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Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

Roads in cities are such a waste of space. A long time ago I did a quick survey of SF and found something like 20% of the land was dedicated to cars. Some articles from people here that talk about this [1] [2] [3]. That is the most subsidized land on the planet but people don't think of it that way. They think roads are free so any tax to use them is wrong. That space could be helping out the city in so many ways but instead it is just ugly pavement. Yes we need some roads, but cars driving in the heart of downtown as normal transit? It boggles my mind how dumb that is. Raise this tax until basically nobody is using the roads then rip most of them up except maintenance corridors and put that land to use.

[1] https://www.sfmta.com/press-releases/sfmta-completes-citywid...

[2]https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities...

[3] https://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/11/03/study-quantifies-how-u...

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You’re not incorrect per se, but it’s important to note that deliveries into downtown would be important for it to be a thriving destination for shopping, residential or business. Not to mention space for heavy equipment to come in to do repairs and construction. Minimal maintenance corridors may not be enough.

You also need public transit options into it as well as transportation solutions for “out of towners” who descend onto downtown for some event (eg public parking lots outside the city that has public transit to the event).

It can be an easier and more politically popular idea to just use streets to solve this problem at the individual level even if less efficient rather than requiring efficient central management planning by the government.

And just to be clear, I’m a fan of the changes SF is making, just highlighting some of the challenges, not to mention that SF isn’t going quite so far as to rip up existing streets with the exception of the latest vote where the entire city basically voted against the will of the outer sunset to convert the highway to a park and not just closed on the weekends as it’s been since COVID (increasing maintenance costs due to erosion are another huge reason it’s a good idea).

In any city that isn't hopelessly car-dependent there is some kind of rail to bring in commuters. A subway, tram, light rail, passenger rail, often a combination of all of them. Once you have a stable system to bring in commuters, adding a couple parking lots to stops on the outskirts for "out of towners" is pretty easy.

The rest is just about not removing all the streets. You also need enough roads for emergency vehicles. But simple two-lane roads for arteries and one-lane roads everywhere else are enough for deliveries, maintenance and (European-sized) emergency vehicles. All the other lanes are just there so everyone can travel downtown in their personal car instead of using more efficient transport options.

You can also have fully closed streets open to emergency vehicles as long as a path is kept clear

One-lane road in a city means any car can block the whole road. So if an ambulance needs this road to save you, you're out of luck.

Just because a street is one way does not mean it is so narrow that only one vehicle can fit through.

Streets may be one way because it discourages unnecessary automotive traffic and it allows the rest of the space to be dedicated to bicyclist or use for residential and commercial purposes (outdoor seating, space for games, etc).

So even if the streets are one way, there will often be space for the ambulance to maneuver around blocked vehicles. And if there's not, the ambulance can take another street or road. If it's the only route that can access that location, then with any sane amount of urban planning then the ambulance will be within a short walking distance to the location (and more often than not within eyesight).

Prohibit on-street parking on at least one side of the road, make the side walk on that side big enough that an ambulance can use it to pass other vehicles if the road is blocked (I'll skip the question of why the street is blocked in the first place). Actually enforce the parking restriction.

You need space for pedestrians anyways, and with traffic restricted to the necessary minimum you don't need bollards everywhere

This isn't some kind of rocket science that has never been tried before, it's the reality in many cities around the world. You need an entire concept instead of adding half-backed solutions to an existing system, but the solutions are all well-tried and for the most part very straight forward.

Are you sure that’s not a path dependency that’s difficult to undo? Retrofitting this into a place like the Bay Area seems impractical given how bad public transit is there chronically.

The public transit quality reflects the government quality.

>but it’s important to note that deliveries into downtown would be important for it to be a thriving destination for shopping, residential or business. Not to mention space for heavy equipment to come in to do repairs and construction. Minimal maintenance corridors may not be enough.

I used to work at a warehouse, the whole street of warehouses had a street width of at most 10m (30ft) wall-to-wall. People vastly overestimate how much throughput is needed purely for shipping, due to all the passenger cars on the road.

Heavy equipment is also less of an issue than you'd think, because it tends to expand to fit the space it's permitted - like all engineering projects.

Some cities manage fine with very small roads. Sometimes there isn’t exactly a road at all, but rather a pedestrian area that can be used for deliveries and such when necessary.

American city centers are overprovisioned on roads by probably a factor of 10 or more. Ironically, fixing that would be excellent for local businesses, and they’re usually the ones opposing it because they think there’s no way to get customers besides having them drive directly to the business and park on their property.

