alt Hacker NewsImpressive how cars are harmful to society. This is just a small example. We should be more radical in preventing the use of individual automobiles.
If it works in a country where the auto is so ingrained in the culture and lifestyle, it can work anywhere.
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The converse is how helpful cars are. It allows people to have the ability commute from areas they live at to where they work. It brings down the cost of living by expanding the commute availability circle, instead of driving up land values for the desirable areas.
This comment goes against any individual freedom common law and common sense.
Cars are only harmful in dense cities. They work just fine everywhere else. For example in small cities kids can play in the road without fear of cars. It's only in dense cities where they can not.
Dense cities are also the only places where public transit works, so it kind of balances out.
> This is just a small example.
New York city is a small example? New York city is the largest city in the US, and pretty much the ONLY city where you can do this. And the mediocre results (10% is very little) from even NYC show that this will not even come close to working anywhere else.
NYC is an extreme outlier. The city itself is older than America, older than the British colonies even. It was built by the Dutch. It's infrastructure is closer to Tokyo's[0] than any other American city. Congestion charge works in NYC because anyone driving solo into Manhattan is either an idiot or a cop[1].
In any other city, congestion charge would be an effective tax on mobility, because every other city is so comically car-dependent. You might as well just raise the gas tax. Most cities don't even have a downtown to protect from cars, they're just suburban sprawl forever.
The actually radical solution for places outside the Tri-State Area is as follows:
- Ban mixed streets and highways ("stroads"). That is, any road in the network must either be built to exclusively service local properties, or carry high-speed thru traffic, not both. Existing stroads must be segmented into feeder streets and high-speed roads with ramp lanes on and off.
- Level the zoning code. Allow mixed commercial everywhere, get rid of lawn setbacks, and allow up to four story buildings basically anywhere the soil won't collapse from it. The only limitations to this policy should be to prevent existing tenants from being renovicted immediately.
- Require all new streets above the speed limit for (formerly) residential zoned streets have dedicated lanes for bikes and transit vehicles. The lanes must be segmented for safety. The transit lanes can start off as BRT and then get upgraded to LRT cheaply. If you don't want to run a BRT system then rent the lanes to private transit companies.
I'm not sure how any of this would play in the motosexual parts of America, though. Even nominally blue states like California would shit themselves if you tried to even slightly inconvenience car owners.
[0] To be clear, Tokyo as we know it today was basically rebuilt by America after we leveled it with firebombs. It was specifically built in the image of Manhattan.
[1] I can imagine several reasons why NYPD cops might not want to take public transit which I won't elaborate further on here.