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Comment by TheCoelacanth | Hacker News Reader

Compare a car-centric city like Houston to city center designed before cars. The entire historic center of Siena with a population of 30,000 people and hundreds of businesses fits in the space of one highway interchange in Houston[1].

There's more worth going to within a 10 minute walk in Siena the there is within a ten minute drive in Houston.

NYC, London or Tokyo also work as examples since traffic moves at a snail's pace. It's trivial to beat a car on transit and a moderately fit person could jog faster than a car there.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/uo7cle/a_comparis...

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Google maps shows 29 min by car and 46 min by transit from HND to Skytree (these are few things I know in Tokyo, 5 hours by foot, btw) so I would not trust something you read on Reddit, much less in a community called literally "fuckcars", seems that it might be exaggerating to support its bias.

Same with Siena (I picked just random points "Hotel Athena" and "Farmacia Ravacciano" as they were highlighted on the maps) 17 mins by car, 26 mins by transit (though walking is faster than transit and biking is faster than car, apparently you cannot drive through the city, very progressive).

Change the time to rush hour in Tokyo on Google maps and the commute is the same. Cars are great if there is no traffic and you can park, which is something we can't just engineer ourselves out of without supporting other modes of transit.

> 17 mins by car, 26 mins by transit (though walking is faster than transit and biking is faster than car, apparently you cannot drive through the city, very progressive).

Walking is almost as fast as driving and biking is faster? Not sure how this proves your point, sounds like it is working as intended

My point is that transit is never faster than car, obviously if you close the streets to vehicles you can make places reachable only by foot. You can as well ban bicycles and biking won't be faster than anything. That is also the easiest way to fix a the daily HN thread about cars being too big and scaring cyclists:)

> My point is that transit is never faster than car, obviously if you close the streets to vehicles you can make places reachable only by foot.

This just isn't true, everything breaks down and driving becomes much slower during rush hour due to inherent limitations of, you guessed it, physics.

See my other comment about my rush hour bus commute in Portland, the bus was faster than driving because of dedicated bus lanes. Driving is only fast if there isn't traffic AND there is ample parking close to your destination.

That is obviously not true. Try driving through central London or central New York during rush hour. Subway will be much faster. Jogging will be faster for a moderately fit person.

Siena bans traffic out of necessity, not just on a whim. There simply isn't space for cars.

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