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Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

Fully agreed. And while everything you said is super important and true, one piece that really makes me pumped about this movement to ditch cars is more around quality of life.

If you have to get in a car and drive to a parking lot somewhere to get groceries, commute to work, go out with friends, get healthcare, etc. You will obviously live a less healthy life both physically but also mentally because of it. Walking is exercise, it's something we were all evolved to do and it keeps us healthy physically and mentally. It also encourages community when everyone isn't surrounded by a metal and plastic multi-ton machine. I recently moved to a walkable part of my city and it's actually amazing how much it's benefited my life. I say hi to neighbors and people who walk routes like I do, I get fresh air since not every street is filled to the brim with cars, but honestly one of the best effects is silence. Cars our LOUD. Even electric cars unfortunately, it really has little to do with the sound of the engine at speeds like 30mph, it's more about wind and tire noise. Meanwhile, people walking, biking, or on scooters are silent and it's brought me a lot of peace.

View on HN

I totally agree about the noise and health benefits, but to me it's more a matter of respect and safety. In the U.S., we see too many pedestrians die each year. Our roads are built for cars only, with everything else as an afterthought. When I cross the street, drivers act like it's my responsibility to stay out of their way.

If some people need to use cars for mobility or business reasons, that is fine with me. But they need to have the utmost respect for me as a pedestrian/bicyclist. And the way to accomplish that is to make streets that force cars to slow down and watch out. If we make our cities safe for walking and biking, more people will do so!

> If some people need to use cars for mobility or business reasons, that is fine with me.

Definitely. For stuff like that, emergency services, delivery, trash collection, etc. larger vehicles on streets are totally fine and I think most would agree.

I don't even necessarily think we should ban all cars, but we should definitely stop incentivizing them by heavily subsidizing car infrastructure with city budgets funded by taxpayers. I think if we stop the incentives that were heavily lobbied for by car companies we'll find the _true_ most efficient ways to build cities which will most likely be heavily geared toward walkability and bike-ability, public transport, etc.

worth visiting an old city like Rome. I was shocked by how walkable it was. It was maybe the second night we were there, we causally strolled around after dinner and just happenstance managed to walk by all the major attractions. That's no mistake but honestly when you experience it's so magical. To create a tech analogy I remember the days before Google when search when would have 20 buttons and could take regex and what not. Most people had no idea how to use it and even pros questioned if they were correctly searching so to speak than Google came along and just gave us a box. All that complexity hidden away from us. That was kind of how I felt about Rome. Just wander, you'll get to where you want to go.

> I was shocked by how walkable it was.

I don't see why it would be shocking. It was a city for nearly 3,000 years before cars arrived.

People who grew up in a typical post-ww2 american suburb may not have ever stayed somewhere that doesn't depend entirely on cars to get around outside of manufactured spaces like theme parks.

The American suburbian hellscape is real. I live in one. As far as I can tell the only solution is to burn everything down and start over. I'm open to suggestions though.

Yep, there’s a great book on this topic called “The Geography of Nowhere”. There’s a reason Disney designs things to feel like real places (that don’t exist in America anymore).

Most pre-industrial cities were limited by how far you could walk in 30 minutes to the center of town where the markets and government would be.

Most people walked everywhere, especially in a city.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-29/the-commu...

i've never been in rome but i visited trieste - a very walkable city - a few weeks ago and i was shocked how cars were clogging up everything there. not necessarily cars driving, but parked cars. maybe trieste is a bit special because big parts of it are on a steep hill so it's not that well suited for cycling but none the less, i was very disappointed. not a pleasure with kids. i asked an italian friend about it and his answer was: "welcome to italy".

so, walkable - yes, maybe. but cities that get rid of cars are still on a completely different level when it comes to quality.

I’ve been to a good amount of Italian cities and would agree it’s the same mess of cars all over the place, like anywhere else. I also went to Rome for the first time half a year ago and it wasn’t the mess of cars and Vespas I imagined it was going to be, so hey, perhaps Rome is the anomaly.

> the same mess of cars all over the place, like anywhere else

there are first attempts to reduce the car mess in some cities, mostly by reducing public surface parking and making public transport and biking a viable alternative to car ownership.

The turistic center has big pedonal areas.

