I get your point in general, but I think vehicles are a poor analogy because in many ways they have changed the places we live for the worse (and yes I’ll concede occasionally for the better). It turns out we need places to park all of these vehicles and they compete for space with humans.
That analogy holds too.
(And even more if you can combine them.)
The first sentence is actually a much better jumping off point for the other side of the argument than yours, because the mistakes involved in the statement should set off alarm bells for people who've walked with mathematics.
What do you mean by "place"? What do you mean by "more"?
Are there more places as marked by real numbers between 0 and 1, or places as marked by integers? Could a machine that can count integers 1000000 times faster than people "visit" all those real places between 0 and 1? What would it mean to visit all the places between 0 and 1? Once the machine visited all of them how would it help people explore that territory?
What do the general ratios and rules between paths and areas mean about how much path it takes to cover an area?
The real world is quantized in way that math isn't, of course, but that's one way the analogy can lead you astray.
And even just keeping to the real world rather than math, it's not all about the sheer velocity with which you can cover an arbitrary distance metric. The primary bottleneck is less that velocity than the amount of time you have to direct to place scaled to your capacities. The car's velocity can let you trade some of that time for fast travel between farther places, and with a road network can arguably even increase a certain variety of places, but that's a very different statement than more places. And it's also a wall against attention to everything in between.
I'm sure there's a coherent rebuttal but "That is plainly rubbish" isn't the reply I'd expect in good-faith discussion
I think pointing at Greenland for a start and asking you to think about the problem for a bit will lead to the same coherent view on the matter.
Or if you're just saying that a very good backpacker that happens to be in greenland can get more places by walking because of a lack of roads, that might be true. But for a normal person in a typical household, their walking range is not that big. If you're in the US or Europe the roads reach almost everywhere.
They neglect to build sidewalks, and force you to walk 1-2 meters from cars racing at 70 km/h. With all the noise and high risk stressing you up to the level you just wanna scream.
stevenhuang: No one forces you to drive. You can still walk.
Not everybody in the world is effectively forced to drive. Sure, maybe if someone has the misfortune to be an US city they have no other option but there are other places that are not like that and cities with good public transport and relatively low car usage.
Or has he changed his mind again.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.