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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

> cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward

Inside cities that is. One must remember that a lot of the people that move around in a city every day don't live in the city. And for many of them a car is a requirement anyway. For me the car is a sunk cost - I have it for the rare times I need it (I don't need it to go into the city), but buying/maintaining/insuring it is mostly a fixed cost, meaning that the marginal cost of each mile driven is very very small. I wouldn't mind if my city was made car free tomorrow - but I still wouldn't drive any less.

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Many suburbanites, however, have the entitled attitude that cities should accommodate their car trips to dense areas at the expense of people actually living there. Often their mindset is that cities are strictly where people go instead of where people live. In the US this mentality is exarcebated by the white flight and the decay of inner cities, but does also exist in Europe.

As one of these so called "white flight" people, I can't describe how much such statements frustrate me. I didn't move from the city because I'm a racist or don't want to be around people of color. I don't want to be around people period. Living in the city stresses me out. The constant noise, the issues with drunk people randomly knocking on my door at 2am, the couple of times I woke up to people fighting in the parking lot, the sirens, the random music festival 3 blocks over that I didn't know about, the fact I had 2 motorcycles stolen in 5 years, my kids not having a convenient place to play outside and more led to me leaving the city.

I didn't move because I'm white, I moved because I wanted peace and quiet. Most of the people I know who live around me moved away from the city for the same reason. Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...

Call it "middle-class flight" if you want. The end result is the same.

It's quite a different thing to be accused of racism than it is to not be able to afford to live in the nicer areas of a metropolitan area.

People fleeing city centres is often not a matter of affordability but a choice on other criteria.

I have no issue with that. I just don't like being labeled a racist.

There are good reasons to believe that highly urban environments are bad for your mental health (in ways that I think are worse than how bad they are for your physical health). Sometimes I feel like strong advocates of increasingly-dense construction feel that the denser your lifestyle, the more prosocial your behavior. Maybe these advocates are among the most extraverted people, and they have little experience with the stress it causes others.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230535/

And to what extent the hostility of urban environments is due to cars and car-centric planning hostile to human-scale activity? The whole point of new urbanism is creating livable, hospitable urban environments, and usually people-friendliness means car-unfriendliness.

Your generic suburbs have their own problems – massively artificial, claustrophobic rows and rows of almost identical houses, with zero character and nowhere to go without a car.

I agree wholeheartedly with you; like you I'm a proud suburbanite who can't tolerate cities, noise, and people, and to that I'll add one thing...

> Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...

On this note, almost the entire Asian population of the Dallas area lives in the suburbs, and those who can afford it are starting to move to the exurbs. Only people without the means to leave are staying in the city because the city sucks.

This article is about a city that doesn't suck, largely because it was made car-free. Not much "noise" when cars are gone.

People make noise. People shouting in the streets, nearby festivals, etc. I don't like people, and there's no such thing as a dense city that doesn't suck for me.

It's a town with a population of 90k. It wouldn't suck either way.

Almost none of the noise issues I experienced while living in the city was from automobiles.

traditional white flight (1970's style) mostly ended in the early 2000's when traffic got bad enough and baby boomers started to age out of power. It's an outdated term in most cities I think.

> Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...

Part of the reason the trend is called "white flight" is that for a long time and in many places non-white people were prevented by bank, municipal, real estate office and HOA policy from purchasing houses or even getting mortgages in the suburbs.

Calling it white flight isn't always an accusation of racism against the people who were fleeing, more against the people who openly prevented people of color from leaving as well.

Yes. If folks are interested, here's more about that: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Color-of-Law/

That's not what "white flight" refers to. While the 1940s-1950s move to the suburbs consisted almost entirely of white people due to systematic racial discrimination preventing POC from moving, that is not "white flight".

The phrase "white flight" refers to a 1970s phenomenon where white people repeatedly moved from one suburb to another (often in circular patterns) in order to avoid POC after desegregation and civil rights legislation made suburbs accessible to POC for the first time. This was exacerbated by real estate agents engaging in a race-baiting, unscrupulous practice called "block busting".

