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Comment by patrickyeon | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you bike for most of your transportation in your city? That's what "anti-car" people (speaking as one myself) want: to emphasize infrastructure that enables and encourages that. The "anti-car" thing isn't "ban cars entirely in all cases", just "stop assuming everything needs to be car-first at the expense of every other modality".

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Yea my point is that if you want to be less car centric, maybe try moving out of the big city. It's ironically easier to obtain that lifestyle in a small city in America than the "walkable urban utopias" everyone seems to desire on HN.

Mostly only out of American big cities (at least in the developed world), the point is to fix that. A lot of big cities in Europe and East Asia do fine without being car-centric.

A lot of places depend on cars / 2-wheelers beyond American big cities. Based on my first hand experience - big cities in India and Brazil.

You're right, in my zeal I overstated a bit. But among the richest/most developed nations there are the US & a few similar countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) where a lot of people drive cars and on the other hand western europe and the reach east asian countries (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore) where mass transit (and in Europe sometimes also bicycles) is the main form of transportation in the large cities.

Super obvious response, but it depends on the city. Smaller denser European cities that were not designed, but evolved over hundreds of years from earlier settlements, don't handle car traffic very well and are better suited to walking and cycling (or battery operated scooters). But even larger cities over here work well for walking and cycling because you tend to find lots of bars, restaurants, convenience stores and shopping malls all over them. In my home town, you can't walk a mile without passing a dozen bars, a dozen restaurants and two decent grocery stores.

But it's not just down to city size. Take a city like Provo in Utah. It's not large by any standard, but it's completely designed for cars. It has awful public transport, a grid 'motorway' system cris-crossing it, everything-as-a-drive-thru, lots of unused space, lots of parking lots... If you try walking around it, you'll just spend hours walking past nothing in particular to get to nowhere special.

It seems that everything is way too far apart because it's all separated by huge sprawling parking lots that are mostly empty. 50-70% of the acreage is devoted to cars not even counting the ultra-wide roads and only occasional pedestrian crossings every half mile. These roads usually have speed limits well above 45 mph. The worst examples I can think of are Scottsdale AZ and Irvine CA.

It isn't surprising that so many cars are on the road when just to cross the street you need to walk a quarter mile on average. Then you have to cross the death trap parking lots with zero shade and 120 degree black top.

Here in Europe it's often the opposite. E.g. in Austrian cities you have decent bicycle infrastructure and everything in reach in the cities while in rural areas that's often not the case.

I've been in the US once, 13 years ago, and it was pretty shocking for me to experience the concept of "car centric" in its full glory for the first time. I was at CES in Las Vegas and went to some club one evening with a friend. At some point I left and wanted to walk to the Hotel alone in order to calm down and enjoy the nice climate. Turned out, there was simply no walkable connection between the 2 locations. I couldn't believe it, but - being stubborn - walked anyway, in the dirt along some highway, a bit scared of being picked up by the police, not even sure if walking there was even legal.

Later that week I moved to LA and first saw the endless suburbs of an American city, from the air.

I don't know how representative those 2 places are for the US, but having seen that, I can totally understand why many Americans have a very hard time imagining life without a car.

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