9 ms·

I feel compelled to dissent against initiatives to directly take cars off the road, rather than improve alternatives. Growing up in the suburbs without a car,

I feel compelled to dissent against initiatives to directly take cars off the road, rather than improve alternatives. Growing up in the suburbs without a car, I was really excited about carless urban life. Then I actually experienced it (Hyde Park, Chicago). I'm on the opposite corner of the neighborhood from the business districts, so a little errand like CVS or the grocery store is around half an hour by foot each way. The bus or shuttle is usually a wash, given the time spent waiting for it. A bigger errand like Target or Macy's is a special occasion, taking about 50 minutes each way (walk to bus, wait for bus, ride bus, wait for train, ride train, walk from train station, or sometimes take yet another bus). A downtown or North Side restaurant, once you get tired of the local ones, is a similar ordeal. Feeling trapped in the neighborhood was mostly an annoyance. I adapted by buying most things from Amazon (Prime is well worth it) and carefully planning shopping lists for brick-and-mortar stores. After a while I got tired the local restaurants, so I pretty much stopped eating out. I assuaged my claustrophobia by burning either money (Uber) or time to go downtown every few weekends, but generally spent as little money as possible when doing so. Still, it grew more annoying over a few years. The turning point came when I realized that it took about as long to get from my apartment to the downtown train station (about 7 miles) as it did from that train station to Milwaukee (90 miles). I bought a car recently, and my quality of life shot up dramatically. Distances that used to be a big deal are now nothing. Even if I'm going somewhere without cheap parking, I can drive directly to a train station instead of taking the bus. Life moves faster. I get to enjoy the city more often. If the CTA would run more frequent, smaller vehicles on its routes I would easily go carless again. But instead it sounds like the approach is just to degrade the experience of owning a car until it's as bad as public transit, rather than the other way around. When that happens, it's off to the suburbs, I guess.

