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Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, I think that ICE cars should be banned from cities, the air would be much better, and these curbside chargers look like it could help with that.

On the other hand, a city filled with parked EV cars is not very different from a city filled with ICE cars. Curbside parking should be abolished or at least significantly reduced. People should just park in underground garages and walk the remaining 200m, there's no need to have parking everywhere. It's much easier to install chargers in a garage.

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Cologne is a city with roots that reach back to the Roman empire. It has grown and developed over hundreds of years. Where would all these underground parking lots come from?

Why not go a step further and demand that all roads should be put underground, too, so that pedestrians can enjoy an idle stroll on green meadors above ground without all the annoyances that come from car traffic?

Streets? No, that's where people live, work.

Roads? Sure! Stroads, too (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad)

> Cologne is a city with roots that reach back to the Roman empire. It has grown and developed over hundreds of years. Where would all these underground parking lots come from?

If car parking is a worthwhile use of space, the market will provide it (and whether below or above ground is beside the point). If it's not, it won't.

> Why not go a step further and demand that all streets should be put underground, too, so that pedestrians can enjoy an idle stroll on green meadors above ground without all the annoyances that come from car traffic?

It's a good idea, but we probably have to get there incrementally.

In < 10 years or so we’ll have fully self driving cars. After some time there will smaller versions that can run on smaller roads even. By that time robo taxis won’t have to park in the central parts of cities but can simply park in cheaper parking spots further out or automatic garages.

I'll believe it when I see it. But if you're right, all the more reason to eliminate street parking and reclaim that space for more human uses.

If parking would be left to "the market", no one would do it within city limits. Parking spaces are heavily subsidized.

In Germany, until recently the costs for a residential parking spot were capped at strong 35€/year or so.

The actual "market value" of the equivalent space in cities is often around 4000-6000€/year.

Getting cars out of cities and using the space more efficiently for pedestrians, cyclists and public transport is not only a way to drastically improve safety and quality of life in cities, but also a smart economical choice (and no, building tunnels like Musk dreams of it, isn't the solution to this problem).

Especially in Cologne where the underground is already full of modern and ancient stuff!

> Why not go a step further and demand that all roads should be put underground, too, so that pedestrians can enjoy an idle stroll on green meadors above ground without all the annoyances that come from car traffic?

Don’t threaten me with a good time

Tunnels are much more dangerous to transit and vulnerable to being blocked than open-air streets.

> Why not go a step further and demand that all roads should be put underground

Like a subway. Throw in some bicycles or e-scooters for the last ~200 meters.

Good luck hauling 100lbs of groceries through the subway.

100 pounds! We'll need at least 2400 pounds of automobile to handle such an unweildy load.

I jest but people handle shopping in a myriad of ways, if you live somewhere with good transit it's really not an issue.

The Big Shop is a bit of a symptom of suburbia's unavailability problem anyway, since it's such a pain in the butt to get groceries I would optimize it all into one big shop with the car. It's really similar to living remotely, I used to live in rural Aus and the closest shops where a town over, so you drove half an hour or so to get your groceries.

Living in the city, you do more shops but less per shop, and it is totaly managable on foot with good transit or by bike with good panniers/bags.

It's super easy to get groceries where I live but I still wouldn't want to go shopping multiple times per week. I'd rather spend time on other things.

Exactly, this is why I order my groceries delivered to my door.

Costs 0€ if you're not a stickler about the delivery window and order for at least 50€ at a time.

“But we’re going to need a car” is a reason some people don’t sign up for a CostCo membership.

Definitely. A bike trailer or cargo bike could work though.

I have 4 kids and I don't think I ever bought 50kg of groceries.

Then again, I've lived within walking distance of a supermarket most of my life, so I just go shop groceries every other day or so.

I'd rather spend my time at home with my kids than grocery shopping every other day. Sure that would make it easy to transport groceries on foot, but the mental load of remembering when to buy what would be much larger than just going through your weekly routine. On a plus side, I like buying raw fish and other very perishable goods and going grocery shopping more frequently would give me more options to enjoy those over the course of the week rather than in a concentrated period after grocery day.

I do this all the time: I bought a fold-up shopping cart with 150lb capacity, and take it on the elevator to the subway platform.

Honestly, it’s even easier than doing it by car; I don’t even have to deal with hauling bags out of the trunk, I just roll up to my refrigerator and unpack everything right in the kitchen.

Sounds like a good idea, if the subway has working elevators and isn't too crowded.

Meadows and pastures are for pedestrians only! No mechanized devices of any kind. Only exception would be crutches and unpowered wheelchairs for those who are disabled!

> demand that all roads should be put underground

That's called subway.

>Why not go a step further and demand that all roads should be put underground, too, so that pedestrians can enjoy an idle stroll on green meadors above ground without all the annoyances that come from car traffic?

I'll do you one better!

Since the cars are going to be electric, why not put charging inside the road, so that the car would charge while rolling?

