Hacker News Reader

Comment by skeletal88 | Hacker News Reader

But then public transport has to improve also. You cant make owning a car impossible without offering alternatives.

Generally, restrictions on cars make public transport better automatically, as they make buses work better.

It certainly helps the buses move more efficiently, but it can't do much about things like bus stop placement, or just generally sense of place as you start or end your trip.

> it can't do much about things like bus stop placement

Why not? Fewer cars means more room for bus stops.

Because there has to be a place where the bus stop could sensibly be. A history of car-centric design often eliminates those opportunities.

I see. I think you're talking about stop placement on a higher level? Removing street parking can free up room for lots of extra stops, which can help with bus bunching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching

I'm talking about what you physically see, or even step over, at the actual physical location where you're contemplating putting the bus stop; which is there because people were only thinking about cars when doing the zoning and construction.

car centric areas put their front door far from anyplace a but can easilly get. Either the but slows everyone else down because it is going in and out of all these parking lots and cul-de-sacs, or the walk from the but stop to where you are going is already your entire travel budget.

I think it gets confusing because we start out talking about cities but we'd also like to include other areas that are overrun with cars in the conversation. Buses in Ghent and Paris aren't going to be navigating parking lots and cul-de-sacs, no matter how much car infrastructure is removed. We can free up a lot of room for bus stops, though, which helps keep buses moving smoothly.

Suburbs are either cities in their own right, or part of the whole city. It deoesn't make sense in this discussion to think of them as not part af the city: they cover too much of the population.

Not really. Unless the restriction is to take a generic lane and dedicate it to buses. But if restriction is to take a generic lane and give it to bicycles, then both cars and buses sit in the same traffic jam.

So, first, it would be rare to bring in restrictions of this sort without doing something to buses. But even if you _don’t_, reduction in traffic helps buses (assuming you already have bus lanes, which any city doing this stuff generally would, the main problem for buses is intersections, which this helps with)

It`s totally possible.

My city excels at this. We are at level where bus system is not enough at all. But the municipality is trying to avoid it since it’s seen as politically tricky. Nobody wants to start it, take the beating and then let opponents cut the tape a decade later. The bus system is struggling too. Old buses, incomplete bus lanes and so on. When one jackass got an idea to reduce car traffic and started with adding obstacles to cars without improving public transit… Traffic did not better. And buses get stuck with the rest. Thankfully remote/hybrid work is all the rage. In recent decade quite a few offices and other workplaces moved away from urban core. That helps the situation a bit.

Alternatives naturally become more viable over time as more and more people find car use impossible, but its kind of hard to tell in advance which lanes of public transport are most necessary to improve. So imo the best solution is just to do it, and then see what happens and adapt. It's too hard to plan out everything in advance, and if you try you get deadlocked politically and nothing ends up happening. So you just find the best lever you can to reduce traffic immediately, and just start pressing it. But you warn everyone that you're pressing it, and when you do so you do it slowly.

The reality is that a lot of traffic is simply unnecessary, and dissipates once you add some friction. The most extreme example of that is the rise of remote work during and after Covid. As it turns out, none of these people actually needed to go anywhere.

And more generally, cars induce their own demand simply by virtue of being the fastest and most comfortable option, and they shape the environment around them to depend on them. Small local shops get outcompeted by distant behemoths due it being more convenient to drive. People move to a large house in a distant suburb rather than a small apartment because they know it's just thirty minutes away from work by car anyways. The easier it is to drive, the more entrenched driving becomes. And any way you slice it, undoing that process will cause pain, so you might as well go ahead and start, because you're never going to find a way to prevent the consequences anyway.

None of the changes in the comment make owning a car impossible, they just make driving marginally less privileged over walking and biking.

No, it's worse than that. The city council very much implemented an anti-car (harassment) policy, to the point that car owners felt hounded by their own council's policies. It seriously wasn't a matter of "marginally less privileged".

Motorists are incredibly fragile. I'm glad Paris has had a mayor who could stand up to their entitled whinging.

Interesting how correctly naming them motorists sharpens how "the default" is often to be presumed drivers and pedestrians and cyclists are marginal

I don’t know that it’s a helpful distinction. A lot of people do it all - drive, walk, bike, and take public transit. Only in this kind of discussion do I see people declaring it a team you have to choose.

Motorists are an easy scapegoat but without alternatives it's just political handwaving. And most people are motorists.

Take my city for example. I work in an office block around a 15 minute walk from the centre, which has free parking for employees. Monday this week the city announced that the land is now paid parking to the city effective immediately. When it was pointed out they they hadn't provided any of the necessary signage or machines for this, they decided it was illegal to park there at all, with fines and tow trucks for non compliance. An email from them suggested "cycling or using public transport as the weather is nicer".

I cannot stress this enough. No warning, no compromise, no other use for this land, just an immediate draconian announcement.

It's very easy to call another group entitled if you're not one of them

> the city announced that the land is now paid parking to the city

what a strange way to put it... why didn't they just say that they are not using any more taxpayer money to finance your parking space? Land in a city is not "for free".

> It's very easy to call another group entitled if you're not one of them

yeah, well: my point, exactly!

You miss the larger point not mentioned: all those motorists will be mad and looking to vote for someone next election that will undo it all.

Your job in any political office is not to leave everything as-is and to cement yourself into that position, but to make marginal improvements, even if doing so costs you the next elections or inconveniences people (hopefully only temporarily).

Most of those marginal improvements can only be seen as something positive in retrospective, not while they're being made. While they're being made, they'll always be unpopular, as the voter base is usually not keen on defending the people that are currently in charge. That doesn't mean they won't show up in the next elections, just that they are quieter in the meantime.

in the ideal world maybe - but we don't live in the ideal world: most are trying to get re-elected, or elected to a higher office now that they have experience.

and even in the ideal world a great leader can do more in the next term if they get relected.

I'll be totally honest in that I don't know what the arrangement was before, but that free parking was previously enforced by permits so it's a reasonable assumption that it was not at the tax payers expense

> Motorists are incredibly fragile

Until you throw yourself in front of my car

> > Motorists are incredibly fragile

> Until you throw yourself in front of my car

Fragile with regard to their egos, as illustrated here.

Imagine how "hounded" everyone else feels by driver friendly polies in other cities.

The starting point is anti-anything-but-a-car, so it's understandable that in the process of getting to any sort of parity you'd feel like it's "harassment".

It's like claiming getting rid of slavery is "harassment", because your unfair privileges are being taken back.

When one is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com