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Comment by NegativeLatency | Hacker News Reader

Can't speak to this everywhere but in Seattle and Portland there is already extensive underground and 1st 2nd floor parking for many of the "4 over 1" style of modern apartments.

Part of the problem with this is that it's so expensive that it cuts into the developers budget leading to less housing being built in medium density areas and larger/taller buildings so to keep the margins up.

Even if you imagine a magic shrinking situation where a car could be shrunk down and put in your pocket like a pokéball there's still the issue that roads in cities don't have the throughput to be able to move all those cars effectively.

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If only we had a means of transportation that could efficiently move large quantities of people into dense areas of living.

It would be like a really big car that could fit lots of people. You could then put it on tracks so it had its own right-of-way or even underground.

Oh well, one day we'll figure it out. I'm sure instead what we should be doing is expanding our highways and building more parking lots. It'll fix the problem one day I'm sure of it!

except that one big car is not controlled by you, and you have to schedule your trip around it, rather than have the convenience of any-time availability. Not to mention you can't really carry much onboard.

Your objection is specifically a cultural objection rather than one based on any physical real world issue.

Japan, many european cities, etc are all comfortable with the provision and use of widespread public transport.

Where it's a problem is those locations where people such as the Koch brothers [1] invested 50 years (1970 - present) and tens of millions of dollars to bend both public opinion and state and city representatives against public transport.

It didn't take much to have the land of the free muttering in lock step about freedumb's, liberty, and their right to roll coal.

From a distance it was like watching lemmings march over a cliff [2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvQ-uEP_w7A

> Japan, many european cities, etc are all comfortable with the provision and use of widespread public transport.

And yet, they have many many cars.

> a cultural objection rather than one based on any physical real world issue.

and this is what i dislike about discourse about public transport.

It is woefully inadequate in the majority of the US. Until the day it is fixed, car will always be a superior mode of transport, but then if car is so often used, there's no public incentive to build out more PT.

And by now, the suburban sprawl has made it such that building out the necessary PT with sufficient quantity and quality to replace cars is prohibitively expensive.

The best solution, imho, is a fleet of auto-driving cars that do not need to be parked, but is available at one's beck and call. Think uber, but is available 24/7 on demand.

These are just small, super inefficient buses.

I don't understand what it is you dislike about the discourse. But to address your point, the United existed before cars. Post WWII, we took very intentional steps to dismantle all the trams and passenger rail we had (we had so so many trains), and to design suburbs that require cars. And by "we," I mean government officals and all levels of governments, along with the wealthy capitalists (car manufacturers could sell more cars if there are more places that require cars, and railroad tycoons made more money in freight than passengers).

Infrastructure is built upon intentional decisions with agendas, not following laws of nature or something.

Do people not have to schedule around 15-30 minute drives? How is that any different from “I can be there in 15 if I make the S3 train otherwise about 25 since I’ll catch the 86 bus that runs shortly after”? There really is no defense at all for being car dependent. Literally every other country in the world proves you don’t need them.

> Literally every other country in the world proves you don’t need them.

Please, tell us one country in the world that doesn't need cars.

Many, may be less dependent on cars than the U.S. . But no country is independent of cars. Using such hyperbole doesn't help the conversions. It just deepens the trenches.

> Do people not have to schedule around 15-30 minute drives?

That's not the same kind of scheduling. You can miss a bus, and be forced to wait for the next one (which will at 15 minutes minimum), but your car departs exactly when you're ready to leave whenever that is. After that, then you add the 15-30 minutes drive time (or more for a bus, if it's not an express bus and makes intermediate stops or if it takes an indirect route for your itinerary). This is so obvious I'm surprised I have to point it out.

Where I live, the subway comes every 3-5 minutes, like clockwork. Is that really so inconvenient?

On the rare occasions you have more stuff than you can carry, you can just pay for delivery. It's far cheaper than the ongoing total-cost-of-ownership of a car.

> Where I live, the subway comes every 3-5 minutes, like clockwork.

aka, you've just qualified your use of public transport with the condition that you would not ever need to wait more than 3-5mins. What if you had to wait 30mins or an hour?

In the majority of cities in the US, esp. slightly more rural areas or smaller towns, this is clockwork public transit is highly unlikely to be the norm.

>What if you had to wait 30mins or an hour?

I wouldn't live in such a shitty, broken, mismanaged shithole. Properly managed places are able to provide good public transit.

>In the majority of cities in the US, esp. slightly more rural areas or smaller towns, this is clockwork public transit is highly unlikely to be the norm.

Right, because the US is broken and doesn't know how to do this stuff properly. It's like complaining how Eritrea isn't able to provide efficient public transit.

> I wouldn't live in such a shitty, broken, mismanaged shithole. Properly managed places are able to provide good public transit.

So you don't want to live somewhere near forests or lakes. Somewhere, where is still some for of nature present. You only want to live downtown in a major city. Let me guess, you don't have children. Because many people change their opinion about that when they become parents.

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