In my experience, most people really do not understand how fundamentally unsuited cars are to solving urban (or dense suburban) transportation problems. Without really staring at the underlying geometry, it is hard for laypeople to understand that automobile-centric development patterns are by-and-large incapable of producing the kind of human-scale, dense, walkable areas that are (1) instinctively pleasing to be in, (2) generators of economic value, and (3) much more environmentally sustainable than the alternative.

All this being said, I find it hard to fault 'environmentalist' politicians for their embrace of the electric car: politics is "the art of the possible", and the conventional wisdom, at least in the States, does not yet recognize automobile-centrism as a key problem. There are a lot of entrenched interests in favor of the status quo - not just the traditional car lobby (auto manufacturers, suburban developers, oil companies), but the ~half of Americans who live in suburbs, hence having their lifestyle and wealth reliant on cars remaining a dominant form of transportation. If the choice is between gas cars and electric cars (as, for a mainstream politician it basically seems to be), I am at least happy we are moving towards the latter, even though neither are the right answer.

Shameless plug: I recently attempted to visually explain the first issue (why geometry makes cars unsuited to dense transportation) on my nascent blog: https://digital-cygnet.medium.com/a-quick-visual-illustratio...

How many people want to live in dense cities without any means of escape? It sounds miserable to me.

But I live in a really small city (< 250k) and drive maybe 3-5k miles a year (mostly to our cabin in a neighboring state) and bike a LOT. It's kind of ironic I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it.

It sounds like you bike for most of your transportation in your city? That's what "anti-car" people (speaking as one myself) want: to emphasize infrastructure that enables and encourages that. The "anti-car" thing isn't "ban cars entirely in all cases", just "stop assuming everything needs to be car-first at the expense of every other modality".

Yea my point is that if you want to be less car centric, maybe try moving out of the big city. It's ironically easier to obtain that lifestyle in a small city in America than the "walkable urban utopias" everyone seems to desire on HN.

Super obvious response, but it depends on the city. Smaller denser European cities that were not designed, but evolved over hundreds of years from earlier settlements, don't handle car traffic very well and are better suited to walking and cycling (or battery operated scooters). But even larger cities over here work well for walking and cycling because you tend to find lots of bars, restaurants, convenience stores and shopping malls all over them. In my home town, you can't walk a mile without passing a dozen bars, a dozen restaurants and two decent grocery stores.

But it's not just down to city size. Take a city like Provo in Utah. It's not large by any standard, but it's completely designed for cars. It has awful public transport, a grid 'motorway' system cris-crossing it, everything-as-a-drive-thru, lots of unused space, lots of parking lots... If you try walking around it, you'll just spend hours walking past nothing in particular to get to nowhere special.

It seems that everything is way too far apart because it's all separated by huge sprawling parking lots that are mostly empty. 50-70% of the acreage is devoted to cars not even counting the ultra-wide roads and only occasional pedestrian crossings every half mile. These roads usually have speed limits well above 45 mph. The worst examples I can think of are Scottsdale AZ and Irvine CA.

It isn't surprising that so many cars are on the road when just to cross the street you need to walk a quarter mile on average. Then you have to cross the death trap parking lots with zero shade and 120 degree black top.

Here in Europe it's often the opposite. E.g. in Austrian cities you have decent bicycle infrastructure and everything in reach in the cities while in rural areas that's often not the case.

I've been in the US once, 13 years ago, and it was pretty shocking for me to experience the concept of "car centric" in its full glory for the first time. I was at CES in Las Vegas and went to some club one evening with a friend. At some point I left and wanted to walk to the Hotel alone in order to calm down and enjoy the nice climate. Turned out, there was simply no walkable connection between the 2 locations. I couldn't believe it, but - being stubborn - walked anyway, in the dirt along some highway, a bit scared of being picked up by the police, not even sure if walking there was even legal.

Later that week I moved to LA and first saw the endless suburbs of an American city, from the air.

I don't know how representative those 2 places are for the US, but having seen that, I can totally understand why many Americans have a very hard time imagining life without a car.

Mostly only out of American big cities (at least in the developed world), the point is to fix that. A lot of big cities in Europe and East Asia do fine without being car-centric.

A lot of places depend on cars / 2-wheelers beyond American big cities. Based on my first hand experience - big cities in India and Brazil.

You're right, in my zeal I overstated a bit. But among the richest/most developed nations there are the US & a few similar countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) where a lot of people drive cars and on the other hand western europe and the reach east asian countries (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore) where mass transit (and in Europe sometimes also bicycles) is the main form of transportation in the large cities.

I'm not sure I fully follow "I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it", but I think there are two potential points of disagreement:

1) Living in dense cities is not for everybody, but given that large and (at least pre-covid) growing majority of people in the developed world do choose to live in cities, I think it's safe to say that there is a very sizable demand. For an example of the benefits of density, see [0].

2) I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a "means of escape", but getting rid of cars of course necessitates replacing them with other modalities. If you want to go skiing does it matter to you whether you take a train or a car? Or, for further afield trips, take a train to a car rental far from the city center? (If you mean escape in a literal sense, like "evacuate in the face of a disaster", then cars are clearly not fit for purpose -- if roads can barely handle rush hour traffic, mass evacuation is a recipe for gridlock)

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-01/how-densi...

