> Ban private cars from all inner cities, at least in Europe where there's acceptable public transport and alternatives.

A more constructive/less destructive model would be for SF to actually built decent public transport and get cars off the street by offering better alternatives.

Of course, SF long ago lost its ability to build things. So only banning remains in the toolbox.

Fast buses are difficult if they are stuck in car traffic. Remove the cars and the bus can move much faster. If the bus moves faster and can more accurately predict a schedule, more people may use it, which allows more frequent runs, and so on.

It took SF over 20 years to get started on one fast bus line on Geary. It's still not done.

https://thefrisc.com/the-ballad-of-geary-brt-b70ac45d0a4e

Functioning major cities build subways, a much bigger undertaking.

I think buses is all we can handle in SF considering the Chinatown subway station debacle.

Our roads are fairly wide for a city, I think busses are ok. They're way cheaper too.

I guess we'll see by 2040 :)

Buses also need to be safe in SF. If its just me riding, I sometimes will grab one rather than driving. If I am going somewhere with my son, I typically just use the car.

We can restrict cars and build public transit. Cars are the #1 killer of Americans under the age of 25. It only falls to #2 at the next age range because of overdose deaths.

Cars are deadly and inefficient. Electric cars are still cars.

Except that most vehicular deaths don't occur in cities [1]. Banning cars in metro areas would do basically nothing to change the things you mention. Banning cars where deaths actually happen is a complete non-starter.

[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/10/the-geography...

New York City sees ~200 traffic deaths every year, the good majority of them pedestrians, and it's traumatic every time it happens. Sure, as a percentage of our population, we have fewer people dying from car crashes than Montana, but so what? Does that mean the 200 deaths per year is acceptable, especially when we can do a lot more to bring down the number of deaths than Montana can because we're dense enough for people to use alternatives?

It would make a real difference in NYC, so why wouldn't we do it. I'm always a little bit on edge when crossing intersections on foot, and especially when biking, because so many drivers are so erratic and dangerous. We don't need to put up with it.

What does "traffic deaths" mean and what are the detailed stats on that? I'd love to see a source because I strongly suspect a large portion of those are not private passenger vehicle collisions.

Also, every transportation method includes accidents. From [1] describing NYC subway safety, "There were nearly 900 incidents last year [2017] in which someone was on the tracks or was hit by a train after getting too close while on the platform." Should we also ban subways because people die as a result of them?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/nyregion/nyc-subway-track...

The majority of those are people on foot or on bike who get run over by cars and trucks. The rest are people in cars and trucks who die either in single vehicle crashes or in crashes with other vehicles. This doesn't include subway deaths; that's a separate stat. I'm not playing semantic games here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/nyregion/nyc-biking-death...

As for the subway, that's a separate topic. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish with your whataboutism. Yes, of course it can and should be made safer. One obvious way to do so would be to add platform gates as many other subway systems worldwide have. But the subway is already a lot safer than on-street vehicle traffic, and no, of course we shouldn't ban it.

Your NYT article does not provide any actual detailed statistics on type of vehicle involved, let alone whether the drivers were always at fault.

And I'm pointing out the issues with transportation safety in general because people such as yourself demonize cars specifically when it's not at all clear that cars are the real problem, let alone the biggest one. Look at Tokyo for example. Cars are all over the city, but pedestrian fatalities are extremely low because affordances are given to pedestrian traffic (ex. elevated crosswalks). If you want to sell people on banning personal vehicles in cities, the burden of proof is on you that 1) cars are the best problem to focus on, 2) the only way to solve the problem is to ban cars, and 3) the available alternatives are actually better than cars

> let alone whether the drivers were always at fault

Why is this relevant? If the city has a 60mph highway running through a dense neighborhood, and a toddler walks into the street, and is killed by a driver (not the driver's fault), that hardly absolves the city of addressing this problem.

I suspect this kind of thinking is what adds to a lot of the friction. Nobody is demonizing drivers. What many of us are upset with is our cities' planning, giving far too much leeway to vehicles and too little to human beings living there.

