started to insist that there is a vast conspiracy to prioritize footwear and only that holds off construction of heated sidewalks and prohibition of the "no shirt, no shoes, no service" signage.

1. To clarify: none of the barefoot walkers I know does that, they seem to be pretty content with the status quo and are not militant about propagating their lifestyle to everyone hence "if".

People only "want" to drive the ten minutes to the grocery store because that drive would be a half hour bike ride or a 90 minute walk. But they'd much rather the grocery store be a ten minute walk away.

I really don't think most people would choose to carey groceries for 10 minutes. I'd drive a half hour as opposed to carrying groceries for 10 minutes.

I'd go by bike or use a hand cart

There's a feedback cycle here. If it's long and difficult to get to the store, you need to buy a lot to make it worth the time. If it's easy and quick to get to the store, you don't need to buy nearly as much. Carrying a single small bag of groceries for 10 minutes shouldn't be a big deal.

> People seem to generally want to be able to go far, with little effort, directly where they want, independently

This is exactly why I want to live in a bikeable, walkable city! I really don’t consider babysitting a massive 2+ ton hunk of metal and plastic to be low effort or independent. On the contrary, it’s the most draining and stressful thing I do on a regular basis.

You mention “go far”, but I don’t think that’s actually the priority for people. What they really want is to get to their daily destinations – the store, the park, the office, the mall. The distance is a consequence of the car, not the other way around.

People will still want to go places that are beyond biking distance or need to do something that isn’t practical on foot/bike, and that’s fine. For most people, if they lived in a bikeable and walkable area, these would be a minority of trips. But for those minority of trips where a car makes sense, a car should be used. (Note: this doesn’t mean they need to own a car.) Cars don’t need to be eliminated from cities, just reduced and deprioritized enough to make biking and walking safe and appealing.

I wouldn't describe my relationship with my daily driver as babysitting. Once I get going it pretty much feels like an extension of myself.

In my case it's also very low maintenance, maybe equal effort to maintain as my bike - charging batteries, adjusting brakes, lubing the chain etc. compared to filling up gas and occasionally topping off the oil, which is all the maintenance my Jeep tends to need.

If you have the physical layout of suburban sprawl then obviously you will drive everywhere you can; it’s designed not to be usable any other way.

What we’re asking for here are things like street and block systems, mixed use zones, bike lanes, buildings pulled up to the sidewalk instead of set back by giant surface parking lots, etc. When you have those things, the preferability of different transport modes change.

> They had bicycles through most of the 1800s and people generally chose to maintain a horse if they could.

They had something bicCle-like, which was less comfortable with way less bicycle compatible roads.

Cobblestone and hills on a heavy bike without transmission? - Not good. Same with a paved bike path and either a lighter modern bike or even E-Bike? - Smooth riding.

That said: Their are cases where a car is needed, given the right infrastructure that need however can be reduced, so that people can make the choice. Which in turn can create new possibilities for the young, disabled or old, which won't be there in a car centric place.

Absolutely. Cities can be beautiful and livable and affordable and pollution free. Currently most US cities are not. Most Americans have to own cars or other vehicles just to get around. It doesn’t have to be that way.

I lived car free for couple years, until had a first kid. Carrying child car seat with you gets old very quickly. And, in winter time, biking is not only unpleasant but dangerous (or rather more dangerous than in summer). Even if it's only for 3000km a year, our lives, kids lives (and their activities) and business we bring would be negatively affected if we had no car.

It's fundamentally an infrastructure problem. Not just bikes has a good video on finnish biking https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU, and the difference is bike paths in the us/Canada usually get treated as a leisure, rather than an essential service.

Man, the way bike paths, and even sidewalks, get treated in Canada is so frustrating. The city's instructions on shoveling your stretch sidewalk tell you that you must not shovel it I to the road... and then the city snowploughs come by and push a load of snow onto the sidewalk that you've already shovelled.

