<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>fsloth</author><text>I think it is well known the car and petrol companies were heavy lobbyists in developing the transit architecture in the US (including zoning and so on) after the second world war. To exaggerate a bit, the entire country was designed to facilitate automobile sales.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Effects_of_the_car_on_societies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Effects_of_the_car_on_societ...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the continental europe most of the urban centers predate the automobile hundreds if not thousands of years, thus the existing infrastructure does not use the private automobile as one of the key design constraints.&lt;p&gt;Not so in the US, where huge areas were populated and zoned specifically with the support of the automobile as one of the key constraints.&lt;p&gt;Once the infrastructure has been built using one design constraint, it&amp;#x27;s really expensive and difficult to unravel it.</text><parent_chain><item><author>abakker</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know if it really proves anything and it might be OT from your point, but, the confounding variable is that in the US - especially outside of the major urban areas -  &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; is just very far away in terms of miles. Lacking a car, you can expect life to be very difficult. there are still plenty of places in the US where the range of a tesla might be a borderline problem week-to-week. (though probably not as often as people think and if you plan well)&lt;p&gt;My casual observation is that smaller countries just have a lot more good options when it comes to transit because the total distances are much smaller.</text></item><item><author>danans</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a strange shift in affairs that China appears to have the greatest incentives (urban pollution, petroleum imports) today to advance clean transportation and energy while the US has stalled or moved backward, at least the Federal level.&lt;p&gt;Western European countries, for whom fossil fuels don&amp;#x27;t seem to be an identity politics issue like in the US, are also making more progress in electrifying their transportation and developing renewable generation - like those massive offshore turbines in the North Sea, or the more comprehensive EV charging networks.&lt;p&gt;Again, they seem to have stronger incentives: high gas&amp;#x2F;petrol prices, higher population density, tense relations with Russia - their big petroleum and natural gas supplier, and the desire to gain an advantage in clean energy technology while the US is seemingly regressing.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps states that have taken the problem seriously - wind in Texas, Iowa, EVs in CA, WA, NY, will carry the torch for the US without the Federal government&amp;#x27;s support.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/electric-buses-are-hurting-the-oil-industry</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>freddie_mercury</author><text>The OP was talking about China. China is bigger than the continental US. I think the persistent myth about the US&amp;#x27;s size being some unique problem doesn&amp;#x27;t explain much.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s more, if you think of the EU as a comparison for the US, with the individual counties as analogues for US states, it seems to explain even less. Belgium and Massachusetts are the same size but over has much better transit options than the other.</text><parent_chain><item><author>abakker</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know if it really proves anything and it might be OT from your point, but, the confounding variable is that in the US - especially outside of the major urban areas -  &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; is just very far away in terms of miles. Lacking a car, you can expect life to be very difficult. there are still plenty of places in the US where the range of a tesla might be a borderline problem week-to-week. (though probably not as often as people think and if you plan well)&lt;p&gt;My casual observation is that smaller countries just have a lot more good options when it comes to transit because the total distances are much smaller.</text></item><item><author>danans</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a strange shift in affairs that China appears to have the greatest incentives (urban pollution, petroleum imports) today to advance clean transportation and energy while the US has stalled or moved backward, at least the Federal level.&lt;p&gt;Western European countries, for whom fossil fuels don&amp;#x27;t seem to be an identity politics issue like in the US, are also making more progress in electrifying their transportation and developing renewable generation - like those massive offshore turbines in the North Sea, or the more comprehensive EV charging networks.&lt;p&gt;Again, they seem to have stronger incentives: high gas&amp;#x2F;petrol prices, higher population density, tense relations with Russia - their big petroleum and natural gas supplier, and the desire to gain an advantage in clean energy technology while the US is seemingly regressing.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps states that have taken the problem seriously - wind in Texas, Iowa, EVs in CA, WA, NY, will carry the torch for the US without the Federal government&amp;#x27;s support.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/electric-buses-are-hurting-the-oil-industry</url></story>