> Look at Tokyo for example. Cars are all over the city, but pedestrian fatalities are extremely low because affordances are given to pedestrian traffic (ex. elevated crosswalks). If you want to sell people on banning personal vehicles in cities, the burden of proof is on you that 1) cars are the best problem to focus on, 2) the only way to solve the problem is to ban cars, and 3) the available alternatives are actually better than cars

Tokyo has a lower car ownership rate than every city in the U.S. So... although cars may be "all over the city", they're still relatively uncommon.

And what problems do you think we're focused on here? It's not just about safety from car accidents. It's also:

- Is cheaper to not build / maintain roads/streets/bridges/parking lots that would otherwise be unnecessary.

- More pleasant for city residents (fewer honking horns, less sitting in traffic, more space for parks and greenery, more walking -> healthier residents, etc.)

- More environmentally friendly from both a localized air pollution standpoint and a global climate one.

Besides the other commenter pointing out that Tokyo has low car ownership rates, so if that's your ideal model then you too are essentially on the same side as getting rid of most of the cars, there's a telling fact in your suggestion to remove people from the urban streetscape entirely by removing them to elevated walkways. Cities are for people. Why are cars so important that they should take over everything? Why ban people from the streets instead of banning the cars? I don't want to have to take stairways and bridges everywhere, and then have huge numbers of vehicles whizzing by constantly at ground level emitting lots of pollution (yes, even EVs emit brake and tire dust). That sounds like a dystopian nightmare city, not a pleasant city.

And I don't know what to tell you, but I've been to Tokyo, and it's nothing like what you're describing. You sure you went to the right place? The most busy pedestrian crossing in the world, the Shibuya scramble, is in Tokyo, and it's an at-grade intersection. You know why it's safe? Because pedestrians are prioritized over vehicles, and the longest part of the light cycle stops all the car traffic entirely and lets people walk everywhere. And also, the Japanese are simply more communally-minded than Americans. Simply put, their drivers are better-behaved. They generally won't park in marked bike lanes (same as in Amsterdam) because of the social stigma of doing so. Meanwhile, in the US, drivers don't give a shit, and so we need a solution that isn't social stigma -- building more physical protection and removing cars entirely from many spaces, since people can't and won't operate them safely.

And the discussion of "fault" is entirely missing the point. It doesn't matter who's at fault in any given fatal crash. What matters is that we have 40k deaths per year in the United States caused by vehicles, more than almost any other cause, and we need to fix it. The fault if anything is a systems problem; we have way too many cars, not enough alternatives to them, and the built city environment prioritizes cars too much and doesn't do enough to separate vulnerable people who aren't in cars from them entirely.

Does "vehicular deaths" include deaths caused by air pollution? I think I've read that cars cause more deaths through air pollution than through collisions.

I happen to know that 100% of vehicular deaths in San Francisco happen in the city, so your numbers are pretty suspect.

Great, how many vehicular deaths is that exactly, and how many are cars instead of other vehicles not banned? For comparison, let's also make sure to check the number of CalTrain and BART deaths each year (at least 20 last year)[1].

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/09/28/as-deaths-rise-on-bay...

You can't mix and match stats like that.

I think it's the "We" that Senior BurningFrog is talking about. The central subway debacle ought to give one pause about the clowns in San Francisco government building anything, ever. 2 billion dollars for 2 miles of subway and counting over the last decade or two; I can't remember how long this has been in the works. Meanwhile Russian barbarians able to add subway stops at will, even during collapse of the Soviet Union.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_timeline_of_the_Mosc...

Build better alternative works only when combined with a prohibition on cars. Otherwise as soon as the traffic situation improves (as in more people taking bus), car becomes even more faster and convenient. There has to some artificial constraint on the other side - whether it is outright ban or fee/tax or permits is to be seen

There's two part pressure needed for every change: good alternatives and disincentives for the old option.

Empirically, I don't see that at all.

Usually a better alternative will make the old thing obsolete without any disincentives.

This only works if better alternatives don’t impact the existing means.

For instance if you want a good cable car system or dedicated bus lanes, bike paths, it will go through reducing or removing private car lanes.

