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Comment by vladms | Hacker News Reader

I would have expected the article to give some clear pool/metric/statistics about "people hate the idea ... ". There are indeed loud people and big interest groups that oppose car free cities, but I am not sure about "people" in general.

Sure, you need means of transport and to be able to live, and you can't change things over night, but if you would ask people "would you prefer to have a supermarket 5 minutes away or one 20 kilometers away" I doubt anybody would say "no I want only things far to be forced to use a car".

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> but if you would ask people "would you prefer to have a supermarket 5 minutes away or one 20 kilometers away" I doubt anybody would say "no I want only things far to be forced to use a car".

For most people it's not about the supermarket. Those are a dime a dozen and all the same. It's easy to provide those in sufficient amounts everywhere.

Now try it with jobs. Not any job, but your job. Is it possible to have your job be 5 minutes from your home. How about in 5 years when your job is underpaid or unfulfilling? Is your next job also 5 minutes away? Or do you now have to move? And 5 years after that, when you're laid off?

I find that loads of people start out enjoying the car-free experience. And then they get a job in the next town. And/or they get kids, so commute-time takes away from kids-time. Life becomes too busy to spend the extra 30 minutes commuting per day that public transport would cost.

Between the trade-off bad job, no time, and car/public transport, the car quickly becomes the best solution. Even if you don't like driving.

Sounds like moving should be made easier.

It's much easier if you rent an apartment and don't own much stuff--which is a trade-off itself.

There's also questions around a partner. Can you only have relationships with people whos career is near your current employer?

Something something dense cities and good public transport. You can get from one side of Berlin to the other - not including suburbs - in half an hour and without needing to park.

It's certainly possible, but more difficult the larger the city. Actually my main concern would be transporting furniture, appliances and the cost of renovations and maintenance. Transport of large items is difficult without cars. Cost of renovations are often many fold higher for dense housing due to greater difficulties with waste disposal and higher transport costs.

That would be great, but your forebears locked in a great prop 13 basis decades ago and it would be worth more than your raise to give it up. Or you're in faux social housing in the form of a rent controlled apartment and don't want to give up that subsidy.

Or there simply aren't homes to move to that are closer because every municipality in the area has tried to build offices rather than homes since the 1970s. And thus the office park around your new job is itself so big as to require a car to traverse it.

This is the crux of the matter - when people worked at a company for life, they could build their life around it.

If you know you’ll be commuting to The Factory for the next forty years, you can happily take the bus or train or whatever to it. You buy your house and put down roots.

Now cities are larger and your job changes every five to seven years and either you move each time to be near enough, or you let your family stay where everyone they know is, and take the commute on the teeth.

The solution is smaller cities; not larger ones, or going back to longer term employment.

>> If you know you’ll be commuting to The Factory for the next forty years

That was not the norm historically. Average job tenure is longer now that it was in the past. And the typical manufacturing facility lasted nowhere near forty years. The average lifespan of a factory is around 10 years. Most companies aren't around for forty years.

> That was not the norm historically. Average job tenure is longer now that it was in the past.

Stats on that?

The norm for most people used to be to work for the same company most of their career (if not all of it) and retire from there with a pension.

Nowadays most people change jobs every couple years.

>> The norm for most people used to be to work for the same company most of their career (if not all of it) and retire from there with a pension

Stats on that?

That absolutely was not the norm. Again, most companies did not exist long enough for someone to work at one for their entire career. Median job tenure 40 years ago was around 4 years (BLS).

A minority of private workers were covered by pensions at the highest point, and being covered by a pension plan did not mean you got a pension. A company might have required 30 years of service to get a pension. Work there 29 years and 11 months, get fired, no pension. Work somewhere ten years and then decide you hate it? Either work there another 20 years hating it or quit and lose your pension. Job hop for a raise every few years? No pension. Many pensions were not adjusted for inflation. Many pension plans went bankrupt. Pensions sucked. I know, I have one from the 90's. Worked there 7 years, that pension is going to pay me roughly the same monthly amount as I will be able to take from my last year's contributions to my 401K, even if those contributions make no investment returns before I retire.

I have no idea how young people get these fantasy ideas about the past. And do you really want to work in the same place for 40 years? A 401K is better than a pension. A 401K, Roth IRA and HSA is immensely better than a pension.

> Work somewhere ten years and then decide you hate it? Either work there another 20 years or quit and lose your pension.

That's not usually how it worked.

