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Comment by mcrider | Hacker News Reader

I wish driving and owning a car started to become discouraged the same way sin taxes and bylaws are discouraging cigarette smoking. Sitting outside on a bench in Honolulu yesterday, I looked around and saw that half of what I was seeing were roads and cars. This space that could be so beautiful (it's Hawaii after all) was overwhelmingly just about being a transportation network.

I love the feeling of driving a car, but I think the cost is too high -- So much financial and mental stress (not to mention so much death -- A classmate from high school was killed in a crash just last week) is caused by these things and they bisect our physical spaces making so much of our world uninhabitable and depressing. I realize people need transportation but I had hoped the rising cost of oil would cause a paradigm shift in how we commute, and that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.

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When I visited Hawaii for the first time I noticed that something was very different compared to similar vacation destinations in for example south-east asia.

It's the same climate. It's the same relaxed atmosphere. It's the same hotels. People come there for the same reasons. People wear the same kind of clothes.

But the major difference is that all hotels in Hawaii have huge parking garages. It's a ten-minute drive from Honolulu airport to Waikiki, there's excellent public transportation, hotel shuttles, and taxis, but people still just rent cars, because american tourists rent cars out of habit, not necessity. It's so deeply ingrained, it's gonna take a long while to dispel it.

I've lived in Honolulu for a couple years, and IMO its a shining example of bad infrastructure. The public transport is quite a bad actually and efforts to build a rail system have been constantly delayed by corruption, NIMBYs, and bureaucracy. People rent cars so they can access the rest of the island because otherwise its impossible. Its not just American tourists either, a huge portion of the tourist population is Japanese or Canadian.

But at the same time the locals seem to really love driving. Every household has at least one car and traffic is often rated as bad or worse than LA. For a place that you would think would be ecologically responsible (and a great test bed for transportation technology, as its such a well-isolated location), the car culture hear is so ingrained that I think it would take some major deterrents to get people to stop driving.

Parking is the primary reason why I'm so excited about self-driving cars. A much more efficient usage of cars and roads when you basically have an automated version of Uber's heatmaps. It would truly provide for everyone's transportation at a very personal and granular level ( the problem with public transportation being that it doesn't take you to exactly where you need to go) while freeing up all that real estate all over the place for better things. Bet you traffic congestion and per capita pollution levels get nicer too as the traffic becomes more efficient.

Well, it's habit for a reason. Not every locale they visit is like Honolulu & Waikiki.

Heaven forbid they use these rented cars to stray outside of Honolulu!

Also: The reason there are so many cars, roads, and parking lots in Honolulu/Hawaii compared to SE Asia? Because the residents of Hawaii aren't poor - in fact they're quite well off by SE Asian standards.

For comparison, Singapore is pretty well off, too. And only heroic efforts by the government keep the car population in check. Eg there can only ever be around 1 million cars on the island, and permits are auctioned off. A ten year permit goes for around 100k SGD at the moment.

"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Yellow_Taxi

Sin Taxes and shaming are the wrong way to go about shifting away from car-centric cities - people still have to get where they need to go. You first need to build effective public transportation networks, bike lanes, and restructure cities to that long trips are less necessary. Once you've done all that, then you can start punishing people for driving.

Realistically, just removing the outsize subsidies driving has had for generations would be seen as an "attack" on the American way of life. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.

Right, i disagree with you wholeheartedly. The probably is the how do we get from here to there. We have transportation infrastructure. It's roads, the roads are mostly designed for car and light truck traffic primarily. Now my question to you is, how do you justify, politically, the proposal to add a bunch of extremely expensive, and unpleasant to build (2nd ave subway made 2nd ave horrifically ugly for a couple years) infrastructure.

Without a billionaire (thus fairly incorruptible) mayor in his last term, i really don't think it's going to happen.

People have invested in the car infrastucture, they have bought certain houses, in certain neighborhoods because of it, they have planned their lives around it. You can't just say, "okay, we're all going to take light rail now, so we need to remove all the street parking on your street, sorry, 1/4 of this town is going to have to deal with dramatic changes in infrastructure.

No, the way to do it is sin taxes. Why? Firstly, because the pain is felt by everyone. This prevents NIMBY's from getting their ammunition. Everyone feels the pain, everyone must adjust. Secondly, it provides a gradual path to a low-car environment. Slow is good, fast is politically untenable for most cities. As traffic decreases, you can add BRT lines with little objection. You can switch current infrastructure from private vehicles to public. You don't have to dig a bunch of holes in the ground, you just have to re-purpose. Thirdly, you've just funded your public transit projects.

If we want to make public transit in america. I honestly thing the best way to do it is build a better bus. A bus that feels like a subway car. A bus that i would want to ride, even when it's packed.

You answer is "sin" taxes, and you see no way people would want to spend on a light rail project. But why would they vote themselves into a sin tax then? How is it different. Wouldn't building of a light rail in a town or region come with an increase in taxes anyway for a good number of years? Is that a "sin" tax?

> I honestly thing the best way to do it is build a better bus

A bus is a bus. Unless the wheels are falling off. The problem is not the bus, is how often does the bus come. If sell my car, and the bus only comes in the weekdays, ok, now I have to get taxi to grocery shop on the weekends. It would dictate when I have to leave from work because I might miss the last one.

The other problem is social. This is hard to say but in many cities, public transportation is often used by those that cannot drive, that unfortunately includes crazy people. You might not otherwise encounter them but you will on public transportation. In some cities it is a small nuisance. In some it happens often because almost everyone who is capable of driving is driving or getting rides. That bus could have gold plates handles and it could even be free, and a lot of people will still opt for driving.

> Firstly, because the pain is felt by everyone.

Yes. It can't be just artificially and locally manufactured pain -- sin taxes. Why would they ever vote for that? Why would a small quiet suburb of some major city just decide to vote to punish themselves for driving? But the pain has to already be there -- horrible traffic. If they start sitting in traffic for 2 hours every day, they might start thinking, hmm, we've tried HOV-3 lanes and even then it is not quite doing it? Maybe a light rail is better. Or more buses.

> A bus is a bus.

No, just no.

> because I might miss the last one.

We are talking about cities. There should not be a last bus. They should run 24 hours/day.

> now I have to get taxi to grocery shop on the weekends

In a real city, you can usually walk or at the very least, cycle to your grocery store. If you can't then you do not actually live in an urban environment.

> public transportation is often used by those that cannot drive, that unfortunately includes crazy people.

Right, again i'm talking about creating a system of urbanism in major cities. I'm not talking about Houston or San Diego. I'm talking about cities like Amsterdam, Edinburgh, or Stockholm. If taking a bus is slower than taking your car at rush hour, you'd have to be crazy to take the bus. If you build a good BRT system that is faster than using a car, people will use it. Not just crazy people.

>Why would they ever vote for that? Why would a small quiet suburb of some major city just decide to vote to punish themselves for driving?

We are talking about cities like Philly, and people that live in cities like Philly, we are not talking about some exurb that uses subsidized parking in major cities to facilitate their commute.

Why would they vote for that? Easy, because it pits competing interests together so that there is no major bloc that forces a candidate to change. Let's say you add a sin tax. Those that can afford it would benefit, because there would be less traffic on the road, and those who don't own cars would benefit because it would improve the public transit infrastructure. The slowly increasing it while slowly increasing the public infrastructure would never force a major bloc into political action. Something that definitely would happen if you dramatically reduce the quality of living for 1/6 to 1/4 of a city's population by trying to dramatically ramp up some type of subway system and digging up people's front lawn for 18 months, so that they can have access to a subway in 6 years.

In a real city, you can usually walk or at the very least, cycle to your grocery store.

Gotta love that goalpost shifting. Have you considered that there are plenty of cities here in the US (real or not, by your standards) where that's not true?

We are talking about cities like Philly, and people that live in cities like Philly, we are not talking about some exurb that uses subsidized parking in major cities to facilitate their commute.

The problem is that without the commuters coming in, the urban core dies. This is exactly what happened in Detroit. Now, it's possible that if you already have an excellent transit system and a vibrant urban core (like New York, for example), you can impose congestion charges and get away with it, because the core of the city is attractive enough for people to continue to want to go there and the public transit system is robust enough to carry them. But that's not the case in Philadelphia. For older "rust belt" cities, which are already having issues with people moving away to sunnier, warmer southern cities with lower taxes and bigger roads, making the core of the city even more inaccessible isn't a winning strategy.

The best way is to make public transport more like cars.

Individual cars, perhaps on a track system, that people can book at any time of day to whereever they like, without having to share with a large number of unknown people and without random stops and detours that slow it down, getting a guaranteed seat and place to put anything they are carrying, which then leaves to pick someone else up when they arrive, and they just book another 5 minutes before they leave when they want to go home.

ET3 and Hyperloop are two very similar ideas that fit your parameters.

That's great for going between cities, but useless within them. It also needs something on a smaller scale for people to get from home to work to the shops to home without standing for 30 minutes in the rain and not getting a seat, or for them to get home when drunk at 3am and the trains don't start until 6.

