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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

> It's about who's going to pay for those highways

Those who are paying now. And if it's only for emergency vehicles and trucks that bring food to cities (because you are right, cities need them to survive), then don't you think you need less infrastructure? Doesn't seem to me that 6-lanes highways are fully used by emergency vehicles and trucks.

> won't work and will definitely not happen anymore.

It's not black and white, it's a gradient: you can definitely try to move from the right-hand map towards the left-hand one.

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> trucks that bring food to cities (because you are right, cities need them to survive), then don't you think you need less infrastructure?

You'll still need the current paved roads to remain pretty much in place. Granted, the highways with 3 or more lanes could lose them (the extra lanes, that is), but we're still going to need 2-lane highways in order to connect the bigger centers of interest.

To say nothing of the fact that less personal cars will also mean much more expensive gasoline/diesel in order to cover up for the last sales (once you get rid of personal cars), lots of economies of scale will vanish over night. The same discourse should be gad regarding the current forced push to electrification.

Note that illich is against cities. In his mind, a more atomised world would emerge from such a ban, more localised and focused on communities in neighborhood, with less dependencies outside.

So the only thing using roads would be emergency. Food would need to be local too or transported slowly by speed of walk or bicycle.

Which means that we would all be taxed pretty high for something rarely used.

> Food would need to be local too or transported slowly by speed of walk or bicycle.

I'm sure he knew that, and I'm a genuine fan of Illich (with all his pluses and minuses), but what he proposes will certainly lead to future famines.

Well big cities are a problem we need to address. They absolutely depend on fossil fuel for trucks to bring food into them.

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