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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

How long would that take to happen? It’s not like all of the current building and infrastructure can be torn down and rebuilt in the European model overnight. Could it even happen within one person’s lifetime?

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No pain, no gain. We just suck it up for a few years. Our future generations will thank us.

You get immediate savings by stopping road expansion and cutting fuel demand (close lanes on big roads, replace with bicycle lanes). You get 3-10 years of pain from bicycle/walk-commuting in a city designed for cars. To compensate, let people build supermarkets and stores in single family zoned areas. Subsidize rent-a-bike companies with funds from gas taxes and frozen road construction projects.

This is basically the only sure-fire way to let poor people generate free cash flow to survive the recession without having to helicopter them money. This has worked for developing countries like China. Also, this is a way to keep cities financially solvent by letting the tax revenue to land area ratio increase naturally as people adjust to human-powered commuting.

I still don't understand how that would fix anything. The suburbs of the city I live nearby extend out for 10 miles from the city center. And between here and the city center there is a super steep road that runs for about 4 miles. Trying to bike from the city center up to the suburbs at the end of the work day would be extremely difficult except for an elite athlete.

Building is fast if you allow people to do it. You could have a new apartment building in around a year, and that's without really pushing it. Zoning and permits are what's holding construction back

Lack of construction workers is also holding things back, this could be a lit of a licensing issue, but there aren't enough workers to do all the projects that are funded now.

It's not like the European model even works. Public transport is only as good as it is convenient, and it's virtually impossible to make it convenient for most people outside of extra-super-ultra urban areas (think New York City and London).

If you can hop on a bus within a 5 minute walk of where you live, and then hop off withing a 5 minute walk of where you work, life is beautiful and you can probably ditch your car (at least for daily commute). For most, this is not the case.

And I don't want to live in a ultra-urban area.

Pure nonsense - you don't have to live in Megacity One to have that level of functioning public transport. Most people in Europe live in cities with populations under a million and guess what - even the smaller regional cities in Germany, France, the Netherlands etc have fully functional public transport systems.

The only thing really holding back public transport is lack of imagination and ambition. Just because things don't work now doesn't mean they can't if you actually try.

You don’t have to live in an ultra-urban area, but 80% of Americans live in an urban area already. [0]

When we have discussions like this, the “normal case” is actually that people live in cities, so that’s obviously what the conversations gravitate around.

I grew up in a small town (4k pop), and there’s no reason bikes shouldn’t be extremely effective in town. It’s tiny! There’s no true need to drive a large, inefficient vehicle .5mi to the rite aid or McDonald’s. Nearly everyone in this tiny town is within quick walking distance of what used to be a passenger train station. It could become a passenger train station again with the right investment.

People living in truly rural areas is an edge case where cars obviously make sense. Even then, the majority of car trips are local. 60% of trips are fewer than 6mi.

0: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g... 1: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1042-augu...

The average trip distance is likely higher than 6 miles. Even assuming 0 mile trips for all of the 60% under 6 miles and the low end of each range puts the average over 5 miles. That also pretends that you don't take kids, or pets, or other people. Not everyone is traveling only by themselves to very local places.

Edit: meant average, originally put median

Come visit Edinburgh! People love to complain about the buses here too, but they're genuinely pretty good -- and there's absolutely no way I'm commuting into the city centre by car.

The fact that it will take time is not a counter-argument.

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