The lowest common denominator? I don't own a car, and I'm sure many other people in my city don't either, so no: it's not the lowest common denominator for us: walking is.
Cars are themselves very expensive and require a massive amount of infrastructure to function. Look around a city and think of all the cars, streets, parking lots, highways, etc, used for cars. Then think how that all impacts any other mode of transportation other than vehicles. Go deeper and imagine a world without those cars - what to do with all this new-found space?
The words you're looking for is, "status quo". Cars are on the, "status quo" pedestal. They've replaced everything else because their massively profitable to produce. Damn the long-trail environmental cost of them, or how they've influenced the design of our modern cities.
That's the most ridiculous justification I've heard for anything. A thousand dollar piece of toilet paper is also massively profitable to produce, but nobody would buy it. People buy cars because they are useful.
If you think most people don't enjoy the freedom they get from owning a car, you are living in a bubble. I work with people that could take the caltrain and get to work faster, but they still choose their car because of the flexibility in schedule and destinations it gives them.
Also, walking is not the lowest common denominator if you have a job far away, have small children, or have a disability.
I grew up in a suburb of Chicago. I could walk to two grocery stores, but each took 30 minutes each way. I also grew up across from both my grade and middle school, a horse ranch, a gym, and a massive park.
I loved my childhood because we could play full field soccer games, rugby, football (American), etc. However, if my parents wanted to get anything you had to drive.
Most people on HN don't appear to realize what it's like growing up or living outside of the west or east coasts of the U.S. or Europe. It's not that it was built for cars, it was built for farms and agriculture, nothing is wrong with that either.
We had a forest behind our house, a soccer field where we also played bandy in the winters, 10 minutes walk to the horse range, a golf course that also was used for cross country skiing in the winters, 5 minutes to the commuter train that took you to the city center in 15 minutes, lakes we swam in the summers and ice-skated in the winters. Markets for food within easy walking distance and a decent mall within easy bicycle distance. I bicycled everywhere when I didn't use public transport. I didn't even bother to get a drivers licence until I was a bit over 30, and the only reason I got it then was because I was planning some long holidays in the US. You don't need to center you society around cars and driving to have a very high and pleasant standard of living.
Currently in Brazil the laws about import cars are extremely draconian, and taxes are overall sky high, crappy local made cars are frequently 2 times the EU or US price of the same, but higher quality model.
People still get in terrible debts, paying sometimes interest that totals several times the principal, to buy cars anyway, not because they are useful, but because frequently they are the only choice. For example in Rio de Janeiro, because of the Olympics, the government deliberately canceled public transportation routes connecting poor areas to the touristic areas, forcing people of poor areas to use cars, specially because parts of the route are impossible to cross on foot (mountains with no hiking trails, with the passage being road tunnels)
Or that for the world cup, the government declined several train proposals in favour of making "light train over road" routes, where you just build gigantic roads on pillars and place buses on them.
The entire government apparatus spent decades and untold fortunes making the car the fast and flexible option. We now have the benefit of hindsight that tells us it was a massively inefficient use of public funds.
Think about how much a car costs to buy and own (purchasing, upkeep, insurance, gas, parking, storage) - then put a price on that in hours you work a year. I bet it's a lot! Maybe weeks out of every year. Now, think of not having to work those days, because you don't have car, and those expenses do not apply to you.
What would you do with all this time you know have? So many things! I can't even imagine what to do first!
Cars enable convenience, not flexibility. But it comes at a huge price: a financial price, an environmental price, and a huge price on the standard of living in the negative direction - not just for people living in fancy cities: the oil field worker, the car factory worker, the people living in third world countries mining some of those conflict materials you all need. There's no free lunch.
You can argue about a single car, and how much convenient it is for the individual, but we're talking about something we've produced in the hundreds of millions. There's huge effects of this invention.
You know what happens to cars and cities? People live far away from their jobs. Then they talk about their hellish commute. And how much gas costs. And how their neighborhood is boring. And how there's not parking. And how the car needs to go into the shop. And on and on and on. These may all be transparent to you, but without a car, I hear it all the time, and I'm happy - so very happy to be off that spinning wheel.
