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Comment by throwaway22032 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway22032

The anti car bias on HN is such a blind spot.

Yes, lots of us work on computers and have metropolitan hobbies.

Huge numbers of people don't. It's an empathy gap.

Cars aren't worse or better, they're just different. You can't have NYC with LA's parking and you can't have LA with NYC's parking.

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Discussing a topic rationally and openly isn't a bias, and I've seen no evidence that HN has an anti-car bias particularly.

We dedicate a huge amount of the public space to personal vehicles, and it is the sort of solution that basically creates its own problem, with the uptake of cars necessitating urban planning that make it necessary for an uptake in cars. Rinse and repeat.

It should be possible to discuss this rationally. I see cars as having tremendous faults, yet I own two of them.

I’d also add the enormous expense: if you’re rich, sure, cars aren’t a concern but even middle class people are usually worried about payments & repairs, and loss of a reliable car is one of the most common ways people fall out of the middle class, not to mention everyone starting retirement with so much less money.

There are good parts, of course, but I think it’s very reasonable to ask whether we get a good value from something we collectively give up so much for.

Wouldn't really call it middle class if a lower five digit sum is a major inconvenience. Probably the problem is more that there is not much middle class left nowadays and most people are lower class.

The American median income is around $45-50k so pretty much by definition any 5 digit expense is a big deal for the middle class. More importantly, however, you have to look at the amount of money people have leftover for unexpected expenses – a ton of people are living close to paycheck to paycheck even if they have median or better household income. They’re middle class by any common definition but fragile.

That sounds more like "petite bourgeoisie" than actual middle class. I know there was a lot of effort to redefine the term, but imo median income has little to do with it. If you live paycheck to paycheck you aren't even petite bourgeoisie.

No idea why you think median income has any relevance here. You could of course define "middle class" like that, but that is not the actual meaning of the term. I think in Western societies your middle class is at best 10% of people nowadays.

And just to add: I think this widespread redefinition of what middle class is not an accident. It seems quite effective, if you think 50k USD is middle class in the US. It wouldn't even be middle class in most of poorer Europe. The idea of term is completely unrelated to relative income, but rather a different social status; that isn't the case if you live paycheck to paycheck. And this redefinition is happening to obscure the fact that a large part of our population in the West had a loss in living standards over the last decades.

I think the blind spot and empath gap gp is referring to is the attitude of the anti-car crowd. I had this just yesterday in another thread. The attitude of many city folks toward suburbanites is basically "have you considered radically changing your lifestyle, abandoning most of your existing habits and hobbies, and petition your town to put in bike infra where zero room to do so exists?"

They fail to realize that huge swaths of America is pretty much permanently stuck with pedestrian-unfriendly infrastructure.

> zero room to do so exists?

Can you show an example?

> abandoning most of your existing habits and hobbies

Why would you do that? The only hobby I know that requires a car is racing, and you have race tracks for that.

> city folks

What if it's not just city folk tho :)

It's USA pro-car bias, not HN anti-car bias.

Looking from anywhere else in the world - how car-centric USA is - is fucking insane. Minor regional differences doesn't matter, you're still out there in the top right corner, category of your own.

BTW one of the result of this is that somehow Americans think only people living in big cities don't like cars. Like WTF? What does one have to do with the other?

That's not true at all. Tons of places outside the USA love cars and have a car centered transportation system. If anything it's a European biais to assume otherwise

> Cars aren't worse or better, they're just different.

Cars are plain worse. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-transport-mode

> anti car bias on HN

I more worry worried about the anti smashing your fingers with a hammer bias on HN

> It's an empathy gap

It is an infrastructure spending gap.

Even if towns had the infra money and political will (they usually don't), where's all this hypothetical infrastructure gonna go? Where I live, there's a main drag which is the ideal location for pedestrian infra, has all the shops, near the one (1) bus route we have. No sidewalks. No room to even put one in, without some massive eminent domain. Literally there are buildings in the way which would prevent any expansion.

I walk this road every weekend for fun. No pavements, yet I feel perfectly safe: https://www.google.pl/maps/@51.3167434,22.543053,3a,75y,89.3...

cars go on it like 30 km/h cause it's so narrow. No need for any infrastructure.

If the road is wide enough for cars to go faster - it's wide enough to fit pavement (one side at least). Pavement can be very narrow too - 1 m is infinitely better than no pavement. I've even seen 0.5 m pavements but that's stretching it :)

If the road is so narrow you can't fit pavement there - it's probably safe already.

But I've seen roads in USA and I think you just have no comparison on what "no space" means.

Look, having to commute to work sucks. This isnt an empathy gap, or if it is maybe in the other direction. Commuting half an hour or more to your retail job due to essentially zoning laws isn't great, and it could be made better.

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