23 ms·

Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them

328 points by edward 9y ago

alkonaut 9y ago
Another one of those things I have to come to HN and read about the US situation in order to reflect on the situation at home. I never even considered a situation where I’d be ”trapped” at home. It works like this: If you aren’t fit to walk to a bus stop, you get tax subsidized taxi (think it’s about 70 or 80% subsidized).
- TaylorAlexander 9y ago
  Out of curiosity do you mind sharing the location?
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    Sweden
- xversilov 9y ago
  It's hard for a non-American to appreciate just how different their urban environments are compared to the US, and vice versa. It was certainly a shock to me when I first arrived to the USA... "Why is everything so far away? Why does every building have a bunch of empty space around it? (i.e. mandated setbacks)" etc. The lack of real cities is probably my least favorite thing about the USA.
  - ars 9y ago
    And it's one of my favorite things about the USA. I hate dense European style cities. Different people like different things. The nice thing about the USA is you can pick. You can live anywhere from a remote farm to a dense apartment.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      But you don’t really get to pick. Dense European style cities are outlawed in the US. Hell, dense European style suburbs are outlawed here. My pre-zoning code suburb has lots that are less than 3,000 square feet. It’s awesome—easy to walk and you see your neighbors all the time. But it’s completely illegal to build more neighborhoods like mine. The minimum lot size now is more than five times bigger—we have legally mandated suburban sprawl. And there is no justification for it. If people wanted to have big lots, developers would subdivide lots that way. There is no reason to mandate it by law.
      - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
        Sure, it's outlawed - in your suburb. It's not a nationwide ban, though. It's not even (I presume) statewide, or even city-wide. (It may be true that there literally are no municipalities in the US with zoning codes that allow dense neighborhoods, but I would be highly surprised.)
        natrius 9y ago
        It's outlawed in so many places because of the incentives at work. At the edges of a city, greenfield exclusive neighborhoods have a better chance of holding their value than neighborhoods that let people with less money buy homes on less land. Once an economically stratified city is in place, no one can opt out without losing money. Everyone has to opt out together, and the politics of that are the worst.
        brians 9y ago
        This is a great focusing question. There was a study a Few years about about which cities and suburbs could be built under their current zoning laws. I remember it showing that Somerville—a dense collection of 3-decker houses near Boston—was completely impossible to build under its current laws. I don’t have the link handy, but happy googling.
        oftenwrong 9y ago
  - influx 9y ago
    The USA is so big and diverse it's silly to say that the it doesn't have any "real cities". I suspect New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Portland and others would be proof otherwise.
    - davidw 9y ago
      NY, Boston, kind of. Portland... a little bit, downtown, and starting, a little bit to be that way in some areas. With the Supreme Court's Euclid decision in 1916, we've had zoning that has only gotten worse and worse since then, so most things built in the years following that have deviated from that sort of walkable, incremental city that we used to have here too. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburban-experiment https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...
    - TulliusCicero 9y ago
      Even 'real cities' in the US have a lot more garbage urban design than most cities in, say, western Europe. Even the denser ones like you frequently have silly car-oriented design, like minimum parking requirements, and huge swathes of the city that are mandated single-family housing only. Comparing Seattle's transit system to, say, Munich's (where I currently live) is a sick joke. Munich is far more walkable and bikable, too. Of course, a big part of this is that a majority of the land in Seattle is zoned exclusively for, you guessed it, nothing but detached single-family homes. As an example, I sometimes visit smaller cities (< 50k) here, and even then they still are highly walkable, moderately dense, and they usually have pretty good transit connections to other places.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    There is a wide diversity of cities in the US. You can go to places like NYC, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. and see examples of cities with decently dense cores and functional public transit. But then you can go to cities in the South, for example, where it's almost impossible to get around without a car.
- 549362-30499 9y ago
  We have this system in Boston and it works alright (it's called "The RIDE"). Boston doesn't have great transit by European standards, but it's still better than pretty much everywhere in the U.S. except for New York. It's always crazy to me to read these transit threads and see so many people who can't comprehend a day to day life that doesn't involve owning a car!
- syrrim 9y ago
  How it works where I am is they have special buses for the old and disabled. You ask a day before for one to show up at your house, and then it will take you where you're going.
drewg123 9y ago
I'm really hoping that we'll have self-driving cars by the time that I reach that stage of life
- ars 9y ago
  How will you get in the car? If the car itself was the only problem then Uber solves that. But it's not enough.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I live in an exurban area only about 40 miles outside a major coastal US tech center city. There's minimal Uber around where I live.
    - kdot 9y ago
      You can schedule Ubers ahead of time.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        And there are taxi companies as well. The point is that there is minimal service. You can't just pick up a phone and have a car there is 15 minutes.
      - paulie_a 9y ago
