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Comment by ErikVandeWater | Hacker News Reader

Cars aren't the solution to the future of transportation. Walkable cities and quality public transit between them is.

I've noticed a great increase in the /r/fuckcars sentiments (probably can be traced back to some popular YouTubers or something) - setting "cars vs public transit" as the fight is only going to result in public transit losing, and hard.

Cars are just too insanely cheap and convenient at what they do.

Because 20% of your taxes goes to funding roads and 50% of your city is pavement.

Some people would prefer it to be different.

> 20% of your taxes goes to funding roads

This is just nonsense. It's something like $600 per capita [1] on tax revenue of $23,000 or so per capita [2], for 2.6%.

[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... [2] https://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/per_capita

I wouldn't dismiss this as only the view of the extremists at fuckcars. There's plenty of other subreddits that aren't anti-car but share the sentiment that more density and proper public transport is crucial.

There's a wide gap between "we should design cities better and include public transportation" and "electric cars are evil and all cars should be banned".

Even in the 'best case scenario' of the US entirely mobilizing to electrify and nationalize all rail lines we'd be looking at a minimum 10 year maybe much more effort, and during that time reducing the amount of gas usage is good, whether it be by hybrids or electric cars or something else.

Indeed. We should be doing both

I would. I live in a progressive town that is great for cycling both weather-wise and road-wise. Among the childless, woke 20-some and 30-some, of which there are a lot, walking and cycling could not be less popular. It has only gotten worse in the last 20 years. Likely for the same reason dietary, consumer choices, and political engagement have not reflected what seems to be popular opinion; because people actually value convenience and entertainment much more.

Great idea but not going to work. Even in Japan, ~70% of households own a car. They serve a vital component of transportation that is not easily substituted for.

Ownership and use are two totally different things though. I lived with a wealthy family in Hamburg and they owned 2 cars and a vacation home in Southern Germany… and they seldom drove except to the house in the South (sometimes) and, maybe, once a month for a big grocery run. The kids rode bikes to school, the couple took the U-Bahn to work. I saw the same things in Spain and Switzerland. Obviously these are just anecdotes, but the fact is that the super-majority of developed countries do a much better job at creating infrastructure to avoid car-use than the US. I would wager Japan is similar. I quick google search tells me the average Japanese car owner drives about 3,700 miles vs the average American driving over 13,000 miles a year.

Yep. I own a car and a fuel tank ladts 2-3 months. Berlin has great public transportation and is quite bikeable.

I would like to add to that, that this is not true for the country side. At least in Germany. Public transport is pretty much non existent there, e.g. (anecdotal) a part of my family lives in a village with ~4000 inhabitants. To get to the next bigger city there is one bus that goes in the morning and one that goes back in the afternoon. That is it. If you want to go to dinner or visit someone after that, you need a car or go by bike 15km one way.

Japan has a car to household ratio of 1.06, compared to America's 1.88 average per household.

South Korea has even fewer. Let's set the first goal at one car per household, and supplement everything beyond that with transit and electric bikes.

US is clearly the outlier in automobile dependency, no argument there.

Electric bikes are more akin to scooters and mopeds. A quick look at Asian cities and comparing them to Copenhagen and Amsterdam shows the difference between the two. Riding old-fashioned bicycles would do most Americans some much needed good.

Electric bikes still require pedaling and have been demonstrated to be aerobic exercise. If Americans rode e bikes everywhere, we'd have a huge improvement in health.

One car per family is doable, even in the US. We did it for a while and then got ourselves a Golf.

Even after we moved to the suburbs, and the Golf was in the shop (deer) for a month (supply chain), it wasnt so bad.

The secret?

My other car is a 7 seater SUV with a 3.3L V6 that can tow 5000 lb. Its big enough that it can do anything I might need it to do.

Getting the golf, ironically, lowered our fuel consumption because the golf can do 70% of what we'd use the SUV for. But, because of that remaining 30%, I'm keeping the SUV.

So its not obvious that simply lowering average numbers of cars per household improves anything.

Btw, replacing my Golf with an F150 hybrid would probably lower my fuel usage.

What does car per household have to do with anything? I can have 12 cars and never drive, one car and be on the road 24/7.

