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Comment by lolftw | Hacker News Reader

I think most people would understand something like living "side by side with cars".

Even if not alive, you can live very close and shape your life by and with technology.

I don't take any issue with the OP's formulation.

And Americans' lives have been heavily shaped by cars and the car industry in a negative way. So, a pretty apt comparison.

And also in a positive way. I mean, it's not personal teleportation, but it sometimes feels like it.

The illusion works only in places like American and Canadian suburbs in which residents depend entirely on cars for even the shortest trips. Everything takes 10-100x the space due to all the paved asphalt. It’s an intensely alienating approach to building infrastructure.

The isolation produced by centering our urban and suburban design around cars is pronounced. It cannot be understated how much damage cars have done to our sense of connectedness, community, walkability, and health.

And yet, watch all these consumers deciding they want something different from what you're proclaiming is better for them.

Human consciousness is dictated by their material conditions, not the other way around. If the material reality of many Americans is unhealthy foods and heavily car-centric urban design, where does the "decision" to walk and take public transit come from? It is genuinely not an option for the vast majority of Americans to live in a walkable and/or public transit supported community if the infrastructure does not exist.

And this wasn't due to consumer choice, either. Decades of policy dictated the shift towards car centrism that resulted in railways and street cars being torn up, the construction of the interstate highway system and destruction of dense urban cores, zoning law mandates and parking minimums, federal subsidies for suburban mortgages, etc.

This "choice" or "decision" was manufactured by car lobbyists.

It’s not exactly a free choice when the built environment and infrastructure is designed around a single mode of transport. I can’t just “choose to cycle” when there are no bike paths, or “choose to walk” when things are spread out and separated by impassible freeways as to make it impossible. Look up the various ways the oil and automotive lobby has influenced city planning over the years – it might become a little more obvious who has the “free choice” here, and it’s not consumers.

It's not just a matter of preference or proclamation. There are decades of research showing that more walkable neighborhoods are associated with higher physical activity levels, lower rates of some chronic diseases, more interaction with neighbors, and stronger feelings of community. The debate is usually about how large those effects are and whether they're worth the trade-offs, not whether the effects exist at all.

Yes, yes, totally dismiss the agency of people who inconveniently don't like what you want them to like. Their preferences mean nothing, their actions must be dictated.

I'd be more angry with you if I wasn't amused at the frustration you must be feeling in failing to get traction for your dystopian vision.

You're making a lot of unwarranted assumptions about me: I'm not dismissing agency. I don't feel people making decisions is inconvenient. I don't not like their decisions. Their preferences do not mean nothing. I'm not dictating their actions.

I own and drive 2 cars.

I'll just stop there. I don't feel this conversation can continue in a positive way.

Walkable neighborhoods and cities that aren't car centric being a "dystopian vision" is laughable. Thankfully, the default for car brains across much of the globe is car centric urban design.

You people never fail to be ridiculously dramatic.

You can see the same outcomes in cities that are walkable and interconnected. Its to complicated of a problem to point to cars as a major factor.

The happiest years of my life were when I didn't own a car and didn't need to because I had access to good public transit and walkable neighborhoods.

And despite all the deaths they caused, the benefits are undeniable... Fancy going back to horse and cart? Didn't think so...same logic applies to ai

Horse and cart, no. But some cities have banned cars and replaced them with various alternatives, and it works.

There are alternatives to the car culture we have. It would require significantly rebuilding how we build infrastructure, but the result could be much safer, cleaner, and less stressful.

Of course Americans would rather die, but counties of sane people might be able to work it out.

> It would require significantly rebuilding how we build infrastructure

That simple huh?!

Yes? Read that sentence again: "...how we build infrastructure"

Removing onerous parking requirements, like the ones that have resulted in countless strip malls and unwalkable cities with inadequate housing stock.

I'm not suggesting that's all that's necessary but there are indeed simple steps we could take.

The car did not replace the horse and cart. This is an oft cited and widely believed myth. It replaced mostly walking, but also cycling, trollies and trains. And it didn't do so until after a huge build out of infrastructure to accommodate drivers at the cost of everything else.

After the building of highways and roads cities were no longer walkable, people had moved out into the suburbs, their jobs were now a couple of towns over and they couldn't even walk to the grocery store. Cars enabled that, but politicians and capitalist were the ones who did that.

> It replaced mostly walking, but also cycling, trollies and trains.

And everything was carried on people's heads, yeah? The horse and cart was in use right up to the 20th century my man...there was no other way to move heavy items across land until the combustion engine (or canals thought that's not technically over land)

Yes, true. You found one thing that people used mostly horse and cart for which they now use lorries and vans for today. However since the invention of car (after it stopped being a toy for rich people) cars have by far been mostly [like overwhelmingly so] used for personal transport. And I simply assumed that is what you meant (because that is what most people mean).

> You found one thing

And you found one other "thing"

Actually even today it's 80/20, but lorries carry far more stuff than cars do, so you need less lorries.

And the inverse is also true, horse and cart was used for personal transport as well

Horse and cart was used for a personal transport very rarely, by a tiny subset of the population for a minority of their trips, the vast majority of the population lived within a walking distance for the vast majority of their trips, the invention of the steam engine ruined that and suddenly people started living within a tram-ride for vast majority of their trips, and started using trains to go on longer trips they simply couldn’t do before. The car took this to the extreme, and ruined the cities on a scale which the tram was previously unable to.

> and ruined the cities on a scale which the tram was previously unable to.

Industrial era London was not a utopia. Read a Dickens novel. It was a hellhole. The car also made the suburbs possible. They kill millions every year but the benefits massively outweigh it (or at least society has effectively voted for that).

First off, you don't know if duskdozer doesn't want to go back to cart and horse. Second even if they don't there's an enormous amount of space between horses and https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/ a third of my downtown being parking lots, downtown which is already the dense bit.

Famously, the only way to transport humans are cars annnnnd, horse and cart!

Apart from the super intelligence bit. We are already struggling to build systems with enough memory to hold this brute force statistical approach, how exactly will AI fix this?

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