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Comment by nextlevelwizard | Hacker News Reader

>You've never been outside the US, have you?

You are right. Having lived all of my life in Finland, I have never been outside of US... oh wait... Again what is the alternative for me? To walk to the train station. Wait for the train that goes once per hour to spend 10 minutes on a train, so I can then walk to the bus station and wait for the bus that goes every 30 minutes, so I can take the bus for 15 minutes, so I can get - sort of close to work - and then walk for 5-10 minutes to work. In blistering snow storm.

or I can just hope in my car and drive 15 minutes and be within 30 meters from my office door.

Do you see how getting rid of cars doesn't seem to have alternative?

>Tens of millions of people in my city do it every day.

What if I don't live in your million people mega city? What if I live in my 30k people small city and commute because I don't want to pay out the ass to live in some shoe box?

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The point I think is that if we as a society NOW starts to develop with public transport, walkability and bikes in mind we can with time get a built environment that works without a car. No one wants to remove all parking or take away your car and force everyone to take the bus/train.

I live in a small 30k city in Scandinavia my self and know what you are talking about. It was a city with rural fishing villages and farming communities on the outskirts up until around 1960, but then the city started to spread out due to the increasing access to cars. Now most everyone drives everywhere, the small mall outside of town has grown to enormous proportions and now we even have american style strip malls along the main road out of town. Myself I live in a suburb outside of town that back in the days were farm land and some small cottages for the city folks. My family moved out here in the 80's, my dad used to take the bus out here to camp when he grew up in the 60's and 70's. Out here we are car addicted. People drive everywhere even if walking or biking takes about the same time. And people drive everywhere because the car is the default when going anywhere because we live 10 km from the mall and 18 km from the city so nothing is close by. Anyway, this is just me rambling. My point is that our places are designed for cars and such using the car becomes our default mode of transportation. By rather designing our environment for walking, cycling and public transport we can get more people to walk, bike and use public transport. And if you still "have" to use a car, that is fine. A car is a tool, and sometimes it's the best tool for the job, but very often it is not and the externalities of mass car usage is not worth it (In my opinion). :-)

Perhaps you need a (e-)bike. Instead of taking 15min, you'd take 30min at city speeds.

But actually, if cars disappeared, people would have an incentive to work closer to where they live. So instead of living next to a quick road connection, you could live next to a quick bus/foot/bike route. And others would do, too. And look at all the unneeded space that used to be streets and parking lots, ready to be repurposed into new houses and offices!

>Perhaps you need a (e-)bike. Instead of taking 15min, you'd take 30min at city speeds.

My old commute, prior to switching to full time WFH, was ~25 miles and took 25-30 minutes by car depending on traffic/stoplights. It would take me an hour to an hour and a half on a typical ebike, and it would be far too cold to make the trek 3 months out if the year.

I guess you chose your work/housing combo to be only friendly to a car. The alternative in this case is to choose a place where they are not so far apart - hardly impossible.

At only vastly increased housing prices, sure.

That is not a given, see sibling comment.

The tech industry is scattered all around the Bay Area. I’ve had four jobs in the last sixteen years, and each of them has been at least twenty miles away from the next (San Francisco, Mountain View, Walnut Creek, Sunnyvale).

Place built to require X is unuseable without X unless the dependency is broken - news at 11.

That is 15 minutes at 80km/h. e-bike can only go upto 25km/h here and even then biking is not really suitable for most of the year due to ice and snow.

>people would have an incentive to work closer to where they live

Again this is easy to say for people who have already made the decision. If over night cars became illegal many people would now be stuck with basically unlivable properties since there is no public transportation or at least not good ones.

I could move closer to my office, but I would have to pay twice as much for same living space and that is now when cars still are a thing. The prices would go up by quite a bit if you literally couldn't live further away. At least this is what I hope you mean, if you mean that I should instead look for a job near me then that would just be silly.

Cars becoming illegal over night is about as ralistic as popping up infrastructure replacing it over night. It's a complete straw man.

In reality, cars can only disappear gradually, with less-car-dependent infrastructure replacing them as they go, and prices adjusting together with that. If you want to find reasons that no-cars can't work, you'd do much better by acknowledging that their disappearance would bring wider changes to urbanism.

(Also, it's not unheard of to choose a job based on what's in the area. Academic couples do that quite often: when one moves, the other often tries to find a job based on where they go.)

So basically you decided to run your life in a fairly uncommon combination of factors, then based on it make strawman judgements about everybody else's reasons to own or not own a car, and in the end expect real world to follow these judgements. And you wonder why people assumed of you that "you've never been outside of the US" - it's exactly such attitudes which triggered their mistake.

Ahhh, Finland, home to Simo Häyhä (1905 - 2002) who famously couldn't do shit without owning a car.

A farmer from hundred years ago didn't use a car, such a good argument! This is like saying that no one in USA should be poor since Steve Jobs was famously worth millions. Like what even is your argument? That I am not as "hardcore" as Häyhä?

> Having lived all of my life in Finland

I was thinking the amount of whataboutism has a familiar smell. Just accept you live in the ass-end of the world where few want to (and even then it seems we want to kick out those who would), and that it comes with a price tag.

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