However, the rest of the city is as full of cars as it may get.

I have to say, it mostly remains walkable. It just would be so much nicer with more efficient public transportation and less private cars.

On another HN thread it was discussed that because road wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale to the fourth with vehicle weight, a few large delivery vehicles are far worse than many lighter ones. It is better for us all to use the lightest vehicle we can to go get groceries and take our garbage to the recycling facility (or landfill) than to have trahs trucks, delivery trucks, or busses move us about. Trains or other steel wheeled things are the best.

> road wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale to the fourth with vehicle weight,

(Emphasis mine) Do you have a source for this? I do not see how this specific claim could be true, and I am not sure how exactly that needs to be modified to make it true.

I mean, if you take a vehicle that weights one ton and double the number of wheels, that specific claim says that the road/tire wear would not change, as the vehicle weight stays the same. Further, doubling the wheels can't easily be distinguished from splitting the load to two vehicles with half the weight, which should reduce wear & tear of each vehicle to one sixteenth, totaling to one eighth. So there is kind of a contradiction.

And as a sanity check, a passenger car weights ~10^3 kg. A large truck weights ~10^4. So a truck would wear the road something like as much as 10 000 passenger cars. That's a bit hard to believe.

So the actual law might be something like tear & wear scales to the fourth of the weight on a single wheel. But even that leaves something to hope, as I think you need to assume similar wheels. So maybe the actual law has something to do with pressure on the road?

The original fourth power law relates to axle loads, which as you point out is not the same as what I said. So we should get rivian to add a lot more wheels on those amazon trucks. But even if they put as many on as they could fit, the capacity and load is so much higher than what each person getting a delivery would use, you are still in the hole vs a normal ev not to mention a trike just big enough to pop over to the warehouse at the train station to pick up your packages.

Edit: forgot to paste link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

>That's a bit hard to believe.

The way I heard it explained was imagine a toddler jumping up and down on your bed. They could do this indefinitely. Now imagine a rugby player doing the same. The bed wouldn’t last very long.

At the same time larger vehicles generally have a better engine size to capacity ratio, so if you don’t want to pillage the earth for raw earths, lithium, cobalt etc. then large vehicles are still good.

Those Amazon delivery trucks are pretty light weight.

It's not like they are hauling sand, the boxes are mostly empty.

A lot of that can be solved by law too. I know a lot of Americans would see this as an infringement of their freedoms but it’s quite common in other countries to place the order of responsibility to the most vulnerable to least vulnerable. What I mean by this is that cyclists need to give way to pedestrians, and cars need to give way to cyclists and pedestrians. I’ve never quite understood the logic behind jaywalking laws because it penalises the vulnerable rather than places greater responsibility on those who are least vulnerable.

It's useless to build a straight road, 4 wide lanes, then stick a sign on the side going "pls no speederino". The roads and the streets themselves need to be designed so that they do not allow unsafe use. Meaning any road/street shared by pedestrians needs to have narrow lanes, few lanes, sidewalks separated by e.g. a row of trees, speed bumps and raised crosswalks, bollards separating lanes, chicanes, etc.

That's already the norm in the UK. To be honest I'd forgotten many residential roads in the US were dual cartridge ways. That does make things more tricky.

In some Canadian cities, they build the residential streets with only one lane (there’s still traffic in two directions), and it solves both the speed problem and helps with the density problem. I hated it at first, but once I’ve parked my car (probably to take the bus, no less), I’ve thought, gee this is nice.

US pedestrians die at a higher rate than elsewhere but not because you have a lot more vehicle miles, it's down to the appalling quality of the roads (design construction, and maintenance), the shockingly casual attitude to drinking and driving, and the fact that so many US vehicles are pedestrian hostile.

But all of those things seem to be an expression of the US majority way of thinking. That is what needs changing; if you don't pedestrians will still be run over by drunk drivers, etc.

I would personally give way to vehicles of any kind when walking, rather than expect them to give way to me. I have better visibility and awareness, I am easily manueverable and I can stop faster.

I will not put my life in the hands of someone and just hope they see me in order to give way to me. I will take the initiative and be responsible for myself, not require others to be responsible for me... That is called "being a burden".