        You can without a guarantee it will come
- simonebrunozzi 9y ago
  If you're younger than, say, 60, you're probably going to be just fine.
tabeth 9y ago
I always get an inkling that buses (like Bolt/Mega/PeterPan) + the existing highway + roads are superior and more scalable than any other type of transportation, dollar for dollar. Why do people push for rail? Self-driving cars obviously can enhance this (the bus idea), but I suspect they will create even more traffic if we insist on having 5 passenger cars be 75% empty. Buses are great because demand can be reallocated easily. Imagine a place like New York, where buses can go out to the suburbs and bring people into the city and the evening and morning (say, 50% of the fleet), and during the day 90% of the fleet stays in the city doing intra-city transportation. Rail doesn't have this flexibility. EDIT: Rail definitely has its place, but you almost never hear anyone starting a bus project. Just curious to why there's relatively little mention of buses in the public transportation (new project) realm. I imagine perfected public transportation would involve linking between self driving cars on the square mile level, buses on the square deca mile (is that a thing?), rail for a hundred mile radius and obviously planes thereon.
- jseliger 9y ago
  Why do people push for rail Visit Japan (or these days China) and you will understand. This reminds me of people who say, "What's the big deal about electric bikes?" Ride one and you'll know. See what Japan and China are doing WRT rail and you'll know.
  - lgas 9y ago
    Given the difficulty and expense associated with going to Japan, perhaps you could describe it to us here using words.
    - dragontamer 9y ago
      You pretty much can get anywhere in Japan using rail / subway alone. https://www.japan-guide.com/g17/2361_01.png https://www.japan-guide.com/g17/2361_01.png Subway maps cover cities to insane details. https://bento.com/pix/subway/tokyo_subway_1700.gif https://bento.com/pix/subway/tokyo_subway_1700.gif
spullara 9y ago
My grandfather I think just gave up on life after he lost the ability to drive. Taking taxies in St Petersburg, FL in the mid 1990s just sucked. Inconvenient, expensive and slow. I wish he was still alive today and I could give him an Uber/Lyft account.
terenceng2010 9y ago
Hong Kong has minibus as public transit, which allows for about 16 passengers per ride. Maybe it is a economical way for seniors' transportation? As it's up keep cost should be lower than a normal bus.
- dluan 9y ago
  Taipei does as well, and it's used a lot by seniors as they get to ride free.
revelation 9y ago
That's because prior to being too old to drive, they didn't give a fuck about the public transportation system. Actually, even after being too old to drive, they happily continue to vote against public transportation. It's bizarre to suggest our transportation system is failing them. It's exactly the transportation system they voted for, the transportation system a good bunch of them built, designed, railroaded through poor communities, terraformed cities to support. It's been failing large swaths of people for many centuries, but that generation didn't bother. They built this shrine to the personal automobile. It's not even a case of buyers remorse. For the longest time in their life, they happily took advantage of limitless cheap fossil fuels, plenty of unregulated cars and wide roads to drive them on, and the best part, they managed to put it all on the tab for the next generation. Its Caligula all over.
- cmurf 9y ago
  It's baby boomers. Overwhelmingly the baby boomers I know are all: driving is a right, not a privilege, and I'm insured and insurance solves all problems and mistakes, rip out those damn trees and put in more car lanes so I don't have to wait in traffice. Gimme! And my grandparents' generation were fans of the bus and trollies before big oil got them ripped out of most American cities in favor of buses, and wanted people in general to have an easier time to get around.
- echlebek 9y ago
  I generally agree, but "many centuries"? Come on. :)
  - trgn 9y ago
    ha, imho, it reads as a stylistic choice that fits the exasperated tone I think. But there's a certain logic to that statement too. American cities always had very wide streets, 100 years before the car was invented even. In hindsight, it's hard to rationalize why really, but it seemed to have been because of this obsession for utility and practicality. Those very wide rigid grids were a transport-oriented design choice. To keep the horse shit away, so carts could make U-turns, so you could dump your bathwater in the middle. The tragedy was that those wide streets were the seed for cars eventually destroying urban cores. When cars were invented, they had the space for them right there. A street that was used for everything (markets, recreation, horses, ...), suddenly became a 4-5 lane highway filled with loud, stinking, dangerous cars. Of course nobody wants to live next to that, it's genuinely awful. It set in motion a vicious cycle of people moving out of the cores and needing more parking-infrastructure to accommodate that commuting.
sevensor 9y ago
My 96-year-old grandmother has macular degeneration in her eyes and neuropathy reducing sensation in her feet. She can neither see the road very well nor feel the pedals accurately. The state of Florida just renewed her license for six more years. I'd say it's irresponsible of her to keep up the license, except she has no options. The town she's in recently made it illegal for residents of her park to drive their electric carts across the street to Publix or down the sidewalk to the doctor's office. Those are the only two places she needs to go. Some of her friends who had given up their licenses in favor of electric carts are now SOL. They have to rely on favors to buy food and go to appointments.
- sjg007 9y ago
  There should be county sponsored transportation for medical appointments. Also it seems uber could work?
  - sevensor 9y ago
    > There should be county sponsored transportation for medical appointments. How's your experience been with that kind of service? There's a reason lawbreaking octogenarians still ride golf carts down the sidewalk to get to the doctor's office, hoping they won't get ticketed. > Uber. I'm sorry. Did I mention my grandmother is 96? Ninety-six?
    - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
      > I'm sorry. Did I mention my grandmother is 96? Ninety-six? HN forgets that not everyone has coastal tech money a lot.
      - lovich 9y ago
        That is true, but periodic Ubers are also way cheaper than owning a car. If you only need to travel once a week it would likely be far cheaper than car taxes, gas, and maintenance
pbnjay 9y ago
On the one hand, I don't want this to happen to me either (but I'm more likely to retire somewhere accessible than the suburbs). But on the other, this whole situation just screams entitlement. They'd rather stay in their houses with all of their stuff, which even their own kids don't want [1]. Just imagine if they would actually move out of their houses: it would open up more housing, making it more affordable to new homeowners. It would alleviate transportation subsidies to better serve others. It would lower ambulance costs and reduce time to service. Just by putting older folks closer to the care they need. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/your-money/aging-parents-with-lots-of-stuff-and-children-who-dont-want-it.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/your-money/aging-parents-...
- wvenable 9y ago
  I agree with your sentiments here but the other perspective is that you've worked your entire life, saved up, built up a wonderful home with all your belongings and now at the end of your life you have to give up everything you've worked for. Possibly your home is one of the few things that give you comfort and peace.
  - erentz 9y ago
    Well, yes. You can't have one without the other. You want good accessible living? That requires density and transit. It's not like the last 70 years of terrible urban planning and lack of transit construction didn't happen during that "entire life" you speak of.
- sevensor 9y ago
  > They'd rather stay in their houses with all of their stuff Or they're old and poor, have little more than a house to their name, and the alternative is indifferent care by bottom-feeding nursing homes.
  - joe_the_user 9y ago
    What homes are those? I mean "nursing home" and "retirement home" are two different things. One houses the chronically ill, often old - at very high prices but payable by insurances/the-state and the other houses old people at merely high prices but these prices have to be paid by the residents and there's no way to make them low even cutting all your costs. And apartments and trailer parks that house seniors at a slight discount. But yeah, you're basically right, selling one house to movement into uncertain housing is terrible decision and there's
AckSyn 9y ago
This headline alone has me thinking "As if it's a requirement that a transportation system needs cater to the people who can't physically drive?"...
jonathanyc 9y ago
I think this is an awful situation, but at what point do we call seniors’ desires unreasonable? Is their want to stay in their suburban homes which are designed for cars really something the state should be concerned about when the working poor struggle to afford the subway?[1] I think we should make relocation easy for the elderly who aren’t able to get around. I think it is terrible if they can’t move from their houses to places easier to get transportation from. But I really don’t see how this problem is more urgent and important or even independent of the general problem of people not being able to afford housing/transportation. Are we supposed to prioritize the elderly who already have houses over those who don’t? 1: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/06/16/when-people-cant-afford-transit-new-york-city-pays-for-it-one-way-or-another/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/06/16/when-people-cant-affo...
- mjn 9y ago
  Imo some level of service even in areas not all that favorable to transit is reasonable. Or at least, I think it's possible to do at least slightly better. I now live in a fairly rural part of the UK, a remote region (Cornwall) that has no real urban areas. And yet just about every population concentration of over 1000 people or so, here, has a bus that does at least one round-trip a day. Towns of over 20,000 people have very good, regular service. Of course it's subsidized, and in the smaller villages it might literally only be once a day in each direction, but a service does run. In many American towns and suburbs it seems not even that level of service is available. And it's not due to the distances or population density either. I used to live in a suburb of Houston, TX that had 60,000 people, was about 20 miles from downtown, and it had no bus service! Now I live in a smaller and more remote town in the UK, and it has decent bus service.
  - TulliusCicero 9y ago
    The demographic we're talking about is the exact same one that hates transit and will refuse to fund it. It's not unlike the rural areas in the US that are heavily dependent on government subsidies that they vote against.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
AmVess 9y ago
The old and the poor are increasingly left out of public transport. The city where I used to live removed the bus routes from the poorest parts of the city and opened up new routes to the richest part. Buses on the new routes were almost always empty...rich people own cars, you see. The city where I currently reside simply shut down their entire bus operation instead of jerking around poor people.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  > rich people own cars, you see. The irony is that in Silicon Valley, the rich people ride the bus.
dundercoder 9y ago
I’m 36, live in the suburbs, and in recent years have gone (legally) blind from Retinitis Pigmentosa. Voluntarily giving up my license was one of the hardest and most important decisions I’ve made. There is literally 0 public transportation here. Not even Uber or Lyft have come around. America’s sprawl and dependence on cars is incredible. It wasn’t until I spent time in London, Oxford, and Paris that I could recognize how much everything here is built around the idea of owning a car. So now my wife has to give rides to our four kids, AND me, and there’s literally nothing I can do about it except petition for better transit, and pray self-driving cars get here faster. Being dependent on rides feels like being 15 again. It’s humiliating being picked up from a job interview in a parking lot with 200+ cars.
