Hacker News Reader

Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

Making driving worse instead of making public transport better is such a public sector-brained take.

Driving has been subsidized and "made better" for so long that it feels natural. Forcing your private steel box through public spaces should be the most impractical and expensive thing to do, yet it's not.

Cars replaced the horse and cart. There were roads before cars, and roads carry a lot more than cars. Try getting a fire engine to your house without roads.

You misunderstood my comment. Driving is made worse by the presence of other people driving. Government can partially mitigate it by spending taxpayer money on building more road infrastructure. Or for a fraction of the cost, making public transit better.

Sometimes you have to nerf something because it's been buffed too many times, beyond what's sustainable or reasonable

It's only really been buffed by the facts you don't have to pay for massive custom vehicles or drivers, and market dynamics (and the corresponding incredible features and amazing factory and transportation efficiencies) mean cars are extremely good value for money for a lot of people.

In other words: there's a profit motive, so people get something really good for their money.

Public transport is frequently a monopoly or semi-monopoly, and there is power available (the people running the public transport also get to set rules for drivers), and exercising power is much, much easier than competing in a market.

So you bought a car for a good price full of features, good for you. Now where are you going to drive the thing? Can you build your own road wherever you want to go? No, only the state can build roads? How could we allow such a monopoly over our lives.

Now you say there are rules to follow on these roads, with enforcement, meaning someone has power over you the entire time? Yikes.

Sorry, I'm not sure what point you're arguing against.

Going over the patch notes, here's some buffs you might have missed:

Mandatory parking minimums, high speed limits, car lanes without bus lanes or bike lanes, tearing down neighborhoods to build interchanges and highways...

Driving is currently subsidized in a variety of ways that hide it's true costs. Almost any effort to make driving's perceived cost closer to the real cost, including externalities, is a good thing.

IMO, it's not so much "make driving worse" (ie actively make roads worse, etc).

Instead, it's actively make transit better be reallocating road funds... Add buses or light rail or dedicated/separated bike lanes instead of brainlessly adding traffic lanes. Every bike added to that bike lane is one less car (very roughly).

Additionally, tax car infrastructure appropriately. Free road-side parking is not an entitlement. Reduce parking minimums in redevelopment/new development and let the market determine the supply of spaces. A good example - it's increasingly common for apartments in DC to charge extra for a parking space.

Most of the above applies to urban areas as well as moderately dense suburban zones.

Large cities can take additional steps - no car zones (common in Italian towns), congestion pricing (London, NYC, and others already do this), and changes to road design to better accommodate pedestrians (plenty of YT videos about various plans to do this).

You said it's not to make driving worse, but then listed multiple examples of making driving worse:

- reallocating road funds (away from driving and toward busses/rail/bikes)

- tax car infrastructure appropriately, presumably higher

- reduce parking minimums

Not that I'm against these, but they will surely make driving worse.

That is wrong on multiple dimensions.

What makes driving worse is the presence of more cars. This can be partially mitigated by piling money into road infrastructure, but infrastructure is a band-aid on a problem created by more people choosing to drive.

What makes driving better is the presence of fewer cars. There's really only one way to reduce the number of cars on the road: build good alternatives to driving. If you love driving, you should be the strongest champion of public transport investment.

They keep driving how it is, and make other things better relatively. Reducing parking minimums doesn't remove existing parking, it prevents building more. Building bike lanes doesn't usually mean reducing car capacity. Adding more lanes to already huge highways doesn't actually improve driving, so redirecting that money to rail does not make driving worse, in fact it stands to make it better by getting more people off the road

Removing parking minimums doesn't even prevent more parking - it only lets the market balance supply/demand for parking. The current system in most of the US requires worst-case/max-demand parking lots, so the only time a shopping center's lot is full is a few peak hours on the weekend and Christmas season. The rest of the year, it's mostly empty.

Here's a good summary of one case of a small town dealing with absurd parking regulations... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017-11-22-how-parking-m...

And just to add my own recent anecdote... we visited southern Italy (Puglia) last month. Most of the towns have zero traffic* zones (ZTL zones) in the historic centers. In all of them, there were either ample metered street spots just outside the ZTL or small pay lots a short walk away. As far as I could tell, as a tourist, it worked well - the downtowns were vibrant with lots of foot traffic.

* ZTLs allow local traffic and handicapped transport within certain guidelines.

Let's make everything harder to use and cost more. It's for their own good!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com