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Comment by polarix | Hacker News Reader

If this were actually doing as the title suggests, it would demolish the possibility for any personal DIY projects that require heavy equipment/materials. Indeed, bulk home goods and appliance sales companies should be up in arms.

Luckily, they're just trying to make it possible to get around without cars, not illegal to use cars, which is likely to dramatically increase the possibility for lightweight cooperative social interactions.

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In most areas, even pedestrianized streets allow delivery and residents' vehicles (sometimes also taxis), at certain times of the day at least. In some cases any vehicle is allowed as long as it watches for pedestrians, and travels at a speed safe for a mixed-use road (meaning 5-20 km/hr or so, depending on road size and congestion). Sometimes the arrangement is called a "living street" if that's the explicit design goal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_street

In central Copenhagen a number of streets are like that, so you often see delivery vehicles slowly making their way through. But most cars that don't need to drive right into the city center will avoid it and take one of the more major roads that bypasses the city center. So it gets most of the cars out of the city center by just incentivizing them to take a faster route, and allows/requires the remaining ones to share the road on an equal basis with other users.

In Berlin (where not everybody owns a car), it's quite common to see people walking out of the hardware store with large planks of wood balanced over their shoulder, or sometimes in a bike trailer. People manage.

And yes, obviously you still need to allow commercial delivery vehicles. There's really no alternative to that.

A plank of wood or two is fine to carry, but what if you need to move something heavier like a refrigerator or a piece of furniture? It's ridiculous to think that people should have to carry that stuff by hand or on bicycles over distances of multiple miles.

I think it's more feasible that we ban personal vehicles in cities while still allowing commercial and emergency vehicles. Even allowing these vehicles, we'd probably be able to reduce most roads to single lane one way streets.

> what if you need to move something heavier like a refrigerator or a piece of furniture?

How did the refrigerator get into the store in the first place? It can get out the same way.

I don't know how often you buy new refrigerators, but I would rather hire a delivery company every time I change my refrigerator if that means living in a clean city.

On the other car, the ban for private cars usually has only effect during a period of the day. In Barcelona, at least, you can access most streets in the city center after 20:00.

> hire a delivery company

As usual, this plan is OK for the more affluent and makes life more difficult for the poor.

Poor people are probably using public transit, not driving in the first place. Investment in public transportation would be good for them. Investment in roads (automobile infrastructure) benefits only those who can afford cars.

So it is more expensive to pay a one time fee to deliver the fridge (which a lot of companies do, or make it free), than to own and run a car?

What you say may be true in US cities, or in the countryside.

For me, living in Tokyo, it is really cheaper not owning a car but renting it when I need to, or hiring a delivery service. I guess that the same happens in most major European cities.

Clearly the sane solution is then for everyone to own a car. Because that's what people use cars for in the city, moving heavy stuff.

This just sounds like concern-trolling.

I'm generally a fan of anything to remove cars from the city center, it is really an improvement and transitions us from the inefficiency of single-occupant transportation to group movements. As you point out, it also introduces logistical complexities for downtown residents, but when everybody is in the same situation it is perhaps easier to build comprehensive solutions.

It would be pretty nice if roads were such that things like deliveries, various public transit, and taxi/car sharing options were the only allowed options as far as cars go. If the roads become uncongested, and parking is no long a major use of cities, a lot of the existing uses for cars would disappear.

it is hard to imagine right now, but if you made cars completely illegal except for maybe emergency vehicles, i do believe that we would see a lot of creative solutions pop up for transporting bulk items or large items like furniture.

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