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Comment by elmerfud | Hacker News Reader

Yes I agree let's fundamentally eliminate the right of free travel from place to place through the public thoroughfares on the conveyance of your choice. Because it's that pesky fundamental concept that we have of freely moving about through cities through county borders through state borders without being stopped and harassed that's actually the fundamental problem of it all. So instead of just pissing around and banning cars from using the roads that their taxes pay for let's just eliminate the entire concept of allowing people to move from place to place without permits and papers. Because that is a great model for a country to have.

But we're talking about New York city so you've already granted the port authority wide latitude and restricting your movements and controlling the population.

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Years of auto and oil industry propaganda has deluded people into equating freedom of movement with car ownership. My freedom of movement is violated when the subway isn’t moving. For people on a bus stuck in traffic, their freedom of movement is violated by a government that incentivizes car ownership and creates gridlock. As a cyclist, my freedom of movement is violated by reckless drivers putting my life at risk, supported by a government captured by the auto industry, failing to build real infrastructure that enables that freedom the way it does for car owners. Not only car owners pay taxes, by the way. Particularly in Manhattan.

Common American reply. It's turned into "freedom".

Public transit can easily be 1st class transit with freedom, as long as it's prioritized as such. When transit has to fight with vehicles, it's strictly worse, and discourages usage.... Unless you're in the poverty class and have to.

Roads are high speed infrastructure to get from 1 area to the next. We call them highways and interstates. WE NEED THOSE.

Streets are the downtown, slow speed where human scale stuff happens. It's also where transit should be. These are also needed.

Those 2 or 4 lane highish speed abominations where businesses are loosely connected by asphalt oceans are "stroads". They do both a street and a road terribly, induce sprawl, and are terrible for anyone not in a vehicle.

And sheesh, with your polemic, depriotizing motor vehicles doesn't cause you to lose freedom... AS LONG AS OTHER MODES OF TRANSIT ARE EASIER/BETTER.

But you’re still free to travel there as often as you like, for however long you like, any reason you like, and you don’t have to tell anyone about it.

I’m not allowed to drive my car on sidewalks or bike paths, but that doesn’t mean we live in some dystopian nightmare where the right to free travel is restricted and I have to show papers everywhere I go.

> The first step to rid ourselves of our, dare I say, enslavement to our car-centric way of life is to make car ownership as expensive and inconvenient as possible. I hope more cities follow. Start closing off entire areas to cars.

I'm pretty sure GP is responding to this, which while I appreciate the transparency, is atrocious. Creating negative incentives just makes people angry, and generally surfaces a lot of inequality.

I just went on a long haul train ride with my dad who is heavily disabled. The people on the train were nice but trains are very clearly built around the concept of able bodied people. There's a single bathroom for disabled people and it's inside one of the sleeper rooms. He basically had to sequester himself in his room for 24 hours. Meanwhile, my dad can drive a car.

Maybe before we go making hyperbolic statements that are sure to encourage decision making that results in gross inequality we should think about the basics of a problem first.

I think cars have a lot of advantages like the one you mention (and others, eg much less crime risk). But we can pull back on the car obsession a little bit, we’ve gone kind of crazy the past 100 years and made some awful cities. I think cars should be an option, they just shouldn’t be the only reasonable one.

I agree. I walk, take the train, ride my bike, or ride the bus whenever possible. I've adapted a good portion of my life to that thinking, including buying a more expensive house that I could do those things.

But a lot of folks in this thread came to defend someone who analogs cars to enslavement and championed making them so expensive people can't afford them.

Your free travel is free only because its true cost is heavily subsidized and carefully hidden. Pay what it costs and you can travel all you want. I’m done with my tax dollars paying for your bad habits. “Free” my ass.

How are motor vehicles subsidized?

----------------------

Loosely enforced speed limits

Arbitrary setting of speed limits

Free, off-street parking mandated in building codes

Low Housing density induced sprawl and car requirement

Exempting pickup trucks and SUVs from emissions laws

Lack of vehicle safety laws to protect pedestrians and cyclists

Aftermarket products exploit a lack of regulations

Mandatory Insurance law: payout requirements

A mortgage interest deduction drives suburban sprawl

Tax laws favor car ownership

Tax formulas favor car commuting over public transit, biking, and employer van pools

Pedestrians have limited ability to sue drivers

Pedestrians can’t sue car makers for defects

Hit and runs are rarely prosecuted

Out-of-pocket car expenses don’t cover the cost of roads

.... Is this a good start, wussboy?

I would say the two factors of free parking and free road use far eclipse the rest.

Given "using the roads that their taxes pay for", OP seems to be under the impression that gas tax just about covers it. Difficult to find an unbiased source but iirc gas tax covers 30-50% of whats spent on roads

Of course, like other infrastructure, its not necessarily meant to pay for itself directly, so long as economic growth makes up for it, but I think there's many cases where adding another lane to thr highway costs more than it enables. Frankly a lot of the road construction seems like a grift to me - how many hours can we take to resurface this section of the interstate ? Easy place to pour money - the roads always need repair, and yet, with all the bridges and tunnels failing with inadequate upkeep, one wonders if the money ever touches the ground.

The real cost of roads is in the space you take up that other cars cannot (at least in any area with significant population density). And that’s not paid for at all.

This is a gigantic strawman. Having some limited car free areas like downtown cores has nothing to do with free travel. There are already plenty of areas you aren’t allowed to drive. And car-free areas can make a downtown area so much more pleasant, for example Mountain View closed down just a few blocks on one street in its downtown and that alone makes it 10x better to visit.

weird take

I am free to move across borders, it's my car that requires paperwork and requires that I submit to detainment and harassment by any cop I happen to pass by.

Having a car is great for doing your own thing on your own schedule, but it's also an expensive liability. I'd rather live in a world where I'm not compelled to take on this liability just to get across town.

> But we're talking about New York city so you've already granted the port authority wide latitude and restricting your movements and controlling the population.

This is a bizarre argument. Cars are heavily policed: they must be registered and licensed. The state tells you where you can park it, and your ability to operate it is completely controlled by the state and can be taken away from you. In order for car infrastructure to function, there is a huge increase in police presence in people's lives to enforce traffic rules, parking, etc. None of this is true of, say, walking, biking, or taking transit, all of which are pretty unregulated, even in New York City.

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