@wat1000 perfectly said. And the small businesses are the most easily frightened by well financed campaigns that make them afraid their business will shutter if car based traffic is even slightly reduced.

In Ancient Rome, private vehicles were banned during the first ten hours of the day. Doing the same for nearly all commercial deliveries would make a lot of sense today too. A huge number of delivery trucks are massively oversized and inappropriate for their task. Charging for oversized vehicles might wake some business owners up to more carefully evaluating their costs and making more rational choices. Heavy equipment is easy to permit.

Look at any car-free area and there are very reasonable exceptions to make them function. The important thing is to remove cars as the mandatory way to access locations, and to cease prioritizing cars over more efficient methods of transit. Forcing cars into our cities took a massive amount of changes to our legal and planning system, and huge huge subsidies. Just going back to thinking of cars as one of many ways to get around, rather than as the primary and prioritized method of getting around, would allow for much more efficient systems.

New York City has more than adequate public transportation, except for the private vehicles slowing it down.

SF has adequate public transit, but without all the cars in the way and with higher ridership it would be amazing.

The small difference between Ancient Rome and the governments of SF and NYC is that ancient Rome had good government.

> It can be an easier and more politically popular idea to just use streets to solve this problem at the individual level even if less efficient rather than requiring efficient central management planning by the government.

So how many 40 lane roads are you going to build instead of single train lines?

This is kind of like an argument-by-consequences since SF funding for transit and roads has viability problems due to SF's comparatively low residential density, as the funding from Covid, federal and then CA state emergency funding that replaced those disappear in 2025. This will cause big service reductions in SF MUNI [0], BART and Caltrain, starting this year.

And it wasn't about "the will of the Outer Sunset" [1], and some (local) people there rely on car or rideshare access, plus all the rest of us from everywhere that isn't the Outer Sunset also want to be able to drive there to visit. The existing post-Covid time-shared road/park setup on Highway 1 was already incredibly friendly to bikes, pedestrian, pets, children, surfers. And SF Measure K only passed 54.7:45.3% [2].

> "increasing maintenance costs due to erosion are another huge reason it’s a good idea)"

You could argue the exact same that SF cablecars could be cut because they net lose money (federal subsidy), or about all of us constantly paying for the upkeep of Highway 1 down at Big Sur, which is regularly closed/subsided/storm-damaged, and costs $$$ to repair every winter, but the wishes of the (small population of) locals have to be balanced against the wishes of everyone else (CA + out-of-state residents, tourists) who use it.

In any case re the viability of transit at such low neighborhood densities, Seamless Bay Area [3] have for years been pointing out the ongoing insanity, duplication, waste, lack of ticket interoperability etc. of bankrolling 27 different agencies for 9 counties in a metro area of only <8m people [4], smaller than NYC/LA/Chicago. These operating costs are soaking up any passenger revenues, preventing it from being spent on services. SF was particularly disproportionately hard hit by the permanent Covid change of both WFH/remotework + exodus of tech employees and companies + record-high SF downtown office vacancy.

[0]: https://www.kqed.org/news/12014573/sf-muni-dire-need-funding...

[1]: "Do voters want to close S.F.’s Great Highway? New Chronicle poll shows where they stand [Prop K - 46% in favor of closure, 44% against, 10% undecided]" 10/2024 https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1gaaj36/do_vo...

[2]: 2024 SF Measure K https://sfelections.org/results/20241105w/index.html

[3]: seamlessbayarea.org

[4]: "One journey, one ticket", key learnings from Swiss public transport" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38686115

One extreme approach to that would be to pick some line in western SF neighborhoods, close all roads west of it, declare everything west of that a park, and reroute Highway 1 slightly eastwards. And compensate people affected by the change.

Or close that to regular car traffic but keep SF Muni buses and trams and maybe high-occupancy taxis/ shuttles/ rideshares.

This line of thought is pretty silly. Claiming that the city is subsidizing X billions because some public space is free.

The land there is so valuable because it's desirable. Sure, NYC could sell central park for a bazillion dollars. But the land there is so expensive because central park exists. If it were sold and became buildings, the price of sq ft in Manhattan would massively drop.

Except in downtown SF there are dozens of giant empty lots, some are just abandoned, some are flat lots used for 6hrs a week for event parking.

We still have a few of those here in DC. I've always assumed they're just a way for the owner to hold onto the real estate until it's time to sell.