In general it’s both effects in one go: transform/reduce the existing infra into the new one, automatically making the new one better when it lands (and inconveniencing everyone until it lands)

IMHO, facts don't sell anything. Defining an option as better isn't sufficient. Disincentives for the status quo are not necessarily taxes or legislation. A powerful disincentive is "missing out" on a "movement" or "being left behind". Adding busses doesn't feel like a "movement", but car-less cities has a nice Green Dream ring to it that might garner support from the right demographics by allowing a moral high ground. There will be increasing disincentive pressure against neighborhoods that allow cars, by a migration of commercial business to car-less areas, perhaps, or a loss of property values in those car-packed areas. But for those disincentives to be effective, they should be given time in the spotlight.

Murder requires intent. Involuntary manslaughter is more accurate, if not as emotionally charged.

They know. They deliberately drive As close as they can to cyclists because they feel they own the lane, and if we die it’s our own fault.

Honestly you should probably talk to someone about these thoughts.

That's ridiculous, I'm from Europe, I like moving around city in a car and I don't mind other cars, but a) there should be only underground parking lots; b) there should be bike lanes everywhere where there are roads; c) parking in illegal spots should be severly punished and d) diesel cars (and petrol when electric cars become mainstream) should be banned from entering city center. I don't understand the mentality that "I don't want cars in MY city so we should ban all cars!" - I don't like some things in my city as well but I understand that it's hard to please all so we should simply aim for moderation.

> Ban private cars from all inner cities > We need to reclaim our cities

Cities have a responsibility that extends beyond their own defined borders. Cities act as the cultural, legal, and commercial nexus for the surrounding rural and suburban area – sometimes that can include the entire state.

That responsibility includes the ability for outsiders to be able to access it.

Bike, bus, or train. The ability for outsiders can exist without cars.

Dedicated lanes and car restrictions make buses acceptable public transit pretty cheaply. They can at least serve as a bridge in cities that are borderline ready for restrictions to get the ball moving faster.

I get what you're going for, American cities are very car centric. But do you have any sources for those strong claims like GM blackmailing people?

It's a reference to the GM streetcar conspiracy (most notably retold in Who Framed Roger Rabbit).

While it's a decently well-known anecdote, most experts nowadays believe that the very real attempt to monopolize the selling of buses to city transit did not contribute in any significant way to the dismantling of the streetcars--the streetcars were already in rude health and dying, and their rapid dismantling happened even in cities where the bus transit companies were not involved.

> the streetcars were already in rude health and dying

You can't be both in rude health and dying at the same time! They mean the opposite thing!

Rude health isn’t really a common term. I interpreted it as poor health which seems rather obvious from the context. It does appear to actually mean good health but it’s pretty obscure.

GM is already laying the groundwork for the next bailout with their plans to stop building cars, they just don't realize it yet. As for the plan to ban cars from city centers, I am all for that. I want to see mass amounts of money invested in public transit.

Rude health means good health, not poor.

I think, more importantly, is why does it matter? We have the infrastructure we have now. Maybe GM should be held accountable for what they did, but what does that have to do with access to cities for people with cars today?

I see a lot of vitriol towards drivers in this thread, and any other time this topic comes up. We didn't make the world the way it is. It ultimately feels like classism. I'm glad these folks are able to take advantage of the privilege of living in a dynamic, multicultural city. But not everyone can afford that.

I think it matters because people often think we "naturally" progressed to today's city arrangements because they're better than the alternatives. And this GM example highlights that it's not necessarily the case.

> I see a lot of vitriol towards drivers in this thread, and any other time this topic comes up.

Understand that it is a frustrating topic. Cars are one of the top killers in the U.S. both directly and indirectly. They make our places of living less safe and less pleasant. It's especially frustrating when people who live in the suburbs commute in to where we live, then complain about how unpleasant city living is—in large part because they're making it unpleasant.

> It ultimately feels like classism. I'm glad these folks are able to take advantage of the privilege of living in a dynamic, multicultural city. But not everyone can afford that.