Having lived in Europe a little while (had to do something with all that free time!), intelligent, forward-thinking people, living in cities without cars, because these cities were designed before cars. Other options are created, like public transportation system (and bike sharing schemes) that don't have whatever stigma they have in the states.
I don't know for this topic if I'm willing to trade "flexibility" for a massive amount of complexity.
My annual maintenance costs + insurance + licensing on my 15 year old car are about the same cost as renting a car for two days.
I think you vastly overestimate the cost of owning an older car.
Im also not sure you understand the term flexibility in the way most people do. Right now (as in within 10 minutes), I can be on my way up to Lake Tahoe or off to Yosemite. There is no other form of transportation that can work that quickly. Even with an amazing rail and bus network, you are beholden to the schedule and the overhead of local transit to the long distance station. With public transportation your life is dictated by the schedule of the transit, with a car you just leave whenever you feel like it.
The bigger question is - why is it strictly necessarily to have to use it for ten minutes - just to get milk?
And while most places in the US simply do not have it, the solution to public transportation scheduling is that they run so frequently no one bothers to check the schedule. This is, admittedly, a chicken-or-the-egg problem in most US cities, although some are starting to get it.
Great if you live on a route popular enough that they do that. You are screwed otherwise. Even if you do live on a popular route, it also doesn't solve the problem if you want to go somewhere unpopular.
>I do not find it particularly urgent to make long-distance trips - presumably for leisure - within ten minutes of making the decision.
Good for you, but not that relevant for people that do. Waking up Saturday morning and deciding to drive out to a destination like this, spend the night, and then drive back the next day is not considered unreasonable.
>The bigger question is - why is it strictly necessarily to have to use it for ten minutes - just to get milk?
Because I need milk for a recipe I just found online and I don't want to wait 15 minutes for the next train, ride for 10 minutes, shop for 5 minutes, wait 15 minutes for the return train, and then ride for 10 minutes. And those times even generously assume I live right on a stop and there is a store right on a stop.
I was alluding to the fact that it a circular problem - frequent routes (within reason) become popular routes.
>it also doesn't solve the problem if you want to go somewhere unpopular.
The vast majority of trips are to popular locations, by definition. Everyone can still use cars for unpopular destinations.
>Waking up Saturday morning and deciding to drive out to a destination like this
One can wake up in the morning and decide to take a weekend trip without a car. The difference? It will take probably about an hour to get underway.
Meanwhile, a person in an urban area can have all of these car advantages for infrequent uses such as weekend trips or going somewhere unpopular with far less expense by having a Zipcar account.
Because I need milk for a recipe I just found online and I don't want to wait 15 minutes for the next train
Your perspective is very narrow. I asked why you should have to drive to get milk, your response is because you don't want to take a train to get milk.
There is a far simpler option than either of those.
You may want to consider that other people may make their choices for reasons they personally find compelling in the context of their individual lives.
What many people are realizing is that cars should not be the be-all and end-all of urban design in the US.
The United States has a population density of 35 people/km2.
San Francisco has a population density of 7,124 people/km^2.
I'm not sure what point you were trying to make, but I don't think anybody really wants to plan the rural areas of the US in the image of Hong Kong.
For a long time I did not want a car but when children came, we have bought it and it help our mobility a lot, if you have full car, it is also cheaper travel than paying tickets for everybody. For a travel inside a city I still use public transport wherever I can as it is the fastest and most green way to get around.
If you don't live inside a major city, or if you live in a car-friendly area, parking and storing your vehicle is very cheap - often free. Parking and insurance combined may be less than $200/month.
When you have a family, or a business group, traveling by car has the added advantage that the rest of the group is unable to become separated from you along the way. Sorry to sound tautological or pedantic, but it's an often-overlooked point. It's almost like putting your family into a ZIP file - on arrival, everyone will still be in the car, nobody will get lost on the way or take the wrong turn. Like young classmates holding a rope on school outings.
I also lived in Paris, where I used public transports exclusively. I hadn't a car.
Honestly, in both cases, there is no free lunch. In Paris, most people don't have a car, but yet they still live far away from their jobs and have hellish commute.
I agree that cars bring a lot of complexity, but stuffing all people in the same area also bring its share of complexity.
