12 ms·

Cars Kill Cities

189 points by Jakob 13y ago

kyrra 13y ago
At this point for a lot of cities, it would require a large amount of infrastructure change. Mass transit in most cities sucks today, so people use cars. To do this right, the city needs to do a massive up-front investment in public transit. And there is no guarantee that this investment will ever pay off.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  Yes, it would require a change in infrastructure. No, it is not necessary for the investment to be done upfront. You quickly ramp up cheap mass transit options (bus service segregated from regular vehicular traffic with dedicated lanes, MUCH cheaper than light rail construction) while using permitting/zoning to phase out car-friendly policies. It won't happen overnight, but its a start.
  - chongli 13y ago
    Bus service does not work. People hate buses, no matter how well designed and efficient their routes are. Buses have an extreme social stigma attached to them.
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      I love buses. Gives me a chance to read, when I would otherwise be stuck driving.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      Unfortunately, just because you hate something doesn't mean we should continue to support policies for wasteful/inefficient transportation.
      - chongli 13y ago
        You know what's wasteful and inefficient? Empty buses driving around all day. My city is full of them!
    - rayiner 13y ago
      It's a catch-22. In most cities, the bus service sucks, but poor people can't afford anything else, so as a result, busses are full of poor people. In New York and Chicago, busses are clean and well-maintained because they serve higher income people and tourists as well. Manhattan is a place where you're just as likely to sit on a bus next to a guy making $1m+/year as some disheveled homeless dude.
    - lovemenot 13y ago
      Reading abut the Google Bus protesters was disappointing. Whatever one's opinion of gentrification, targeting buses seems perverse. I could not discover the protesters' point of contention. Doesn't Google (and other SV companies) already pay the city to use the infrastructure?
- jrs99 13y ago
  that's why we should make new cities with the infrastructure to support a population with zero cars allowed. And make that city an awesome place to live.
  - conjecTech 13y ago
    As a small business owner who sells a physical good, statements like this scare the hell out of me. You have no idea the kind of monopolization and losses of freedom implementing ideas like this would entail. Cars are democratic. They are a cheap, scaleable way of solving the problem of transportation. Kill cars, and you will destroy a lot of entrepreneurship in things that really matter. You will also be hurting those that start with the least most of all.
    - gabemart 13y ago
      Can you explain a little more? It seems on first blush that a no-cars city with good public transport and good support for walking and cycling would be much more democratic than a city where people rely on cars to get to places. Bikes are much cheaper than cars, food is much cheaper than gas. It's much cheaper to take a public transport link to a destination than to take a taxi or rent a car. It seems very counter-intuitive to say "cars are democratic" where then are lot of people who can't afford a car. They also seem much less scalable than the alternatives. I'm lucky enough to live in a city with lots of shops in walking distance of my apartment. There's a discount supermarket 15 minutes away where I buy most of my food. If I lived in a city where all the big supermarkets were in strip malls or commercial estates on the outskirts of the city, I'd have to buy my food at smaller convenience-style stores with much higher prices and a poorer selection of goods.
      - conjecTech 13y ago
        It's hard to argue against his abstract proposition since he didnt really provide an alternative plan, but in general, there are two main factors I'd like to stress. The first is the loss of mobility and its results. One almost universal facet of the alternatives to cars that people suggest is that they limit where you can enter and exit the system. You can't use a train to navigate to anywhere you want to go: you use it to get close and then use some other way of getting the rest of the way. Remove other transit systems, and this will effectively set property values. Want to open a store? Well, if you're an established player with easy access to capital through the investment bank that handled your last merger, than the cost of leasing or purchasing property with reasonable access via transportation is fairly easy. But if you don't, you're probably not going to be able to afford that. You're going to have to locate yourself in a far less accessible location. And the value proposition of your business now has to overcome this difference as well in addition to regular value you would offer. From a consumer standpoint, this means you have fewer alternatives. Things have to be pretty bad with your existing supplier of a good or service for you to switch if doing so is going to entail a higher inconvenience in terms of access. I saw this all the time in Chicago. People could charge a premium beyond what their higher rent would require simply because they knew that you would be reluctant to walk another 15 minutes to get to someone who was charging 10-20% less per item. There are additional fixed costs that would go with the logistical concerns a model like this would entail. How are you going to get things to and from your business? The constructs are going to most likely favor established methods. Say we don't allow cars to drive, but we do decide that we need the infrastructure to allow 18-wheelers to get through, and you can use that method instead. Well now you need a loading dock. Now you either need to pay someone else a premium for hauling it for you or buy an 18-wheeler yourself. You can't simply use the car you were already using to commute to your day job while trying to start this new business. You can't sacrifice additional time to lower the cots. You are effectively confined to hiring other people to do it for you because of the system. In short, it makes the system much more rigid. It leaves fewer feasible alternatives both for the consumer and the provider. It also makes barriers to entry far higher.
- asynchronous13 13y ago
  I think you mean, "Mass transit in most American cities sucks today".
abduhl 13y ago
This post is a rant backed up with only anecdotal evidence and an enraged author with a penchant for catchy headlines. No solutions are offered because no problem is properly presented.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  At the other side, the author presented the less fitting anedocte he came up with, saying "see, even if I try hard to refute the hypothesis, I can't". And it's not an extraordinary hypothesis.
CapitalistCartr 13y ago
I fond our cities profoundly ugly, but cars serve an essential service. I need a flexible, quick means of secure transport. I need to move a variable number of people from 1-4. I often need to bring tens of kilograms of stuff with me. What else can fill the bill around a large metro area (~3 million people)? I would love an alternative, to live in beautiful cities, to walk around the way I can overseas.
- jrs99 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City
- rayiner 13y ago
  Walking + a cart.
tdees40 13y ago
This is easy enough to fix from a policy standpoint: (1) make free parking a taxable benefit for companies (2) tax the hell out of gas/car registration, or at the very least tax it enough to pay for infrastructure (3) no mandated parking minimums in new construction in cities (4) get rid of publicly paid for parking But of course this requires transit alternatives and popular support, which does not exist in places like Atlanta. I live in Orange County, and I bike to work (we have perfect weather and mediocre bike infrastructure), but people love their cars here.
- dublinben 13y ago
  I think a better alternative for 2 would be congestion pricing for downtown areas. An across the board registration hike would be regressive, and disproportionately affect the rural poor.
  - tdees40 13y ago
    Ah yes, even better. But that couldn't even fly in NYC, arguably the place with the least car friendly political environment in the US.
gress 13y ago
