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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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".

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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