Self-driving cars could be very economically feasible for traveling within a city. They will be able to drive in tightly packed formations to minimize air resistance as well...a sort of hybrid between public transportation and individual/family transportation.

Everyone, literally everyone who I know who advocated this type of position became silent when they had children.

Unless you have a parent in the household who isn't working, life gets pretty crappy without a car. The person who doesn't work spends half the day running errands that would take 45m in a car. If both parents work, You pay 2x for diapers at CVS vs Target, spend half your evening on the bus to pick up your kid from daycare and huff groceries home for dinner, etc.

People would work it out...

In Sydney, we have always had daycare next to home or work, in San Francisco I put the kids in a bike trailer.

The number one thing that worries me about my 9 and 12 year old getting to and from school are the cars. The 12 year old could bike to school if it were not for cars. The 9 year old walks, as did the 12 year old before starting high school and catching the bus.

Cars can be handy for carrying stuff. On the other hand I like strollers as a shopping trolly that goes all the way home.

In my family the person who does not work does not drive at all...

And disposable diapers (nappies) are cheap delivered. And you can use re-usable ones with a service that comes to your house.

artsrc,

Your post here is pretty hilarious.

Note that the message you were responding to started off with this:

> Unless you have a parent in the household who isn't working, life gets pretty crappy without a car.

And your response contains this:

> In my family the person who does not work does not drive at all.

It's as if the person you respond to had already accounted for your response!

Heaven help you if you ever live in a place with moderately bad weather for even part of the year. Neither Sydney nor SF are even remotely good places to model transport policy on.

My housemates were public transport fanatics, public transport "does everything we need, you just need to harden up a bit, there really is no need for a car", and one of them was a moderate cyclist. I went away for three months during which they had free use of my car. On return: "We're getting a car".

I am friends with a couple that has two young children (the oldest just started kindergarten). They don't have a car. They have had trouble finding apartments near public transportation, and it has limited job opportunities. The occasionally ask for rides to locations or for large shopping trips. They seem to like the benefits though. They get more exercise, no need to worry about parking, and no car/insurance/gas/maintenance payments. While my husband and I use public transportation for work, we plan on keeping our vehicles (or at least one of them) for when we have kids.

I grew up around families too poor to afford a car. They were inconvenienced but not overly. We had a car, but used it not a lot, mostly on weekends, my mom bussed to work everyday because she worked in a skyscraper that had no parking.

I've lived both lifestyles: car free (NY) and absolutely car dependent (TX).

I can say that the best lifestyle is to have decent public transit and cycling infrastructure available, for example for commuting to work in a nuclear city on the weekdays to avoid traffic, in conjunction with 1 car for the family to use on weekends and evenings: grocery runs, errands, weekend getaways, etc. In a city with sensible roads and limited parking, not monstrous freeways and parking lots that dominate the landscape like in Texas, so I can have an efficient hatchback or crossover and not feel like I'm going to get killed. And it's much more affordable to have one car for a family that gets shared. Growing up in TX, when my sibling and I were both over 16, we had four cars (!) in our household, which is absurd.

We could start be simply encouraging it less — spending less public money on roads, having more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly laws (and enforcement), and creating zoning codes that require less parking for development projects would all go a long way.

If you've heard the overused phrase "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" the obvious analogy is intentional destruction of infrastructure results in lower population, lower population density, lower property values...

I don't know the specifics of the linked article, but stereotypically some outsider comes in, says "you have some nice profitable land here, and I have a plan to fix that...". If you'd like to experience anti-car infrastructure, we have plenty of semi-abandoned residential in the poorest parts of the inner city, and some vacant abandoned commercial space in the bad parts of town with limited parking. Of course the restaurant right off the interstate is doing booming business although there's always someone with a plan to "fix" that for them.

"We need more customers... I know, we'll make it impossible for anyone outside walking distance to get here, that'll fix everything..."

What we need is more money spent on roads and parking. Done the right way, of course. Nothing wrong with wide roads, wide sidewalks, strips of parks and trees and green spaces. Just remember where the bread is buttered, pedestrians = homeless panhandler but car = customer.

> pedestrians = homeless panhandler but car = customer.

This isn't inflammatory at all... not at all...

Google claims "intended to arouse angry ... feelings."

I'm trying to be informative. May not like the way things are, but pretending "most people" don't look at the world that way isn't going to produce anything useful.

I also have the defense of truth. Other than downtown Manhattan or downtown Chicago, this is how it is. You make money off someone who drives to your business, not some homeless dude who needs to use your bathroom.

Customers come in cars. That's just how it is.

Customers come in cars because there's no other way to get there. Cars, being hugely inefficient uses of space, actually decreases the number of customers who can get to your store. You can take a fully-packed car and compare the space used to people on a sidewalk: that's the difference in customers you're losing out on.

Seriously? So the best way to get more people in a sports stadium would be to get rid of the parking lot, or walmart's sales would go up if they got rid of their parking lots? Or on a small scale, I'd be more likely to go to a restaurant or small retailer if I knew for certain I couldn't get there on foot and if I drove there, I wouldn't be able to park?

Now I do see your point for a stereotypical neighborhood local bar where they shouldn't be driving drunk anyway, or even a small local pharmacy or convenience store/gas station.

I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots?

The principle of charity has long since expired and now we are left to ponder whether you've ever even been to a city. To answer your question, yes, the best way to get people to a stadium is, by far, to remove the parking lot. Here's one of the most well-attended MLB stadiums in the country. It's served by two streetcar lines and a mainline railroad.

https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@37.779165,-122.390703,3...

Here's Wrigley Field:

https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@41.949016,-87.655596,3a...

At Yankee stadium they built a parking garage and so few people use it that the garage operator is bankrupt. They are tearing them down. The stadium is served by a subway line and Metro North even has a station literally called "Yankees".

I suggest you get out of Mom's basement and see the country before holding forth on its infrastructure.

You are going to compare most of America to New York? The city with perhaps the best American public transport, and the lowest per capita car ownership? I'd rather take public transit to a stadium (barring the recent super bowl) but due to poor public transportation in some places I don't have a choice. The solution isn't to decrease parking lots first. The solution is to improve public transportation, then you can remove the parking lots.

New York isn't some kind of rare case. 6% of Americans live in the NYC metro area. That's the thing about cities and suburbs: tons of people live in cities, by their nature, and relatively few people live in the suburbs, by their nature as well. If more people lived in the suburbs, they'd turn into cities.

Anyway yes, I am comparing. The article is about the form of urban spaces and how it can better balance the needs of all users, in light of the fact that extant american streetscapes strongly favor the car over all other users. The claim was made that stadia require parking lots. Examples of the opposite were given.

The fact that in some places you don't have a choice simply reflects on the inadequate urban forms that are found in many suburbs in the USA.

The New York City metro area is about 25M people, 8M live in NYC itself. It's an area stretching from eastern Pennsylvania to Suffolk County, and Central Jersey to Kingston, ny and Commecticut.

Lots and lots of people live in the New York suburbs, millions actually. They left the city because the costs of living there are just too high. Many/most businesses did too. Many of the buildings in the manhattan skyline are mostly empty. The diversified industry and commercial businesses that made NYC such a powerhouse of economic activity in my dad's youth are long gone. (To suburban hellholes in the South)

Since I can't reply to throwaway, sports stadiums in major cities offload their parking lots to the surrounding areas, or even far out and add in shuttle service. They still have parking, just not in the form of a giant parking lot.

http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/sf/images/ballpark/y2010/... http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/chc/ballpark/transportation/

All the parking lots on that SF map are slated for construction.

http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/04/12/mission_rock_gets_r...

Wow that is nuts! SF is really facing some big problems, I hope other cities can learn from their successes and mistakes. Though I still love my parking spaces.

It works nicely in Toronto, with two sports facilities (a stadium and an arena) easily accessible by transit (the SkyDome^wRoger Centre and the Air Canada Centre), and a third reasonably accessible by transit (BMO Field). Based on the concerts that I've been to at the ACC in the last few months, at least half of the people attending take transit to downtown (although some park at edge transit parking lots).

> I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots?

The poor parts of town don't have much money because... they are the poor parts of town, maybe? Just maybe?

BTW, sports stadiums would probably benefit from lack of a parking lot in a reduction of the number of drunk driving accidents in the surrounding area.

> So the best way to get more people in a sports stadium would be to get rid of the parking lot

The googling is taking too long for me to get numbers, but I'd be willing to bet that most stadiums have enough seating capacity that, if you were to pack every single space in their actual parking lots with cars, you'd completely fail to fill it up.

> or walmart's sales would go up if they got rid of their parking lots?

Walmart is a special case in that it's built around people who have cars: you don't go to a Walmart to buy only what you can carry. You go there to buy as much as you can so that you can avoid shopping for the rest of the week.

But around here, Pike Place Market? Westlake Center? Pacific Place? Yeah. Most of their business comes from the fact that they're within walking distance from the Financial District and the Convention Center. Uwajimaya? Benefits immensely from the fact that it's located in Chinatown, where its main market is; I'm two blocks from it and I pick up something every other day on my way home from work.

