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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

> We need to encourage people to only use a vehicle of a size they actually need.

Social engineering is generally bad. We don't need to do this, because people should decide for themselves what they need.

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Who are "we" in this scenario? Over the last 70 years the United States has undergone an extreme course of social engineering whereby every aspect of our lives was re-centered around the car. That could never have happened without government powers and subsidies.

It was called the "Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956"[1]. There was a time before almost every family had multiple cars and the population was 164,063,411 (not 350 million) that cars seemed like a pretty good trade off I suppose. Like many old politicians cars have likely outlived a some of their usefulness.

Ran across this Youtube Channel the other day. "Not Just Bikes"

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A

This guy is an Urban Planner I think. Makes a pretty compelling case for things that make Urban areas more livable.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...

Nah, he's just a mechanical engineer who moved to the Netherlands and started making content on how much better the infrastructure is than the shitty suburbs of Toronto and a few other places, and did a few videos basically re-hashing StrongTowns content which was started also by a civil engineer iirc. I like his channel though. There are a few other YouTubers like CityBeautiful, CityNerd, who he's done collabs with and are in the Urban Planning discipline in some capacity.

When your country is flat you can have spent the last 50 years designing cities more around bikes.

The flatness imo only lends itself particularly well to their dutch bikes, but nothing to do with whether a region has invested in their biking infrastructure. Plenty of places are flat, and plenty of those flat places are horrible car-infested hellscapes that are falling apart. There's nothing particular unique about the Netherlands.

Fwiw, I'm very much pro car-last infrastructure.

Yep. J-walking laws were completely promoted by car manufacturers since pedestrians got in the way of drivers. Basically pushing everything that was not a car off of the roads.

How so? What about bikes, motorbikes, buses and trolleybuses? (Brit; don't know the rules.)

This happened because cars (and roads and their vehicles in general) are unreasonably useful. They deliver emergency services vehicles. They deliver goods. They enable people to live further from where they work, so they aren't so beholden to local employers, and vice versa with employers being less beholden to local labour. Their drivers don't go on strike. Etc etc. Trains are a very useful optimisation for highly-trafficked routes, but they aren't the general case.

It happened because we built an interstate highway system between and through our cities, destroying downtowns and neighborhoods, and dismantling many functional transit systems.

If it weren't for this incredibly massive car subsidy, we'd have a much more balanced transportation system today.

Interstates aren't only for cars. They're for many different vehicle types, no?

I think it would've happened regardless. Cars took over the entire world. Even in places where everything is close-by it's abnormal and limiting to not have access to a car.

No, that's wrong. In London for example, 46% of households do not have a car.

London is very unusual in that it has a high density mass transit system and much of it was built before cars existed. The fact that half the households still have cars after all that tells you how useful they are.

But they can go rent a car easily. Or they have a friend/family member that they can borrow a car from.

And 46% already means that it's not the norm to not own a car.

>because people should decide for themselves what they need

"Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins."

Every successful, decent civilization is a balance between limiting personal rights where they impede on the enjoyment, safety, and security of others.

And extraordinarily few people are deciding anything for themselves. The epidemic of monster pickup ownership isn't some careful evaluation, but is decades of extremely successful marketing.

The other way to phrase it is that we need to make the price of a good or service more accurately reflect the negative externalities.

Indeed. Markets can only be efficient if all costs are priced in correctly (as possible). This includes environmental damage.

I have a 20 year old 5 seater sports sedan with a 3l engine that gets ~ 32mpg on the highway.

Marketing is social engineering the US plenty; you need a bigger truck/suv so you feel high up and safe -- at least this is what the worrisome folks think.

> people should decide for themselves what they need.

People's choices affect others. Heavy vehicles wears more on tires and road surfaces, adding particles to the environment which cause thousands of deaths each year.

Its done all the time, for all kinds of purposes, including car-first and bigger-is-better mentality. It didn't come out of blue.

> Social engineering is generally bad.

So insurance company shouldn't raise your premiums if you are a bad driver and crash your car every month?

There are like 10 private actors trying to socially engineer me. Among them are car drivers that act in an agressive manner when they see a bicycle on the road, they want to discourage cyclist from using the road and do it very effectively.

Insurance companies don't raise premiums in hopes of making you a safe driver, they do it because you're higher risk.

That's the difference between social engineering (policies designed to produce an outcome) and market forces (policies reacting to changing environments).

Social engineering is a layer on top of market forces that rarely works as intended because people aren't very good at predicting the behavior/reaction of markets.

People that throw drinks at cyclists while driving aren't market.

The idea that you can reduce all of society to market forces is preposterous.

If you take you argument about 'social engineering' to it's logical conclusion, it would mean that we should not stop people from starting open pit fires in parks and causing wildfires, we should mandate vaccines, chlorinate water, have food safety standards and other idiosyncratic outcomes.

> The idea that you can reduce all of society to market forces is preposterous.

Good thing I didn't say that then.

> If you take you argument about 'social engineering' to it's logical conclusion,

Logical conclusion or comical extreme?

That's a hot take if I ever heard one.

Since you take a stance against social engineering, would you agree to completely defund the road transport network, given that it is acting as a massive social engineering operation in favor of cars?

I don't believe it does do that, any more than water works are a social engineering operation to get people to drink tap water.

Also remove parking mandates. No reason to believe that so much parking is the most efficient use of valuable land.

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