> I have a pension from the 1990's. Worked there 7 years. I'll get around $150 a month when I retire

As you yourself note. You didn't lose your pension by leaving after 7 years, you still get it. Sure it's minimal because you only worked there 7 years instead of 40 but you didn't lose it.

> I have no idea how young people get these fantasy ideas about the past.

I wish I was that young but I also will eventually receive a pension from a company where I worked for a few years in the early 90s. It'll be like $100 but I only worked there a few years.

>> you still get it

Different plans had different limits. Mine was 7 years, I stayed just long enough to get it. If I had left a few months earlier, would have lost it. Pensions suck.

Isn't the job thing _easier_ if you live in a denser town? If you have more jobs per km² you're less likely to need to move when you switch job.

Maybe yes maybe no. A lot of the jobs in a big city metro are out in the burbs. Until fairly recently, my company's only office in the area was a 45 minute drive from downtown. There are more tech jobs in the city proper than there were 15-20 years ago when there were approximately zero. But a lot of the jobs in the area are still spread around the suburbs and exurbs.

I don't think proponents of the "car-free" or "15-minutes" cities have:

- supermarkets are super close

- everything else is super far (including workplaces)

- you don't have a car

in mind. I don't think that in London (the main example in the article) most jobs are a 45 minute drive from central London nor that most people drive to work.

>nor that most people drive to work

That's probably true in Boston as well. But that's because, if you work 45 minutes out of Boston--of which there are many companies along the Route 128 or 495 corridors--you probably don't live in Boston unless you're a die-hard urbanite willing to put in a long commute to your suburban job. (To be fair, a lot of the west coast companies that established Boston outposts are in town and local suburban companies increasingly have options for people to work in a city office (or remotely) if they want to.)

> Is it possible to have your job be 5 minutes from your home. How about in 5 years when your job is underpaid or unfulfilling? Is your next job also 5 minutes away? Or do you now have to move? And 5 years after that, when you're laid off?

Yes.

Further, most people don't live 5 minutes away now, even in car-centric developments. The average commute time has been, for centuries, 30 minutes one-way:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant

* https://archive.is/edypl / https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-29/the-commu...

It's just that with increased speeds the distance has gotten longer in recent decades.

Yeah the problem is exactly the design of cities which make the car the best solution! The car is both the fastest and the most convenient if the roads are wide and the buildings are sprawled around. If you build the city tightly so it's easy to walk everywhere and everything is nearby, you a) don't need a car and more importantly b) there is no room for cars, this space is recovered for humans.

Disclaimer: my household owns two cars.

I'm not talking about "everything". I'm talking about jobs. Your job. Is your job so generic that almost everybody in your country can do it? Because that's what you would need for this to be realistic. Everybody living so close to enough jobs of the exact type they desire. Not just a job title, but the industry, the size and type of company, the salary level, the type of people, and a bunch of other things.

And even if it were realistic, you'd have more choice by widening the circle anyway. Get an even better job by driving a bit.

You're so focused on driving I feel you're missing the point of designing the space so driving isn't necessary. Your axiom is 'work is far away'.

But the point is it only happens if it's convenient to be far away. Design your city in a way it's convenient to be nearby and it'll be nearby. The problem is this design is completely at odds with private car ownership.

> But the point is it only happens if it's convenient to be far away.

No. The point is that "work" isn't a generic thing like "supermarket". A specific job is something that needs to fit your personality.

If you're the type of person that really digs working for big tech, you aren't going to find a job you enjoy in some small town. You can probably find a job maintaining the website of the local bank, but are you really going to think that's a good outcome?

Hell, for big tech the jobs aren't even commutable from anywhere if you are willing to commute by car. Or helicopter. But this problem goes for loads of people in loads of jobs. If you can commute further you have more choice. More choice gives you better odds at a job you like.

I completely agree, it's just there's nothing stopping those office jobs to be created next to train stations. Except there aren't enough conveniently located train stations... turns out there are in Paris and London though?

Car dependence is a feature of sprawling cities. If you make your city dense, the jobs will be there. The fact that everyone has a car makes the jobs be all over the place because if employees can't commute further, the jobs will move to them. It's pure game theory.

The big question is how to jump from a stable state of car dependence to a stable state of mass transit and I don't see a way to do that in general.

> Design your city in a way it's convenient to be nearby and it'll be nearby.