The post is right, and even more so for developing world cities that emerged before cars were around. However the post is also naive. Cars are usually much faster, provide much better shelter from the weather, and are much less tiring than trying to lug bags from one place to another on buses or other public transport. They also place far fewer constraints on when you can travel. Of course it's possible to structure one's life so as to deal with all of the issues. I have lived half of my adult life without a car, including 4 years in the SF Bay Area, and I managed. But let's stop pretending that there isn't a trade off. Cars are very very convenient. The key to reducing the need for cars is not just good public transport - it's services that reduce the reliance on traveling to get chores done. Things like grocery deliveries, laundry pickup, and amazon.com. It would be a lot easier to rely solely on public transport if you never had to carry anything.
- GuiA 13y ago
  Self driving electric cars that people pay for on a subscription model (rather than ownership) are the future I'd like to see. I hope it happens during my lifetime.
  - jowiar 13y ago
    Taxis are a reasonable "turking" of this concept.
    - samolang 13y ago
      And zipcar.
      - jowiar 13y ago
        Zipcar is great - I love it. But as far as a "self-driving car network" goes, one of the big advantages is that you don't need to worry about parking on either end. A higher percentage of cars are in the process of getting someone from point A to point B rather than taking up space somewhere.
    - 13y ago
saraid216 13y ago
Eh, IMO, cars are killing democracy, too. I haven't lined up the studies to actually show the causal chain, though. It's something I need to get around to doing.
digitalsushi 13y ago
If most things could be delivered by drones to where you lived, do you think we would space out, or clump together, or stay the same? I think, for me, I could use my car payment on taxi service if I didnt need to commute or do errands, and it would be about the same. Except I wouldnt have a car, something that breaks down.
elhector 13y ago
High correlation with another post in the board: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2013/12/10/why_cul_de_sacs_are_bad_for_your_health_happy_city_by_charles_montgomery.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2013/12/10/why_cul_de_sac... Can be a bit of a catch 22 in today's world, where new cities and developments are created assuming high volume / usage of cars. You can see how dense cities can work very well with very few cars in places like Amsterdam, but there city setup and infrastructure eases walking / biking and is very unfriendly to cars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Amsterdam#Car http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Amsterdam#Car
forrestthewoods 13y ago
Self driving cars my pick for best solution. You can have fewer cars services more people with higher efficiency. It's all wins across the board. I hope the bloggers solution ideas aren't "better public transportation". Public transportation sucks, even in Europe. A pre-requisite to good public transportation is poor infrastructure for private transportation. I view asking for better public transportation as asking for a faster horse. We can do way better than that.
- tieTYT 13y ago
  > Public transportation sucks, even in Europe. Although I've only visited, I thought the public transportation in France was very good. Those buses move super fast. In America it's common to have to ride a bus for over an hour to get to your destination that's not that far by car standards. Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say this?
- Tiktaalik 13y ago
  Self driving cars doesn't change much. Supposing that there would exist car sharing systems such that a single car may be used throughout the day by several people, then we could cut back on parking spots, but I'm sure there will be many that own their own self driving car and share it with no one. During morning rush hour the only difference from now would be that commuters could do the crossword puzzle instead of focusing on traffic.
  - kjackson2012 13y ago
    Incorrect. If you have self-driving cars, the entire flow of traffic could be much more efficient, virtually eliminating traffic jams. You could drive at the speed limit with a lot smaller distance between cars, etc, packing in a greater density of people without sacrificing speed.
    - Tiktaalik 13y ago
      I think you'll see some gains in efficiency, but negligible compared to how efficiently we can move people via rapid transit. At the end of the day you're still going to be having most often a single person in a large vehicle that takes up a lot of room on the road.
Tiktaalik 13y ago
Car oriented design is not efficient at all for most city trips and we need to dramatically increase funding for alternatives. Alongside directing our infrastructure dollars toward supporting a more balanced mix of travelling options, the most sensible thing we can do is to expose more of the real cost of car oriented infrastructure to the end consumer via road fees, bridge tolls and ending free parking.
Anechoic 13y ago
FYI, the author of that post address self-driving cars in his next post: http://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/self-driving-cars-freedom-or-more-of-the-same/ http://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/self-driv...
- jstalin 13y ago
  That betrays the basic attitude of these anti-car folks. It's not the cars, but the freedom to live where you want that they detest.
  - cylinder 13y ago
    They're free to live where they want. Just stop expecting the rest of us to pay for the ever-expanding roads and freeways that they feel entitled to reach them.
  - api 13y ago
    They also detest the democratization of wealth, which invariably results in some form of "sprawl." It's either the horizontal sprawl of endless little palaces of Versailles with their little lawns, or it's the vertical sprawl of monstrous energy-sucking megastructures full of luxury condominiums. But in either case the result of democratized wealth does not give fellatio to agrarian-utopian fantasies.
  - Tiktaalik 13y ago
    People can live where they want, but I'm critical of having to subsidize the excessive amount of infrastructure necessary for the lifestyle choice of unnecessarily travelling very large distances. For me it's even worse because I live in a region where the terrain requires a lot of bridges.
    - DannyBee 13y ago
      "but I'm critical of having to subsidize the excessive amount of infrastructure necessary for the lifestyle choice of unnecessarily travelling very large distances" Why choose this choice as the the line in the sand? Are you also critical of having to subsidize the excessive amount of infrastructure necessary for the lifestyle choice of living in a strictly large than necessary place, for example? Because you subsidize that to a large degree too. Everyone who has a larger dining room because they have made the lifestyle choice of wanting to host dinner parties. Or large kitchens. Large bedrooms. Large yards. You name it. It's all strictly unnecessary, and all lifestyle choice. Among other subsidies, all of it takes up valuable space that could be given to the public, or something else done with it. It requires more infrastructure - greater water supplies, greater sanitation requirements, power supplies, gas supplies, what have you. Yet we subsidize this just the same as you are paying for roads, you are just paying for it in different places. In truth, we subsidize a large number of lifestyle choices that impact infrastructure (having kids, riding bikes, heck, even buying groceries, you name it). From what I can tell, it just seems some people are upset that they subsidies don't always match whatever their particular ideology of how cities should be built is. Just remember there really is no "better" or "worse", when it comes to lifestyle choices, just different (you may impose moral judgements on lifestyle choices depending on ideology and viewpoint of purpose of society, but the truly vast majority of these moral judgements are not universally shared)
justinsb 13y ago
