Comment by xwolfi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xwolfi | Hacker News Reader

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Lived in Paris for years but wanted to go to my native Normandy 90 minutes away by car often, with friends (so train is uneconomical, and whatever): I love car free cities just as much as I love cars, but I feel they always miss the massive parking space at the periphery. Those have to be free one day, and truly understood and desired, so we can sort of mix the intra city metro/bike, the intra regional car, and maybe the rest by train (but again, train multiply cost for a group when car divides it so hard to choose).

Now I live in Hong Kong, bought a 1998 Porsche 911 that guzzled gas and spat good smoke, that cost me so much in eco tax and gas tax (the same thing, really) for so little use I gave up and am car-free now :D

Cant wait for massive electric cars adoption where the discussion will move away from how we murder the world for fleeting amusement, and back to transport convenience and pleasure to drive. But Im sure we ll find problems with Lithium mining or whatever.

Making cars electric doesn't solve any of the problems with cars though. Cars, no matter the technology, are the problem. I'd much rather get rid of more or less all cars, permanently, period.

Cars create opportunities for working class people that wouldn't exist otherwise. You're advocating for removing mid to long range personal transportation entirely? what's the basis for this? I'm all for city neighbourhoods being less car centric.

Sure, but they are still deadly. Self driving isn't ready yet despite the low bar of needing to be better than humans

Of course you can't stop at simply getting rid of cars and calling it a day, there's countless other things that would have to come with that. Obvious ones include improving public and active transport, but really, fundamental transformation of entire cities to be less like Houston and more like Tokyo and Amsterdam is what's needed.

People love to respond that that's too expensive or unworkable or unrealistic or whatever, ignoring that it's actually the status quo that is too expensive, unworkable and unrealisitc, and that there are now a bunch of previously car centric cities that have been deliberately and fundamentally changed very successfully.

But that's silly. Everyone agrees with you but what if you need to go to your grandparents in the country side village of 200 farmers ? You could build a once-a-day bus line or you could just let people take a non polluting car from a lot outside the city.

Cars are not the problem: it's their aggregation in dense city + their pollution. Remove the pollution, people stop dying, we can then discuss your dream of perfect public transport for optimization's sake.

>>>People love to respond that that's too expensive or unworkable or unrealistic or whatever, ignoring that it's actually the status quo that is too expensive, unworkable and unrealisitc

I'd want to see some numbers to support that. What does it cost to provide round-the-clock availability of secure, climate-controlled public transport to every possible location, urban or rural? Bullet trains on standby at 0100hrs to take 1 guy from Osaka to Kanagawa would cost a fortune. In comparison, while PARKING and roads definitely have costs associated with them, the hardware/infrastructure is largely concrete, and inexpensive to maintain when operating below capacity. So 1-2 people can hop in a car and take a road trip at a far lower net/civilization-wide resource expenditure.

Japan has great public transport. Japan also has great cars and a very healthy car community. What part of Japan's transportation approach classifies it as "unworkable and unrealistic" to such an extent that completely banning cars is the optimal solution?

I don't get that one. Cars are mostly fine if they don't pollute. They'd just be large bicycles. Why do you think the concept of automated personal transport is "the problem" ?

I think for instance we can't possibly build enough railway and bus network to serve every inch of the territory and it's simply to allow fast speed individual transport to distribute the load. It can be even automated with no pilot control, but it's impossible to schedule-base every location in a city without displacing people, rebuilding cities entirely around specific common transport etc. In Europe and Asia, where we build a lot of cities organically, it seems silly. In the US, where cars are even MORE prevalent to the point cities are built for them rather than humans, it will never disappear.

I think that there much better approaches to your problem than to just wack a great big car park on the outskirts.

For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car.

Even with electric cars, cities should still be designed for people rather than cars. Electric cars are still a massive burden on the environment so we shouldn’t be aiming for most people to have their own.

>>>For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car.

But cars are not only transportation. They are also secure, climate-controlled semi-private spaces. If I leave a nightclub with a woman at 1am, too far from my home to walk there, trains shut down for the night, no taxis available.....

Having extra pocket money to buy train tickets is useless in such scenarios. If I have my own privately-owned vehicle (POV), I can bang the woman in the back seat, in the club parking lot. And I sure as shit don't want to "car share" with anybody ELSE inclined to do so as well!

POV ownership is like having insurance: it's often underutilized but when you REALLY need it for those rare edge cases, it's worth its weight in gold.

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