The pre-covid world is kinda over. Density has very clear downsides that have never been more apparent. I don't know how often you do the train + car rental thing, but the friction is much, much higher than driving (especially if you have any sort of gear like you would for skiing). Not everyone wants to be so contricted both in freedom of movement and in living space.

Blaming disease spread on density is kind of a cop out after how we saw the world respond to crisis. Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong, and most Chinese cities are super dense places that, for most of 2020, I would have preferred to be living in compared to the US.

The success of these cities is due to political action that is unpalatable to most in the west. Hong Kong in particular demonstrates what happens when even vestigial western ideals and the necessary political structures for this sort of action mix.

You can look at San Francisco which did better than most places in the US. It was actually funny to watch tech bro's flee the city for places where the pandemic ultimately hit far worse.

The friction of owning a car is much, much higher than having to care a few times a year on how to carry your skis or sporting gear on a train and renting a car afterwards.

Personal anecdote: I was born, grew up and lived up to my mid-20s in São Paulo, Brazil. It's a city where a car is a basic necessity, much like in the US, public transportation sucks and is spotty, never on time. I owned cars, I loved the frictionless way to get out, getting the elevator out of my apartment, down to the underground garage, turning my car on and driving away, easy. But that car sat idle 98% of the time, I paid road taxes, maintenance, parking spot, etc. for the convenience of having a car ready to go at an instant time.

Nowadays I live in Sweden, I never need a car apart from moving houses or carrying some large furniture. A few times for a road trip here and there, I can just rent a car when needed and I come out on top of expenses still, the peace of mind of not having to take care of a car is another huge bonus.

The pre-COVID world will still exist, cities are a necessity if you want to have good public services, without higher density a city has no way to fund high quality public services.

I would like to know what clear downsides, apart from disease spread, has COVID showed from living in high density cities? And I mean cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, and so on.

I actually find renting a car offers me significantly less peace of mind, because while I don't care if my own car gets dinged, the rental agencies do. In my experience a weekend car rental costs about 3+ months of upkeep, so for me car ownership is an easy financial decision, even though I mostly walk and bike. I might have a different calculus If I had to pay for a parking spot, but this, along with other premiums for space, I feel is more accurately a cost of high-density living, not car ownership itself.

Some aspects of the pre-COVID world may make a comeback, but hopefully as a society we have realized the omnipresent threat of new diseases is very real. This will impact high-highdensity areas more than low-density areas. It is not just disease spread, but also the policies enacted to limit the spread. My friends in NYC tell me that exorbitant rents for tiny apartments they were forbidden to leave was not particularly enjoyable. Paris seems like an exceptionally bad place to be in 2020/21. Public services are nice when you have access to them and not-so-nice when you are dependent on them and they fail. Often access to services is limited based on economic factors in the best of times, much less in times of stress.

It really depends on where you live and what kind of car you own. My car is very low friction. I can just walk out my front door and drive my car wherever I want to go. Fuel, maintenance, and insurance are all pretty cheap.

By contrast renting is extremely high friction. Even if I reserve a specific type of vehicle in advance that doesn't guarantee that it will actually be available when I show up.

> The pre-covid world is kinda over

I really doubt this is the case. In fact people are placing large bets of the opposite. Just saw in the news that some texas developer is planning a new 23 story commercial building in Vancouver's downtown.

Cities have been the norm since humans started living together. They been been a success despite many, many pandemics. They are not going away.

The US isn't gonna change much. Don't know about elsewhere.

I was in a supermarket last Friday afternoon, in Michigan, and it was "I don't want to be here" busy for normal times, never mind during a pandemic. There were people with no masks and people going through the motions of having a mask and so on. People are moving on before they should! Another couple of months is likely all it will be.

People aren’t always choosing cities, there are greater work opportunities in cities and so that is where people have to go. This was true of factory work in the past when people migrated in droves from farms to work in factories because that was their only option and moving to work in cities for office jobs has just been the latest form of this.

Many people (although not all) would choose space in the countryside over dense in the city if they had a choice. I imagine this becomes even more likely as people have families and begin to prioritise other life aspects over and above work.

I live in Berlin with 2 little kids and have no car. We bike and take transit (including long-range trains when going out of the city). There's plenty opportunity to escape (corona lockdowns notwithstanding).

I’ve never owned a car. But somehow I’ve traveled all over my country and the world. And Australia isn’t small. It’s crazy, I know.

Did you rent one? Are you young and healthy enough to walk/bike everyone? If yes, then your assumption about the world is indeed crazy since not everyone would have the same abilities as you.

What do you mean “no means of escape?”

There are trains, buses, taxis, bikes, rental cars etc.

To me owning a car seems much more miserable!

Cars offer a level of freedom far beyond that of public transport.

That doesn’t mean they are the best vehicle to offer that freedom and electric vehicles will definitely be an improvement over ICE vehicles but in my experience as soon as you’re outside of major metropolitan cities public transport options fall apart and are often incredibly inconvenient compared to owning a car.