This is such an interesting comment to me because it gets so much right on how to motivate ditching cars. If you were funding a campaign to eliminate cars to reduce carbon emissions I think you would meet with widespread resistance. If you promote an idea of a higher quality life that is possible w/o cars and explore that - in the end I think you'd end up removing many more cars than the first approach.

I think the root cause is further up the chain of casuality. People need cars because they live in the suburbs, they live in the suburbs because they have children, they want to raise children in more square footage than the urban housing stock offers.

Notable exception being Tokyo

Ironically, if you look NYC in the 1910s, kids used to play baseball in the street because it wasn't yet overrun by cars, suddenly not enough space for kids, so move to the suburbs, which means more and more cars...

And suburbs are not built around public transit anymore, those old enough to have been have mostly shut it down.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

I live on a street that used to have a streetcar line on it! Now it's just a stroad and traffic monstrosity but I sometimes daydream of hopping on the streetcar and going to meet up with friends downtown.

I'm in the suburbs but like you an older one and more densely packed. I'm maybe a mile from a major highway that goes to the city center. It's dead straight and major thoroughfare. If they dedicated one line to rail, none of that mixed BS, and had stops say every mile into the city my god it would be amazing.

Are you sure it is more densely packed? Where I live the streetcar suburbs are slightly less dense than modern suburbs. In the 1950s lot sizes went up, but they have mostly come down again. (streetcar suburbs were built assuming you would get some food from your garden. 1950's suburbs were built by/for people who remembered the depression and wanted a large lot for a garden - or that is my theory.

Streetcar suburbs are not 1950s suburbs, they are 1900s-1930s suburbs. 1950s suburbs are car suburbs.

Right, we have all 3, and they have different forms. 1950s is the least dense.

You're leaving how a key part, at least in America which is racism. Whites ran to the suburbs to escape particular groups and quite frankly still do albeit now it's more in the form of urban sprawl.

This is BS. People go to suburbs because they want a nice house, not because they are trying to run away from race. I grew up in a mix-race suburb. I loved my houses and my friends houses. We had great times on our cul-de-sac since it didn't allow through traffic it was safe to play in the street. We loved our backyard pool. We loved our garage that had a radial saw and a large tool desk. We loved our large 30x20ft family room where we had large slumber parties and large family parties. It requires zero racism to want a house in the suburbs.

Historically, suburbs absolutely were motivated by racism - it's called "white flight".

Today, it usually isn't about racism, it's mostly just continuing status-quo trends without question. But it's important to not put the initial motivation of those trends up on a pedestal.

No need to be personally defensive. What the other comment says is entirely true. There was a mass migration, particularly during the civil rights movement. Here's just one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#/media/File:Gary,...

Plenty of other data shows the same thing. Racism is very much a part of what built suburban america in the large even if it doesn't apply to you or your family personally.

> I think the root cause is further up the chain of casuality. People need cars because they live in the suburbs, they live in the suburbs because they have children, they want to raise children in more square footage than the urban housing stock offers.

Modern suburbs were created by central policy in many ways; the FHA wouldn't underwrite loans for properties with small lots or in mixed-use areas.

Sure, but I'm not sure that's at the root either. Suburbs exist in part due to subsidy decisions on automotive infrastructure. And they're in a stress point in the return-to-office work remote debate now, because even with subsidies on highway infrastructure the commutes to get back to city centers are a major time waste. Offsetting 2-3 hours of family life with commute time is a major quality of life negative.

You've got it backwards. There are suburbs because car infrastructure subsidises many of the costs of that choice. Suburbs are a postwar, post-interstate phenomenon.

"suburbs" dont have to be the unwalkable disasters that we've made them. Brooklyn Heights was "america's first suburb." People moved there from Manhattan seeking everything you just mentioned.

Public school quality and levels of crime (or at least perception of crime) are also huge factors driving parents of small children out of dense cities and into suburbs. Somehow most city governments have been taken over by progressive idealogues who are intent on pushing their luxury beliefs regardless of the negative impact on education or middle-class quality of life. This is how we end up with schools run for the benefit of teacher's unions rather than students, fentanyl dealers in the neighborhood parks, homeless tents on the sidewalks, and organized shoplifting rings excused as reparations for the oppressed.

If we want to give people the option of living without cars then let's start by fixing our cities.

