621–630 of 756 posts
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I think it's actually just anglo countries. The UK is batshit about cars as well, and I don't think the Aussies are much better.
For all the chatter on HN, Europeans in general drive quite a lot. It's fascinating to hear people rail against cars here, and then step back out into meatspace. I just chuckle at the contrast between the dreamers on Reddit/HN and folks in the real world.
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I think it's actually just anglo countries. The UK is batshit about cars as well, and I don't think the Aussies are much better.
For all the chatter on HN, Europeans in general drive quite a lot. It's fascinating to hear people rail against cars here, and then step back out into meatspace. I just chuckle at the contrast between the dreamers on Reddit/HN and folks in the real world.
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Majority of my time commuting the bike wins every time, mostly because I'm commuting at the same time as everyone else.
Not an option any more when you need to start dropping kids off at school first - not to mention the weather and safety.
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…
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You've identified a problem: public transport in some places sucks. But then veered away from the obvious solution: invest in it to make it not suck.
Public transit does not work in a place like Montana or Wyoming. Sorry. Too large, too sparsely populated. Same reason it won't work for most of Texas either. It's fine in Dallas or Austin, parts of Fort Worth... it doesn't scale to Lubbock or New Braunfels. A lot of people have no interest in living in your concrete jungle... myself included.
If you add that in with legacy residents complaining of population booms and losing "the old ways", or nostalgia for self reliance, then Montana fits in perfectly. (Ps I rode in the ~1 uber in Missoula in 2018, and the hotel I stayed in Bozeman in 2022 had free bikes - and many bike lanes, and a nice bike trail)
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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…
> I was shocked by how walkable it was. I don't see why it would be shocking. It was a city for nearly 3,000 years before cars arrived.
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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.
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I spent almost an entire year e-biking to work 7 miles and back 7 miles. I can tell you, all the issues you mentioned are correct. I think, if we had dedicated bike lanes that were away from the main roads, at least we can address the safety issue. that would go a long way towards getting me back to commuting on an e-bike. One more big issue for bikes is the cost of it. I've commuted almost 1100 miles on my ebike and…
Worth looking into solid tyres such as tannus tyres. I've had these for years and it means I don't need to worry about punctures.
Also practice changing the inner tube till you can do it at dusk while late for a school meeting and annoyed in general :)
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> For anyone who has ever been on a bus, and who has the money to never get on a bus again, buses are a non-starter. Feel free to elaborate, because that's not a universal position.
You ever been on a bus with a raving lunatic? Wiled away the hours as the bus chugs along circuitously to a point that is not quite at your destination? Tried to carry heavy shopping on a bus? Walked to a bus stop through bad weather? Taken one mode of transport that was delayed, making you miss the next leg? Waited forever for a bus that never comes? Public transport sucks balls. In the world's densest, biggest citi…
But in Japan, Switzerland, Barcelona, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Sweden, or the Netherlands I've not experienced this much; in many of these cultures since the public bus also serves schools and the elderly, they solve these problems.
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…
To make the 2030 halve our emissions deadline, and 2050 net zero deadline with just little city vehicles, we’ll need to abandon the suburbs, exurbs and rural buildings and infrastructure that we already have, and replace it without producing any additional emissions. Also, in the US, most cities that experienced significant growth after ~ 1950 need to have their new parts razed and rebuilt to accommodate public transit routes and add walkable amenities.
None of that can possibly happen at sufficient scale in the next 7 years, and it certainly would have massive environmental impact if it did.
Alternatively, we could switch all cars to EV’s, use existing construction and infrastructure, and get a > 75% reduction in transportation carbon, even without cleaning up the power grid.
In reality, we are already cleaning up the grid, and time of use subsidies are doing a good job of moving time-shiftable demand to high-production times, when the grid is cleaner.
EVs are currently one of the biggest, easy to time shift loads.
So, we can have a 90% solution to transportation carbon, or go for a 97.5% improvement (rounding the 3.5x improvement moving to mopeds would give up to 4x), but then emit way more carbon than total transportation emissions while we rebuild an unprecedented number of cities all at once.
I’m all for public transit, and think all new urban / suburban housing should be built along high capacity transit corridors, but doing that isn’t going to solve global warming in time.