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Comment by n2d4 | Hacker News Reader

As a European, this seems like an impossible feat at this point. It has been tried, but the cities have evolved in a way where this is just unfeasible.

EU cities have mostly been built to be dense around train & bus stations. US cities (besides NY) are extremely large, flat, and spread out. Even if you had public transportation, it would be practically impossible to get from A to B because there are no hotspots besides the downtown/city center.

The concept of a "car city" is real. It's a vicious cycle that the US entered at some point, and besides rebuilding the cities entirely there's not much hope for public transport.

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Aren't there examples of European cities that "converted?" Amsterdam at least somewhat comes to mind: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...

>>Aren't there examples of European cities that "converted?"

Loads and loads and loads - at least here in the UK, nearly every city centre is converting to be pedestrian only, with cars being pushed further and further out, with councils emphasising that you should really park your car at one of the massive park&ride car parks outside of the city centre then just take a metro or bus in. That's a good thing in my opinion. It's really shocking to look at pictures taken from the city centre just 30 years ago and see that cars basically were prioritized everywhere, the main shopping street in Newcastle for instance used to be a normal road with cars parked on either side - it hasn't been like that for a long time and the city manages just fine.

Not really. If the city is older than cars it didn’t really convert from a car centric city. It tried to convert to one for a while, but that’s not the same as being built with cars in existence.

Atlanta has interstate interchanges that can fit the entire Vatican in them. Every major city in the west is packed with boulevards 6 lanes across. The US didn’t just accommodate cars, it optimized for them as it was building out. Making that walkable again isn’t a matter of converting a 6 lane road into a pedestrian walkway…

Well yes, the question was if there are any European cities that have done it - and as you said, that's been traditionally possible here because cities were never designed to be car-centric in the first place. In US, it's the opposite - cities were built with cars in mind, so just building parks over highways isn't going to solve anything.

Amsterdam was 2-4 storey apartments with narrow streets, but the streets were taken over by cars. Once enough traffic was removed/space reserved for busses, trams and bikes, the public transport was able to effectively serve users.

The US has huge areas where each lot must be single family, at least 50% yard, etc. As well as huge parking lots around businesses. Therefore putting the residents much further from the places they need to be. Meaning busses and bikes would need to travel further. They still need to stop at an interval of say, 10 minutes walk, and therefore they're slower. Even if you gave them a dedicated lane this would not help.

As well, in London I can take a bus and usually access dozens of services at my destination, like food, entertainment, shopping, etc. In the US, a destination might just have one service, and just a few random businesses in walking distance. Again increasing the number of miles travelled.

According to the article, Amsterdam was still built with bicycles in mind:

> At the start of the 20th century, bikes far outnumbered cars in Dutch cities and the bicycle was considered a respectable mode of transport for men and women. But when the Dutch economy began to boom in the post-war era, more and more people were able to afford cars

Amsterdam also has 50% higher population density than Los Angeles, despite housing much fewer people.

Well fair enough, but I really don't think Americans should throw their hands up in the air and say "we just can't do it." This is the country that landed a man on the moon after all, it should be a solvable problem. Maybe the Europeans can't help with their own experience, but the American solution of "just add another lane" is self-evidently unsustainable. Something new is needed.

"just add another lane" actually makes traffic worse, not better. It's an interesting paradox that has been known for over a century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

I agree, but self-driving cars (in the success case) are something new. More safety, less traffic, no more parking. I could see them make the way to Europe too (I'd love to have Waymos in my rural village, where cars are still common).

>>less traffic, no more parking.

These two goals are incompatible. If the idea is that self driving cars don't need to park, they can just drive around in circles until needed(which is an absolutely insane idea for a whole number of reasons, but let's stick with it for a second), then that will only increase not decrease traffic.

>>I could see them make the way to Europe too

I've love to see a Waymo navigate some narrow British roads where there is no road signage and there is no defined priority.

Like, this is a real situation encountered on a road here by myself just few months ago, skip to 1:30 to see the interesting bit - I'd love to hear proponents of self driving cars explain to me exactly what the car would do in this case. Hand over to a remote operator? There is no signal there, sorry.

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

No idea what a driverless car would do, but that VW driver acts like they’ve never reversed in their life…

Less traffic and no parking is compatible because there are fewer total cars, as Waymos are shared.

I don't see any indication(other than some people on HN saying this) that people would not want to own a personal vehicle anymore just because self driving cars are a thing. Whether the car drives itself or not, people want to have their own personal space. Not to mention the (very common) need for things like child seats which don't really work with shared cars.

Well, that is Waymo's plan, which is explicitly a robotaxi, that this article is about. If we were talking about Teslas, the self-driving vision for instance would be different.

