Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them • Hacker News Board

Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them

#101

Post by dundercoder » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:01 AM UTC

I’m 36, live in the suburbs, and in recent years have gone (legally) blind from Retinitis Pigmentosa. Voluntarily giving up my license was one of the hardest and most important decisions I’ve made. There is literally 0 public transportation here. Not even Uber or Lyft have come around.

America’s sprawl and dependence on cars is incredible. It wasn’t until I spent time in London, Oxford, and Paris that I could recognize how much everything here is built around the idea of owning a car.

So now my wife has to give rides to our four kids, AND me, and there’s literally nothing I can do about it except petition for better transit, and pray self-driving cars get here faster.

Being dependent on rides feels like being 15 again. It’s humiliating being picked up from a job interview in a parking lot with 200+ cars.

Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them

#102

Post by andrewprock » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:02 AM UTC

dundercoder wrote: post #101

I’m 36, live in the suburbs, and in recent years have gone (legally) blind from Retinitis Pigmentosa. Voluntarily giving up my license was one of the hardest and most important decisions I’ve made. There is literally 0 public transportation here. Not even Uber or Lyft have come around. America’s sprawl and dependence on cars is incredible. It wasn’t until I spent time in London, Oxford, and Paris that I could recogni…

Have you considered moving to a region with better transportation support?

Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them

#103

Post by joe_the_user » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:03 AM UTC

sevensor wrote: post #99

joe_the_user wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What homes are those? I mean "nursing home" and "retirement home" are two different things. One houses the chronically ill, often old - at very high prices but payable by insurances/the-state and the other houses old people at merely high prices but these prices have to be paid by the residents and there's no way to make them low even cutting all your costs. And apartments and trailer parks that house seniors at a sl…

So talking specifically about the poor, I mean nursing homes. Good retirement homes have waiting lists years long and cost a pretty penny.

But "nursing home" implies someone is disabled and not just old.

Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them

#104

Post by WalterBright » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:04 AM UTC

AmVess wrote: post #96

The old and the poor are increasingly left out of public transport. The city where I used to live removed the bus routes from the poorest parts of the city and opened up new routes to the richest part. Buses on the new routes were almost always empty...rich people own cars, you see. The city where I currently reside simply shut down their entire bus operation instead of jerking around poor people.

> rich people own cars, you see.

The irony is that in Silicon Valley, the rich people ride the bus.

Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them

#105

Post by kalleboo » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:04 AM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #61

_m8fo wrote: post #8

I always get an inkling that buses (like Bolt/Mega/PeterPan) + the existing highway + roads are superior and more scalable than any other type of transportation, dollar for dollar. Why do people push for rail? Self-driving cars obviously can enhance this (the bus idea), but I suspect they will create even more traffic if we insist on having 5 passenger cars be 75% empty. Buses are great because demand can be realloca…

Bus service in a population center without dedicated right of way is horribly slow. You can dedicate some right of way to buses (BRT, for Bus Rapid Transit) but for any large passenger volume, the economics of trains become similar or better. Flexibility is a disadvantage - you shouldn’t plan your life around a bus route remaining high-quality or even extant, because the planners could revoke it at any time.

> Flexibility is a disadvantage

This is what I was going to say. A rail line encourages development and densification around the rail line. Being "x minutes away from the train station" is a selling point for apartments and it can even create whole new commuting suburbs. At least this is how it works in Europe/Asia

Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them

#106

Post by WalterBright » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:07 AM UTC

_m8fo wrote: post #8

I always get an inkling that buses (like Bolt/Mega/PeterPan) + the existing highway + roads are superior and more scalable than any other type of transportation, dollar for dollar. Why do people push for rail? Self-driving cars obviously can enhance this (the bus idea), but I suspect they will create even more traffic if we insist on having 5 passenger cars be 75% empty. Buses are great because demand can be realloca…

The Berlin intracity rail system is outstanding. I used it extensively there.

Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them

#107

Post by dundercoder » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:07 AM UTC

andrewprock wrote: post #102

dundercoder wrote: post #101

I’m 36, live in the suburbs, and in recent years have gone (legally) blind from Retinitis Pigmentosa. Voluntarily giving up my license was one of the hardest and most important decisions I’ve made. There is literally 0 public transportation here. Not even Uber or Lyft have come around. America’s sprawl and dependence on cars is incredible. It wasn’t until I spent time in London, Oxford, and Paris that I could recogni…

Have you considered moving to a region with better transportation support?

I have. I’d have to move out of state and into a fairly urban city to get decent transit. The schools here are fantastic and I love just about everything here, except the lack of transit.

We may get to that point, but for right now I work remotely (platform engineering) and just grin and bear the rest.

Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them

#108

Post by DoreenMichele » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:09 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #36

rayiner wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you don’t really get to pick. Dense European style cities are outlawed in the US. Hell, dense European style suburbs are outlawed here. My pre-zoning code suburb has lots that are less than 3,000 square feet. It’s awesome—easy to walk and you see your neighbors all the time. But it’s completely illegal to build more neighborhoods like mine. The minimum lot size now is more than five times bigger—we have legally m…

Sure, it's outlawed - in your suburb. It's not a nationwide ban, though. It's not even (I presume) statewide, or even city-wide. (It may be true that there literally are no municipalities in the US with zoning codes that allow dense neighborhoods, but I would be highly surprised.)

The New Urbanist movement tried to recreate dense, mixed use, walkable neighborhoods like were the norm in the past. It was an uphill battle. They would take their plans to city hall and get told it could not be approved. They would then carefully scrutinize the zoning laws, rename some roads and other features as something else, rinse and repeat until something resembling their vision could get approved.

In most parts of the US, you can no longer build those dense, walkable, mixed use neighborhoods that make it convenient to live without a car.

Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them

#109

Post by mjn » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:12 AM UTC

jonathanyc wrote: post #86

I think this is an awful situation, but at what point do we call seniors’ desires unreasonable? Is their want to stay in their suburban homes which are designed for cars really something the state should be concerned about when the working poor struggle to afford the subway?[1] I think we should make relocation easy for the elderly who aren’t able to get around. I think it is terrible if they can’t move from their ho…

Imo some level of service even in areas not all that favorable to transit is reasonable. Or at least, I think it's possible to do at least slightly better. I now live in a fairly rural part of the UK, a remote region (Cornwall) that has no real urban areas. And yet just about every population concentration of over 1000 people or so, here, has a bus that does at least one round-trip a day. Towns of over 20,000 people have very good, regular service. Of course it's subsidized, and in the smaller villages it might literally only be once a day in each direction, but a service does run.

In many American towns and suburbs it seems not even that level of service is available. And it's not due to the distances or population density either. I used to live in a suburb of Houston, TX that had 60,000 people, was about 20 miles from downtown, and it had no bus service! Now I live in a smaller and more remote town in the UK, and it has decent bus service.

Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them

#110

Post by volkl48 » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:18 AM UTC

dundercoder wrote: post #107

andrewprock wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered moving to a region with better transportation support?

I have. I’d have to move out of state and into a fairly urban city to get decent transit. The schools here are fantastic and I love just about everything here, except the lack of transit. We may get to that point, but for right now I work remotely (platform engineering) and just grin and bear the rest.

If you get to the point of considering moving, you may wish to look into a college town. They'll typically have far more extensive transit than the average mid-sized city/town does.