[cyberax]

> At the same time NYC and Toronto, we are removing protected bike lanes. In North America the acceptable amount of lives per year to sacrifice for a little convenience for drivers is above zero, and apparently rising.

BTW, what do you think about the 5-10 extra lifetimes that people in NYC collectively waste _every_ _day_ in commute compared to smaller cities?

A well-designed car-oriented city will have commutes of around 20 minutes, compared to 35-minute average commutes in NYC. So that's 30 minutes that NYC residents waste every day on average. That's one lifetime for about 1.2 million people commuting every day.

[woodruffw]

You've sort of given it away with the "smaller cities" thing. People who live in NYC don't want to live in a smaller American-style city with suburban sprawl.

(You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC. That number, already terrible, would be far worse without the city's mass transit -- you simply cannot support the kind of density NYC endeavors for with car-oriented development.)

[cyberax]

I mean, I don't hide my despair at large cities. They're destroying the fabric of the Western civilization by acting as black holes for population.

> You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC.

Here's the thing. A well-designed human-oriented city like Houston has FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.

The fix for cities like NYC is to stop building them and start de-densifying them.

[masklinn]

> well-designed human-oriented city like Houston

Said no urban planner in the history of urban planning. Or NJB (https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54)

> FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.

Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US. The internet tells me you’re boasting of 30mn for an “average 6 miles commute”. That’s bicycle distance and speed that you need to drive due to a broken city.

[cyberax]

> Said no urban planner in the history of urban planning. Or NJB (https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54)

Wrong. Houston is a great example for planners who care about housing availability and the quality of life for the people. And not bike lanes and road diets.

> Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US.

Yes. And the 7th worst traffic in the US is STILL BETTER than any large European city's oh-so-great transit.

Tells you volumes, doesn't it?

[woodruffw]

This framing that commute time matters more than anything else about a city seems facially incorrect. And once again, it glosses over the actual reality here: people living in dense cities want the benefits of dense living, and there’s no tractable way to maintain that while designing a city primarily for car traffic.

[cyberax]

> people living in dense cities want the benefits of dense living

No, they don't. The majority of people in the US (more than 80-85%) want to live in individual homes in suburbs.

Yet people _have_ to live in dense cities because that's where the jobs are.

[Mawr]

> Here's the thing. A well-designed human-oriented city like Houston has FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.

Didn't I debunk your nonsense "data" last time? Why are you repeating incorrect data when you've been corrected? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42648738

[cyberax]

No, you didn't. You googled the first numbers you could find and threw them over the wall.

The official commute time (one direction) for Houston is in the Census. It was 27.6 minutes in the 2023 ACS: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2023.S0801?q=commuting&... (data series: "Workers 16 years and over who did not work from home", "Mean travel time to work (minutes)", restriction by "Census place" = "Houston city, TX"). Make sure you're not looking at "Houston county", which is a small rural area with a population of 20000 people.

And I was talking about the commute time in _large_ cities in Europe, comparable with Houston's population of 7 million. The best is Berlin, with 31 minutes.

So I suppose you're going to apologize for providing the incorrect data?

[Earw0rm]

You do know that cities are for things besides going from your suburban family home unit to your workplace and back again?

[cyberax]

Which "things"?

Pretty much the only thing is the availability of bars and night clubs. And people past the age of 20-25 are typically not that interested in them.

Anything else: museums, operas, theaters, etc. Take up an insignificant amount of time in the real life. For example, most NYC citizens go to museums exactly 0 times a year.

[Earw0rm]

Then why are they paying $3M for a condo? Because it's not 20-25 year olds doing that.

[makeitdouble]

> well-designed car-oriented city

Might be true, but at this point it's an utopian level of fantasy. We spent more than a century with cars in old cities, new cities, smaller ones bigger ones.

The only proven results we've had is reducing cars solveany problems at once.

[cyberax]

The only proven result is the prosperity in the US, that started to ebb once the economic forces started concentrating people into the larger cities.