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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: What is the hard part? If you took all of that stuff and did it as quickly as you could somewhere else, what's would be the biggest issue? People + resistance to change of any kind?

The outcome seems so obviously good. I have never heard of anyone complaining about a city becoming less car centric, but maybe somehow it's an under-represented story?

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Well I sold off my car after realizing I enjoyed the bike ride to work. Then a year later an older family member had a health crisis requiring hospital visits at all possible times of the day and night for many months. Couldnt always rely on cabs and that was the only time I regretted selling the car. But we got through it with friends and fam sharing transport duties. Quite a crazy period so I could imagine it becoming real complicated for certain issues.

Effectively NIMBYism, but for cars. The political backlash would stop all progress. People don’t like change, even for the better.

There are places where car is simply the mean of transport - to the point where using the car is preferred to literally a five minutes walk.

In contexts like this, using a car is perceived as a right - restricting usage doesn't make people think "I'll take the chance to use the bike", rather "How the f*ck do I get there now?".

The trouble is that the backlash occurs even in places that are pedestrian and transit dominated.

You have not heard people complaining about cities impeding traffic, likely, because of the bubble you live in. That is the thing that makes regular people to run for the city offices. A whole lot of recent "urbanization" is not going to survive for long because of this IMHO.

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