jomamaxx 10y ago
The problem is not 'bikes v cars'. It's how the city was planned. European cities have small, walkable centers, the mid-density around that, then instead of suburbs, they have a lot of higher density hamlets around them. Also - they don't have horrific winters in which walking/biking is a pain. So - even for Frankfurt, which has a bunch of US style high-rises in the middle ... you can comfortably walk many places, and bike almost all of them, any time of year. Combine that with widespread and completely integrated public transit (without goons, slubs and idiots ruining them) - it works extremely well. Most North American cities are designed for cars: long blocks, no walkable 'high streets', very wide streets, less density, less public transport ... and often a harsh winter which makes it really uncomfortable for 5-ish months a year. It will take more than bike lanes to change the nature of culture.
- personlurking 10y ago
  Comparing with Lisbon, it has a small walkable center, no high-rises (except for a few semi high rises in surrounding areas), pretty great weather year-round (over 300 days of sun, I believe), lots of medium-sized plazas/parks and lots of lookout points over the city (both usually with one or more kiosk cafes). All in all, lots of compact green spaces, in addition to a few larger ones (parks and gardens). On the down side, the slippery cobblestone sidewalks are only big enough for one person, there's a lot of dog "doodoo" on them, and parking is hell (so they tell me). In fact most people in residential neighborhoods just park on the sidewalks (partially if not fully), as well as double-park. People pay parking meters and often even a homeless parking attendent as well. Luckily, the public transport (metro, bus, train, ferry) is quite good and reliable. I believe the govt was considering adding a downtown tax for cars entering the city center but I forget if that's been enacted. There was also something similar regarding older cars due to being less environmentally friendly.
- thesauri 10y ago
  > Also - they don't have horrific winters in which walking/biking is a pain. As someone living in the Nordics, that's news to me.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    "> Also - they don't have horrific winters in which walking/biking is a pain. As someone living in the Nordics, that's news to me" A) Biking when there is snow on the ground is not something most people want to do. B) Nordics have pussy winters ... you're on the water and it's fairly mild. I'm from Canada where we have real winters buddy. Weeks of -30C, blizzards, often snow up to your waist. Not only is it 'very uncomfortable' to bike in the winter here in Montreal, on most days it's impossible.
    - sctb 10y ago
      Please comment civilly and substantively here or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
CrackpotGonzo 10y ago
I think your problem is that you live in Hyde Park. It is quite isolated from the rest of the city. I agree with you that CTA should step up service to the south side, but living on the north side or west side you would much more easily live without a car. Source: lived on north and west sides for past 5 years and don't have/don't want a car.
- superuser2 10y ago
  I agree that there are places where this isn't a problem. Taking the cars away from places like Hyde Park won't magically make it one of them.
  - tbihl 10y ago
    I can't speak to Chicago specifically, but the problem in tons of places is that there's enough of the transportation budget spent on roads that you can never achieve a decent level of service.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  It's both isolated and largely residential. Not a lot of large stores, just a lot of University of Chicago buildings. It's the most isolated place in Chicago where white people are willing to live. Source: 40 years old, born in Chicago, live in Chicago, attended Ray School and Kenwood, sister taught at UofC, never had a driver's license. Also, Chicago is a designed garden city, enforced by zoning. It's largely and intentionally built up of huge residential arrays of city blocks, a half mile to a side, separated by boulevards where all businesses are packed. So, if you live in the middle of one of these blocks, it's 10-15 minutes of walking to see any business. If taking away drivable areas were accompanied by changes that allowed businesses to be built within those areas, like corner stores, I guarantee that groceries wouldn't be a half-hour away. edit: that's what I get for reading comments before the article. Chicago is perfect for superblocks. It pretty much has them already.
ethanbond 10y ago
If you take cars off the roads, people will rebuild (well, reorganize) their cities to account for it. Public transit obviously needs to be better pretty much everywhere in the US, but people also don't want to pay to make it better. I'm a proponent of simply wiping out parking in most areas. That will incentivize people not to drive, therefore to walk/transit, therefore to value the transit systems and the design of their cities. It's a serious issue of sunk cost, but eventually we need to bite the bullet and start moving in the other direction.
- superuser2 10y ago