- andrewprock 9y ago
  Have you considered moving to a region with better transportation support?
  - dundercoder 9y ago
    I have. I’d have to move out of state and into a fairly urban city to get decent transit. The schools here are fantastic and I love just about everything here, except the lack of transit. We may get to that point, but for right now I work remotely (platform engineering) and just grin and bear the rest.
    - volkl48 9y ago
      If you get to the point of considering moving, you may wish to look into a college town. They'll typically have far more extensive transit than the average mid-sized city/town does.
      - dundercoder 9y ago
        That is a good point.
        9y ago
IIAOPSW 9y ago
I tried having the Uber discussion with my grandmother. We tried to tell her that its all the same mobility that you're used to. We tried explaining that this isn't some patronizing service for seniors but in fact something everyone is doing. We tried explaining how its actually more economical then owning a car. We tried to explain that letting my Grandfather stay on the road is a terrible idea that will get them and/or someone else killed. My aunt even got her an ipad and showed her how to use the damn thing. FFS you press the button and a car comes. The concepts not hard and she's not that senile. But what do we get in response for all our efforts? "I just don't want to." Even in the face of viable technical solutions to the problem of old people on the road, you still have to solve the unsolvable issue that old people are insanely stubborn.
nextstep 9y ago
Car-based transportation sucks at all ages, we just seem to rationalize how shitty it is for the young and able-bodied. The US is insanely car oriented and it is a huge step back in quality of life from most of the developed world.
blondie9x 9y ago
Cars are exploitation. Driving isn't freedom it's the most dangerous and isolating way to move people that exists. The automobile companies have trapped us into debt and traffic laden commutes that waste hours of our short lives on this planet and cause roughly 30% of climate change. Do something. Get rid of your car and push for better mass transportation and development near train stations and major urban areas. Cars are pieces of metal to get us from A to B. Making them out to be something more than that is self deception. We deserve better.
- Cd00d 9y ago
  That's extreme. I have a car in NYC. The subway system here is amazing, while also being an embarrassment. But, the car provides the freedom to visit friends and family for a day or weekend. The cost is $200 per month parking and $150 per month insurance, plus the cost of the car, which is relatively low as we drive less than 500 miles per month. We can visit family in 45 minutes or 2 hours (depending on destination), instead of 3 hours or 5 hours by rail. And, we can make all our departures at will. I can't imagine giving up car ownership, and I don't think I'm deluded.
  - mysterypie 9y ago
    The flexibility of having a car is undeniable. However, pretty much everyone--including the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Reports, and the American Automobile Association--agrees that the total cost of ownership runs to US$8000-$9000 per year for the average person. The cost might be a lot lower for you, but most people are paying a lot of money for having a car at their disposal without realizing how much they're spending.
    - burfog 9y ago
      Time is money. He is saving about 5 hours each round trip. If his time is worth $50/hour, then $8000 for car ownership gets him 32 trips. Add a few more to account for the cost of rail ticket prices. He breaks even if he takes that trip about 3 times per month and never finds any other use for a car.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Tiktaalik 9y ago
We can't wait for autonomous cars to arrive. We need to invest in our cities and rebuild them to make walking and cycling safe and efficient for everyone from children to the elderly. We need to invest in public transportation systems that everyone can use.
alhafizco 9y ago
https://pbckuwait.com/ https://pbckuwait.com/
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
Please replace "our" with "US" when submitting on HN. Not everybody lives in US.
- palimpsests 9y ago
  It's just the title of the article, and yes, I think all or most people here are well aware of the fact that not everybody lives in the US. When I saw it, I didn't know what "our" referred to, until I read it - I didn't assume that the use of this word necessarily implied it had anything to do with my arbitrary country / community / culture / etc.
erikb 9y ago
This should be labelled "in the US". In Europe the public transport is often quite good.
GoToRO 9y ago
Not only seniors. Kids, low income, people with health problems, they all are strangers in their own city with the current system. All this just so that young able people can drive. Of course all this can fire back because if you are the only one that drives and the rest in your family don't, then you are the driver.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> More than anything else, self-driving cars could revolutionize seniors' transportation options. But the problem is created by the over-reliance on cars in the first place, and the fact that cities are planned for cars rather than humans. Self-driving cars aren't a solution, when the problem is too many cars. A real solution would be some kind of pulbic transport that's as convenient and as efficient as privately owned automobiles, but somehow we're much more interested in trying to solve the much harder problem of vehicle autonomy. For the record, I live in a town in the South of London, on the East coast. From the first moment I moved here I was amazed at the number of people with mobility issues -disabled folks, seniors, parents with prams etc- taking the bus for shor hops around town. I understand it's very different in the US, where owning a car is a very big deal, but it doesn't have to be that way. Choices made in the past dictate the current situation; choices that can be undone.