(Actually, Uwajimaya is brilliant in that it has apartments on top and parking below. A lot of residents are literally walking through the store to go home.)

> Or on a small scale, I'd be more likely to go to a restaurant or small retailer if I knew for certain I couldn't get there on foot and if I drove there, I wouldn't be able to park?

No, you're reversing it. The question is about how many more customers a restaurant or small retailer would get. I didn't fully explain: it starts by recognizing that the number of customers you get is a percentage of the number of potential customers you get. If you already knew about that restaurant 50 miles out, then obviously, the only thing that matters is that you can get there. That's a transit issue: can you get to point B from point A in a reasonable amount of time, for a given understanding of reasonable. Some people cannot imagine reasonable amounts of time via public transit, so they cannot conceive of transit without cars.

That's a different problem. The problem here is that, using a "cars = customers" model, you have two facts: (a) most people don't look at the storefronts as they drive by. They're actually looking for parking. Your parking space is a loss leader in order to get them to look at what you're selling in the first place, on their way somewhere else. And (b), people don't know you exist until they see you.

If you already knew about it, then it's more akin to parking at your office. You have no need for discoverability, just availability. If you had magical public transit that was equally fast, you could use it instead and poof. No need for cars at all. The merits of cars versus other things isn't customers; it's speed.

> I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots?

In short, yes. What if those parking lots were cheap housing instead? You wouldn't need a car to get there, and you could walk across the street to shop.

This isn't a silver bullet "delete parking lots = magically better". It's a functional component of many other much larger, much more complex solutions. I'm telling you why the component is being included--namely the space efficiency of pedestrians equals a higher customer base--but that isn't a complete solution by any means.

I mentioned a and b earlier. There is a c.

Anytime your parking lot isn't nearly full during business hours, you have a problem.

Why? The reason that cars = customers is because cars forcibly disallow anyone else from being a customer. When you design your street for cars, you discourage pedestrians: especially the window shoppers. When you design your neighborhoods to be zoned between residential and commerce, you make it impossible to reach businesses except by car or long-distance public transit.

My grandparents live in a suburban cul-de-sac in the Bay Area. Pretty place. Very calm and peaceful. And they're lonely. My parents and uncles and aunts have to regularly drive in from across town to visit with them. Couldn't they go down to the local store, rather than asking a son or daughter-in-law to buy groceries? Nope. They're too frail to drive, and walking the massive block to the huge nearby intersection, and then walking across the vast expanse of asphalt to the nearby Lucky's is basically impossible. Hell, I hate doing it and I jog the whole thing for fun. There isn't even anything on the way to stop at. There's like... one bench for the bus stop. A Radio Shack on the other side of the 3-lane road. There are actually quite a few other options; they're just even further away.

You basically need a car to get to what is technically a block and a half away, if we count by intersection. My god-grandparents would be in a similar situation, but they're able to drive, so they can do the 20 or so blocks it takes to get to the Asian market.

It wasn't always a Lucky's. It used to be an Albertson's, I think. And it was something else before that. That parking space keeps them alive, sure. That's about it. No one goes there unless they have to.

(And if I'd spent the time googling rather than typing up these anecdotes, maybe I would have found some damn numbers.)

As someone who lives with their spouse in a highrise dozens of stories tall built on top of a MTR (mass transit rail) station in a city (Hong Kong) that has what is widely considered a wonderful mass transit system and who regularly walks everywhere, including to and from my local supermarket, and who does not own a vehicle, I would like to respond to your post.

Imagine that you wanted to cook chili for dinner (and leftovers for lunch the next day and or chili dogs a few days on -- YUM!). Recipes differ, but let's say that you went with ground beef, canned beans, tomato sauce of some kind, fresh onions and garlic, and maybe some bell peppers. You might have bought some cheese to grate over bowls of the finished chili and sour cream to spoon onto the cheese. Assume that you already had chili powder and any other spices that you needed at home. Since you're at the supermarket, you also bought the other things that you needed: a bottle of shampoo, some toilet tissue, a lightbulb(it would be slightly cheaper to get a 6-pack of bulbs but you only need one right now and don't want to carry anything absolutely unnecessary home) like, a couple of cartons of milk, some coffee or tea, a carton or two of eggs, some chicken breasts, more vegetables, etc. At the checkout, you bagged your own purchases or had them bagged for you and began the five-to-ten-minute walk home.

(1.) Unfortunately, it was warm out and the cartons of milk sweated and the condensation soaked through that bag (the supermarket uses eco-friendly, recyclable paper bags) and the bottom tore out and everything from that bag fell onto the sidewalk. Time to set your bags on the pavement or the grass next to the sidewalk and try to distribute those items between the remaining bags. The bag holding the ground beef and chicken breasts is looking a bit iffy too, but it'll probably hold (fingers crossed!) until you get home. The milk cartons have warmed up a bit and hopefully won't sweat enough to take the bag(s) into which you've placed them before you get home.

(2.) Wait. Suppose that you opted for the (biodegradable) plastic bags. Condensation wouldn't affect them. As you were walking home, however, one of the corners of one of the milk cartons, with the help of gravity and the movements to which the bag containing the milk was subjected as you walked home, made a whole in the bottom of the bag, with the same result as if you had been using paper bags.

(3.) OK, so you wisely double-bagged (in plastic) your groceries and you made it home without any bags failing. Unfortunately, something in the bag with the carton(s) of eggs shifted while you were humping the bags home and a coupel of the eggs broke, making a bit of a mess in the bag.

(4.) No, of course you wouldn't haul all of your groceries home at once. That's sheer madness. You only took the perishable items and left the rest to be delivered. That meant an extra few minutes spent at the checkout, at the head of a long line of people, each of whom also had to spend a bit longer in line themselves, giving the store your home address and telephone number and checking with the cashier to find out when your stuff would be delivered (answer: 12PM to 8PM the next day, but the delivery person will phone you first). What's a few extra minutes here or there, right? You also aren't paranoid, so you have no problem giving the store your home address and phone number and don't care whether or not the company owning the supermarket aggregates your purchases with your name, address, and phone number and resells the information to marketers. It's a small price to pay for the convenience of not having to lug all of your stuff home yourself.

Not having all of the ingredients for chili (the cans of beans and jars of tomato sauce are amongst those purchases that were to be delivered), you had something else for dinner instead. You weren't planning to make chili that night anyway, since you took the delivery delay into account when you made your grocery list.

The next day, the delivery guy called you a few times while you were in a meeting and couldn't answer your phone. Jeez, his last message sure sounded irate. He was still annoyed with you when you phoned him back and even more annoyed when you told him that nobody would be home to take delivery until at least 6PM. The earlier he can finish his deliveries, the sooner he can get home and spend time with his own family.

When you got home, at 6 PM, he was waiting for you in the hallway outside your apartment door with your stuff packed in half a dozen repurposed cardboard boxes (from the labels printed on the boxes, you can tell that some of them had held bananas and others had held cartons of eggs) stacked on a little cart. Cardboard is better than plastic (even the biodegradable plastic used in the supermarket's bags), so that was good. Unfortunately, after you transferred the boxes inside your apartment, tipped the delivery guy, and began unpacking the items you had purchased the day before, you discovered that the shampoo had been packed upside down and half its contents had slowly leaked out. It only took a few minutes to wash the shampoo off the cans of beans. No big deal. And you can always get another bottle of shampoo when you go back to the store. Maybe you ought to tighten the top of the bottle a bit before going to the checkout next time, just in case, or carry it home. Carrying a bit more weight will just help build up the muscles in your arms and shoulders, right? As a matter of fact, your shoulders were a bit sore from carrying the perishables home yesterday. Feel the burn, baby!

[to be continued]

[continued from previous reply]

(4B.) The next day was uneventful. You were silently thankful that the delivery guy didn't call you while you were at work and pointlessly try to browbeat you into agreeing to an afternoon delivery. When you got home at 6PM, after changing out of your work clothes and freshening up, you began the prep work for your chili. You set your phone on the kitchen counter next to you while you de-seeded and de-ribbed the bell peppers, chopped them and the onions, and minced the garlic. When that was done, since you were already in the kitchen, you wiped down the counters and range and tidied things up. At 7:30, you phoned the supermarket and asked them where your stuff was. The manager apologized and promised to phone you back. At 7:50, he called and apologized some more. There was a mixup and your order never made it onto the delivery truck. But he assures you that they'll deliver everything tomorrow.

You'd already chopped the vegetables. And, luckily, you had eggs and cheese. You made a frittata. The next day, you went back to the supermarket and bought more onions and bell peppers. You bought more beef too, since the pack you'd bought two days earlier had passed its use-by date.

(5.) Why would you visit a grocery store? Jeez what year is it. Of course, you shopped online, at the supermarket website, paid by credit card, and everything was delivered hassle-free three days later from the supermarket chain's warehouse, located some miles away. Well, it was almost hassle-free. The delivery person did haggle over the time -- they wanted to deliver everything at 2PM and it took you a while to make them understand that there would be nobody at home until 6PM. And then, though, he had agreed to deliver between 6PM and 7PM, he didn't actually show up until 8PM.