A drop in the average to one car per household implies a significant reduction in the number of cars on the road. Right now, it's not uncommon to have two family members commute by car every day.

Yes, there will always be outliers, but I care about the average case.

if you don't care about outliers, then don't quote data that does. Outliers are everything, and without them being stripped the data is meaningless.

I would venture to say there is a higher correlation between wealth to cars, than driving to cars. I would futher venture that if you have 4+ cars, you do less driving than the average person who only has one car per household.

I have 17 Tesla's that i rent out on Eturo. I work remotely in downtown chicago and i literally never drive.

You are arguing with a strawman. I don't care about any individual. Your business might own 17 cars, fine.

But like, the world in which the average cars per household is 1.0 is one where there are a lot fewer cars on the road. I'm not sure why that's controversial to you?

What are the means by which a team of 150 can make progress over two years towards that goal?

Such a team can work on improving EC technology. It cannot meaningfully make progress on reconfiguring a city like Houston or Los Angeles or San Francisco.

Look at Google's Environmental Insight Explorer. I'm sure that's less than 150 people and it's doing incredible work to help cities with legislation, transportation, and energy. https://insights.sustainability.google/

Were I live there is a dire need for planners in city offices that do the paper work for opening bike lanes and improving public transport. I think there are only a dozen or two for the whole city. 150 people doing that absolutely would make a difference.

I stand corrected. It would be good to make things like this more widely known.

Why not both?

Many folks on here have hobbies that just are not public-transit friendly, e.g. windsurfing for me. However, I would love it if I didn't have to drive between my urban area and an adjacent one because of the dearth of public transit options (besides the even worse option of teensy flights).

Tons of people in Japan own cars and don't drive them very much; they're for weekend trips to the mountains, going to Costco, etc., not for going to work every day. 1/3 of the population lives in the greater Tokyo metro area, and there simply isn't very much parking anywhere in the city. But single-family houses usually have a tiny garage underneath.

> Even in Japan, ~70% of households own a car.

I'd recommend looking up the average japanese car vs the average american car

An underrated negative of heavy car culture, is that it is likely one of the key reasons Americans are so fat and unhealthy relative to most other western countries.

Cars are death machines, not just because of the high energy collisions, but because they kill us slowly with inactivity and obesity.

I agree that walking is good for you...but...our diet is much, much, much more to blame than our cars.

A couple cans of coke are more calories than you'll spend walking through a city.

Walkable cities imply high density cities.

Unfortunately, that will never happen.

E.g., in the SF Bay Area NIMBYism is rampant and the density is laughable for such a vital geographic area. If walkable cities are not possible in the hyper-progressive futuristic Bay Area, where is it possible in the US?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/democrats-blue-st...

Walkable cities are already a reality in many countries in Europe. It's not rocket science and it doesn't mean you need high density. See Denmark, Netherlands etc for a few examples. Humane cities are a matter of choice, just because it doesn't exist in the US doesn't mean it's impossible.

> Humane cities are a matter of choice

The choice to have founded your city a thousand years before the invention of the automobile, maybe.

Many European cities that were rebuilt after destruction during WW2 were built in a more automobile-centric manner, because people enjoy cars.

Honestly, I would like to see someone start a new city in the US around the concept of walkability. There's so much empty land in this country, and with remote jobs there's less of a need to place a city next to existing employment centers. It would be an interesting experiment, if nothing else.

You know that we took our cities and ripped them apart to install stroads and highways, right? That the historical model of American cities was train based, spreading radially out from a port with folks riding trains into work? And we threw that away in favor of cats relatively recently?

We can choose to upzone and convert large road corridors into rail plus some road and convert some roads to bus rapid transit and some to bikes.

It's an eminently solvable problem and one that has been solved over and over again in the modern era.

> We can choose to upzone

You'll hear no arguments from me. Even the biggest cities in this country are laughably low density.

> convert some roads to bus rapid transit and some to bikes

I don't know, I used to live in one of those big cities that had an awful commute by car, with congested roads and expensive parking when you could even find one. Solo drivers still comprised the plurality of commuters, and that number only went up during my time there, despite many efforts at improving public transit.

