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Comment by epicureanideal | Hacker News Reader

I’d rather not ride a bus with potentially mentally unstable, smelly, or violent others, especially without at least one other human guaranteed to be present.

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Meanwhile i'm trying to figure out if any city in the us is willing to ban cars. I can't think of any other factor that lowers the quality of life in cities that even comes close to them.

> can't think of any other factor that lowers the quality of life in cities

Meanwhile I think nothing lowers quailty of life more than living in a city. That said I don't go into them so you guys can do whatever you like.

This is a very common attitude with americans that dwell in the country. It's just your bog-standard fear of change and the unknown.

Granted, living in the city does reduce your life expectancy by about five years... mostly because of car usage. If only we could figure out how to better distribute labor across a country and not just in cities.

In the United States, people living in urban areas have a slightly longer life expectancy than people living in rural areas. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), life expectancy at birth in urban areas in 2021 was 78.7 years, compared to 78.6 years in rural areas.

Apparently the gap was wider, they blame air pollution for the rural areas catching up. The big advantage urban areas have is rapid access to healthcare.

I’d love to see some of the east, where there were cities built long before cars that have some of the public transit infrastructure necessary, to start doing what Paris and other places have done by removing cars from streets and replacing them with walkable parks and neighborhood shops and gathering places.

More like they used to be.

New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, there’s plenty of places that could do it. They could prove the concept.

I don’t see how it would work in a city like Dallas or LA as they exist today. They would try and it would be deemed a failure and never tried again.

But successful trials in a few very dense places could really start to show the benefits and maybe we could start bringing it to other cities, even those more traditionally spread out.

I guess in places like LA you can to limited areas like the 3rd st mall and expand (https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@34.01585,-118.4963694,3a,90y,...)

And in London they have patches like the bit near Kings Cross I like https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5349883,-0.125411,3a,75y,7...

I guess you could gradually make those and link them with tube / rail etc

> Meanwhile i'm trying to figure out if any city in the us is willing to ban cars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island,_Michigan

Mackinac is a lovely place, but they ban far more than just cars there so it's not a great comparison to other cities. There also isn't a distinction there between transmission and distribution so it's also not a great model for cities regardless.

> I’d rather not ride a bus with potentially mentally unstable, smelly, or violent others

There are solutions to that other than robotaxis. Like healthcare.

For sure, so let’s do that first and then robobuses. The order is important. The other order makes the robobuses unpleasant.

We could have premium exclusive busses. Still a better solution then everyone being carried individually in their own private vehicle. Also think of the networking possibilities!

Google and Apple do that, and protesters threaten violence.

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