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Comment by bedobi | Hacker News Reader

Private automobiles do not belong in cities. They are guests there. But they've invited themselves in and taken over the place.

It's disturbing how common it is for people's default assumption to be that it's the pedestrian/person on the bike/scooter/what have you 's fault that they got hit by a car. Rarely the driver's fault, and NEVER the urban designer's fault.

Most crashes are fundamentally caused by designs that encourage them.

We know drivers speed, we know they text while driving, we know signs and even enforcement doesn't work etc etc. The ONLY conclusion is it's the built environment that must disallow crashes and people being hit by cars from being possible in the first place.

Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces, more vegetation, raised crosswalks, dedicated and physically segregated (by bollards, concrete blocks etc) spaces for pedestrians, people on bikes etc etc.

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I find single lane one-way streets to feel much safer to walk through as I can generally manage to anticipate the actions of one driver at a time.

Agreed; my thought is that it greatly reduces variables for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists.

More specifically, I'd specify road width rather number of lanes. Roads where drivers feel they have room to squeeze by pedestrians and cyclists seem to increase risk.

Road width is tricky. If you make it too narrow, the road is hard to use. If you make it feel like there is a lot of room to get by pedestrians and cyclists, drivers will go fast. The trick is to make it feel like there isn't enough room to easily get by, while actually having enough room to do it safely.

But it's also important to position yourself on the road properly. When driving on narrow roads, I drive over the middle, so opposing drivers will slow, and then get back to my side, so we can squeeze by carefully. When cycling or walking on narrow roads, I position myself where a car's tire would tend to be, not at the edge of the road; this helps a driver see that they need to avoid me, although I'll make room as they get near (yes, somewhat out of self preservation).

Cities are welcome to erect whatever barriers they like to private cars. But don't think there wouldn't be economic impact if far fewer people commute in, come in for the evening, or decide to move out because visiting the suburbs or the mountains is too much hassle. But maybe it's a worthwhile experiment.

The misunderstanding here is that cars are the primary way people commute into the city. This might be true in some places, but for most cities PT and residents make up the bulk of commercial traffic in a city - it makes sense when you consider that most roads only let a few dozen cars a minute through, vs a few hundred people per train (and way more during peak hours).

However, you look at the built environment in a city and the pedestrians often only get 20% of the road area between buildings, while cars get 80%.

I can't speak to averages but I'll say car traffic into Boston is at least as bad as ever and commuter rail is still way down relative to pre-pandemic. So, yes, people take train but a huge number of people drive. (I try to take train the rare times I go into the office although it takes about the same 2 hours as driving.) And the commuter rail is totally impractical to use for an evening event.

Hah, I was about to respond roughly the same thing: Taking the rail into Boston is so impractical that it's easier to drive.

FWIW: The T/Commuter Rail (apologies for blending the two) has more than 90% of US rail accidents. I noticed a ton of maintenance problems the last time I rode it (in 2021) and I don't know if/when I'll try it again.

I know there have been efforts to improve things but service was also cut back during the pandemic. (There are some express trains again.) I'll still take it preferentially for 9-5ish situations like one I'll have next week but it's not actually any faster in general (though I can sort of relax for most of the trip) and is totally unusable for going in for an evening play.

And that's almost certainly a pretty good commuter rail system by large urban US standards. (Not as good as NYC of course.)

So, to my original point, saying "don't drive" is essentially equivalent to saying stay out of the city in general.

Car skeptics are not saying “don’t drive”

They’re saying “allow viable alternatives to driving”

You wrote "Private automobiles do not belong in cities." I'm not sure what's ambiguous about that. Certainly if you tell me I don't belong someplace, I would take that literally.

> pretty good commuter rail system by large urban US standards

I used to take the Caltrain from Palo Alto to San Francisco. The line from Kingston to Boston doesn't even compare.

Caltrain: Tinted windows, comfortable seats. I'm comfortable using a laptop to check email while I ride to work.

MA Commuter Rail: No tint on the windows, seats so bad I'm uncomfortable using a laptop.