People want suburbia because crime is often lower. Why won't we accept this reality. I don't understand why so called progressives don't just face this issue head on. Increasing incarceration rates makes cities safer. It's true that some small number of people will be jailed. It's also true that more people would move to cities.

And before someone throws out some nonsense politics. I live in the inner city (less than a mile to downtown) in a west coast major city. I can count several neighbors on my block, people who've lived here decades, who are leaving due to crime / rampant drug use.

I'm in an east coast city. I've visited big west coast cities numerous times. I feel our problems are very different. You have policies that support the homeless and people with drug addictions so people facing those challenges flock to cities like yours from all over the country. The nations problems are then dumped on places like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. It's not fair and it's not right. We need better federal safety nets to prevent people from getting into these positions to begin with and if they do safety nets that allow them to stay in their hometown.

Incarceration rates in this country are sky-high compared to others with lower crime. Crime rates were decreasing well before incarceration boomed, too. The evidence is incredibly clear that incarceration is not an effective anti-crime measure, to anyone willing to look.

Obviously lower incarceration correlates with lower crime. When crime is low you need to lock fewer people up.

I would suggest people making this claim learn about the difference between correlation and causality.

And then look at El Salvador. It is incredibly clear that increased incarceration lowers crime.

"Notable exception being Tokyo"

The fact that the japanese in general have no children at all makes this notable exception not be one at all. Humans are not meant to live on top of one another. To me the correlation between fertility and urbanization is a clear sign that living on the burbs is a plus for quality of life and the perpetuation of the human race. Cars are just a necessary tool for being a human in 2023.

Heavily disagree with that humans aren’t meant to live on top of each other. We are a tribal species. We all slept together in caves, huddled under the same furs, building housing that expands to fit all our elderly and our young under the same roof. But we were also meant to roam, our toddlers literally run nonstop. We’re not built to yield to concrete paths bearing metal beasts. The issue is that our children cannot play tag wherever they please out in the open, under the watchful eye of a community to make sure Bob doesn’t pull Sally’s pigtails again. The community cannot keep an eye out for SUVs whose sightlines seemed design to hit children.

How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New (detacted single-family) Home (for about $300k in Tokyo Proper) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w

There's more urban dwelling options than just skyscraper.

Low Japanese fertility appears to be a product of their work culture; you don't have time to go on dates if you leave the office at 10pm.

Living in sky scrapers sucks and is not enjoyable. Same with living in suburbia. The sweet spot is densely packed urban areas that are built on the human scale.

living in skyscrapers is no different than living in any apartment building, except the larger number of apartments with nice views.

what modern skyscapers are doing wrong is putting in only large-footprint high-end retail (like department stores) on the street level, or nothing at all. A zoning change to require small retail stalls at the street level would go a long way to making cities more livable. And all those people living upstairs generate a lot of foot traffic to help all sorts of businesses thrive. (what I'm talking about overall is what makes midtown NY so unpleasant compared to other NYC neighborhoods)

It is different. if you are very high up there is too much wind for a balcony and you have no relationship with street life (people look like ants). 5-stories aka Paris-size is human scale, anything much taller isn't. The higher the floor, the less frequently people leave their building.

>what modern skyscapers are doing wrong is

...is not mandating proper insulation/noise-proofing.

> The sweet spot is densely packed urban areas that are built on the human scale.

Near the subway, and surrounded by historical buildings and nice architecture ... where an apartment usually costs an exorbitant price.

It's fascinating to me that folks see clear market signals like this and don't see it as an indication that we need to build more of it.

It's not that it's very expensive to build (well, it's not cheap either), it's that there's so little supply and so much demand.

4 floors high blocks of flats with shops on the ground floor are such a nice compromise in cities. Eastern Europe gets this right.

Different strokes for different folks. I enjoy living in suburbia very much and densely packed urban areas give me nightmares.

It's a positive vision of where society can go rather than having to sacrifice and buckle down.

Do people not remember riding bikes as kids? Riding a bike is _still_ fun. It never stopped being fun. Now you can do that and get to work.

It was fun until I got hit by a car when biking back from work. Now I just drive to work due to the risk of injury from distracted drivers and getting doored in bike lanes.