SF only approves something like 3-4 new housing construction projects a month for its 800,000 or so population. If I have that wrong, just chime in.

So even if you lucked out and acquired land , inherited it , or whatever . It could be years before you can do anything with it. If you even have the money to build on it.

Parking is the only rent you might be collecting on it.

Roads are useful, but what I really think we should get rid of is parking lots. When cars can drive themselves we should build over all the lots and knock down the garages. The cars can spend the day on the road and the night parked outside the city. There should be zero parked inside the city.

Abolish free parking, and raise prices on the parking meter until the parking spots are only ~80% occupied (if they're less than 80% occupied, lower the price).

If there's not enough parking, let the market fix that problem - if private parking lots are profitable use of land, then people will build them. But people will never be satisfied with private parking lots if they could have used free public parking instead (if they'd just looked harder for a parking spot).

In other words, giving out free shit discourages people from buying that shit. Which really shouldn't surprise anyone.

Any other innovative ways to disproportionately tax the wage class?

Charging money for services is “innovative”? I know the hacker set likes to reinvent other industries and call it new, but this is rather extreme.

Just say you're a landlord

Give me free stuff. If you say no you’re a landlord.

Free? Tax-dodging sovereign citizen panhandler too, I see.

Sure - create urban and suburban environments where a car is a necessity for daily function. Financing, insurance, maintenance, repairs, fuel...

Cars aren't cheap. Reducing the overall space devoted to them and utilizing that space for useful purposes would be a net benefit. Providing public transport services with that increased revenue would leave the vast majority better off financially, not to mention the quality of life improvements.

I don't disagree with the objective you describe, but I disagree with the Jonathan Swift-esque idea of abolishing free parking and increasing meters. That would increase the burden on the already-burdened and only nominally affect cost of convenience to the wealthy. I suppose everyone can tip their wait staff by letting them use their residential parking spot-- because without that pre-existing transportation infrastructure, employer provided transport/parking, affordable cost of living, and a living wage for all, I'm not sure how people are getting to work in dense urban areas. Although I love the idea of abandoned luxury vehicles lining the streets with boots on their wheels-- like a broken window theory for late stage capitalism.

If the cars can't park, then they're clogging up the roads and preventing them from being used as intended for transportation.

I am fine with parking lots as long as they're not publicly funded and are taxed just as every other parcel in the city. And on-street parking should be prohibited.

In fact I'd say that self driving cars will mean that it's important that parking is not more expensive than simply driving in circles. You can bet that companies will drive self driving cars in circles to store them while not in use if it's cheaper than parking, and that takes up both more space, and higher value space.

Perhaps there should be some sort of vacancy tax where the operators of driverless cars are charged for every mile they drive without a human passenger.

Youve just invented a new job which is dummy human who is cheaper than parking lot who drives all day around city in otherwise empty cars.

Just another unintended consequence of road use being free for its users, despite road space being a limited resource that's expensive to build and maintain.

Congestion pricing is already a (crude, but still rather effective) way of solving that problem. A more perfect (though impractical to enforce) solution would be charging by the meter-second of lane space consumed, with rates varying over time and location depending on congestion.

Under that pricing scheme, if driving in circles were still somehow cheaper than parking then cars could drive in circles to their heart's content without causing any issues.

This might seem like a good idea at first, but it would essentially result in complete gridlock as the roads fill up with circulating self-driving cars.

No, there's definitely a better solution for this - using self-driving trains to move people.

I'm not sure if people will want to deal with long wait times for their car to drive to them. Imagine watching the end credits roll at a movie theater only to be gripped by the sense of dread that you forgot to call your car during the climactic fight scene and now you'll be waiting half an hour for it to drive from the suburbs.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of reducing car dependency, I'm just not optimistic that self driving cars will help.

roads are dirty tho, n really expensive

In Manhattan you might have an argument. They have the most extensive public transit system in the US.

Anywhere else, you're completely wrong.

Here in San Diego, a typical car drive of ~20 minutes round trip would take ~3 hours on the bus 8-(

Unless you're planning to walk to Minnesota and back (or where ever else you're going) in the current state of affairs you pretty much need roads...

p.s. Also with the "raise the taxes on this until no one uses it" argument, what you're really saying is "make it accessible only to the wealthy".

Nah roads are great and cars are great. They let people get around in ways that are much faster than public transit, with your friends and cargo, protected from the weather, without the safety issues, directly to your destination. If you overbuild and create density of inhuman levels, and don’t build adequate road infrastructure, you will have problems. But otherwise, it’s fine and it works very well in cities of low-mid density.

