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Comment by mcmoor | Hacker News Reader

Everytime I see the ocean of scooters, I wonder how horrible it'd be if scooters weren't invented but instead everyone use cars like in America. Either it'll make the most legendary traffic jam ever or GDP will be cut in half since no one can move anywhere. With our already overcrowded public transport, it's practically the only alternative.

I actually wonder how much better American traffic would be if scooters are more popular.

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The Netherlands had over 1000KM (621 miles) of traffic jams Monday morning.

Americans use cars because we can afford them. The Indonesians would too if they could.

How would Indonesians use cars that cannot go anywhere? It's not about affording but about people/m² compression.

Here's a quick napkin math: a 1.3m² scooter can take 1-3 people, a toyota camry of 8.8m² can take 1-5 people. This gives the humble scooter aprox 3-5 times the space efficiency that of a car.

Not to mention the agility and parking benefits of scooters. There's no way any SEA city could get rid of scooters in favor of cars. Scooters are incredibly under-rated in the west and my favorite tool here in SEA - it's peak practical engineering at scale.

That makes sense, but I have to assume driving a scooter is a pretty dangerous way to get around a giant city?

I have biker friends who call cars "cages", and I get the sentiment. But they have a lot more concussions than any other group of people I know.

Since this is scooters who rarely even reach >150cc, it's actually quite safe since it's slow and light. There are always high risk when we want to go to very rough roads that are also full of trucks (common in rural areas), but in well maintained roads like lots of Jakarta, it's mostly fine.

Though it really isn't helped by attitude of people around here who aren't even wearing helms.

I agree with other commenter and speed is primary danger for scooters. I've been driving for 7 years (mostly in Thailand) and never had an accident as the risk distributions is incredibly obvious:

- stay within reasonable speed

- keep distance

- don't do highways

- project your intentions very clearly with no sudden moves

vast majority of accidents happen when this simple rule set is broken (aside from obvious DUI). If you're driving 40km/h max in a city you are surprisingly safe, especially as scooter traffic culture is very river like so once you're familiar with the area you are basically being carried by the traffic.

Most stats of SEA scooter deaths are coming from really bad driving, as in drunk uncle driving a scooter on the opposite side of the road with no headlights sort of bad driving (sadly very common). The culture can be very unserious about scooter safety when it's quite achievable in practice. It really is an incredible form of transportation when taken seriously.

I got curious to see how many people have cars in Jakarta. While cars per capita of Indonesia is extremely low (~80 / 1000 people), the one for Jakarta is at respectable ~300/1000 people, not far from NYC at ~400/1000 people. Still far away from other cities though.

From my experience also, scooter is still heavily used even by people that have cars because there's just a lot of small roads and neighborhood where it's very unsuitable for cars. This also makes scooter taxi very popular here since it's cheaper, faster, and can reach the deepest parts of Jakarta.

Most Dutch people can afford cars, but many are on bikes (including cargo/e-bikes), about 27% of all "movements" [0]. This is because of the way our infrastructure is set up, the bike is very often optimal (special bike lanes, shorter routes, better/free parking at destination or public transport hubs). Most people do own a car though.

[0] https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/pe...

True, but if there was a city of 40 million in the Netherlands, I'm afraid very few would venture out on bikes there too.

It would be subways then, not cars I suspect. At least in a city like Rotterdam (673K inhabitants) that is by far the optimal way to get around, cars are really almost useless in the city center.

Here, most of the street is already reserved for bikes, with the sidewalks for pedestrians [0]. This is all a one way street.

[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/EkUV5WQaQXFgv8KG8

Car ownership correlates negatively with urbanization in NL, so no, I don't think so. And no 40M city (or 4M city) convinces me driving is an acceptable way to get around.

I can't find the link anymore, but aeons ago I read a blog post on here claiming that the Netherlands is better characterized as a city state, if you're looking at it from an American point of view: the entire country is about the same size as NYC's metro area, and around the same population.

Americans use a car because their infrastructure was build to support it. If they had cities like exist in South East Asia they wouldn't use it. Because if they did it would literally be no traffic, because the city would barly move and you wouldn't get anywhere.

These cities already have to much traffic while only a small number of people have cars.

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