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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Ditch off street parking and buildings will become much more dense, which in turn will make them more valuable (manhattan land is more valuable than suburbia), smaller (because people can't afford much space when land is expensive), which increases density further.

End result: Nobody has space for a car, lots of demand for public transit, makes it worth building public transit.

Unfortunately, there probably will be transitional years of people fighting for parking spaces at ridiculous prices before the transit gets built.

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The problem is that a functional public transit system requires functional roadway design to begin with. Austin is a sprawling mess with a highway system of concentric rings cut through with crossing highways. It's designed for lots of cars funneling people to and from sleepy bedroom communities & downtown. It's not designed for moving masses of people point to point where they need to go.

With the roads Austin has, public transit is expensive to maintain and slow. Expanding the system won't change that, but only exacerbate the current problems.

" Ditch off street parking and buildings will become much more dense, which in turn will make them more valuable (manhattan land is more valuable than suburbia), smaller (because people can't afford much space when land is expensive), which increases density further."

Not necessarily true. In the situation where infrastructure building is almost impossible, the only net result for this is the pubic transit will become more and more expensive.

> End result: Nobody has space for a car, lots of demand for public transit, makes it worth building public transit.

Also, far more tax revenue (from making land more productive) makes public transit more affordable for the city.

The “let’s make life shittier for people so they’ll do the things I think are right” is bad politics and bad policy.

Worked for Europe. Everyone there lives in houses perhaps only half the size of a typical US home, and they're happy with it. Most people have the option to go live in the countryside, have a big house and drive a car, all for the same money, yet they choose to have a small city apartment and use public transport.

Europe was already built before cars existed whereas most cities west of the Mississippi were designed for automobiles save for a tiny downtown core.

This is especially true about Austin.

Paris screwed up their city in the 1970s. They fixed it. The city didn't die.

https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-insolite/photos-...

There needs to be a will to change.

Umm, the public transit is much better and I guess cities are more dense than say Austin at-least?

This is false. Europe always had public transit, up-front. If you look at e.g. Paris you see that the peak in car ownership and beginning of the decline coincides with the economic crash of 2008:

https://www.ceicdata.com/en/france/motor-vehicle-ownership-p...

Overall, the change has been small, and most people still have a car. And the metro network was very advanced by 1939 (unlike some US cities, these lines stayed):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro#/media/File:M...

That's in one of the densest and most famously walkable cities in the world. Most cities in the United States aren't going to be Paris anytime soon, and that's before we consider the dismal state of regional transport (particularly around the West Coast) which was also already extensive in France prior to 2000.

There is just no real basis for claiming that Europe restricted cars prior to building good transit. You might find it in one or two cities, but certainly not most -- in Europe, socialist and communist parties held significant sway until the late '70s in many countries (in a few they've hung on), and pushed for transit the whole time.

Europe BUILT transit. It's not like the tribes that migrated in from elsewhere found a working subway and decided to build Paris around it.

America needs to CHOOSE to build transit. The carrot approach hasn't worked, so it's time for the stick.

> The “let’s make life shittier for people so they’ll do the things I think are right” is bad politics and bad policy.

So do you propose we lift all bans on drunk driving as to make life slightly more enjoyable for a subset of society?

At some level all laws trade off “making life shittier” for some to “make life better” for society. You can argue against particular laws but categorically being against it reduces your argument as asking for anarchism.

That’s framing “getting out of a local optima” in the most negative terminology. Guess everyone should stay stuck in the local optima and not even attempt to find a better one or global one.

It's not making life shittier, it's making life better.

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