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Comment by throwaway22032 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway22032

I like cycling but I think that removing vehicles entirely from cities is silly. It might be possible but it's not going to be actually better.

I'm imagining strapping 100kg+ of toolboxes to the front of my electric cargo bike. It theoretically is possible. But if someone walks out in front of that it's going to be ugly. The braking systems are nowhere near as good as a car's. If it rains it'll be miserable, I'd put up my rates significantly to compensate and a lot of people would rather just exit the market.

It feels like once you actually account for real things that need to happen like vans carting building materials, you're back where you started except that now everyone needs a license to do the same things they did before in their "personal" vehicles.

If you still have lorries and vans and buses then it feels like a lot of the safety and emission arguments fall apart really.

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> If you still have lorries and vans and buses then it feels like a lot of the safety and emission arguments fall apart really.

Disagree strongly. Special access sharply reduces the number of vehicles, of course, but it also changes the natures of the people driving them. A larger proportion will be professionally-employed drivers and moving through a pedestrian-only area that lacks a defined right of way or traffic devices is going to compel most drivers to move at a creeping pace. Traffic citations are more likely under these circumstances as well.

Buses and trams (there's little practical difference when the bus right of way might as well be rails) are unlikely to be operated by aggressive, inattentive, inexperienced, or inebriated drivers, and they're more predictable.

On emissions, there are reductions, first because fewer drivers overall, fewer low-occupancy vehicles with no cargo, and then second order effects on car ownership and miles driven for nearby communities.

> It feels like once you actually account for real things that need to happen like vans carting building materials, you're back where you started except that now everyone needs a license to do the same things they did before in their "personal" vehicles.

There is a finite amount of space in cities which simply isn't enough for everyone to be driving around in personal cars all the time.

Pedestrians and bikes take up much less space than cars (both moving and parked). By getting people to stop using cars unnecessarily and switch to transit, walking, and biking, you can actually free up space for the remaining vehicles to get around, even if doing so requires restricting vehicular traffic on some streets.

Look at Amsterdam. The traffic is less bad there despite more space being allocated to pedestrians and bikes than US cities.

If that seems counterintuitive, think about it the other way: Imagine if you were able to slightly increase the number of lanes by removing all sidewalks and eliminating all transit. While there would be space for slightly more cars, traffic would end up being much worse, because all the people who were walking/biking/taking transit would end up taking much more space on the roads than was created by adding the lanes.

> If you still have lorries and vans and buses then it feels like a lot of the safety and emission arguments fall apart really.

An engine moving thousands of pounds of cargo is a lot more efficient than an engine moving move two hundred pounds of flesh.

Also lorries and delivery vans use can be limited to specific time window. That is what actually happen in historic city centers that are closed to traffic in many european cities: delivery vehicles can still deliver goods at specific time schedules in the morning when the streets are less busy with pedestrians and they have to do so at low speed.

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