After tipping the delivery person and cutting open the taped-shut cardboard boxes containing your purchases, you were a bit aggravated to find that they had charged you for two cartons of Brand X organic, free range eggs ... but delivered two cartons of (cheaper) Brand Y eggs. Also, some of the vegetables had seen better days. No matter. The former was an honest mistake and the latter was a small price to pay for convenience you knew that you could cut out the iffy bits of the vegetables before using them. You put the eggs in the fridge, after calling the supermarket and being shuffled from one employee to another to get them to agree that you could exchange the wrong eggs for the ones that you had paid for at your local branch the next evening, provided that you could show them the printout of your order confirmation email. Then, you briskly began the task of cutting up the now-empty cardboard boxes and folding and stacking the pieces so that you could get them into a bag or so that you could get rubber bands around them ... for the trip downstairs to the cardboard recycling bin. It was nearly nine by the time that you got back into your apartment and slipped off your sneakers to sweep up the slivers of cardboard and little bits of flotsam and jetsam (dried bits of banana-something from the banana boxes and wispy little feathers that had been inside the boxes that had held cartons of eggs before being reused by the supermarket) that ended up on your kitchen floor while you were unloading and then cutting up and packing the cardboard.

Except for permutation #1 (I haven't seen supermarkets using paper bags here, possibly because of the condensation issue), we have experienced each of these scenarios, numerous times.

I didn't even touch on what it's like to be walking home from the supermarket, in the open, and getting caught in a sudden downpour. Even if you are carrying a tiny collapsible umbrella, it's a neat trick to use it if you're carrying more than a tiny amount of stuff since holding an umbrella with one hand entails carrying everything else with the remaining hand. Fun times.

I didn't take up the question of multiple stops/errands, either. Without a vehicle to hold stuff in between stops and to get you from one stop to another faster, everything takes much, much longer to accomplish and the planning outings becomes much more than a matter of leaving the supermarket stop for last so that your ice cream won't melt. You've got to juggle your guesstimates as to the weights of the stuff you'll be picking up or dropping off at each stop, the form factors of the packages they'll be in, and (for those establishments where you'll be making purchases and which offer delivery) their delivery times and your past experiences with the reliability of their delivery personnel.

Your problems are easily solved with a collapsible shopping cart.

Collapsible shopping carts would not solve the problems created by trying to accomplish everyday errands and maintain a developed-world standard of living in the absence of a personal vehicle any more than keeping your plough's blade really razor-sharp would solve the problem of having to use a plough, drawn by oxen, after the use of tractors has been forbidden for ideological reasons.

Was that all a parable? The specific problem was getting more groceries home than you could comfortably carry, and needing them sooner than they could be reliably delivered. Wheels are a huge help in doing this.

Perhaps the more general problem is having things appear in your home at more or less the instant you decide you want them. Since instant delivery is unavailable (is this the problem?), this will require you to outsource your planning to some other person, like a servant, or to some sort of AI, or the closest that Amazon or Google can do.

Sorry that the 2nd half of my reply to your comment is on top of the first half). HN wouldn't let me post it as a single reply, so I had to break it up. HN wouldn't let me reply to myself either, so it had to be a 2nd reply to your comment.

I hadn't realized that replies were stacked newest-to-oldest.

My bad.

Edit: this reply was the last but has ended up on the bottom. Wheee!

I'm not really sure what you're getting at. You're saying that your supermarket and delivery person use you low quality packaging material, so therefore you need to take care of it yourself via car? Um, okay? Going from flimsy paper to a gigantic, self-propelled metal box seems like a bit of an extreme, but it floats your boat?

I still buy milk and eggs regularly and I don't have the issues you're talking about. Maybe it's because I use a reusable cloth bag that's sturdy enough to hold up even when drenched. Maybe my milk is packaged in a decent enough carton that condensation isn't really a relevant factor. Maybe the person who bags my groceries is competent? Maybe it's because I walk like a normal person?

> I didn't even touch on what it's like to be walking home from the supermarket, in the open, and getting caught in a sudden downpour.

I've experienced it. And at this point in my life, I've started to hate rain, which is ironic for Seattleite. But it's still manageable. Perhaps it's because I'm young and virile, I'm still capable of stepping up my pace for two blocks with a heavy backpack on my back (I walk to work and I carry my laptop with me both ways) and my hands filled with bags. (We still use paper bags, too; city ordinance for recycling. Seattle tends to be less humid than Hong Kong.)

I should point that out a third time to make it clear: my closest market is 2 blocks away. Because it's the Asian one, it doesn't have all the foods that I like (like Jamaican jerk sauce, mmm), so I take the light rail downtown and go to one of the markets there and bring it back.

I also do not use a delivery service. I consider it an unnecessary luxury, and am afraid of the exact hassles you describe: I have enough issues receiving the usual parcels to begin with.

> Without a vehicle to hold stuff in between stops and to get you from one stop to another faster, everything takes much, much longer to accomplish and the planning outings becomes much more than a matter of leaving the supermarket stop for last so that your ice cream won't melt.

That's certainly true. I tend to make it a point to only target a few stores per outing, because it's not reasonable to do them both on the same day. This is pretty nice, as it means I actually spend less overall and I get a bit more exercise. I need to value my targeted purchases highly enough to dedicate a trip to getting them.

Incidentally, I have family in Kowloon (both of my parents grew up there) and my aunt actually uses a car. But I also don't know about anything near her apartment; it's been a long time since I visited.

What I'm getting at is that having a personal vehicle gives a person a lot of choices that are not available to those without personal vehicles and that walkability and public transit are not a viable replacement for vehicle ownership unless one is willing to sacrifice large amounts of time (walking time) and mental energy (working out, in advance, the logistics of your movements for the day/evening in advance in detail).

Your situation with a local market that doesn't stock everything that you need leading to you needing to sometimes have to make another trip to get a specialty item, is a small example of what I'm talking about. You make an effort to see the upside (spending less, getting exercise) of having to advance-plan your errands and restrict the number of errands that you can do in one go and I think that your positive attitude is admirable but it's akin to a person who has lost their vision comforting themselves with the thought that their sense of hearing has become much more acute to compensate somewhat for their loss of sight.

Also, a reusable cloth shopping bag is great. So long as you always carry it with you. And so long as all of your purchases fit inside of it.

Perhaps, from your point of view the reusable shopping bag's fixed size serves as an additional constraint on your grocery spending and is helping you to lead a more frugal and focused life.

Obviously, I disagree. I can think of better uses for my time than acting as a human pack mule and the opportunity cost is cumulatively enormous -- all of the things that I could be doing during the lost time, which does add up, and the things I'm not getting done or taking longer to get done b/c of the can-only-get-n-errands done instead of n+several-more factor due to walking time or the delay involved in hailing taxis or waiting for booked taxis to show up.

> What I'm getting at is that having a personal vehicle gives a person a lot of choices that are not available to those without personal vehicles and that walkability and public transit are not a viable replacement for vehicle ownership unless one is willing to sacrifice large amounts of time (walking time) and mental energy (working out, in advance, the logistics of your movements for the day/evening in advance in detail).

Sure. But what you're not detailing are the drawbacks of having a personal vehicle, namely the additional errands piled on from having to maintain it (and its license), the extra space required to store it, the emotional tax of being in traffic, the higher risk of injury, the consequences at a macro-scale.

It's manifestly unfair to say, "Well, choice!" when both options have drawbacks. Not having a car, for instance, makes it harder to road trip: admittedly not something you do much of in Hong Kong, but it's a quintessential American fantasy. I'd estimate 20% of Americans have lived out of their cars at some point; their experience would not have been better without a car.

> Perhaps, from your point of view the reusable shopping bag's fixed size serves as an additional constraint on your grocery spending and is helping you to lead a more frugal and focused life.

This is overthinking it, in my view. I recognize that I can always make a second trip if I need to, and given that I can literally go to the store twice a day if I actually have the need, it's meaningless to worry about buying too many items. "I'll go back tomorrow" is a reasonable thought and doesn't require justification.

It's an extra 10 minutes a day to detour through the market, pick up what I need, go through checkout, and be on my way. This is a side effect of not driving; if I drove, I'd go to the Costco in the other neighborhood, fill up my trunk with bulk purchases (because any less would fail to justify the gas I just spent), and be set for a few months since I'm living alone.

It's certainly true that I disagree with rampant consumerism and unintentional obesity. This is something like saying I disagree with providing suicidal people with loaded guns, in order to provide them with choice. The provision of choice is not a binary action: it can be provided in many ways, and you need to choose between those possible actions.

In order to argue for cars, you need to do more than argue that they provide choices unavailable to walkers and cyclists. You need to argue that the choices they provide are more important than the choices provided by what a car-less society would look like.

If the parking lot is not full, how do you figure?