328 points by edward 9y ago

Another one of those things I have to come to HN and read about the US situation in order to reflect on the situation at home. I never even considered a situation where I’d be ”trapped” at home. It works like this: If you aren’t fit to walk to a bus stop, you get tax subsidized taxi (think it’s about 70 or 80% subsidized).

TaylorAlexander 9y ago
Out of curiosity do you mind sharing the location?
- alkonaut 9y ago
  Sweden
xversilov 9y ago
It's hard for a non-American to appreciate just how different their urban environments are compared to the US, and vice versa. It was certainly a shock to me when I first arrived to the USA... "Why is everything so far away? Why does every building have a bunch of empty space around it? (i.e. mandated setbacks)" etc. The lack of real cities is probably my least favorite thing about the USA.
- ars 9y ago
  And it's one of my favorite things about the USA. I hate dense European style cities. Different people like different things. The nice thing about the USA is you can pick. You can live anywhere from a remote farm to a dense apartment.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    But you don’t really get to pick. Dense European style cities are outlawed in the US. Hell, dense European style suburbs are outlawed here. My pre-zoning code suburb has lots that are less than 3,000 square feet. It’s awesome—easy to walk and you see your neighbors all the time. But it’s completely illegal to build more neighborhoods like mine. The minimum lot size now is more than five times bigger—we have legally mandated suburban sprawl. And there is no justification for it. If people wanted to have big lots, developers would subdivide lots that way. There is no reason to mandate it by law.
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      Sure, it's outlawed - in your suburb. It's not a nationwide ban, though. It's not even (I presume) statewide, or even city-wide. (It may be true that there literally are no municipalities in the US with zoning codes that allow dense neighborhoods, but I would be highly surprised.)
      - natrius 9y ago
        It's outlawed in so many places because of the incentives at work. At the edges of a city, greenfield exclusive neighborhoods have a better chance of holding their value than neighborhoods that let people with less money buy homes on less land. Once an economically stratified city is in place, no one can opt out without losing money. Everyone has to opt out together, and the politics of that are the worst.
      - brians 9y ago
        This is a great focusing question. There was a study a Few years about about which cities and suburbs could be built under their current zoning laws. I remember it showing that Somerville—a dense collection of 3-decker houses near Boston—was completely impossible to build under its current laws. I don’t have the link handy, but happy googling.
        oftenwrong 9y ago
- influx 9y ago
  The USA is so big and diverse it's silly to say that the it doesn't have any "real cities". I suspect New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Portland and others would be proof otherwise.
  - davidw 9y ago
    NY, Boston, kind of. Portland... a little bit, downtown, and starting, a little bit to be that way in some areas. With the Supreme Court's Euclid decision in 1916, we've had zoning that has only gotten worse and worse since then, so most things built in the years following that have deviated from that sort of walkable, incremental city that we used to have here too. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburban-experiment https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...
  - TulliusCicero 9y ago
    Even 'real cities' in the US have a lot more garbage urban design than most cities in, say, western Europe. Even the denser ones like you frequently have silly car-oriented design, like minimum parking requirements, and huge swathes of the city that are mandated single-family housing only. Comparing Seattle's transit system to, say, Munich's (where I currently live) is a sick joke. Munich is far more walkable and bikable, too. Of course, a big part of this is that a majority of the land in Seattle is zoned exclusively for, you guessed it, nothing but detached single-family homes. As an example, I sometimes visit smaller cities (< 50k) here, and even then they still are highly walkable, moderately dense, and they usually have pretty good transit connections to other places.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  There is a wide diversity of cities in the US. You can go to places like NYC, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. and see examples of cities with decently dense cores and functional public transit. But then you can go to cities in the South, for example, where it's almost impossible to get around without a car.
549362-30499 9y ago
We have this system in Boston and it works alright (it's called "The RIDE"). Boston doesn't have great transit by European standards, but it's still better than pretty much everywhere in the U.S. except for New York. It's always crazy to me to read these transit threads and see so many people who can't comprehend a day to day life that doesn't involve owning a car!
syrrim 9y ago
How it works where I am is they have special buses for the old and disabled. You ask a day before for one to show up at your house, and then it will take you where you're going.

drewg123 9y ago

I'm really hoping that we'll have self-driving cars by the time that I reach that stage of life

ars 9y ago
How will you get in the car? If the car itself was the only problem then Uber solves that. But it's not enough.
- ghaff 9y ago
  I live in an exurban area only about 40 miles outside a major coastal US tech center city. There's minimal Uber around where I live.
  - kdot 9y ago
    You can schedule Ubers ahead of time.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      And there are taxi companies as well. The point is that there is minimal service. You can't just pick up a phone and have a car there is 15 minutes.
    - paulie_a 9y ago
      You can without a guarantee it will come
simonebrunozzi 9y ago
If you're younger than, say, 60, you're probably going to be just fine.

