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Western Europe in a VERY dense city BTW.
I don't think the implied claim is that there should be specifically a train to every particular address, if that's what you're counting as failure in the game, but rather that with good public transport (including trains) and pedestrian/cyclist-friendly streets it shouldn't be the case that most people need to drive.
Need to move 3 or 4 people? Driving the car may be cheaper.
Don't want to get rained on? Or heatstroke? Or walk through snow? Or carry a bunch of stuff, like a groceries/familyWeek or whatever else? Or go into the countryside/camping? Or move a differently-abled person? Or go somewhere outside public transport hours? Or, or .. or.
Are there many cases where people should take public transport or ride a bike instead of their car? Obviously yes. But once you have a car to cover the exigent circumstances it is easy to use them for personal comfort reasons.
They’re also a joke when it comes to moving large numbers of people. I can’t imagine the chaos if everyone leaving a concert at Wembley Stadium decided to leave by car.
Fort Worth is worse for this!
Strongtowns is definitely worth a listen.
But people claiming that you can live a life without cars don't seem to realise the very many scenarios where cars are often easier and sometimes the only answer.
> Need to move 3 or 4 people? Driving the car may be cheaper.
That's the issue―the average car occupancy is <1.5. Our goal should be to raise it, by offering alternatives to cars in cases where they're not appropriate.
> Are there many cases where people should take public transport or ride a bike instead of their car? Obviously yes.
Not many, most. Cars are a niche, they're only economical when transporting a few people with cargo over medium distances. Everything else is more efficiently covered by another mode of transport.
And "obviously", huh? Look outside. It's all roads.
> But once you have a car to cover the exigent circumstances it is easy to use them for personal comfort reasons.
You'd be surprised. The Netherlands is the best example of this―the Dutch own almost as many cars per person as Americans do, yet they cycle orders of magnitude more.
It's a matter of designing our built environment to make the most efficient mode of transportation for the situation the most convenient option.
> > Need to move 3 or 4 people? Driving the car may be cheaper. >That's the issue―the average car occupancy is <1.5. Our goal should be to raise it, by offering alternatives to cars in cases where they're not appropriate.
When I said this, I meant in terms of $ to the individual making the choice. Apart from city parking costs, and congestion charges, with modern phones being used a lot for transport these days could we do dynamic group discounts? IE my transport app shows a QR code, my friends who are coming with me scan it with their transport app and by travelling together(beeping on and off at the same locations within the same timeslot) we get a discount?
> Not many, most. Cars are a niche, they're only economical when transporting a few people with cargo over medium distances. Everything else is more efficiently covered by another mode of transport.
I agree in the context of city planning and public transport being a lot better than it is now. Otherwise, the last mile problem is a hard one to get past. As soon as you walk or ride a bike to the station/bus-stop you've introduced constraints on cargo, physical fitness and weather. All mostly easier with a car. Also, a car provides freedom/flexibility for midday decisions like "I'll do the groceries on the way from work" or "my wife had an issue at work, so I'll go pick up the kids this afternoon" or similar - harder to do if you've committed to pubic transport in the morning.
> And "obviously", huh? Look outside. It's all roads.
Where I am, public transport is buses. Bicycles are meant to ride on the road. So the roads are still used even if the car isn't.
> You'd be surprised. The Netherlands is the best example of this―the Dutch own almost as many cars per person as Americans do, yet they cycle orders of magnitude more.
This is one thing I find frustrating. But not everyone has a "default active" lifestyle. Many are quite sedentary. Also, a significant chunk of car costs - purchase/depreciation, yearly insurance and registration - are not mileage based. But it is frustrating that other options are not even considered. Again though, urban planning and current public transport shape the society we live in for generations. Maybe we'd all be more active if it was better done.
> It's a matter of designing our built environment to make the most efficient mode of transportation for the situation the most convenient option.
So much this. But there is a lot to overcome. Individualism, NIMBYs and cars themselves as a status symbol of freedom and "go anywhere, go anytime" flexibility. I don't see how to do it - but I'd support smart attempts to try.
In the states at least if you're using public transit it's generally as an intentional time / cost tradeoff. That's not a mystery and taking a point-to-point schedule and comparing that against public transit constraints doesn't really prove much.
If you want the freedom to move across vast amounts of open nature, then yeah the private automobile is a good approximation for freedom of mobility. But designing urban areas that necessitate the use of a private vehicle (or even mass transit) for such essentials as groceries or education is enslavement. I don't buy the density argument either. Places that historically had the density to support alternative modes of transportation, densities that are lower than they are today, are only marginally accessible to alternative forms of transportation today. Then there is modern development, where the density is decreased due to infrastructure requirements.
These things are different.
So no, I don't think Europeans who haven't been in America have quite absorbed just how vast America is. It stretches across an entire continent in the E-W direction, and N-S (its shortest border) still takes nearly a full day. (San Diego to Seattle is about 20 hours, and that's not even the full N-S breadth of the country since you can drive another 2.5 hours north of Seattle before reaching the Canadian border). In fact, I can find a route that goes nearly straight N-S the whole way, and takes 25 hours to drive, from McAllen, TX to Pembina, ND: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BpvjrzJvvdjD9vdi9
Train travel is sometimes feasible in America (I am planning Christmas travel with my family, and we are planning to take a train from Illinois to Ohio rather than fly, because the small Illinois town we'll be in has a train station but no airport; counting travel time to get to the airport, the train will be nearly as fast as flying but a lot cheaper). But there are vast stretches of the country where trains just do not make economic sense, and those whose only experience is in Europe usually don't quite realize that until they travel over here. For most people, they might have an intellectual grasp of the vastness of the United States, but it takes experiencing it before you really get it deep down. Hence why the very smart German engineer still misread the map: his instincts weren't quite lined up with the reality of America yet, and so he forgot to check the scale of the map.
