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Comment by malermeister | Hacker News Reader

In this world, we'll still have giant hunks of steel zooming around our cities, creating noise, taking up space and wasting energy to move themselves around (the payload to weight ratio of cars is abysmal).

We need to get rid of cars altogether, with exceptions for emergency services etc.

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I'm fiercely anti-car, but I also live in reality. If you find a few tens of trillions of dollars to rebuild every American city to be car free, let us know. I'll buy some books to occupy me during the 2-3 decades on non-stop construction.

What do you suggest people do when the weather isn’t quite as nice?

Where I live, it gets so brutally hot and humid in the summer that people literally collapse and die if they do anything much outdoors.

San Francisco is not like that though. that's the whole point of the article. They could also take transit.

SF despite being dense and having high transit ridership for a US city is still fairly car oriented. If the endpoints of your trip are not near Muni/BART station it's going to take twice as long on transit. And the hills can make the walking part difficult for people who are elderly, disabled, or need to transport items.

That sounds like a place not suitable for human life.

Well, hundreds of millions of people already live here.

Not for much longer. In the 20 - 30 years, those areas will become uninhabitable.

You're inverting cause and effect.

The reason it gets so hot in cities is because it's a concrete wasteland that traps heat because of, guess what, cars.

Here's an experiment to show said effect - same city, same day, very different street layouts: https://doemee.leiden.nl/uploads/55aa69e8-fb15-4ccc-8335-9b6...

These self-driving taxis are basically just buses you can call to pick you up on demand. In areas where there's sufficient density, the most cost efficient option would probably be a self driving on demand bus. In principle, I think they can be part of the solution.

The main difficulty is making sure the self driving transit vehicles are safe enough that people feel comfortable taking them instead of individual cars. Even though you are statistically speaking less likely to get shot on Philly public transit than you are to die in a car crash on a Philly highway, many people still choose to drive because there's a shooting on transit every few months or so and other less serious disorder on a more regular basis. I assume the same is also true in other cities like San Francisco or New York.

I'm strongly in favor of walkable cities and public transit but most people are going to choose cars and suburban sprawl if it means not having to deal with rampant crime. So anybody who wants to get rid of cars and car dependent suburbs needs to be in favor of both locking up the criminals (in a manner that respects their rights to due process of course) and addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty, bad schools, drugs, etc.) so we don't end up with another generation of hardened criminals.

Transitioning to bike-centric urban transit takes decades. The best cities in the world have roughly equal bike and car traffic (and a big chunk of transit), but it's taken decades to get there.

Cars moving over the next 15 years to be much safer for pedestrians/cyclists could be a big shortcut on this path.

Seemingly Paris has done a great job over the past 2-3 years.

Paris has done great in climbing up to a bit more than 15% of daily trips by bike.

My point is: even the bicycle capitals of the world (Amsterdam, etc) have equal car and bike trips per day, and it's taken a long time to get there.

IMHO, San Francisco's Telegraph Hill neighborhood with it's 31.5% grade will take longer than Paris to become bike friendly.

There is 36C outside with ca 50% humidity

Do you suggest biking?

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