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Comment by marshmallow_12 | Hacker News Reader

i commented about this subject yesterday, i don't think it's a bad idea, but i personally can't imagine living without a car. It wasn't a popular opinion but i still stand by it. Maybe i'm just afraid of change, but i hate the thought of having to rely on public transport. tfl in my experience is a slow, noisy uncomfortable nightmare.

Anecdotally, i remember seeing a prediction from the 1950's about mile high skyscrapers containing fully contained "cities". I'm not sure what happened to those..

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I don't think this is about 'no one should have cars', but that no one in the city should NEED a car to get to 95% of their long tail of errands. I pay a premium in my area right now to live walking distance to shops, restaurants and a grocery store even though I still have to drive to work every day. That proximity is valuable even if it doesn't mean I don't need a car at all.

Honestly I think America's lack of walkability is a major contributor to our health crisis. Even if you still drive every day, walking to dinner or the grocery store would have a hugely positive impact on people's health in the long term.

I don't think it's possible to be both dense enough to sustain local stores that can be walking distance and at the same time have the infrastructure that allows everyone to have a car. My evidence is that no such place exists, and also, simply the amount of space that car related infrastructure takes such as roads and parking.

Also, once people have access to a car, they're going to use it to shop at big box stores to save on price, starving the local smaller stores of business.

What happened to those is people want to have the flexibility to move around independently of their jobs. You can still see those in Montreal -- one tower my friend lives in has offices on the middle twenty floors, grocery and shopping on the bottom three, parking in the five basement floors, and the top twenty floors are for residential (with a restaurant on the top two, because imagine the view!). It's not a bad place to live and work, but, he just happens to not work there -- his workplace is a tower three blocks away.

The promise of a 20-minute neighborhood is not trading 20 minutes stuck in traffic in your car for 20 minutes stuck on a crowded train. The promise is that most everyday needs can be met within the radius of 20 minutes of "active transport" like walking, cycling, or scootering. Frequent public transport service just further extends that radius.

How such an arrangement would work in London, for example, is beyond my comprehension.

I'm not sure what you mean? London is one of the places I can readily imagine this existing.

Where I live in Seattle, an area that isn't even in the downtown or Capitol Hill core, I am a maximum of 15-minute walk from two parks, a library, three shopping areas, two grocery stores, health care offices, and a major transit center. At the transit center, two bus routes that go to different parts of the city (an important thing, since two bus routes going to roughly the same place are basically the same bus) arrive every 12-15 minutes virtually the entire calendar day.

Does that not sound like something that many parts of London already have?

Not that i'm aware. Many shops i need are in large, industrial areas, far away by foot. And 20 minute walks everywhere simply eats up my day. I hate using the buses, driving is far, far easier and faster.

Wait, what part of London are you from?

I lived there for a decade and only knew a single person who had a car (because they had to commute out west towards Slough).

Driving in London does not make any sense, it's expensive (congestion charge, parking), slow and impractical. Especially when London is made up of what is basically dozens of villages, all with their own high street.

I lived in many different parts of London and never had to walk more than 15-20 minutes to get anything I ever needed. Rarely I'd have to hop on the tube to get something specialised (which would probably not even be available outside of a large city like London).

What part of Seattle are you in? I could imagine this maybe in the Roosevelent/Ravenna area, or perhaps near Northgate/Greenwood?

Think “bridge is out.”

You have to do it, not imagine it. I didn't imagine I'd sell my car when I moved to my current house. But seeing the bus every day while I drove for a few months convinced me I ought to at least try it - two months later I sold the car that I hadn't used in a month.

Sadly I have to move.

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