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Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

> But they are.

They are. Except for building highways. Gas subsidies. Gas stockpiling for security purposes. Road Maintenance. Signage. And then there's the opportunity cost of the space lost to parking.

Those above choices? Well they're collective and everyone has to pay for them, because without raising taxes they are much too expensive to fund privately. So even if you ride a bicycle to the train to work everyday, you still get to pay for the construction and maintenance of the highway that driving commuters drive their cars on that you can't ride your bicycle, or any smaller motorcycle, on.

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> Except for building highways. Gas subsidies. Gas stockpiling for security purposes. Road Maintenance. Signage.

No need to even go that far. Just building so many roads (which are inimical to anything but cars by definition), stroads and parking space requirements: when 60% if a commercial lot has to be parking you reduce commercial density by 2/3rds, and increase the difficulty of alternate modes if transport because it becomes significantly more difficult to make rounds without a car.

And that’s if you can even reach the place to start with. The latest “not just bikes” video has a demo of a short walk through a houston suburb (where the author originally needed to go 800m to buy replacement luggage), and it’s terrifying.

I doubt Houston suburbs will ever replicate a European walkable city. Europe had a heatwave recently and thousands died. Houston deals with that sort of temperature every summer. Then there's the humidity.

Meanwhile business offices in Houston continue to be aggressively air-conditioned, filled with people wearing full suits and ties, in blind imitation of European culture.

That's rather missing the point.

People die in european heatwaves because they're not used to the heat and don't have the right habits, and the homes are not set up to handle them: AC is relatively rare (especially whole-house AC), homes are not set up for airflow, and almost none have ceiling fans. Unshaded southern / south-western windows are also rather common, as usually the goal has been to get the sun and heat in, not keep them out (in fact in the last few decades the building codes have drastically increased the required window surface).

Which of course doesn't mean you should follow a central or northern european set up for a city like Houston, you should rather look at southern-europe, or SEA. But overall it's probably going to look like favouring shade, greenery, and airflow.

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