alt Hacker News> So what exactly is your beef with urbanism?
It's the root cause of all the current political problems in the US and Europe. It's a kind of pollution that offloads externalities (high living costs) from companies onto the population. Dense cities allow companies to more easily access larger pools of workers, without having to care about their long-term benefits.
> Would you prefer if we just focused on making car traffic as fast as possible and pushed aside other methods of transportation?
Yes. I would go as far as ripping out all the local transit (eventually). Self-driving cars have solved the only real problem with cars: people who can't or shouldn't drive (children, elderly, people with disabilities, etc.)
> Do you interpret these results as evidence that attempting otherwise is folly?
Yes. Quite simply: look at the stated goals of programs like Vision Zero. They are social engineering programs that simply use saving human lives as a justification to push their agenda. I hate that.
Other urbanistic programs are similar, and even urbanists admit that: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-m...
> That sounds like a pretty big win to me?
Sure. But at what cost?
> Yes these programs are designed to make other modes of transport more attractive
No. They are designed to make car travel intolerable. It's a zero-sum game, a bike lane almost always means removing a traffic lane.
> What do you make of all the data that shows that adding lanes to a highway doesn't decrease traffic?
It's a real phenomenon - induced demand. And it also applies to housing costs: increases in housing density do NOT result in lower housing prices.
And the fix is actually the same in both cases: eliminate the _need_ for more lanes or denser housing.
>Yes. I would go as far as ripping out all the local transit (eventually). Self-driving cars have solved the only real problem with cars: people who can't or shouldn't drive (children, elderly, people with disabilities, etc.)
One other problem with cars is that not everybody can afford one, or really should need to have one in a big city. Even if Waymo were a free or cheap public service, it's still far less efficient and more disruptive than a robust public transit system. When dense cities are walkable and bikable, less people need cars for everything. That's hard to achieve with cars at 40mph everywhere. There's a place for cars but we've only created the problem by having them zoom around every inch of a city at the expense of everything else.
Also, tax the companies, easy. In America we've been manipulated to loathe the ideas of taxes. Taxes are what pays for things that are good for everyone.