Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

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What you said is factually true, but I think there are bigger problems in context.

Most people, having grown up with cars from parents and peers, can't imagine anything other than a car-centric life. The distances are too far, the bus comes once an hour, and biking is too dangerous. So getting an electric car might be the only improvement that they can think of. Especially given the upfront cost of electric cars and their reduced convenience for long road trips, it's easy to feel that they made enough personal sacrifices for the sake of the common good.

While electric cars are a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, the real bitter pills are things like ending exclusive single-family detached house zoning, increasing density, allowing mixed residential-retail-office neighborhoods, converting car lanes to bike or transit lanes, building rail lines (which can easily take a decade), offering decent inter-city train service. I fear that electric cars offer an easy "personal responsibility" band-aid that exhausts people's willpower to demand more substantial collective change.

> Don't hijack the climate emergency for your political agenda.

What's with this accusation?

Some people have only lived in highly dense areas and can't imagine why you'd need a car in certain cities or regions.

Those seem to be the people who push the car-less idea the most, because it meets their world view, but doesn't work once you step outside the downtown bubble.

But what I think they want are solutions to the parking, traffic, and other issues that stem from city overpopulation and/or planning mismanagement of cities.

As an outsider I agree cities need to rework how they handle cars (idling in traffic for an hour to go 10 miles, parking being hell, etc.) but it's a specific problem to cities (some more so than others)

> Those seem to be the people who push the car-less idea the most, because it meets their world view, but doesn't work once you step outside the downtown bubble.

I have a friend who lives in a small village of roughly 3k people. If you step out of her backyard, you step into a winefield. You have to close the windows when they're fertilizing the fields nextdoor with dung.

I can reach her in half an hour plus three minute walk with trains that go every 15 minutes (half-hourly after 8pm, hourly after midnight).

Somehow this is possible all over the world, except in the US where it just an inevitable impossibility, just the way things are. I dare say, the people who are actually in a bubble here are the North Americans who have never seen or lived in a city that is anything except a square mile of skyscrapers surrounded by an endless sea of car-dependent single family houses and desolate concrete parking lots.

Density is key. The US is HUGE. It's the same reason why standing up cell towers doesn't work well in the US vs other countries.

I don't know why cities don't have better public transportation. Maybe because voters don't hold their local officials accountable when they mismanage public funds (California's $80b train fiasco)

I do know cars are needed in rural areas for many reasons and aren't posing any sort of a problem.

Fix the cities. Transit, traffic, and parking is a mess, but it has nothing to do with cars, they are a symptom, it has more to do with population and public spending.

> The US is HUGE.

China is huge too. Russia is gigantic. The US was huge before the 1950s too.

The terrible city sprawl of the US is not a law of nature, but specific post WW2 city design policies that could easily be reversed at any time.

> I don't know why cities don't have better public transportation.

It's the same policies. Take the minimum parking requirements: you can't have multiple shops accessible from one station because every shop needs to be surrounded by a walking distance worth of parking. You need to duplicate your entire network because things like corner stores don't exist, meaning there are basically no trips within residential areas. Allocating almost all budget to cars for the last half century has lead to severe loss of experience with designing transit. The Buy America clause says that foreign companies must set up temporary factories in the US whenever someone orders a trainset from them.

There's lots and lots of things, but they all originate with car-centric post-ww2 policies.

Spot on. I really hope that through automation, rural public transportation becomes cheaper and more frequent as a result.

I was lucky, since I lived in town, but my childhood friends would come to school by bus. It took them 3h to get here, the motorist had to cover all the tiny villages along the way, and time adds up. If we didn't have those buses (most of them were vans), well then, I don't think most kids would get their lessons.

Who had cars though? No problem.

But yeah, it's difficult to employ a system on a rural area.

> the bus comes once an hour

And takes many hours to travel the same distance as a 20 minute car ride. People who say "just hop on public transportation" live in the top percent of cities where that actually makes sense.

As a litmus test, choose a few random city in the US. Get times for a 41 mile (average commute) public transportation trip, and times using a private car. You'll might be surprised how much longer it is.

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