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Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

> If some people need to use cars for mobility or business reasons, that is fine with me.

Definitely. For stuff like that, emergency services, delivery, trash collection, etc. larger vehicles on streets are totally fine and I think most would agree.

I don't even necessarily think we should ban all cars, but we should definitely stop incentivizing them by heavily subsidizing car infrastructure with city budgets funded by taxpayers. I think if we stop the incentives that were heavily lobbied for by car companies we'll find the _true_ most efficient ways to build cities which will most likely be heavily geared toward walkability and bike-ability, public transport, etc.

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worth visiting an old city like Rome. I was shocked by how walkable it was. It was maybe the second night we were there, we causally strolled around after dinner and just happenstance managed to walk by all the major attractions. That's no mistake but honestly when you experience it's so magical. To create a tech analogy I remember the days before Google when search when would have 20 buttons and could take regex and what not. Most people had no idea how to use it and even pros questioned if they were correctly searching so to speak than Google came along and just gave us a box. All that complexity hidden away from us. That was kind of how I felt about Rome. Just wander, you'll get to where you want to go.

> I was shocked by how walkable it was.

I don't see why it would be shocking. It was a city for nearly 3,000 years before cars arrived.

People who grew up in a typical post-ww2 american suburb may not have ever stayed somewhere that doesn't depend entirely on cars to get around outside of manufactured spaces like theme parks.

The American suburbian hellscape is real. I live in one. As far as I can tell the only solution is to burn everything down and start over. I'm open to suggestions though.

Yep, there’s a great book on this topic called “The Geography of Nowhere”. There’s a reason Disney designs things to feel like real places (that don’t exist in America anymore).

Most pre-industrial cities were limited by how far you could walk in 30 minutes to the center of town where the markets and government would be.

Most people walked everywhere, especially in a city.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-29/the-commu...

i've never been in rome but i visited trieste - a very walkable city - a few weeks ago and i was shocked how cars were clogging up everything there. not necessarily cars driving, but parked cars. maybe trieste is a bit special because big parts of it are on a steep hill so it's not that well suited for cycling but none the less, i was very disappointed. not a pleasure with kids. i asked an italian friend about it and his answer was: "welcome to italy".

so, walkable - yes, maybe. but cities that get rid of cars are still on a completely different level when it comes to quality.

I’ve been to a good amount of Italian cities and would agree it’s the same mess of cars all over the place, like anywhere else. I also went to Rome for the first time half a year ago and it wasn’t the mess of cars and Vespas I imagined it was going to be, so hey, perhaps Rome is the anomaly.

> the same mess of cars all over the place, like anywhere else

there are first attempts to reduce the car mess in some cities, mostly by reducing public surface parking and making public transport and biking a viable alternative to car ownership.

The turistic center has big pedonal areas.

However, the rest of the city is as full of cars as it may get.

I have to say, it mostly remains walkable. It just would be so much nicer with more efficient public transportation and less private cars.

On another HN thread it was discussed that because road wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale to the fourth with vehicle weight, a few large delivery vehicles are far worse than many lighter ones. It is better for us all to use the lightest vehicle we can to go get groceries and take our garbage to the recycling facility (or landfill) than to have trahs trucks, delivery trucks, or busses move us about. Trains or other steel wheeled things are the best.

> road wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale to the fourth with vehicle weight,

(Emphasis mine) Do you have a source for this? I do not see how this specific claim could be true, and I am not sure how exactly that needs to be modified to make it true.

I mean, if you take a vehicle that weights one ton and double the number of wheels, that specific claim says that the road/tire wear would not change, as the vehicle weight stays the same. Further, doubling the wheels can't easily be distinguished from splitting the load to two vehicles with half the weight, which should reduce wear & tear of each vehicle to one sixteenth, totaling to one eighth. So there is kind of a contradiction.

And as a sanity check, a passenger car weights ~10^3 kg. A large truck weights ~10^4. So a truck would wear the road something like as much as 10 000 passenger cars. That's a bit hard to believe.

So the actual law might be something like tear & wear scales to the fourth of the weight on a single wheel. But even that leaves something to hope, as I think you need to assume similar wheels. So maybe the actual law has something to do with pressure on the road?

The original fourth power law relates to axle loads, which as you point out is not the same as what I said. So we should get rivian to add a lot more wheels on those amazon trucks. But even if they put as many on as they could fit, the capacity and load is so much higher than what each person getting a delivery would use, you are still in the hole vs a normal ev not to mention a trike just big enough to pop over to the warehouse at the train station to pick up your packages.

Edit: forgot to paste link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

>That's a bit hard to believe.

The way I heard it explained was imagine a toddler jumping up and down on your bed. They could do this indefinitely. Now imagine a rugby player doing the same. The bed wouldn’t last very long.

At the same time larger vehicles generally have a better engine size to capacity ratio, so if you don’t want to pillage the earth for raw earths, lithium, cobalt etc. then large vehicles are still good.

Those Amazon delivery trucks are pretty light weight.

It's not like they are hauling sand, the boxes are mostly empty.

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