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Comment by rtlfe | Hacker News Reader

> Anecdotally certain areas in London shops with parking near or in front of the premises seem to survive better than shops that have no parking at all.

Presumably those are areas that don't have the bikes and buses the article talks about. You obviously can't make driving impossible without providing any alternatives.

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> You obviously can't make driving impossible without providing any alternatives.

This sums up my complaint about Strong Towns, Not Just Bikes, etc. They want to do things that will make driving impossible (or at least miserably difficult) now, and only maybe later do things that will provide alternatives for everyone.

You can make this argument for any change that would improve cycling and transit though. Take street A, a street that right now is hostile to both; it only has car lanes, traffic is fast enough that it's intimidating to bike on, and buses get stuck in traffic. You'd like to get to street B: a street that people feel safe to bike on (protected bike lanes) and that enables transit to be fast and reliable (dedicated bus lanes or streetcar right-of-way).

Now how do you get from A to B? At some point during that process, you'll have to take away space from cars. This might mean removing travel lanes, and it might mean removing on-street parking, but regardless, that is a necessary step to get to street B.

That point is where people complain, "you're making driving impossible!" But you can never get to street B if you never make that step. And at the point you do, there generally also won't be that many people biking or taking transit, because you haven't changed the street yet.

> At some point during that process, you'll have to take away space from cars.

Why couldn't you just build transit that's above or below the existing space for cars instead? Sure it might be more expensive or difficult to do, but at least it wouldn't be making people's lives worse the whole time.

That is exorbitantly expensive by comparison and only makes financial sense when you have a large enough population in the area to support it.

Local governments are not rolling in cash. If your town substantially raised your taxes to pay for that project, would you also complain about that?

> Why couldn't you just build transit that's above or below the existing space for cars instead?

It's basically free to paint a lane red and declare that it's only for buses. Tunnels can cost billions per mile.

It's free in terms of direct monetary cost to do, sure. But there's a very high cost of banning cars from a lane, borne by everyone who used to use that lane but can't anymore.

Alternately: there's a high cost to not creating a dedicated bus lane paid by everybody who rides the bus or chooses not to ride the bus because it's too slow.

Or you fix the "bus stuck in traffic" by charging a toll (possibly congestion-adaptive), high enough to prevent the bad congestion.

If we did this, it would fix the problem, and I'd support doing it. But it'll never happen because it's "too regressive".

As in, would hurt the poor the most? If so: just split the payments (after accounting for the cost to run the system) equally between the city's residents. The poor people will be the first to share cars, so getting an equal share of the profits, while splitting the per-vehicle tolls across the occupants, should be able to counter the regressive effect of a per-vehicle toll. And making it adapt to congestion would prevent the "I got no one to share the ride with this late at night, and I couldn't afford to not split the toll" issue, at least with something like Uber or Waymo to fix the "you didn't drive to work at noon in your own car for late shift" aspect.

And I believe that if ride sharing is effectively forced through capping the traffic to non-congested levels, there would be a practical solution to the issue of organizing ride-sharing for the trip back home late at night.

Like, some sort of dynamic bus network using normal cars (Uber Pool w/ having to switch cars at suitable "hub"s either end of the freeway portion of your trip, or even along the way if any of the resulting legs of your journey would be too-low-throughput to meet realistic latency expectations of yours), at least for the time it takes to manufacture better-suited public transit vehicles. Software for this can happen in at most a couple months to get something that works, so just make the tolls under this system take half a year to activate after getting enacted for the region.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k

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