It's really unfortunate because I'd rather bike, but the infrastructure in the US even in relatively bike friendly cities here is dangerous.

That's so frustrating and I'm sorry.

The USA is the richest country in the world, but our biking infrastructure is worse than third-world countries. Not only is the bike infrastrcute inadequate and with many gaps, but what does exist is frequently designed to mix with a mode of transportation that is actively hostile to biking.

I hope you find a way to bike again. Biking alongside cars is so stressful and dangerous, but biking along a safe route is so enjoyable.

Luckily there are plenty of good places to bike here and it's enjoyable to do so on weekends.

It's just not practical for commuting to work since the "bike infrastructure" consists of painted bike lines next to rows of parked cars.

if you're not already, you should advocate for the infrastructure in your city. these things do not happen on their own, we must push for the future we desire.

This! Car drivers like to complain about the cost of building bike infrastructure. But if you look at the statistics, bike infrastructure is like 1/100th of the cost per mile as car infrastructure.

That's a good idea. What do you think is a good starting point for this?

Look to join neighborhood associations that influence city policy. Reach out to your council person or the mayor, depending on how big your city is. Talk to neighbors.

Strongtowns.org has good resources

Riding a bike is not fun if you're doing it to commute - having to do it in all weathers, in traffic that feels unsafe, even if you don't feel like it and got poor sleep etc. It's really fundamentally not the same.

> Riding a bike is not fun if you're doing it to commute - having to do it in all weathers, in traffic that feels unsafe, even if you don't feel like it and got poor sleep etc. It's really fundamentally not the same.

With good infrastructure, like PBLs, cycletracks and dedicated trails, it really is that fun. DC is an extremely good place to bike commute and I do it in all weather.

Anywho if you got poor sleep and decided to drive, everyone else is living at the mercy of your alertness. I'd rather you rode a bike.

> Driving a car is not fun if you're doing it to commute - having to do it in all weathers, in traffic that feels unsafe, even if you don't feel like it and got poor sleep etc. It's really fundamentally not the same

In a town that is minimally designed to facilitate the movement of people instead of cars there are multiple modes of transportation available to commuters, including but not limited to public transit for those days when you don't feel like walking or riding a bike.

I spent almost an entire year e-biking to work 7 miles and back 7 miles. I can tell you, all the issues you mentioned are correct.

I think, if we had dedicated bike lanes that were away from the main roads, at least we can address the safety issue. that would go a long way towards getting me back to commuting on an e-bike.

One more big issue for bikes is the cost of it. I've commuted almost 1100 miles on my ebike and already have had 3 flat tires! That's a cost of about 10 cents a mile which means that the cost of flat tires is twice as much as all my other bike commuting costs (depreciation and repairs). So, we also need to address the nails and screws on the paths issue. i think that would be greatly solved with increased bicycle adoption.

That's like 30 bucks per flat! But given your original tires will certainly wear out, start researching puncture resistant tires now. And a patch kit. ;-)

I'm able to fix the front flat tires much more cheaply: just the cost of the inner tube about 6$. but the flat tires happen most frequently in the rear.

the problem is I can't remove the rear wheel myself because the frame doesn't fit perfectly. so, it's nearly impossible to remove the rear wheel unless you're really talented mechanically.

Are you replacing the whole tire after every flat? In my experience, that's almost never necessary.

One of my two bicycles is a secondhand Schwinn Loop, a cheap folding bike with 20" tires and an extremely rearward weight distribution. After riding ~1,600 miles on it, I just recently replaced the rear tire because it wore thin. I had gotten 5 or 6 flats on that tire. I was able to keep using it, and tube, by removing the nail/staple/glass and patching the tube. I still have the same tube under the new tire. The patches seem to be permanent fixes.

(My other bike is a 700c hybrid bike from Bikes Direct, which I've put around 3,500 or 4,000 miles on. I've only gotten two flats, patched them both, and still haven't worn out the original tires.)

Most bikes come with the cheapest possible tires and inner tubes. If you're going to ride a lot then it's worth buying something more robust, even if they're a bit heavier. Continental Gatorskin tires are pretty good, and you can also get puncture resistant tubes with thicker walls and internal liquid sealant.

It also helps to carry a CO2 inflator with a few cartridges. Much faster than a hand pump.