People just don't like public transit for some reason, even when the alternative is pretty shitty. I don't imagine that it's gotten any more popular in this year, with higher rates of crime and other antisocial behavior on public transit around the country.

> one that has been solved over and over again in the modern era

Are there really good examples of cities anywhere around the world that were previously automobile-centric that became public transit-centric?

I'm of the opinion that people don't like public transit because we half fund it. So they look at it and are like, "no, why would I want more like that?"

But like, a cleaner, faster, more frequent, less crowded transit? Yes please!

Cities like Oslo, Philadelphia, Boulder, and Seattle are experiencing huge transit changes right now and seeing major increases in bike and transit ridership. Boulder, in particular, dramatically reduced single occupancy transportation.

More frequent is usually quite the problem because while the vehicles are just a matter of cost, the staff isn't.

Driving any large vehicle is a stressful job and there's always a shortage of people willing to do it.

Of course this implies that the larger the vehicle the better, so rail comes to mind, but that it turn requires infrastructure.

Overall it's a hard problem to solve.

Then how did the Europeans manage to do it? They had to. There's literally no other option for a region that doesn't have abundant oil resources.

>That the historical model of American cities was train based, spreading radially out from a port with folks riding trains into work? And we threw that away in favor of cats relatively recently?

This is quite false, unfortunately. It seems like cats have fallen out of favor in America, and now everyone is getting a dog.

Hahaha, curse typing on my phone!

I thought it was an intentional metaphor, coming from the "herding cats" line of thought.

You need to stop playing Sim City, walkable cities are a fantasy in the US. You need broad political support to basically redesign every city outside NYC and some parts of SF, Seattle, and Boston. It will never happen.

There is a constant stubborn push back of "it's impossible" while time after time different parts of the world have proven it is in fact possible. The biggest impediment to walkable cities in the US is the broken political system that makes bipartisan efforts exceedingly rare. If a politician of one party advocates for it everyone on the other side needs to throw out bullshit arguments as to why it's dumb.

I'd even argue that the only reason it currently is hard to do it in many parts of the world is just because people believe it's impossible. You need general population support to make changes.

People believe it is impossible even when the evidence is right in front of them in the form of others walking and cycling. It most definitely is an issue of social will more than anything.

It's not only been done in cities all over the world, it's very much currently in progress in many places. Seattle is expanding rail, removing single family zoning, and building higher density while expanding transit. It maybe takes a decade or two, but it's extremely doable.

Over 80% of Seattle housing land is SFH. The "expanded rail" runs to non-walkable suburbs instead of filling out Seattle. Pretend we believed there was a climate crisis and decided to stop all cars. At our current rate of transit increase and our current population increase, I think we're at centuries before we'd even have the capacity.

https://www.theurbanist.org/2018/06/01/correct-percentage-si...

0% of Seattle is zoned exclusively single family housing. Everywhere it's legal to build more than one unit per lot.

And the trains have absolutely resulted in both increased density and upzoning.

Greenwood and Phinney ridge are both "suburban" but totally walkable.

All we need to do is properly fund transit. It's not hard, it's just not cheap.

I would not consider something you can't sell separately (ADU) a "unit", which would make me disagree with your second sentence.

The light rail doesn't go to Phinney or Greenwood, but I meant Lynnwood, Shoreline, etc stops.

It's not just "not cheap", it's ruinously more costly than cars. Housing just isn't dense enough to bake it affordable.

Walkable without density => walkable only for the rich

Would love to see Europe with US levels of diversity and population still remain "walkable" without density

Most European "cities" are what would be a suburb/village in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities

The US has tons of walkable suburbs and villages.

Walkable does not imply high density. I've lived in areas that are suburban + townhouses that are totally walkable.

Were there some 5 over 1s in the commercial areas? Sure. Is that high density? Hardly.

Yeah, no one lives in high density cities any more, they’re too crowded.

Exactly. Until people in the US develop the political will for change, technologically driven improvement in cars is the best way to reduce the damage.

There is no one solution. Phrasing the prolem that way makes no sense. Cars, trucks, and independent wheeled vehicles will have a place for a long time to come. Electrifying cars and trucks is a huge improvement.

Summoning the political and social will to replace car-centric infrastructure is a different problem, one even so-called progressives are not interested in adopting, at least for themselves.

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