I wouldn't call MA commuter rail "Good" by US standards. It's treating MA residents like a captive audience, and then the politicians and leaders scratch their heads and wonder why we'd rather clog the freeway with luxury cars instead of taking the train.

Why makes it impractical for an evening event?

I've seen in other cities that, bizarrely to me, the rail shuts down before the end of sporting events, concerts, and other things that would attract people to the city.

Maybe they don't want drunks?

There are very few nighttime trains and it would take me a good extra hour to get home even once I caught one of the sparse trains. If I had to take the train in for a play I'd simply pass.

Out of curiosity, how hard would it be to take a rideshare home? Too expensive?

Yes. Probably close to $100. (I'm about 45 miles outside.) And probably hard to get a driver later at night. I do book a private car to and from the airport but I'm not going to do that for a random evening out. (The small theater I have a subscription to also has a free parking deal at a nearby garage so that doesn't even factor in.)

Meanwhile in Tokyo 40 million people virtually all take the train, and those who do drive never experience traffic or gridlock

I like to think of PT as placing an "upper bound" on how bad traffic can get. If PT is faster than sitting in a car, people will take PT instead, alleviating congestion. This more or less results in traffic getting worse until it reaches the speed of PT, at which point people start switching transport modes and it stops getting worse.

If the train took the same amount of time as driving I'd take the train every time - driving sucks, whereas I can read or watch videos on the train.

This works because (grade-separated) PT can (at least relative to roads) take on an effectively unlimited amount of extra commuters without getting slower, as pretty much all of its costs and transport times are fixed, whereas roads just continually get slower with additional traffic. This is part of the problem with busses and the like - they get caught up in traffic, so unless they get their own dedicated lanes you won't get the same traffic-reducing benefits as you would with heavy rail and the like.

When I was an undergrad there was I think one bus route I took in 4 years because it was marginally quicker than walking an extra 15 minutes to catch the subway depending on where I was.

My preference within the city when I'm there these days is subway or walk. But the connection to the subway really only works on a commuting timetable and, if I'm going to park on the outskirts anyway to catch the subway I'll mostly just drive in.

It's very, very possible for public transport to be overloaded to the point where people have to wait for another train because there's just no room left. Some NYC subway lines are like that routinely during rush hour.

Yeah, that's why I specified "relative to roads" :P. There are capacity limitations, they are just much more generous than the alternatives.

> you look at the built environment in a city and the pedestrians often only get 20% of the road area between buildings, while cars get 80%.

How is that significant? I very rarely have run out of room on the sidewalk. Cars are larger than I am, they need more space.

I agree with the general consideration that cars waste real estate, but sidewalk width hasn't been a problem that I've seen.

Uh, I encounter that everywhere from San Jose to NYC to Miami

You run out of room on the sidewalk? Like a traffic jam? Maybe we're talking about different things. I rarely have to stop moving on a sidewalk, or if I do it's not for more than a moment, and I'm talking about the most dense cities.

Maybe NYC in the theater district when some plays are letting out ...

Times Square can get pretty bad. But, yes, that's unusual.

My more conventional frustration is wide roads with shitty traffic signalling that hold up a crowd of pedestrians while 10-15 cars crawl through the intersection. That being said, at peak times some areas definitely get extremely busy with pedestrian traffic.

Realistically you do need vehicles in cities for logistical reasons etc, so it's not really a sensible line of thought - but it's still annoying :). It's probably worse in other cities, as Melbourne has plenty of street-level trams with separated rights of way as well as many roads being single-laned both ways, so it's honestly not that bad here.

>> for most cities PT and residents make up the bulk of commercial traffic

"According to the American Community Survey (ACS), public transportation commuters constituted about 5 percent of all workers in the United States in 2019. Though public transportation (transit) was a relatively uncommon method of traveling to work in the United States as a whole, it played a prominent role in certain places, like the cities of New York, where over 2 million people commuted by public transportation, and San Francisco, where over one third of workers did so."

-- https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

So even pre-pandemic when public transportation was in higher usage, there was maybe one city in the US that meets your criteria. For the other 19,494 of the 19,495 cities in the US, private transportation was a large majority.