If self-driving cars become a reality, it is interesting to think of what happens to all this space & infrastructure. If the model is that we don't own cars, but rather share them like taxis, then there is no need for parking: the car will just drop you and go to its next trip. If the model is that we own our self-driving cars, it may be that they can be parked at much greater distances (10+ miles) from where we spend time (in much denser structures than today). We can likely eliminate parking from inner cities, both garages and roadside parking. If we can design roads and grids for computers and not humans, perhaps we can make them much efficient by trading off simplicity. Could we have a complex system of mostly one-way streets? What interests me is that not just parking garages go away, but what today is a four-lane-width road (with two lanes dedicated to parking) may become a single-lane one-way street. The sidewalk - which used to be 20% of the space - is now 80% of the space. Looking around busy cities, and trying to imagine what it will look like post-self-driving car, is IMHO mind-blowing.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  - Self-driving cars will still need to park at off-peak times. Unless they just keep driving in circles. - Having your car park 10 miles away from you after every trip adds some forty miles of travel per commute. That's forty miles of fuel and forty miles of maintenance, every day. - I'm also not thrilled about the prospect of already-dense cities shrinking streets to one lane. We call them concrete jungles now- can you imagine if all the roads were only 15 feet across? Goodbye, sky.
  - justinsb 13y ago
    Definitely valid points! Personally, I hope that we end up with a shared-ownership model, and that the cars do park 10+ miles away if they are idle, but that this is amortized across a large number of commutes. I also hope that we use the liberated space for sidewalks and green spaces, not for more buildings. Small changes though (whether we own or share our cars, planning policies on urban parking & freed up lanes) will have a huge effect...
  - GuiA 13y ago
    - Self-driving cars will still need to park at off-peak times. Unless they just keep driving in circles. "they can be parked at much greater distances (10+ miles) from where we spend time, in much denser structures than today" - Having your car park 10 miles away from you after every trip adds some forty miles of travel per commute. That's forty miles of fuel and forty miles of maintenance, every day. Only if we map 1 car to 1 person. Of course that'd be completely unoptimized - people wouldn't own car, but rather have a "subscription" where they can get a car dispatched at any time (à la Uber). Cars would only park 10 miles away at truly off peak hours; the rest of the time they'd go to service some other customer. - I'm also not thrilled about the prospect of already-dense cities shrinking streets to one lane. We call them concrete jungles now- can you imagine if all the roads were only 15 feet across? Goodbye, sky. As the previous poster said, the extra space would go to sidewalks. Outside patios, trees, grass, parks... the things we could do would be amazing. Some older European cities from pre-car eras are built like that, and it's wonderful.
revelation 13y ago
I think what we need are exponential tolls based on distance to city center or density of pedestrian traffic around. I couldn't care less about cars on streets dedicated for them, but everywhere else they need to piss off and quickly. They are death machines.
api 13y ago
I have lived in both car-dependent and transit-based places, and can see advantages to both. Given that the advantages of transit are commonly discussed these days, I thought I'd give some of the advantages of cars. (1) Cars don't have schedules. You can just jump in your car and go any time of day or night. Cars also don't stop running at 2am, while most transit systems do. (2) Cars permit sprawl. Sprawl has been bashed to hell and back for some justifiable reasons, but it has one big advantage: it breaks the backs of real estate markets. Sprawling car-dependent regions are much safer from the real estate hyperinflation that plagues cities that are either transit-based or geographically constrained. Bubbles of local real estate inflation surround transit hot spots, creating a two-tier society in which ease of transportation is exponentially (not linearly, as with cars) correlated to income. The poor get loooooong bus->train commutes while the wealthy get fast train->train commutes. (3) Cars can haul stuff, which gets increasingly important when you have children. Pretty much everything about the suburbs seems idiotic until you have kids, then it seems reasonable. I can't stress #2 enough. Compare the Los Angeles metro area to the San Francisco bay. The former is a largely car-based sprawling metropolis, while the latter is partly transit-based and also geographically constrained (which for the market does the same thing as transit-dependence). In the LA metro area there are many neighborhoods where poor and working class people can afford to live. In the Bay Area you're spending $3000/month for a crack den. Everyone but professionals and the rich are completely priced out of all but the absolute worst neighborhoods, or are pushed out to the fringes with the longest commutes. It's funny that transit is often cited as good from an equality point of view as it gives everyone access to mobility without requiring car ownership, but the real estate inflation that it engenders negates this IMHO.
- StaceyEC 13y ago
  Great insight.
jseliger 13y ago
If you're interested in this topic, Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City are both worth reading. The former explains how "free" parking isn't really free and how it distorts a lot of behavior, and the latter is about what cities are good for and how to build healthy cities in general. Personally, I wonder why people would want to own a car if they can avoid it: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/why-would-you-want-to-own-a-car-if-you-could-avoid-it/ https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/why-would-you-want... , but that may be a minority viewpoint.
- zalew 13y ago
  > The High Cost of Free Parking convince me that 800 pages is worth it (reviews so far haven't).
  - GuiA 13y ago
    They're not worth it. You should spend the time that it would take you to read this book doing some high yield activity instead, like trading stocks or growth hacking your startup. Anything less than that just isn't worth the trouble.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - ars_technician 13y ago
      Your sarcasm implies that he doesn't want to put effort into reading what appears to be a bad book because it doesn't have a return, which is a crappy assumption. People have a limited amount of time, and there are far more good books than any one person could read, let alone bad books.
      - GuiA 13y ago
        At least one person who is not the author seems to have liked this book, so I challenge the assumption that it "appears to be a bad book". And... it's a book, dude. You can check it out from the library or buy it used for ten bucks and stop reading it if you don't like it; that's not going to ruin your life. If you have enough time to reply to my dumb comments on HN, you must certainly have the time to start reading the book for 30 minutes and decide if it's worth continuing or not :)
samatman 13y ago
In the East Bay, I ride a 3000w electric scooter. A kWh of power is a good days ride, commute, shopping and socializing (I tend to charge twice a day, because I can). Please consider joining me: the more scooters there are the safer we all get to be. It's fun! When you get going fast, you can't even hear the motor, just the wind.
tootie 13y ago
New York City recently launched it's CitiBike program and set up bike racks in spots that used to be reserved for street parking and you should have seen people flipping out despite the fact that less than 50% of us actually own cars. And let's not forget about the amount of space we dedicate cars being able to move around.
conjecTech 13y ago
As a life long ATLien, I want to know when Atlanta was walkable, and if it could have even been considered the same city as it is now. For those of you who don't know, the population of metro Atlanta more than doubled between 1990 and 2010. Yes, all types of transportation suck in Atlanta, but roads and cars are an extensible, scaleable solution with most of the costs being marginal as opposed to fixed, meaning additional demand can be handled easily. Like others have noted, you offered no real solutions to that problem. MARTA is kind of a joke of a system for anyone that values their time. A trip on MARTA will take about twice the time it would take to drive in a car. At the average commuter distance, you recoup the cost of buying a $5,000 car in a year if you value your time at minimum wage. If you actually care about fixing the problem, fix the economics of alternatives. Don't just go about complaining about the fact that you don't like not being able to walk where you want to go, suggest solutions. And please try to consider this problem outside of the perspective of being a student, because that honestly seems to be the only perspective you've given to this. A lot of the vehicles you see in Atlanta are work vehicles, and that mobility makes a lot of things possible that you probably are a fan of. You may want to consider the dynamics of the local economy further. Honestly, I have to say this article isn't up to the standards I'd expect of a fellow Tech student, particularly a PhD candidate. You are very well intentioned and undoubtedly intelligent, but simply pointing out what everyone knows isn't very helpful. I'll be interested to see the future posts you promised.
