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Comment by TexanFeller | Hacker News Reader

A big problem with this is the incredibly long payoff time. You make parking go from miserable to insufferable, but it will take a decade minimum for good public transit and making popular areas bikeable/walkable. Sad experience with government projects tells I’m being generous on the timescale. If you make the infrastructure problems in Austin more painful for a decade there will be a migration away and we might have a death spiral from losing the tax base to pay for all that shiny public transit.

Car free areas also raise objections about accessibility for the disabled. How do you get your wheelchair to the middle of that car free area half a mile from the public transit stop closes to where you want to go.

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Bike infrastructure means some brick separators and painted lanes. It takes less than a month to build city-wide rudimentary protected bike lines.

BRT is similarly quick to implement, if a little more expensive. Remove 1 lane of parking from major downtown roads & replace with a painted BRT lane. Order about 50 buses to run in 1 way loops around the downtown area. Have high frequency BRT between the out-of-downtown parking area <-> downtown core.

Either should be doable under 1 year.

The blockers are all political.

> Bike infrastructure means some brick separators and painted lanes.

The biggest issue with bike infrastructure is that the people responsible for infrastructure genuinely believe this. The end result is usually a scattered bunch of stupidly dangerous "bike lanes" which aren't of use to basically anyone.

You need a separate biking network, which interfaces with car traffic as little as possible. This means you're essentially building "cycling highways" through car-free or car-minimal residential streets. Doing this properly means re-engineering those streets and intersections basically from the ground up, not just putting some paint on a highway gutter.

Thank you for saying this, the half measures currently being implemented most places are indeed woefully inadequate. The “bike lanes” near me are just painted lanes that frequently intersect turning cars. I would LOVE to bike to work, but not if I have to fear serious injury every day.

I cycle quite a lot in London which has put a lot of these in and honestly I think most of the separated lanes etc are a waste of money - they only really make a difference on the busiest roads with the narrowest lanes or at the most dangerous junctions. What does seem to be hugely underestimated is the need to provide lots of decent secure cycle parking at every destination.

> It takes less than a month to build city-wide rudimentary protected bike lines.

Citation needed. Maybe a month of actual painting time once you've done all of the planning, but planning the routes and going through all of the approvals and meetings is absolutely not possible in a single month. Not even a single year.

If you do it on every street you don't have to spend any time planning the routes.

Absolutely not true. Every intersection is its own special snowflake and if you don't consider the intersections your bike paths will not be usable.

Maybe instead of planning bike lanes we should be addressing the root causes of why it takes such such an absurd amount of time to make changes like this. Once we do that we can get back to bike lanes.

> How do you get your wheelchair to the middle of that car free area half a mile from the public transit stop closes to where you want to go.

One would assume you would wheel your wheelchair there. You know, the same way people walk their feet there.

> Car free areas also raise objections about accessibility for the disabled.

What about all the people with disabilities that make driving dangerous or impossible, would love to know how we’re making driving accessible for the blind. There are far more people with disabilities that makes car travel difficult, than there are people for whom direct point-to-point car travel is an absolute necessity (short of someone being rushed to a hospital, I’m not sure what people would need regular, direct, point-to-point car travel).

This is a chicken-and-egg situation. We can't get rid of parking until we have good public transit! We can't have good public transit because all the parking mandates reduce density so much that you can't live without a car!

If you bite the bullet and remove parking, better public transit will come. If you never remove parking, you will never have better transit.

By another measure, removing parking mandates is a very immediate success because it lowers rents by several hundred dollars a month: https://www.planetizen.com/news/2023/11/126192-parking-refor...

Sounds like a skill issue. Paris made itself bikeable pretty quickly.

As for disabled: improvements to walkability and bikeability are also improvements to disabled accessibility in almost all cases. Not all disabilities are visible, and some even preclude driving at all. And when car parking is a hard requirement, there are dedicated disabled-parking zones.

EDIT: "X was built for walkability but Y was built for the car" you always hear this but it's just a lazy BS excuse not to do anything or think critically about the built environment. many of the cities people tout as "obviously this was built to be walkable" used to be clogged with cars (including Paris). it has wide boulevards! and many cities people think "oh this is obviously built for cars so we shouldn't bother" used to be totally walkable and had world-beating public transport (Los Angeles). it's ahistorical, learned helplessness, never backed by any rigorous comparisons, just vibes.

Paris was originally built to be traversed by walking and on horseback. It was originally built for density and walkability with roads tacked on later as an afterthought. Many streets in the core of Paris, Rome, etc. are tiny and barely fit for cars. Not as easy in a city that grew up with cars and are have as much roadway as buildings.

Nothing about this makes it a 'car free area'. They are saying no more arbitrary minimums. Nobody is saying parking is not allowed. You better believe businesses will still want parking for their customers. And a new apartment complex/condo is still going to have them to attract tennants.

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