If the parking lot is not full, you're getting even fewer customers, because you're losing out on even the choked trickle that comes from cars. You don't want it to be completely full: churn needs to happen. But at less than, (out of my ass), 80% and you have space being taken up by a potential car that isn't producing any value for you.

This isn't different from a warehouse for your inventory. You don't want it to be full; in an ideal situation, the size of your warehouse is the amount that you sell over X period of time. If you have inventory sitting there, it's not being sold. Similarly, if you have parking spaces not being used, it's not making you money.

Err... questions of optimal parking lot utilization does not explain why cars reduce the number of visitors you get.

I explained that in the comment you responded to. You're the one who brought up parking lot utilization.

Maybe I'm just being dense right now, but you said:

Cars [...] actually decreases the number of customers who can get to your store.

I don't see how the comment I replied to proves/explains that statement.

> You can take a fully-packed car and compare the space used to people on a sidewalk: that's the difference in customers you're losing out on.

Fully-packed car. That's 4 to 6 people. A parking space is about 153 square feet in size. [1] A single person takes up about 7 to 10 square feet to be comfortable. [2] (Fair cop: I'm not making any measurements here.)

That's 9 people you're failing to serve by providing a parking space. That's assuming everything is ideal for the car: that it's filled with 6 people, that every parking space is being used by a car filled with 6 people. (I would guesstimate the average car occupancy is 2.5ish.) Let's further assume my math is crap and the numbers are non-ideal and round it down to 5. (Yes, I just chopped off 50% from the size of my claim.) That's still a ~50% loss.

That's the back-of-the-napkin math. In reality, it's more complicated. It asks what you replace the parking space with. It asks what the sidewalk capacity actually is and whether or not that would change if you replaced the parking space with (blank). It asks what the layout of the entire city is and how the public transportation system is and how the city helps inform its residents of your establishment. It asks how happy a customer is when they walk in your store and whether or not that changes the tone of your business.

But these are questions that can't be addressed by "cars = customers" anyways. As I explain elsewhere on the thread, designing for cars naturally discourages other forms of traffic. That's a complicate claim and is explored across many, many books on urban design.

So we simplify. If the original claim is that a car represents a customer, then my challenge is to look at the space taken up by a car and see what you lose as a result. The easiest number to get is this: 5 customers, ideally.

[1] http://www.timhaahs.com/index.php/site/dbdetail/1_what_is_th...

[2] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_square_feet_does_a_person...

I just realized that I misunderstood your question. On the off chance that you still care and you'll read this, I'll fix that.

When I said "fully-packed car", the implication was that the car would arrive and use up a parking lot space. The parking lot space has to be provided in order for the car to use it up. If the space is being used in order to provide a space for a car to park in it, then the same space cannot be used for something else.

Multiple studies demonstrate that customers who arrive by car come less often and spend less in total than customers who arrive by any other means. Why? Because it costs the customer a fortune to drive and park their car, so they are spending more on transportation and less on whatever you are selling. The same studies have demonstrated that business owners do not know this. This is why the small business parking delusion persists. This is why small business owners show up at city council meetings across the country to argue against their own best interest.

Here's one and you can google for the rest: http://kellyjclifton.com/Research/EconImpactsofBicycling/TRN...

I wish establishments that thought this would post it in their windows so I could walk my money right past them. It sounds like you don't live in an urban area, correct me if I'm wrong... because most people I know walk to where they are going in Philadelphia.

You live in South Philly, don't you?

What we need is more money spent on roads and parking. Done the right way, of course. Nothing wrong with wide roads, wide sidewalks, strips of parks and trees and green spaces.

Have you ever visited an urban area? Where on earth would this "infrastructure" be placed? Next to the Best Buy and the Outback Steakhouse?

Principle of charity requires me to imagine that you just have had the bad luck to be only exposed to outdated ideas... Plenty of places to start, maybe here: http://m.fastcoexist.com/3021074/making-the-economic-case-fo...

> Just remember where the bread is buttered, pedestrians = homeless panhandler but car = customer.

Hah. What? Driving consumes a tremendous amount of most people's disposable income. I know people who spend $5-10k a year on transportation.

If someone is living in an urban area without a vehicle, they are likely to be paying more for housing and living in a significantly smaller space than someone living in a lower-density setting (e.g. suburbs) who owns and uses a vehicle of their own and may have a lawn, swimming pool, tool shed, little machine shop or sewing/crafts room, etc.

Can you sell more gardening products (seeds, soil, tools, fertilizer, etc.) to someone who has a yard or someone who has a balcony that could potentially accommodate a planter or two?

Will you sell more pool toys and equipment to someone who has a pool in their yard or to someone who may periodically use their building's clubhouse's pool or walk to the local municipal pool?

How much less furniture or art or carpeting or pretty much anything can you sell to someone who has 500 square feet to live in versus someone who has 1000 to 2000 square feet of space in their home? Smaller kitchens translates into less counter space, so less space for kitchen appliances or even fancy pasta storage containers.

The knock-on effects of your customers living in smaller, urban spaces vs. larger suburban-type homes are huge.

So the downside to beautifying and reclaiming our cities by discouraging the automobile is that ... we buy less useless crap and live more efficiently? Shudder.

Just remember where the bread is buttered, pedestrians = homeless panhandler but car = customer.

I'm not sure if you're trolling or just a bit tone-deaf, but this is an incredibly US-centric way to see things. Seriously, it makes you seem a bit clueless.

Clearly, the mindset you voice here is something that city planners in the US need to take into account. The question is, where does this difference come from, and can something be done about it? After all, cars and all the infrastructure surrounding them take up an enormous amount of space, which seems wasteful in the design of efficient and compact cities. How can those inner cities be "revived" in a way that makes them livable?

I live 30 miles from work, having more pedestrian and cycle friendly laws won't do one bit of good.

You would likely take them into account if you happened to move.

A few more bike lanes and bike storage space on the commuter train goes a long way. I live 20 miles from work and prefer to leave the car at home.

The problem is that you live 30 miles from work, a fact you find acceptable only because you know cars can get you there. Before the automobile era this was unheard of.

How are you privy to the reason the OP lives 30 miles from work?

Perhaps he has other obligations, such as family, that require him to live where he does. Or perhaps the cost of living near OP's workplace is beyond his means.

You assume too much.

Some cities are doing this. Vancouver BC has a policy of not expanding its road network whatsoever, and is actively decreasing by reserving portions of it to exclusive bike and pedestrian use. The city has also engaged with communities to find portions of road that are unused enough that they could be converted to parklets.

I think that only applies to the DT core not the GVRD / lower mainland as a whole.

In the last 5 or so years we have built a new bridge to replace the albion ferry (golden ears), replaced & widened the pitt river bridge and interchange, construction of a new 10-lane Port Mann Bridge, 37 kilometres of highway widening from Vancouver to Langley & the replacement of nine highway interchanges, widened/improved 176th to the blaine truck crossing & fraser highway, construction of the south fraser perimeter road, and iirc some improvements around white rock and the airport.

Translink is also considering replacing/widening the pattullo and george massy tunnels. And this is just what i know about and can remember.

However we have also increased bus service in general, built a new rapid transit line from DT to the airport (canada line), are now extending the skytrain to the tri cities and hopefully soon after down the broadway corridor to UBC.

DT Vancouver isn't building more roads, but theres not exactly room for any new ones. It has also converted some road space to bike lanes and is now considering removing the viaducts, but it only covers a small part of the region's transportation infrastructure.

You're right I'm only talking about Vancouver City proper. The provincial government, which controls the highway system, does not have the right approach and has been dramatically over building with the new bridges.

Remember how rapidly the general opinion on smoking changed? It wasn't that long ago that smoking was cool. I think we are seeing the beginning of a similar shift for personal automobiles in urban areas. It wasn't the taxes that drove away smoking, it was the frowns and glares. The shift will take longer. So much of our society is structured around vehicles. Government identification is mostly through driver's licenses. Whole chunks of the judicial and police systems are dedicated to traffic violations.

Surely you've noticed that huge hunk of land over next to you on the maps called the mainland, haven't you? Lots of folks over here, like me, live 20 miles from town or more. Without a car, we'd starve.

Sure, it'd be great if we all lived in cities and sat on park benches fretting over the absolutely terrible state of aesthetics the cities have gotten into with so many cars -- wouldn't bikes and walking just spruce up the place immensely? -- but that's just not reality for us.

Thanks for being patronizing, however I grew up in the country outside of (coincidentally) Philadelphia and understand owning and driving automobiles is necessary e.g. when you live on a farm. I don't think anyone would ever be against that considering there are no other options. It was pretty clear that I was talking about cities, and why would you not want your environment to be beautiful and healthy?

I would love for my environment to be pretty. Thanks for asking.

The only reason I replied to you at all was that I get concerned when I see people present aesthetic arguments that don't seem very well thought-out. Because it's not that we have a different definition of pretty. It's much more that I'm willing to see the ugliness and think of how far we've come from island natives having a life span of 33 and you're more likely to think of how much the view would be better without all the concrete in the way.

