Life in the Spanish city that banned cars • Hacker News Board

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#631

Post by ajmurmann » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:45 AM UTC

sakopov wrote: post #484

breatheoften wrote: post #419

Its insane to me how large space-wise small towns in the us (Oregon in mind as I write this) are — with a huge percentage of the real estate devoted to parking lots. Even setting aside the traffic, it’s silly to walk across these towns because businesses are separated from each other by massive parking lots. The traffic is often amazingly inhumane. Many of the small towns in Oregon are formed on either side of the ma…

Half of Kansas City's downtown is parking lots which generally sit empty during the day. To make matters even worse, the city is constantly building mixed-use areas with retail and office space, restaurants, hotels and apartments intermixed with roads running every which way. Walking around these places is just a constant hazard.

Can you explain how the mixed-use makes this worse? Not having seen it, I'd expect it to make the situation better that I have a restaurant right next to my apartment or office and don't need to get in the car.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#632

Post by jimmaswell » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 5:13 AM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #614

jimmaswell wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Easy in the US 2. You can get a good reliable used car for under $1000 easily, and I use mine every day 3. Not a big deal 4. 3 5. I don't mind paying taxes for infrastructure 6. 5 7. Acceptable risk for the massive benefit to me 8. Efficiency is constantly improving and there are no emissions from an EV 9. How is that any different from how we shape the landscape for our own benefit in every other way?

40 hours a week at federal minimum wage is $15,000. AAA considers average car ownership cost to be at $6,000 a year. https://www.moneycrashers.com/living-without-car/ That is a ridiculous cost to just throw on poor people. And this is assuming a poor person has a full time job with no dependents, and has no other competing concerns for money.

I didn't say it's not good for poor people to have other options, I just said it feels more like freedom to me having the choice of driving.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#633

Post by jiggunjer » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 5:25 AM UTC

wool_gather wrote: post #461

electricslpnsld wrote: post #446

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. I commuted by bike for two years or so in Po…

Sometimes they're a bit overly quote courteous unquote -- stopping unexpectedly to let you cross, holding up traffic behind them, or waiting too long to turn onto the road you're on so that they end up behind you when they could have easily gone in front and been on their merry way, etc. Not that I want to complain -- I'll take this any, any day over the drivers in certain other northern cities named after 70s rock b…

This is exactly how my first and only car accident happened. I was driving and the car in front on the next lane randomly stopped on the road. I couldn't see there was a cyclist on the other side of the car. The old lady went for it despite me not slowing down, so I hit the brakes and got smacked from behind by another car.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#634

Post by newshorts » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 5:52 AM UTC

my wife and I used to need to take vacations and drive to the mountains on the weekends just to get away from the stress of the city. Then we moved to an area where we can bike to two separate town centers and we haven’t felt the need to take a vacation in years.

We are more social and more relaxed now, and I swear it’s because we can bike to all the places we would have driven, like restaurants, movie theaters and grocery stores.

Ditching the car has been a very positive experience.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#635

Post by newshorts » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 6:12 AM UTC

strictnein wrote: post #247

montenegrohugo wrote: post #3

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…

> 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…

Try going to Yosemite on the weekend from the Bay Area.

If you want to see the endgame for cars as a primary means of transportation check out San Francisco.

We tried to go to Tahoe one weekend and gave up after waiting in line to get on the bay bridge for 2 hours and moving only 2 blocks.

Another time it literally took 10 hours to return from a ski trip and it’s supposed to be a 3 hour drive.

We don’t go anywhere in California now. If we want to ski, we fly out of state.

The problem is cars don’t scale.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#636

Post by dang » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 6:32 AM UTC

ChristianBundy wrote: post #570

throwaway809484 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely what shines so much in Pontevedra (the city featured in the article) and e.g. Oviedo (another Spanish city that aggressively adopted this policy in 1991). Local shopping benefited so much from banning cars downtown. Little specialty shops and cafes blossomed vs suburban malls. Sadly, I think this is only easy to accomplish in mid-sized densely-populated cities ( Paradoxically, shopping associations…

I'm not sure how or why, but you're dead. Your comments are only visible to people with `showdead` enabled. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

The comment was killed by HN's anti-troll software, which is tuned more aggressively for new accounts and unfortunately gets some cases wrong. Fortunately users tend to vouch for those, as happened here. That unkills them.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#637

Post by gaius » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 6:41 AM UTC

gpm wrote: post #609

alkonaut wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxi prices would have to be substantially lower for taxi to be a viable alternative. Perhaps for some of the use cases there could be better utilization (meaning cheaper) taxi, e.g. a taxi picking up my kids for school could also pick up a few more.

To everyone above wondering why people think self driving cars will help. This is why. Eliminate the driver and taxis become way cheaper (probably cheaper than owning a car). That means people like alkonaut here will be far more interested in just not owning their own car that sits idle except when they are personally driving it. Which reduces the amount of space we are spending on car storage.

why people think self driving cars will help

Why do you think they will be cheaper? Get ready for surge pricing being the norm. If you don’t have a vehicle of your own, you’ll have no choice but to pay. That’s why investors are willing to pour untold billions into this, they expect a massive payoff.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#638

Post by the_clarence » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 7:19 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #584

the_clarence wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I meant, in the extreme case where a driver license is “needed”, you still don’t need to buy a car.

It's not "needed" to rent a car, it actually is needed. Buying/leasing a car versus combining traditional rentals, hourly rentals, and Uber/Lyft/taxis/etc. (plus other forms of transportation) is mostly an economic decision. But not having a license means that you don't have a lot of those options available to you. IOW, there's a big difference between not owning a car and not having the legal ability to drive a car.

Definitely agree with you, but doing the math in my case it’s just better not to spend the time and money getting a driver’s license. Unless you live in a city where you need to drive.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#639

Post by lovemenot » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 7:55 AM UTC

minikomi wrote: post #595

ta1234567890 wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sadly, I think this is only easy to accomplish in mid-sized densely-populated cities ( You are right about the "easy" part, but it can definitely be done. In fact that's what Tokyo feels like, and it's the largest city/metro area in the world, with 38 million residents.

Indeed. I've lived in downtown Tokyo for 8 years without even owning a driver's licence. Walking through the city is one of my favorite pastimes.

Sure, but the whole thing depends on there being world-class public transportation. Fortunately, Tokyo has that.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#640

Post by adrianN » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 7:58 AM UTC

claydavisss wrote: post #103

nobody271 wrote: post #91

I walk to the grocery store most days. It seems to kill several birds with one stone: - unwind after work - get exercise - get outside - time to think You would think it would be a lot more popular but it's not. It seems more like there must be something wrong with you if you walk on a daily basis lol. ... societal norms I guess.

Come back when you are seventy and tell us if you still enjoy cycling with forty pounds of groceries This entire thread is predicated on building cities for young single men

My mother is seventy one and rides a cargo tricycle to the supermarket. She can't drive so in an American city she would have to order her groceries, I guess.