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Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

economist.com

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Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#571

Post by magduf »

tom_mellior wrote: post #552
magduf wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "vending machines" inside restaurants are only there to increase efficiency and reduce labor needs, because there's a labor shortage of sorts in Japan. For stuff outside, they just don't have problems with vandalism and theft the way America does, so it makes it much more feasible to have lots of vending machines outside: no one is going to deface them or break into them. This is also really useful for bicycling.…

How is this about culture and not about economics? People presumably don't steal bikes for fun but to fence them, because that's the best way for them to keep themselves from starving.

Having a country with starving people is absolutely about culture. The culture of that country doesn't allow any social welfare programs, so people become like that.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#572

Post by yongjik »

davesmith1983 wrote: post #569
magduf wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is such a biased representation of what the real problem is and you conveniently ignore things like violent thugs on public transport (I've experienced this several times in the UK), rowdy teenagers, drunks and the mentally ill. Except these problems don't seem to exist at all on Japanese or German trains. Maybe there's just something seriously wrong with your country.

> Except these problems don't seem to exist at all on Japanese or German trains. Lets see if that is true: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/18/german-train-axe... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/10/knife-attack-jap... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/25/tokyo-knife-at... https://www.scotsman.com/news/world/big-increase-in-sex-assa... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-07/women-subjected-to…

If you have to quote a three year old article to demonstrate that people do get (occasionally) assaulted on a Japanese train, then yes, it does seem much better to me.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#573

Post by padobson »

n4r9 wrote: post #534
mcv wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU's budget is tiny, though. It doesn't maintain armies, police, infrastructure, health care or any sort of social security. Farm subsidies are among the few things the EU spends money on. The rest is paid by member states. So this is not a meaningful comparison.

A meaningful comparison is difficult, granted. If anything, doesn't that make OP's point about food prices being low due to agricultural subsidies less tenable though?

No less tenable than the food standards proposition, unless you have data that shows the difference in industry expenditures on food quality.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#574

Post by sunstone »

Kifot wrote: post #277
sunstone wrote: post #139

Last year in the Netherlands more e-bikes were bought than regular bikes. And on average the e-bikes cost twice as much as the regular bikes. What the Dutch have discovered is that an e-bike is more of a substitute for a car rather than for a pedal bike, it's expands the range of running errands up to 10km or 15km while being more convenient and often faster than a car. This is future of most cities worldwide sooner…

As a guy from Poland, I feel like the only obstacle is atrocious weather in winter, which stops 95% people from riding bikes. From March to November it would work just fine though.

The Norwegians say,"There's no such thing as bad weather just bad clothing." :) But more seriously in poor weather if you don't have to pedal very much and you have a "fat tire" e-bike [1] you may find it's quite a bit more comfortable than you expect.

https://www.radpowerbikes.com/products/radrover-electric-fat...

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#575

Post by ryandrake »

magduf wrote: post #554
briandear wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically we change our quality of life to fit some urban ideal? My kids’ grandparents live in a different state and a different country. A child on the BART train? You have got to be kidding. With the insane people, mentally ill, the thieves and the homeless, I would’t expose my kids to having to deal with that nonsense. Cars are awesome. Being forced to share public transportation with a bunch of weirdos isn’t p…

>A child on the BART train? You have got to be kidding. With the insane people, mentally ill, the thieves and the homeless, Typical American paranoia.

I’m a huge proponent of the whole “free range kid” thing, and am always looking for ways to encourage my kid’s independence, but there’s no way on earth I’m putting her on BART by herself. This is not a general paranoia about trains or public transportation—it’s a specific observation about BART in particular.

Hell, I won’t take BART through certain stops at certain times of the day and I’m a grown-ass man.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#576

Post by davesmith1983 »

yongjik wrote: post #572
davesmith1983 wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except these problems don't seem to exist at all on Japanese or German trains. Lets see if that is true: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/18/german-train-axe... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/10/knife-attack-jap... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/25/tokyo-knife-at... https://www.scotsman.com/news/world/big-increase-in-sex-assa... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-07/women-subjected-to…

If you have to quote a three year old article to demonstrate that people do get (occasionally) assaulted on a Japanese train, then yes, it does seem much better to me.