  It takes a LONG time to build out serious transit infrastructure. Like 30 years (see Seattle's recent ballot initiative). You're asking basically an entire generation to have shitty mobility for most of their working lives, so that they will vote to build trains for their children. More likely they will just leave the cities. Cities do adapt to poor mobility: local businesses get to charge huge markup because they don't have to compete with the rest of the city. I don't think that's particularly good for consumers.
  - ethanbond 10y ago
    You're asking basically every generation after us to have shitty environmental health and shitty cities for the entirety of their lives. Also, if you need a car to be mobile enough to live your life, you already have shitty mobility. You should have the ability to live your life without having to pay the tens of thousands of dollars that owning a car demands [0]. You could get rid of cars and with all that newly available street space add a bunch of electric buses for the interim. You could even up taxi availability and efficacy, seeing as there would be minimal traffic from non-public sources, further reducing the costs of using them. This would also make the city significantly more bike friendly, even before the cultural reorganization into self-sufficient neighborhoods. There would also be a significantly reduced strain on pretty much every social institution there is. In NYC on August 2nd 2016 alone, the NYPD tended to at least 357 accidents [1]. Reducing this would free up valuable police and medical resources. Oh, and it will also help to save our species from impending environmental doom. 0. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/ 1. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Motor-Vehicle-Collisions/h9gi-nx95/data https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Motor-Vehic...
wutbrodo 10y ago
Leaving aside the general point that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to compare "not having a car in a (somewhat) car-oriented city" to "changing car policy in general, with the attendant changes to the city structure down the line": > I assuaged my claustrophobia by burning either money (Uber) or time to go downtown every few weekends I don't actually take a lot of Ubers because my area is so well-connected by transit (and dense with commerce), but at least in my case, the idea that Uber is "expensive" as a transport option pales in comparison to the massive cost of owning a car (and paying for parking, maintenance, insurance, etc). Is this not the case for you? Even with how walkable and transit-friendly my situation is, Uber and car rentals are still a necessary (though occasional) component of my overall transportation budget. Relative to living in a car-oriented area and owning a car, I still end up paying volumes less (as well as having a far, far better transport experience overall in terms of time, convenience, and health).
splitrocket 10y ago
I lived in Hyde Park, Chicago. I now live in Brooklyn, NY. Hyde Park is an extremely poor example of a walkable neighborhood. Greenpoint, Brooklyn, however, is substantially more walkable. I would argue orders of magnitude, but walkscore.com says it's 76 vs 99. Perhaps the scale is logrithmic?
- superuser2 10y ago
  I don't disagree that successful dense, walkable neighorhoods exist. I could have phrased my post better. What I take issue with is the position advanced in this thread that raising the hassle of owning/operating a car in places like Hyde Park is a good idea, that it will somehow transform those neighborhoods to be more like New York.
oblio 10y ago
Bike + basket wouldn't have helped? :(
sogen 10y ago
Odd, I walk a lot, I live near 4 drugstores, 4 supermarkets, about five 7-11, many restaurants, big stores like Macy's etc, all by walking 10 minutes at most.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ricardobeat 10y ago
Your experience is a direct result of car-oriented city planning. It will be very hard to undo.
- superuser2 10y ago
  Indeed. I simply claim that directly taking the cars away from car-oriented cities without taking steps to undo their car-oriented nature is not a good idea.
maxsilver 10y ago
>I feel compelled to dissent against initiatives to directly take cars off the road, rather than improve alternatives. I was really excited about carless urban life. Then I actually experienced it (Hyde Park, Chicago). And you have the experience of using transit on what's generally considered a Top-5 system nationally! The transit experience elsewhere is often significantly worse than yours. We have "urbanists" here trying to block cars in our tiny little city, where a 10-minute car commute takes 90 minutes by bus (a bus which often does not run on nights, weekends, or holidays). I totally support trying to be more environmentally friendly, and increasing density to do that, and making places more pedestrian friendly. But we really need to come up with some real, functional mobility solutions to do that. Telling folks to "walk everywhere" simply isn't a solution, for the same reason we haven't shut the internet off and told people to "mail CD's everywhere". No amount of banning cars is going to magically make bad transit better -- we need to start building good transit first.
- philwelch 10y ago