5% of commuter trips in the US are by public transportation. Under 3% are walking. 85% are car, truck, or van, either alone or carpooled. If cars only get 80%, sounds like they are being cheated. They should get 85% instead.

So your observation is US cities don’t have transit, therefore we should invest more in car infrastructure?

It will depend on your definition of "city". I live in Melbourne, AU, and realistically only the inner couple of km around the CBD are "proper" city area where space is truly at a premium.

In the CBD and surrounding area you'd have to be insane to drive - there's simply not enough space. However, in the "metro area" which sprawls for many km in all directions, I would expect a lot of commuting is done by car, due to poorer PT service coverage and frequency, along with lesser traffic congestion.

> The misunderstanding here is that cars are the primary way people commute into the city

The number of cities this is true for in the US is extremely small.

On the contrary, building cities to be nicer places to be a pedestrian in means you can design them more around people without cars. Look up statistics on how much land we dedicate to parking. You end up with far more effective use of land, higher overall productivity, and a larger tax base which helps support the infrastructure investment in a virtuous cycle.

Park and rides in suburbs so commuters don't have to take up disproportionate space in the more valuable city environment are just a part of this, but the root of the issue is providing viable alternatives to driving. Housing policy and public transit policy are deeply linked with this.

> Cities are welcome to erect whatever barriers they like to private cars.

This is inaccurate - for liability purposes, most road design in the US conforms to the MUTCD (and other design standards), which have very car-centric requirements. For example, the minimum lane width it allows is 11 feet (3.3m). If you design and install a 10 foot lane, you're not supported by that standard, and will likely get sued for damages if someone sideswipes someone, etc. The same applies for many other features that can improve pedestrian safety. It's one of the fundamental reasons north American built environment looks so much different (even compared with a car-centric design in other countries)

Yes, but cities can presumably limit parking, make it very expensive, perhaps implement congestion charges. They have lots of levers to keep cars out if they want to without not complying with design standards.

> cities can presumably limit parking, make it very expensive, perhaps implement congestion charges

These are three very difficult to implement changes (due to complaints), and also very ineffective at increasing safety (fewer vehicles = more speeding = no improvement in accident rates).

> have lots of levers to keep cars out

It's not about keeping cars out, it's making them behave safely. You can put a 20mph limit at an elementary school, but if your lanes are limited to 11 foot width, you'll still have cars driving 40, you still have long crossing distances, you still have all these factors reducing safety. If your corner radius has to be designed for a transport truck turning at 15 mph, you'll have cars turning at 40, failing to yield at crosswalks, etc.

> without not complying with design standards.

It's not about "not complying with design standards" - it's about the standards being too car-focused and having unintended consequences for others.

> But don't think there wouldn't be economic impact if far fewer people commute in, come in for the evening, or decide to move out because visiting the suburbs or the mountains is too much hassle.

Maybe more people would commute in, parking outside the city and taking public transit, and enjoying all the benefits of a low-traffic, pedestrian city: No parking problems or costs, no traffic, no fuel costs, highly available transit, things built for pedestrian and transit travel. Maybe they'd move in.

Outside of some big commuter lots, I'm skeptical a lot of people are going to do a lot of multi-mode transport into a city outside of regular commuting. I certainly don't do it. And more pedestrian friendliness wouldn't tempt me to move into a city either.

So you don’t even live in the city, you don’t find pedestrian or bike friendliness attractive, yet you demand that cities bend over backwards in a never ending attempt to accommodate more cars, faster bigger roads, parking lots etc etc

Glad we have that on the record

I never wrote anything like that. I said that cities should make choices about what their residents (and businesses) want to accommodate or not. Personally, I don't care much.. If I'm traveling I'm mostly not driving (so I do prefer pedestrian-friendly cities with good transit). And I rarely feel like dealing with the hassle of driving into the only nearby large city for the evening--so I mostly don't do it, which I'm perfectly fine with. I'm not demanding anything.

> Cities are welcome to erect whatever barriers they like to private cars.

https://youtu.be/VWDFgzAjr1k?si=IQbceOTAEhmJ6nmw&t=537

"The real problem is that we couldn’t build another place like this if we wanted to. It’s not allowed. It’s literally illegal in Canada, to build something like this today."

