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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

This ship sailed like 60 years ago (blame your parents, speaking of consequences). At this point, autonomous driving is the best we can do in places like Los Angeles or San Diego.

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I've been traveling around visiting US cities.

Cities like San Antonio, TX with its Riverwalk and Atlanta with its Beltline not only show every other city a path towards walkable and sustainable future but also how a city can invest tens of millions in walkable infrastructure that yields billions in economic investment and development.

Also, I don't have a car so I've been taking bus, train, plane, and occasional car rental to travel between towns and cities. Recently I've started taking buses. What I've discovered is that I can get on the bus in the morning, plug in my phone and laptop to AC power, and using my mobile hot spot work all day while on the bus. The buses travel on interstate highways which have excellent continuous mobile service. Amtrak trains are awful for working because lack of stable internet connection.

San Antonio barely has a functional downtown, there's a grim shell of tourist oriented restaurants and hotels immediately around the river walk but really struggles to be a center of business. There are few condo buildings downtown. Unlike Dallas and Austin San Antonio hasn't really seen a resurgence of it's downtown region.

Furthermore the river walk was built in the 1930s as a way to improve property values, and remodeled a handful of times over the decades, that's not a recent innovation

The San Antonio river walk has been extended 15 miles along the San Antonio river north and south of the downtown area. It has spurred billions in investment along its banks. This is exactly what my point is, there isn't a resurgence in the downtown region because new development is happening north and south along the river.

The ship hasn't sailed at all, very few things in life are really set in stone (for example fossils).

Doesn't mean a transition is easy or cheap. Nor will it be quick. After spending years and years both in the US and Western Europe, I wish for a healthy mix of cars and public transport. As it stands, this means significantly and heavily reducing cars in high density settlements where public transport is already sufficient or generally viable in the future.

I absolutely love cars and driving but I despise them in city centers. So much property could be regained to improve the daily lives of millions of people in various ways. There is a multitude of projects which have shown how successful this approach is.

One such project is the ban of cars from the Jungfernstieg area in Hamburg. 5 years ago you would walk along Jungernstieg and hundreds of cars would pass by, especially young men showing off their shitty, loud, tuned Mercedes CLAs to everyone. Then the city reduced access for cars there upon popular request and repurposed some lanes for plants and bicycles.

It took a while until people understood [1] but eventually they did. All sources in German.

Before (4-lane road): https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/verkehr-in-hamburg-fahrverbot-au...

After (intermediate car-reduced): https://www.hamburg.de/pressearchiv-fhh/14369764/2020-09-30-...

Future (cars banned): https://www.hamburg.de/bvm/medien/17154924/2023-05-30-bvm-ju...

[1] https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/autoverkehr-am-jungfernstieg-das...

The ship hasn't sailed, it will just take a very long time to come back to port

If it's not out sailing, why are we waiting for the ship to return to port?

In the 70's, the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands was renovated from car central to bike central. That only took a few years, bike paths aren't that expensive.

For the ship to come back to port, someone has to want it to come back to port.

I guess you don't know anyone that makes under $50k/yr. in the US. I'm guessing you probably just associate with other high-paid techies who can't understand why commoners just can't "eat cake". Trust me: when a bus route is shut down because rich people sniffle at a 0.2% tax for something they'd be too embarrassed to use, thousands suffer. If you've never had to switch from a 30 minute bus ride to a 1hr bus ride because of this, you will not understand any of this debate or its consequences, as I stated.

I was merely saying that for public transportation to be viable again in these cities, someone has to act - either by lobbying loudly and/or by putting their money where their mouth is.

Proposing that autonomous driving is the only way forward sounds pretty sad to me as it doesn't solve the main issue with cars: their environmental impact.

I didn't mean it would be easy to do, nor that it is decently doable to use public transportation in these cities' current state. Sorry if it came out that way.

You're certainly doing a great job making public transportation sound appealing to us "techies".

You should look at Dutch cities, for example Utrecht got rid of a huge chunk of hideous highway in the center of the city and in its stead is now a beautiful canal with one the busiest bike-traffic streets in all of Europe.

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-remov...

Yanks could do the same if they wanted to, but unfortunately they've been brainwashed into thinking walking is the devil

The housing stock of a city rebuilds itself over a 30-60 year timeframe though. So starting now doesn't preclude us getting ahead of things for the future. We need some gutsy Robert Moses type figures, utilizing modern knowledge and less racism.

Throwing up your hands whining "Its to haaaaarrd" is very un-tech-bro of you.

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