  Nobody is going to care about transit unless it's for everybody and not just for the poor. Also, oftentimes the best way to make transit better is to divert resources away from individual automotive transport. A dedicated bus lane means fewer lanes for cars. Wide sidewalks mean fewer lanes for cars. For streetcars and light rail to be effective alternatives to driving they have to be grade-separted, and that means fewer lanes for cars. Money that could be spent widening a freeway could instead be built constructing a subway. Cars are also a classic example of socializing losses and privatizing gains. Taxpayers build and maintain the roads, air pollution and carbon emissions affect the global climate, and pedestrians and cyclists are driven out of public space in fear for their lives, but at least you can get point-to-point between your house and Wal-Mart. There are ways in which driving will always be "better" for the individual driver, but only in a fundamentally selfish and antisocial way.
  - superuser2 10y ago
    >A dedicated bus lane means fewer lanes for cars >For streetcars and light rail to be effective alternatives to driving they have to be grade-separted, and that means fewer lanes for cars. Yes, and setting dedicated right-of-way for public transit makes it faster, which should compensate for at least some of the reduced drivability in the overall navigability of the city. I think this counts as making transit better first (or at least at the same time).
radicsge 10y ago
Don't know about Hyde park, but all these small distance problems can be solved by bike, which is way faster then car in this range. Don't see a problem here, really.
- superuser2 10y ago
  From late October through late May (I am not exaggerating that much) bikes are a pretty bad time here. Maybe a problem global warming can solve!
mahyarm 10y ago
It sounds like you still live in suburbia. I can bike or walk to local stores in 5-10m and since my job is down town, getting to city target, cvs or whatever is another 5-10 minute work errand. I have a car but use it so infrequently that I might as well sell it. Uber covers the other gaps and is significantly cheaper if you think about the TOC of a car.
CalRobert 10y ago
It sounds like your neighborhood is not particularly walkable. Ideally groceries are under a 10 minute walk. It varies depending on your level of fitness and the local infrastructure, but a bicycle also does wonders to shorten journeys of a few miles.
_ph_ 10y ago
In your cities case, the problem starts by having separate residential/business districts. In traditional, less car centered cities, those would be mixed. Here in Europe it is quite common in the cities to have shops on the ground floor of most buildings and residential use above. This means you are never very far from the shops.
ejenk 10y ago
I'm sorry, but as a resident of Hyde Park for more than a decade, your experience could not be more alien to me. I have not once wished for the burden and expense of owning a car. Indeed, living here has convinced me that the personal automobile has no place in an urban environment. Hyde Park is very far from perfect, but its problems are entirely the fault of people with attitudes like yours. You could have bought an apartment close to the shops you'd like to frequent, or bought a bicycle (and now, bike share is a legitimate option). It takes 10-15 minutes to get downtown on Metra, but you probably couldn't be bothered to read a train schedule. And indeed, the problems with Metra—namely, long headways outside of peak hours and lack of fare reciprocity with CTA—would be eminently solvable by a consituency who values freedom from cars. Instead, we have people like you, who will exacerbate our issues by demanding more parking (and hence, necessarily, less density, less walkability, less transit, and less vibrancy). The assumption that everyone will drive engenders opposition to new development, particularly the type of mixed-use development that makes things easy for people on foot. I'm always dismayed to see this kind of thinking on a site called Hacker News. A true "hacker" would look at the problems of urban living and try to unearth the real causes instead of falling back on the same old kludge everybody uses, buying a car. If you did, you would see that the kludge itself has become the dominant problem. You feel entitled to easy access to the city, the sort of easy access that is currently offered to drivers and prohibited to anybody else. You're coming from a place of enormous privilege. Living without a car in Hyde Park is, despite your protestations, easy. Living, with or without a car, in most of the rest of the South Side is incredibly difficult. Many people on the South Side are too poor to own a car, or are driven into poverty by needing to own one to access their jobs. By choosing to drive, you are actively making life harder for the majority of South Siders, who would benefit greatly from better transit access and jobs and shops they can safely walk or bike to. Buying a car bought you a bit of convenience, but make no mistake: the system you have bought into immiserates, maims, and kills. We need to think beyond our own immediate comforts and decide to build a city that is safe and accessible for everybody.