tabeth 9y ago

I always get an inkling that buses (like Bolt/Mega/PeterPan) + the existing highway + roads are superior and more scalable than any other type of transportation, dollar for dollar. Why do people push for rail? Self-driving cars obviously can enhance this (the bus idea), but I suspect they will create even more traffic if we insist on having 5 passenger cars be 75% empty. Buses are great because demand can be reallocated easily. Imagine a place like New York, where buses can go out to the suburbs and bring people into the city and the evening and morning (say, 50% of the fleet), and during the day 90% of the fleet stays in the city doing intra-city transportation. Rail doesn't have this flexibility. EDIT: Rail definitely has its place, but you almost never hear anyone starting a bus project. Just curious to why there's relatively little mention of buses in the public transportation (new project) realm. I imagine perfected public transportation would involve linking between self driving cars on the square mile level, buses on the square deca mile (is that a thing?), rail for a hundred mile radius and obviously planes thereon.

jseliger 9y ago
Why do people push for rail Visit Japan (or these days China) and you will understand. This reminds me of people who say, "What's the big deal about electric bikes?" Ride one and you'll know. See what Japan and China are doing WRT rail and you'll know.
- lgas 9y ago
  Given the difficulty and expense associated with going to Japan, perhaps you could describe it to us here using words.
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    You pretty much can get anywhere in Japan using rail / subway alone. https://www.japan-guide.com/g17/2361_01.png https://www.japan-guide.com/g17/2361_01.png Subway maps cover cities to insane details. https://bento.com/pix/subway/tokyo_subway_1700.gif https://bento.com/pix/subway/tokyo_subway_1700.gif

spullara 9y ago

My grandfather I think just gave up on life after he lost the ability to drive. Taking taxies in St Petersburg, FL in the mid 1990s just sucked. Inconvenient, expensive and slow. I wish he was still alive today and I could give him an Uber/Lyft account.

terenceng2010 9y ago

Hong Kong has minibus as public transit, which allows for about 16 passengers per ride. Maybe it is a economical way for seniors' transportation? As it's up keep cost should be lower than a normal bus.

dluan 9y ago
Taipei does as well, and it's used a lot by seniors as they get to ride free.

revelation 9y ago

That's because prior to being too old to drive, they didn't give a fuck about the public transportation system. Actually, even after being too old to drive, they happily continue to vote against public transportation. It's bizarre to suggest our transportation system is failing them. It's exactly the transportation system they voted for, the transportation system a good bunch of them built, designed, railroaded through poor communities, terraformed cities to support. It's been failing large swaths of people for many centuries, but that generation didn't bother. They built this shrine to the personal automobile. It's not even a case of buyers remorse. For the longest time in their life, they happily took advantage of limitless cheap fossil fuels, plenty of unregulated cars and wide roads to drive them on, and the best part, they managed to put it all on the tab for the next generation. Its Caligula all over.

cmurf 9y ago
It's baby boomers. Overwhelmingly the baby boomers I know are all: driving is a right, not a privilege, and I'm insured and insurance solves all problems and mistakes, rip out those damn trees and put in more car lanes so I don't have to wait in traffice. Gimme! And my grandparents' generation were fans of the bus and trollies before big oil got them ripped out of most American cities in favor of buses, and wanted people in general to have an easier time to get around.
echlebek 9y ago
I generally agree, but "many centuries"? Come on. :)
- trgn 9y ago
  ha, imho, it reads as a stylistic choice that fits the exasperated tone I think. But there's a certain logic to that statement too. American cities always had very wide streets, 100 years before the car was invented even. In hindsight, it's hard to rationalize why really, but it seemed to have been because of this obsession for utility and practicality. Those very wide rigid grids were a transport-oriented design choice. To keep the horse shit away, so carts could make U-turns, so you could dump your bathwater in the middle. The tragedy was that those wide streets were the seed for cars eventually destroying urban cores. When cars were invented, they had the space for them right there. A street that was used for everything (markets, recreation, horses, ...), suddenly became a 4-5 lane highway filled with loud, stinking, dangerous cars. Of course nobody wants to live next to that, it's genuinely awful. It set in motion a vicious cycle of people moving out of the cores and needing more parking-infrastructure to accommodate that commuting.

sevensor 9y ago

My 96-year-old grandmother has macular degeneration in her eyes and neuropathy reducing sensation in her feet. She can neither see the road very well nor feel the pedals accurately. The state of Florida just renewed her license for six more years. I'd say it's irresponsible of her to keep up the license, except she has no options. The town she's in recently made it illegal for residents of her park to drive their electric carts across the street to Publix or down the sidewalk to the doctor's office. Those are the only two places she needs to go. Some of her friends who had given up their licenses in favor of electric carts are now SOL. They have to rely on favors to buy food and go to appointments.