Well yes, let me rephrase that - I don't see any indication that people would switch to robotaxis over owning a personal vehicle. I see that now already - it would be cheaper for me to take a taxi(you know, normal human operated kind) to work every day and back than to own my own car. Once you add up the finance payments, insurance, maintanance and fuel, I could easily just Uber every day to work and back and it would actually save me money. I don't want to do that though, as I like the flexibility of owning my own car - and that feeling doesn't change even with robotaxis. Maybe I'm an outlier?

That might be normal in the US, but in Europe it's very common to take public transport to work every day.

I know, I'm in Europe. And yes, public transport is an option but a lot of people still own and drive cars(just on my street every single house has at least 2 cars each, even though our public transport options are excellent).

If 60% of people want to travel at 8:30am and they don't want to share a vehicle, then there needs to be that many cars and space for them to park.

You can park them further away from their destination, this increases traffic massively driving to the parking.

As well, if the ride is comfortable then people will be willing to plan longer commutes. An induced demand which increases the number of miles driven and hence traffic. Watching TV in the car is a major appeal of self driving.

If at peak time only 60% of people are driving that means we saved 40% of parking space at no traffic cost, even if we just park the cars normally! That is significant.

I'm also convinced that the peak share of vehicles in use is less than 60% at any time of the day and year, but happy to be proven wrong.

It's simple: just level the US to be as flat as Amsterdam and bikes will be just as viable for a wide enough range of people.

Wild idea: maybe they could try to make a pilot project of that in - ironically - the decaying Motor City maybe.

Also: the big car mania spilling over from the US to Europe makes driving in European cities/roads more and more difficult, as formerly bidirectional parts are now choke points where only a single oversized SUV can fit through at a time.

I suspect that if a metro would be built in a large car centric city over time the city would adapt to the metro and become less car centric. But making the economical argument for building the metro in the first place would be very hard. It would pay back over a time scale that capitalist economies hardly consider.

No, capitalist economies tax effort and spend it on longer-term things. It's democracies where things can be rolled back by the next leader that are the main cause of short-termism.

(I don't have a better alternative to democracy; just stating that's where the flaw is. Well, that and zero incentive to do things well/efficiently outside of political kudos).

Things used to work pretty well in capitalist democracies when the capitalists were well regulated and taxed and the demagogues didn’t have unrestricted personal access to the voter base.

That was a pretty brief period, wasn't it?

Funfact: San Franscisco has a public transport system in the area where the driverless cars are operating.

It took how many years just to add one new line?

I believe you are talking about Van Ness BRT. A couple of decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to build a two mile bus lane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Ness_Bus_Rapid_Transit

LOL.

It's like that cartoon with the swing. "I just wanted someone to paint a line on the road"

https://fisher.osu.edu/blogs/gradlife/2011/11/16/a-simple-sw...

That also applies. But I was thinking of the Chinatown line that connects with Fourth and King.

How many years to implement self driving cars?

But really I think they’re the future of the city.

That's because it's a hard problem, not because of local government.

I think the point of the comment was: is this even a problem that needs to be solved because we already have a perfectly good solution, it's just that nobody (for REASONS) wants to implement the solution. So, some company has to solve a "hard problem."

A perfect "this is why we can't have nice things."

Not everyone agrees that public transport and rebuilding cities around them is a good idea. That’s what you people who are obsessed with trains and busses don’t get. Self driving cars are still cars, and cars come with a freedom public transportation can’t match. It’s more likely that self driving cars become public transportation than we enact the fantasy that the US changes it’s entire cultural mindset to hate individual choice.

I for one don’t want to ride a bus, every time I’ve been on one there’s been some drugged out maniac sketching everyone out. They’re also usually gross like public bathrooms and building more, forcing everyone to use them, isn’t going away to change that.

> every time I’ve been on one there’s been some drugged out maniac sketching everyone out.

I'd never been on a bus until I moved out of the US, and I've never run into that problem.

> you people who are obsessed with trains and busses

I'm not obsessed, I grew up in the US. I drove a car every day since I was 16.5 years old, well into my 30s. I also drove fuel trucks, tractors, boats, and so much more during my life in the US. It wasn't until I moved out of the US that I saw a different way of living. Does it have issues? Yep. Does it mean I can live without a car payment, insurance, and maintenance costs? Hell yeah, and that is a lot of money.

Do I miss having a car? Yes! I actually do. However, when I need one, I can usually rent an electric BMW one for a few hours for ~50 USD an hour, or ~100 for a day. But realistically, on average, I only need a car for a day, every few months.

U.S cities were rebuilt to accommodate cars, and there's no reason they can't be rebuilt to undo this damage.

USA has trouble building enough houses as it is, or a single bridge or piece of infrastructure, and you say they can simply rebuild entire cities?

I mean... have you seen how much space is taken up by parking lots in the US? Often, the parking lot is bigger than the building it serves. That's a lot of space for homes ... shops ... instead of places for cars that do nothing.

Over 50 years.

uh, what about the opportunity cost of rebuilding something that's already been built?

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