I have thousands and thousands of miles on my bicycle tires. The cheap tires on my commuting bike kept wearing out, and I eventually switched to a high-quality replacement with a high latex content. I haven't had to replace the tires since, and the visible wear is minimal. I cannot recommend good tires strongly enough.

You could request your city council to attach a magnet to the ends of their sweep trucks. This would remove all nails and sharp ferromagnetic debris from the bike paths at no additional cost. They do this in certain countries to avoid flats in public buses.

Worth looking into solid tyres such as tannus tyres. I've had these for years and it means I don't need to worry about punctures.

Or Kevlar. I had kevlar tyres for a long while and they did much better at keeping me from flats. Also, over time, I learned which blocks are inexplicably thorn filled or nail filled and just avoided them as a general rule.

Also practice changing the inner tube till you can do it at dusk while late for a school meeting and annoyed in general :)

Riding a bicycle as a primary form of transportation isn't for everyone. But it is for some people today. By building safer bicycle paths, cycling can work for more people tomorrow. And by advancing technologies and subsidies, e-bikes can open up cycling to more people still.

Even if cycling is a thing that some people only do in pleasant weather, individuals and society benefit from more people cycling and less people driving cars.

Hmm, at this point I have to be in the office 4 days a week thanks to ratcheting up RTO, but my bike commute is the best thing about that, sitting around during the pandemic just made me lose muscle and feel down. In the PNW, snow and ice aren't usually a problem, so it's just lots of cold rain, but with decent gear that isn't really a problem.

Same here. I commute 3 days per week, 15 km each way. It takes me 35-40 minutes, but I enjoy it and get great exercise. I spend the time thinking about my day, and am happier and more productive if I've gotten that exercise.

I do get the occasional flat, but I learned to change it myself, and can get a new 4$ tube on in about ten minutes.

I pack rain pants and a shell and just put them on if a bit of rain comes. I only give up when the roads are snowed in and haven't been cleared yet, which is only a few days per year.

Most complaints about weather and maintenance are easily dealt with with a few basic skills and simple preparation.

It might sound like year round commuting is extreme - but ive found it far easier and far more enjoyable than I expected.

With the exception of unsafe conditions, riding in all weather is a blast. Though I don't know if I'd think so, if the weather included 100+ degree heat. And I'm fortunate to have terraformed my riding conditions through years of refining my route. I'm of the opinion that route choice is the #1 safety factor for cycling.

Granted it's not for everybody, but the extremes and unpredictability are actually part of why I love the great outdoors.

A bike ride is much more invigorating than driving the car. I feel much better after even a short bike ride. No similar benefit from driving a car.

Driving a car if you have not slept is not just a danger to you, but to many other people.

On an average day my bike commute is the best part of my day

> in traffic that feels unsafe

I understand that's how it is in the US, but there's many places where that is not a problem.

It's still more joyous than driving in those same conditions. The wind against the cheek, the body warming up with exertion, the endorphins or whatever when you finish, the biker is much closer to these things than the driver.

I do this with my kids and it's still pretty fun. Though admittedly it's nicer when the weather is good (just like driving).

Then don't commute in bad weather and in unsafe conditions. Working from home and improving road infrastructure is totally an option.

Work from home is an option only for some office folks.

Would you be happy if your baker, barber, car mechanic will not commute to the workplace if it is raining?

I'd be happy if they have an easier and safer commute because everyone else is staying home.

This kind of argument goes both ways. See —- having a car is also an option only for a minority of people, so please stop having it.

This is exactly what you wrote, a vision. The first major obstacle is our urge to lower the effort one needs to get through the day doing all the chores, groceries, work etc. If you tell someone that now they need to move their lazy ass, and ride a bike for a some for kilometers, a couple of times a week and then some more for the so called „greater good”, I’d expect a lot of push back.

I remember riding a bike to go places as a kid/teen. I used to ride a couple miles to a CD store, convenience store, etc all of the time. If I had been aloud to drive a car I would have said fuck this piece of shit bike and thrown it immediately in the dumpster for the convenience of a car.

I just drove by a new giant highway overpass being built in Texas and I was wondering to myself "how many houses could have been built with all the money and resources sunk into this?"