While this is true, roads are also expensive; particularly in places like dense cities where space is at a premium. It makes perfect sense to charge road users for their consumption of of an expensive, limited resource, as long the price is fair (determined by supply and demand and not just as ploy by people who hate cars to eliminate their use).

Nah.

>That is the most subsidized land on the planet but people don't think of it that way.

That's because it generally isn't in terms of paying cash subsidies. What happens is that when the city is laid out areas are blocked out for access. Doing that doesn't really cost you anything. In places that get pedestrianised the road space is still there, just used for people rather than cars.

How do you propose we handle logistics or emergency vehicles? I’m all for more walkable cities but rip them all up and replace them with what? Rails which are more expensive and less flexible? Pneumatic tube? Even if you switched to single person cargo bikes you would still want dedicated areas for vehicles versus pedestrians.

This problem has been solved by equipment designed for narrower roads. It is not a hard problem to solve and cities like this have been around a very long time.

There are literally solutions to every issue you bring up that are already on the market.

See pedestrian first roads in the NL. There are bigger and more complicated cities that have done these things and became the better for it.

> How do you propose we handle logistics or emergency vehicles?

Find the the width of said emergencies vehicles, and then build bike lanes that are a little wider than that: the emergencies vehicles can drive down them quite easily (and cyclists can get out of the way quite quickly).

Alternatively, if a city has trams, created segregated rights of way, and the emergency vehicles can use them.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2dHFC31VtQ&t=18m47s

And less-car-centric areas ≠ no-vehicles-allowed-ever areas.

Other countries just use more space-efficient vehicles.

Cities have had roads long before there were cars. So many people like to pretend that before "car culture" there were no roads in cities or that before cars there were no big roads. There were huge roads in cities in the 1800s to accommodate carriages, streetcars, and all the extra people on the road because a 5 minute trip by car takes 20 minutes on foot. Cities in 1000 AD had roads, and a lot of them were pretty damn wide. Ancient Rome was famous for building roads. Roads are not a waste of space. Roads are infrastructure.

Cars need a disproportionate amount of space for the number of people that they serve compared to every other means of transport. Bicycles, e-scooters, buses, etc serve many more people per square foot compared to mostly empty cars.

You can certainly pack more bicycles/e-scooters per square mile, but they also move a lot slower. Not to mention cargo capacity of trucks vs. things like e-scooters. Buses and trains also don't go everywhere. If you banned cars and expanded bus routes to compensate, you would get much less utilization of space for your buses. In other words, buses are dense because other modes of transport allow you to only put a bus route on very common paths.

The point still stands, though. The roads that they are complaining about were largely planned and built before cars. Downtown SF had roads that were very similar in size in 1900 as they are in 2025. The roads didn't magically get wider when cars came in. If they weren't a waste of space with no cars, they aren't magically a waste of space now.

Many other cities that were built up much later have huge parking lots in their city centers, which are a massive waste of space. Roads, on the other hand, are not.

Downtown only exists in the first place because roads go there. You know the old saying? All roads lead to Rome. Cities concentrate people and need a lot of resources to be sustainable, and roads are what bring these resources.

Giant American roads mostly don’t bring those resources. They bring vehicles passing through, they bring vehicles filled to 20% or less of their capacity, and they bring street parking, one of the most inefficient uses of land imaginable in a downtown area.

Look at what’s needed to bring those resources and people, only those, and you need far less than what American cities have.

You know what those roads originally had on them? Small carriages (see etymology) and foot traffic, not modern cars. It blows my mind that people think cars are necessary for modern cities when the best ones to live have very few or no cars

That’s just pure nonsense. Have you been to, like, any major non-American city? People just take public transit, or walk, or, live in downtown

This entire comment section is simultaneously hilarious and sad to read, because it's obviously a bunch of myopic Americans who have never ventured outside of America and have no clue how other cities in the world work. Honestly I try to avoid commenting in forums like this because it's so fruitless: it's just like trying to have a rational discussion about vaccines (or anything really) with a bunch of Trump followers.

What’s funny is that I’m sure most of them know other kinds of cities exist. And they know that people somehow manage to survive and thrive there, even if they don’t know how. But this all gets ignored once you start talking about trying to emulate some of that.

For too many Americans, there’s no difference between “that can’t work,” “that can’t work here,” and “we don’t do that.”

Did you know that car ownership in the Netherlands has continued to rise?