bhavvik 13y ago
Before cars invaded Ahmedabad, India, two wheelers and rickshaws were primary modes of transportation for longer distances. Walking and bicycles were used for shorter distances.. Cars were used on occasions.. Traffic issues were non-existent. People starting using cars as primary mode of transportation because everyone else started doing it.. meaning using two wheelers became less safe, more car traffic, increased pollution effects, etc. Idea is to go back to using cars as only ocassional mode of transportation and for that one option is govt helps reduce traffic for two wheelers/rickshaws/bicycles.. Dedicated lanes for these would help.
6d0debc071 13y ago
Do people actually want to live in cities, how many of them? - (and whatever for?) One narrative here goes, there are lots of cars, so it creates an unfriendly environment, so people have to live outside the city and have cars. But that narrative doesn't make sense for how the cars got there in the first place. Another narrative goes: cars enabled people to move about quickly, they enjoyed this. One manifestation of this ability was to escape from cities and still get to work. Thus carparks and reasonably fast roads. # Or maybe people just enjoyed moving about quickly even over relatively small distances and it snowballed For example, I live about five miles away from where I used to work. I could spend 10 minutes walking to the nearest busstop, 15 minutes waiting for that bus, another 10-15 minutes getting to the busstop in town, another 10-15 minutes waiting for the next bus to work, another half hour or so while the bus drives there (takes longer because of stops). Or I could just get in the car and be there in 16-20 minutes. An hour and a half vs 16-20 minutes. And this isn't a bad place for public transport. Buses, on average, every 10-15 minutes is pretty good. It just adds up. Heck, given a couple of hours I could probably walk there. It's far from clear that it makes sense, even under generalised utility, to agree with the author's desire to make cities better places to live at the potential cost to people who may prefer to live elsewhere and drive.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  You could also bike there in 30 minutes and get some excercise as a bonus.
Xylakant 13y ago
I'm genuinely curious: Here in germany we have car-sharing offers that allow you to pick up a car on the street, ride it to where you want to go and then leave it parked there in the larger cities. The fee is usually about half of the fee of a cab. Then there's the same for bicycles. The combination of public transport and car-sharing in berlin is awesome, at least in the city center: I go most ways by public transport and then grab a car or bike if I need to. If I really need to travel long distance by car, I get a rental and I'm coming out ahead financially, even if I throw in the occasional taxi ride because it's late and I'm lazy. From the posts here I get the impression that this doesn't exist in the US - and I can't imagine that.
- dustcoin 13y ago
  What you are describing sounds like https://www.car2go.com https://www.car2go.com, which is available in some US cities.
  - gregl 13y ago
    Which just happens to be a German company :) We have it in Toronto and it's super useful sometimes to quickly get somewhere within the downtown when transit would be slower and cabs more expensive.
- jes5199 13y ago
  A handful of cities in the US have in the last few years gotten a service called car2go, which is exactly what you describe. It's not available in the biggest cities, though. A few cities are also starting to have bicycle-sharing services. It's just not very common, yet.
was_hellbanned 13y ago
I walked around Tokyo marveling at the infrastructure. Fully enclosed (or perhaps 3/4 enclosed) freeways that explode out of the ground, split off to surface streets, and arch up through the sky and around corners. Well-engineered, rubberized mounting systems and the enclosure mean you only heard the faintest hint of cars rocketing by at speed. Highways branching to high-capacity, multi-lane surface streets, which further branch into narrow neighborhood streets (similar to an alley in the US) meant that pedestrian traffic was quite safe, and generally well-respected. By contrast, American cities have a couple of arterial freeways, a massive grid of wide-yet-low-capacity surface streets, and neighborhood streets that people speed through in an effort to shave seconds off their commute. And when they get to work, they park in huge parking lots, instead of stacked parking structures (ideally under the target building itself). American transportation infrastructure is terrible.
- deegles 13y ago
  I think the road infrastructure pales in comparison to the subway/rail system. The volume of people it moves is incredible. Also remember that it's all built in an earthquake-prone area!
  - was_hellbanned 13y ago
    I didn't even bother getting into the rail system, since I assume everyone realizes how advanced it is. I really wanted to put this in though: I've watched Shinkansen pull into the switchyard at night to "go to bed". It's quiet. Here's a bullet train, cruising into a rail yard pretty much in the middle of a neighborhood, idling along after midnight, and you only hear a very muffled motor as it glides by. Compare that to America, where our trains seem to be built solely to meet basic load requirements, and where they honk four times (as long or short as they want) before every crossing that's not guarded with quad-gates.
- lovemenot 13y ago
  Quite so. Furthermore, the preponderance of bicycle-riding and perhaps the best public transport network in the world makes Tokyo, in some ways, a role model for urban design. Outside of the big cities　in Japan though, you see the same infrastructure that characterises the US: strip malls and the like. Population density seems to be the major driver and, perhaps contentiously, willingness to subsume one's own freedoms to the common good is a secondary one.
alexeisadeski3 13y ago
Wonder when the liberals will wake up and smell the coffee: Private busses are the miracle solution to public transport.
- wh-uws 13y ago
  Trying to be as non promotional as possible here. With my startup I'm working on this problem aiming to make easily setting up private transport a reality. You can check out my vision here. http://www.driveless.co/about.html http://www.driveless.co/about.html My contact if is in my profile if you have any comments or criticism.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  But they bring in undesirable male nerds.
jpb0104 13y ago
Did you guys see this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882352
glomph 13y ago
David Byrne's book Bicycle Diaries has some fantastic analysis of the effects of cars on cities (particularly American ones). I would highly recommend it!
x0054 13y ago
Cars kill density, but they don't kill cities. I live in San Diego, a very car friendly city. I can get to almost any store, restaurant, or shop in 15 minutes or less. The key is medium density city with lot's of freeways. High density is not all that it's cracked up to be.
andrewliebchen 13y ago
For a forum that spends a lot of time talking about disruption with members who I'm sure pride themselves on their rationality, there is a surprising amount of "damn the torpedoes" defense of the status quo here.
kimonos 13y ago
We can use solar powered vehicles instead..
kator 13y ago
I lived most of my life in Los Angeles, having a car was a right of passage. I moved three years ago to New York City and I sold my car (finally) last year. It's amazing how liberating it is, no insurance, parking, gas, maintenance. These things eat into your life and you really don't see it until it's gone.. I'd be glad to never own another car, but if I move again to a place that doesn't support it I guess I'll buy another chunk of metal and watch the quarters fly out the tail pipe..