There were places this winter where the sidewalk was impassable due to several feet deep on compacted "snow boulders" from ploughs. I get that you need to allow car access, but not at the expense of pedestrians being able to walk anywhere.

The mere fact that the sidewalk isn't public property maintained by public works says a lot about the transport priorities.

I have lived in a US city with pretty decent public transportation without a car for several years until recently. The problem is just complete lack of flexibility.

Want to do anything an hour out of the city - you're either begging for a ride or trying to fight the absurdities of renting a car.

I now live in a cheaper area, more outside the city where it makes even more sense to own a vehicle, and its definitely worth it. All that being said, all of the shops I most frequently patron are walkable from my home or work.

> People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas.

I don't think r/place has caused this. There has been a massive increase in an anti-car sentiment in the last few years.

Maybe the cause is people staying home more often now, so they care about whether their neighbourhoods are nice?

I heard of “r/fuckcars” for the first time a few days ago, and I’ve seen it mentioned ~4 times since then, and I’ve never visited r/place. From my perspective it seems like r/place has boosted this topic’s prevalence. Kinda cool.

r/fuckcars is really suspicious

I saw it a couple of times on my semi-nightly super deep Reddit trawls, it was a sub with a few hundred people. Then suddenly a few days later it exploded and took over the site

I've only seen that happen before with political subs, and I'm pretty sure those were coordinated offsite by bot armies (at least, I'd assume it's impossible for 50,000+ people to suddenly jump into brand new subs and rocket them to the frontpage a couple of days after they're created without some coordination)

edit: Ah, maybe it is organic.. I have to admit that I do really hate cars. If the news blasted us every time someone dies in a car accident the way it does for guns, maybe more people would hate them.

That's because there's been a huge, sustained rise in pedestrian and cyclist injury and general reckless driving through the pandemic. Many cities relaxed traffic enforcement during the pandemic because cars are such an important part of the American transportation framework. This lead to predictably horrific consequences for non drivers and drivers alike.

My favorite is Detroit and their absolutely ridiculous approach to planning the city, which was along the lines of “hue hue hue hue let’s make it look like a wheel and spokes!!” then only a decade later “hmm wait never-mind”, leading to an awful mishmash of design ideas resulting in a downtown that is basically impossible to drive. Luckily, no one really goes downtown in Detroit since the riots in the 60s, otherwise the traffic would be terrible.

https://detroitplanninghistory.weebly.com/1700-1900.html

This was fun too: https://panethos.wordpress.com/2020/11/22/the-worst-failures...

They also displaced whole neighborhoods to build highways and bridges https://www.luc.edu/eminent-domain/siteessays/detroitmi/

Add in the collapse of the American auto industry that was keeping Detroit relevant and these days it all adds up to be a place I never see myself going back to in this lifetime, and an example of how bad in so many different ways a city can be.

Bonus: they have an above-ground train that goes between places no one actually ever goes between https://gizmodo.com/i-spent-a-day-on-the-world-s-most-pointl... it’s like if BART went between the SAP Center and Levi’s Stadium with no other stops.

I think you're vastly overestimating the cultural impact of reddit on the general public. This is a huge talking point in New Zealand right now and I promise you it has nothing to do with /r/fuckcars which even I, a Reddit user, had never heard of.

And then go to cities that implemented lightrail and bike lanes and got rid of some car parking to do it. Talk to the business owners there. None of them have recovered to anything like the preconstruction levels of business... And those are the ones who survived the long closure of the road to put it in.

At least, that's the takeaway from the metro nearest me. At least they got a couple of shiny new luxury apartment buildings out of it. Maybe the hope is to gentrify all of the poorer businesses out to be replaced with hipster shops that won't complain.

The article establishes that business owners are not the most reliable source on the impact affecting themselves.

Got any actual data?

I drove through the area I'm thinking of a few weeks back. Maybe 40% of the businesses that were there before are gone, but much has happened in the past few years.

