Hacker News Reader

Comment by welshwelsh | Hacker News Reader

There are still plenty of roads though, which shouldn't exist in a dense city like Manhattan. We have a long way to go still

View on HN

> There are still plenty of roads though, which shouldn't exist in a dense city like Manhattan. We have a long way to go still

How, exactly, are stores supposed to get the things they sell, restaurants supposed to get the food they prepare, construction crews supposed to get the materials they use, garbage collectors supposed to pick up trash -- and a million other things that make a city possible -- without roads?

New York City has had roads since before cars existed...since it was a tiny little colony with a literal wall where "wall street" is today. This kind of rhetoric is silly and counterproductive.

Nobody is talking about ripping up roads. The city obviously needs roads, at the very least for the kinds of public and business services you've mentioned.

(One of the virtues of congestion pricing is that it makes obligate uses of the road better: fewer personal cars on lower Manhattan's grid means faster grocery store deliveries, fewer construction trucks double parked, faster garbage pickup, etc.).

> Nobody is talking about ripping up roads. The city obviously needs roads

I don't know what to tell you. I quoted the parent post, in its entirety, at the time I wrote my comment. Doesn't seem cryptic to me.

> Nobody is talking about ripping up roads.

Nobody? The post being replied to literally said:

> roads though, which shouldn't exist in a dense city

I think you’re being a tad uncharitable with your interpretation of “no roads”.

Arguably they mean “no roads for private vehicle traffic”.

Pedestrian plazas and walkable areas demonstrably result in higher foot traffic for shops. Nobody has the slightest issue with the garbage truck cruising through to pick stuff up-they’re not a big cause of gridlock and congestion. This is a pretty solved problem in parts in Europe.

Unfortunately, "no roads" is exactly what the OP wrote. I'd like to think he really meant either "no roads open to personal cars", or "no wide roads", or "no roads with street parking", because I think those are all fairly reasonable positions for a dense city, but I find it hard to interpret his comment that way, the way it's written.

But you're right: it is possible to have roads that aren't open to private vehicles; I've seen this in Amsterdam, for instance, where remote-control bollards will lower for certain vehicles (trash trucks, etc.).

Personally, as someone who lives in Tokyo, I think the easiest way to solve this problem is the way it's mostly solved here: simply eliminate all street parking, and require anyone living in the city who wants to own and keep a car there to prove they have a place to park it. We don't have roads banned to private cars, or congestion pricing (aside from tolls on the highways), but there's remarkably little car traffic for a city with this many people, and I think it's pretty clear why: if there's no place to park other than inconvenient and very expensive private parking lots, why get a car, or use it in the city if you have one? (To be clear, a lot of people actually do own them, but just don't drive them much because there's no place to park at the places inside the city where they want to go, so many cars are just for weekend use.)

There are relatively few cities (of which Manhattan is probably one) where, if I lived in the city, I wouldn't own a car but--yes--I might park somewhere on the periphery where it was cheaper and not use it day-to-day. I know very few people who aren't maybe just out of school who don't own cars even if they live in a city.

It is easier to get by with things like Zipcar and Uber but I'd still probably find it had value so I wasn't structuring things around not having a car.

I guess everyone in Venice, Dubrovnik, and Capri just starves under a mountain of trash?

That's a completely silly response, but I'll give you points for at least making me wonder how they collect trash in Venice. Turns out that:

a) it's a huge problem in the canal district (thus making my point)

b) they have boats with trash compactors:

https://www.c40.org/case-studies/new-waste-collection-system...

My point is these problems are solvable if you make an actual effort to solve them. There are costs and tradeoffs, but it's crazy to just throw up your hands and assume a city without roads is impossible as soon as you think of a problem rather than taking 5 minutes to actually try to address it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com