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Comment by ARandomerDude | Hacker News Reader

The problem with these solutions is they always ignore one major detail: families. It's pretty hard to pack your kids and groceries into a tiny car or on a scooter.

Encouraging tiny cars for the masses may also encourage a Japan-style demographic time-bomb.

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I use public transit, a bike, and I haul my family in a GMC Sierra.

Most of the time, bikes are better. Sometimes, I use the truck. We shouldn't require use of the truck, which we do in 95% of the urban areas of this country. I'd rather just put my kid on a bike like they do in NL.

The solutions don't need to address every use case or family size -- smaller vehicles could work very well for commuters, that's enough to make a dent in emissions.

What happens when the bigger family vehicle inevitably crashes into people on their scooters? Just trading one problem for another.

build better infrastructure. cars hitting bikes/scooters/pedestrians happens because you don't have good separation. Better bike lanes and road design do a lot to reduce accidents (see the Netherlands for examples on how to do this).

Bollards bring a smile to my face every time I see them.

Yeah, but if you put bollards everywhere then emergency vehicles have to park in the street, where Teslas can run into them.

"Your floor is now clean!"

"Encouraging tiny cars for the masses may also encourage a Japan-style demographic time-bomb."

This needs some explaining.

I've known people from whom the "have a 3rd kid, or stop at 2?" question probably was tipped over to "stop at 2" by the cost and hassle of having to buy a bigger car to comfortably & safely fit 3 car seats, on top of all the other painfully-high expenses of having a kid. And I've repeatedly heard needing to get a minivan or largish SUV mentioned in conversations about whether to have more than 3 kids, as a downside to going higher.

I'd absolutely believe that car-dependence has played some measurable role in suppressing birthrates, by causing step increases in transportation costs at certain counts of kids. 1 or 2 is no problem with almost any car, but 3 means at least a large sedan, and 4-5 means a van or SUV. More than 5 and you're looking at a fullsize van or a minivan with dual bench seats or something.

One thing I loved living in Japan was availability of minivans that were actually small. The Toyota Sienta (note: not sienna) had 7 seats while being built on the Vitz (Yaris) platform. 3 feet shorter than a north american minivan, a foot narrower, and an engine roughly half the displacement (but still could go highway speeds without issue). I would happily upgrade from a small hatchback to one of those.

Yeah, such cars are hard to find in the US and I'd hesitate to buy one, personally, given the ever-increasing size and weight of the average car on the road, mostly from trucks and SUVs. I don't want to pack my family into a car with little crumple-room and low weight, on American highways.

Cracking this chicken-egg will require forcing huge-ass vehicle ownership down first, and good luck with that in the US. :-(

What's the leg room and seat width in those things? I am wondering whether a three-row Yaris could comfortably fit a modern American man - tall and with borderline-obese BMI - in any of its 7 seats.

3rd seats on JDM subcompact minivans are small even for Japanese, so like for children or emergency. It's fine for the purpose. https://youtu.be/8KHrR0FKs9Q?t=1223

2nd seat leg and head room is great, but possibly the seat size is a bit small for US fat people.

Yep, that video shows it well! Third row is a little tight, but I'm 6'1" and sat there for a 5 hour drive with my duffel on my lap, haha. I think I had it better than the three larger folks sharing the middle row. So it would fit 4 adults and two kids quite comfortably (and for the discussion at hand, it would fit a family of 6 or 7 just fine, just have to keep luggage down as the back seats take up much of the trunk)

Here´s some research and commentary on this:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c4daDbQD398BmW5k5/on-car-sea...

"I'd absolutely believe that car-dependence has played some measurable role in suppressing birthrates"

That seems pretty far fetched. I bet you could see an effect from the size of laundry machines too.

read A Pattern Language. families can get by when we stop doing development around anti-patterns that have the inconvenient external cost of burning up the planet.

Tying small cars to demographic might be a bit of a stretch. Small cars are an effect of the demographics and environment, not the other way round.

Families cant travel by train/bus/tram ?

That's a leap!

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