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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

This article doesn’t really say much. It makes a vague claim that cycling promotes social distancing, but so do cars. In fact, enclosed cars are much more distant than bikes trailing each other at ten feet lengths. As far as I can tell the author is asking for driving infrastructure to be repurposed under the guise of the pandemic, but it just comes off as an opportunist grab while everyone who might care about driving convenience is distracted by the virus.

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Most cities with a subway or significant bus infrastructure have very high population densities. "Everybody drive" is not going to work in places where driving isn't already the default mode of transit.

Plus, few people can afford it. Have you looked at the price of a parking spot in e.g., major parts of Boston or NYC? 5-6 figures to buy, or hundreds/mo to rent, and that's with working mass transit. I guess that those prices would at least triple if everyone started driving. Lots of wealthy people take the subway and commuter rail.

I don't think cycling is the solution. But cars are definitely a non-starter.

I can attest.

Own a car in NYC. $400 for the lease. $200 for insurance. $400 for parking.... or about $200 every 2 months in parking violation tickets.

But... Even in NYC a car is the difference between going to one of the packed urban parks... vs going to the woods upstate.

The problem is that cars don't scale as a transportation solution. They take up too much space. Normally public transport fills the gap, but it's hard to keep your distance in a crowded train.

Bikes on the other hand scale much better. You can easily double a road's throughput with bikes. Now take away lanes used for parking and even more bikes fit on the road.

>You can easily double a road's throughput with bikes

For often jammed inner city street, I think its more an order of magnitude increase or more rather than a double.

Removing a lot of street parking would increase the throughput of a street 12-36 times easily.(a regular NYC one way street will have one lane for traffic and two lanes "for parking")

Ubiquitous car ownership is physically impossible in urban areas— usually at least 10 people live in a building one or two parking spaces wide, and even if parking were solved, urban roadways cannot handle all those cars driving at once — and many people are unable to drive for health, financial, or legal reasons.

Bicycles (or other small wheeled vehicles) are much more accessible to more people now that electric power is practical in addition to human power.

In many urban areas, there is a lack of _any_ safe bike routes from point a to point b, which is not the experience of the motorist.

Let's assume everyone takes a car instead of public transport. Where do you think people will be parking in cities like New York or London?

There is no way cars are the solution to this.

Where would people park in economic hubs of Boston, DC, Philadephia, San Francisco, Seattle, Miami, etc...

I couldn't find a parking spot in Palo Alto, CA... and that's not a densly populated area.

The places discussed in the article rely far more on public transportation than cars for day to day transportation. It is also impossible for either Paris and London to transition from public transportation to cars because you can't widen city streets.

Also most new cars have options for HEPA filters. Filter MFGs do build HEPA filters for cars that originally didn’t.

On the other hand people could wear a full face mask with good screw on filters too.

Yeah, NYC should really just disband the subway and tell everyone to drive their cars.

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