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Comment by jokethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

There's an argument which comes up often when talking about a society without a central government: "Who will build the roads?"

Besides the simple idea of neighbours building and maintaining small roads, I argue that I wouldn't want the highway.

Between the ecological damage, the noise, air pollution, increased reliance on shipping things from far away vs buying local - are we really sure building the massive road network in the US was the best option? Consumerism may be good for the economy, but I argue it's not in our best interest.

Sure, I love the freedom to drive fast anywhere but at what cost?

And who knows, maybe if we didn't have a central entity redistributing resources in an arbitrary way and shaping the market, some entrepreneur would have worked on flying cars and skipped the road altogether.

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> some entrepreneur would have worked on flying cars and skipped the road altogether.

In practice, a society without a government is just a collection of local warlords depleting all the resources in a violent struggle for power.

For example, consider the history of Somalia or the general concept of a power vacuum.

So I'd think the chances of such an environment supporting an entrepreneur working on flying cars to be near zero.

I'm not sure why you've been downvoted at the time of my commenting; but you've probably upset someone who deserves to be upset. The sheer amount of space that is killed off in many cities to support roads and car parking is insane. If there wasn't that much dead space, walking around would be more than feasible.

Car-centric design sits in competition with pedestrian-centric design, and the bias towards road over-construction has ruined a lot of urban spaces. At the very least, rolling back government involvement in road construction would be helpful.

You can't have a walkable city, or any kind of city really, without a central government of some kind.

About flying cars, I don't think they are a solution to almost anything.

First of all, they'd always need more energy because staying in the air doesn't come free. Lifting a whole car for the usual 1.2 people in it seems wasteful.

Secondly, the noise problem would be huge. I don't see how flying cars could ever be more quiet than road-using cars (again, more power needed to overcome the drag that's generated by the lift, and propellers, jet engines or whatever aren't exactly quiet on their own). They'd also produce their noise up in the air where it can spread over a much larger area compared to land-based transportation, where even a small line of greenery reduces noise levels quite nicely.

Finally, even perfectly self flying cars (and obviously, I wouldn't want to have the average car driver handle a 3 ton flying machine over my head) would need a big amount of space around them in all directions. I doubt that there's enough air space to handle the amount of car traffic that even smaller cities currently have.

There's a reason we only see helicopters used in a small niche, and I don't think flying cars or the currently worked on drones are ultimately that different from helicopters.

How strange. I imagine the argument is propagated by the historically illiterate. When I think of the origins of modern roads, I naturally think of English turnpikes at the dawn of the industrial age -- all privately owned toll roads.

> There's an argument which comes up often when talking about a society without a central government: "Who will build the roads?"

Zeppelins are way more efficient. Use water as ballast, or compress the helium you don't need.

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