Hacker News Reader

Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com