How can you possibly have every job be nearby to everyone? That's just not possible. Now factor in job changes or even career changes. Unless your primary criteria for picking a job is to have it nearby, the probability of having jobs far from home approaches 100% over time.

Jobs of a given type tend to congregate in specific locations. Tech in Silicon Valley. Finance on Wall Street. Politics in DC. Entertainment in LA.

So picking a geographic location based on your field and having a lot of job options is workable for a lot of occupation categories.

We lived car free life in our 20s before kids.

Groceries were a total PITA, maybe if you order a lot of delivery it’s fine, but we cook every meal and needed at least a granny cart at least once a week. And small grocers nearby had terrible vegetables; there is a lot of variance in supermarket quality. Maybe in NYC they have it figured out, but the trade off is everything cost crazy money.

I commuted by bus for this time to work, an hour each way and my hours were beholden to an infrequent bus schedule — it knee capped my career because I had to leave at hard cutoff and never could meet up for lunch or happy hour, and lost 10-15 hrs a week on a bus.

Even subway is so-so, unless they run every 5 minutes and you live and work on top of statio can add up fast, and transferring lines adds a ton of time.

Huge regret trying to live car free in an American city (not NYC).

Just for contrast. I'm living a car free life in my mid-late 20s at the moment in Denmark, and I rarely ever order delivery.

Supermarkets are close enough (I actually live above one, but were that not there, there are still three others within a five minute walk), that I rarely do a "weekly" shop and just buy my groceries when needed, most of which are of decent to high quality.

It's not really much of an inconvenience to keep a relatively well stocked kitchen without a car here. I'm really struggling to understand how a "granny cart" worth of groceries once a week is a chore? That's a couple of bags worth at most.

Buses could be a bit more frequent here, but they're still good enough that I don't have a hard cut off for when I have to leave the office. I lose maybe 7-8 hours a week on my commute, which is time I'd spend reading anyway.

Oh I think one big factor is it was a 1 mile walk in 32C degrees and swampy high humidity.

It wasn’t a couple of bags, it was a cart of about 4 bags at least, including a gallon of milk, often including bags of flour, eggs, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/LS-Folding-Shopping-Basket-Capacity/d...

Ah. Yeah, a mile in that kind of heat and humidity would have me rethinking my shopping habits and choice of lifestyle as well.

Electric bike? Electric moped if you wanna stretch

This was 20 years go. I actually wish Segways became a thing. They could climb stairs, took up less area and could carry a heavy load balanced by the gyros.

How many children do you have?

None. But neither did the GP when they were living car-free in their twenties.

> Maybe in NYC they have it figured out, but the trade off is everything cost crazy money.

Yes, living in Manhattan and Brooklyn, this was not a problem. Manhattan had a supermarket on every block. Brooklyn was a little farther, but the variety and quality of the food was excellent. This was a while ago, so don't remember how prices stacked up. Just that on an NYC salary, food was affordable for our family.

Lived in Tokyo and Osaka, but most of that time didn't have to cook much. But remember groceries being very accessible in walking distance.

Vacations in various cities in Italy and Paris, groceries were accessible, very high quality, and affordable.

So I think walkable grocery shopping is a good experience in NYC and big cities outside the US. But probably not great in the median US city.

I’ve lived and worked in London all my life. Of all the ways I could get to work, driving has to be at the bottom of the list.

> Between the trade-off bad job, no time, and car/public transport, the car quickly becomes the best solution

If you beat public transport by using a car then there just isn't enough public transit or the city isn't dense enough (likely the former, due to the latter). If you live 3km from your job in London or NYC then at least during rush hour it's likely to be faster to use public transport than a car.

> Life becomes too busy to spend the extra 30 minutes commuting per day that public transport would cost.

This is again based on the premise that public transport costs time, rather than saves time or doesn't matter time wise.

People who work in really dense cities but live far outside it so they need to drive from home are already likely to not drive all the way into the city center but rather drive to the edge of the city center, park there more cheaply, and take a train the last 10% of the way. The key is that that traffic in the city center is slower than public transport, including the wait times and walking required. Within some distance from the city center of a city that is dense enough and has enough public transport, this holds true. And it's in this area that private car traffic make little sense at all. But that doesn't mean people can't have cars. Or that suburban people won't drive. You might still want to drive somewhere on the weekend. Or you might need to drive to even reach the public transport.

IF you live in a city with enough density that public transport beats the car most of the time, and IF your job is in that same area too, then yes, going car-free can save time. But you need several hundreds of thousands people in the same-ish spot for both those assumptions to hold true for most people. And probably also some badly designed roads.

