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Comment by kettlecorn | Hacker News Reader

I have a very loose mental framework for thinking about cars that I think is helpful:

If you look at space taken up length-wise in a lane the length of the average car in the US is 14.7 ft. For a person standing on a sidewalk the average person's foot size is ~10 inches. Let's hand wave the math and say cars are 10x longer.

Very loosely our built environment scales 10x to match that new scale. Roads need to be 10x bigger, parking lots take up even more space.

The ultimate result is not that there are far more unique destinations available to the average person, but that they are further away, bigger, and costs are far higher.

Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded.

It's a clear example of the tragedy of the commons.

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"Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded."

Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was.

The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.

The problem with your argument is why would people buy cars if they were so terrible? While the infrastructure was obviously worse than today clearly they afforded tremendous advantages which motivated their adoption!

In the early days that advantage was the ability to rapidly traverse relatively developed areas with more convenience. Over time infrastructure and adoption chased each other, but now the most populated parts of the US are developed to the point that there's little way to ease congestion with more road infrastructure. The only way to grow is to sprawl into new cities.

For a long time in population centers the pattern was new car infra. -> more driving convenience -> more cars -> repeat. In cities that's running into bottlenecks.

Today people primarily buy cars out of necessity, but in areas where most people live congestion and a more sprawling environment has diminished much of the time saving advantage.

It was terrible. People bought cars anyway because it was still better than walking.

In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day. The roads were lousy in 1919. But even then, it was better than a mule train.

People bought into cars early because they could get around quickly to more destinations, not because walking was uniquely awful.

In Philadelphia's paper in the early 1900s there was a daily column about "pleasure drive" routes and constant advertisements appealing to new drivers with destinations near the city.

That advantage of being able to "get out of the city" is still there, but it's further and further away. For day to day life the experience of walking / transit / biking in a pre-car US city or a modern US city is somewhat comparable in terms of time and enjoyment.

However US cities and suburbs, due to car-centric scale, allow more people to live on larger plots of land.

Walking was uniquely awful in many situations as soon as the alternative of cars were available. Peoples' options were "get a car", "suffer what you now realize is awful", or "don't do those things". Unsurprisingly, many people chose the first option.

You think they - we - chose wrong. To put it charitably, we who disagree with you do not feel the need of your opinion on what we should want and should choose.

If you have a better way, show us the better way, and make us want it. Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist. We live them. Don't tell us the parts we enjoy don't exist. We experience them. Don't lecture us, entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.

Cars were better than horses, not walking, and you conveniently forgot the "use the streetcar/bus" option. Why is that?

I lived in the suburbs from West Mass, I lived in downtown Boston, I lived in Manhattan. Guess where I was the most miserable?

> Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist.

The point is less about "cars vs no cars", but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning. Do you live in the suburbs? Have you ever considered how much your lifestyle is subsidized by those who live downtown? Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?

> entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.

Ask anyone in Amsterdam (which was in the 70s on its way to become as car centric as most North American cities) if they would like to go back to their ways.

> Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?

This is such a weird line of inquiry.

Yes! It is the largest single QoL improvement I have after my house.

Almost everyone who can afford it buys a car as soon as they can. Yes, even in the UK, even in Europe. It is such a huge boon.

If cars were made more expensive I would sooner work harder to keep the car than give it up.

I don't know what sort of answer you're expecting? Why would I possibly not want a car? The only reason I can think of is if it became so expensive that just paying a personal driver was cheaper.

First, kind of weird of you to associate the idea of having no car to losing your penis. I'd joke about it, but I learned to avoid making jokes about potential psychological issues.

Second, I don't think you are aware of how much of cities' financial troubles in North America are related to the budget imbalance between suburbs and downtowns.

Third, I'm talking about all the externalities. It's not just gas or street parking. It's also the cost of all those parking lots doing nothing productive. It's the health cost of having an overweight and sedentary population who can't even walk to get groceries. It's the cost of increased air pollution that brings hundreds of thousands of people to the hospital with respiratory issues. It's the cost to a city's economy that wastes a sizeable portion of its GDP to car traffic. Car owners pay only a tiny fraction of that.

