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To build the cities of the future, we must get out of our cars

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: To build the cities of the future, we must get out of our cars

#261

Post by adwww »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #59
adwww wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not happening though. My parents live in a beautiful part of the rural UK and have super-fast fibre to the premises internet, next day Amazon prime available, online food shopping from 4 or so supermarkets locally, etc. Basically everything you'd think you'd need to live away from the city, but still the area is depopulating rapidly. Younger people don't want a life of car dependancy and social isolation.

> Younger people don't want a life of car dependency and social isolation. When I moved from my families acreage that was 10 minutes out of town it wasn't because of social isolation or car dependence - it was because I couldn't get an post-secondary education in my community. Even if I hadn't gone for an education, there was a ton more employment opportunities in the urban centre. I stayed in the city because "junio…

Ah yeah I didn't mention employment which is clearly the biggest barrier at the moment to living outside urban areas, as I assumed the parent comment was suggesting remote working is what will enable moving away from big cities.

Re: To build the cities of the future, we must get out of our cars

#262

Post by 0xffff2 »

magduf wrote: post #173
jpindar wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know several people who, like myself, used to drive small pickups and now drive midsize ones. We would prefer to drive small ones, but they don't make them anymore. Among people who are willing to restore old vehicles, some small trucks are becoming classics.

They can't sell small trucks in the US because of the Chicken Tax: https://fee.org/articles/chicken-tax-makes-trucks-expensive-...

Don't pretty much all overseas car companies build vehicles for the North American market in North America these days? That would make the tariff point moot. My "Japanese" mid-sized truck that's bigger than I really need it to be was built in Mississippi.

Re: To build the cities of the future, we must get out of our cars

#263

Post by erik_seaberg »

jjoonathan wrote: post #95
czechdeveloper wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get easily insulted for proper choices. Homophobic comments on cycling and veganism are common. I rather believe that we are doomed - that we will destroy nature sufficiently for it to stop producing enough food to sustain us as species - than that we will change.

Today's environmental causes suffer from a credibility problem imposed by the mountains of failed breathless malthusian doomsday predictions from yesterday's environmental causes. I've seen the science and believe it, but the boy who cried wolf was also correct, in the end. Please don't be a credibility problem for tomorrow's environmental causes.

It's not helping that politicians give lip service to an existential crisis and then bury it in the bottom half of a huge agenda. At this point I'm pretty sure I'm more worried than they are.

Re: To build the cities of the future, we must get out of our cars

#264

Post by Kaiyou »

Xylakant wrote: post #183
educationdata wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Car is not just the "culture", car serves our need. If you are young without kids, it may not make much difference for you to ride a car, or take a bus, or a train, subway, etc. But if you have a family, it makes a huge pain without your own vehicle. If the city of future requires families to abandon their own vehicle, it is not the correct city of future. Just design a better one.

> If you are young without kids, it may not make much difference for you to ride a car, or take a bus, or a train, subway, etc. We have a toddler and a large dog. We own two electric cargo bikes and get around perfectly well without owning a car. There's car/truck sharing and rental if I really need to transport something large and heavy (> 100kg). > Just design a better one. I'd very much prefer if all that parking…

Pain starts at the third child. Ideally families should have over nine kids each. Unfortunately, we are a dying society that on average doesn't even reach replacement level of children. If you want to think about a city of the future, it might be worth thinking about whether anybody will be around living in those cities.

Re: To build the cities of the future, we must get out of our cars

#265

Post by benj111 »

Kaiyou wrote: post #243
benj111 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its a hatred of cars. Its just cars are so entrenched in western cultures that its easy to overlook all the problems. All those things you cited are all exacerbated by the car. Electric cars will solve the pollution issue, but they are still cars, with all the issues they bring.

Even with all their problems, they are still the best and often only solution. They move on your schedule, they stop on your schedule, they make it easy to move more stuff than you can otherwise carry from your house to wherever you want to move it. And their cheaper than public transport, too.

Agreed.

You can make other options less bad in this regard though. And do things to reduce the problems.

You assertion on public transport costs is heavily dependent on unstated assumptions though.

Re: To build the cities of the future, we must get out of our cars

#266

Post by asdff »

zip1234 wrote: post #255
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #63

This is one of the reasons the self-driving craze in tech is so silly: We have vehicles you can commute in and not drive called public transit. Self-driving cars is desire for public transit that doesn't have your rich self sitting next to a poor person on the way to work.

I think the issue is that public transportation is rarely point to point. A point to point self-driving transportation capsule could be more efficient and be better utilized than public transportation.

Point to point is by definition wasteful. Look at how goods are moved around the globe: it's always hub and spoke because that's what works best rather than an infinite number of dedicated routes. Walk on foot, bike, skateboard, take a bird or lime to a hub and you remove a ton of engineering headaches. You could have the hub to hub route be completely isolated from traffic and pedestrians and many of the highly publicized issues with self driving cars would be eliminated with zero engineering required. But lets keep wasting time and effort figuring out how to make an uber you don't have to talk to during your ride instead.

Re: To build the cities of the future, we must get out of our cars

#267

Post by asdff »

myself248 wrote: post #123

Funny how the loudest voices in these sorts of articles are always from places with temperate weather.

In the midwest you still see people clad head to toe in goretex waterproof gear biking to work in a blizzard. Doesn't matter how the weather is if you've prepared for it.

Re: To build the cities of the future, we must get out of our cars

#269

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

0xffff2 wrote: post #227
scriptkiddy wrote: post #222

I live in Los Angeles; The Mecca for the automobile. Back in the early 20th century, the city was trying really hard to invest in public transportation through the use of electric street cars. Unfortunately, car manufacturers were able to weasel their way into the pockets of the city planners and put a stop to that. We have a problem in Los Angeles. And that problem is that it's almost impossible to live close to whe…

Do you own your house? I'm curious because you speak as if "where you live" is an immutable fact, whereas my solution would to be to move closer to work.

For some people, moving isn't very easy. If you have kids there's the whole issue with switching schools, etc. If you tend to switch jobs frequently it may be a case of just getting settled and now you're in a new job.

Moving is also, for many people, a gigantic pain that they'd rather avoid, even if it means suffering through traffic every day.

Re: To build the cities of the future, we must get out of our cars

#270

Post by asdff »

rootusrootus wrote: post #137
myself248 wrote: post #123

Funny how the loudest voices in these sorts of articles are always from places with temperate weather.

And places that are already dramatically denser than the vast majority of the developed world. Over the weekend I found myself looking for a place in Europe in satellite view, outside of an urban core, and I was struck by how many single-family houses there were, complete with driveways and cars. Here on HN I have been led to believe that Europe is a utopia of forward-thinking people too concerned about the environme…

You know there are cities in Europe as well, right?
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