189 points by Jakob 13y ago

kyrra 13y ago

At this point for a lot of cities, it would require a large amount of infrastructure change. Mass transit in most cities sucks today, so people use cars. To do this right, the city needs to do a massive up-front investment in public transit. And there is no guarantee that this investment will ever pay off.

toomuchtodo 13y ago
Yes, it would require a change in infrastructure. No, it is not necessary for the investment to be done upfront. You quickly ramp up cheap mass transit options (bus service segregated from regular vehicular traffic with dedicated lanes, MUCH cheaper than light rail construction) while using permitting/zoning to phase out car-friendly policies. It won't happen overnight, but its a start.
- chongli 13y ago
  Bus service does not work. People hate buses, no matter how well designed and efficient their routes are. Buses have an extreme social stigma attached to them.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    I love buses. Gives me a chance to read, when I would otherwise be stuck driving.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Unfortunately, just because you hate something doesn't mean we should continue to support policies for wasteful/inefficient transportation.
    - chongli 13y ago
      You know what's wasteful and inefficient? Empty buses driving around all day. My city is full of them!
  - rayiner 13y ago
    It's a catch-22. In most cities, the bus service sucks, but poor people can't afford anything else, so as a result, busses are full of poor people. In New York and Chicago, busses are clean and well-maintained because they serve higher income people and tourists as well. Manhattan is a place where you're just as likely to sit on a bus next to a guy making $1m+/year as some disheveled homeless dude.
  - lovemenot 13y ago
    Reading abut the Google Bus protesters was disappointing. Whatever one's opinion of gentrification, targeting buses seems perverse. I could not discover the protesters' point of contention. Doesn't Google (and other SV companies) already pay the city to use the infrastructure?
jrs99 13y ago
that's why we should make new cities with the infrastructure to support a population with zero cars allowed. And make that city an awesome place to live.
- conjecTech 13y ago
  As a small business owner who sells a physical good, statements like this scare the hell out of me. You have no idea the kind of monopolization and losses of freedom implementing ideas like this would entail. Cars are democratic. They are a cheap, scaleable way of solving the problem of transportation. Kill cars, and you will destroy a lot of entrepreneurship in things that really matter. You will also be hurting those that start with the least most of all.
  - gabemart 13y ago
    Can you explain a little more? It seems on first blush that a no-cars city with good public transport and good support for walking and cycling would be much more democratic than a city where people rely on cars to get to places. Bikes are much cheaper than cars, food is much cheaper than gas. It's much cheaper to take a public transport link to a destination than to take a taxi or rent a car. It seems very counter-intuitive to say "cars are democratic" where then are lot of people who can't afford a car. They also seem much less scalable than the alternatives. I'm lucky enough to live in a city with lots of shops in walking distance of my apartment. There's a discount supermarket 15 minutes away where I buy most of my food. If I lived in a city where all the big supermarkets were in strip malls or commercial estates on the outskirts of the city, I'd have to buy my food at smaller convenience-style stores with much higher prices and a poorer selection of goods.
    - conjecTech 13y ago
      It's hard to argue against his abstract proposition since he didnt really provide an alternative plan, but in general, there are two main factors I'd like to stress. The first is the loss of mobility and its results. One almost universal facet of the alternatives to cars that people suggest is that they limit where you can enter and exit the system. You can't use a train to navigate to anywhere you want to go: you use it to get close and then use some other way of getting the rest of the way. Remove other transit systems, and this will effectively set property values. Want to open a store? Well, if you're an established player with easy access to capital through the investment bank that handled your last merger, than the cost of leasing or purchasing property with reasonable access via transportation is fairly easy. But if you don't, you're probably not going to be able to afford that. You're going to have to locate yourself in a far less accessible location. And the value proposition of your business now has to overcome this difference as well in addition to regular value you would offer. From a consumer standpoint, this means you have fewer alternatives. Things have to be pretty bad with your existing supplier of a good or service for you to switch if doing so is going to entail a higher inconvenience in terms of access. I saw this all the time in Chicago. People could charge a premium beyond what their higher rent would require simply because they knew that you would be reluctant to walk another 15 minutes to get to someone who was charging 10-20% less per item. There are additional fixed costs that would go with the logistical concerns a model like this would entail. How are you going to get things to and from your business? The constructs are going to most likely favor established methods. Say we don't allow cars to drive, but we do decide that we need the infrastructure to allow 18-wheelers to get through, and you can use that method instead. Well now you need a loading dock. Now you either need to pay someone else a premium for hauling it for you or buy an 18-wheeler yourself. You can't simply use the car you were already using to commute to your day job while trying to start this new business. You can't sacrifice additional time to lower the cots. You are effectively confined to hiring other people to do it for you because of the system. In short, it makes the system much more rigid. It leaves fewer feasible alternatives both for the consumer and the provider. It also makes barriers to entry far higher.
asynchronous13 13y ago
I think you mean, "Mass transit in most American cities sucks today".

abduhl 13y ago

This post is a rant backed up with only anecdotal evidence and an enraged author with a penchant for catchy headlines. No solutions are offered because no problem is properly presented.

marcosdumay 13y ago
At the other side, the author presented the less fitting anedocte he came up with, saying "see, even if I try hard to refute the hypothesis, I can't". And it's not an extraordinary hypothesis.

CapitalistCartr 13y ago

I fond our cities profoundly ugly, but cars serve an essential service. I need a flexible, quick means of secure transport. I need to move a variable number of people from 1-4. I often need to bring tens of kilograms of stuff with me. What else can fill the bill around a large metro area (~3 million people)? I would love an alternative, to live in beautiful cities, to walk around the way I can overseas.

jrs99 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City
rayiner 13y ago
Walking + a cart.

tdees40 13y ago

This is easy enough to fix from a policy standpoint: (1) make free parking a taxable benefit for companies (2) tax the hell out of gas/car registration, or at the very least tax it enough to pay for infrastructure (3) no mandated parking minimums in new construction in cities (4) get rid of publicly paid for parking But of course this requires transit alternatives and popular support, which does not exist in places like Atlanta. I live in Orange County, and I bike to work (we have perfect weather and mediocre bike infrastructure), but people love their cars here.

dublinben 13y ago
I think a better alternative for 2 would be congestion pricing for downtown areas. An across the board registration hike would be regressive, and disproportionately affect the rural poor.
- tdees40 13y ago
  Ah yes, even better. But that couldn't even fly in NYC, arguably the place with the least car friendly political environment in the US.

gress 13y ago

The post is right, and even more so for developing world cities that emerged before cars were around. However the post is also naive. Cars are usually much faster, provide much better shelter from the weather, and are much less tiring than trying to lug bags from one place to another on buses or other public transport. They also place far fewer constraints on when you can travel. Of course it's possible to structure one's life so as to deal with all of the issues. I have lived half of my adult life without a car, including 4 years in the SF Bay Area, and I managed. But let's stop pretending that there isn't a trade off. Cars are very very convenient. The key to reducing the need for cars is not just good public transport - it's services that reduce the reliance on traveling to get chores done. Things like grocery deliveries, laundry pickup, and amazon.com. It would be a lot easier to rely solely on public transport if you never had to carry anything.