sjg007 9y ago
There should be county sponsored transportation for medical appointments. Also it seems uber could work?
- sevensor 9y ago
  > There should be county sponsored transportation for medical appointments. How's your experience been with that kind of service? There's a reason lawbreaking octogenarians still ride golf carts down the sidewalk to get to the doctor's office, hoping they won't get ticketed. > Uber. I'm sorry. Did I mention my grandmother is 96? Ninety-six?
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    > I'm sorry. Did I mention my grandmother is 96? Ninety-six? HN forgets that not everyone has coastal tech money a lot.
    - lovich 9y ago
      That is true, but periodic Ubers are also way cheaper than owning a car. If you only need to travel once a week it would likely be far cheaper than car taxes, gas, and maintenance

pbnjay 9y ago

On the one hand, I don't want this to happen to me either (but I'm more likely to retire somewhere accessible than the suburbs). But on the other, this whole situation just screams entitlement. They'd rather stay in their houses with all of their stuff, which even their own kids don't want [1]. Just imagine if they would actually move out of their houses: it would open up more housing, making it more affordable to new homeowners. It would alleviate transportation subsidies to better serve others. It would lower ambulance costs and reduce time to service. Just by putting older folks closer to the care they need. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/your-money/aging-parents-with-lots-of-stuff-and-children-who-dont-want-it.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/your-money/aging-parents-...

wvenable 9y ago
I agree with your sentiments here but the other perspective is that you've worked your entire life, saved up, built up a wonderful home with all your belongings and now at the end of your life you have to give up everything you've worked for. Possibly your home is one of the few things that give you comfort and peace.
- erentz 9y ago
  Well, yes. You can't have one without the other. You want good accessible living? That requires density and transit. It's not like the last 70 years of terrible urban planning and lack of transit construction didn't happen during that "entire life" you speak of.
sevensor 9y ago
> They'd rather stay in their houses with all of their stuff Or they're old and poor, have little more than a house to their name, and the alternative is indifferent care by bottom-feeding nursing homes.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  What homes are those? I mean "nursing home" and "retirement home" are two different things. One houses the chronically ill, often old - at very high prices but payable by insurances/the-state and the other houses old people at merely high prices but these prices have to be paid by the residents and there's no way to make them low even cutting all your costs. And apartments and trailer parks that house seniors at a slight discount. But yeah, you're basically right, selling one house to movement into uncertain housing is terrible decision and there's

AckSyn 9y ago

This headline alone has me thinking "As if it's a requirement that a transportation system needs cater to the people who can't physically drive?"...

jonathanyc 9y ago

I think this is an awful situation, but at what point do we call seniors’ desires unreasonable? Is their want to stay in their suburban homes which are designed for cars really something the state should be concerned about when the working poor struggle to afford the subway?[1] I think we should make relocation easy for the elderly who aren’t able to get around. I think it is terrible if they can’t move from their houses to places easier to get transportation from. But I really don’t see how this problem is more urgent and important or even independent of the general problem of people not being able to afford housing/transportation. Are we supposed to prioritize the elderly who already have houses over those who don’t? 1: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/06/16/when-people-cant-afford-transit-new-york-city-pays-for-it-one-way-or-another/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/06/16/when-people-cant-affo...

mjn 9y ago
Imo some level of service even in areas not all that favorable to transit is reasonable. Or at least, I think it's possible to do at least slightly better. I now live in a fairly rural part of the UK, a remote region (Cornwall) that has no real urban areas. And yet just about every population concentration of over 1000 people or so, here, has a bus that does at least one round-trip a day. Towns of over 20,000 people have very good, regular service. Of course it's subsidized, and in the smaller villages it might literally only be once a day in each direction, but a service does run. In many American towns and suburbs it seems not even that level of service is available. And it's not due to the distances or population density either. I used to live in a suburb of Houston, TX that had 60,000 people, was about 20 miles from downtown, and it had no bus service! Now I live in a smaller and more remote town in the UK, and it has decent bus service.
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  The demographic we're talking about is the exact same one that hates transit and will refuse to fund it. It's not unlike the rural areas in the US that are heavily dependent on government subsidies that they vote against.
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AmVess 9y ago

The old and the poor are increasingly left out of public transport. The city where I used to live removed the bus routes from the poorest parts of the city and opened up new routes to the richest part. Buses on the new routes were almost always empty...rich people own cars, you see. The city where I currently reside simply shut down their entire bus operation instead of jerking around poor people.

