Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

I love the car and car culture. I've road tripped across the U.S. and live in an RV. I will never go back to living in an apartment. There's no human connection there. I spent years living in apartments and maybe met one or two people, with no meaningful connections ever developed. Cars are great for road tripping, and America is highly optimized for it. You can, with the same vehicle, without unpacking once, travel from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific ocean in a matter of days. You can visit the mountains, beaches, camp in hundreds of national and state parks (for cheap or free).

In Florida, some of my fondest memories was jumping into two cars with my teenage friends and riding out the one hour drive to Daytona, where we'd drive our car literally on the beach and then plop down right next to it, sneaking sips of Natural Light that we illegally smuggled there between sessions of football and boogey boarding. Then we'd get back in the car and be back before curfew.

All of our vacations were to the Smokey Mountains, a mere 9 hour drive from central Florida. Dad would drive overnight in our minivan while us kids slept in the back seats. We'd pull up to a cabin first thing in the morning and excitedly rush to our claim our beds for the few days we'd be staying there. Despite sleeping a little rough in the car, we were more than energized by the newness of the locale and the existence of elevation we were quite unfamiliar with back home on the relatively flat peninsula, and we'd proceed to hike the woods around the cabin to survey the land.

Plenty of human and natural connection is to be had with your own vehicle in America. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Your positive examples all have one thing in common: they're not happening in cities. Just because a car makes sense in the countryside or beach does not mean it makes sense inside of a city.

A problem with our approach to urban planning is that we get large, sterile apartment buildings or detached single family homes but absolutely nothing in between. If that missing middle was allowed by right, you'd find what I enjoy right now: both human connections and a car-lite lifestyle.

>they're not happening in cities.

Neither is people willingly moving there. Dense urban living might appeal to young people but once you build a family and priorities change to peace & quiet, safety, good schools, and stable property values, dense urban living loses most of its appeal.

Those values are totally compatible with dense urban living! I have kids and enjoy all of those things in a walkable/bikeable community (Boston, MA). Most Americans have never seen it work so they think it's impossible. The reality is that it's illegal to build these places and the environment found here was built before NIMBYs strangled it.

I think you are discounting the desires of others. I personally love having my little slice of land. Cooking for myself in my own kitchen. I don't mind a drive every couple of weeks to get some more food. I know all my neighbors and bbq with them occassionally. I don't wish to break up dense city culture, why do you want to break up my preferred suburban culture? Can't we live in peace rather than dumping on each other's life choices?

They're talking about wanting dense urban living, and you're talking about preserving suburban living. Having one doesn't remove the other. Good, dense, urban living, however is very often shut down by suburbanites, because they work in cities, and actively shut down any attempts to reduce cars (and car amenities) in cities.

Once you build a family you need 3 bedrooms and probably don’t have $1.8 million for such a condo. But the reason condos cost so much per square foot is regulation. Fundamentally, they should be cheaper than comparable houses.

>But the reason condos cost so much per square foot is regulation.

Can you cite any specific examples of such regulations here? I currently live in a condo that was converted over from an apartments (quite common). If anything, the reason a condo might cost more per square foot is that smaller houses cost more per sqft period (less sqft to 'divide' fixed expenses across).

Try a zoning map, like San Francisco. Multifamily structures are illegal on the vast majority of the land. In those areas that do allow multifamily, it is mostly very small ones. And even when a large multifamily structure is permitted by zoning, it can be years of environmental litigation and discretionary review hearings.

https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2019-02...

Most areas in the US have regulations along the lines of "Ratio of floor area to size of lot must be no higher than X, must have at least Y parking spots per unit, building must be no taller than Z stories" which greatly increases the cost of multi-family housing units.

Don't forget parking minimums.

$1.8mil for a condo is ridiculous, in many places you can get many hundreds of acres of land for this amount

The Netherlands seems to pull off having a high fertility rate [1] and high population density [2]. Anecdotally, my friend who was born there in the late 1980s described being allowed to travel alone starting from a young age. I had one American friend born in the same generation who was allowed to bike around LA in his mid-teens, and my parents almost called CPS on him.

[1] https://i.redd.it/k03mlnruuro61.jpg [2] https://www.stockingblue.com/article/126/european-union-stat...

The netherlands also has the population of some US states. How does this translate to forcing people living in the countryside to living in a city?

Your comment only makes sense in the US

This thread is about American urbanism.

The idea of the post is that American cities are badly designed, and IMO current criticism makes no sense without looking at European cities and how American cities could look more like them.

Completely agree with you, and its telling that virtually every response here has been "That's only true in the US!". I've lived in Japan, and its true, urban living there is much better for families. But the premise of this thread is American cities and why people choose to live elsewhere, dependent on their cars. And the answer is precisely what you've said.

American cities are not only unpleasant families and the many people who don't fall in the young, single, relatively wealthy professional class, they are actively hostile towards them. Almost no one in the suburbs lives there because they love suburban life. They live there because it's the lesser evil compared to living in the city, given their personal situation. The people here calling for bans on cars are treating cancer with cough medicine. If people want to remove the American dependence on cars, they need to make American cities a more than a playground for the young professional class, and make them places a large proportion of Americans would actually want to live in.

> If people want to remove the American dependence on cars, they need to make American cities a more than a playground for the young professional class, and make them places a large proportion of Americans would actually want to live in.

This is precisely what happens when you remove cars from cities.

Maybe you think that because the only dense urban living options available to you are the car hellscapes?

I've been raised in Warsaw (a dense capital of Poland). I've had good schools within walking distance. I've had access to quiet green spaces within walking and biking distance (they weren't paved over for parking lots). I've had lots of places to hang out with my friends, who lived nearby, or whom I could reach myself via frequent, reliable, and affordable public transport.

And Warsaw wasn't a particularly utopian city. Just built with decent public transport and without NIMBY zoning policies.

and so because you were raised this way the rest of us should be? why do we constantly push our ideals onto others?

I'm just giving a counter example that dense cities can be appealing for raising a family, and even an unexceptional city like Warsaw can manage it with the right priorities. The fact that something exists doesn't mean it's the only and forced option.

These "Cars Bad" articles are always written from the perspective of people who live in cities, and like city living. If you live in Chicago or NYC or SF, of course we should have fewer SFHs, more apartments, fewer cars, use mass transit, make things walkable, and so on. It's hard to disagree with that.

But if you live in a county with 50 people per square mile, none of these things make sense. Cars are basically required, apartments don't make sense, mass transit is nonexistent, and nothing is walkable, and that's often why people move there.

I like the USA because you can choose where to live. If you want to live in a concrete honeycomb, walk everywhere, take the subway, great! Move to the city! If you want to depend on a car and live where you can't even see your neighbor's house let alone hear it, great! Move to the country! One choice is not objectively better for everyone.

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