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Comment by rahen | Hacker News Reader

> it would be wise to invest in a world where we move more towards these superior modes of transportation

This simply is pre-WWII urban planning. We used to have sustainable cities and comprehensive passenger rail systems before we teared them down for cars and suburbia.

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For better or worse we used to have 4x less people

The solution to that, in hindsight, was probably not building the majority of new housing in sprawling, low-density suburbs that require a car to get most places people want to go though…

Which is why industrialized countries with higher population density move back even faster to pre-WWII urban planning (EU), or sometimes never left it (Japan).

I dont see how it matters. Its not like we have run out of room. Just have 4x the number of small neighbourhood grocery stores

We're running out of something though, or some combination of things. Otherwise you wouldn't have such accelerating inequality and popular unrest.

Ya, we’re running out of wealth mobility. No one can afford houses because corporations vacuum up all the money.

Vs pre-ww2 where all the peasents could easily afford real estate?

The population of the US has nearly tripled since then and the GDP has grown almost 2000%; more than 1500% if looking at real GDP [1]. There should be far more wealth equality now but there isn’t.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/1031678/gdp-and-real-gdp...

The 1920s was very famous for wealth inequality, so im not sure that's true.

With a quick google i found this graph https://www.cbpp.org/wealth-concentration-has-been-rising-to... which suggests that the present is much more unequal than the 1970s, but still hasn't risen to the level of inequality from the pre WW2 era.

Yes indeed.

The fact that conservatives broadly have taken the position supporting of cars and car-oriented development is one of the most absurd things imaginable. Socialized inefficient infrastructure that was not even a thing a hundred years ago being considered a conservative policy, a real hoot.

I'm not sure how much of this is true.

I'm a conservative, and I would love to have more walkable/bikeable cities and to not need a car.

>I'm not sure how much of this is true.

I'll admit to this not being an opinion I hold based on any kind of scientific observation, this does seem to be an opinion I have anecdotally observed among rural- and suburban-populations, which tend to lean more towards the conservative political spectrum than their urban counterparts.

>I'm a conservative, and I would love to have more walkable/bikeable cities and to not need a car.

Kudos.

I’m not a conservative, but the independence that cars provide holds a certain appeal and aligns fine with conservative values. Anyway, conservatives happily embrace new technology all the time (almost all conservatives have a smartphone and an Internet connection, and those developments are much more recent than cars); adopting cars isn’t a contradiction at all—clinging to trains and bikes would be the contradiction.

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