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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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!

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