Maybe the solution would be to build better public transport systems outside of major cities but to do that requires funding and local governments (in the UK at least) seem to be chronically underfunded so I doubt that it will become a reality anytime soon.

In my experience, currently public transport works really well for high density routes, but no one has managed to solve the low density route issue. Take a bus going towards a leaf node at 10 pm on a week day, and you're often the only one in a huge bus with the driver (that's of course if you're in a place where such a bus exists). Environmentally and economically, that's dreadful, worse than a car. I don't think public transports running at 5% capacity is the solution.

The solution might be full self-driving cars, but we're far from it yet.

Ha, I totally agree with this. I have seen so many of those big empty buses with just 1 or 2 people in them. Perhaps self-driving cars and autonomous vehicles will be the solution to this.

>"To me owning a car seems much more miserable!"

Well you are free not to own it. Nobody's forcing you.

Actually my main mean of transportation in Toronto is bicycle myself (well I work from home for the last 20 years anyways).

I also own car (van actually) and it gives me great and hassle free degree of freedom. If I am in a mood and I often am I can jump in and in few hours be in complete wilderness swimming in some godforsaken lake. Or if I need to grab some heavy stuff and bring it somewhere which happens rather often. And I do not need to arrange / wait for anything. Just get in and go.

So no. Screw that dense car free living. To each their own.

Yes and you can say that a helicopter would offer you even more freedom, but does that mean we should build our cities so that everyone has there own helipad?

Ironically it probably would take up less space than the infrastructure build for cars.

But this is the point made by the OP, essentially for the convenience to jump into your car a couple of times a year and drive to the wilderness without having to walk or take a means of public transport, you require cities to be build around those cars. The issue is you don't directly see the cost associated with it, because you're used to it. The thing is, if you actually had to pay for that convenience (because if we would not have to build the car infrastructure cities could be much cheaper) directly there clearly would be a point where you would say it is not worth it.

Yes, too many people can't bear making anything they sense to be a sacrifice on their part. The solution is definitely to shift the car ownership economic burden more towards car owners instead of everyone. Giant empty parking lots and huge roads are an insane cost with a terrible maintenance story.

I like to think of it as moving away from a datacenter to cloud based solutions. You don't need to buy all that capacity ahead of time anymore just for those short bursts.

>"Yes, too many people can't bear making anything they sense to be a sacrifice on their part."

Sorry but I do not live to make sacrifices for the "benefit of everyone". I already left one country because of that. It was called USSR. And the first thing I did as soon as I could - got myself a car and traveled all over the places on my own.

My small software development company does not use cloud either. Self host and rented dedicated servers. Orders of magnitude cheaper that that cloud. I prefer to feed myself rather then keep filling pockets of FAANG and the likes.

But you are expecting everyone to make sacrifices for your benefit, because non-car drivers are significantly subsidising car drivers. Lets make car cost exactly what they should be then, things like lets make real-estate used for roads in cities go into rental costs for those roads (via taxes, road tolls etc.), lets price the environmental costs appropriately, including the health cost from noise etc. If you still want to pay for your car then, go ahead, but don't expect others to subsidise your living.

How can it be 'complete wilderness' if reachable by car? Isn't there some sort of infrastructure necessary in order to reach it by car which ultimately destroys nature?

Gravel / dirt road and then take canoe to some secluded spot. No one is around which to me is enough to call it "complete wilderness", does not need to be Ellesmere Island. No visible "destruction of nature" either.

Car centric infrastructure forces people to own cars.

And I don't know a ton of people that "buy" cars they can afford, they buy car payments they can afford. I just can't help but feel that breaking that cycle would be a societal good ( for people, sorry automakers).

And I buy used vans. Whet you know might not reflect generic situation.

>"Car centric infrastructure forces people to own cars."

Where? I live in Toronto and I certainly do not feel that I am forced to have a car.

Toronto where the previous mayor removed bike lanes, was caught reading a book whilst driving, and called cyclists "a pain in the ass"? That Toronto?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17914504

Yeah, that sounds a welcoming place.

I do not give a shit what our previous world famous lunatic said. I just state my personal experience and I ride my bike everywhere nearly every day.

Everywhere where daily amenities are too spread out and the streets are too dangerous for children and old people to cycle on them. That's most of the developed world outside of some very large cities.

And because I do not feel forced it deserves downvote. Fucking thought police.

I would definitely agree with you about the merits of smaller cities, but half the value of density is that "escape" is easier. Driving for a solid hour through nothing but housing estates is not my idea of freedom.

It does depend on your idea of "escape" though. Good trains to beauty spots make a world of difference.

The no means of escape from NYC was what I could never handle (so got a bike, motorcycle, car and eventually just moved out) but there are many people who grew up in big cities for whom the endless concrete blocks is just the normal environment, though I think its kind of sad.

> How many people want to live in dense cities without any means of escape? It sounds miserable to me.

Some 30m people in Tokyo seem to be doing fine.

Doesn’t mean they actually want to be there though.

Nice blog post. It really does come down to just how big cars are and how much space they take up. A car in motion takes up a ridiculous amount of space factoring in stopping distance.

