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Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2016a

So only people who live downtown can go downtown unless they want to spend an hour in public transportation. Go it.

This is a terrible idea.

I live 40 minutes outside of Boston but sometimes I have meetings in downtown Boston. If I'm on time I'll park at the T (subway) station and take the T the rest of the way in but if I'm running late I'll usually drive directly in and park downtown. Sure it costs $20 for a couple hours but it is worth it when you are in a time crunch.

Making public transit the only way to get downtown is essentially saying you don't want people doing business in your downtown. Since taking public transit turns my 40 minute drive into two hours (each way).

Edit: of course I can park and take a taxi or Uber just like I can park and take the T but that adds a lot of time (and cost) to my trip. And that money is money I might spend at business downtown if I didn't just blow it on a taxi.

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To take it even further: they should make an individual parking spot held in reserve for you at every place where you might conceivably hold a meeting. That way if you are running late to a meeting in the center of the city you can always drive right up to the door from the suburbs.

And they shouldn't charge, because that would add a lot of cost to your trip.

That's called a leased parking space (except for the free part) and my point was that people who can't afford to live downtown are the ones inconvenienced not the people who live there. Effectively the rich are hoarding the downtown so that they can deal with a little less traffic and if you have to do business downtown, screw you, you should be rich enough to have a condo walking distance away.

You took exactly the opposite away from my comment from what I was trying to say.

Why does public transit have to be 2 hours? If you replaced every 30 cars with one bus, you could run one bus every minute, the bus could travel much faster because there are no cars clogging the lanes. It is simply more efficient and potentialy faster.

One would hope that a car ban would be done alongside heavy reinvestment in public transit. Best of both worlds would be car-less city center with fast access from the suburbs.

Yes.

Life will be a little less convenient for you for those "sometimes" that you have meetings, and a lot better for a lot of people.

That kind of trade-off is something we call "society".

The people we are taking from have less money (housing is cheaper far from center) and the people we're giving to have more. This is a regressive policy, not something we do often.

You took exactly the opposite away from my comment from what I was trying to say.

This is BAD for society. It is only good for people rich enough to actually live downtown. For someone who needs to go for a job interview or commute to work every day an extra 40 minutes each way is not a "little" inconvenient; it makes downtime completely inaccessible to them.

I think the whole idea is to add cost to bringing a car downtown, so fewer people will do it. The proposition is that the harm this does to suburbanites will be offset by making the city more livable for it's residents, and maybe by doing so encourage suburbanites to move inward at the margin.

What city (that would plausibly do this) doesn't have a rent crisis?

The people who get a more "livable" city (where livable apparently does not include navigable) are those who can pay the most. The people who get locked out of the city are those who can pay the least. Few suburbanites could afford a bedroom per child in the city center, yet this is standard in the suburbs. This is under current prices; think how much worse they'd get if every suburban resident was trying to move in.

The city is going to be less livable if people have to pay higher portions of their incomes for less space, and waste more of their lives in transit.

We should do this so some people paying $3500/mo rents don't suffer the indignity of looking at a parked car?

There's obviously a balance to be struck. But motorists kill a lot of people, make a lot of noise and pollution, and use a lot of infrastructure that city-dwellers must pay to maintain. So I think it is not out of bounds to consider reducing the footprint of a city that is dedicated to them. To the extent demand supports it, there will still be private parking and valet services.

I'm not worried about the housing costs issue. I think it is likely that any city council able to overcome the action-potential of banning cars will also be quite pro-housing.

Banning cars and banning new housing have precisely the same motivation: to protect and increase quality of life for existing urban residents at the expense of everyone else.

The kind of city council that imposes height limits and lot coverage maximums (tall apartment buildings and their residents are considered noise, shadow, and cultural pollution) is the most likely to ban cars.

Your subway takes more than twice the time to get you to the city center than driving?

I have to say, I've never been to a city like that. I mean, unless your meetings are at 4am or something. Don't you have traffic? Is your subway pulled by horses?

All the extra time adds up: parking and walking to the train, waiting for it, a min. or so at each stop on the way; even more waiting if you have to switch lines.

As long as I could avoid peak time, I found it similar in Boston: 40 mins to drive in, 60-70 mins on the train.

And parking and taking the T wasn't even always an option as the garage on my route (Alewife) can fill up.

Not exaggeration, actual numbers:

10 min - Finding a parking spot at Alewife

15 minutes - getting the ticket if you don't have one (moot if you have a pass or stored value / Charlie Card)

10 minutes - walking to the actual train platform and waiting for the next train to leave

30 minutes - to downtown crossing because it has to stop every stop along the way

10 minutes - to walk from the station to your meeting

And that is assuming you don't need to transfer to another line.

Granted the first and last one are time you'd spend either way (unless your lucky enough to have the garage attached to the building you need to be in)

Drive time for said trip... 20 minutes

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