Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

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The problem isn't the wording, it's the hare-brained idea that public and private shouldn't mix and cooperate. Flip the statement, make it about education - "How can it be that private benefit – the education – is financed by the public money?" - to clearly see the implications.

We finance the baseline of education/transportation infrastructure from public funds because we believe that improves productivity, and performance of civic duties in a democracy across the board. Purely privately owned education/transportation is politically contentious for various reasons, right? Enclosure of the commons, economic inequality, limited avenues for upward mobility and all that, right?

Lastly, a pedestrian on city-founded sidewalks is "a private citizen occupying public space" just as well. There's no moral qualitative difference between an individual pedestrian, an individual on a bicycle, an individual in a car [1], or a group of individuals in a tram or bus. We can argue about occupancy and all that, but that's just quantitative difference of maybe an order of magnitude at worst. The use of public space should should primarily support the main activities of the general public.

[1] pollution from ICEs aside, but we're on track to fix that permanently.

Then as you say don’t simply ban "private property occupying public space" but require some degree of efficiency when doing so – people can occupy public space, but like with all resources, they must be considerate and efficient when doing so and not let it go to waste.

A simple requirement would be a strict upper limit of 1m²/passenger at all times for vehicles and pedestrians. Trivial to fulfil for considerate means of transportation and quite impossible if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you.

>A simple requirement would be a strict upper limit of 1m²/passenger

I beg to differ - this doesn't gracefully handles special cases. Both my disabled neighbor or my friend taken by ambulance to the hospital (made up examples) would fare far worse than in the current system.

We already have have a better system to divide that among people - those who care highly about particular issue can reserve more space or whatever with small green tokens.

>if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you

An easy snark, but this two tonnes[1] reliably brings home a week worth of groceries, drives me 2hrs to meet family, and occasionally delivers tools and materials to various points. All that on the cheap, and with easily calculable costs. Prohibiting it by governmental fiat would surely give us various nice well understood savings, but would cause a lot of loss, both direct and via lost opportunities. I'd be much more reliant on service providers - typically large companies - that would provide the service at the time, cost and quality level I would have little to no control over.

Thanks, but no thanks; I don't want to be any more dependent on goodwill of businesses than I already am.

[1] 1090kg in my case, to be exact.

reliably brings home a week worth of groceries, drives me 2hrs to meet family, and occasionally delivers tools and materials to various points. All that on the cheap, and with easily calculable costs

All the talk of banning cars seems to come from people so privileged that other people invisibly provide all the services of the road network to them, delivering their stuff and so on. I mean if a person’s entire life is based on Netflix and Amazon and Uber Eats in an apartment full of stuff that just magically appeared sure they don’t need a car, and no one is forcing them to buy one. But they are so vocal that everyone who hasn’t chosen that lifestyle should be penalised, and they can’t even clearly articulate the alternatives. An hour outside London “public transport” is one bus in the morning and another in the afternoon. But yeah, let’s all get self-driving trams or something on every B-road...

You can be in favor for banning personal use vehicles without banning delivery and ambulances. And as you'll note the city in the article only banned cars in the city center, so talking about an hour outside of London is not relevant. If London banned cars in the city center you could drive to the closest rail station at the border of the exclusion zone and take public transport from there.

Funny you should say that. Next step is people self-segregating into pedestrian cities and car cities or city districts; of high-paid knowledge-based jobs living in tranquil peace vs. of people in low-paid menial jobs, living in ever worsening conditions.

Right now I enjoy the perks of having everything near by in the city center, but if my city went pedestrian-first, I would move to the countryside and simply drive to customers when the need occasionally be. But that's feasible only because after all those years, only since I'm in senior technical position in knowledge based sector, and could easily work remotely, and also could work 20hrs-week and earn well enough.

But that's not possible for everybody right now.

No such luck for young people who are just launching their careers, or who are for whatever reason having local responsibilities like, for example, a sick parent. Doubly no such luck for people in service economy "gigs", working for peanuts and by necessity having to perform labor at their workplaces.

Truly, a perspective of privilege.

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