GuiA 13y ago
Self driving electric cars that people pay for on a subscription model (rather than ownership) are the future I'd like to see. I hope it happens during my lifetime.
- jowiar 13y ago
  Taxis are a reasonable "turking" of this concept.
  - samolang 13y ago
    And zipcar.
    - jowiar 13y ago
      Zipcar is great - I love it. But as far as a "self-driving car network" goes, one of the big advantages is that you don't need to worry about parking on either end. A higher percentage of cars are in the process of getting someone from point A to point B rather than taking up space somewhere.
  - 13y ago

saraid216 13y ago

Eh, IMO, cars are killing democracy, too. I haven't lined up the studies to actually show the causal chain, though. It's something I need to get around to doing.

digitalsushi 13y ago

If most things could be delivered by drones to where you lived, do you think we would space out, or clump together, or stay the same? I think, for me, I could use my car payment on taxi service if I didnt need to commute or do errands, and it would be about the same. Except I wouldnt have a car, something that breaks down.

elhector 13y ago

High correlation with another post in the board: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2013/12/10/why_cul_de_sacs_are_bad_for_your_health_happy_city_by_charles_montgomery.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2013/12/10/why_cul_de_sac... Can be a bit of a catch 22 in today's world, where new cities and developments are created assuming high volume / usage of cars. You can see how dense cities can work very well with very few cars in places like Amsterdam, but there city setup and infrastructure eases walking / biking and is very unfriendly to cars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Amsterdam#Car http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Amsterdam#Car

forrestthewoods 13y ago

Self driving cars my pick for best solution. You can have fewer cars services more people with higher efficiency. It's all wins across the board. I hope the bloggers solution ideas aren't "better public transportation". Public transportation sucks, even in Europe. A pre-requisite to good public transportation is poor infrastructure for private transportation. I view asking for better public transportation as asking for a faster horse. We can do way better than that.

tieTYT 13y ago
> Public transportation sucks, even in Europe. Although I've only visited, I thought the public transportation in France was very good. Those buses move super fast. In America it's common to have to ride a bus for over an hour to get to your destination that's not that far by car standards. Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say this?
Tiktaalik 13y ago
Self driving cars doesn't change much. Supposing that there would exist car sharing systems such that a single car may be used throughout the day by several people, then we could cut back on parking spots, but I'm sure there will be many that own their own self driving car and share it with no one. During morning rush hour the only difference from now would be that commuters could do the crossword puzzle instead of focusing on traffic.
- kjackson2012 13y ago
  Incorrect. If you have self-driving cars, the entire flow of traffic could be much more efficient, virtually eliminating traffic jams. You could drive at the speed limit with a lot smaller distance between cars, etc, packing in a greater density of people without sacrificing speed.
  - Tiktaalik 13y ago
    I think you'll see some gains in efficiency, but negligible compared to how efficiently we can move people via rapid transit. At the end of the day you're still going to be having most often a single person in a large vehicle that takes up a lot of room on the road.

Tiktaalik 13y ago

Car oriented design is not efficient at all for most city trips and we need to dramatically increase funding for alternatives. Alongside directing our infrastructure dollars toward supporting a more balanced mix of travelling options, the most sensible thing we can do is to expose more of the real cost of car oriented infrastructure to the end consumer via road fees, bridge tolls and ending free parking.

Anechoic 13y ago

FYI, the author of that post address self-driving cars in his next post: http://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/self-driving-cars-freedom-or-more-of-the-same/ http://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/self-driv...

jstalin 13y ago
That betrays the basic attitude of these anti-car folks. It's not the cars, but the freedom to live where you want that they detest.
- cylinder 13y ago
  They're free to live where they want. Just stop expecting the rest of us to pay for the ever-expanding roads and freeways that they feel entitled to reach them.
- api 13y ago
  They also detest the democratization of wealth, which invariably results in some form of "sprawl." It's either the horizontal sprawl of endless little palaces of Versailles with their little lawns, or it's the vertical sprawl of monstrous energy-sucking megastructures full of luxury condominiums. But in either case the result of democratized wealth does not give fellatio to agrarian-utopian fantasies.
- Tiktaalik 13y ago
  People can live where they want, but I'm critical of having to subsidize the excessive amount of infrastructure necessary for the lifestyle choice of unnecessarily travelling very large distances. For me it's even worse because I live in a region where the terrain requires a lot of bridges.
  - DannyBee 13y ago
    "but I'm critical of having to subsidize the excessive amount of infrastructure necessary for the lifestyle choice of unnecessarily travelling very large distances" Why choose this choice as the the line in the sand? Are you also critical of having to subsidize the excessive amount of infrastructure necessary for the lifestyle choice of living in a strictly large than necessary place, for example? Because you subsidize that to a large degree too. Everyone who has a larger dining room because they have made the lifestyle choice of wanting to host dinner parties. Or large kitchens. Large bedrooms. Large yards. You name it. It's all strictly unnecessary, and all lifestyle choice. Among other subsidies, all of it takes up valuable space that could be given to the public, or something else done with it. It requires more infrastructure - greater water supplies, greater sanitation requirements, power supplies, gas supplies, what have you. Yet we subsidize this just the same as you are paying for roads, you are just paying for it in different places. In truth, we subsidize a large number of lifestyle choices that impact infrastructure (having kids, riding bikes, heck, even buying groceries, you name it). From what I can tell, it just seems some people are upset that they subsidies don't always match whatever their particular ideology of how cities should be built is. Just remember there really is no "better" or "worse", when it comes to lifestyle choices, just different (you may impose moral judgements on lifestyle choices depending on ideology and viewpoint of purpose of society, but the truly vast majority of these moral judgements are not universally shared)

justinsb 13y ago

If self-driving cars become a reality, it is interesting to think of what happens to all this space & infrastructure. If the model is that we don't own cars, but rather share them like taxis, then there is no need for parking: the car will just drop you and go to its next trip. If the model is that we own our self-driving cars, it may be that they can be parked at much greater distances (10+ miles) from where we spend time (in much denser structures than today). We can likely eliminate parking from inner cities, both garages and roadside parking. If we can design roads and grids for computers and not humans, perhaps we can make them much efficient by trading off simplicity. Could we have a complex system of mostly one-way streets? What interests me is that not just parking garages go away, but what today is a four-lane-width road (with two lanes dedicated to parking) may become a single-lane one-way street. The sidewalk - which used to be 20% of the space - is now 80% of the space. Looking around busy cities, and trying to imagine what it will look like post-self-driving car, is IMHO mind-blowing.

