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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

Not just the legal system but also the city planners who designed all sorts of things like suburbs, malls, etc. that favour cars and are pretty much copy-pasta all over each city on the whole continent. All these people want bike lanes, I want my horse lane.

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Let's not forget that, at least in the case of New York, mass transit was deliberately pushed out, in pursuit of some kind of elitist pipe dream. The more I read about Robert Moses, the less respect I have for his legacy.

Your comment makes me think of the premise behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Judge Doom: Several months ago I had the good providence to stumble upon this plan of the city council's. A construction plan of epic proportions. They're calling it a freeway.

Eddie Valiant: Freeway? What the hell's a freeway?

Judge Doom: Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena. Smooth, safe, fast. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past.

Eddie Valiant: So that's why you killed Acme and Maroon? For this freeway? I don't get it.

Judge Doom: Of course not. You lack vision. I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night. Soon, where Toontown once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.

Eddie Valiant: Come on! Nobody's going to drive this lousy freeway when they can take the Red Car for a nickel.

Judge Doom: Oh, they'll drive. They'll have to. You see, I bought the Red Car so I could dismantle it.

Today, San Francisco only has trains along Market Street, fingering out into a half dozen neighborhoods. Most of the city is served by buses. Originally, many of those buses were, in fact, trains:

> ...as SF's rail network was removed or replaced with bus lines in the mid-century, it went from 16 rail lines to five...

The reason we still have the trains we do is because they were the lines that used tunnels, so they couldn't easily be replaced by buses.

The World's Fair, which also brought us the Palace of Fine Arts, spurred the construction of many of those train routes. You used to be able to get to the Presidio by train! Imagine if, instead of spending effort digging up the tracks to replace them with buses, they buried the tracks and built an actual metro system: you could get around the city without a vehicle.

https://www.sfmta.com/blog/how-munis-streetcar-lines-got-the...

  Today, San Francisco only has trains along Market Street

Um, Caltrain? BART? Fixed rail Muni, including the 3rd Street line all the way to Bayview?

Perhaps I should have been more specific; I was talking about MUNI:

> along Market Street, fingering out into a half dozen neighborhoods

Do streetcars not count as trains?

> along Market Street, fingering out into a half dozen neighborhoods

https://inhabitat.com/what-happened-to-los-angeles-streetcar...

Atleast things were "planned" in the US.

In my country (India), there is hardly any planning -- empty land == lets buy and build a building. No regulation even on buying cars, keep on piling and spend an hour or two for a 8 KM ride home from your office.

There is no incentive to use public transport. There is no special lanes for public transport. No one follows the "lane rules" either. They(us) got enough money to buy a car but no sense on how to use them properly.

And note that cars much costlier in India if you consider PPP. Its horrible.

No incentive to use public transport is exaggeration. More than half of India is reliant on public transportation in some form or another. If the Delhi Metro or the Mumbai Local shuts down, there’ll be riots within an hour. Just a couple of weeks ago a 1km stretch of Delhi metro on the yellow line shut down and the whole south of the city was gridlocked in 30 mins in the afternoon (when it usually isn’t). Even in rural areas, a vast majority of people are still dependent on public transit in the form of government buses, private buses, taxis, tempos, autorickshaws etc.

Public transportation is the backbone of India. I can only agree to the point is that it’s uncomfortable and overcrowded to use.

> No incentive to use public transport is exaggeration

There isn't a single person in India who will not buy a car if they have the money to. How many of these 'rich' people really use the Mumbai local and Delhi Metros?

Suburbs, sure, but do malls really favor cars? Where I grew up, the mall was the only place where people would walk from one store to another instead of driving. I’ve also been in plenty of urban malls that have excellent public transit connections and are situated on busy pedestrian streets.

Malls are usually surrounded by a huge carpark.

So are suburban train stations. It’s the natural byproduct of places where people change their mode of transport from cars to something else. Malls are one of the only high-density land uses that people in the suburbs accept, and the surrounding carpark is a necessary buffer between the low- and high-density development. I contend the problem isn’t with the mall itself, but with the low-density development surrounding it.

I think this is the point. Malls in cities in other countries are not as pedestrian/public transit unfriendly as they are in the US.

Absolutely not. In Sydney, we have malls with their own suburban train stations (eg Macquarie Centre), and bus interchanges.

The vast majority of people get there by public transport, not driving.

I want the majority of the road network roofed with turf into a long hill with occaisional exits, or lowered and moved completely underground.

Terrible maintenance costs for ventilation, plant vehicle access, widening (e.g. temporarily for roadworks), poor kerb access for deliveries/emergency vehicle access, plus a firetrap in the case of a burning vehicle

At least that's what I've worked out from Cities: Skylines.

I've concluded the opposite: leave the cars where they are. What I want is a separate pedestrian level to the city - a skyway system (though I'm fine with it being underground). Let the humans walk in air conditioned comfort while not cars to worry about. This is much cheaper than the underground roads.

How about air conditioned skyways for pedestrians in cities and underground roads everywhere else?

Underground roads are orders of magnitude more expensive, so it isn't worth creating them (with some exceptions). With unlimited resources we could create as many as we want, but I have better things to do with my time/money than build roads.

Skyways are significantly cheaper than bridges. It would still be cheaper to make the ground level of your city a building, but not having to support the mass of cars and trucks means skyways can be significantly cheaper.

In the modern world trucks and buses are far too useful to ban completely from cities where people live. People need their stuff delivered, and need to get longer distances once in a while. Thus I'm saying reserve the ground for those uses and get humans away from them. It is a compromise, but I think it is a good one.

Not worrying about the humans in particular. Uncovered ground level roads are just death traps and fencing them off is even worse in many ways.

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