And this is another piece of frustration. Yes, given current government incentives, it can be more affordable to live in the suburbs than in cities. But this is artificial. Urban dwellers ultimately subsidize those living in suburban/rural areas, thanks to government policy carried over from the cold war era. It's so bizarre that we live in a time/place where driving a personal automobile to work is seen as "lower class" than riding bicycles or taking the bus/train to work. Something's broken.

Because there's an argument that the way the world is currently arranged is the best, most ideal way because people are perfectly rational, etc. If it's obvious that someone made suboptimal choices in the past because of a profit motive, shouldn't we examine that and attempt to correct for it, rather than assuming that the status quo is as good as we can get? We may need to save ourselves out of a local maxima and that's not a painless process.

I am very aware of driving's safety statistics. And I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to design their spaces the way they see fit. It's on San Fransiscans to decide what is best for the city, and everyone outside can just deal. Buy neither is "GM blackmailed people" and excuse to treat drivers like murderers in these conversations.

I am OP and quite the driver myself. However, I never drive in the inner city (~ 5km radius from city hall) in my town because:

a) it's annoying due to overloaded traffic

b) it's annoying due to parking

c) my job provides me with year-long public transport ticket and taking a car and paying for all certain and possible costs is economically disadvantageous

d) public transport is amazing, taxis work and ride sharing and car sharing exist on top of it for cases when public transport shuts down (during major incidents usually, e.g. finding yet another WW2 bomb at some construction site)

Just cut it down to business/public traffic and reinvigorate inner city life with more sensible things. It actually already happens from now and then for festivities and other events and people start using ALL of the space that cars uselessly take up.

So, this is an extremely well-known claim for which you can find numerous reasonable-looking citations if you actually cared to spend the couple seconds to ask Google, but FWIW there is a lot of argument as to whether it is really true in such simple terms, despite so many sources and citations.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/06/be-careful-ho...

> So, this is an extremely well-known claim for which you can find numerous reasonable-looking citations

I didn't see any mention of blackmail in that article? Which bit were you referring to?

> We need to reclaim our cities and revert the damage done by big auto. GM and others have screwed American city inhabitants for decades by actively destroying public transport projects through lobbyism and blackmail.

What lobbying are you talking about? The most common story, regarding GM and street cars, has largely been debunked: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/06/be-careful-ho...

> Eventually, argues Slater, the operating costs could not be ignored. Just before World War II the operating costs for buses were 20 percent less per seat than for streetcars. After the war even a trolley-friendly city like San Francisco found buses cost 37 percent less to operate per hour. This wasn't just the case in the land where General Motors was king; in England, too, passenger costs had leveled out or started to favor buses by the 1930s.

> A case study can be made of Los Angeles, where Snell focused a good deal of his attack. But contemporary accounts suggest that a transformation from streetcars to buses was underway long before GM and its affiliates entered the scene circa 1940. As early as 1923, the Pacific Electric rail line was buying buses to replace some of its routes. The city's board of public utilities encouraged this trend — calling the use of motor buses "a foregone conclusion" — and by 1930 the city's big bus conglomerate carried 29 million riders a year.

More generally, you're overlooking the utter failure of public transport systems in the U.S. What lobbying was responsible for DC's and New York's subway systems literally falling apart, despite ample funding? Is GM lobbying responsible for it costing 5-7x as much to build a mile of subway in New York as compared to London or Paris? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

What killed transit in the U.S. is a combination of cheap gas prices and ample land making car-dependent sprawl economical, and government incompetence making transit uneconomical. Here in Maryland, the State is building a 26 km light rail line through the suburbs for $7 billion. The Swedish city of Uppsala is building 17 km of light rail through their downtown for 340 million Euro. That cost differential is utterly fatal. For transit to be useful it needs to go where people are. If it costs 10 times as much to build a kilometer of rail, you simply can't build enough transit to make it a viable competitor to driving.

The cost disease likewise makes it impossible to quickly fix problems that make people not want to ride transit. DC's Metro ridership is declining due to low quality of service. We need a new rail station at Roslyn because that is causing a bottleneck. The estimated cost in 2012 was $1 billion for a new underground station on an existing line. By contrast, Stockholm is planning to extend its underground system by 11 km, including 11 new stations for $3.3 billion. A similar new underground line in DC (which is desperately needed to relieve congestion on the Orange/Blue/Silver tunnel) would be a $20 billion project.