All of Texas (30m) could live in a high density city the size of Tokyo. Which is huge, but not as huge as the rest of Texas.

> ”Cars our LOUD. Even electric cars unfortunately”

While it might be true that there isn’t a huge difference at highway speeds, EVs can make a massive difference to noise levels on city streets! When cars are crawling along in city traffic, engine noise dominates.

As electric vehicles have started to become dominant on central London streets, this has been really noticeable. Sometimes I’ll see queues of cars waiting at intersections but notice how remarkably quiet it is - because they’re all EVs or hybrids! Other times, there’ll be one or two old diesel taxis in the mix and it really stands out how noisy they are in comparison.

Electric cars are loud as well. Most of the car noise is due to tire friction. Start at 11m10s mark on https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8

Not at city speeds they’re not. City streets with EVs are much, much quieter than ones filled with roaring combustion engines. There’s a reason why regulations require EVs to have noise emitters when moving at low speeds (but they’re still much quieter than combustion cars!)

Not to mention the benefits of cleaner air, and far less waste heat being emitted.

Did you see the video I linked or are you just playing a game of repeating your beliefs?

Even electric cars at city speeds are above 75dbA, which may be of course less than a loud combustion motorcycle, but nonetheless already into "loud" territory.

Let me rephrase: in a real-world city environment, electric cars are very quiet compared to combustion cars. For one thing, unlike combustion cars, they are absolutely silent when stopped at intersections or in traffic!

Of course they do still emit some noise when moving, and this noise increases with speed. But not enough to annoy you when you’re trying to sleep at night, or have a conversation with a friend. It is always combustion vehicles which do that!

This isn’t my “beliefs”, but actual real-world experience of living in a busy, noisy city where there are large numbers of EVs.

This will go over like a lead brick in car infested suburbia.

I love a carless life in Berlin, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Seoul, but a carless life in Santa Clarita California? Carless like in Silicon Valley? Not gonna happen. LA, maybe a few can get buy without a car but they'd need to add Tokyo level of trains (40+ lines with express trains) before I could function without a car in a city like LA. I have friends I can generally see in 40-60 minutes that with current public transportation would take 3hrs one way.

I'm not saying we shouldn't start adding the public transportation back to LA. Of course we should. But it will be 100 years before it's anywhere close to where it needs to be for people to give up their cars.

And for suburbia, you'd have to get everyone to sell their 2-3 car tract houses so you can rebuild the cities to be more dense, and get all the stores to give up their parking lots, It's just not going to happen. :(

Too many cities have physically been designed around driving

Have you seen pictures of Atlanta from 1930ies and now?

There are two major interstates cutting thought the city. TWO!

And intentionally designed to destroy communities that were experiencing very high economic growth and an easy way to implement redlining and segregation.

I agree and live in an area where I only have to use my car a few times a week and walk/bike most of the time.

The problem is most people own homes in areas where it's not practical to create a 15 minute city.

Plus a lot of people are lazy. My neighbor drove his car 600 yards to pick up a pizza.

How do we address the people who live in areas where the grocery store is not within walking/biking distance.

Living car free in a city built for it can be bliss. But tons of people do not live in cities built for it. Do we rebuild those cities? Force them to move?

I’m not a architect, but I suspect building a bakery in a place people want to buy bread is more energy-efficient compared to driving 5 miles (uphill both ways) for every bread-enjoyer in a personal cars.

We change the zoning code so that it becomes legal to build a grocery store in those areas, then let the market do its work.

Yes, we rebuild those cities: but that need not be done by force. We can simply relax the draconian Euclidean zoning rules which prohibit traditional mixed-use city building.

And for those handi-capable folks, what do we do?

Building for pedestrians helps everyone.

https://streets.mn/2023/07/19/if-we-want-a-shift-to-walking-...

Well what do you do when your only option is a car but you can't drive?

Cycling infra helps: https://youtu.be/xSGx3HSjKDo?t=42

So does public transport: https://youtu.be/hK5r4dtFXGA?t=326, https://youtu.be/PgFVjCL21WI?t=178

Quote from a stranger: "I am a disabled individual. I literally cannot operate a motor vehicle in a legal capacity. I cannot live in most US cities because of the lack of public transport and inability to walk places. I WANT THIS TO CHANGE. I am visually impaired, but I want this to change not only for me, but others like me whose disability would not hinder their life nearly as much if the cities they lived in were walkable cities. This would also benefit the mental and physical health of future generations, granting younger people the opportunity to see more of their home town in a safer environment."

