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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

> This whole war on driving hot take is completely tired because it makes no consideration of the tradeoffs.

The only reason driving is convenient is because you make no consideration for your externalities.

Noise, killing 38,000 people a year in crashes, 400 billion/year on road construction and maintenance, pollution killing people who live near highways, trillion-dollar imperial adventures to secure foreign oil, city designs that are absolutely unlivable without a car that costs ~$3,500/year to own and maintain...

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Those externalities are minor compared to the massive utility we derive from being able to travel point to point at high speeds on our own schedule. In my opinion the reverse of what you say is true - it is fashionable for urbanists to claim these externalities are big when it is clear the time saved across the hundreds of millions who drive in the US alone is much larger in magnitude. The numbers you quote aren’t very meaningful without context. For example, 38000 road deaths doesn’t seem like much when you consider that there is only ~1 death for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled - and that number is going to keep falling as safety tech becomes more standardized. I also simply can’t take a claim like “city designs that are absolutely unlivable” seriously. Plenty of people live and thrive in car centric cities just fine, so this is clearly hyperbole.

It is actually possible to be able to travel point to point on your own schedule in the same small amount of time without all those externalities. See Dutch cities like Utrecht and Amsterdam. Where everything is a bike ride away.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in the Netherlands, this is simply not true. “Everything” is not a bike ride away. You’re equating a severely limited life to one with a lot more access and freedom to chose from more than what is just immediately nearby. It’s simply not the same thing. I’m glad for the people who are content with such a set up, but it’s not for everyone. For me, I found Amsterdam tremendously boring after a short time because of the relatively limited choice of activities compared to a car-centric US cities where intraday travel over longer distances is trivial. I would also say that the claim that you can travel in the “same small amount of time” is factually incorrect for other reasons. A one mile bike ride is simply not going to be faster than a 1 mile drive unless you’re in a city where they have overbuilt or have tremendously lagging driving infrastructure. I can only see the two being approximately the same for very short trips.

I'm pretty sure a 1 mile bike ride is always faster than a 1 mile car ride unless you have empty roads and parking spaces right in front of the entrance. You can very easily cycle a mile in traffic in around five minutes (some people can run it in 4 minutes!). A car in very light traffic takes maybe two minutes for the same distance if there are no traffic lights at all. That doesn't leave much time for parking and walking from the parking spot to where you actually want to be.

Anecdotally, I'm faster on my bike on almost all trips that are shorter than about 7km, and a majority of the trips of up to 10km. Only then does a car really start to save time. And then you realize that many 10km trips could be 7km trips if the city hadn't used so much space for car infrastructure.

> after a short time because of the relatively limited choice of activities compared to a car-centric US cities where intraday travel over longer distances is trivial

Within an hour, you could have been in Utrecht, The Hague, Rotterdam, Haarlem, by public transport.

Let's put it this way: you could be in front of Rembrandt's Night watch at the Rijksmuseum, and within 1h15 minutes, be in front of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring in an entirely different city 60 km south, without breaking a sweat. Two of the greatest pieces of art.

Hell you could be in Brussels within two hours. London or Paris in four hours. You could have your breakfast by a canal in Amsterdam, your lunch in front of the Eiffel tower, and dinner by Big Ben.

But somehow, that's boring because it doesn't involve a car?

The Netherlands is the flattest country in the world. Of course bicycles are convenient there. Try biking around San Francisco where there are ski-jump sized hills everywhere.

The Netherlands are quite windy, but both wind and hills are negated by electric bicycles.

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