There are islands in the US that may or may not be literally car-free but certainly have very few cars, e.g. the Cranberry Islands in Maine, Isle au Haut, etc. Probably around the San Juans in Washington State. Of course, taking a boat to go to the grocery store may not be what you have in mind. But there are certainly at least almost car-free options if you're willing to live with the tradeoffs. Of course, they're not cities.

I've never been to Maine, but we have many small islands in BC with very few cars as well. However, despite the small quantity of cars, they're as car-dependent as anywhere; it's very dangerous for pedestrians to walk across them, because the roads have high speed limits, no sidewalks or shoulders, blind turns, and no lighting, so you're in danger of being hit by one of the (very few) cars screaming by at a high speed. Just like most rural areas in North America, and nothing like the neighbourhood described in the linked video. But maybe it's better in Maine.

Plenty of small islands off Maine have essentially no car traffic, even if they have roads, and are very safe to walk; I've done it plenty of times. Of course, others are essentially just rural communities with no sidewalks and traffic on country roads.

That said, I'm guessing most people envisioning car-free cities aren't thinking in terms of a once a month trip to the mainland to buy groceries.

It’s so strange when motorists talk and act like there aren’t countless cities around the world where people do just that - live life with zero need for or benefit from a car. They buy groceries, take the kids to soccer practice and visit grandma too you know.

> Private automobiles do not belong in cities. They are guests there. But they've invited themselves in and taken over the place.

You seem to be ignoring what actually happened. A huge number of the people in those cities wanted automobiles. That's why governments taxed people to pay for the roads for those cars.

I think I agree with the rest of your post.

https://roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/

Um... somebody wrote a book, and here's an ad for it? OK, so?

I mean, it does have a catchy title, but no, I'm not going to go order the book, and read all 170,000 words it boasts of, in order to try to figure out how you think that refutes my statement. If you've got an argument, make it.

I for one would like a system where I could simply cast FHQWGADZ as a combination of tokens that each support my stance on complex matters.

It can be tiresome to have to repeat facts and opinions. It seems that grandparent has read a book, and found its contents convincing enough to share it here. A bit terse, but still relevant, no?

No, not relevant. They read a book. They could have summarized the relevant points of the book... but they didn't. They could have given the gist of the argument of the book... but they didn't. They gave a link to a 170,000 word long book - and nothing more.

Seriously, how many people are going to go read it? Very few. How many are going to read it in time to say anything relevant to the discussion here? Zero.

So dropping a link to a book that size functions as an end-of-conversation move. It says "you can't argue with my unstated position until you've read this" (whether or not that was the post writer's intent). That doesn't make for a healthy conversation. For that reason, I call it out when I see it.

[Editing to add: It's even worse if you think in terms of time. How long would it take the poster to give a summary? Ten minutes? Well, how long would it take me to read the book? But it's worse, because more than one person read the post. How long would it take, total, for all of them to read the book? So it's really, really, really wasteful of peoples' time to just drop a link instead of writing the summary.]

That is not how it works. What people want is a function of the choices available.

When the government builds a ton of car roads, people want cars. When they build great rail, bike lanes and walkable streets, people want cars much less.

> What people want is a function of the choices available.

> When the government builds a ton of car roads, people want cars. When they build great rail, bike lanes and walkable streets, people want cars much less.

Is there evidence of that? I haven't seen an American city where bike lanes are utilized more than sparsely, even when an extensive network is built.

Everyone from kids to phd urban planners and traffic engineers know that viable alternatives to driving lead to people switching modes. This isn’t controversial.

I'm not claiming it's controversial. Do you happen to know where I can track down the factual basis?

My many but anecdotal observations of bike lanes do not support it (I wish it did).

You see more bikes in Cambridge MA than you did before a lot of the bike lane work (probably intermixed with some changes in attitudes/preferences). But still a tiny fraction of both pedestrians and cars.

Bikes need a network, not just lanes. Also many bike lanes just randomly end, aren't protected/separated properly, etc.

I agree, but I'm talking about bike lanes in places with networks.

