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Comment by gardenfelder | Hacker News Reader

Wow! 28 cars dumping onto a tiny road. Hard to see this idea ending well...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/11511+Summit+Wood+Rd,+Los+...

Thats not many cars, and it's a short road. If each car takes 5 seconds to pass a particular point, that's only a few minutes overall of cars in a day.

I would suggest that Los Altos Hills should start enabling transit if their roads are overloaded. Or even better, they should have done some planning.

Funny to imagine all 28 people leaving for work everyday at the exact same time.

I guess. Like they all have the same length commute?

Pretty sure you could fill that entire place with people who would like the 10 minute bike commute to Foothill College. The weather will be fine for that like 360 days a year.

You know that these 28 cars are unlikely to be driving all at the same time right?

Most of these neighborhoods you could 10x the traffic without anyone noticing.

In CA there’s at least one or two cars per bedroom of housing. They’ll be parking all along the street.

But so what? This is a last ditch effort to beef up the critically low housing supply, not intended to be the ideal solution.

Maybe we should stop overrelying on cars and build some public transport while we're at it?

The Bay Area has absolutely perfect weather for walking and cycling. Wish we would design more for that

Have you tried biking from San Francisco to Mountain View?

Yes. Bayshore and La Honda, etc. The cycling in nature is gorgeous. But the cities themselves aren't very bike friendly.

Biking La Honda is strenuous and risky. Few commuters would do that.

In a suburban area far from a major city?

Not going to happen.

Even other countries with great public transit dont do have that.

Have you ever tried to use public transport to get from Los Altos to San Jose? Any other developed country trumps public transport in the middle of the Bay. My wife, who loves public transport, gave up almost immediately when we moved here - I just Uber but would use public transport if available. Cycling just can't get you far enough sadly.

Thats my point. Its not reasonable to expect rapid public transit in a place like PA.

You could run buses, but youve just turned a 30 min commute by car into a 1.5hr bus ride with multiple bus changes.

Transit only works in medium to high density cities.

Visit Switzerland some time it’ll blow your mind.

Basically every square inch of that country is connected to convenient and frequent public transit. And it’s one of the most naturally inhospitable places for building anything you can imagine, we’re talking towns on the side of cliffs and so on.

But if you’re in a tiny village at minimum there’s a bus that connects to rail, frequently, and that rail is frequent and highly reliable and goes literally everywhere.

It’s possible and we have the resources to do it too we just don’t.

There are buses in PA that connect to Caltrain.

Turning a 30 min commute by car into 1.5hr by transit means few uses it.

Yeah that’s not how the Swiss system works at all though is the point.

My tiny village of 800 people in Central Europe has a train to the capital of the country - about one hour away - every thirty minutes. It also has one to the capital of a neighboring country every thirty minutes.

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