I know of 5 that definitely closed because of it, at least 8 more that were torn down (including a grocery store and a Walmart) to put up a field for a soccer team right on the line (which may or may not have been built without the light rail going in). 3 more that I can think of didn't make it to COVID, but they were probably struggling beforehand and might not have survived anyway.

YMMV.

>so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me

Excuse me? If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind.

I dread the idea of moving back to .ca from .nl for exactly this reason. Hellscape is right.

hellscapes? lol. I've been to Europe several times, the cities there have their own problems. I never have problems getting around a city in either place.

“If you don’t agree with my position, spend some time listening to my side’s propaganda.” Not Just Bikes and StrongTowns is not where one should go to educate themselves, because those sources are highly, highly biased.

I generally that those "against car ownership" are just PR and PR-convinced guys, really, that's not intended as an insult but as an (hopefully) open minded consideration:

- those who work and live in a "small" area, witch means in bike/foot range for anything do consume far less, yes, but to sustain those sober lifestyle many others run on km and km on gasoline trucks & other transports means;

- European style cities (where from I came from, switched to a mountain area few years ago) are a nightmare in the modern world because being dense means being unable to evolve. There is no room to change because there is no space to move and when something exceptional but not so exceptional happen is a disaster;

- most tend to think living in apartments, very concentrate is efficient, like a big factory tend to be more efficient than various little and spread, that's false actually. Environmental costs of tall buildings is FAR superior to many equivalent (even bigger) single-family homes, those buildings demand structure and infrastructure that single home do not need at all and not only: as dense cities they can't evolve. So we can build a "A-class state-of-art" building today, in 100+ years it will be the same building, probably in a dangerous shape, very inefficient and can't be rebuilt.

We need a certain density because transportation costs and social life, idea sharing etc demand a bit of aggregation but we all know pushing aggregation is a vary bad move. Actually the dominant idea is "small and smart cities" but even these can't really scale because today we can build them (well, at a hyper-big cost) for today needs, tomorrow we will be still unable to evolve them because of density. IMVHO the sole scalable model is the Riviera one, where living and working buildings are spread together but residential parts are single-family home with enough room to be rebuilt on generational change, and factories except for those who demand a certain size, can be single-purpose areas so something that can be rebuilt at a certain point in time with enough ground around to do so. That's also have another positive aspect: it stop the possibility to concentrate to many people in small places making them nightmare like many modern city-states.

In the Riviera model we have schools like campus where students can aggregate to develop ideas and social life, but again they are single-purpose complexes so easy to rebuilt/change as needed, there is a bit of travel but not too much, a bit of aggregation perhaps less effective than a dense city one, but without risk to became too dense etc.

In medio stat virtus. A lesson too many forget.

I feel bad for people who lives in cities without a car. It's sad life. You're stuck in a tiny bubble defined by a handful of transit stops. This is true in New York, London, and Paris all the same.

Public transit is slow and shitty in every city in the world. If you compare travel time by foot to subway the subway merely cut it by 50%. Subways are about as fast as a moving sidewalk. The "better" a city's public transportation the longer the average commute time of workers. Spending two hours a day on the train isn't living. (Nor is spending two hours a day in a car.)

I also refuse to accept that dense cities are cheaper than the alternative. Everything in a city costs 10x and takes longer. London's water pipes leak about 25% of their water. Replacing these pipes is effectively impossible.

I'm hoping remote works kills the dense mega-city and lets people spread out a bit more.

You must live in the suburbs. Even in slow transit San Francisco, taking the bus is always faster, never mind Paris.that’s not counting we’ll never meet our climate goals with suburbs.

> that’s not counting we’ll never meet our climate goals with suburbs.

Nonsense. It's perfectly possible for us to achieve clean energy and clean transport.

“RMI analysis indicates that the United States must reduce VMT by 20 percent before the end of the decade to limit warming to 1.5°C—and this remains true even under ambitious EV adoption scenarios.”

https://rmi.org/our-driving-habits-must-be-part-of-the-clima...

