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Comment by nakajimayoshi | Hacker News Reader

It’s truly understated how much damage the automobile industry has done to the U.S. economy.

The country was built on railroads, the poor excuse that it’s “too large” for rail and walkable cities was always a cop out, people too lazy or blind to realize that driving to McDonald’s in your F150 after filling a flatbed with Costco Groceries isn’t how the rest of the planet lives.

New York and Boston are anomalies on the American map. You really won’t find any other city inside the U.S. that has as many pedestrians.

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There is a law (laws?) in the US that dictate the amount of parking spaces each building needs. It's calculated using a Magic Formula.

IIRC the formula was made by a man who had zero experience in anything and didn't even own a car. He just made up the numbers off the top of his head.

And now Americans have more parking spots than people.

Still everyone seems to love the European style walkable cities but refuse to understand they've actually made it illegal to make cities like that. Zoning laws don't allow for mid-rise buildings with commercial use on the bottom floor and regulations about minimum amounts of parking space force every second block to be a parking garage...

>There is a law (laws?)

it seems highly unlikely, given the way law works in the U.S, that there is one overarching law governing this.

There are probably varying laws in each jurisdiction - but sure, these laws probably just copied whichever jurisdiction was first mover in the space.

Parking minimum requirements are usually handled at the local level.

Parking minimum recomendations were somewhat standardized by the Institute of Transportation Engineers,(ITE). So whenever city councils around the country decide to prioritize car usage over walking and public transit, and obligated to guarantee people a place to store a car, they often turn to the ITE's guides.

That said, the ITE's parking minimums guides are themselves kind of arbitrary. And the guides absolutely assume that practically everyone is traveling by car, and maybe (!!) that's not a great assumption to build on.

A YouTube channel called Climate Town created a fun and well-researched video recently on the topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8

Most likely it was the Climate Town video I was remembering in my comment =)

At least the link is marked as visited for me, so most likely I've watched it.

It's also sad how many other countries are eager to replicate the US's mistakes here.

Cries in Norwegian.

That would be unfortunate. We just got back from vacation and thought Oslo and Bergen were fantastic places to be car-free.

Oslo is quite good and getting better. Central Bergen is also very good and anywhere along the light rail, but Bergen made the same mistake as most other cities in Norway in the after war period. They let the city expand outwards to car dependent suburbs. They are trying to move in the right direction now at least. That's not the case for most other cities in Norway. It's a car dependent country.

Our cities is small, but at least I feel we are trying to balance things sensibly. That is have a mix, some single family housing, some row houses, and then fill core and close to core with mid-rises of varying heights.

How can you tell? American economy is the biggest in the world and growing, unlike Europe.

Do you claim it'd be even bigger with European style cities?

I can agree on quality of life grounds, but "damage to the US economy" seems like a hard sell.

> Do you claim it'd be even bigger with European style cities?

Yeah, very likely it would be bigger if people didn't have to waste time in traffic, commuting. Imagine the value added if 50% of the people wasting their time driving in major US cities could be instead using that time to do something else during their commute. Or how much money has been dumped into building and maintaining roads that could be used for other public utilities/services with higher ROI, like education, or healthcare.

American economy is the biggest due to other factors, in spite of being entirely car-dependent, not because of it.

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