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Comment by Karsteski | Hacker News Reader

> End cars

I guess those of us that live in rural areas should just bike 100s of km everywhere then.

It's always amusing to see these hyperbolic, clearly unrealistic statements on here. I wonder what's going through the head of someone like you...

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83% of Americans live in urban areas and 70% of annual vehicle miles are in urban areas. Rural communities are an edge case where cars would still make sense.

17% of Americans is not an "edge case" by any stretch of the imagination. That's 57 million people.

Not to mention the fact that a large part of those 83% would like to be able to occasionally travel outside the urban area.

There are also planes and trains, and, if you're travelling to a remote location without access to either of those, rental cars. But most people in an urban area are primarily travelling within that urban area.

OK? You ignore the larger point by disagreeing with the terminology I chose. Reducing car usage in the US by 70% would be an absolutely massive win

And Musk sending employees back to the office is the opposite of reducing single occupancy vehicle use.

You might want to look up how the US Census Bureau defines urban. My 7,000 person town with orchards and farms is considered an urban area. This makes some sense as it's loosely part of a greater metropolitan area but it's not remotely an area that could be served to a significant degree by public transportation.

>It's always amusing to see these hyperbolic, clearly unrealistic statements on here. I wonder what's going through the head of someone like you...

If the edge cases mostly only affected people you didn't like how much would you care about solving them.

Exactly.

Well said. It's equally hyperbolic and unrealistic to require poor people to buy and maintain an automobile, which is basically what has happened because our public transit sucks.

Hey, that's easier than razing and rebuilding US cities that were built under the assumption everyone has a car.

(Among other things, they have road topologies that make buses and bikes completely infeasible.)

We already razed the cities once to build the roads.

> Among other things, they have road topologies that make buses and bikes completely infeasible

If the hilly San Francisco can have lots of bikes and buses (…and cable cars and street cars and light rail and commuter rail) then so can most cities.

I hardly see any bikes in downtown SF, I can't imagine anyone is riding them elsewhere.

You should see the rest of the country, there’s even fewer bikes in most places.

But downtown doesn’t need bikes. There’s amble public transit and everything is close by. Most people I know who bike use it for longer distances, eg the base of Bernal Heights to downtown via mission+market. Or going from Caltrain to sunset.

Hills aren't the problem. Urban sprawl is, and so are irregular road grids with uniform density everywhere.

SF is compact, and has a few main drags where it makes sense to have trollies / bus lines. It also has a well-defined city center, so a hub and spoke transit system mostly works there.

In contrast, public transit doesn't even really make sense in South Bay. It was (mostly) laid out when public transit was common, but now there are multiple mini-downtown areas without train service, and many of the tracks have been ripped out.

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