It's not weird at all. Both vastly improve my quality of life. I could get by without either, but I'd rather not. I'll edit it out of my reply since you seem averse to analogy.

Cars are everywhere. American choices to have huge multi lane streets everywhere and parking lots the size of cities are optional.

It's a false dichotomy. Across Europe we have cars, even in London, a public transport mecca with tiny roads, >50% of households have cars.

They are great. Properly super useful. I think that people who deny that utility are ideological zealots to be honest.

No one is denying the utility of cars. The argument is against (a) car dependency and (b) the fact that its total cost is not fully born by their owners.

Also, you can re-read my original comment. Notice the "the point is less about cars vs no cars, but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning" part, and please realize that talking about London has nothing to do with the original point.

Sure.

I simply gave my 2c on your question.

> Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?

Yes. I would. And honestly there really isn't much in it. In the US, basically everyone drives. In the UK, pretty much everyone who pays taxes drives.

At least in my situation, I think that if the costs were moved from general taxation to directly falling on car owners, I'd end up net positive!

Holy shit, talk about reading things out of context.

You, dear sir, have absolutely nothing in common with the average North American who lives in the suburbs. The question was not directed at you.

If you want to at least try to understand the context before jumping to give your opinion and share with us your psycho issues, try watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0

Your car improves your quality of life. Every other car reduces your quality of life by a small delta: they reduce walkability and bikability, they are deadly, they cause traffic and slow down public transit, they reduce visibility, they are noisy, smelly and hot, they occupy space that is ugly, radiates heat and could be used for other purposes, and so on.

Let me put it this way: if I decide to walk to a restaurant, I would get there faster if there were no cars, and I would enjoy the terrace more if it wasn't for their noise or the ugliness of the parking lot. You can have your convenience, or I can have mine, but it isn't really possible to have both, at least not to the fullest extent.

And that's the problem we have to come to grips with: all the cars you don't drive make your life less pleasant. What is the balance? If the balance is that global quality of life is optimal when 10% of the population of a city has cars, who gets to be in that 10%?

I don't really agree with your premise because you are not incorporating the positive contributions of additional users.

Take the metro as an example. Each additional user is another person in my personal space, they could be smelly, they might mean that I have to stand or scrunch me up in a narrow seat. They make it slower for me to exit the station when there are queues. They could give me airborne diseases like COVID or whatever.

Those are the negatives.

But without that scale the metro isn't viable, you can't have a train system that only one person uses, so the additional people are useful. They fund it, they campaign to have it put in, etc etc.

The same is true of the road network. Yes, cars being parked on my road affect my quality of life, but the fact that other people drive increases my quality of life because we collectively pay for the road network, petrol stations, R&D into new car designs, we agree that street parking is collectively useful even if that blue car across the road is in the way for me personally, etc.

There is a critical point for both systems at which there are just too many people. I would argue that most humans don't actually enjoy huge population density and are just forced into it by economic factors (e.g. all of the best jobs in the UK are in London).

I am making the case that the advantages once enjoyed by cars have been substantially reduced, for day to day life where most people live, as most people need a car.

The irony of your argument is that very few people who want more car-light or car-free cities are "forcing" anything on anyone, but the inverse is absolutely not the case.

A tremendous amount of taxes are allocated only for highways or car-centric revenue. Federal and state politics prevents cities from putting that money elsewhere. Highways were plowed through US cities and are maintained there over the objection of city residents. States intervene to prevent cities from running bus priority lanes. Cars purchases are subsidized where bikes and transit passes are not. Federal road standards, which are applied in cities, are designed for cars and not pedestrians / bikes.

A prominent example is NYC being forced by NY State to cancel congestion pricing.

The list of ways car-centric decision making is forced on dense cities is very long. Very few people are trying to "ban cars" but are instead trying to let cities too dense for cars guide their fate.

The biggest advantage for cars is that they lack any fixed schedule, route, or stops.

