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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

This is a bad-faith fallacy. We had cars that emitted X amounts of tyre/brake particulate and 10X amounts of combustion residue, we got rid of the combustion part, and now we hear "OMG! 100% is tyre particulate!!!"

Sure, but people won't stop moving, and there's no vacuum, you should compare brake particulate to whatever else people would use if cars didn't exist.

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Or you could just make a city car-free. There are so many benefits besides fewer particles in the air. People can walk and cycle safely. Kids can play in the streets. The atmosphere is so much nicer, since people are not isolated by walls around them.

I have lived in a city with a (nearly) car-free city center (+ separate bike lines for many roads outside the center) for most of my adult life [1] and it is just glorious. Most locals just walk or cycle. Longer distances by (electric) bus or train.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen#Cycling_and_walking

Kids can't play in streets as now the new predators are cyclists who don't slow down or get down of their bikes. Besides, cars are a staple for families, and hardly substituable. Good luck doing groceries for 6 without one.

It's mind boggling to me that this is a genuine comment.

I suggest this yt channel as a start to open your eyes as to how yes, another world is possible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM

I live in Riga, here cyclists ride on the sidewalk, along with e-scooters. I went out for a ten minutes walk with my son, I had to physically and verbally intervene three times to avoid him being hit by a cyclist or e-scooter. Last month our nanny was hit by a cyclist. In Paris it is very common and the main reason they banned e-scooters.

So, while the US paradigm is toxic, I'm not convinced about the one you are proposing, given that, in my experience, cyclists are ruthless and never behave unless I physically intimidate them. And I would rather walk in peace.

I live in Riga, here cyclists ride on the sidewalk, along with e-scooters.

First, give cyclists bike paths, second develop your culture around cycling and walking. It's not a problem here. Virtually everyone cycles here (more bikes than people in this country). I am over 40 and I can only think of two people I know who had more serious injuries (one broken tooth and one broken leg), but both managed to fall without any other traffic involved.

Kids in our city walk or bike to school by themselves when they are 9 or 10 (some earlier) and there are virtually never accidents.

It's a shame that riders of bikes and scooters in your city feel so unsafe riding on the road, that they are forced onto the sidewalks. Blame dangerous drivers and the lack of protected bike lanes though, not your neighbors who are just trying to arrive at their destinations alive.

Pedestrian collisions with bikes versus collisions with automobiles are utterly incomparable both in number and severity. If that cyclist had been driving a car, you would probably need to find a new nanny!

Delivery drivers on e-bikes are the worst in my country, they ride on the sidewalk between pedestrians and cross the roads ignoring traffic lights and rules, feels like you are in a developing Asian country. Why don't they want to ride on the roadway? Because with their and car drivers style of driving it's dangerous.

Delivery drivers are a completely separate problem, and they are a menace whether they ride bikes, scooters, or cars. The issue there is the gig economy apps incenctivising by every means possible (including threats of termination) that drivers go as fast as possible, rules and their own safety be damned. All for someone to get their soggy fries in 35mins instead of 40.

The problem is that most cyclists in my city have no idea about the basic of safety and how to evaluate risk. Most of them ride with headsets on, often noise-cancelling, no helmets and no reflectors. So I'm a bit dubious about the excuse "they are so scared". And even then, they can still walk instead of endangering pedestrians.

As for your last paragraph, this is false; walking on the sidewalk is and should be safe: adding cyclists there makes it unsafe, irrelevant of the car's behavior. Typical predatory thinking of a toxic cyclist.

You need to develop infrastructure (bike lanes and paths) and a cycling culture (which comes with giving kids training in primary school). To give some examples how things work here:

- Most kids get 'traffic training' and have to do a theoretical and practical exam when they are about 10 or 11.

- Building a cycling culture makes car drivers more aware. If car drivers are also cyclists themselves, they are more aware of cyclists. Also, during driving lessons some techniques are practiced, like e.g. opening a door with your hand that is opposite to the door. By doing so, you automatically turn while opening the door, so you can see if any cyclists are passing. All of this makes cycling on roads (as opposed to pavements safer).

- Give bikes a lane, or even better a separate bike path. Only let cars and bikes share a street in low-speed (30 km/h) non-busy streets. Cars, bikes, and pedestrians differ so much in speed that they usually should not be on the same roads.

- Change your laws such that in accidents involving cars <-> bikes or car <-> pedestrian, the car driver always bares a certain amount of liability even if the cyclist/pedestrian is at fault. To a cyclist/pedestrian a car is like a bullet flying by. Putting more liability on the car driver makes them more careful.

- Design your cities so that cycling/walking is preferred. E.g. the city I live uses filtered permeability. As closer you get to the city center, the harder it becomes to get there by car, whereas you can get everywhere easily by bike or by foot. This fosters a culture where biking/walking is the norm, because you can get in different places faster by bike.

It works very well. I don't know of any pedestrians who were hit by a bike.

Typical predatory thinking of a toxic cyclist.

Please avoid the personal attacks and victim-blaming. I have also lived in a country that was not cycling-safe and usually the only way to avoid getting hit is to ride on the pavement (as most natives did). The problem is not the cyclist, but the miserable infrastructure for anything that is not a car.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permeability_(spatial_and_tran...

This is certainly not very common in Paris. Cyclists behave extremely badly, but don’t ride on the sidewalk. E-scooters were another story though, and were indeed banned for this reason.

They don't do it often, but I do see it happen once or twice a day when I'm out. Usually it's only for a short distance though.

Cargo bike?

It isn't very different than a car if you want to reach the same level of features.

Hi Stavros. I would never say OMG—dont believe in deities—and I feel sorry that it came out that way. I was commenting on the GP, which was suggesting alternative ways to get similar effects to those of car-free cities, but in alternative ways. Of those possible ways, to my suprise, the large conveyor belt seemed an interesting possible next step. EVs are not reducing polution in modern cities, unfortunately. They are still way better than gas burning vehicles for a lot of reasons, including CO2 reduction, but as per studies by the Economist they are currently worse on air pollution in cities, unfortunately, due to their typical extra weight, so once we optimize life in cities, we probably want to find ways to reduce their weight and speed, and currently the straightforward solution is to reduce their numbers. As people start obsessing with detecting microplastics in the next decade, these types of changes in city life vs rural life exposure might become even more dramatic.

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