Hacker News Reader

Comment by just_steve_h | Hacker News Reader

It's alluded to briefly in other comments, but one of the biggest problems in our country is the fact that our built environment was completely reconfigured for the automobile - and not simply due to "demand."

Since the 1960's there have been tremendous advances in safety for people INSIDE of automobiles, but the safety of people outside of automobiles continues to be largely ignored.

There is a kind of arms race underway toward larger and heavier vehicles, which are far more deadly than small cars.

We have inherited so many tragedies from our grandparents' generation - the dominance of the car is on spar with nuclear weapons in the threat it poses to humanity.

View on HN

The automotive industry has put a ton of work into pedestrian safety with frontal impacts.

The car is required in a developing country like the US. There is so much space between things still.

Our grandparents wanted to get to work and travel. Hard to blame them.

Also, so far, MAD has greatly reduced the number of big wars. It's hard to predict the future, but nuclear weapons so far have provided a lot of peace.

The car is only a hard requirement in the US because the country is designed for it to be a hard requirement. It's not some intrinsic fact of reality.

Idk... It's part of the culture in the US and seems to be getting worse lately.

As an example, I love the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, but after the pandemic they instituted this policy that pedestrians were no longer allowed to walk on the 3 Mile Drive. This is a service-type road throughout a park that people routinely walked on for decades. Not in a minor way either: it's a major pathway through the park that the park is designed around in many ways. It's difficult to not walk on the drive.

People also like to drive on it to look at the landscaping, and use it to get to locations in the arboretum. It really seemed to me that some wealthy benefactor complained to the arboretum about pedestrians as they were driving around, and the park in the process banned the pedestrians. In the process they immediately made the place much more pedestrian hostile.

It's difficult to describe how absurd this is if you haven't been there, given the layout and history. They also used to routinely have fundraiser 5ks on it and no longer do, etc.

It's like they're literally moving to prioritize cars in the landscape in a park for landscaping.

This is after also limiting the density of visitors as well by requiring reservations.

Anyway, this is a place I love and I am really disappointed in in the last couple of years (I could go on about a couple of other things). It's partially a personal rant, but it's also to me a very good example of how cultural norms in the US are very car-centric and that trend seems to be increasing lately.

That sounds like a lobbying problem more than a car problem. Fix the broken lobbying system in this country and that solves your issue.

That car is not inherently required. It's required because US cities are designed around cars.

There's a great channel called "Not just bikes" that demonstrates what cities look like that don't follow this pattern. Denser buildings, narrower and fewer lanes, less space wasted on parking, better pedestrian crossings and islands, better signaling/timing for pedestrians, etc.

Those cities have lower noise, lower pollution, better economics (road maintenance is a massive cost) and are way safer.

Everyone on HN keeps saying cities. Cities this, cities that. Sure, maybe it's an ideal from an efficiency standpoint. But guess what, a lot of people in the US don't live in cities. Most of the country consists of space that is not cities. Most of the people I know live in these places, all across the country.

This is one of the reasons why we left the US. It’s so nice to walk or bike or train everywhere.

You could also do that in big cities like Boston and NYC.

Not even close to the same thing.

Yes they are. Boston in particular was pretty great in that regard. Its metro system is much more expansive than it is here in Helsinki.

I have read that current hood designs are effectively required for pedestrian safety, so the "old-timer" look will not come back. Which would speak against "the safety of people outside of automobiles continues to be largely ignored."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com