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Comment by ErroneousBosh | Hacker News Reader

> Cars, and in particular, parking, kills cities. Parking is sponge that sucks all the life out of places.

What's your solution to it then?

Mixed-use developments, walkable neighborhoods. When you make it easy to walk or bike to any place people need to go, parking is not necessary. Plenty of cities do it just fine, just not in the US.

Then invest in public transit (trains, mainly) for whatever isn't within walking distance.

Okay, so cities that are only accessible to people who live there?

It would be better to just get rid of cities. They're a drain on resources that we can't afford.

I think you'll find that the cities that do this manage to have travelers from other areas just fine.

If you built for cars you get traffic and congestion: if you built for people (transit, bike lanes, pedestrianization) you will get community

Also ban free parking

Japanese cities have extensive train networks making it easy, quick and cheap to get around. Most people living in Tokyo or other major Japanese cities don’t own cars. This makes the cities much more liveable and community oriented.

Japan also has some other differences from america that are required for this system to function

Yes; however America constructed those differences over the course of the 20th century when they removed rail lines and paved everything over with concrete. In the 1920s and 1930s America was exactly like this, with dense high-frequency train networks connecting even smaller towns, and walkable urban centers.

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