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Comment by philip1209 | Hacker News Reader

As a Manhattan resident, I’m excited. There should be at least one city in the USA built for people instead of cars. I understand it’s not for everybody, but 75% of the residential space in the county is only zoned for insipid, paved single-family home suburban hellscapes. Leave one city for people who want a European-style walkable city.

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NYC is very car centric. Just because you don't need a car to go see your friends or run errands doesn't change that. The streets are lined with cars, sometimes double parked, and collisions with pedestrians are plentiful.

Maybe if there were fewer cars on the road, there would be fewer collisions with pedestrians.

Only 22% of Manhattan’s households own cars. Maybe the people who live on the island should be prioritized over visitors.

This is a first step.

It’s a driving city

You must be joking. Since tyrant Robert Moses, NYC is undeniably built for cars. Maybe if anything had changed since then you would have a point, but the fact is American society is wholly incapable of even maintaining, much leas building, public infrastructure due to its demented obsession with privatization and profit, so NYC's transit system is a clusterfuck of rot and in no way something to be proud of.

>public infrastructure due to its demented obsession with privatization and profit

It's not privatisation that created laws forcing a minimum number of parking spaces. You can bet if there were no zoning laws or mandatory parking space requirements US cities would be a lot more walkable, like Asian cities.

>It's not privatisation that created laws forcing a minimum number of parking spaces.

It is privatization that renders the government only capable of punitive solutions (regressive fees, etc.) rather than constructive ones (public infrastructure upgrades, etc.). Realize the revenue from these fees will be 99% laundered and swallowed up by private contractors. That ink is already dry.

>You can bet if there were no zoning laws or mandatory parking space requirements

Nonsense. This is the demented obsession I described above. You aren't making any sense at all. Working people aren't lobbying for parking space requirements; petty business owners are.

Yes, but this is a move in the right direction.

Hijacking infrastructure (roads only for busses) seems like a weird way to reduce “congestion”

It does work to an extent, but it's an appallingly cheap strategy that will fall very short of making NYC public transit remotely decent.

No, it's a scam that will backfire and ultimately end in regression. You can't just get rid of cars. You have to replace them with something. Working people will feel the pain of this because the trains are already way too overcrowded.

Punitive measures in the absence of constructive measures will absolutely fail. This isn't complicated.

This would be a more reasonable argument if we were talking about a city like Dallas. Manhattan is one the most transit oriented cities in the US. Bus, ferry, and train service already exist. All that require would be an increase in frequency as people leave their cars.

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