I own a reliable econo-box that I bought years ago. Maintenance is almost nil, parking is less time than it'd take me to use public transit (which is relatively bad where I live), and underground parking comes with my condo.
I am a huge advocate of public transit, but I'll say that cars are pretty nice.
#canyousayconflictofinterest?
Linky: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con...
In the US, personally owned vehicles are critical for sprawling suburbs and rural life. It is a big country with low density. Cars should not be necessary in the big city. Those that are designed well make it possible to live without a car. In much of America, it is quite challenging to live without a car. This is partly due to choices we have made, not because it had to be that way.
When everyone owns a car, everyone needs one, cars become an instrument of dependence rather than freedom.
Markets are a great way of finding 'the best' solution to problems like this, but they aren't allowed to function any more in most cities in the US because of the amount of rules and regulations about what can be built where.
No, they're not. I've seen the markets in action, and one ends up with shopping malls surrounded by four-lane streets with no crosswalks. As the my sibling comment points out, markets are great for maximizing incoming for the stores leasing space in the malls. One prime example I'm thinking of was 25 years ago, let's go to Google's sat view and see if much has changed...nope, looks like it's just as car-centric as it was when I lived there.
Now one can go all "no true Scotsman" on me, what with regulation and all, but there has been regulation long before either of us were born so one might as well argue that are no true markets because the sky is blue. It also ignores the fact that folks like the Simons (owners of malls across the U. S.) might have a little hand in how those regulations get written. What regulation has brought about in cities like Redmond is that if you're building streets, you're building them for everyone so there will be sidewalks and bike lanes.
That's almost never "the market" in action. For one thing, street design is obviously under the purview of the local (and possibly state and federal) department of transportation, not private developers. Plus, local zoning regulations usually have minimum parking requirements that strongly incentivize those kinds of car-centric shopping malls. It's hard to build a pedestrian-friendly area if the law says you need to use a ton of space (often more space than is used for the actual buildings) for car parking.
> Now one can go all "no true Scotsman" on me
It's not "no true scotsman", it's simply the truth that it's the government pushing car-centric design. Now, in some cases the market might ALSO want car-centric design, but it's hard to tease that out when the rule of law is so strong to begin with.
You should look up the zoning codes in your city, as well as a zoning map. They are incredibly detailed, and extremely prescriptive. What we have in the US is very far from a market-based solution!
And those rules and regulations absolutely have worsened with time. Look at cities from 100 years ago, how they had nice downtowns where people could walk around (and also drive, but slowly) and they were relatively dense.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-p...
This is an official map of the city where I live: http://i.imgur.com/N0X8HTh.png (Screenshot of http://ims.kiel.de/extern/kielmaps/?view=stpl&coords=3257435... with the layer for zoning enabled and the layers for PoIs disabled)
Purple are the areas for which any zoning restrictions at all exist – in the rest, no zoning regulations exist, as long as you follow normal building law, and get a normal permit, you can build what you want, skyscraper or single family home.
You can visit the specific plans for each area by going to , for example, http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/1008.pdf (this for the area marked as 1008 in above map).
Sometimes they look like this: http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/919a.pdf (Very restrictive new post-2005 development, only terraced housing, single family housing, and some small apartment buildings), or sometimes they look like http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/907.pdf (left half is "mixed use", right half is a shooting area), but sometimes they have no regulation at all except specifying "have around 40% mixed use, mkay?". Or even like this http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/919c-1.pdf where there are some dotted arrows with the label "foot paths", kinda showing where maybe someday foot paths will be made (IRL they were made completely differently, after demand has been evaluated based on where people walk the grass down)
This is probably a far better mix than the overly restrictive situation in the US – regulations are good when they help consumers, small businesses, or to keep the market balanced, but regulations to help developers make profit are often a bad idea.
Generally, the largest difference is that we just zone 90% of what we zone as mixed use, and let the market decide what it’ll be.
Obviously mass transit can help if it is reliable, cheap, and expansively deployed in the city, but that's not a typical case in the US. Otherwise you're going to have to accommodate cars, and lots of them. That means big fast busy roads that are unfriendly to pedestrians.
Also, it's nothing for me to bike 5 miles to go somewhere by myself, but if I have to bring my 3 year old twins along and then haul several kilos of groceries or other heavy/bulky items back that bike ride starts to look rather impractical.