Well why can't we go further? We have the technology for self-driving cars, and public transportation that doesn't suck, but for a multitude of reasons we don't utilize this. And beautiful living spaces really is a superficial reason to want cars to go away -- definitely secondary to (if you reread my OP) the financial, environmental, and mental burdens of driving, as well as the countless deaths caused by drivers every year.

suburban areas 20 miles out worked before the car (100 years ago) and before the car was convenient (60 years ago).

You can't just discourage the use of cars, without providing an alternative.

They would need to build proper public transport first.

Most of the US is far, far behind other countries there, but many other first world countries are still completely impractical to travel by public transport too. e.g the UK, where while trains go most places, they are notoriously slow, unreliable and expensive and do not run in the very early morning. Even countries people might expect to have good transportation (e.g. Germany) see the same problem to a lesser extent, rendering its day to day use impractical.

The real answer is to have guided taxi-style individual vehicles that people can book, take to whereever, which then leave to pick someone else up, giving the privacy, speed and convenience benefits without the parking and traffic problems, but the technology isn't there yet to implement them in a real city.

I've started trying out UberX in SF and it's been a revelation. The "public transportation needs to be better" argument goes away in a future when large swaths of urban professionals switch over to on-demand transportation, which will eventually be automated.

It sounds awesome, so long as there's always excess supply of on-demand transportation.

When there's a bump in demand (rainy day, major sporting/tourist/whatever event) and on-demand transport services are fully utilized, leaving many waiting or unable to get a vehicle, not so much.

What exactly is the alternative to cars?

Oh, easy - bikes and/or public transportation, of course. /s

The idea of abandoning a car is silly at this point because it's just not going to happen. Maybe if urban sprawl wasn't a thing we could figure something out. On my team, I live the closest to work at 6 miles, with many of my coworkers commuting 40+ minutes. There's no complete replacement for that. Even when I was a public transportation commuter at a previous job in a different city, I had to drive a few miles on a highway to get to the bus depot. The anti-car sentiment seem to me to be localized in tighter packed cities with better public transit, which is a minority of the cities in America (sorry for being so US-centric, I haven't lived or worked outside of the States).

Dealing with urban sprawl is effectively the first step. There are ongoing movements to reinvent suburbs into communities, which could theoretically attract localized businesses to reduce the amount that people need to commute.

It's important to recognize that the long commutes came about because of cars. Because it was possible to take the open road to get to work, sprawl was a reasonable option. And then everyone joined in on the fun and the open road vanished. It's a bait-and-switch.

This doesn't mean that getting rid of cars will automatically fix things, but deliberately removing our dependence on them will absolutely help because part of that action is fixing things.

Long commutes are enabled by cars, but I don't think they're the direct cause - sprawl was a thing before cars as we know them came about. It's a natural phenomenon to move away from the civic center, we are just able to move father away because of cars. Before that, it was horses and carriages. Cars let us move further our, sure.

Specifically in my case, the company I work for is located in my city (despite recent sale to an SF-based one). They chose a prestigious address over being near where the already sparse urban living was, and even that is geared at singles and young couples. I couldn't live near work if I wanted to.

Personally I don't think cars are a bad thing and I don't want to trade mine for a bike or the bus. I like the freedom a car gives me. I don't have to plan my route to work on anything or anyone. I can leave when I want. I can go to lunch farther away from my office. Yes, it's contributing to climate change, and we need to solve that problem, but I don't think the solution is removing dependance on cars.

> sprawl was a thing before cars as we know them came about. It's a natural phenomenon to move away from the civic center

It is to a degree: it is a sign of status to be able to afford actual land from which you can bar others, and therefore actually using it isn't terribly surprising. This has been true since before castles were invented. The main difference is that, in those times, it was understood that the occupants were aristocratic elite.

> we are just able to move father away because of cars. Before that, it was horses and carriages. Cars let us move further our, sure.

Right. The issue isn't the combustible engine; it's the attitude that comes with being a car driver, which isn't that much different from being a horse rider. This is coupled with an illusion that you don't lose the connection to the urban center as a consequence (indeed, in many places, you find that another urban center inexorably becomes necessary).

> Yes, it's contributing to climate change, and we need to solve that problem, but I don't think the solution is removing dependance on cars.

The problem that I want to solve is a fundamentally broken social structure incapable of doing things like opposing the NSA in a meaningful sense and the IDL is an exception rather than a rule. Cars contribute to this problem by weakening the social basis by which we commit civic action and by disenfranchising the core of our human populations (the percentage of human beings in urban centers broke 50% a long time ago) in order to service the more far-flung.

This is the essence of the city. Everything is connected. Our democracy is broken and this is part of the reason. People complain about how no one cares about the real issues. Why not? In part because they're exhausted from their commute. Certainly there are other reasons, but this is one and it's big.

Sprawl is just a subsidy for cars. Remove the sprawl subsidies and find out just how quickly your 40-mile commuters move to a home closer to the office (or find another job that isn't out in BFE.)

So you have to find two places of work, shopping, school (potentially several different schools), worship, and recreation all within say 2 miles of your home?

Good luck with that.

Huh? EDIT: Ah I guess you are saying two places of work, one for each adult in a household? Well have you heard of these things called buses and trains? They're awesome. You don't need everything to be in walking distance, as long as both ends are walking distance from transport.

Also the nice thing about not being a superstitious throwback is I don't have to find any place to worship, walking distance or otherwise.

Just because you don't live ars' life doesn't mean the world should be your way and not his/hers. The term "superstitious throwback" is a really assholic way of dismissing an argument because you don't agree with it.

You don't need everything to be in walking distance, as long as both ends are walking distance from transport.

... and that would be the problem, in much of the USA.

> Well have you heard of these things called buses and trains? They're awesome.

They ARE awesome, but often come at the expense of time. I live in Tokyo, which has an amazing public transportation network.

Including walking to/from stations and bus stops, taking the bus/train costs me around 80 minutes of my day each way -- that's over 2 1/2 hours of my day.

If I take a taxi directly from my apartment to work, it takes about 15-20 minutes to get directly to work. Let's call it 40 minutes of my day.

I can get back two hours of my life every single day with point-to-point transport. That's two hours I could be catching up with friends, reading a book, cooking, exercising, etc. It matters so often to me that I end up paying the 4000 yen or so it costs to take a taxi twice a day a horrifying number of times.

This is to say nothing of the fact that I can sit in the taxi and read a book or something rather than being crammed and crushed in public transport.

> I live in Tokyo, which has an amazing public transportation network.

> Including walking to/from stations and bus stops, taking the bus/train costs me around 80 minutes of my day each way

That's not actually how we define "amazing public transportation network". My experience of public transit in Seattle is "about 5 minutes away from a bus stop, anywhere, and about 30 minutes to anywhere I care to go in the city, and maybe an hour if I go across the lake to Bellevue or Redmond".

The fact that it takes you longer for traveling within the city than it does for me to change cities suggests to me that Tokyo's public transit is either ridiculously bad or you have an extremely unusual case.

> That's not actually how we define "amazing public transportation network".

It's pretty comparatively amazing to me. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania in a town with no buses or taxis. The closest train/bus station was about 50 minutes away by car.

My apartment has a bus stop right outside its door, but I have to travel the entire bus line to get to where I want to go, and that's 15 minutes from work.

There's a train station five minutes from work and two others within ten minutes from work, but none of them go directly to the station closest to my apartment.

That's trivially easy in most cities, on foot or bike, because we're talking about 12 square miles of city.

Add in reasonable public transportation between places, and we're talking more like within 5-10 miles.

I simply don't believe that there's an area anywhere around an urban center where you can't find all of that within ~75-300 square miles, as most urban areas simply aren't that big.

Most cities already have plenty of public transportation.

I thought we were talking about expanding it to sub-urban areas too, and in those places finding all those things within distance is much much harder.

Suburbs as anything other than streetcar suburbs are basically only a thing due to the subsidization of the automobile infrastructure.

Then you're just arguing for one way of life over another. I like living in the suburbs. I don't want to feel like a sardine packed into a can.

You (or whoever is arguing for it) would rather not live in a world that has tainted nature with roads and automobiles.

Why does it have to be one way or another? In the present, there are plenty of places to go and see nature that hasn't been tainted by cars and roads.

Many of the people in this thread write as if cars are manifestly obviously bad, and that we should go to great lengths to remove or drastically reduce them from society.

I guess I didn't get the memo.

Living in the suburbs doesn't mean you avoid the sardines feeling: https://maps.google.com/?ll=35.833819,-78.909173&spn=0.02637...

Cars aren't manifestly bad, but that kind of neighborhood is.

> Living in the suburbs doesn't mean you avoid the sardines feeling

You're not wrong, but I'm not sure it's really relevant to what I'm saying. So what, some suburbs aren't ideal to my particular way of life? Yeah? So?

> Cars aren't manifestly bad, but that kind of neighborhood is.

sigh...

Do you care to elaborate on the "sigh" with any actual discussion?