jomamaxx 10y ago

The problem is not 'bikes v cars'. It's how the city was planned. European cities have small, walkable centers, the mid-density around that, then instead of suburbs, they have a lot of higher density hamlets around them. Also - they don't have horrific winters in which walking/biking is a pain. So - even for Frankfurt, which has a bunch of US style high-rises in the middle ... you can comfortably walk many places, and bike almost all of them, any time of year. Combine that with widespread and completely integrated public transit (without goons, slubs and idiots ruining them) - it works extremely well. Most North American cities are designed for cars: long blocks, no walkable 'high streets', very wide streets, less density, less public transport ... and often a harsh winter which makes it really uncomfortable for 5-ish months a year. It will take more than bike lanes to change the nature of culture.

personlurking 10y ago
Comparing with Lisbon, it has a small walkable center, no high-rises (except for a few semi high rises in surrounding areas), pretty great weather year-round (over 300 days of sun, I believe), lots of medium-sized plazas/parks and lots of lookout points over the city (both usually with one or more kiosk cafes). All in all, lots of compact green spaces, in addition to a few larger ones (parks and gardens). On the down side, the slippery cobblestone sidewalks are only big enough for one person, there's a lot of dog "doodoo" on them, and parking is hell (so they tell me). In fact most people in residential neighborhoods just park on the sidewalks (partially if not fully), as well as double-park. People pay parking meters and often even a homeless parking attendent as well. Luckily, the public transport (metro, bus, train, ferry) is quite good and reliable. I believe the govt was considering adding a downtown tax for cars entering the city center but I forget if that's been enacted. There was also something similar regarding older cars due to being less environmentally friendly.
thesauri 10y ago
> Also - they don't have horrific winters in which walking/biking is a pain. As someone living in the Nordics, that's news to me.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  "> Also - they don't have horrific winters in which walking/biking is a pain. As someone living in the Nordics, that's news to me" A) Biking when there is snow on the ground is not something most people want to do. B) Nordics have pussy winters ... you're on the water and it's fairly mild. I'm from Canada where we have real winters buddy. Weeks of -30C, blizzards, often snow up to your waist. Not only is it 'very uncomfortable' to bike in the winter here in Montreal, on most days it's impossible.
  - sctb 10y ago
    Please comment civilly and substantively here or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

CrackpotGonzo 10y ago

I think your problem is that you live in Hyde Park. It is quite isolated from the rest of the city. I agree with you that CTA should step up service to the south side, but living on the north side or west side you would much more easily live without a car. Source: lived on north and west sides for past 5 years and don't have/don't want a car.

superuser2 10y ago
I agree that there are places where this isn't a problem. Taking the cars away from places like Hyde Park won't magically make it one of them.
- tbihl 10y ago
  I can't speak to Chicago specifically, but the problem in tons of places is that there's enough of the transportation budget spent on roads that you can never achieve a decent level of service.
pessimizer 10y ago
It's both isolated and largely residential. Not a lot of large stores, just a lot of University of Chicago buildings. It's the most isolated place in Chicago where white people are willing to live. Source: 40 years old, born in Chicago, live in Chicago, attended Ray School and Kenwood, sister taught at UofC, never had a driver's license. Also, Chicago is a designed garden city, enforced by zoning. It's largely and intentionally built up of huge residential arrays of city blocks, a half mile to a side, separated by boulevards where all businesses are packed. So, if you live in the middle of one of these blocks, it's 10-15 minutes of walking to see any business. If taking away drivable areas were accompanied by changes that allowed businesses to be built within those areas, like corner stores, I guarantee that groceries wouldn't be a half-hour away. edit: that's what I get for reading comments before the article. Chicago is perfect for superblocks. It pretty much has them already.

ethanbond 10y ago

If you take cars off the roads, people will rebuild (well, reorganize) their cities to account for it. Public transit obviously needs to be better pretty much everywhere in the US, but people also don't want to pay to make it better. I'm a proponent of simply wiping out parking in most areas. That will incentivize people not to drive, therefore to walk/transit, therefore to value the transit systems and the design of their cities. It's a serious issue of sunk cost, but eventually we need to bite the bullet and start moving in the other direction.

superuser2 10y ago
It takes a LONG time to build out serious transit infrastructure. Like 30 years (see Seattle's recent ballot initiative). You're asking basically an entire generation to have shitty mobility for most of their working lives, so that they will vote to build trains for their children. More likely they will just leave the cities. Cities do adapt to poor mobility: local businesses get to charge huge markup because they don't have to compete with the rest of the city. I don't think that's particularly good for consumers.
- ethanbond 10y ago
  You're asking basically every generation after us to have shitty environmental health and shitty cities for the entirety of their lives. Also, if you need a car to be mobile enough to live your life, you already have shitty mobility. You should have the ability to live your life without having to pay the tens of thousands of dollars that owning a car demands [0]. You could get rid of cars and with all that newly available street space add a bunch of electric buses for the interim. You could even up taxi availability and efficacy, seeing as there would be minimal traffic from non-public sources, further reducing the costs of using them. This would also make the city significantly more bike friendly, even before the cultural reorganization into self-sufficient neighborhoods. There would also be a significantly reduced strain on pretty much every social institution there is. In NYC on August 2nd 2016 alone, the NYPD tended to at least 357 accidents [1]. Reducing this would free up valuable police and medical resources. Oh, and it will also help to save our species from impending environmental doom. 0. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/ 1. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Motor-Vehicle-Collisions/h9gi-nx95/data https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Motor-Vehic...