I live in a town of 125k people, where I can reach any spot by bike or public transport in about 30 minutes. Perfectly commutable. It has a few jobs for people like me, but not enough for a decent amount of variety.

> I live in a town of 125k people, where I can reach any spot by bike or public transport in about 30 minutes. Perfectly commutable. It has a few jobs for people like me, but not enough for a decent amount of variety.

Car-free center can work there too. But for 125k people it might just be a few blocks square in the middle. The math is pretty simple. If density is so low that there can't be stations every 5 minutes of walking, or so low that businesses like large detached grocery stores, gas stations, building material stores and so on could even think of being there, then it's 100% car territory.

But one shouldn't let it become self-fulfilling. If city restaurants have parking then they need a lot of space, which lowers density, and they become unattractive to people who are walking. So a key ingredient for a car free city could be to ensure no establishments have parking lots within a specified distance of the city center. It's nearly impossible to combine parking lots with walkability.

I agree with all of that. And in fact, that is what this city has. The car-free center thing works very well. You get a few large parking garages around the center, and inside you do everything on foot.

The rest of the city is spacious and has good car accessibility, so you can also get out quickly.

> This is again based on the premise that public transport costs time, rather than saves time or doesn't matter time wise.

This is a reasonable premise. Because a car is point to point and public transport by definition is not. I agree it is possible to maneuver yourself into a situation where you live immediately next to the subway stop and your job is immediately next to the other subway stop. Public transport will save time then. But that's very rare and also a fragile setup because as soon as you change either home or job, it's no longer true.

So for most people public transport means walking to the nearest stop, taking the subway/bus and then walking to the destination. So yes it takes more time.

> Is it possible to have your job be 5 minutes from your home.

If you live in a major city, yes.

Mid size cities and smaller, this is much more difficult.

> Between the trade-off bad job, no time, and car/public transport, the car quickly becomes the best solution. Even if you don't like driving.

I quit a job of mine in the New York metro area, largely because I had to drive there. It was hell. Every time it rained the commute would be twice as long. One wonderful evening coming back home the usually 50 minute drive took 3 hours.

Additionally the stress of having to deal with bumper to bumper traffic and the assholes and distracted drivers on the road was slowly killing me.

I swore after that job to never drive to work again. At least on a bus/train I can usually read a book, twiddle with a laptop or something else that keeps me entertained/relaxed.

Good luck walking 5 mins with 6 or 8 bags of shopping, a five year old and a baby in a pushchair.

All these arguments for car-free cities are mostly supported by young, single and childfree urbanites.

This is what a cargo bike is for.

It's mad that you can't see that strapping two kids and 8 bags of shopping into a cargo bike and cycling 10 minutes is far worse than doing the same errand by car.

Worse how? Worse because we're all used to ignoring the negative externalities of driving everywhere? Worse because our kids are used to acting however they want in the back seat of a car? Worse because we built these horribly isolating daily transport systems where people tint their car windows so we can't even see each other and then yell at each other's driving abilities?

The point is that of course it's true that driving is "easier", but it'd be obviously worse in a lot of ways if we didn't build cities the way we did.

> isolating daily transport systems where people tint their car windows so we can't even see each other.

You bring up a lot of good points, but why is this a bad thing?

This hasn't been my experience.

Not as mad as imagining that everyone without a car does this onerous strawman version of your errand.

Do you think they would rather swap? What is the weather like where they live?

Not everyone can or has access to a car so people still have to and do manage that in the car-centric world you're advocating for as well. Except now it's more like walk a mile, wait for the bus, walk another mile.

Yes, and it is objectively worse.

You buy 6 or 8 bags or groceries every day?

Who wants to go to the store every day to buy food? Don’t you have a refrigerator?

You want people to go to the store every day? God forbid people want to relax after work.

There are plenty of alternative solutions compared to outright banning cars. Nothing beats telecommute for speed, safety and emissions for example, but even EVs can mitigate air pollution in cities. They also comfortably beat human powered transportation as soon as someone looks into the carbon footprint of agriculture. Efficiency can differ by orders of magnitude.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore

How about one 5 minutes away where I can go with my car? Which I feel like these people are trying to stop...

If your single car is rivalrous to several other people's ability to live and work in the urban core, yes, that's a pretty good reason to discourage the car.

Massachusetts has park-and-ride, and it's pretty great!

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