In fact, we can forgo the battery entirely, making the cars lighter, by powering them through the road!

While we're at that, we could allow cars going to the same destination to link to each other to optimize traffic.

Oh, and we could also reduce rolling friction by putting these vehicles on rails.

There you go, we could do much better with underground roads on which electric vehicles roll on rails in metropolitan areas.

We could call these system metros.

Ah, if only such utopian dreams could be implemented. I guess we'll never see it in our lifetimes.

I am begging people to realize that cars and trains have different use cases and trade-offs.

Edinburgh literally has underground cycle lanes [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/jun/1...

Just for those who also thought all lines on this map are underground: most of them are not. It's just pathways with segregated traffic. I could not find out how many underground sections there are, but I assume it's just the linking sections (white with black outline)

Yes, you are right I think. I must have misinterpreted something that a friend who lives there said to me. Thanks for the correction.

> It has grown and developed over hundreds of years.

... and 95% of that time there were no cars parked in the street

> pedestrians can enjoy an idle stroll on green meadows ...

Pedestrians like walking on paved streets as well.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that cars should be banned.

Cars are super useful! Cars are useful when you need to pick someone up who is ill, if you need to transport heavy stuff, when the city workers need to collect trash, etc. In all these scenarios it would be nice if the streets weren't crowded with parked cars.

So my suggestion is to remove street parking, turn the streets into shared zones where you can stop your car anywhere for 15 minutes (enough time for picking people up and dropping them off, or for delivering stuff, or for transporting heavy stuff), and where pedestrians, bikes, and cars can travel at reasonable speeds to get wherever they need.

It would actually be nicer for most drivers -- if you park long term, you drive into a garage, if it's just a quick stop, you stop right in front of the house that you need to get to.

> ICE cars should be banned from cities

> a city filled with parked EV cars is not very different

> Curbside parking should be abolished

> just park in underground garages

> walk the remaining 200m

I appreciate the humor. I certainly hope that's how it was intended.

The last part was particularly funny. I get it. Let's dig-up every city and build huge underground car garages --which require massive amounts of concrete, materials, digging, etc.-- generate monumental amounts of pollution and CO2 doing so. And then we park our electric cars underground.

And this is where you really got me: The requirement is to be able to walk 200 meters to every destination within a city. Brilliant! I mean, can you imagine the digging under every city on earth to build massive swiss-cheese networks of parking caverns every, say, 400 meters or so? What are we going to do with all the underground water lines, gas, sewer and, in some cases, power lines?

Yes, as a joke, it's really funny.

Every new development in my city already includes underground parking. The cost of land in the city is way too high to waste it on parking lots.

They are also building lots of underground garages everywhere. I don't know what they do about power lines and sewer lines, but they seem to have figured out a way to do it, considering how many garages are being constructed.

Removing curbside parking would provide some additional economic incentive to build more garages. It's absolutely doable, a single garage can provide a lot more parking lots than the curbs in a 200m radius.

Think about the environmental impact of digging-up and constructing massive underground parking caverns. I haven't done the math, yet, I have done a lot of construction projects of various types. I can assure you that building underground parking structures is probably one of the worst kinds of projects in terms of environmental effects. Not just CO2 generation. Absolutely everything conspires against you for such a project.

I would almost be willing to bet that just one of those underground garage projects generates more CO2 and other negative environmental impacts than all the electric cars you could park in there for their useful lifetimes. Remember that EV's are not environmentally neutral at all.

Start from this basis: Environmentally speaking, the least impactful place to park vehicles of any kind is where you do not have to move one gram of dirt and add one gram of concrete. The simple answer to that is: Existing infrastructure. Which, yes, means, existing streets. Do that and your baseline is mostly reduced to just the environmental impact of the EV's and not much else at the infrastructure level. Anything else --anything-- surely means increased environmental impact.

Second to that might be to go vertical. In other words, above-ground parking structures with the building on top or coexisting on every level. I was recently in Singapore and saw a building fitting this description. Imagine offices around the periphery of every floor and parking for those offices on every floor at the "core" of the building. I can't say I know with certainty how the two approaches compare. I think I can say that not having to dig-up massive amounts of dirt to build a cavern that can support an entire building is likely far worse from an environmental impact perspective.

Don't forget that the minute you place anything underground you are going to have the need for such things as 24/7 ventilation and air management, which means a constant energy load, well, forever. Not so for street parking or above ground parking.

I think this idea of hating on street parking is largely misplaced. As the world evolves towards self-driving vehicles some of the density problems will sort themselves out. You can have your vehicle drop you off at work and then go park somewhere. We can use existing infrastructure more effectively and manage density without incurring massive environmental costs for the life of a city.

Above ground parking puts a limit on density. And it causes a huge amount of traffic. On the road in front of my old office, 90% of traffic were cars circling in an attempt to find a parking lot (there were rarely free spots). And there were regularly cars honking at each other when someone took too long to get into a space.