People absolutely do live downtown. Indeed, one of the biggest trends in housing is people moving back in to downtowns.
> It doesn't make sense to make a walking mall in an area where few people will live in walking distance.
So why all the zoning regulations to forbid it? Markets generally won't build where it doesn't make sense. So let them do their job.
> "big fast busy roads"
You can't build your way out of congestion: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/11/californias-dot-admit...
As for the zoning question, it's probably the result of busybody town governments trying to control every aspect of the city lest some developer ruin their perfect vision of the city. I can guarantee that if you propose to build a big shopping complex in the middle of the city you will have people out to protest for all kinds of reasons. They will protest because it will raise their land values (and taxes) too much and force them to move. They will protest because it will bring in people and ruin their "quiet" neighborhood. They will protest because it will affect local water prices. This is how a lot of regulation gets started, because someone is trying to prevent something from happening to their backyard.
There are legitimate complaints, I think - no one wants a pig offal disposal site next door in their residential neighborhood. But we've gone way overboard in letting zoning dictate what can go where.
> They are not a typical case.
But they absolutely are on YC's radar, because San Fran and the bay area in general are ground zero for the housing crisis in those kinds of desirable places.
...assuming perfect knowledge and the absence of externalities, either of cost or benefit, since (assuming perfect knowledge of costs and benefits) markets optimize the net utility of the direct participants in each exchange, but not net social utility (because externalities are ignored.)
In the absence of externalities, this should be obvious. And in the presence of externalities, I did not claim that markets optimize either net social utility or net individual utility. I claimed only that markets work at least as well as any other solution (and that government regulation works worse, on average).
As far as your specific example, modern advertising, is concerned, I'm not clear about whether you think externalities are significant in this case or not.
From a post from davidw further down: You should look up the zoning codes in your city, as well as a zoning map.
I'll take you up on that, as it's been ages since I last did, and I don't recall having done so to any great detail for my adopted city of Redmond. And I get the impression that you might be a little more recently informed than I, so I should get caught up in the conversation. :-)
If someone can make money by building a store, that's great, what's wrong with it?
Zoning should be about keeping truly noxious activities away from residential areas, not about keeping a corner store away from where people could possibly walk to it.
The net often gets cast too widely though - so that the corners stores can't be built either.
I live in a quiet mostly rural neighborhood. I wouldn't object to a corner store replacing the nearest house. I would object to the house and all of its land getting cleared to drop a home depot in.
Unfortunately, zoning regulations prohibit both - as if there were no difference between them.
There can be plenty of things wrong with it. I don't subscribe to the idea that whatever makes money is instantly the best thing.
And I never said that I want to keep corner stores away from where people could walk to it. I said that leaving everything up to the "free market" doesn't always yield the best solution for everyone. It only yields the most profitable solution for those with the money.
That's currently what we have; nothing at all resembling a free market where you can buy a piece of property and more or less do what you want with it. The rules and regulations in place are absolutely about enshrining the car-centric city.
With a more market-oriented solution, some people could have their "burbs" and others could have other kinds of housing and neighborhoods.
Developers generally aren't the ones pushing for restrictive zoning laws, residents are. For decades Americans have lived under the impression that businesses near homes is somehow a corrupting influence, and that putting businesses far from homes is somehow a feature and not a bug.
The current suburban landscape in America is the result of both overzealous urban planners, too eager to create a magnum opus of central planning, and the residents who eagerly bought into the concept believing that the best life is a carefully manicured, highly restrictive one.
This is also why I'm skeptical of YC's thing here - this smells lot like how these misadventures in central planning have begun in the past. Sam's thought elsewhere about relocating startups to help bootstrap the new city's economy is also a bit disconcerting - these exist, they're called company towns, and they tend to be economically fragile (all non-diverse economies are) and good examples of central planning run amok.
I sincerely hope anyone applying to this is very well versed in urban planning and its history world-wide, because there have been many misadventures in planning, and those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
I think this is one of the most insightful comments here vis a vis YC's plans, and it's one of the reasons I'm in the "markets" camp. I know I'd prefer to see more mixed-use, bike/pedestrian friendly cities, but ultimately I'm wary of even my own "plans" and think the freedom to have people doing different things, and let cities evolve naturally beats even the best of plans.