Nonsense.

The source article is discussing, without sharing their supporting evidence, the transition to EVs. If 100% of vehicle miles were driven by EVs charged with clean energy there would be no need to reduce mileage. We're talking about city design for the next hundred years. Not the transition to EVs over the next 5 to 20 years.

Clean energy and clean transportation is possible. Some might even say it's inevitable. Once achieved there is no existential requirement to reduce vehicle miles.

Public transit is not slow and shitty in The Netherlands.

You mean on days other than those days when no trains run whatsoever?[1]

[1] Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today (ns.nl)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30901009

Have you ever driven in London? Have you used public transport in London? Moving around is much more efficient using public transport. The underground + a couple of buses take you around everywhere faster than a car.

You know you can just rent a car, right? If you don't use it 5 days out of 7, it's much, much cheaper to rent one.

Renting a car (in the US) can cost $40/day.[a] That’s how much gas costs me in a week or so. It’s not cheaper to rent.

[a]: Don’t forget the $150-300 deposit (that takes a week to disappear). And also being pressured to pay for their $15/day insurance. Rental companies are expensive

The cost of a car isn't just gas, you have to amortize the cost of the car depreciating, the maintenance, registration, etc. For a quick example, https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co... has a monthly cost of 690 using average (used) values and 0 dollars for gas. So you can drive 17 days a month and still come out ahead renting. There are services like zipcar, or [hourcar](https://hourcar.org/individual/) that make renting significantly more convenient, though the costs are marginally higher if all of your trips are full day.

I've done this calculation multiple times in my life, and because I mostly get around via bike (perks of living in college towns which have to invest in non-car infrastructure), its never been worth buying a car.

I spent $4205 on car expenses last year, not including fuel (since I'd pay fuel separately on a rental car as well). That's for two cars (spouse & I), so I'll say $2100 per car.

The cheapest rental car I could find (searched kayak.com) is $72/day.

So, renting could only be cheaper if I used a car less than 2100/72 = 29 days per year.

But that's not counting cost or inconvenience/time of getting and returning that rental car. The few times I'd had to rent a car I've had to get an Uber ride to get to the rental place and then back home, so that adds another $20 or so to the rental.

> Renting a car (in the US) can cost $40/day.

I just looked up (on kayak.com) the cheapest rental car I could get tomorrow and it is $72/day.

> it's much, much cheaper to rent one

It’s much, much more convenient to be able to go where I want when I want.

Hiking, skiing, my friend’s cabin, the lake house, my friends in the suburbs, Costco, that speciality root beer store I like. I don’t even need to plan my trip. I can go whenever I want.

Yes you can rent a car to do those things. But it is indisputably friction. My experience is that my friends who don’t have cars are subsidized by those who do. Either that or you don’t see that friend because public transit makes it too inconvenient.

What are you talking about? I live in Stockholm, it's Saturday, 23:00, and I can be in the next city over, Uppsala, 70km away, at 0:04, using public transport.

I takes 28 minutes to a random spot I just picked on the other end of the city, 10km away.

Stockholm has 100 subway stations alone, and probably over 1000 bus stops. I have no idea why you should say that is "a handful".

I can also bike everywhere, of course. Usually way faster than the car over medium distances.

When I was living in Tokyo, it was theoretically possible to get from where I lived to the center of the most popular downtown hangout spot in 20 minutes by train. In reality, though, you had to tack on between 5 and 30 minutes of random delays depending on the train schedules and what time it was.

If you're sitting in your living room, and decide "I want to go to $place, it's a 45 minute trip if I leave now and a 20 minute trip if I leave in an hour" I think you could make an argument either way.

Within downtown Tokyo, you can often beat the train by just walking briskly from point to point, and almost always beat it by riding a bike.

Maybe the guy above you is focusing entirely on those worst case walking/schedule-based delays and you're focusing entirely on the best case.

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