Live data from Hacker News

Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

theguardian.com

451–460 of 699 posts

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#451
post #270
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to justify when you could potentially be looking at a 50% pay cut. That's the only reason I haven't moved myself.

Do you actually get anything out of that 50% more pay? Thinking about higher rent, healthcare etc.

The rent is higher in the US? Have you seen rent prices in London, Amsterdam, or Dublin?

Health care is included in any well paying tech job.

Please list out the other "etc" that makes up for $100,000+ difference.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#452

The one question I have, that I haven't seen answered in the article or elsewhere, is how deliveries are handled. Presumably shops and businesses in a car-free city need to get truckloads of goods or equipment moved in and out on a regular basis. How is it done? I've always loved the idea of being able to live in a car-free city, but never quite understood how certain things would work, including garbage collection,…

Where I live, the municipality is seriously looking into an out of the city distribution centre with (smaller, electric) vehicles for supplying the city centre. That doesn't make it free of cars, but it will be more efficient (not every shop needs their own supply truck, supplies can be shared).

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left the city when we had kids, and the thing that drew me to suburbia is that kids can just roam around outside unattended, biking around, building tree houses etc. Basically it's centered around 2 themes 1) As a parent I don't want my kids outdoor time to be limited to the times I can follow them, and 2) The idea that since my childhood was happy, I should give my kids the same experience. I don't necessarily thi…

I understand the impulse to go to the suburbs now that we have cars everywhere, but it didn't need to be this way. Plenty of people walk to daycare or buy a bike with a cart to pick up their kids. Also, speaking of daycare, that's another thing I really think is essentially stupid. Imagine two different situations. First situation: Normal family sends 2 kids to daycare. About $50k here in Toronto. Cool. The daycare w…

Cart + bike is definitely an option, at least for 3/4 of the year.

In my case (Sweden) the daycare subsidy is much more significant, 2 kids is $3700 (Canadian) so the incentive to work full time is absolutely massive in comparison.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#454

This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward. Cities get bigger and denser, and wasting a big % of land on parking spaces, roads, intersections and accepting a horrible air quality (that reduces citizen life spans and health quality) and noise pollution just does not make any sense anymore. Carse are effective in less dense…

The biggest problem with your argument is that you're talking about "cities" only and ignoring the rest of the country. Cities make up 3.5% of the US land: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33....

I like the idea of large cities improving their public transportation systems and having parking lots on the outskirts but it doesn't make financial sense in the smaller size cities. There are lots of people like me that live in a small down and commute into a city (60k people). I'd love better public transportation but it only makes financial sense in the "downtown" areas.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#455

Raleigh converted Fayetteville Street to pedestrian only back in 1977. It ended up killing all of the businesses there. https://www.wral.com/news/local/story/163829/ The city reopened it to traffic, however, and "revitalized" the area, resulting in a booming downtown economy: https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2007-may-learning-... I love pedestrian districts in cities. Copenhagen comes to mind. However, pedes…

Church st in Burlington VT partially closed to cars starting in 1980 (based on Stroget in Copenhagen) and ongoing into 2005 with more and more blocks carved out for pedestrians only. It has been very successful. Why did it work, when Raleigh failed? What needs to be "considered carefully", exactly? (The large college nearby definitely helps in VT's case. But what else?) https://www.churchstmarketplace.com/ https://ww…

I'd attribute a large portion of church street's success to zoning policies, the city has kept that street focused on small business to avoid that common american experience of walking by a walmart for twenty minutes... the north end of the street was more sparse in terms of doorways and always was more empty, but the center and southern end were vibrant.

So I think the key to trying to do this is to encourage small business to minimize the feet/door so that there is a reasonable variety of services available.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#456
post #375
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes beyond these things. You get a quality of life enhancement by being in a more community centric environment. Less pressure overall. No one wonders if there is something wrong with you when you take 3 weeks off in a row. Being able to walk to the bakery, grocery store, and having better access to quality food. The fruit in the U.S. is quite bland compared to what you get in Europe. Having people out and about…

Also when I go to the U.S. it’s kind of shocking to see how many people could do with good healthcare but are obviously not able to get it. I want everyone around me to be healthy not just my immediate friends and family.

[deleted]

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#457
post #270
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to justify when you could potentially be looking at a 50% pay cut. That's the only reason I haven't moved myself.

Do you actually get anything out of that 50% more pay? Thinking about higher rent, healthcare etc.

Absolutely. Only a few cities in the USA are expensive on an international level. The cost of living in most regions of the USA is so incredibly low that a decent programmer has a shot of having a paid off house & car, no student loans, and $100k or so retirement account by the age of 30 (assuming graduating college @22).

Where I live, the median house price is about $170k USD (avg rent is just under $900/mo) and the median software engineer salary is just under $100k USD.

Plus, taxes in the USA can be pretty low.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#458
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward. You're really looking at this from a very narrow mindset. It isn't going into the city that a lot of Americans really want and need cars, it's heading out of the city. This may be shocking to people with a European upbringing, but when you have a vast country with lots of open…

Do you honestly think we can't do that in Europe?

Do you honestly think there are no walkable cities in the US or whatever outlandish claims are being made by Europeans in this thread?

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#459
post #389
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern discourse about "rights" has become twisted. Some day we need to realize that one person's right is another person's prohibition. A society needs to choose its rights wisely lest the unintended consequences result in less overall freedom. In a healthy civil society legally enshrined rights are less important because you can trust that everybody's freedom will be maximized, at least to a first-order approximati…

IMO as we accumulated more and more "rights", the concept became diluted. We went from the bedrock negative rights of freedom of speech, travel, etc, then to positive rights, and then people started applying the concept of "rights" to what I would consider "entitlements".

It's all the same debate, really. After all is said and done, rights function to entitle you to things or acts. The blurry line that I believe you might be talking about has a very specific name, but recent social and public discourse make a lot of people nowadays automatically cringe at it's sight (wrongly, IMO) without seriously hearing out or considering it's merits. I'm talking about the word "privilege".

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road. A solution is to level the planes of separatio…

> Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road. I commuted by bike for two years or so in Po…

I would argue this is more to do with Portland culture of nice than anything.

I love riding, but I have been run over. No thank you. I will bike for transportation the day we implement Dutch style separated bike lanes (i.e. by an actual physical barrier, even if only a slightly raised bike lane)

Other than that, I drive my mountain bike to areas where there are no cars.

Edit: in the city I'm in now, we just 'created' a bunch of bike lanes. Which means putting paint on a continuous stretch of asphalt and expect vehicles moving at 10mph that weight 50 pounds to do just fine sharing the road with vehicles weighing 2000+ pounds and going 50+ mph. Ridiculous and a waste of my tax dollars.

Post reply on HN