The coming sea change in electrifying transportation will include roads just as much as cars. Right now we are just barely off the bottom of the 'S' curve of transitioning from ICE to electric. But in about fifteen years we'll be near the middle of that curve and that's when we'll realize roads could be much better if the ICE cars where banned. With only electric vehicles the air will cease to be continually poisoned by emissions and then roads and streets will start to move indoors. Covered roads will become practical with electric only vehicles and the majority of those e-vehicles will be a lot smaller than the current average ICE car because electric technologies make smaller vehicles much more practical. The current boom in e-bikes is just the beginning of a major trend to electric smaller vehicles.

A lot more quickly than you expect ICE vehicles will be restricted to the highways and periphery of towns and cities because they'll be too big, heavy and poisonous. In a word they'll become unsafe for urban transport and our cities will become much more healthy and livable.

The trend has already started. E.g. in Germany, some cities prohibit older Diesel engines within city limits.

This has lead especially commuters of low-wage jobs quickly being forced to buy a new, more environmentally-friendly car (and their Diesel car just lost a lot of value in the market), so they have no option other than switch to gasoline engines - which are usually OLDER cars than they used to be with WORSE pollution statistics.

Buying a new car is not affordable to them. Public transportation is a lot better than in the US, but still will not solve the issue completely, and where it is a viable alternative, it's expensive both in time consumption and in money spent.

With a new law that was meant to lower pollution (and the jury is still out on if the goal was achieved, as during the corona crisis, pollution sank overall), we've created worse conditions for the underclass and lower middle class.

This is how you destroy support for ecological policymaking. If you want a better world for yourself and your children, you cannot achieve it by making it worse for others and the present.

The change won’t be for free (even though it probably in the end will save us all a lot of money), and unfortunately, everything that cost money will hit the poor hardest. But that is a problem that is solved with progressive taxes and redistribution, not something that should stop us from saving the environment.

The change won't be for free. But rather than lower the usefulness of cars, make sure new cars have better fuel economies (which directly translates to lower pollution). Within 10-15 years, clunkers get replaced anyways, so a general policy of "by 2027, all newly-registered cars must have a maximum amount of X litres per 100 kilometres" or a ban of Diesel engines outside of speciality markets (military, agriculture, trucks) would hurt virtually no-one (but inefficient car makers, who should improve).

If you hit the poorest, you won't get a ecological paradise, you'll eventually get the next iteration of an autocratic dictatorship (either left-wing or right-wing) - now with the extra support of the industry. No-one needs that.

You clearly don't understand the urgency of the matter. Maybe if you wrote "by 2027, all newly registered cars must have a maximum amount of 0 litres per 100 km". Cars, of all sorts, is fundamentally unsustainable in urban areas. They take too much space, they forces spread, they are too loud, they use too much energy and they polute too much (that includes electric cars). So we have to lower the usefulness of cars to make our cities more useful for the people that live and work in them.

(Electric cars might be the best alternative in rural and even some suburban areas. But they don't belong in a city.)

The reason diesel engines have been prohibited in certain city centers is because they have been shown particulary bad for people's health [0]. That is usually also something that hits the poorest people hardest. Rich people choose to live somewhere else.

Your last paragraph is just non sequitur. If you want to, you can try to explain why you think that would be the case.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/15/diesel-e...

>In my experience, most people really do not understand how fundamentally unsuited cars are to solving urban (or dense suburban) transportation problems.

In my experience, most people who are against cars really do not understand how fucking awesome it is to drive a car and how well it works in terms of getting me from A to B in the minimum time with the minimum fuss with plenty of space for my shopping. Nothing else comes close unless you are only going around an uber dense area in rush hour.

Yes, there are issues with cars. I will still rather be stuck in traffic, sitting in my own comfortable indoor seat than riding a bike to work or taking the bus with no guarantee of a seat, nor enough space to sit even if I get it. A little planning and I am at work before rush hour and it isn't even an issue.

If I was to take public transportation it would need to not take twice the time (I measured it from the time I was outside my building to the time I was inside at work), it would need to be far more comfortable and I would need to be certain that there wouldn't be trouble in the bus.

But most of all? I would need to be certain that the people who made the changes were previously happy drivers and are now happy public commuters.

I did just buy a nice bike for the exercise and the ease of parking, but it only makes sense for short journeys to dense places where parking is the major issue.

The key driver of our apparent disagreement is likely the definition of "urban (or dense suburban)" in my post. There are plenty of places and use cases for which cars are magical things, whisking you from place to place with no effort and a minimum of cost. However, the important things to understand are:

1) Many countries effectively subsidize cars over public transit in ways that are non obvious (not charging for externalities, minimum parking requirements, huge comparative investment in automotive public works), so your accounting of the costs you see (insurance, gas, depreciation) will likely underestimate the true societal cost.

2) The problem that cars seem to solve (getting around a sparse world) is also _the problem that cars cause_ (sparsification). If you have to drive three miles to get to the grocery store, you could think "thanks cars for making this drive easy", or "boo cars for making this drive necessary". In the city I live in there are 3 grocery stores within a 10 minute walk of my apartment.

