> It's a no-brainer that the party to yield should be the one who can yield.

Alternative no-brainer - the new entrant to street traffic that doesn't have the handling or control to safely co-habitate the street with existing users shouldn't be allowed onto streets. They should instead be restricted to specific and limited long distance routes that actually take advantage of their ability to travel many miles an hour on an artificial fuel source - with an allowance within streets to allow emergency vehicles of course.

In short, walk or take a tram to your parked car if you need to drive it to the next town.

Car-brain be strong.

You gotta give it to the auto-makers. Probably the greatest propagandists of the modern world.

The fact is that cars make places suck. They are dangerous to other road users, the roads built for them create dangerous microclimates, monopolise what was once shared infrastructure, and they enable evils such as the supermarket.

Cars are like guns in the states but worse.

I think you may have misinterpreted what the person above you said. I think the person above you is actually not as car brained as you think. I read their suggestion not as "everyone should use a car to get everywhere" but instead as:

> Cars can't safely be on streets with pedestrians, so we probably shouldn't allow cars onto roads where pedestrians could walk. Instead the only place where cars should be allowed are roads meant for long-distance driving, like interstates, as that's the environment where a cars advantages shine. Once off of an interstate, you gotta park that car in a dedicated car-storage facility and then walk or use public transit to get around. If you want to drive a car, then "walk or take a tram to your parked car if you need to drive it to the next town."

They were referring to the GP and generally agreeing with the person they replied to.

you lost me with the supermarket... lots of people in NYC walk or take the subway to supermarkets that have little/no parking... people like a big store where all the food is in one place.

Here supermarkets are associated with large car parks.

Up here in Vancouver we have a Costco that's in the middle of downtown and trivially subway accessible - it also has a parking structure and Costco in particular is a rather difficult shop to do on foot... but grocery stores with a wide variety are still useful to make trips on foot to if you only need niche ingredients and can pick up the bulk of your food at veggie markets and butchers.

>In short, walk or take a tram to your parked car if you need to drive it to the next town.

What does that have to do with what I said?

Without allowing vehicles on roads (and the jaywalking laws that came with it), deliveries to the high-density places where people live , or to city centers, would be limited to what can be drawn on a horse and carriage.

Those laws specifically benefited those people who live without cars.

The high-density car-free life you dream of would never have been possible had your "no-brainer" alternative been adopted - you can't transport that much goods, that quickly, and that often, and that reliably with horses alone.

I have no objection to commercial delivery vehicles, mass transit vehicles or emergency vehicles - I solely object to personal vehicles being assumed to have a right to directly access to every store front in a city. If we shifted out cultural view to looking at these vehicles as borrowing the public space of streets - instead of viewing streets as zones prohibited to pedestrians we'd probably all live longer lives without compromising on our deliveries. You can also look at European cities to see how last-mile deliveries to addresses that aren't on car-width roads are handled with cargo and motor bikes.

> You can also look at European cities to see how last-mile deliveries to addresses that aren't on car-width roads are handled with cargo and motor bikes.

High-density living requires much more cargo space than motorbikes can handle.

Just moving into the area alone requires an automobile (you're not moving 3 beds, 5 couches and everything else on cargo bikes). hundreds of thousands of eggs, loaves of bread and litres of milk alone is delivered in a large high-density metro per day. you aren't going to fit 100k cargo bikes into the train station.

My point is not that we need to keep autos, my point is that the high-density living we have now would not have been possible if automobiles were not allowed on roads.

We're lucky that it was allowed, because it enabled a rate of progress that would never have been possible without it.

You realize that high-density car-free cities existed for thousands of years before cars were invented?

> You realize that high-density car-free cities existed for thousands of years before cars were invented?

Not at the scale we commonly have now. If you have any links to a 2000 year old skyscraper, now would be a good time to post it.

Global population wasn't at the scale we have right now either. However, London had several million inhabitants in the late nineteenth century, before any cars were around.

> Global population wasn't at the scale we have right now either.

Yes. Because technology like the automobile was not around to support the high-density living that we enjoy now.

> However, London had several million inhabitants in the late nineteenth century, before any cars were around.

Nowhere nearly as dense as we want to live now. And that wasn't thousands of years ago either.

My point is that, without the automobile, high density populations could not be supported.

You're moving goalposts across continents if a car free city with several million inhabitants doesn't qualify as dense car-free living.

I don't think so. I started the thread with:

>>>> We all benefited, yourself included, from having those early laws on the books.

then reinforced with

>>> The high-density car-free life you dream of would never have been possible

then reinforced, again, with

>> Because technology like the automobile was not around to support the high-density living that we enjoy now.

I thought I was being clear that I was referring to the dense car-free cities we now enjoy, or we expect to have, not overcrowded and unsanitary slums[1].

So you claiming that a dense car-free city is possible is irrelevant to "the car free city we now enjoy", because the car-free cities we now enjoy does not have millions of people living in overcrowded and unsanitary slums.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_London#19th_century:

> While the city grew wealthy as Britain's holdings expanded, 19th-century London was also a city of poverty, where millions lived in overcrowded and unsanitary slums.

Overcrowding and sanitation are orthogonal problems to delivering goods to millions of people in a city. London for example was unsanitary because we didn't even have an understanding of germ theory at the time. People however didn't starve because no trucks where around to stock the shelves.

I'm seeing here a lot of conflation between "street" and "road." In historical usage, a road is the surface you drive on, and a street is a pathway with buildings on either side.

In people-centric culture, a street is a place for people. This is the way streets worked for millenia. Horses and horse-drawn carriages were usually allowed on the street as well, which are more dangerous than a person.

In car-centric culture, a street is simply a kind of road, and all roads are the primary domain of cars. There is no logical reason that this must be so - cars could, for instance, only have right-of-way on non-street roads, like highways.

Also, your assertion that cars (even old cars) cannot travel at a low enough speed to have a safe stopping distance around pedestrians is simply not true. Even a collision between a pedestrian and a car at "walking speed" (if the car completely failed to notice the pedestrian) rarely results in a fatality. Which you can easily look up yourself, but the numbers I'm seeing are less than 1% fatality rate for collisions below 10mph.