wutbrodo 10y ago

Leaving aside the general point that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to compare "not having a car in a (somewhat) car-oriented city" to "changing car policy in general, with the attendant changes to the city structure down the line": > I assuaged my claustrophobia by burning either money (Uber) or time to go downtown every few weekends I don't actually take a lot of Ubers because my area is so well-connected by transit (and dense with commerce), but at least in my case, the idea that Uber is "expensive" as a transport option pales in comparison to the massive cost of owning a car (and paying for parking, maintenance, insurance, etc). Is this not the case for you? Even with how walkable and transit-friendly my situation is, Uber and car rentals are still a necessary (though occasional) component of my overall transportation budget. Relative to living in a car-oriented area and owning a car, I still end up paying volumes less (as well as having a far, far better transport experience overall in terms of time, convenience, and health).

splitrocket 10y ago

I lived in Hyde Park, Chicago. I now live in Brooklyn, NY. Hyde Park is an extremely poor example of a walkable neighborhood. Greenpoint, Brooklyn, however, is substantially more walkable. I would argue orders of magnitude, but walkscore.com says it's 76 vs 99. Perhaps the scale is logrithmic?

superuser2 10y ago
I don't disagree that successful dense, walkable neighorhoods exist. I could have phrased my post better. What I take issue with is the position advanced in this thread that raising the hassle of owning/operating a car in places like Hyde Park is a good idea, that it will somehow transform those neighborhoods to be more like New York.

oblio 10y ago

Bike + basket wouldn't have helped? :(

sogen 10y ago

Odd, I walk a lot, I live near 4 drugstores, 4 supermarkets, about five 7-11, many restaurants, big stores like Macy's etc, all by walking 10 minutes at most.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

ricardobeat 10y ago

Your experience is a direct result of car-oriented city planning. It will be very hard to undo.

superuser2 10y ago
Indeed. I simply claim that directly taking the cars away from car-oriented cities without taking steps to undo their car-oriented nature is not a good idea.

maxsilver 10y ago

>I feel compelled to dissent against initiatives to directly take cars off the road, rather than improve alternatives. I was really excited about carless urban life. Then I actually experienced it (Hyde Park, Chicago). And you have the experience of using transit on what's generally considered a Top-5 system nationally! The transit experience elsewhere is often significantly worse than yours. We have "urbanists" here trying to block cars in our tiny little city, where a 10-minute car commute takes 90 minutes by bus (a bus which often does not run on nights, weekends, or holidays). I totally support trying to be more environmentally friendly, and increasing density to do that, and making places more pedestrian friendly. But we really need to come up with some real, functional mobility solutions to do that. Telling folks to "walk everywhere" simply isn't a solution, for the same reason we haven't shut the internet off and told people to "mail CD's everywhere". No amount of banning cars is going to magically make bad transit better -- we need to start building good transit first.