For anyone with any type of handicap, we should definitely still build our world with them in mind. Building our world more around walking, micro-mobility, and public transit would surely help those who might be in wheelchairs, scooters, etc.

And what happens when it is freezing or storming outside? Not everyone lives in LA.

If you need proof that HN is a bubble, look no further than this thread.

Is your point that all handicapped people need cars to get around in bad weather? I understand not everyone lives somewhere with good weather, but I'll point you to look at cities that get a ton of weather and still manage to have good transportation like Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Tokyo, etc. and many handicapped people make great use of the transportation in those cities.

Physical and mental ability exists in a spectrum for all of us. A small portion of people may physically need to be driven around in a vehicle. But a huge portion of those with disabilities are still fully able to get onto a lightrail, metro, etc. to get around.

So, and I guess I will belabor the point, not all disabilities work the way you think.

I am freely mobile. But ... I have an extreme photosensitivity disorder. (At this point someone is going to make sunscreen noises and I sigh) There's a lot of us out there and we basically need to be under something to get around without accumulating more damage. During the night, I am completely free. During the day, I am wrapped up like the Invisible Man, scampering from one shadow to another, with layers and layers of protection. If I didn't have a car (with a special film covering the windshield, technically illegal), I don't know how I would get around.

I loath walking more than any other activity. Your utopia sounds like hell of earth for me. I don't want any of those things you mentioned.

I don't want to waste tons of time just getting places, I want to live in an area that is not so congested that traffic is a problem, I want space to live. I do NOT want to be near other people just to get somewhere, or worse live very close to others.

I'm actually on board for this! If you want to live that way you should be able to. But, you should be held responsible for paying your share of the infrastructure required to support such living. As long as that is understood, I don't really think there's anything inherently bad with what you describe. But I doubt people who love living the suburban car-centric life would like to see their taxes for infrastructure double. Here's an infographic explaining those numbers https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...

Those costs aren't really all that high, and are easily outweighed by the dramatically lower costs in the suburbs. Everything is cheaper there, land, buildings, repairs, goods and services.

Cities might look good in this narrow measure, but costs are higher and wages are higher, which means cities consume far more goods.

Suburbs also tend to produce more thing in real (i.e. not monetary) terms. They have far more manufacturing, more farms, more backyard experimenters who go on to invent things.

You can't learn, on your own, to be a mechanic in a city, in a suburb you can simply get an old car and mess with it. Same with tons of other fields, in a suburb you can just try it out, in a city you don't have room for that.

Without suburbs cities would fall apart - but the cities don't really realize that. Cities have higher income so they suck in everything suburbs produce, but cities don't really produce anything of their own, it's all internal services.

> Those costs aren't really all that high, and are easily outweighed by the dramatically lower costs in the suburbs. Everything is cheaper there, land, buildings, repairs, goods and services.

He's talking about infrastructure cost (how much it costs your municipality to provide the services that you use, like the roads) while you are talking about cost of life (how much it costs you to pay for other things that you need, like food or getting your car serviced).

On the infrastructure front, suburbia simply cannot compete with cities. Infrastructure cost is bound to be more efficient where people live in more densely populated areas. The length of pipes that a municipality needs to lay down in order to serve a single family home in the suburbs is the same as a whole 6-story building in the city (the diameters of the pipes might differ). On a per-capita basis, there's no contest.

A particular factor in the funding of suburban streets is that the initial paving is often subsidized by the federal government. Once the streets start crumbling down after ~20 years of usage, then the real cost hits. Here's an explanation by Not Just Bikes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0

I think you might be using a very narrow definition of "city". There are tons of small cities around the country where you can choose between a downtown apartment, a townhome in a development, separate small house on a half lot in a canopied neighborhood, or a big house with a half acre of land, all within easy biking distance of the city center. And even those 1000 sq ft houses on half lots can and do hold the old car that you want to be able to wrench on.

> I loath walking more than any other activity

This 'loathing' is going to severely impact your health in later years. Walking is a big part of keeping the body functioning well.

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