Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives • Hacker News Board

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#391

Post by alistairSH » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

ThomPete wrote: post #385

alistairSH wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and we turned around and codified all of that so we can't easily do anything different. For example, as noted in the article, developers are REQUIRED to supply parking in most locations. Looking out my office window, there's a sea of surface parking. If that was legally mandated, the developer could in-fill with mixed-use and some of us could live literally right next door. Instead, the closest I can get to work…

They are required BECAUSE cars are base for the sprawl. Again even in Denmark and other places that are extremely pro-public-transportation and anti-car, cars are still used by the majority of people because its the base means of transportation which provides the most benefits when you boil it down. Forcing people to live in big cities with public transportation makes no sense on a continent like America. Public tran…

makes no sense on a continent like America

Based on what metrics?

Sure, the space is there, but there are real costs to using it the way we do. It is a choice we have made as a society. But, there's no natural law that required us to choose cars or stopping us from reconsidering.

As I see it: - cars and the sprawl they allowed made sense at the time

- entrenched interested worked to codify the car-based lifestyle

- it is likely time to reconsider the path we took, given what we now know about pollution, the time wasted in traffic, and other factors.

- those entrenched interests have done such a good job of selling the car as a fundamental (and "free") part of the American Dream that many people are unwilling to consider anything else (see sibling comments about freedom and flexibility).

Edit - a few links that discuss the costs of maintaining suburban sprawl: 1 - https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ... 2 - https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/05/quantifying-cost-spra... 3 - https://fee.org/articles/the-unbearable-truth-about-infrastr...

Plenty more to read through, if you want to spend the time.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#392

Post by gumby » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

There's a pretty good book on the origins and consequences of the car culture called, not surprisingly, "The Car Culture by James J. Flink.

It was written in 1975 so doesn't speculate on the future of self driving vehicles but part of what made that book interesting is it took an oil shock to really get some attention on the problems.

(let's not forget that one enormous benefit of automobiles was that they cleaned up the cities which used to be full of horse manure. Of course we know now that they pollute in other, destructive, ways).

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#393

Post by ambicapter » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #151

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Older people losing their cars is often the start of a decline unto death I'm not sure this is just because of the way neighborhoods are set up. It's also a lack of social structures to catch this. The richest country one earth, has Uber, yet can't keep healthcare costs low enough to keep the elderly alive longer.

It’s definitely not just that but losing the ability to travel is a big multiplier since it affects your ability to see other people, eat well, exercise, etc. along with getting medical or legal assistance.

I mean, ability to do those things isn't really endemic to "the ability to travel" is it? More like a function of how your area is setup whether or not you need to travel far to do these things or just leisurely amble over.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#394

Post by mcguire » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #28

dalbasal wrote: post #12

Another way of stating this could be "transport is a policy question." How cities are built and what transport infrastructure they're built around. Im fairly sympathetic to the overall aims of this article. I think a transport system more similar to those in the Netherlands makes for better urban landscapes. But... this habitual style of treating everything as a conspiracy, built around a personified enemy ("They gav…

I'm not saying we should never think in abstractions... but there is a formulaic pattern here that's old, paranoid and harmful. Except these conspiracies were (and are) generally real, and their effects are real. The pattern isn't journalistic, it's historical.

This is absolutely true. Why, I myself am a member of no less than 8 conspiracies that I know of. Of course, I can't tell you any further details; that would defeat the point of a conspiracy after all.

The problem is that I keep forgetting the secret handshakes. One of these days, I'm going to leave my thumb out rather than in and someone's going to shank me with a shiv. Or shiv me with a shank; I can't remember how that goes either.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#395

Post by carapace » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #371

carapace wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I was talking about this a couple of years ago and got called a conspiracy nut. I was like, "crack a history book." Now I can just point to this video. Cheers! (FWIW, Robert Anton Wilson once pointed out that, of regime changes in the 20th century, over half of them were the result of some sort of coup . In other words, conspiracy is normal. Make of that what you will.)

Yeah, it is. Glad to see another person realize it. Most write-ups about it act as if believing in conspiracies requires a nutball. Whereas, the world is full of actual conspiracies going on all the time. I wrote a counterpoint to Bruce Schneier saying that: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_psycholog...

Wow, very nice.

FWIW, you identified the reason(s) why I'm personally not concerned about general erosion of privacy, while bring very concerned about differential erosion of privacy.

- - - -

A though, can animals conspire? It's something that almost seems to require intelligence and "higher level" communication. Do chimpanzees conspire?

Would there be an adaptive advantage to conspiracy skepticism? Is that why conspiracy skepticism is so common? Most people are followers and a few are... tricky?... leaders?