There are plenty of city pairs where high speed trains do make economic sense and America still doesn't have them. [1] is a video "56 high speed rail links we should've built already" by CityNerd. And that's aside from providing services for the greater good instead of for profit - subsidizing public transport to make a city center more walkable and more profitable and safer and cleaner can be a worthwhile thing. The US government spends a lot subsidizing air travel.
> So no, I don't think Europeans who haven't been in America have quite absorbed just how vast America is
China had some 26,000 miles of high speed rail two years ago, almost 30,000 miles now connecting 550 cities, and adding another couple of thousand miles by 2030. A hundred plus years ago America had train networks coast to coast. Now all Americans have is excuses why the thing you used to have and tore up is impossible, infeasible, unafordable, unthinkable. You have reusable space rockets that can land on a pillar of fire. If y'all had put as much effort into it as you have into special pleading about why it's impossible, you could have had it years ago.
This is, of course, a massively broad generalization, and there will be plenty of voters who don't fit that generalization. But the average American voter, as best I can tell, recoils from the words "high-speed rail" like Dracula would recoil from garlic. And I do believe that California's infamous failure (multiple failures, even) to build the high-speed rail they have been working on for years has a lot to do with that "high-speed rail is a boondoggle and a waste of taxpayer dollars" knee-jerk reaction that so many voters have.
The forests and wilderness of the PNW are much, much, much, much more remote and wild than virtually anywhere you’d go in Europe. Like not even close.
Or have a "car-cabin-without-engine-and-wheels" and treat it like a packet on a network of trains and "skateboard car platforms".
Such "freedom"...
They just don't have to use them all the time since they can take the more efficient public transport, and they can buy one after college even, they don't need to drive one from 16 yo just to be able to get around...
I'm curious how this changes (in your mind) if "trains" can be expanded to "trains, buses, bicycle", or if you consider that to be a separate discussion.
The Atlanta Metro has 6.5 million people across TWENTY THOUSAND square kilometers.
Trains just don't make sense for this. Everything is too spread out. And that's okay. Cites are allowed to have different models of transportation and living.
I like how much road infra we have. That I can visit forests, rivers, mountains, and dense city all within a relatively short amount of time with complete flexibility.
Autonomous driving is going to make this paradise. Cars will be superior to trains when they drive themselves.
Trains lack privacy and personal space.
Did you forget to support yourself? You're saying Rheinland has three times the population density of Atlanta, with convenient passenger rail, and that demonstrates that low population density isn't an obstacle to passenger rail in Atlanta?
I live in NYC which has 29,000/sqkm in Manhattan and 11,300/sqkm overall. Public transportation is great here and you don't need a car.
but at 240/sqkm, that's really not much public trans per person!
How did we get here from the post about uv?
I'm so stoked for what uv is doing for the Python ecosystem. requirements.txt and the madness around it has been a hell for over a decade. It's been so pointlessly hard to replicate what the authors of Python projects want the state of your software to be in.
uv has been much needed. It's solving the single biggest pain point for Python.
Public transport is to move people around, not to make money.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> a society that glamorizes everyone driving the biggest trucks and carrying the largest rifles
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/traf...
Depending how expensive is gasoline in your country, when using a car people underestimate the cost of a travel by a factor two to five, because they don't count the depreciation of their vehicle's value and the maintenance cost (and sometimes even insurance price) driven by the kilometers ridden during the trip.
Calgary apparently also does a good job of clearing its bike lanes.
And I do my Costco shopping by bike year-round. I think I've used the car for large purchases at Costco twice in the last year.
I _rarely_ drive my car anywhere in Toronto, and find the streets on bike safer than most of the sidewalks in January -- they get plowed sooner than most homeowners and businesses clear the ice from their sidewalks.
And in Toronto we're rank amateurs at winter biking. Look at Montreal, Oslo, or Helsinki for even better examples. Too bad we've got a addle-brained carhead who doesn't understand public safety or doing his own provincial as our premier.
Personally I've also biked to work (and everywhere, really) in sub-zero degrees many times, because the bicycle lanes are cleared and salted. It's really not too bad. It actually gets a bit too hot even, because you start out by wearing so much.
I used to bike to work in just-above-freezing temperatures. That wasn't so bad.
The one time it started to rain mid-journey, that was bad.
> there’s no weather problems, there’s clothing problems
Do the opposite thought experiment for me: Pick any two points of interest on the map and see how well connected they are with roads. Keep doing it until you find somewhere not accessible via car. See the issue yet?
We've paved over the entire planet to the point that you can get anywhere you'd like with a car. We have not done so whatsoever for any other mode of transportation. Pedestrian walkways come close but we prioritize vehicles over those too. The investment into public transport & cycling infrastructure is a statistical error in comparison to roadways.
So no shit it's more convenient for you to take a car than a train, that's the entire point―it shouldn't be.
A 20 lane highway should be a train track, intra-city roads should be dedicated to bikes, not cars.
I guess Europeans will never find out how great the US is :-)
And you have to get lots of permits to have an AC installed legally. If you do not have a permit, you will have to pay a really hefty fee when the inspectors come.
So yeah, buying an AC is what most people would do, but they do not because of the damn permits they most likely will not get. It is a shitty situation.
Actually this idea of just buying things at "the store" is relatively new too. Historically people would make more things themselves, and more food would be purchased directly from farmers who had grown it.