This is a blog post of a cycling advocate, from 2019 but still relevant - [0]

Quote:

In 1992, 42% of Dutch households were car-free. By 2016 this had dropped to about a quarter. Car ownership has continued to increase since then. Higher car ownership leads to higher car usage. Almost anyone who can easily afford a car has one and there aren't many people at all who choose to go without if they can afford one: Amongst people of average income, just 12% of households don't have a car and that drops further to just 6% for high income households.

In other words, people choose to own a car if they can afford it, even if they cycle frequently at the same time.

[0] -https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2019/08/the-car-free-m...

All large European cities have a lot of traffic, public transit notwithstanding. And in the small towns, most people have a car because public transit is not economical in sparsely populated areas.

I like to drive. Edit: see also this pro-car, pro-toll note by Bryan Caplan.

https://www.betonit.ai/p/cars-could-be-even-more-convenient

This is a non-informational take which is just ahistorical, as evidenced by the fact that just 30 years a lot of European cities were very much car-centric and were much more awful by pretty much every metric than they are today.

About one in every two households in Amsterdam own a car. I would bet many that don't use taxi services themselves now and again, and almost everybody would indirectly rely on roads used for deliveries, workmen, emergency services. And that's about the best case for a European city. It's comparable to New York City.

Paris, London, Prague -- higher.

The reality is that these romantic notions people have of cities not relying on cars or roads is an unrealistic fantasy. Yes it's certainly nice if you have good public transport that many people can use for most of their transport. The reality is though that even in the very best cases of those like Amsterdam and Tokyo, personal car ownership rates are still enormous, and the cities would cease to function without small private vehicles for commercial operations, let alone removing the roads for garbage collections, busses, emergency vehicles, etc.

And yet, if you walk around Amsterdam or Rotterdam you see a lot of bicycles and trams and pedestrians, and very few cars.

Cars certainly exist, but they are clearly not used by default for everything.

Contrast with my recent visit to New Jersey. The hotel was surrounded on all sides by parking lots and multi lane roads). There was no sidewalk.

I haven't walked around those cities, I've walked around certain areas of London or Tokyo as a tourist mostly in central areas that are well serviced by public transport and are very dense, without any real understanding of what it actually takes to live, work, raise children, or anything else in those places. I certainly saw a lot of roads and cars, particularly when looking out the window of trains and busses into actual places people live.

> Cars certainly exist, but they are clearly not used by default for everything.

Sure, I've noticed a bunch of American cities I've been to are a more difficult to walk or get public transport than any big ones in Europe or Asia I've been to.

They're all automobile-centric though. You'll never get rid of cars, taxis, trucks, busses, or roads. Not in any of them. Better walking, riding, and public transport is great, it's just never going to do away with the car, nor is doing away with cars and roads ever going to solve any problems that cities have. There should be more honesty and pragmatism around this.

Everybody likes to drive. It's far more private, personal, and free than even the best public transport, which is why a country like Japan with some of the best public transport on earth has a car ownership rate of 1 per household, and even in Tokyo it's 33% of households, with a large taxi industry.

It astounds me that so many on the left seem to be converging on the opinion that it should be a goal to reduce, eliminate, tax private transportation for the common person.

Public transport is great and should be improved or encouraged, and road area usage should be as efficient as possible. But private transportation should be made cheaper and more convenient and accessible to as many people as possible. That is a great way to improve quality of life and expand opportunities for people.

I hate driving but every time I get on my bicycle I remember how fun it is... until a car starts driving behind me impatient to get somewhere a few seconds faster. I can bike to many places in my town faster than the drivers can drive if I put some effort into pedaling.

I don't mean everybody likes the act of driving, I mean everybody likes what driving [a private vehicle] can do for them. I didn't mean even that in the absolute literal sense either, but anecdotes from people who don't have a car or get driven by friends and never take taxis or uber anywhere would be interesting and will probably help us to understand why virtually everybody likes driving.

I don't think anyone literally likes driving. Some people like racing, some people like drifting. But who the heck likes getting in their car, waiting at stop signs and lights, staring down a road for hours, and wondering whether the oncoming vehicle veering left is going to turn on their turn signal or straighten their path.

No amount of reason will negate the fact that people like the convenience of cars.

There is a reason cars, and paradoxically larger cars are being bought in increasing numbers.

You can of course force people to give up conveniences they like, you just have to contend with the fact that the modern world makes it easy for people to move or vote with their wallet.

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