Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Picture
There seem to be articles from citylab (and other &#x27;urbanist&#x27; outlets) flooding Hacker News daily. Somehow they all end up on the front page. This article&#x27;s submitter (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;user?id=gmck" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;user?id=gmck</a>) is a 5-month old account that submits almost entirely just citylab articles.<p>Clearly there are people looking to influence the HN crowd one way, especially with the anti-car narratives. Here&#x27;s a different narrative about cars that shows the other side:<p>Cars are fast, and in areas that are not ultra high-density, they save time relative to ANY alternative (walking, biking, buses, trains) and therefore drastically improve your quality of life. They don&#x27;t require you to wait on someone else&#x27;s schedule, especially given the often inconsistent timing of buses.  They work in all weather (such as rain) and in all terrain (such as hills) and are viable for older folks who may not be comfortable riding a bike everywhere. They don&#x27;t require you to risk sitting down on dirty seats (6-year-old girl stabbed by uncapped needle on bus: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metro.co.uk&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;08&#x2F;girl-6-injected-needle-hidden-two-bus-seats-9873386&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metro.co.uk&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;08&#x2F;girl-6-injected-needle-hidden...</a>). They don&#x27;t require you to expose yourself to violence (40 to 60 teens rob BART train: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfgate.com&#x2F;crime&#x2F;article&#x2F;BART-takeover-robbery-50-to-60-teens-swarm-11094745.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfgate.com&#x2F;crime&#x2F;article&#x2F;BART-takeover-robbery-5...</a>). They let you travel all over the land, including away from cities, and therefore give you a greater degree of freedom than the reach of fixed rails or transit systems that are limited to cities.<p>It seems most of these anti-car articles conveniently ignore the massive benefits we get from fast, private, point-to-point motorized vehicular transport.<p>PS: literally less than 10 seconds after I posted this comment, it was down-voted. No one reads that fast, and this is clearly a spiteful downvote from someone who doesn&#x27;t want any visible challenge to the prevailing narrative. That&#x27;s unfortunate and a sign of degradation in discourse within the Hacker News community.