It seems you're trying to portray any detractors of suburbs as radical tree-huggers, whilst ignoring the fact that the kind of suburban sprawl happening today has a ton of other downsides, and fails to even meet your own standards for a nice neighborhood.

Edit: To give you some context, I live on the opposite side of town from the neighborhood I linked to. My neighborhood is much lower-density than that one, but while still unquestionably suburban, has schools and a large variety of shops within walking distance and safely accessible by foot and greenways and bike routes leading toward the city centers. My neighborhood was built in the 1970s. There are similar neighborhoods in the area covering a broad range of density and property values. We don't even have a mass-transit system worth mentioning, but it's still a much better place for getting around without a car. Yes, suburbs can be done well. But at least in my area, the new residential development is mostly comically tragic, and it's affecting what people mean by suburban sprawl.

The "sigh" was because it seems my point was missed. The particulars of what I happen to enjoy as a living arrangement are borderline irrelevant. The point I was making is that a bunch of people are pushing their way of life on to others (through sin taxes and policy changes and the like) based on the premise that their way of life is obviously superior.

I'm saying the dual of "my way of life is better."

Someone else brought up that there are subsidies supporting my way of life though. I'm fine with removing those. But I personally haven't seen that position advocated in this thread. So I didn't account for it.

> radical tree-huggers

Radical tree huggers? Come now. No need for the flamebait. I love nature. I frequent it whenever I get the chance. But I don't feel entitled to it wherever I happen to be.

> whilst ignoring the fact that the kind of suburban sprawl happening today has a ton of other downsides, and fails to even meet your own standards for a nice neighborhood.

I didn't ignore anything. I never said suburbs were always the best. I didn't even say that I prefer every suburb to any city. I didn't speak with exact precision because the details of "my way of life" weren't crucial to my point.

I didn't say any of this because I never argued that suburbs were, in any way, shape or form better than cities. I merely stated that I prefer them. And that's enough.

You're making a false dichotomy, between the urban no-car life you don't want, and the suburbs that make it impossible to get anywhere without a car. A happy middle ground is possible and exists in many places, and can be done without much extra effort, but it requires some. Zoning regulations and the like have proven to be insufficient for preventing developers from throwing down several square miles of cookie-cutter homes at a time embedded in a fractal maze of cul-de-sacs with no room for commercial development, meaning those neighborhoods end up car-mandatory and impossible to service with mass transit even when they're very dense. There are plenty of sound public policy reasons for wanting alternative forms of transportation to be viable, so even if it feels like someone shoving their way of life down your throat, it'll still probably save you tax money in the long run even if it has to be achieved through blunt means like "sin taxes".

Edit: Many of the subsidies the car-only lifestyle gets are really negative externalities the burden of which is shared by everyone: the public health nightmare of obesity, pollution in the form of smog and runoff, political downsides of dependence on oil. How could those be dealt with in a way that doesn't feel to you like an unjust sin tax or someone forcing their way of life on you?

I'm sorry I gave you the impression that I think there are only two options. I don't think that. I don't think my way of life is better. I don't think yours is. I just want people to stop saying their way of life is obviously better (even if it is some sort of middle ground), and that because of that, we should just start taxing people for doing things they don't happen to like.

If you feel the desire to press me more for my view on taxes (because you perceive some inconsistency), and in general, government, then I implore you not to. It's a waste of time, and in all probability, we will vehemently disagree.

When I've been saying "better" here, I'm using it in the sense of Pareto efficiency - more preferred even by people with different preferences. I'm not imposing a single linear scale along which to rank things.

If you don't think taxation or other government intervention are justified in order to achieve a Pareto improvement that the free market demonstrably cannot achieve on its own, then yeah, talking government with you is a waste of time.

> that the free market demonstrably cannot achieve on its own

Are you referring to the free market that caused suburbs to become a thing only "due to the subsidization of the automobile infrastructure"?[1]

So somehow, people are blaming sprawl on the subsidization of automobiles---which, let's not kid ourselves, is done only by government and corporations in bed with government---but you, you, are saying that this is really a demonstrable failure of a free market? (Which, of course, you proclaim because it doesn't meet some arbitrary standard that seems impossible to measure. Which apparently---and conveniently---seems to line up with what you happen to like as a way of life.)

Have I got that right? Or are you referencing some other failure?

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7208650

The market failure to which I was referring is the ongoing situation where demand for housing does not lead to communities being built, only housing developments that force a car-only lifestyle with all its negative externalities. As I've said, suburbs can be done right, but that's not what's getting built. This should surprise nobody, because the housing market hits pretty much all of the exceptions under which free-market capitalism isn't even theoretically optimal.

But yeah, in my area the cost of upgrading the road network is mostly not borne by the people moving to the area and necessitating the new and wider roads. That's one of the reasons our new housing developments are too big.

> "Which apparently---and conveniently---seems to line up with what you happen to like as a way of life."

This is not a coincidence, suspicious or otherwise. It is part of the definition of Pareto efficiency.

> Edit: Many of the subsidies the car-only lifestyle gets are really negative externalities the burden of which is shared by everyone: the public health nightmare of obesity, pollution in the form of smog and runoff, political downsides of dependence on oil. How could those be dealt with in a way that doesn't feel to you like an unjust sin tax or someone forcing their way of life on you?

I don't want subsidies. I don't want any of them. Get rid of them. Car subsidies are just as much an imposition as sin taxes are.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Automobiles, and in general, industrialization, come with a cost. Externalities (positive or negative) that are a result of hundreds of millions of people acting cannot be eliminated without coercion. And of course, coercion introduces its own form of externality.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. I'd rather we all plead our case to persuade others than shove it down everyone else's throats.

"Oh but that would be great if only people weren't idiots..."

And around in circles we go.

[responding to your edit]

I truthfully don't see anything to disagree with you there. I think it'd be fantastic to live in a small town with good public transit (even if only good bike paths). There are unfortunately few of them where I live (central Massachusetts). Hell, I love a good bike path. I've been on the one up in Burlington, VT. It's awesome. Same with paths in Amherst and around Cambridge.

But the fact that I can walk/bike/scooter down to the corner pub in my little town has very very little to do with why I have a car. For example, my parents live about 25 minutes away. Some of my good friends live 35 minutes away. When I visit, it's common for me to lug stuff back and forth (whether it be food or other various items). My job is about 45-60 minutes away in the city. (That's by car. Want to know how long it'd take with public transit? Over two hours. And it's just as expensive as owning a car!)

There's just no viable way for me to do that with anything other than a car. And some day, when kids get added to the mix, I fret to think of how much more difficult it would be without a car. Hell, I even live in walking distance to the T! (That's the commuter rail that goes from Worcester to Boston.)

You're welcome to live in whatever kind of place you want. I think what people object to is the massive subsidies slathered on the suburban lifestyle under american policies.

I'm fine with getting rid of subsidies.

Look at this thread. Most of what I see are people advocating "sin taxes" and the like. Or, increasing subsidies to shape a world more fitting of what they want.

You really need some reading lessons, then. There have been like... 3 people advocating sin taxes.

> You really need some reading lessons, then.

Thanks for the insult saraid216! Is there anything else about me that you'd care to attack? (If not, feel free to take a look at my comment history. I'm sure you can find something. If it'll make you feel better, I'm all ears.)

If you channel them to be somewhat more linear, commuter rail can work okay for suburbs. Copenhagen took that approach, with a goal that even quite far out suburbs should be in reasonable biking or bus distance to an S-train station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_Plan

My job is in the city, and I'd love to live within walking distance. The problem is I would have pay ~2x for a place to live, and still end up in a noisy high crime area.

You wouldn't have to pay ~2x if nobody could drive cars. You would dream of paying only ~2x.

When you eliminate zoning laws and allow greater density, housing supply increase and housing prices decrease (relative to what they would do if there was less housing stock available). With greater density, public transit makes a lot more sense.

Another way to look at "sprawl" is: Enough space to have privacy, enough space to pursue your own interests, enough space to have the kids enjoy the backyard as opposed to a 4'x3' balcony on the 20th floor of an apartment building. Enough space to design your own home or addition, perhaps, if you have the inclination. And enough space to have a car that gives you more independence (when you want it) than being at the mercy of public transportation schedules concocted by central planners.

You also might enjoy sports cars, as I do, and enjoy owning a very well-designed vehicle that does 0-60 in under four seconds and is a joy to drive on the windy roads near my house -- though it would be nice to add a self-driving car to the garage too. (HN trivia: I had lunch with Steve Jobs in 1989, and he drove up in a black Porsche 911. Larry Page bought a Tesla roadster. I recall Cypress Semiconductor CEO TJ Rodgers telling me about his Mercedes; you can probably track down the interview if you're interested.)

Also: I don't live in a downtown area. Nor do I live in suburban sprawl. But "sprawl is just a subsidy for cars" is a weak argument that gets the facts wrong: car commuters are subsidizing public transportation via gas and other taxes, not the other way around.