3) Some people truly do prefer the spread out, population-sparse lifestyle enabled by cars. But some other people truly prefer the dense, walkable urban lifestyle that, as I have mentioned, cars seriously disrupt. The damage comes when people in one group try to force the other to adapt to rules that make sense in their preferred environment (e.g., if Urbanite A wants to ban cars while Ruralite B wants to put highways through the urban center so she can get to work via car). I tend to side with the Urbanites on this issue at present, because it doesnt take much to see who has the upper hand in American cities right now. (viz: Rober Mosesization of most major American metros in the 60s-80s)

The issue boils down to roads and parking more than cars. Trees need sunlight, but cars don’t so roads work just fine segregated below street level away from pedestrians and inclement weather. It sounds expensive, but work out how expensive NYC’s above ground road network costs both in terms of land value and ongoing property taxes and you see just how pricy cheap roads end up.

Go 3D to segregate N/S traffic from E/W traffic thereby eliminating traffic lights and things really pick up. Of course it’s much easier to blame cars, but counties only have so many people you can actually build enough infrastructure to solve the root issues.

lol ok elon

The original idea is vastly older than Elon.

From the 1939 worlds fair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World%27s_F...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World%27s_F...

Love the explanation. But what about adding some underground parking?

It's a fix but a costly one. An underground car spot costs in the tens of thousands and so this ends up boosting the price of housing in addition to making construction more complex and time consuming.

As well there's the environmental impact. Concrete creates a lot of CO2 and we actually need to use less of it going forward.

Issue is, cars are incredibly convenient.

Need to get somewhere in the suburbs? Carry large items? Go in the nature for the weekend? Any route that's not been anticipated by the central-public-transport-planning-committee is probably way better done with a car latency-wise.

Above a certain income threshold, it'll be really hard to convince people to ditch their car completely. You might get away with reducing car footprint from one per adult to one per household. Any dense development should have some sort of underground parking planned for it. Then it makes it much easier to get rid of on-street parking and convert the space into safe cycling infrastructure.

It's no real argument that cars will always win the day on the edge cases, though the real question is whether we should be designing our cities to accomodate the edge cases for the majority cases. The majority of transportation uses are much more mundane and can be well served by active transportation and public transportation.

For example creating a bus route to the base of the mountain so that hikers and snowshoers can access the wilderness is a big win for the public at large, but nonetheless there will always be a group of enthusiasts that want go on a further flung mountain hike, and they'll need to use a car to get there. Doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea to create the infrastructure that accommodates the bigger group.

Building big expensive concrete car lots, assuming everyone has a car, is an example of building for the edge case. In Vancouver, a city that has done not a bad job of building protected bike lanes, there's data out now to support that the parking lots that it has mandated in new apartment buildings are in fact overbuilt, under utilized and part vacant!

> whether we should be designing our cities to accomodate the edge cases for the majority cases.

Edge cases will always need to be accommodated. That's one of the foundation of engineering and good design.

> In Vancouver, a city that has done not a bad job of building protected bike lanes, there's data out now to support that the parking lots that it has mandated in new apartment buildings are in fact overbuilt, under utilized and part vacant!

In a city that's famous for having real estate sold for investment purposes and not actually occupied? Shocking!

If they started to charge the same for parking and street space as for any other property in places like NYC, the problem would disappear rapidly.

Is parking possible on both sides of each apartment block (re: your blog post)?

Thanks for the comment -- yes it is, but all sides also have more apartment buildings on them so it doesnt change the analysis. I probably could have explained that better in the post

Most humans enjoy being comfortable. Costs (financial and ecological) ignored, it's safe to say that a large portion of the population would choose to proceed quickly from point A to B in the comfort of a private enclosed vehicle.

Obviously this desire needs to be balanced with environmental protection, practicality and accommodation of those who legitimately want to cycle or walk. There are a few technologies coming down the pipeline that should help achieve a compromise between all of these:

-mass electrification of vehicles

-pervasive small-diameter tunneling: The jury's still out on whether this can be done cheaply enough, but if this works out, it completely solves the urban scaling problem. Passenger vehicular traffic in cities can be pushed down into the ground, freeing up existing space for cyclists and pedestrians. Parallel tunnels can be trivially added when specific routes require additional capacity.

-self-driving vehicles: Self-driving taxi services would reduce the demand for personal ownership of vehicles, thereby reducing the total ecological burden.

I'm in complete agreement with you that automobile-oriented transportation, as implemented today, is completely awful. That doesn't mean we should reject the human element, and force people to do things they don't want to, when technological progress can allow us to satisfy those wants responsibly.

People are only comfortable in cars because they've learned to be. Before I owned a car and cycled every day I didn't once think it was uncomfortable and that I'd rather be in a car. My body was used to it.

I can offer a contrary anecdote. I grew up in a Canadian city, but my family never had a car. I spent my entire childhood bussing everywhere. It sucked. It really fucking sucked and I hated it the entire time. Most journeys across the city required waiting for transfers in temperatures ranging from -30C to +30C. Any kind of irregular or lengthy trip was always an exercise in planning and frustration when scheduled busses arrived early/late or never showed up.