philwelch 10y ago
Nobody is going to care about transit unless it's for everybody and not just for the poor. Also, oftentimes the best way to make transit better is to divert resources away from individual automotive transport. A dedicated bus lane means fewer lanes for cars. Wide sidewalks mean fewer lanes for cars. For streetcars and light rail to be effective alternatives to driving they have to be grade-separted, and that means fewer lanes for cars. Money that could be spent widening a freeway could instead be built constructing a subway. Cars are also a classic example of socializing losses and privatizing gains. Taxpayers build and maintain the roads, air pollution and carbon emissions affect the global climate, and pedestrians and cyclists are driven out of public space in fear for their lives, but at least you can get point-to-point between your house and Wal-Mart. There are ways in which driving will always be "better" for the individual driver, but only in a fundamentally selfish and antisocial way.
- superuser2 10y ago
  >A dedicated bus lane means fewer lanes for cars >For streetcars and light rail to be effective alternatives to driving they have to be grade-separted, and that means fewer lanes for cars. Yes, and setting dedicated right-of-way for public transit makes it faster, which should compensate for at least some of the reduced drivability in the overall navigability of the city. I think this counts as making transit better first (or at least at the same time).

radicsge 10y ago

Don't know about Hyde park, but all these small distance problems can be solved by bike, which is way faster then car in this range. Don't see a problem here, really.

superuser2 10y ago
From late October through late May (I am not exaggerating that much) bikes are a pretty bad time here. Maybe a problem global warming can solve!

mahyarm 10y ago

It sounds like you still live in suburbia. I can bike or walk to local stores in 5-10m and since my job is down town, getting to city target, cvs or whatever is another 5-10 minute work errand. I have a car but use it so infrequently that I might as well sell it. Uber covers the other gaps and is significantly cheaper if you think about the TOC of a car.

CalRobert 10y ago

It sounds like your neighborhood is not particularly walkable. Ideally groceries are under a 10 minute walk. It varies depending on your level of fitness and the local infrastructure, but a bicycle also does wonders to shorten journeys of a few miles.

_ph_ 10y ago

In your cities case, the problem starts by having separate residential/business districts. In traditional, less car centered cities, those would be mixed. Here in Europe it is quite common in the cities to have shops on the ground floor of most buildings and residential use above. This means you are never very far from the shops.

ejenk 10y ago

I'm sorry, but as a resident of Hyde Park for more than a decade, your experience could not be more alien to me. I have not once wished for the burden and expense of owning a car. Indeed, living here has convinced me that the personal automobile has no place in an urban environment. Hyde Park is very far from perfect, but its problems are entirely the fault of people with attitudes like yours. You could have bought an apartment close to the shops you'd like to frequent, or bought a bicycle (and now, bike share is a legitimate option). It takes 10-15 minutes to get downtown on Metra, but you probably couldn't be bothered to read a train schedule. And indeed, the problems with Metra—namely, long headways outside of peak hours and lack of fare reciprocity with CTA—would be eminently solvable by a consituency who values freedom from cars. Instead, we have people like you, who will exacerbate our issues by demanding more parking (and hence, necessarily, less density, less walkability, less transit, and less vibrancy). The assumption that everyone will drive engenders opposition to new development, particularly the type of mixed-use development that makes things easy for people on foot. I'm always dismayed to see this kind of thinking on a site called Hacker News. A true "hacker" would look at the problems of urban living and try to unearth the real causes instead of falling back on the same old kludge everybody uses, buying a car. If you did, you would see that the kludge itself has become the dominant problem. You feel entitled to easy access to the city, the sort of easy access that is currently offered to drivers and prohibited to anybody else. You're coming from a place of enormous privilege. Living without a car in Hyde Park is, despite your protestations, easy. Living, with or without a car, in most of the rest of the South Side is incredibly difficult. Many people on the South Side are too poor to own a car, or are driven into poverty by needing to own one to access their jobs. By choosing to drive, you are actively making life harder for the majority of South Siders, who would benefit greatly from better transit access and jobs and shops they can safely walk or bike to. Buying a car bought you a bit of convenience, but make no mistake: the system you have bought into immiserates, maims, and kills. We need to think beyond our own immediate comforts and decide to build a city that is safe and accessible for everybody.