Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrybczyn | Hacker News Reader

Nothing wrong with driving. Just drive appropriately.

Car sharing. Taxi / Uber. Hybrids. Electric cars. Self driving cars.

The freedom to transport yourself is a powerful force for good, and socialized public transport and bikes are not a real solution in many / most places.

(am a biker, love biking, only commute by bike to work 3 months of the year)

View on HN

Driving with shared cars, Uber, hybrids, evs, and self-driving cars doesn't fix the one and ultimate problem with cars in cities: space. A person walking needs maybe 0.5m². Self-driving electric Uber still needs ~50-60 m² of space per vehicle in moving traffic. Plus parking. And if we allocate enough space for people to drive in the first place they can only drive to places. The distances grow too long for biking and walking.

> (am a biker, love biking, only commute by bike to work 3 months of the year)

Living somewhere where I commute by bike (or run!) every single workday, I'm curious as to what limits you to 3 months.

Weather. Boston for example has three months that the casual commuter would find tolerable.

But that's not because of the weather, but rather what the conditions are of the bike infrastructure in that weather. I think Amsterdam weather isn't very substantially different from Boston's... but in Boston winter weather bike lanes are practically un-existent when snow-plowing trucks have cleared the snow for cars to the area where bike lane would be (if it even exists to begin with).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston#Climate

Thanks for the info. I can imagine you do NOT want to share the roads with cars in those conditions.

Cheaper taxis and self driving cars should reduce the need for parking space but I would expect that it would result in more cars using the road overall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com