I can safely say that I genuinely didn't enjoy public transit. I wasn't "tricked" or "fooled" or "indoctrinated" by western society into envying the "holy automobile". The mere fact that you used the phrase "My body was used to it" indicates an implicit aspect of unpleasantness that one needs to trick themselves into accepting.

As an adult, I am now fortunate enough to own a vehicle, and the comfort, convenience and empowerment of owning a car is almost incomparably higher to public transit or cycling.

It seems like you are either 1) rejecting the possibility that technological innovation will allow for responsible and scalable use of automobiles and/or 2) rejecting human comfort as a valid argument for doing anything

We should be putting resources into public transit and cycling infrastructure for all the individuals like yourself who want (or need) to commute in that manner. And as long as we can do so responsibly (which I totally see humanity being able to do in the medium-term future), there's no reason not to also appease people who enjoy traveling comfortably.

I had a choice when I was 16 years old. I could take a 45 minute bus ride to and from school every day for free; or I could get a job, purchase my own vehicle, pay for my own gasoline and insurance, and drive to school in 15 minutes. I did the second option and never regretted it.

I hate buses too. I had a 12 mile journey to get to school when I was 15. I rode to school on my bike as soon as I realised it was possible. Buses are the absolute worst for me so it's no surprise a car would be considered more comfortable.

Are you sure you didn't also learn to be comfortable in a car? You had to learn to drive, right? And didn't all that bussing condition you to find it comfortable in a cramped metal box that moves? I like driving but hate commuting in heavy traffic. I'm pretty sure most people do. Have they been "tricked" into accepting that?

>"Are you sure you didn't also learn to be comfortable in a car?"

Yes, I'm pretty sure that I didn't have to learn to be comfortable in an environment that I immediately found comfortable.

>"You had to learn to drive, right?"

I must have forgotten the part where I was indoctrinated into praising the wonders of the holy automobile.

>"And didn't all that bussing condition you to find it comfortable in a cramped metal box that moves?"

No? What part of my anecdote made you think that I ever became comfortable with bussing? Are you really suggesting that a hard-shell non-adjustable bus seat (if one is lucky enough to not be standing), with strangers squished up again you, is comparable to what one gets in most automobiles?

>"I like driving but hate commuting in heavy traffic. I'm pretty sure most people do"

Moving the goalposts eh?

Still waiting for a direct response to my previous comment, but I don't really expect to get one. "It seems like you are either 1) rejecting the possibility that technological innovation will allow for responsible and scalable use of automobiles and/or 2) rejecting human comfort as a valid argument for doing anything"

Oh man, in high school the public transit in Ottawa was hell in the winter. Waiting 20-30 minutes in -25C with a -40C windchill during the morning rush hour on the transit way makes one really appreciate a good winter coat.

No.

Cycling is fine until its too cold, too wet, too hot, and oh I am late or I need to carry something else or .. or... or..

seriously all these articles act as if it is a viable solution day in and day out and its far from one.

people like cars, buses, and other enclosed transport, all for the same reason. because it can make the weather irrelevant to the trip

> Cycling is fine until its too cold, too wet, too hot, and oh I am late or I need to carry something else or .. or... or..

Welcome to life, it's hard, and this will hardly be the worst thing you'll face. I bike year round in Berlin, all you need is a rain coat and waterproof shoes, I'm faster than cars on any trip <5km. I still cringe every time I bike next to a 1km+ traffic jam (ie. every single day) and see that every car is occupied by a single person. Moving 2 tons of metal for a 70kg meatbag will always be the least efficient way. Just stop a minute and think about it, the whole street if completely packed, hundreds of square meters used, for what, maybe 300 persons in their expensive wheeled boxes... and then you have the space used by parking spots.

People in the past, and a lot of people today, still live perfectly fine without cars. We fucked up by designing all of our activities around them and now we're slave to them, it doesn't have to stay like that.

Convenience will kill us all if that's all we care about and don't take into account the non monetary price of it

I think there are a few convenience sacrifices you're neglecting. Not everybody has the luxury of living in such a mild climate as Berlin. In north Texas for a quarter of the year anybody will be a sweaty mess in a few minutes after stepping outside. Berlin has average of freezing temperatures in the winter months. That's not suitable for biking in a raincoat. You're fortunate that your job/school is a brief bike ride away. How does your choice in employment/school change when your spouse needs to commute 30 minutes in the opposite direction. What about children working or attending college? What about multigenerational households? Each person in the home that needs to commute somewhere constrains what they can do, where your family can live or both. Should everybody just waste more of their day with less flexible modes of transportation?

> when your spouse needs to commute 30 minutes in the opposite direction.

They wouldn't need to if we didn't design cities around roads instead of designing them around people.

Cars pushed people away from their working place, we commute as much as in the paste but we travel much greater distance and now we're trapped. It was a curse in disguise, and I'm not even talking about the financial stress owning a car ads to most people's budget

Some of my fondest memories are of when the weather was "too" something. Some of them make great stories. But I'm sure you enjoy recounting your tales about how comfortable it was in your little box. I prefer to live and experience the world.