Very, very economically efficient with huge economic diversity and competition, but nonetheless unpleasant (and unsafe!) in many ways.
Complete freedom is likely not the right answer, but neither is the extremely prescriptive type of planning that has dominated American cities since the 50s, the type that Jane Jacobs rails against in her famous book.
Oddly enough we were really good at this between the late 1800s and early 1900s. The places in America that people continue to enjoy being (and now have become enormously unaffordable) have almost all come of age in that era. I'm still not entirely sure what the x-factor was, but part of it was probably a more "gardener/enabler" philosophy to urban planning than the "prescriptivist/masterpiece" thought that dominates now.
Planning in many places in that era was more about setting the foundations for the market to grow productively, rather than monumental projects designed to micromanage the conditions of every day life. See for example the Commissioner's Plan of 1811 in NYC.
I agree with you completely: I'm not a 'markets' guy because I think they're the answer to all problems all the time, but because I think in this case we could use more of them.
Back then there was no metro, there was a sea of private jitneys and buses fighting each other for bus stops. Traffic safety was utter shit.
The government had minimal involvement in food safety. Private "certifiers" sprung up to plug the gap, but piracy of food safety certification stamps was rampant, and the whole having to check the packaging to see if some product was certified safe by your preferred certification provider was a persistent stressor.
Building codes technically existed but enforcement was non-existent. Partial building collapses were common. The skies were a tangle of wires running overhead from competing TV, phone, and other companies, each of which needed their own set of last-mile infrastructure. A lot of it was poorly installed, accidental electrocutions weren't uncommon. It was all kind of Blade Runner-esque in hindsight.
The way I see it, I lived in the libertarian paradise some HNers dream of creating, and it wasn't really all it was cracked up to be.
Absolutely. I remember way back when there was discussion of what to do with the huge plot of land north of us. Corner store, maybe? The local paper quoted someone in the neighborhood, "who's going to walk to the store in the rain (which a suburban of Seattle gets a bit of)?" Umm, maybe all of the people I see out walking when I'm walking the dogs in the dead of December in the dark and the pouring rain? Back to California with you Mr. NIMBY, the rest of us deal with walking in the rain just fine.
But that's probably the guy that shows up to zoning meetings and I'm...not. Yes, I'm lazy and yes, I should fix that.
I'm not talking about "libertopia" here, so yeah, I think government has a role. Just that that role in terms of zoning should be radically shrunk.
Your statement is only true for low speed roads. At higher speeds, it is impossible or unsafe for anyone to use the road unless they are also going at an equally high speed.
So in practice, cars do NOT function as a lowest common denominator, but actively drive out other means of transportation because the roads they prefer -- high speed roads -- cannot be safely used by pedestrians or cyclists!
There's a bigger issue here. Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house?
I have lived carless and had to make many independent trips per week to buy food. Being able to do it all at once is an enormous upgrade to quality of life.
- Carried the bags
- Used a backpack
- Used a push-cart (can carry groceries for 5 people for a week)
- Biked (with panniers)
- Biked (with a trailer -- can carry groceries for 10 people for a week)
- Jogged, when I just needed something small on short notice for a cooking project!
https://www.amazon.com/Whitmor-6318-2678-Deluxe-Rolling-Util...
They do make bigger ones, but much bigger and you're better off with a second person.
> Being able to do it all at once is an enormous upgrade to quality of life.
Another perspective, a ten minute walk a few times a week is much better for quality of health (therefore life) than taking a car everywhere.
Of course, I don't have kids and am generally not a very busy person, so it might not work for everyone.
We mostly walked or biked to the local grocery store in Italy. It led to more fresh food, as you buy stuff in smaller quantities and eat it right away. A large backpack is fine for moving stuff. It worked for our family of 4.
You can't eat when you're hungry, because you don't keep food at home.
A huge portion of your week is suddenly devoted to shuttling back and forth between home and the grocery store.
And you think that's not a massive inconvenience?
In a surburb, you spend some time making a shopping list to ensure you don't forget something, drive to the store, spend at least 30 minutes getting everything (it takes at least 5 minutes to walk from one end of the store to another), spend time waiting in line and checking out, drive back, unpack, et cetera. The whole process takes about 2 hours.
