641–650 of 756 posts
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Not an option any more when you need to start dropping kids off at school first - not to mention the weather and safety.
There are tons of options for carrying kids on a bike. Made even easier when you add electric assist.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: building the future around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable. We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in the developing world without mass catastrophe (raw materials/labor needed for construction and maintenance, raw materials/labor/space needed for roads and parking lots, literal tons of waste--batteries, tires, steel, plastic, foam--, energy ne…
Fully agreed. And while everything you said is super important and true, one piece that really makes me pumped about this movement to ditch cars is more around quality of life. If you have to get in a car and drive to a parking lot somewhere to get groceries, commute to work, go out with friends, get healthcare, etc. You will obviously live a less healthy life both physically but also mentally because of it. Walking…
The problem is most people own homes in areas where it's not practical to create a 15 minute city.
Plus a lot of people are lazy. My neighbor drove his car 600 yards to pick up a pizza.
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> If some people need to use cars for mobility or business reasons, that is fine with me. Definitely. For stuff like that, emergency services, delivery, trash collection, etc. larger vehicles on streets are totally fine and I think most would agree. I don't even necessarily think we should ban all cars, but we should definitely stop incentivizing them by heavily subsidizing car infrastructure with city budgets funded…
On another HN thread it was discussed that because road wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale to the fourth with vehicle weight, a few large delivery vehicles are far worse than many lighter ones. It is better for us all to use the lightest vehicle we can to go get groceries and take our garbage to the recycling facility (or landfill) than to have trahs trucks, delivery trucks, or busses move us about. T…
It's not like they are hauling sand, the boxes are mostly empty.
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> If some people need to use cars for mobility or business reasons, that is fine with me. Definitely. For stuff like that, emergency services, delivery, trash collection, etc. larger vehicles on streets are totally fine and I think most would agree. I don't even necessarily think we should ban all cars, but we should definitely stop incentivizing them by heavily subsidizing car infrastructure with city budgets funded…
worth visiting an old city like Rome. I was shocked by how walkable it was. It was maybe the second night we were there, we causally strolled around after dinner and just happenstance managed to walk by all the major attractions. That's no mistake but honestly when you experience it's so magical. To create a tech analogy I remember the days before Google when search when would have 20 buttons and could take regex and…
Most people walked everywhere, especially in a city.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-29/the-commu...
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Winters tend to be colder the further inland you go, e.g. daytime temperatures in Germany in the coldest parts of winter are typically lower than in Iceland.
Minneapolis is an inland climate colder than Germany in winter, yet Minneapolis is (for the US) a place known for the number of people who bike year round.
I've seen a lot of these on my local walking path. Which is exactly that - a narrow, paved walking path, in a park. Sometimes they will use their horn to alert peds walking they are passing - which is like, a car horn, because they need that for roads. I've never been "horned" but I've heard it and its not pleasant. Other times they just blow right by no warning. And unlike walkers or bikers, I almost never see them…
Yeah there's a real problem brewing there, we've created bicycles that can go as fast as cars, but the folks riding them seem oblivious to that and think it's okay to blast down bike paths and sidewalks. Yes, getting hit by a car is technically worse, but a couple hundred pounds of human going 25 mph still does quite a lot of damage.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: building the future around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable. We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in the developing world without mass catastrophe (raw materials/labor needed for construction and maintenance, raw materials/labor/space needed for roads and parking lots, literal tons of waste--batteries, tires, steel, plastic, foam--, energy ne…
I think the answer might be nice if there's a better story.
Maybe not so much living without and riding bicycles and walking, but maybe more like:
- telecommuting - with government overriding 3-days-in-office ceo stuff
- goods delivery instead of shopping, maybe permits/regulations/etc to prevent 1000 delivery vehicles
- car rental, or fractional ownership, or something for exceptions
- rezoning/rebuilding so neighborhoods have some services within a short distance.
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It's a positive vision of where society can go rather than having to sacrifice and buckle down. Do people not remember riding bikes as kids? Riding a bike is _still_ fun. It never stopped being fun. Now you can do that and get to work.
Riding a bike is not fun if you're doing it to commute - having to do it in all weathers, in traffic that feels unsafe, even if you don't feel like it and got poor sleep etc. It's really fundamentally not the same.
I understand that's how it is in the US, but there's many places where that is not a problem.
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I'm actually on board for this! If you want to live that way you should be able to. But, you should be held responsible for paying your share of the infrastructure required to support such living. As long as that is understood, I don't really think there's anything inherently bad with what you describe. But I doubt people who love living the suburban car-centric life would like to see their taxes for infrastructure d…
Those costs aren't really all that high, and are easily outweighed by the dramatically lower costs in the suburbs. Everything is cheaper there, land, buildings, repairs, goods and services. Cities might look good in this narrow measure, but costs are higher and wages are higher, which means cities consume far more goods. Suburbs also tend to produce more thing in real (i.e. not monetary) terms. They have far more man…
He's talking about infrastructure cost (how much it costs your municipality to provide the services that you use, like the roads) while you are talking about cost of life (how much it costs you to pay for other things that you need, like food or getting your car serviced).
On the infrastructure front, suburbia simply cannot compete with cities. Infrastructure cost is bound to be more efficient where people live in more densely populated areas. The length of pipes that a municipality needs to lay down in order to serve a single family home in the suburbs is the same as a whole 6-story building in the city (the diameters of the pipes might differ). On a per-capita basis, there's no contest.
A particular factor in the funding of suburban streets is that the initial paving is often subsidized by the federal government. Once the streets start crumbling down after ~20 years of usage, then the real cost hits. Here's an explanation by Not Just Bikes:
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It was fun until I got hit by a car when biking back from work. Now I just drive to work due to the risk of injury from distracted drivers and getting doored in bike lanes. It's really unfortunate because I'd rather bike, but the infrastructure in the US even in relatively bike friendly cities here is dangerous.
That's so frustrating and I'm sorry. The USA is the richest country in the world, but our biking infrastructure is worse than third-world countries. Not only is the bike infrastrcute inadequate and with many gaps, but what does exist is frequently designed to mix with a mode of transportation that is actively hostile to biking. I hope you find a way to bike again. Biking alongside cars is so stressful and dangerous,…
It's just not practical for commuting to work since the "bike infrastructure" consists of painted bike lines next to rows of parked cars.