I lived day in day out with a bicycle for years. Do you not believe me? Even now, I have a car, but I don't use it every day and I cycle if it's close enough regardless of the weather.

As for needing to carry something, you make other plans. You're on hacker news, I'm sure you're smart enough to figure it out. And being late? What? Are you advocating speeding?

What is this? You claim that people are only comfortable in cars because they've learned to be, and then someone responds providing all of the ways that cars are actually more comfortable and your response is "being uncomfortable makes for a great story"?

I mean, sure, you make some good points, but they have nothing to do with the completely valid statement you are responding to. If you're going to completely sidestep their comment, just man up and admit you were wrong before you move on to other arguments supporting your position.

First of all, there's a difference between being less comfortable and uncomfortable. I said I was never uncomfortable on my bike, I didn't say it was equally as comfortable as every other state of being.

When I used to ride in cars as a child it was incredibly uncomfortable because I got car sickness. When I started to learn to drive it was uncomfortable again because of all these weird controls and the stress. I'm sure many of us would find it uncomfortable merely to be inside a car had we not grown up with them from a very young age. I, and everyone else, learnt to find cars comfortable just as I learnt to find bikes comfortable.

I mean you're not wrong but you're not refuting that bike's are less comfortable, just that our lives would be better off with a little less comfort. I agree with you, but I don't think most people would.

I'm not trying to. My point is that there is no absolute scale of comfort. We are comfortable with what we are used to. That's why one person's comfort zone is different to another's. When I started to drive seriously it was way less comfortable than cycling for me. Manoeuvring a four-wheeled vehicle around is considerably more difficult. Acceleration is pitiful and you can't stop easily. You have to actually queue behind other cars in heavy traffic! Trapped in the little box in which you must remain, even if walking is now quicker. And just look at how angry it makes people. I've seen people literally go mad stuck in traffic. They're all on edge and the slightest mistake or unexpected behaviour can turn them into a frenzy. And this is meant to be the pinnacle of comfort! Because I don't get wet when there's a little rain?!

I’ve commuted by bicycle all year round in Umeå in northern Sweden (as well as Stockholm and Ann-Arbor MI). When you are used to it you don’t even think about it. You need good clothes to pull over when it’s raining or cold, but those cost less than most people pay in car insurance for a month or two.

And I’m far from alone. For a lot of people it is the solution, day in and day out, and it has been for many years.

Those times usually not that big of a deal anyway. Too cold you can dress up against, to warm could be a thing depending on where you are, if you're late then a bike is probably the fastest mode of transport through a busy city anyway, carrying things is definitely possible.

And these situations aren't common anyway, and I say that living somewhere where so many people bike everywhere all the time that finding parking can be an issue (though is still much easier than finding parking for a large steel box on wheels.)

Taxis, small delivery vehicles, utility cars, cars and trucks for countryside use, and various trucks for city and highway use can all be electric, with all the benefits of EVs.

If you want public transit be more popular, build denser cities. E.g. on Manhattan using the subway is a no-brainer, and you are rarely more than two (long) blocks from a subway station. In some more remote parts of Brooklyn, you often cannot reach the destination by subway alone, and you have to take a bus. Even further away, traveling by a bus either becomes too slow, or the bus does not come close enough, and a car is inevitable. I suppose there is no way to make public transit economical or time-efficient in agglomerations like Houston, even though LA manages a bus network somehow.

Cycling such distances us also problematic: you either have to be pretty fit and take a shower when you arrive, or you have to have all the time in the world. Cycling within a dense city is pretty practical, though.

There's a chicken-egg problem at play, though. We can't build denser cities because we need to build 4-lane roads and parking; we can't get rid of these roads and parking because people need cars because the city isn't dense enough yet. It's certainly solvable on the many-decade timescale by smart, consistent city and state governments, but it's going to be a gradual slog of incrementalism (e.g., see all the changes NYC has made to shift from car centrism since the 90s - gradually adding bike lanes, closing Times Square to traffic, closing 14th street to private cars, congestion pricing for taxis,...)

The distance problem with cycling is solvable (though it pains me a bit to say this as a recreational cyclist) by electric bikes and other micromobility solutions (e.g. Citroen Ami). The streets of NYC are chock full of delivery drivers and others zipping along at 25mph on cheap, quiet electric bikes with ranges of many dozens of miles. Once we have a better regulatory regime for these (so people aren't blowing so many lights and hitting so many pedestrians), I could see them being a viable alternative to cars for many-mile use cases, at least during dry/temperate weather.

Indeed, two-wheeled electric transport is pretty great! It's a mix of EVs and bicycles proper.

These devices still need parking, even if they are as compact as a scooter or a bicycle (not like a motorcycle). Keeping them in an apartment is a bit uncomfortable, too, especially in a walk-in on 4th floor, since they are not exactly lightweight.

Electric skateboards are much more compact, but take more skill, and have a shorter range.

All this is totally solvable, but the problems first needs to be recognized.

"parking" is relative. we all have bike racks around somewhere; they work just fine.

Step 1: stop subsidizing car travel. Make automobile owners pay their way--to include negative externalities such as noise and pollution.

Just removing parking subsidies would be huge.