WalterBright 9y ago
> rich people own cars, you see. The irony is that in Silicon Valley, the rich people ride the bus.

dundercoder 9y ago

I’m 36, live in the suburbs, and in recent years have gone (legally) blind from Retinitis Pigmentosa. Voluntarily giving up my license was one of the hardest and most important decisions I’ve made. There is literally 0 public transportation here. Not even Uber or Lyft have come around. America’s sprawl and dependence on cars is incredible. It wasn’t until I spent time in London, Oxford, and Paris that I could recognize how much everything here is built around the idea of owning a car. So now my wife has to give rides to our four kids, AND me, and there’s literally nothing I can do about it except petition for better transit, and pray self-driving cars get here faster. Being dependent on rides feels like being 15 again. It’s humiliating being picked up from a job interview in a parking lot with 200+ cars.

andrewprock 9y ago
Have you considered moving to a region with better transportation support?
- dundercoder 9y ago
  I have. I’d have to move out of state and into a fairly urban city to get decent transit. The schools here are fantastic and I love just about everything here, except the lack of transit. We may get to that point, but for right now I work remotely (platform engineering) and just grin and bear the rest.
  - volkl48 9y ago
    If you get to the point of considering moving, you may wish to look into a college town. They'll typically have far more extensive transit than the average mid-sized city/town does.
    - dundercoder 9y ago
      That is a good point.
      - 9y ago

IIAOPSW 9y ago

I tried having the Uber discussion with my grandmother. We tried to tell her that its all the same mobility that you're used to. We tried explaining that this isn't some patronizing service for seniors but in fact something everyone is doing. We tried explaining how its actually more economical then owning a car. We tried to explain that letting my Grandfather stay on the road is a terrible idea that will get them and/or someone else killed. My aunt even got her an ipad and showed her how to use the damn thing. FFS you press the button and a car comes. The concepts not hard and she's not that senile. But what do we get in response for all our efforts? "I just don't want to." Even in the face of viable technical solutions to the problem of old people on the road, you still have to solve the unsolvable issue that old people are insanely stubborn.

nextstep 9y ago

Car-based transportation sucks at all ages, we just seem to rationalize how shitty it is for the young and able-bodied. The US is insanely car oriented and it is a huge step back in quality of life from most of the developed world.

blondie9x 9y ago

Cars are exploitation. Driving isn't freedom it's the most dangerous and isolating way to move people that exists. The automobile companies have trapped us into debt and traffic laden commutes that waste hours of our short lives on this planet and cause roughly 30% of climate change. Do something. Get rid of your car and push for better mass transportation and development near train stations and major urban areas. Cars are pieces of metal to get us from A to B. Making them out to be something more than that is self deception. We deserve better.

Cd00d 9y ago
That's extreme. I have a car in NYC. The subway system here is amazing, while also being an embarrassment. But, the car provides the freedom to visit friends and family for a day or weekend. The cost is $200 per month parking and $150 per month insurance, plus the cost of the car, which is relatively low as we drive less than 500 miles per month. We can visit family in 45 minutes or 2 hours (depending on destination), instead of 3 hours or 5 hours by rail. And, we can make all our departures at will. I can't imagine giving up car ownership, and I don't think I'm deluded.
- mysterypie 9y ago
  The flexibility of having a car is undeniable. However, pretty much everyone--including the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Reports, and the American Automobile Association--agrees that the total cost of ownership runs to US$8000-$9000 per year for the average person. The cost might be a lot lower for you, but most people are paying a lot of money for having a car at their disposal without realizing how much they're spending.
  - burfog 9y ago
    Time is money. He is saving about 5 hours each round trip. If his time is worth $50/hour, then $8000 for car ownership gets him 32 trips. Add a few more to account for the cost of rail ticket prices. He breaks even if he takes that trip about 3 times per month and never finds any other use for a car.

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Tiktaalik 9y ago

We can't wait for autonomous cars to arrive. We need to invest in our cities and rebuild them to make walking and cycling safe and efficient for everyone from children to the elderly. We need to invest in public transportation systems that everyone can use.

alhafizco 9y ago

https://pbckuwait.com/ https://pbckuwait.com/

eeZah7Ux 9y ago

Please replace "our" with "US" when submitting on HN. Not everybody lives in US.

palimpsests 9y ago
It's just the title of the article, and yes, I think all or most people here are well aware of the fact that not everybody lives in the US. When I saw it, I didn't know what "our" referred to, until I read it - I didn't assume that the use of this word necessarily implied it had anything to do with my arbitrary country / community / culture / etc.

erikb 9y ago

This should be labelled "in the US". In Europe the public transport is often quite good.

GoToRO 9y ago

Not only seniors. Kids, low income, people with health problems, they all are strangers in their own city with the current system. All this just so that young able people can drive. Of course all this can fire back because if you are the only one that drives and the rest in your family don't, then you are the driver.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> More than anything else, self-driving cars could revolutionize seniors' transportation options. But the problem is created by the over-reliance on cars in the first place, and the fact that cities are planned for cars rather than humans. Self-driving cars aren't a solution, when the problem is too many cars. A real solution would be some kind of pulbic transport that's as convenient and as efficient as privately owned automobiles, but somehow we're much more interested in trying to solve the much harder problem of vehicle autonomy. For the record, I live in a town in the South of London, on the East coast. From the first moment I moved here I was amazed at the number of people with mobility issues -disabled folks, seniors, parents with prams etc- taking the bus for shor hops around town. I understand it's very different in the US, where owning a car is a very big deal, but it doesn't have to be that way. Choices made in the past dictate the current situation; choices that can be undone.