Obviously cars are environmentally a disaster, but people like them too much to give them up altogether.

But if you drive a car, the least you can do is park it somewhere where it isn't taking away public space. (Parking cars are also in the way of other cars that try to get somewhere)

A better approach, over time, would be to create incentives to decentralize work hubs. Not only are underground garages environmentally horrible, they don't fix the root cause of the problem at all.

Looking at early morning and evening traffic on Google maps for lots of cities around the world shows just how badly we have done in this regard.

If thats the problem to solve: - remove cars from the sidewalks/streets - get to a store not more than 200m of walking

If think the concept of public transport within cities does not work so bad: metro/tram etc. at least here in Europe.

The problem is the integration of them. I lives in Belgium for a while and was happy to use park&ride parking and hope on a tram with the same ticket.

If we want to do this, lets create parkings in and outside the city with a seemless transit - direct exit of the parking to the right perron/app parking with included fare for the public transport. I am up for this (even with a stroller).

You might as well ban cars entirely at that point. The biggest criticism of EVs is that they are still cars. They are still the most resource and footprint intensive form of transportation out there.

We really should ban cars from certain parts of city centres, and cities have been doing so. Changes per city of course, but we don't need to accomodate cars up to the businesses doorstep. If your business actually required car access, you probably wouldn't have survived in a city centre anyway. IKEA requires car access, and you can tell by how much parking they need. A dress shop doesn't need car access, one (taken) car spot versus the hundreds of people on foot. Give me a break.

I am salty because of all the beneficial works that get turned down by the encumbent store owners who can't let go of their measly parking affordance for the sake of hundreds of people actually using the streets.

Not accurate, short-haul flights are.

Means of Transport CO2 equivalent emissions per passenger km

Short Flight 255g

Medium Car (Gasoline) 192g

Medium Car (Diesel) 171g

Medium Flight 156g

Long Flight 150g

Bus 105g

Medium Motorcycle 103g

Gasoline Car (Two Passenger) 96g

Medium Electric Vehicle 53g

National Rail 41g

Ferry 19g

Eurostar (International Rail) 6g

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-the-carbon-footpr...

Also, electric cars with multiple people manage to beat rail:

https://www.pawprint.eco/eco-blog/green-myth-busting-train-v...

Side note: Hacker News should support tables, and shouldn't strip emoji.

Your figures don't add up. Divide the electric car by 4 or 5 and it's still more than the electric Eurostar train, and that's a high speed train too.

Yeah but it still beats the other trains, which is very surprising. Also my second link has more info. I’d prefer better sources on all of this though.

The source is probably an older edition of [1]. The source for that is partly [2].

That splits the figures into 35.2g / passenger-km for electric, and 704.4g for diesel. The per-vehicle-km figures have a 1:3 ratio, but the per passenger figures nearer 1:20, so I think the huge disparity is due to electric trains being on much more heavily used lines. With Eurostar being 6g, they must have very high usage, or maybe the older electric trains really are much less efficient than the newest ones.

[1] https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1843/rail-emissions-2019...

[2] https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/infrastructure-and-...

Do you know how much each underground stall costs? It varies a bit, depending on where you are, but they're extremely expensive.

Do you know how much each above ground car park in a city costs? It’s insane, but we make the public pay for it regardless of if they use them.

I don't exactly see what banning ICE/promoting EV has to do with controlling curbside parking. It just has to be banned. Then the issue of compatibility between EV charging and mechanical parking[0] can be addressed.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6blks7vfZog

If I've learned anything living in central Amsterdam, it's that a healthy city has a mix of all transit options almost everywhere. Cars, bikes, motorcycles, scooters (the vespa kind), mopeds, buses and trams all mix with pedestrians at street level.

Sure, some areas are closed to cars and trucks, but it is just as common that non-cars and pedestrians are simply overwhelming cars on a street by sheer numbers. This means that most places are still accessible to a car or truck, it's just not the most convenient option for most use cases.

I get that not everywhere is going to be like Amsterdam, with high density, narrow streets and a consensus that bicycles are first class vehicles, but the notion that cars have to be eradicated to make a city livable is ridiculous.

Do note that Amsterdam is working slowly but surely to get rid of street parking.

Rather than abolish curbside parking...reserve more of it for specific uses. Every block should have at least one space dedicated to delivery, one for services like maintenance/repair workers, another for drop-off, another for municipal/emergency. Allow standing and active loading/unloading in all but the emergency spaces.

Also, we should not subsidize parking for private individuals (ie none of the uses above) in any way, shape, or form.

Delivery vehicles and drop offs double park, maintenance parks on the pedestrian path or in the no-parking alley. It's tolerated by all road users, including law enforcement. It already is this way, don't need to overengineer anything to achieve what is already there.

Many European cities (at least mine) don't have roads wide enough to double park.

I agree, outside space in cities is too valuable to be taken up by parked cars. New multi family construction should have requirements for underground parking spaces with EV loading infrastructure.

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