Which is the massive inconvenience?
Apart from that, though, almost anything that you can easily plan out and do in bulk is going to out-efficiency something done in smaller iterations involving a lot of repeated steps (going in, walking around, checking out, etc.).
When we go shopping on the weekends, we mostly buy for the entire week. We buy quantities of food that can make plenty of leftovers and buy water/soft drinks by the cases that last several weeks. We try to make the process as efficient as possible and we could stop by the store more often since it's close - but that would waste a lot of efficiency.
That's why we just drink tap water, or water with syrup if you like something sweet (a bottle of syrup lasts a week). It's a lot cheaper, too.
Not always. When I cycle or catch the bus home, I pop into the shops near my house, grab some stuff I need, and then continue on the way. Or I grab stuff at the supermarket near work, and cycle home with it in a bag.
Now I don't need to plan a big trip. I am already traveling to go home.
We're not European, we're not going to be European...ever. We just don't "pop in" to some market while we're walking by. We pop-in while we're driving by or we plan to drive 5 minutes to an awesome supermarket.
Just stop this constant crap about walking and "only if we're like some European village" crap that will never happen in America.
It happens a lot in New York City, and other dense urban areas in the US.
Hackers are anti-establishment! Hackers are not conformists that defer to government minders!
Try reading Louis Hyman's "Debtor Nation," particularly the bits on FHA and the creation of a national (and heavily subsidized) mortgage market.
The sub/exurbs, the essential symbiotes of car culture, are the dirigiste statist artifacts.
(yes, also a lot of the people who want to have you sell your Nissan Armada are also like that, and it's fair of you to call out statist authoritarian where you see them. But it's lunacy to suggest that suburbs and car culture just represent an organic Choice of the Free Market™)
But for a large fraction of the world, it's more like this:
1. Step off bus you took home from city center job, having decided dinner recipe on the ride.
2. Buy fresh produce from independent grocery store on same block as bus stop.
3. Walk remaining 2.5 blocks home.
It's not really an inconvenience.
Yes, in an urban environment you generally have less stored food. But usually not zero stored food. You also have less space to store it in, which makes shopping every other day more convenient. Trading off time for space and whatever conveniences urban living might provide you.
I honestly don't see how you think this is a reasonable straw man you've constructed.
I've carried 30+ kg of groceries on my bike panniers, about 15 to 30 min of ride to the store. Regular city bike with off-the-shelf panniers, not a cargo bike (which would easily take 100+ kg).
But quite honestly, I'd much rather get the groceries delivered to my home. I sometimes do but the websites to order the food are so bad that it takes more time to fill the order form that it's faster to ride to the store.
Bike is my primary means of transport for 8 months of the year because my city is awfully designed traffic-wise (if you need to cross the town east-west). A moderately fast bike ride beats any form of transport (including a car) on my daily commute.
Even more so if enough people do so that the store can switch from a storefront laid out for customers (with cashiers, displays, and tags on shelves) to a warehouse.
Safeway has a long-running delivery program, but they sure aren't pushing it very hard.
The system in Shanghai, where you might expect delivery to be popular, is that supermarkets operate their own buses which stop near your home. It solves the "the store is far away" problem, but it does nothing for the "I need more food than I can personally carry" problem.
You moved the goal post also. In the thread above we are talking about a 10-minute walk.
A cart is not actually responsive to that, because it reintroduces the other problem.
Shopping once every 7 or 10 days obviates the advantage of the freshest produce, meat, etc. but when I'm shopping every couple days it makes a difference, and I've enjoyed cooking and eating more.
A collapsible grocery cart (similar to a collapsible stroller), and insulated reusable grocery bags.
https://www.amazon.com/UTG-Environment-Molle-3-Day-Deploymen...
(Sometimes if I'll buy eggs I'll carry those in a separate bag. How difficult.)
This would be highly inefficient and result in higher costs of goods and reduced options for consumers.
The other thing worth mentioning is that bikes/pedestrians can go anywhere cars can, but the opposite is not true. If we made streets that were "bike only" cars wouldn't be able to access them. Cars are on a pedestal not only because of convenience and speed, but because they're the lowest common denominator.