sliverstorm 13y ago
- Self-driving cars will still need to park at off-peak times. Unless they just keep driving in circles. - Having your car park 10 miles away from you after every trip adds some forty miles of travel per commute. That's forty miles of fuel and forty miles of maintenance, every day. - I'm also not thrilled about the prospect of already-dense cities shrinking streets to one lane. We call them concrete jungles now- can you imagine if all the roads were only 15 feet across? Goodbye, sky.
- justinsb 13y ago
  Definitely valid points! Personally, I hope that we end up with a shared-ownership model, and that the cars do park 10+ miles away if they are idle, but that this is amortized across a large number of commutes. I also hope that we use the liberated space for sidewalks and green spaces, not for more buildings. Small changes though (whether we own or share our cars, planning policies on urban parking & freed up lanes) will have a huge effect...
- GuiA 13y ago
  - Self-driving cars will still need to park at off-peak times. Unless they just keep driving in circles. "they can be parked at much greater distances (10+ miles) from where we spend time, in much denser structures than today" - Having your car park 10 miles away from you after every trip adds some forty miles of travel per commute. That's forty miles of fuel and forty miles of maintenance, every day. Only if we map 1 car to 1 person. Of course that'd be completely unoptimized - people wouldn't own car, but rather have a "subscription" where they can get a car dispatched at any time (à la Uber). Cars would only park 10 miles away at truly off peak hours; the rest of the time they'd go to service some other customer. - I'm also not thrilled about the prospect of already-dense cities shrinking streets to one lane. We call them concrete jungles now- can you imagine if all the roads were only 15 feet across? Goodbye, sky. As the previous poster said, the extra space would go to sidewalks. Outside patios, trees, grass, parks... the things we could do would be amazing. Some older European cities from pre-car eras are built like that, and it's wonderful.

revelation 13y ago

I think what we need are exponential tolls based on distance to city center or density of pedestrian traffic around. I couldn't care less about cars on streets dedicated for them, but everywhere else they need to piss off and quickly. They are death machines.

api 13y ago

I have lived in both car-dependent and transit-based places, and can see advantages to both. Given that the advantages of transit are commonly discussed these days, I thought I'd give some of the advantages of cars. (1) Cars don't have schedules. You can just jump in your car and go any time of day or night. Cars also don't stop running at 2am, while most transit systems do. (2) Cars permit sprawl. Sprawl has been bashed to hell and back for some justifiable reasons, but it has one big advantage: it breaks the backs of real estate markets. Sprawling car-dependent regions are much safer from the real estate hyperinflation that plagues cities that are either transit-based or geographically constrained. Bubbles of local real estate inflation surround transit hot spots, creating a two-tier society in which ease of transportation is exponentially (not linearly, as with cars) correlated to income. The poor get loooooong bus->train commutes while the wealthy get fast train->train commutes. (3) Cars can haul stuff, which gets increasingly important when you have children. Pretty much everything about the suburbs seems idiotic until you have kids, then it seems reasonable. I can't stress #2 enough. Compare the Los Angeles metro area to the San Francisco bay. The former is a largely car-based sprawling metropolis, while the latter is partly transit-based and also geographically constrained (which for the market does the same thing as transit-dependence). In the LA metro area there are many neighborhoods where poor and working class people can afford to live. In the Bay Area you're spending $3000/month for a crack den. Everyone but professionals and the rich are completely priced out of all but the absolute worst neighborhoods, or are pushed out to the fringes with the longest commutes. It's funny that transit is often cited as good from an equality point of view as it gives everyone access to mobility without requiring car ownership, but the real estate inflation that it engenders negates this IMHO.

StaceyEC 13y ago
Great insight.

jseliger 13y ago

If you're interested in this topic, Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City are both worth reading. The former explains how "free" parking isn't really free and how it distorts a lot of behavior, and the latter is about what cities are good for and how to build healthy cities in general. Personally, I wonder why people would want to own a car if they can avoid it: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/why-would-you-want-to-own-a-car-if-you-could-avoid-it/ https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/why-would-you-want... , but that may be a minority viewpoint.

zalew 13y ago
> The High Cost of Free Parking convince me that 800 pages is worth it (reviews so far haven't).
- GuiA 13y ago
  They're not worth it. You should spend the time that it would take you to read this book doing some high yield activity instead, like trading stocks or growth hacking your startup. Anything less than that just isn't worth the trouble.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - ars_technician 13y ago
    Your sarcasm implies that he doesn't want to put effort into reading what appears to be a bad book because it doesn't have a return, which is a crappy assumption. People have a limited amount of time, and there are far more good books than any one person could read, let alone bad books.
    - GuiA 13y ago
      At least one person who is not the author seems to have liked this book, so I challenge the assumption that it "appears to be a bad book". And... it's a book, dude. You can check it out from the library or buy it used for ten bucks and stop reading it if you don't like it; that's not going to ruin your life. If you have enough time to reply to my dumb comments on HN, you must certainly have the time to start reading the book for 30 minutes and decide if it's worth continuing or not :)

samatman 13y ago

In the East Bay, I ride a 3000w electric scooter. A kWh of power is a good days ride, commute, shopping and socializing (I tend to charge twice a day, because I can). Please consider joining me: the more scooters there are the safer we all get to be. It's fun! When you get going fast, you can't even hear the motor, just the wind.

tootie 13y ago

New York City recently launched it's CitiBike program and set up bike racks in spots that used to be reserved for street parking and you should have seen people flipping out despite the fact that less than 50% of us actually own cars. And let's not forget about the amount of space we dedicate cars being able to move around.

conjecTech 13y ago

As a life long ATLien, I want to know when Atlanta was walkable, and if it could have even been considered the same city as it is now. For those of you who don't know, the population of metro Atlanta more than doubled between 1990 and 2010. Yes, all types of transportation suck in Atlanta, but roads and cars are an extensible, scaleable solution with most of the costs being marginal as opposed to fixed, meaning additional demand can be handled easily. Like others have noted, you offered no real solutions to that problem. MARTA is kind of a joke of a system for anyone that values their time. A trip on MARTA will take about twice the time it would take to drive in a car. At the average commuter distance, you recoup the cost of buying a $5,000 car in a year if you value your time at minimum wage. If you actually care about fixing the problem, fix the economics of alternatives. Don't just go about complaining about the fact that you don't like not being able to walk where you want to go, suggest solutions. And please try to consider this problem outside of the perspective of being a student, because that honestly seems to be the only perspective you've given to this. A lot of the vehicles you see in Atlanta are work vehicles, and that mobility makes a lot of things possible that you probably are a fan of. You may want to consider the dynamics of the local economy further. Honestly, I have to say this article isn't up to the standards I'd expect of a fellow Tech student, particularly a PhD candidate. You are very well intentioned and undoubtedly intelligent, but simply pointing out what everyone knows isn't very helpful. I'll be interested to see the future posts you promised.

bhavvik 13y ago

Before cars invaded Ahmedabad, India, two wheelers and rickshaws were primary modes of transportation for longer distances. Walking and bicycles were used for shorter distances.. Cars were used on occasions.. Traffic issues were non-existent. People starting using cars as primary mode of transportation because everyone else started doing it.. meaning using two wheelers became less safe, more car traffic, increased pollution effects, etc. Idea is to go back to using cars as only ocassional mode of transportation and for that one option is govt helps reduce traffic for two wheelers/rickshaws/bicycles.. Dedicated lanes for these would help.

