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Comment by slothtrop | Hacker News Reader

This has turned in to a r/fuckcars thread.

Zoning reform is the cure, if we want 15 min cities. The market will do the work, if you let it. Plus, many problems are just housing problems in disguise (including homelessness). Rhetoric I see here about banning cars is both redundant and ridiculous. If people have more convenient options, they won't use cars anyway. If you deign to "ban" cars without a replacement people accept and find convenient, not only does that not help anyone, it will be ignored and cast off as fanaticism.

Granted as climate is an issue we want to address in the short-run, that can demand some imperative policy moves to encourage a faster transition. Still need zoning reform first though. Anything resembling "degrowth", however, will just make peoples lives worse in the developing world and here.

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Yeah, this is what annoys me with a lot of the fanatics. If your carrot is apparently so good, then why do you need the stick? Almost nobody has a problem with building walkable neighborhoods and "15 minute cities", what they have a problem with is the direct attempts to just make driving worse rather than making the alternatives better. Frustrating cars is a goal loudly and proudly declared (hence the name of that sub), then suddenly turned round and called a "conspiracy theory" when someone dares to say they don't like it. That phrase seems to have made a comeback to be the thought-terminating cliché and shunning-smear of the 2020s thus far

The whole attitude is just completely elitist, thinking that they know what people want better than they do themselves, and calling them all manner of names for being impertinent enough to hold an opinion of one's own rather than yielding to their betters

In the context of the US, the vast majority of all infrastructure built or rebuilt over the past century was optimized for cars at the expense of everything else, including demolishing buildings which helped to create the demand for that infrastructure in the first place.

Because car traffic was prioritized over everything else it created a situation where improving any alternative will unavoidably require some sort of compromise.

Although, somewhat non-intuitively policy choices which discourage driving can free up space on roads and create a better experience for other drivers. (I can't find an original source, but I remember hearing about a planning study in some European city which found that about a third of the drivers who contributed to the traffic jams in that city's downtown were just going for a drive and didn't have any specific destination)

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