No, the OP is actually correct. The origin of the term "white flight" was a phenomenon that that followed the "great migration" of people from the rural south during the war and immediate post war years in the US.[1][2]

>"The phrase "white flight" refers to a 1970s phenomenon ..."

No, the 1970s may have seen a recirculation of the original phrase but it is commonly understood that "white flight" refers to phenomenon around the war years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

[2] https://priceonomics.com/the-great-migration-the-african-ame...

At least one of your challenges is addressed by the OP: "The constant noise"

Nobody (and especially not the person you are replying to) said everyone who is white and moved to the suburbs is/was participating in "white flight."

I think you may be neglecting the extent to which you are describing the self-reenforcing downsides of "post white flight" urbanism. Given the age demographics of HN, it's more likely than not that the city life you (or any of us) experienced was well after white flight ran its course, with consequent effects on crime and noise in cities. If you imagine a world in which the people who wanted quiet never left, the picture of urbanism looks a bit different. If you read about American life in pre-war cities, or the late 19th century, urban areas were a place where all types of people lived, including families, the elderly, and people who seek calm and quiet.

I don't know how it is outside of Canada, but here in Toronto what drives me insane is that Cities are essentially completely beholden to the province and it makes everything worse.

Something simple like setting up a toll to use city streets to reduce congestion is completely off the table. We end up highly taxing corporate zoned housing to try to kinda indirectly tax the work place of the suburbanites that are making a mess of our city, but it's only a partial fix and it's distortionary.

Meanwhile, people that actually live in Toronto pay way more in income tax than people that live outside of it, and our taxes are indexed to inflation, unlike the petrol taxes. Add in the three way split of the left vote and the FPTP system and we end up with a vindictive moron in charge of the province fucking up representation by changing our riding map in the middle of a city election.

Cars have ruined so many things. The amount of times a car has honked at me for not putting my own life in danger because I need 5 seconds to get to a safer place to pull over with my bike is crazy. I'm not "taking a lane" I'm just keeping myself from getting doored.

Imagine if cars had never been invented and we could have stuck with trains for everything? Way more green space. Way healthier population. Way more 4 or 6 story buildings. Way more parks. Way less time wasted behind the wheel. Fewer deaths. No road rage.

And what would we have to give up?

3000 sqft suburban houses and their shitty pools that get used 5 times a year. Instead of watching TV at night alone at home people could walk over to their friends place or go out to a cute restaurant or well groomed park.

I left the city when we had kids, and the thing that drew me to suburbia is that kids can just roam around outside unattended, biking around, building tree houses etc. Basically it's centered around 2 themes 1) As a parent I don't want my kids outdoor time to be limited to the times I can follow them, and 2) The idea that since my childhood was happy, I should give my kids the same experience.

I don't necessarily think suburbia is the culprit for traffic though. It probably is in North America where suburbs often means "not even public transport available to the city". They were planned for and built for cars! My suburb was not. People lived here before cars too.

I use public transport for most of my needs (including commuting) and drive very few miles per year - but I use my car many times for short distances, mostly things like picking up kids from daycare etc.

I understand the impulse to go to the suburbs now that we have cars everywhere, but it didn't need to be this way. Plenty of people walk to daycare or buy a bike with a cart to pick up their kids.

Also, speaking of daycare, that's another thing I really think is essentially stupid. Imagine two different situations.

First situation: Normal family sends 2 kids to daycare. About $50k here in Toronto. Cool. The daycare workers pay their taxes, the family pays theirs after claiming a $6k tax credit. At the end of the day the government gets around $30–40k more in income tax.

Second situation: Family A has two kids and so does Family B. They take turns watching each others kids, reducing each family's working hours by 25%. Assuming both parents earn the same base income in both families, but that only one of them wants to raise kids all day, the government loses about $11k in tax revenue per family, or $22k total.