I'd like to be wrong: Where have you seen medium or high utilization of bike lanes, in the US?

does us even have a network of protected and optimized bike lanes+comfortable parking for them ? If you can't let a child drive alone in that lane, it's not safe. The point of bike infra in NL is that it's generally safe, many shades for hot summers, semaphores autoswitch when bikes approach to give them green, there are lot of bike parkings and bike routes are shorter compared to car ones, as result you'll get to dest same or faster compared to cars. As result, ppl prefer to use a bike even if car ownership in NL is pretty big(cars are mostly for long trips for routes where pub transport is not that good). Does US have anywhere same lvl of bike infra(or even close to it) any any existing city?

there's not a single city in the US that has a real bicycle network

despite all the improvements even cities like NYC still doesn't have this

imagine a city that's made up of a neighborhoods with high quality roads inside them but unconnected and separated by patches of sand dunes or dirt fields with between them

would you look at that and conclude "nobody drives here, these people must hate cars, we shouldn't invest in roads then, roads and cars are a useless technology, hiking on foot or riding a camel or donkey is superior!"

of course you wouldn't

but that's exactly what it's like being on a bike in ALL cities in the US - islands of a few (mostly unsafe) bikeways here and there, but not a complete, safe network to connect them in a meaningful way, so it's little wonder they're not as used as they could be (although despite that, esp in nyc, bikeways ARE heavily used)

if you wouldn't ride in them, they're not safe

if you wouldn't let your kids or nephew johnny ride in them, they're not safe

meanwhile in the Netherlands, Valencia, Seville, Barcelona, Paris and a bunch of other places in the world, they HAVE started to build meaningful, safe bikeway networks, and what do you know, then, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of people (including families and kids) end up using them daily

taking cars off the road and freeing up space for ardent motorists who always complain about traffic

it's a win win but most motorists are too blind to see it

I do think driving is less dominant in New York, for example.

Bike lanes in Vancouver and Montreal are pretty heavily utilized. But bikes are quiet and take up so little space compared to cars that it's easy to not notice.

New York City, for one. Heavily used transit, and in recent years much improved bike lanes, and a v successful bikeshare scheme. I highly recommend reading about Janette Sadik-Khan's great efforts to make NYC more walkable and bikeable and reduce car dominance (she has a good book called Street Fight).

But how heavily are those bike lanes used? Pretty sparsely IME.

From wikipedia:

> Cycling is increasingly popular in New York City; in 2018 there were approximately 510,000 daily bike trips, compared with 170,000 daily bike trips in 2005.[2][3]

Might depend on the city. I've personally been on pretty dogshit bike lanes, and it really only takes one or two particularly dangerous spots to lead you to re-route.

Might also depend on what you consider and observe for 'bike lanes'. I've known very pleasant walk/bike paved paths that you wouldn't necessarily see from a car.

Have you ridden any of the bike lanes you've observed? My hunch is that they don't adequately serve the need due to a combo of dangerous intersections/car exposure and poor road conditions (potholes, construction, rails or grates sufficiently wide to trap a wheel).

EDIT: you might try looking for a counter example in Portland, OR? Purely anecdotal but my recollection is that I and many people I knew primarily biked around the city, probably had something to do with the infrastructure (roads felt safe, car exposure felt manageable, etc).

> A huge number of the people in those cities wanted automobiles. That's why governments taxed people to pay for the roads for those cars.

What is the basis of that? Perhaps, having the option of roads; and being led, to a degree by leaders' belief in roads, they wanted cars. Seeing public transit and seeing leaders' belief it it, they might have used that.

Akshully it’s you who need to read up on first thing about the history of the invasion of cities by the automobile. Complete, total regulatory capture of the government by the automobile and oil industry, purchase of transit only to rip it to shreds etc etc.

The funny thing is, traffic in general and life for ardent motorists in particular would be better the better alternatives to driving are. Instead, they shoot themselves in the foot by shutting down anything other than adding more and more traffic, making things worse and worse for themselves.

I know about the purchase of transit lines. Where did they get the money to do that? By selling cars, that's where. Who was buying the cars? People who wanted them, not just people who had no choice. (Because the money to buy the transit lines was there before the choice disappeared.)