Other common modes of transport that lack fixed schedule, route, or stops: - biking - micromobility (scooter-share, etc.) - walking - dial-a-ride transit options

But they have other cons as well. You need to have good bike lane infrastructure or to be confident taking the entire lane, whereas most everything is already created around the car or increasingly being created around the car (in the case of the developing world beginning its nascent highway networks). You have to have fair weather or be able to pack around gear like rainpants wherever you are going. You probably make use of the cargo capacity of your car once a week when you buy groceries and goods from stores that tend to size their products around that sort of interval of a trip. I ride my bike plenty but honestly when I go to the grocery store three blocks a way I am usually taking the car, because its easier when I realize oh crap I need milk, I need a gallon of vinegar, I need paper towels, I need toilet paper, I need olive oil, and that alone will overload the panniers and be nigh impossible to get on the bike, especially the paper products and their awkward bulk. I haven't used my panniers for groceries personally since I broke three eggs in a carton with them once. I either walk and grab a small handful of things or just take the car most times.

> In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day.

They used the Lincoln Highway, which wasn't fully paved until the 1930s. In 1919, it was a (bad) dirt road except in cities. In 1919 there was an awful lot of space between cities, especially once you got west of Chicago (that not too far from the truth today, except you might say Omaha instead of Chicago). You can't really compare the convoy experience to walking-vs-driving in cities :)

On first read, I was wondering why on earth did they not use a train? I looked it up and found this from a primary source:

> The principal objectives of the expedition were to servicetest the special-purpose vehicles developed for use in the first World War, not all gf which were available in time for §uch U§e; and to determine by actual experience the possibility and the problems involved in moving an army across the continent, assuming that railroad facilities, bridges, tunnels, etc. had been damaged or destroyed by agents of an Asiatic enemy.

which makes a lot of sense. great reading: https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/resear...

Another reason, not stated: The rail system melted down with the traffic load of World War 1. (Or with the government taking control, when they didn't know how to run a rail system.)

I always found it amusing how, in Bertha Benz's first trip in the prototype car, she had to go to a pharmacy for petrol.

Many early cars were large terrifying beasts. Huge wheels, engines and very noisy. Extremely expensive too. I totally understand with mud roads and low power densities of the time that is a logical design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mL4jA59ibU

The implication is that car ownership rose slowly from 0% to 80% despite the experience being terrible.

How can this be true?

It's even worse if you don't limit the velocity to sth like 30km/h - because then you need more space for turning and acceleration/breaking; and also noise increases with speed - which tends to make people put their houses further away from the streets - which makes everything even less dense, which requires people to speed up and use cars more.

So in practice it's worse than 10x.

I don't think your logic works. Cars are 10x longer, but (for example) my house is not 10x longer in all 3 dimensions.

The streets in downtown Salt Lake City were famously designed to be able to turn a horse-drawn wagon around. That width turned out to be pretty good for cars when they came - no additional scaling needed.

Salt Lake City has a huge volume of parking lots, highways, and many roads.

While individual streets may not have scaled up there were other parts of the built environment that did to accommodate cars.

This isn't really true outside of some very tarmaccy American cities.

I live in London, UK. I can use my car to get to places, it just costs more, through congestion charges, parking, and time.

The car hugely, hugely increases my exploration radius vs. walking and public transport.

There is also a value in things being bigger. I remember going to a random grungy arcade bar in LA that had fifty pinball machines. We don't have the space for that, at least, not unless it's an Experience(tm) with a corporate backer .

Those very "tarmaccy" US cities are what you get when you "stretch" cities to accommodate the scale of cars.

Other US cities are gradually moving towards that design by adding incrementally more parking and highways, but it's a slow process.

I have no opposition to cars, but designing cities where nearly all trips require a car is an extreme that most people in the US live in. If you own a car you use here and there that's absolutely fine, but if there's nowhere for someone to live where they can comfortably get by without a car that's a bad place to be.

And as I argued in my initial point when everyone needs to drive the congestion and distance between things substantially reduces the advantage of driving in the first place.

Before the very first car has been made people in the West and Asia had been using horse-drawn carriages for centuries and built cities to accommodate those. If your logic is sound then adoption of cars has shrunk the cities as a horse-drawn carriage had been longer than a motor-driven car.

Horse-drawn carriages were typically used for moving goods or for shared transit, not for most individuals in single horse drawn carriages going to all sorts of day-to-day trips.

The point is that the default mode of transportation requires vastly more space than it used to.

