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Comment by drunner | Hacker News Reader

And that is a long standing failure in urban planning in the US. Cities that don't support walking/biking/public transit stupid, but just accepted as the norm here.

The whole I-10 thing in LA right now cracks me up. Like they are begging people "please take the bus/train, don't drive", because 1 road closed. Imagine if the bus/train was already preferred because the infrastructure was so much better. Imagine if all the haste/special orders they used to fix the road, they consistently used that to build/expand public transit and walking/biking instead.

The damage is so deep that it feels irreversible at this point, like the US will be doomed to cars and traffic forever. If it took NL like 30-50 years starting in the 70s to reverse course, were looking at a century+ here if we were to start now, which were not.

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> The damage is so deep that it feels irreversible at this point, like the US will be doomed to cars and traffic forever.

There's lots of energy to change things, but you need to find the right city. It will still take 50 years to even approach the level of Amsterdam, but here in Boston I live car-free and the bike infrastructure is getting better every year. Right now the problem is density: solving the car problem ultimately means building dense housing.

Or perhaps it means building less-dense light commercial?

I'm not a big fan of the perspective that our only solution to the current housing issues are to package humans in quarters whose main selling point over chicken coops is that your feces don't fall on the heads of your downstairs neighbors.

the idea that there is either the zero-density of single family homes, versus giant apartments that are skyscrapers with thin ceilings and walls, is a false choice due to the US’s bad urban planning.

there are a lot of density options between everywhere USA and Manhattan - row homes for example - that would give a pleasant middle ground and still massively improve density and walkability

This is needlessly hyperbolic. You don't need to cram humans into a SimCity arcology to achieve sustainable levels of density. Hell, you don't even need skyscrapers, which are foolishly inefficient in any case. 3- to 6-story mixed-use development is all it takes (when I say "build housing" I'm only referring to the most pressing crisis, not suggesting that housing should be zoned separately).

Now that the US made that choice, more density and more walkability has to necessarily come at the expense of drivers. Some of whom can handle it and some of whom who largely can't afford to restructure their lives around super dense and super expensive urban cores.

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