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Comment by maratd | Hacker News Reader

> Is there really any downside to banning personal cars from the city?

The fact that you're stomping all over a person's right to own property and use it as they wish?

Oh sure, the city will prosper as a result, but when you start making rules solely for the sake of the majority, throwing basic principles into the garbage bin, you set a precedent.

A precedent where anything that's for the greater good passes muster, regardless of anything else.

Which seems fine at first. The majority, is the majority of people right? Why not act solely in their interest?

But the truth is that we're all part of some minority or other. In some way, everyone's interests contradict the majority in some way.

If my grandma lives in the suburbs and it takes 4 hours to see her using public transportation and 30 minutes using a car ... well, you just fucked me over, didn't you? And that's just a mild example.

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I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not (60-40 that you aren't - that's not to belittle you, I think you raised points worth discussing either way) - so in the case that you aren't, a response:

You keep cars on the periphery of the city, and have good public transit to and from them. So your 30 minute trip turns into a 20 minute public transit ride to your car (or a 10 minute taxi ride), and then say a 25 minute drive - longer than before, but not 4 hours. So no, you are not "fucked over".

And presumably, this comes with an increase in public transit quality. Most cities now are built around cars, but they don't have to be. Also, something like this would have to happen gradually - make dedicated non-private vehicle lanes (buses, taxis, etc), build up public transit, disincentivize cars via taxes and zoning, etc.

A place that's perhaps in range of this is Manhattan - most people I know, quite successful, don't own cars - and the ones that do use them to get out of the city on weekends, not for daily transit. It's a place where owning a car is pretty much worse than not - expensive and rare parking, high insurance, congested roads, etc. No joke, I know at least one senior executive here who doesn't have a driver's license because he let it expire.

And why do this? Because we should be building safe, healthy, happy, sustainable and affordable cities - something which cars are not contributing too. So ban them outright? Of course not - but maybe phasing out private vehicles in cities over the next 20 years is something worth seriously considering.

Any rational planning system would enhance public transport to mitigate the effects of curtailing widespread use of privately owned cars. However, you seem to be American so perhaps the notion of rational planning is alien to you. Certainly the use of verbiage like "stomping all over a person's right to own property and use it as they wish" would indicate that rational thought is alien to you.

I call the same false mentality as with gun regulation. There are things many Americans won't ever understand :'(

In most towns, bus economics only allows for one hour routes and a transfer for most trips. That means two hours in motion average for a round trip, and up to two more hours waiting if your business does not line up with scheduled stops. The grandparent comment is exactly right.

Shorter, more frequent routes are possible, but making the economics work does require a ban on cars to convert drivers to paying transit riders. But most of the drivers still need cars to get to outlying areas, so they have to pay bus operations and car capital outlay. People woth modest incomes cannot afford both, so they would have to give up the car and be trapped in the denser part of the city, indeed having their personal liberties stomped on.

Autonomous taxis will rewrite the economic rules. Since they won't crash, the massive crumple zones and crush cage can be eliminated, dramatically reducing capital and operating costs. An autonomous taxi ride will likely cost less than driving your own beater.

Yours is the sole intelligent response, so I'll comment here.

> Autonomous taxis will rewrite the economic rules.

You're absolutely right.

However, that technology isn't here yet and there is no guarantee that it will arrive. Mind you, most of the barriers to adoption aren't even technical, although those exist too. I prefer not to count my chickens until they hatch.

Right now, public transportation means one thing: unions. And unions, in turn, mean: strikes, price hikes, inconsistent schedules and performance, etc.

On top of that, subway and other rail systems reach relatively few places. That means buses. And buses exacerbate the above issues to an even greater extent.

Self-driving vehicles work today and are legal in several states. Elementary pieces of self-driving tech are selling in production cars. I take it as a foregone conclusion that everything will be self-driving in 50 years—probably much sooner.

How about just a good and reasonably fast commuter-rail network? It's faster to get to many suburbs of Copenhagen by public transit than to drive, because we have: 1) extensive commuter rail; and 2) not many freeways.

I don't think it's only that American cities aren't actively discouraging driving (e.g. by banning cars from city centers), but that they are spending huge piles of money actively encouraging it, by building 10-lane freeways and the like. If you build rail and not freeways to all the suburbs, most people take rail for routine trips.

America is big. The population is very spread out. It is normal for an American city to have 1/20th the population density of Copenhagen. Commuter rail would just dump you in a sprawling suburn with no economically viable public transportation. Autonomous taxis will make it workable, but that is a decade or two in the future.

>Since they won't crash

Yeah, software never has bugs.

> The fact that you're stomping all over a person's right to own property and use it as they wish?

Nobody is restricting your right to use your property as you wish. You may drive your car on private property all you want: your own property, or that of anyone else who gives you permission. That's what private property rights guarantee.

What you seem to want is to drive your car on property you don't own, which is not some kind of human right. Nobody is required to facilitate your desire to drive around by building you roads and granting you access to them.

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