The only thing that stops this practice from being widespread is that most employers want full-time workers.

Cart + bike is definitely an option, at least for 3/4 of the year.

In my case (Sweden) the daycare subsidy is much more significant, 2 kids is $3700 (Canadian) so the incentive to work full time is absolutely massive in comparison.

I use public transport for most of my needs (including commuting) and drive very few miles per year

As a city parent, every morning I walk with my kid to the daycare and have to cross traffic mostly from suburbanites whose kids are A-OK while they put my kid at risk on their way to work. Thank you for taking public transit!

"Instead of watching TV at night alone at home people could walk over to their friends place or go out to a cute restaurant or well groomed park."

No thank you. As much as I like my home town, I don't want to pay a fortune (that could buy a castle or another absurdly large property elsewhere) for a crappy house or condo in the densest part of Toronto and never enjoy personal peace and quiet again. Not everyone wants to live in miserable close quarters paying exorbitant rent for the freedom to walk to convenient overpriced services.

A home and a yard allows those who need it to live with a measure of dignity. It's pants and you're trying to argue that everyone would be fine with shorts.

Ironically I live in NYC right now which is even worse in most of those respects, but at least the pay/COL ratio is better. Public transportation is better too. In the end if I buy a home it isn't going to be in either city.

I'm not arguing everyone should live in huge, loud cities. You can still have sleepy towns with trains. I'm arguing that cars ruin lives and cities.

I think it's mostly those who are better off than average who argue against cars. No other comment from me.

This is an attack on character and a bit disingenuous. If a rich person proposed a good idea, would we not listen to them because they are rich?

My point is that it is a lot easier to argue against cars when you make a good living and can afford the nicer parts of the city. When your choice is a crappy car commute or a nightmare commute via trains and public transit, and the places in your budget for you to live in don't have "cute restaurants" or "well groomed parks", things are not so cut and dry. Cars improve quality of life for many people and it's downright myopic and classist to say they ruin lives and cities.

You're confusing cause and effect. The effect of having cars everywhere is that we end up with cities where the downtown core is hyper dense and the extents are flat. What we want is the opposite. Six storey mid rises. And commutes via trains and mass transit are only nightmares when they're all trying to get to the same place and they're 3rd class citizens to cars and trucks.

> And what would we have to give up?

A lot of freedom to travel.

To live within reasonable walking / public transport distance of my workplace in SF, I'd be paying about a thousand dollars a month more in rent. If you don't want me to commute in from the suburb, build more housing in the city and bring down market rent there.

how about they just charge you really high tolls and congestion tax instead? ;)

Thereby driving up demand for living downtown, further driving up rent? Excellent solution.

Or encouraging people to take the train into SF. Of course, not everyone has a convenient train option because the patchwork of cities makes it incredibly difficult to drive a joint transit initiative.

Sure, that's exactly what urbanists are trying to do. But they're prevented by NIMBYs and car-centric regulations, like mandatory minimum parking spaces per inhabitant.

Many urbanites have the entitled attitude that cities should not accommodate people who are not rich enough to live within walkable distances of their job.

Many of the cities in the US that are dense enough to be reasonable walkable/bikable are also incredibly expensive in those areas.

I haven't met many urbanites who would deny that cheap and reliable public transport also is the backbone of any large urban area, precisely for this reason.

This is normal for people who work in London and live in the commuter belt around it. Most of these people have a car but walk to the station, or drive to the station, and then take a train into London. Once in London these people then take the tube, buses, bikes or walk to get around.

The car still gets used outside work to get groceries, pick up kids from schools and of course at the weekends.

Same things for most cities in France

Won't something like rental cars make more sense in such a case ?

Not at their current price point.

Locally (Portland, Oregon) the car2go rental rate is approximately equivalent at 1 hour versus my cost of owning a new car for a day. So if I could get by on less than an hour of car2go time per day it would be worthwhile.

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