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Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

Redmond, Washington isn't in Silicon Valley...

I'm using SV as shorthand for the tech industry generally -- and Redmond is very much to Seattle what Silicon Valley is to San Francisco. Car-dependent suburbia that threatens the health, safety, and quality-of-life of everyone forced to be there. San Francisco is as walkable as the West Coast gets, which alone testifies to the disgrace of American urban planning.

Ey would have been killed long ago if he dared to ride a bike to work. If Redmond had been planned after Copenhagen's model, he would still be alive to make the world a better place.

I actually agree with this response. Because of Microsoft, Seattle has become Silicon Valley North, just the same as NYC has become the Silicon Alley and Chicago is... whatever they're calling Chicago now.

All of them are similar, heavy car usage, not enough walking, and no safety for humans.

Google is trying to solve it by making smarter cars. How about we solve it by making our communities smarter instead?

We call it the "Silicon Forest." I remember Redmond when it was still just a small town whose claim to fame was a TV production lot for Northern Exposure (I grew up in Bothell just north on 405).

That Boston managed to avoid this is a very big reason why I don't have much interest in living anywhere else. In Somerville and Cambridge, I feel exceptionally safe, even around cars.

"Heavy car usage", in NYC?

After decades living in real car-only cities (Atlanta, Miami, Sao Paulo), I'm glad to live car-free in NYC. And considering family and small child.

While gentrification continues to push people away from Manhattan, you still have decent options of public transportation to everywhere around here.

We can criticize NY for many things, but being a 'car city' is not one of them.

Anyway, I really wish more cities in the world could offer similar life style, allowing people to leave their cars behind and use public transportation. It would save lives, the environment, and increase everyone's happiness.

RIP Mike.

I've never been to NYC, but every depiction I've seen of it grid lock and seas of yellow cabs, and cabs have been known to hit people too.

Grid lock is annoying, but it's not going to kill you violently. And good luck trying to drive 100 mph in Manhattan.

Underneath the sea of yellow cabs you have a very efficient subway system, connecting the entire city to its 5 boroughs. And you also have a decent railroad system, connecting Manhattan to nearby cities.

It's true that some areas are not properly served through subway, and you have to rely on bus. But it is still an order of magnitude better than some of the cities mentioned above.

It would be nice if NYC laws were as friendly to pedestrians as public transport is. Most pedestrian deaths in NYC occur in cross walks where we have the right of way. The charges for a car running a person over in a cross walk can be as little as a $300 fine and are often not much more than that.

Actually, self-driving cars are the only proposed solution to automobile accidents and related deaths that seems like it might work. Laws don't work, education doesn't work, and even the safest, most careful drivers can and do have accidents. Let's be clear. In the US, at least, cars are not going anywhere unless costs become as prohibitive everywhere as they are in NYC. Even then, they're still not going anywhere (NYC still has a ton of cars obviously). I have no idea what making communities smarter means. What exactly are you proposing?

Generally he means addressing the problems "heavy car usage, not enough walking, and no safety for humans". Optimizing city design for people, and not for vehicles. This is generally done by increasing density, and requiring mixed-use buildings with commerce on ground level, and more public spaces and wider side walks, and dedicated lanes for bikes and public transportation.

Cars aren't going anywhere anytime soon in the US because sadly you can't function without one in the vast majority of places. It's far easier to implement this design philosophy for a growing city[1], but really hard to change the layout of a mature one, though it can be done thoughtfully [2].

[1]https://www.ted.com/talks/enrique_penalosa_why_buses_represe... [2]https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_burden_how_public_spaces_ma...

Chicago is Chicago; not much going on there, for its size.

Chicago here... it's anything than "car city". I haven't had a car in a decade. I'm not sure you've actually lived in any of these areas. It's possible to live without a car in only a few cities, and Chicago and NYC are two of them.

I live in Seattle and work in Redmond and do both solely via public transit and walking. Redmond has a large number of bike lane miles (as does Seattle, and many of Seattle's are protected, separated bike lanes) along with fast, frequent, and long span-of-service transit to places like Seattle and Kirkland and Bellevue. Microsoft has even helped with that by funding things like Overlake Transit Center, a street and pedestrian bridge over highway 520, an upcoming pedestrian-only bridge over 520, pushing for light rail to Redmond, and even both providing tap-to-use transit cards to everyone who holds a badge and partially funding the switch to that system (the ORCA card ). Yes, the property improvements benefit Microsoft in addition to the public but Microsoft was under no requirement to help pay for them.

People take transit a lot in the Puget Sound region but it, like many places, still has a stigma associated with it. Seattleites voted last year to tax ourselves more to provide over 200,000 hours per year of more transit service; the rest of the county had its chance before that and voted no. It's not that transit doesn't exist, it's that getting people to use it and agree to make the investment in it (beyond billion dollar light rail lines, because buses are apparently "icky") is difficult even if the system does work well for the commuter crowd. I don't even commute regular hours and I can get everywhere I want to go via our transit system.

To be clear, there are actual costs involved that affect these dynamics. Property values anywhere near a transit line go way up. For many years I rented and biked to work, but when looking for a house it was massively more expensive to get anywhere within a reasonable bus ride of Redmond. I ended up to the north, where it's still not a bad bike commute (an hour, but mostly on dedicated bike trails instead of roads), but the fastest bus ride is to go west above the lake to downtown Seattle and then east back across the lake to Redmond.

That wasn't my experience, but I'll grant that maybe I got lucky. I also live where it takes a transfer (a local bus that comes every 15 minutes to downtown and get on the 545) and, at least in the case of my coworkers, a lot of people are vehemently opposed to transferring. A bike commute would be awesome if I could make it up that hill to the IH-90 bridge...

Cycling on roads is extremely dangerous. Every single person I know who commutes by bicycle has been hit by a car at least once. One of my colleagues was killed cycling to work when he was hit by a semi truck. Another woman was recently killed by a box truck cycling to work a block from my office.

I thought this too, but after looking at data it doesn't really seem any more dangerous than driving a car. I think the reason it sounds dangerous is that when it happens everyone hears about it and talks about it a lot more than car accidents.

Mrmoneymustache did an analysis and if you define 'safety' as 'expected life span', cycling is actually safer than driving a car.

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