I lived in Vancouver, which is very transit friendly by NA standards.

In the residential Neighbourhood I lived in, most roads were 3-4 cars wide, and 2 of those widths were exclusively for parking private cars (parking lane, travel lane, possibly another travel lane, and another parking lane). The building I lived in had as much square footage for parking as it did for living.

Parking a car in was more or less marginally free(as in most North American cities). Using a city parking spot for anything else cost money, and was time limited. Renting a private parking spot was about $100/ month (due to building codes there was an oversupply of private parking in addition to the available street parking). Renting a bedroom the size of a parking spot was $500+/mo.

In other words, the city incentives were set up that a climate controlled parking spot for a car was significantly oversupplied, and cheaper, than a putting a human in the same space.

Problem is: automobile owners chose their houses with these subsidies already accounted for in their budget. Remove them and suddenly it's impossible for them to stay in their home.

Oh, and they can't move closer to the city center: removing the subsidies just made houses that are centrally located impossible to afford for them.

So, spread the change out over a number of years, say 15 or 20. Building public transport won't happen over night either. People can't expect their living situation to stay the same forever, societal change requires personal change too.

I agree, but I think Vancouver has a pretty good handle on its car/parking situation. That's Vancouver proper, not the suburbs. Most new buikdings that go up have their parking underground, and then drivers in the city are squeezed for the most part in terms of parking options and so on. The parking lots that are still around seem to be from older buildings, that then get replaced with higher density eventually. When I do drive, it's actually still pretty pleasent, because it's for necessarily driving dependant activities.

Even though there's quite a lot of electric cars, there is still a remarkable level of noise generated next to patios along main roads, so improving that would be nice, if we can assume that cars won't go away entirely.

Compare that to the prairies, Alberta, or even the island, and it's a world of difference in terms of surface level lots. Would be curious what your opinion is as (presumably) a bc resident.

I live in Vancouver proper and rarely drive. The city has done a pretty good job on the bike routes; I can get to nearly anywhere in Vancouver within a 30 minute bike ride from my home turf of Mount Pleasant. I think forcing parking lots under ground and limiting parking spaces has been great for the city! It is definitely a trend with new buildings to have limited parking options. My workplace office houses about 60 people but we only have 4-5 parking spots which incentivizes alternate transit modes. Having limited parking options means that many people at my work live local to the office and either bike or walk to get there, which I think is awesome!

Ultimately the city of Vancouver cannot grow out anymore therefore we need to grow up without increasing the amount of traffic on the roads. I think the key to limiting traffic on the roads is to build dense walkable communities connected by solid transit options.

Regarding solid transit options: I think the city desperately needs a broadway skytrain all the way to UBC and a skytrain line which goes from metrotown straight west down 49th avenue connecting with the canada line at oakridge and ultimately terminating at UBC.

Going east-west in the city kind of sucks right now and most of the crappy buses to ride on are east-west due to overcrowding.

Interesting point. I hadn't thought of a SkyTrain to Oakridge from Metrotown. Oakridge is apparently getting a massive redevelopment and that could increase demand, but is it currently busy enough? I guess with the development happening ta Metrotown as well, it would be good to just connect all major centres. I did used to live in Burnaby, and it sucked getting to the airport from there.

While I appreciate the contrarian view, it’s not either/or. Cars are a wonderful thing and facilitate independence and long distance travel. Electric cars are even more wonderful things. And Bikes are wonderful for active transport and but not a substitute for cars

It should be an either/or for travel within cities. I live in London and own a car, which I never use to travel around the city or at rush hour, only to leave on trips or for occasional movement of bulky items. The congestion charge (£10/day) and schemes such as local government closing off many residential streets to through traffic (which makes Islington wonderfully pleasant to walk/cycle around, it’s awesome!) help make this a no brainer, but I’d be happy for things to be taken much further with more restrictions and charges, as there are still far to many cars in London.

Cycling infrastructure still needs much more investment and we should be changing rules to massively encourage electric micromobility as well. The safety arguments against it are nonsensical when compared to the cars it replaces, and better provision on roads would make it even safer.

I never said it was an either/or situation here, but when governments put money toward things you can see where their priorities are.

Right now with continuing near zero investment in active transportation the government is saying that its pretty much going go with the near status quo, minor and easy to achieve solution. The amount of CO2 reductions that follow will reflect this lack of ambition.

it's sort of unclear to me why you think moving to electric vehicles and renewable power will reflect a "lack of ambition" in CO2 reduction.

In the Seattle area the existing train tracks are removed and turned into bike paths which transport about < 1% of the people the rail lines could have served.

Seattle also will dig a new transportation tunnel, and fill up another tunnel with the excavated dirt, so a lot of money is spent and capacity does not increase.

Exactly. Electric vehicles is a tactic that works within a strategy of fewer cars. A strategy more vehicles, even if electric, will eventually result in more total waste.

A strategy of fewer vehicles works, all the better with a tactic of converting to electric.

Want to lower emissions? One easy, cheap way is to convert car lanes to bike lanes or simply remove them. Lots of other government subsidies worth removing too, especially to fossil fuel extraction.