I didn't quote mine. I literally put in "Japanese Train Attack" and pulled some links off the first page to prove that it isn't quite as perfect as it was claimed. I don't like the fact that the UK is demonised constantly because despite a lot of the problems over here we still do a lot of things right.

Also it doesn't address the very valid point I was making is that until public transport is pleasant and reliable (neither is true in the UK, I dunno about anywhere else and don't claim to) people will not use it if they have an alternative.

No amount of guilting such as the comment I was originally replying to will change that.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#577

Post by davesmith1983 »

magduf wrote: post #570
davesmith1983 wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except these problems don't seem to exist at all on Japanese or German trains. Lets see if that is true: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/18/german-train-axe... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/10/knife-attack-jap... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/25/tokyo-knife-at... https://www.scotsman.com/news/world/big-increase-in-sex-assa... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-07/women-subjected-to…

So you cherry-pick a few examples (one of which wasn't on public transit at all), and you think that's better than a place where 30,000 people per year are killed in auto crashes? Your likelihood of dying on a train in Japan are almost nil, whereas your likelihood of dying in your car on American roads are actually pretty significant, and it's one of the biggest causes of death of non-elderly people.

I did not cherry-pick, I took some examples off of duck duck go to prove a point that everywhere has their problems and you probably shouldn't be criticising my country (which is quite rude) while completely ignoring the point I was making about public transport being quite unpleasant experience in general and why people quite rightly want to avoid it.

The Government wherever that is will have to sort out those problems rather than just try guilty people into not using their cars.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#578

Post by colinmhayes »

onion2k wrote: post #206
H8crilA wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard to learn how to drive. Otherwise not ~everybody would be able to do it. I don't think that self driving cars will replace all cars immediately. That makes little sense from CAPEX perspective, cars are fine for 5, 10, maybe 15 years. You'll not replace an okay car for the latest self driving vehicle, dumping the previous car to the junkyard. Rollout may take decades. And we still don't know when are they…

It's not hard to learn how to drive in a society where most people want to learn. A couple of decades after self-driving cars are commonplace there won't be any instructors working in cities, the rules will be very restrictive for what human drivers are allowed to do, and lessons will be astromonically expensive due to the low demand.

This is a joke. Driving is incredibly easy to self teach with 10 minutes and a parking lot.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#579

Post by tom_mellior »

glogla wrote: post #257
rayiner wrote: post #170

I’m personally not a huge fan of driving everywhere. But I wonder whether HN’s view on this isn’t out of touch with the average middle class American’s. The average American commute is 48 minutes round trip, significantly shorter than France (71 minutes), Italy (65 minutes), or Spain (61 minutes): https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling... That’s mainly because Europe has higher public transit us…

I'm in European city with great public transport, and my commute is 50 minutes by bus or 20 minutes by car (one way). Every time someone says "we should forbid cars in cities", I hear "we should take away 1 hour a day from your family, you should sit in bus instead". (or more likely stand, since the bus is always full) I'm not fan of that.

To be fair, people are mostly saying "we should forbid cars in city centers".

Presumably your commute is so much longer on public transport because neither your home nor your job is in the city center and there are fewer lines out there? Not saying that you deserve to suffer if that's the case, but also probably people aren't coming for cars in your neighborhood first.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#580

Post by dnate »

bluGill wrote: post #507
marble-drink wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just can't compare commuting on time alone. If you commute by car then 100% of that time is spent sitting down either driving or stuck in traffic. If you commute by public transport then maybe 50% of the time is spent reading, and 50% is spent walking. If you commute by bicycle then 100% of the time is spent cycling. It's a shame that study only shows a mean aggregate. I'd be interested to see the raw distributio…

I get carsick when I try to read on the bus. My time this morning was 50% walking, and 50% staring out the window at nothing. It is worth it to not have to drive, but the car is faster by far at no loss.

> at no loss

Lets agree to disagree

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