At the end of the day, Americans are voting totally rationally, and "lobbying" has nothing to do with it. They see $10 billion projects that provide transit to a handful of people, and quite rationally say "fuck it, let's build more highways." I can guarantee you that if the Uppsala light rail project was going to cost $3.4 billion Euro and take 15+ years to build, like it would here in the U.S., the Swedes wouldn't vote for it either.

Ugh... Building the M4 in Budapest was plagued by scandals, delays, and cost overruns, and ridiculed for having cost a whopping €1.6 billion for the entire line. Salaries over here are perhaps a fourth or a fifth of what they are in the US, but it still boggles the mind that building one metro station would cost $1 billion.

How do prices get that high in the US? Are private contractors too intent on pocketing fat profits? Or is it related to health, tort, or other insurances, or a privately funded pension system?

Nobody knows. "Fat profits" doesn't seem to be it. The contractor for the Maryland light rail, Fluor Corporation, has a 2.6% profit margin according to audited public disclosures. One big thing is environmental laws. Government projects in the U.S. must follow something called NEPA, and create an environmental assessment of the project. In practice, every sentence of that report is subject to litigation. The average environmental report for a transit project therefore takes more than six years to prepare.

The Purple Line in Maryland was tied up in years of litigation:

> n August 2016, U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon found that the Maryland Transit Administration and the Federal Transit Administration did not study whether Metro's maintenance issues and ridership decline would affect the Purple Line.[53] Judge Leon decided to vacate the Purple Line's federal approval.[53] A federal funding agreement cannot be signed without the reinstatement of the environmental approval, and Maryland has said it cannot afford to build the Purple Line without sufficient federal funding.[53][54] On August 21, 2017, despite the ongoing court case over the environmental analysis, $900 million of federal funding was granted for the light rail project.[55] On December 19, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in favor of the Purple Line, specifically stating that declining ridership on the Washington Metro system does not require Maryland to complete a new environmental study for the Purple Line.[13] This federal appeals court ruling allowed for construction to continue and effectively ended the three-year legal battle surrounding the 16-mile light-rail line project.[12]

This not only adds to the cost--contractors must build in tons of padding because projects can be litigated even after construction starts. But it makes it impossible to build sustained public support for transit projects. People get worked up about a project, vote for funding, and then literally nothing visible happens for half a decade or more while paperwork gets done. It kills momentum completely.

I love my cars. I have 6. And I hate cities.

Since you don't live in a city why did you feel the need to reply? It has nothing to do with you and your six cars.

I love cars as well, it doesn't mean they should dominate areas where other alternatives make more sense in all aspects but subjective preference.

great, dont come to them!

What do you hope to gain by posting such obviously false posts?

Plenty of people go to SF by choice. Very obviously that's the case. Why try to assert otherwise? Just mindless trolling?

“No one goes there anymore.

It’s too crowded.”

People are only there for work. Most will leave in 3-5 years.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly lately.

If you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Please don't respond to a bad comment with a worse one. The HN guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that.

Especially please don't go into personal attack.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please explain why I should subsidize your unsustainable rural/suburban lifestyle.

Cities are not self-sustaining. Virtually none of the resources needed to build, maintain or feed one actually come from the city itself.

Due to agricultural monocultures and climate limitations, most rural areas are not self-sustaining either. A given rural locale may contribute certain products to cities, but it is also a net recipient of other products from elsewhere – and the logistics of getting all those products to the given rural locale may well have been managed within cities.

So? That doesn't make them any less necessary. If anything, it just reinforces how necessary they are, since different rural areas need to specialize in different raw materials and foodstuffs.

My comment wasn't a reply to why we should do away with cities, it was a reply to why rural areas should "be subsidized" (I'm assuming road construction here, and maybe social welfare for impoverished).

People in Urban and suburban areas are perfectly aware their food come from mostly rural areas.

Almost everything else in your home; your car; the technology they depend on; the road, telecom, hospital, etc infrastructure and the technology they depend on come almost entirely from cities and suburbs.