6d0debc071 13y ago

Do people actually want to live in cities, how many of them? - (and whatever for?) One narrative here goes, there are lots of cars, so it creates an unfriendly environment, so people have to live outside the city and have cars. But that narrative doesn't make sense for how the cars got there in the first place. Another narrative goes: cars enabled people to move about quickly, they enjoyed this. One manifestation of this ability was to escape from cities and still get to work. Thus carparks and reasonably fast roads. # Or maybe people just enjoyed moving about quickly even over relatively small distances and it snowballed For example, I live about five miles away from where I used to work. I could spend 10 minutes walking to the nearest busstop, 15 minutes waiting for that bus, another 10-15 minutes getting to the busstop in town, another 10-15 minutes waiting for the next bus to work, another half hour or so while the bus drives there (takes longer because of stops). Or I could just get in the car and be there in 16-20 minutes. An hour and a half vs 16-20 minutes. And this isn't a bad place for public transport. Buses, on average, every 10-15 minutes is pretty good. It just adds up. Heck, given a couple of hours I could probably walk there. It's far from clear that it makes sense, even under generalised utility, to agree with the author's desire to make cities better places to live at the potential cost to people who may prefer to live elsewhere and drive.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
You could also bike there in 30 minutes and get some excercise as a bonus.

Xylakant 13y ago

I'm genuinely curious: Here in germany we have car-sharing offers that allow you to pick up a car on the street, ride it to where you want to go and then leave it parked there in the larger cities. The fee is usually about half of the fee of a cab. Then there's the same for bicycles. The combination of public transport and car-sharing in berlin is awesome, at least in the city center: I go most ways by public transport and then grab a car or bike if I need to. If I really need to travel long distance by car, I get a rental and I'm coming out ahead financially, even if I throw in the occasional taxi ride because it's late and I'm lazy. From the posts here I get the impression that this doesn't exist in the US - and I can't imagine that.

dustcoin 13y ago
What you are describing sounds like https://www.car2go.com https://www.car2go.com, which is available in some US cities.
- gregl 13y ago
  Which just happens to be a German company :) We have it in Toronto and it's super useful sometimes to quickly get somewhere within the downtown when transit would be slower and cabs more expensive.
jes5199 13y ago
A handful of cities in the US have in the last few years gotten a service called car2go, which is exactly what you describe. It's not available in the biggest cities, though. A few cities are also starting to have bicycle-sharing services. It's just not very common, yet.

was_hellbanned 13y ago

I walked around Tokyo marveling at the infrastructure. Fully enclosed (or perhaps 3/4 enclosed) freeways that explode out of the ground, split off to surface streets, and arch up through the sky and around corners. Well-engineered, rubberized mounting systems and the enclosure mean you only heard the faintest hint of cars rocketing by at speed. Highways branching to high-capacity, multi-lane surface streets, which further branch into narrow neighborhood streets (similar to an alley in the US) meant that pedestrian traffic was quite safe, and generally well-respected. By contrast, American cities have a couple of arterial freeways, a massive grid of wide-yet-low-capacity surface streets, and neighborhood streets that people speed through in an effort to shave seconds off their commute. And when they get to work, they park in huge parking lots, instead of stacked parking structures (ideally under the target building itself). American transportation infrastructure is terrible.

deegles 13y ago
I think the road infrastructure pales in comparison to the subway/rail system. The volume of people it moves is incredible. Also remember that it's all built in an earthquake-prone area!
- was_hellbanned 13y ago
  I didn't even bother getting into the rail system, since I assume everyone realizes how advanced it is. I really wanted to put this in though: I've watched Shinkansen pull into the switchyard at night to "go to bed". It's quiet. Here's a bullet train, cruising into a rail yard pretty much in the middle of a neighborhood, idling along after midnight, and you only hear a very muffled motor as it glides by. Compare that to America, where our trains seem to be built solely to meet basic load requirements, and where they honk four times (as long or short as they want) before every crossing that's not guarded with quad-gates.
lovemenot 13y ago
Quite so. Furthermore, the preponderance of bicycle-riding and perhaps the best public transport network in the world makes Tokyo, in some ways, a role model for urban design. Outside of the big cities　in Japan though, you see the same infrastructure that characterises the US: strip malls and the like. Population density seems to be the major driver and, perhaps contentiously, willingness to subsume one's own freedoms to the common good is a secondary one.

alexeisadeski3 13y ago

Wonder when the liberals will wake up and smell the coffee: Private busses are the miracle solution to public transport.

wh-uws 13y ago
Trying to be as non promotional as possible here. With my startup I'm working on this problem aiming to make easily setting up private transport a reality. You can check out my vision here. http://www.driveless.co/about.html http://www.driveless.co/about.html My contact if is in my profile if you have any comments or criticism.
yetanotherphd 13y ago
But they bring in undesirable male nerds.

jpb0104 13y ago

Did you guys see this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882352

glomph 13y ago

David Byrne's book Bicycle Diaries has some fantastic analysis of the effects of cars on cities (particularly American ones). I would highly recommend it!

x0054 13y ago

Cars kill density, but they don't kill cities. I live in San Diego, a very car friendly city. I can get to almost any store, restaurant, or shop in 15 minutes or less. The key is medium density city with lot's of freeways. High density is not all that it's cracked up to be.

andrewliebchen 13y ago

For a forum that spends a lot of time talking about disruption with members who I'm sure pride themselves on their rationality, there is a surprising amount of "damn the torpedoes" defense of the status quo here.

kimonos 13y ago

We can use solar powered vehicles instead..

kator 13y ago

I lived most of my life in Los Angeles, having a car was a right of passage. I moved three years ago to New York City and I sold my car (finally) last year. It's amazing how liberating it is, no insurance, parking, gas, maintenance. These things eat into your life and you really don't see it until it's gone.. I'd be glad to never own another car, but if I move again to a place that doesn't support it I guess I'll buy another chunk of metal and watch the quarters fly out the tail pipe..