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The dreaded electric car is the answer. When you look at busy streets where all of the houses have turned their backs on the noise, pollution and general filth
by Theodores 8y ago
The dreaded electric car is the answer.
When you look at busy streets where all of the houses have turned their backs on the noise, pollution and general filth that comes with regular traffic think how different it would be if every one of those vehicles 'sat in traffic' and inching forward was an electric vehicle.
People could have clean windows and open their front doors to the street. They could even grow a few plants. Crossing the road even in solid traffic would be safer just because you could hear.
If individual communities could vote if their street was electric only then there would be an incentive for people to get their street essentially car free. Imaginably the lamp posts would be charging points too.
Streets designed a century or more ago and where community once thrived would come back to life. House price values would be vastly more for 'electric' streets just because the standard of living is better. So you could buy an electric car and offset that against the higher valuation of the house - assuming you are owning and not renting.
As for old fashioned cars blazing through and creating pollution, there are license plate reading cameras and fines. As for the folks from the countryside that still have their old ICE vehicle, they just have to park a street or two away when visiting their friends on 'electric' streets. This will obviously stress out the parking in neighbouring streets incentivising them to go electric too. Eventually everyone can have a livable street even if there is lots of slow moving traffic moving at a snails pace. It just won't be noisy traffic with killer fumes.
- nwah1 8y agoI think the combination of ideas that Silicon Valley is inching us towards is essentially what Personal Rapid Transit has always been. Electric cars are about eliminating the issue of pollution. The idea of ridesharing is to eliminate the maintenance, debt, and storage costs of owning a car. Self-driving cars are about eliminating the accidents and wasted time spent driving. Hyperloop is about using up less valuable surface space just for transportation, and hiding the ugliness of roads underground. Personal Rapid Transit has been able to accomplish literally all those goals since its inception. Each pod is autonomous, on-demand, driverless, and electric. It can be either on a hanging monorail, or undergound, to avoid wasting valuable surface space. And it doesn't require miles of ugly gray asphalt.
- soperj 8y agoElectric cars still make noise.
- ghaff 8y agoEspecially when the hypothetically self-driving ones are all tooling around the block 20 times because there's nowhere to park.
- nwah1 8y agoThat's why I mentioned smart parking meters. They would set prices so that there's always spots available for those willing to pay more. The end result being less congestion and shorter commuting times for everyone, by avoiding the need to circle the block.
- paddy_m 8y agoAt highway speeds yes, at city speeds no. At highway speeds most noise is from wind and tires, so electric vehicles don't help too much. Electric vehicles still don't help cities too much, they still sit unused for 95% of the time time, and occupy a large amount of space compared to bicycles, pedestrians, or public transit.
- core-questions 8y agoThis all sounds great, and you're not wrong, but like many on HN you come across as someone who's living in a bit of a bubble. Electric vehicles simply are not on the table for a massive swathe of the population who are driving $2000 clunkers that they need in order to be able to get to/from work every day. Until we can get electric cars on the used market for that kind of price range, that still have the effectively-unlimited range of a gas car, this entire idea is a pipe dream. Penalizing people for doing what they have to do in order to go about their lives is a recipe for a populist uprising that undoes all of your changes and sets the effort back a decade. Spending millions on expensive, privacy-invading license plate cameras to charge people a fine for going through the motions of their life is dystopian and horrible - and doesn't make good financial sense. Far better to directly incentivize people to get the electric car you want them driving, rather than punishing them. If gas prices had continued to rise like they were doing a decade ago, then we might be in a situation now where it would make financial sense for more people to convert to an electric car. This didn't happen, and so right now for most people it makes no sense to do. Put an artificial barrier like your penalty in place, and they'll elect Doug Ford in order to stop you. It has to actually make real economic sense, not artificial, or it will fall apart.
- nwah1 8y ago>Penalizing people for doing what they have to do in order to go about their lives is a recipe for a populist uprising that undoes all of your changes and sets the effort back a decade True. The yellow vest riots in France were ignited by a gas tax. Of course, probably anything would've set them off since they have a completely different political climate.
- mperham 8y agoA city designed around cars is still a miserable place to be, no matter the type of drivetrain. Needing 4000 lbs of steel and batteries to get a bag of groceries is a horribly inefficient way of life. Cities should be designed so that walking/biking/buses provide 90% of your transit needs with SOVs as the exception, not the rule.
- core-questions 8y agoSo what, my wife is supposed to push a shopping cart in one hand and a baby carriage in the other a kilometer or two in order to go shopping? Spending two hours in the process instead of 20 minutes? I really question whether the average HN poster considers the normal person's use case. Nobody _wants_ to drive all over the damned place, we do it because it's the only thing that makes sense for a dynamic lifestyle.
- TheCoelacanth 8y agoBaby carriages usually have some cargo space. Put the groceries there. Also, we don't have to completely design cities around cars to support the single digit percentage of population that has infants at any given time. Some people can still drive even in pedestrian focused cities.
- nwah1 8y agoAlso, if the environment is not soul-crushing and polluted, then it might actually be pleasant to go for a short walk. If you have to push a baby carriage 2 kilometers just to go to the store, then that is, by definition, not a very walkable neighborhood. Neighborhoods with the highest walkability scores have good stores within a couple blocks radius. Or, in other words, about the same distance that it takes to traverse a Wal-Mart parking lot.
- ghaff 8y agoI have never lived in a city--and that includes Manhattan and Cambridge--that had a "good" grocery store within a couple of blocks. I've had small markets but that's not a grocery store. Though, yes, you can get grocery delivery these days.
- dv_dt 8y agoEven that is overly car oriented, because community infrastructure accounting for electric bikes or scooters might handle an even better quality of life than cars.