Why did people want cars instead of transit, or bicycles, or walking? The alternatives work great... until it's a blizzard or 10 below. Then people don't actually want to wait at a trolley stop or ride a bike. (Yes, I know, you can dress for it. They still don't want to.)

So akkkkshully, people weren't the helpless sheep being run over by the invading automobiles that you claim they were. Autos are not an invasive species, overheated rhetoric notwithstanding. People brought those cars to the cities, and built the roads, and paid for them, and not just because the evil auto companies forced them to.

Did early autos even work in inclement weather? I'm under the impression that cold weather fuels and oils are relatively modern and I wouldnt be surprised if pre-heating systems came years after the vehicles first gained traction.

Not many places - and really not many big places in the US - need engine block heaters. Cold weather doesn't need special gasoline, although diesel fuel does have to be formulated differently (modern winter gasolines are formulated to meet various states' emissions requirements, not because it gels in the cold).

I'm from the South, so I've never had a car with a block heater, but I've driven in temps down to 0 F/-17 C without a problem. They had been that low persistently for about 4-5 days. Perhaps I did untold damage to the car by not having low-viscosity oil, but it worked well for the four years I drove it and the two after that when my sister did (until she wrecked it), and it was seven years old when it became mine. 13 years for a mid-eighties GM car was pretty good.

Given that the auto industry in the US and Canada was basically founded around the Great Lakes, I can't imagine that they wanted to sell things that wouldn't work in the cold weather of that region.

> Akshully it’s you who need to read up on first thing about the history of the invasion of cities by the automobile. Complete, total regulatory capture of the government by the automobile and oil industry, purchase of transit only to rip it to shreds etc etc.

Actually, you've got the timeline wrong. It was the automobile becoming so common in cities that made the automobile industry powerful enough to later do those other things.

What got cars common in cities was that they were safer than horses and didn't shit and piss all over the streets.

> A huge number of the people in those cities wanted automobiles.

No. A huge number of people wanted an easy way to get from point A to B. Many people don't really care about cars, but when you design a city to accommodate only them with no viable alternatives, they will flock to the automobile. Case in point: Tokyo has a car ownership rate of 0.32 cars per household. Why? Because you can take the subway/bus/bike to anywhere in the city, it's clean, it's safe, it's invested in.

> But they've invited themselves in and taken over the place.

Cars are material objects. People take them where they want them. People want them in the cities. There was no great propaganda wave that "tricked" people into doing this. Cars were better. People went with what was better for them, personally.

> Most crashes are fundamentally caused by designs that encourage them.

Most fatalities involve alcohol or drugs. Perhaps we just shouldn't allow the sale of alcohol in cities? At least to me, that would be very welcome, and is a necessary part of any honest "vision zero."

> We know drivers speed, we know they text while driving, we know signs and even enforcement doesn't work etc etc.

Yet we know they can also drive millions of miles this way before causing a single incident.

> that must disallow crashes and people being hit by cars from being possible in the first place.

You can have that. You're just going to have to sacrifice nearly every other modern convenience that people move into cities to experience in the first place.

> Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces, more vegetation, raised crosswalks, dedicated and physically segregated (by bollards, concrete blocks etc) spaces for pedestrians, people on bikes etc etc.

And that's the end of your federal road money. As long as your community can afford all of this on it's own, you can do it, if you can't, you must find a compromise.

This idea that the compromise _must_ be thrown away because a few people can't see any other way forward is ridiculous. Particularly on "hacker news."

"And that's the end of your federal road money." - actually "Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces" are cheaper longterm(sometimes shortterm) for federal money, esp combined with the fact that in pedestrian friendly streets there are more businesses and more customers and as result more taxed money.

cars shouldn't be banned in cities, but env should be heavily redesigned to change priorities, like: pedestrian>bike>pub transp>taxis>personal cars. This is the compromise that works - cars are not banned, just less convenient compared to other methods and because of that car trips are faster compared to car priority, bc there are less cars on the road and less congestion, so ppl that actually need and can afford cars(and all related taxes) will have a more pleasant drive

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