HN? The device you use to access it? Almost all the tech news on it? The network infrastructure you use to lower its comment quality? The language its written? The computers it runs on? Not from rural areas.

That is half true; all the raw materials for all if those things come from outside the cities.

Again, I'm not saying cities aren't important, only replying to a comment asking for justification for rural living.

You don’t have to subsidize me, bud. I paid my own money to get a well, get electricity service, no paved roads for miles. I actually can’t think of a government service I didn’t pay for!

Of course you don't. That doesn't mean they don't exist but it is certainly believable that they are conveniently--so conveniently--outside your mental orbit.

Who subsidized your electrical company's build-out of the long-haul transmission lines to get electricity out to you? Do the payers of those subsidies see an ROI from long-haul transmission lines to economically minimal areas?

Ditto telco?

Where do you buy groceries? Who disproportionately paid for all of the utilities and transportation necessary to make that work?

How about delivery? Mail is hugely subsidized, particularly for rural routes, and commercial carriers use all those roads-'n-stuff to get to you. Your last mile, or even last miles, might be dirt--y'all certainly aren't paying proportionally for the highways to get even close enough.

I grew up in rural areas. Lots of people sneered a lot about The Gubmint. And even in that weird epistemic closure not a one paid out what they took. Which is fine; that's how it's supposed to work, and there's an argument for some subsidy of rural living for a number of both moral and practical reasons. But leaving the disingenuity in the closet where it belongs and showing some basic respect for the process that allows it is at least polite.

isn't oil subsidized?

Please include delivery vehicles into your wish, if you are earnest. Or restrict your wish to through-traffic. Otherwise, you are just calling for a ban of other people traffic.

Edit: would the downvoters care to explain why their prime delivery or their coffee beans are necessary traffic while, e.g., a mother driving their kids is not?

The point is to give incentives to people to use public transport, and discurage owning a vehicle that takes up space and resources.

Why should the city build public transport, if mothers with children won't use it?

Maybe cities should try to build public transport that mothers with children prefer to their private cars?

If cities cannot offer something better, they will never convince. So they must restrict. Then at least they should forbid the better for everyone not just for people their voters do not care about. It is quite revealing that the myriad of small, cheap, and flexible transporters that provide all these services inside cities are nearly always exempt from traffic policies.

Mothers with children already have an alternative: Use public transport, or use an uber, or a taxi. There's no reason to own a car.

It's all about utilization: An uber cab will probably see 10%-90% utilization (passenger count / time in transport), while a privately owned car is utilized only a few minutes of the day, by only 1/5th of the passanger capacity. Most of the time it collects rust on a parking spot that could be utilized for a better purpose. Parks, street food stands, benches.

Same for delivery: If the alternative is that everyone oes out and pollutes supermarkets, streets and public transport to get their freshly ground coffee, don't you think that having a vehicle that delivers on the last mile to the customer is much more efficient?

In cities that invest into bike lanes, obviously cargo bikes are becoming a real alternative for delivery services.

Yes, public transport has to be improved, too, nobody argued otherwise.

Now why is utilization suddenly a concern for cars but not for cargo bikes or exotic consumer goods like coffee? Let me guess, you don't own a car, but a bike and you like to drink coffee? How about your bed, could that not be utilized much more efficiently? I bet 16 hours or so it just stands there collecting dust.

In a city, everything that needs space is scarce. You can ask for a "fair" price for a parking space, but then don't complain about a "fair" rent and a "fair" premium on every service that also utilizes space. The thing is that "fair" can look very different to different people.

Yeah great, i also suggest, as a French, that you come and enjoy our great public transport and the kind of people in it, especially at night. Oh and also try walking under 35°C dressed as an executive

I don’t follow the latter

I think the idea is that walking around the city dressed in a heavy suit when it's very hot outside is uncomfortable and sweaty.

I'd argue that requiring your employees to play an archaic game of dress-up is the real problem, but if I'm being honest, it can be pretty uncomfortable to walk around a sweltering city even in street clothes. (That being said I don't think the tradeoff is worth destroying your city with car-centric design)