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Comment by david2ndaccount | Hacker News Reader

Many cities in the US are only usable by car. You can’t just leap from a car-based city to a non-car-based city, you have to provide transitionary options (also even car-optional cities still have parking garages).

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What it takes is tearing down large swaths of current car infrastructure and the buildings surrounding it. Eg. Seattle tearing down the viaduct a few years back

Which is what it took to turn American cities into car based to begin with.

That's not a great example, because Seattle spent kajillions of dollars on a ridiculous tunnel under the city to replace the viaduct AND THEN built a second ground-level highway on the newly available delightful waterfront space. Seattle's way of getting rid of the viaduct is a colossal waste of money and years of work for a terrible shitty result that is 1000% car based. A giant failure.

I don't think it's a _complete_ waste. It's better than it was before, but, it's absolutely true it could've been done much, much better than what we got.

Somehow many cities took the leap from extremely pedestrian friendly in 1900 to completely car based, so "you can't just" is clearly not true. It just takes a lot of willpower, or in the case of cars, tons of lobbying.

Don't forget a huge post-war economic boom, plus a bunch of racism and white flight.

Absolutely, and while the transition is probably desirable, it'll take a long time. And yes, of course there's in fact still too much car traffic around here, and parking garages exist in great numbers.

Sure, but many cities in the world are not in the US.

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