Hacker News Reader

Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

It's true, and it's odd, because the impulse clearly comes mostly from a desire to level economic inequalities - yet it comes from people who can afford to bike to work, or work from home. In that way it resembles a colonial attitude toward one's own society, at precisely the time when clean, carbon-neutral, fast and efficient personal transportation has come within reach for people below the social status of the proponents of ecological purity. The fact that they don't welcome its availability but instead reach for the next lever by which to reduce living standards and mobility (in the name of "justice") speaks to the classism and privilege underlying their crusade for purity.

View on HN

> people who can afford to bike to work

A bike costs less than a single monthly car payment, and has approximately zero recurring costs. And the infrastructure is cheaper to maintain than car infrastructure, by a lot, reducing the tax burden on cities and towns.

If a household was able to switch from two cars to one because biking was a reasonable option, they’d save hundreds of dollars a month from insurance, maintenance, and the car payment/depreciation.

I support biking as an alternative largely because I’m cheap, the environmental benefit is just a bonus. (And the health benefits, and that it’s just easier to bike 3mi than to drive that distance and have to search for parking)

>> just easier to bike 3mi

Where I grew up in Los Angeles, only the very wealthy lived within 10 miles of where they worked.

> Where I grew up in Los Angeles, only the very wealthy lived within 10 miles of where they worked.

Thats not a mode of transporation issue, that is a city planning issue

See "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtaHNAaDhjU

Bikes are cheap. Living within cycling distance of your workplace can be incredibly expensive.

Exactly! Which is why I try to propose fixing zoning issues and allowing people to live closer to their workplaces, along with the infrastructure changes to go along with it.

And: public transit as a viable alternative. I live ~10 miles from work, but it’s just a short trip from home (by bike or tram) to the train station, which drops me within 0.2 miles of the office. And the trains run every 10-15 mins all day.

I could also walk 15 mins from home for a bus that goes to the block of my office, and has service every 10 minutes until ~midnight, but I’m lazy and prefer the train.

(US citizen living in Europe)

When I lived in Chicago I had two trains inbound in the morning and two outbound in the evening. It sounds limiting but it was nice in that I could never be tempted to come in early or stay late. Last train home departed at I think 5:30 so I'd have to be walking out of the office by 5:15 at the latest.

In many near-urban areas, bikes bridge the gap between the home and public transit, not necessarily all the way to the office. Living 2 miles from a far-flung transit stop might mean 10 miles or more from an urban job, but the bus or train covers most of it.

Bikes are very important modes of transportation for recent immigrant communities. They’re not likely to be working downtown or in a big corporate campus anyway. Construction, food service, retail, building and grounds services are more spread out in near-urban or suburban areas.

Even a long bike ride could be way cheaper than a car and way faster than public transit, which often is built out like spokes from the urban hub. Traveling perpendicular to the spokes can be challenging.

Car dependency is an enormous burden on the least well off

Imagine what would happen if the cars all disappeared, and suburban living was no longer viable.

To eliminate the car, we'd need to move all of humanity into tiny apartments in super-dense cities, something that isn't practical nor desirable given the current design of cities and the current state of society.

(There's also the issue of 'where does food come from?', and the fact we can't fully automate farming yet, so still need people to live and work where the food is produce, in places where cars are essential)

That bit about farming is perhaps less relevant. Fewer than 2% of us farm. That part of the car equation is small.

Oh, and we could live in villages. Like we did before cities grew into such megaliths. That might work too.

We can't go back to villages and working the fields by hand or with horses for the same reason we can't go back to living in caves and hunting/gathering. There's simply too many people now.

That's further than I meant to suggest.

There's plenty of land, plenty of places for people that aren't mega-cities. Those of us out here know that. And my commute? Down the hall to my computer.

Put small towns on train lines, the car issue is lessened. Make the shopping districts walkable, again lessened.

I do use a car out here - to get to a city center where I walk from then on. A train or bus would have worked too.

> I do use a car out here - to get to a city center where I walk from then on.

Is that appreciably different from driving to a mall and then walking through it to do your shopping? A quaint downtown square with a hardware store, a grocer, a butcher, and a barber shop is nostalgic but doesn't serve large populations as well.

The city center I walk has two malls, 20 coffee shops, 100's of businesses. Art, museums, outdoor parks with bandstands. Some people live there and rarely leave.

Pretty different from driving to one mall I guess.

And who goes to 1 mall to do their shopping? I know people who visits three grocery stores and a big-box store to get their groceries. Different places have different stuff, different prices.

I guess that's all part of the car mentality. Takes as long to walk a mall, as drive to another one.

The village/train idea is, make geography meaningful. So you go to a place to do a thing, invest value in the activity.

You are making a classic straw man argument of the form: ”I shall take the thing and crank it up to the max & insist that only instantaneous change happen to show how ludicrous that would be”.

This is a wildly disingenuous argument! Incremental change is possible. Partial change is possible.

Increasingly popular slogans like ‘Just Stop Oil’ or ‘Fuck Cars’, or talk of imminent human extinction, don’t seem to be calls for incremental change, though.

I recall a billboard in New York asking us to ban cars and “reforest” all the roads, which would likewise seem to present hazards to local cycling

Yes, that's true! Which is a way of affirming my original point, that biking to work is for the most privileged.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com