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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Try working in care. Try doing home care for maybe five or six different elderly clients every day, each at a random location. If we want to support elderly people we need to provide for the poorly-paid care providers who must bounce around doing that support. Telling them to take the bus is about as effective as telling Amazon to abandon delivery vans in favor of bicycles.

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This is a great example of a specific problem with a specific solution that people use as an excuse to try and impose blanket, one-size-fits-all city-wide rules for automobile storage.

This must be why Europe just kills everyone over age 75, since it is impossible to support the elderly without 12-lane highways and subsidized gasoline.

Giving viable alternatives to driving (be that cycleways or public transport) reduces traffic, and reducing traffic makes it easier for people that actually DO need to drive motor vehicles.

>Telling them to take the bus is about as effective as telling Amazon to abandon delivery vans in favor of bicycles.

Ironic that you bring this up as an absurd example, when this is exactly what happens in dense cities with good cycling infrastructure (Holland, Denmark, etc).

This edge case that you came up with warrants a car, but is that really the reality of most cars parking in any given community?

And honestly, it’s questionable whether it warrants a car too. In Tokyo it would be perfectly fine to do those trips by public transport. My biweekly cleaner gets around by train to all the places she works at. And local delivery companies all use bicycles for last mile delivery.

Maybe that’s not viable right now, but I think that’s the point of Donald’s advocacy. By not pricing parking correctly we provide perverse incentives as a society that lead us down a vicious cycle. Free parking means more cars means less transit ridership means we need more free parking, and repeat.

This shapes our cities into places that prioritize cars over humans. High housing costs, air pollution, less mobility, less freedom.

If you price parking appropriately, you get a virtuous cycle instead. Expensive parking means less driving means more transit ridership means more free parking slots means more room for other development, etc.

It is not an "edge case" in a development for 55+s. And, with the shifting economic, we will soon see a great many more seniors growing old in condos rather than detached houses.

To be fair I don’t know how often elderly care workers are going to 6 different locations in a single day, but it’s hard to imagine it’s a very common thing. If there’s a large condo with lots of residents wouldn’t it be more efficient to hire a permanent employee?

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