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Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off-topic but NYC went through a similar process when congestion pricing met legal battle after legal battle. Long to short, there was a calculated effort to make midtown less and less vehicle-friendly. The "hack" was to take streets / aves and repurpose those for pedestrians. Special walking lanes, more "park cafes", bike lanes, etc. None were stated as being anti-vehicle - as that would open up legal challenges - but that was obviously the intention.

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And it worked, there's multiple studies showing that retail business in the neighborhoods that limited car accessibility is up while pollution and noise is down and for those who choose to drive into the city, parking is easier.

Its been great for those that can afford to live in Manhattan. For us living in the other borrows its been horrible. The honking is now non-stop.

I'm in Brooklyn, I'm not sure what you mean? How would it affect the outer boroughs?

Here across the 59th, traffic is definitely worst. With the BQE the daily shit-show that is is (never ceases to amaze me, how people get in accidents on a highway that rarely get over 35mph.) The best way was actually thru the FDR. Now everyone just uses Vernon Blvd which is only accessible thru local streets.

But in fact the end goal wasn’t to remove vehicles, it was to reduce congestion, emissions, etc. Those things are caused by vehicles, so policies to remove them will affect vehicles, but it’s disingenuous to suggest that their motivation is anti-vehicle.

It is also anti vehicle. Moving people in nyc at densities of 10ft by 20ft apart from the next human at the best theoretical case is astoundingly stupid.

> Moving people in nyc at densities of 10ft by 20ft apart from the next human at the best theoretical case is astoundingly stupid

Are you sure? I would expect that it is average density of people over the length of the route that is important when it comes from moving people from some point A to some point B on a road.

With for example buses you have high density where the buses are actually at, but 0 density where they are not. The average over the entire route can easily be lower than the density for cars where you can have that 1 person per 20 feet over the whole route.

If an observer at a fixed point on the route sees more than about 50 cars pass between buses passing the cars will have higher throughput.

No one ever said anything along the lines of EVs are ok, we're just trying to tax the petrol vehicles. The goal was anti-vehicle. They didn't not directly but indirectly. Like it or not, the strategy was legal and political genius.

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