Comment by soiltype | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soiltype | Hacker News Reader

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Look I don't fault you - Americans drive cars because every alternative is absolute dogshit, I don't disagree. But I can't e realistic about that and not this:

> As for the environmental impact, I agree that trains or busses may sometimes be better for environment

That's like saying gunshots may sometimes be more dangerous than throwing rocks.

> but we’re also approaching a future of self driving electric cars powered by nuclear and fusion plants providing clean energy

Even if this was true (I don't think either change is happening nearly fast enough) car-dependency is directly upstream of numerous other environmental problems, most of which don't disappear even if you take parking out of the mix, such as grounds heat and flooding caused by paved roads, such as obsession with energy- and water-inefficient low-density residential zoning (sprawl), such as particulate pollution from tires, such as ecosystem damage from the need to dump literal tons of salt on icy roads for tires to drive on, such as the emissions of road paving itself... you get the idea.

These also don't disappear if you replace privately-owned cars with buses and trains. You need paved roads to put buses on and track to put trains on, and they emit particulate pollution as well unless they're also electrified which is a similar problem to electrifying cars.

Low-density residential sprawl is mostly water-inefficient because it allows people to have the ability to have a garden that they water, you don't inherently use more household-internal water if you live in a suburban house compared to an apartment. Most of the energy efficiency issues are also directly related to low-density residential zoning allowing for more physical space for a dwelling than an equivalently-expensive dwelling would cost in an expensive, dense urban area. In short, the things about low-density residential neighborhoods that are less energy efficiently mostly don't have to do with cars and mostly do have to do with goods that people actively want and can only afford outside of dense urban areas.

>Low-density residential sprawl is mostly water-inefficient

Which is more or less a non-issue east of the Missouri river

Indeed, the root of many water problems is people wanting to live in the desert.

Kind of begs the question why so much local level water stuff is federally regulated.

Why do North and South Carolina have to shell out to manage all their runoff in federally prescribed ways just because all the states on the Colorado river can't get along?

Why does St. Louis and every other "give and take from river" water district have to mandate all sorts of federally prescribed minutia written around assumptions of aquifer depletion? It's not like a lack of low flow toilets is gonna affect anything other than the size of the local water treatment plant.

The problems do diminish significantly if you need fewer lanes by half or more, and have fewer vehicles per person.

Low-density sprawl in the American style is impossible without cars. Streetcar suburbs could exist but those are necessarily more concentrated and again need less road coverage.

Nor can you say the sprawl is what people "actively want" when it's illegal to build to any other pattern in the vast majority of the country.

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