Maybe rampant conspiracy is a phase between the moment of evolution of intelligence and the time when "fake news" forces fidelity to reality? It's trivial to show that conspiracy is only ever a local optimum. Multiple competing "truths" incur caloric cost to maintain, but honesty is maximally efficient.

Maybe we all get a clue, become scrupulously truthful, solve all our problems, and go on to live in a new Golden Age...

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#396

Post by mrob » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 6:44 PM UTC

kaybe wrote: post #170

vixen99 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it helps to live in a famously flat country.

You'd think, but it's also close to the sea and that gives you strong winds regularly. The effect on riding difficulty is about the same. Contrary to a slope the wind can also hinder you on the way there and on the way back (when you stayed long enough for the wind to turn). Yay.

Strong winds are worse than hills. If you don't cycle then you might not appreciate how much headwinds can slow you down. Most of a cyclist's energy goes to overcoming wind resistance, and wind resistance increases with the square of the velocity. And crosswinds can be dangerous by making the bike hard to control.

But hills are always in the same place, so you just leave a little earlier and shift to a lower gear. It's slower, but no more difficult, and you have the downhill return journey to look forward to.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#397

Post by mcguire » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

tremon wrote: post #69

C1sc0cat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree and totally ignores the fact that people like the flexibility and freedom (in fact as well as psychologically) Unfortuetly this area and "green" in general does I am afraid does tend to attract "hobbyist" / "crank" activists. (I am using these terms in the political sense and not dising peoples hobbys Eg the green movement needs to concentrate on the present problem (runaway global heating) and not on p…

Speaking as a Dutchman, I experience much more flexibility and freedom riding a bike than my car. That's probably a consequence of both the overcrowding of our roads, and the density of our infrastructure -- I rarely have to drive more than 15 minutes to reach any kind of shop, and by bike I can take shortcuts that my car can't follow, especially in inner cities. Ultimately, my car has been relegated to recreational…

Speaking as a Texan, the Netherlands has about the same area as the state of Maryland and three times the population.

I do love Amsterdam, but there's no way I could live there.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#398

Post by mcguire » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

darkarmani wrote: post #342

ThomPete wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you don't live in a country as big as the US is and don't need to move around like we do in the US. I am from Denmark who also have plenty of bikes and it's a thing. The reality is however that thats fine as long as you live in the cities, it's not way to get around if you live in the suburbs and have to drive 30 miles to work and take care of your picking up the kids and drive 20 miles to the nearest…

> it's not way to get around if you live in the suburbs and have to drive 30 miles to work and take care of your picking up the kids and drive 20 miles to the nearest grocery store etc. That's a consequence of cars not the other way around. If cars were never invented, you wouldn't have the problem of traveling 30 miles to work and driving 20 miles to a store. Those things are possible because of cars and now it chai…

Apropos of nothing, in 1890 (i.e. pre-car), a pound of flour was roughly $4.00; a dozen eggs was roughly $6.00.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#399

Post by u801e » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

9dev wrote: post #357

u801e wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it requires cyclists to act like pedestrians and is only safe to use at pedestrian like speeds, then it's not good cycling infrastructure.

In Munich, where I live, for example, we have bike lanes on the sides of most streets throughout the town, and dedicated bike paths in the countryside. It's wonderful - cyclists can drive safely the speed they'd like to, without interfering with neither cars nor pedestrians. I use my bicycle almost exclusively for anything up to 20km.

Bike lanes on the sides of streets present problems for cyclists where there are frequent intersections. At those intersections, cyclists need to check for traffic overtaking them and then immediately making a right turn in front of them, traffic entering the roadway and encroaching in the bike lane, and oncoming traffic making a left turn across the bike lane.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#400

Post by mcguire » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #7

dredmorbius wrote: post #2

Corollary: the biggest impacts to energy consumption lie in land use and building code changes, secondarily in consumption habits. See LLNL's 2018 energy flow chart: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/... (PDF: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/2018_United-... ) Of 101 quads, 28 go to transport. Industrial use. is dominated by relatively clean natural gas (methane), with a large…

It doesn't seem quite the same, but your comment strongly reminded me of https://www.econlib.org/an-epic-example-of-wealth-destructio... .

What regulation prevents that from being built?

[Edit] The Williamson Act? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamson_Act) "The Williamson Act of the US state of California (officially, the California Land Conservation Act of 1965) is a California law that provides relief of property tax to owners of farmland and open-space land in exchange for a ten-year agreement that the land will not be developed or otherwise converted to another use."

"The property is under the Williamson Act, meaning the land will not be developed or otherwise converted to another use for a number of years." (https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/article23239941...)