Here's Randal O'Toole on single-family homes in the SF Bay area: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/do-single-family... "The vast majority of population growth continues to be in low-density suburbs. Surveys of millennials show that more than three out of four aspire to live in a single-family home with a yard. The data also show that crowding people together isn’t really effective at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions or addressing other urban concerns. Population densities in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose urban areas have already grown by nearly 60 percent since 1990, yet per-capita driving still has increased."

I do apologize in advance for injecting facts into a religious argument about that loathsome invention known as the automobile. :)

> car commuters are subsidizing public transportation via gas and other taxes, not the other way around.

Do you have numbers for this? Last I checked, gas taxes didn't cover the costs for road construction and maintenance, let alone have enough left over to subsidize public transportation.

Billions of dollars are taken from so-called Highway Trust Fund, paid for by your gas taxes, to fund public transport. Cite:

http://reason.com/archives/2012/02/14/house-aims-to-stop-hig... >>Every time you buy a gallon of gas in this nation, you pay 18.2 cents to Uncle Sam. The original rationalization for the federal gas tax was that it was collected in a "Highway Trust Fund" and used to pay for road infrastructure. In 1983, a transit account was created [pdf], diverting 20 percent of the trust fund to pay for the mass transit dreams of local potentates.<<

That's not counting $$$ coming from general FedGov income tax revenue. Because far more people use cars regularly than use public transport regularly, those are additional subsidies extracted (involuntarily) from automobile and truck owners.

Related, with an entertaining headline: http://reason.com/blog/2012/06/22/breaking-affluent-well-edu...

Year, those numbers make basically no sense. Even your link doesn't prove what it claims in the headline. The government shovels billions from the general fund into the highway fund every year. The highway fund disburses a much smaller number of billions into transit projects every year. Therefore the fuel tax does not cover the cost of highway spending.

I'll stop here because I have a policy against arguing with libertarians on the internet, but in case you are interested in facts from actual research rather than from political mouthpieces here's one. The URL says it all:

http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pa...

For some reason, the other side basically looks at interstates and then calls it a day, ignoring that the vast majority of road expenditures isn't federal.

(OK, the reason is pretty obvious: it's the only way to make the numbers come out "right".)

Your post contains false dichotomies and incorrect assertions of fact.

False dichotomy: sprawl vs. 20th floor apartment. There are many single family homes with yards in dense urban areas. Note in this aerial image how the compact residential areas with grid streets are bracketed by commercial corridors on major streets. Walkable access to work, shopping, entertainment, and long-haul transportation are the features lacking in "sprawl". https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8412554,-122.2511705,700m/da...

You claim about gas buyers subsidizing transit has already been addressed in your other post. I will just add that every time I get on the bus I have to disgorge another $2.10 whereas every time I get on the freeway I pay no direct user fee.

Your data about per-capita driving is also obsolete. According to FHWA data, per-capita vehicle miles traveled has fallen 8 years in a row. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring... It's not back to 1990 levels yet, certainly, but it's headed there and is mostly a matter of demographics.

Walkable/bikeable urban and suburban planning. Living closer to work. Delivery services. Scooters, motorcycles, cargo bikes, light rail, buses, cars for hire.

> Living closer to work

You better fix the housing situation first in some areas (cough Bay Area cough).

Isn't a big problem in the Bay Area is that a lot of people living in SF don't work there? In that case, if everyone in google lived next to the googleplex that would free up their appartments for the guy working at the deli downtown.

The daytime population of San Francisco is much higher than the actual number of residents, so no, this isn't the problem. If the daytime population was lower then you'd be on to something.

Google has repeatedly tried to stimulate residential construction in Mountain View but the city of Mountain View just doesn't want it. We're all waiting for windshield perspective baby boomers to just hurry up and die so we can have proper urban forms on the peninsula. And I'm not talking about high rise, I'm talking about 3-5 stories over street level retail. Mountain View currently has lots of single-story and surface parking lots, even in their "downtown" which I reckon to be at Castro and Villa.

The Bay Area is basically the epitome is car-based planning gone horribly, horribly wrong. I am told you have similar circumstances in Atlanta and Houston, but I haven't seen them first hand.

I think it varies, actually. Nearly everything on the peninsula, and everything in the East Bay south of Oakland is pure car dependence. But SF, Oakland, and Berkeley grew up in the streetcar era and are still walkable with decent rail and bus service that can be readily improved when the cheap oil interval finally ends. The string of little towns from Concord to Walnut Creek to Alamo and Danville have walkable nuggets at the core of their sprawls and these can easily be connected by streetcar on the old Santa Fe rights of way if anyone wants to. Livermore also has a proper downtown and even mainline rail service to San Jose. Plus Livermore is dead level and you can bike all over it in no time.

When driving becomes too expensive there is definitely going to be a lot of abandoned sprawl but there's also plenty of decent places to live. By definition, few people live in the sprawl. It's a shame that they wasted so much of their and your money building out those subdivisions in the middle of nowhere, but that's a sunk cost now.

SF is not a car-based planning problem. SF is a NIMBY-ism gone the way it always goes.

The Valley sort of is a transit problem, more than SF. Although SF's lack of a crosstown subway doesn't help: the N-Judah streetcar plus the Geary bus, between them add up to a pretty poor crosstown transit situation. But the Valley explicitly opted out of BART and used the money to build county expressways instead (San Tomas, etc.), which is one of several reasons that it's a sprawling mess.

NIMBY-ism is also a problem in the few places of the Valley that do have decent transport, though I think it's the secondary problem. One place it's noticeable is Palo Alto: why isn't there high density housing near the Palo Alto Caltrain station (which is also conveniently near Stanford and a number of tech companies)? Because Palo Alto homeowners don't want anyone with less than a $1m house to live there. However afaik this is a minority situation in the Valley, and most of it just doesn't have decent transit that could attract high-density housing in the first place. San Jose has also been more development-friendly, although it's too bad there that the VTA light rail is so near-useless, or that area could plausibly have a more urban feel.

Other than the car4hire thing which if required by over 90% of the population amounts to just inserting an intermediary along with all the costs, whats the solution above 80F and below 50F? Icy roads and 10F this morning, no big deal for my car, but everything on your list is a non-starter.

Also no kids or elderly or handicapped or...

It might be that what works perfectly for 20-somethings in socal doesn't work anywhere else for anyone else.

Finally I already live as close to work as financially possible, and its about 20 minutes. And I'm a very well compensated senior developer-type person. I can't live any closer and I'm fairly wealthy, the median income dude is going to have to live much further away.

You're asking the wrong guy about weather -- I bike year-round in Boston. There are other people doing it on other vehicles I mentioned.

And I assure you, children and the elderly manage to survive carfree in cities, towns, and villages all over the world. Quite comfortably, in many cases.

I don't consider a twenty-minute car commute very far at all, certainly not out of bicycle range.

I don't consider a twenty-minute car commute very far at all, certainly not out of bicycle range.

In many cases, what takes twenty minutes in a motorcage takes less time on a bicycle!

the elderly and the handicapped are most likely to need public transportation or a walkable community. Both of these situations inhibit income (especially blue collar). A car that can pick up a wheel chair is not cheap.

I guess you don't have children.

your comment is highly degrading to the significant portion of the population that can't afford cars and do have children.

studies also show that children who venture on their own (walking and biking) establish greater independence and a better happiness index. (and more than likely fewer asthma /allergies if not in a car centric area )

Besides the obvious alternatives in cities, having more efficient cars (i.e., self-driving cars that can algorithmically ease congestion and find efficient ways to carpool) would be a big step forward. Take a drive on any American highway and you'll see the amount of cars with a single occupant is overwhelming -- what a waste!

Do you think more people would share rides if cars could drive themselves? If this wouldn't be the case, I can see how the technology would help parking congestion but not how it would help traffic congestion.

Having smaller cars would actually be a good thing in that it would reduce the space wastage without changing the number of occupants. Don't know if you'd count that as technology in the sense of self-driving cars, though.

Self-driving cars can help traffic congestion in the sense that, if you can tell your car you don't care how long it takes to get somewhere, it might route you through a longer path and consequently help rebalance the load. Maybe.

This seems intuitively true but isn't. The majority (90%) of the space taken by a car at highway speeds is actually due to the buffer zone around it due to speed and not the size of the vehicle itself. Smaller cars don't increase highway throughput appreciably.

The auto driving car will be connected to a network and have a nice GPS, all you have to do is charge a fee for the shorter route.

(I don't think people will be very excited about dynamic road tolls, but I think it would be at least somewhat effective in shaping behavior)

Maybe not carpooling, but proponents of self-driving cars often talk about how their efficiency (i.e. algorithmic efficiency in how they drive) would greatly ease traffic congestion. Much of the issue with traffic is just bad drivers (inefficient merging, accidents causing backups to name a few examples) but also current traffic controls like stop lights could essentially be removed if cars could reliably communicate with each other.

I mentioned these books below, but they serve as a reasonably comprehensive answer to this question:

* http://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/dp... (Warning: Speck's tone is pretty bad.)

* http://www.amazon.com/Happy-City-Transforming-Through-Design...

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