How does it matter how they were used? It's not like they shrunk when used for "noble" causes from your PoV and required narrower roads (and from my reading of classics, horse-drawn carriages were used by city dwellers for individual transportation just like cars nowadays).

It matters because there are far fewer delivery of goods than people getting around for day to day trips.

If you look at the average amount of space taken up by a person traveling around if they walk, or take transit, for most trips then they'll on average take significantly less space than using a car.

And a car takes significantly less space than a carriage with a horse so I don't see what are you trying to say here. You compared length of a car to the length of a foot and made far reaching conclusions but when offered to compare a horse carriage with a car and make the same conclusions you seem to compare cars and feet again.

My point is about the average space taken up on a trip.

In the far past some trips were taken via horse + carriage but tons more were taken via walking and transit. Our built world has scaled to account for that increase in space used on trips.

I am sorry, you are still making little sense. The space taken by a car is the same no matter how many people walk, crawl or stay at home and don't go anywhere. It's more than a man but less than a horse carriage. And since you still refuse to compare the space taken by the horse carriage to the space take by a car, I figure you understand now that your logic is not sound, which is good enough result of this thread.

A horse carriage takes up similar space to a car, yes.

But if 80% of day-to-day trips are walked and 20% are horse-carriages that's much more efficient in terms of space than a world where 80% of trips are via car and 20% are walked.

That additional space manifests in more wider roads to reduce bottlenecks and more large parking lots to store cars at different destinations.

I've phrased this multiple different ways. The concept isn't complex: a car (or horse carriage!) is much bigger than a person walking so if we design a world that encourages more travel via car (or horse carriage!) that world will be less spatially efficient.

But, as I've pointed out repeatedly, in the past far more people walked to take trips than take a horse carriage.

> that's much more efficient in terms of space than a world where 80% of trips are via car and 20% are walked.

I feel like you are trying to say that it will require less space? Like roads can be made narrower or shorter? Why though? The road width is defined by the vehicle size and the number of lanes, and you don't want to cut the number of lanes below 1 but realistically you want 2 so a broken vehicle won't block traffic for everyone. And there are already not many 3 lanes in each direction roads so you are not saving much. Also most 3+ lanes roads I see are arterials and interstates, people driving those routes usually cannot walk them physically as they are tens if not hundreds of miles.

In the low traffic volume world of carriages, one lane in each direction is ample or even excessive for most roads. Many pre-car roads aren't wide enough to even accommodate one carriage in each direction at the same time.

The pre-car Europe and the US were not low traffic. E.g. the main street (Nevsky Avenue) in St. Petersburg, Russia is 200 feet wide since 1760s (and it was expanded from the original 65 feet because that was not enough for traffic).

I'm talking about parking lots and roads.

If every destination needs parking for nearly its peak capacity then that creates substantial sprawl.

Similarly if an area gets a high volume of peak car traffic then over time it will tend to get more arterials and interstates connected to it.

As sprawl and road networks increase it becomes more difficult to get around without a car, incentivizing more cars, which requires more large parking lots / roads.

I don't know where you live but in every city in the US I had been there are minimum lot sizes and setbacks to prevent fires and flooding and those leave plenty of room for parking so I don't see how walking could change that (it's not like fire propagation and water absorption cares about your mode of transportation).

You are describing the problem. Minimum lot sizes is a problem caused by over reliance on cars.

Not really, they existed before cars. As I said they are dictated by the fire safety, flooding danger and nuisance concerns. All the stuff you read on Reddit ("people want to live in tiny apartments but those are illegal to build", "it's illegal to have mixed commercial and residential use", "lot sizes are blown up by parking requirements") could be proven to be completely insane with few minutes of research.

Carriages were extremely rare and cities were not built to accommodate them until the rise of the coach in the 16th century.

Carriages are not much longer than cars, and they're significantly narrower and articulated in the middle. The simplistic model of "length" breaks down when you want to compare two things of similar size, but it's good enough when we're comparing two things where one is 10x the size of the other.

If you visit old cities in Europe and the Middle East you'll definitely see a difference in size and layout between cities that were built for horses (not even necessarily for carriages, just pack-horses) and cities that weren't. And then you'll see another big shift if you go to e.g. South Africa where all the cities were built in the post-coach era.

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