It’s odd to me that these anti-car polemics never talk about why Americans don’t want to ride public transit, while people in most other countries have zero issues adopting it wholesale. Instead they just make it into a simplistic, moralistic crusade about how the suburban car owners are evil people, told from the perspective of a righteous city-dweller.
Here’s a better theory: because American public transit is, when compared with the alternatives, not safe, not clean, and not convenient. Take LA, probably the most car-dependent big city in America. Riding the bus or subway in LA is not an enjoyable experience. Nor is it enjoyable to walk around the areas where the stops are. If I were trying to get more people to use public transit, I’d start by making the stations and buses/subways beautiful, clean, safe places that are just nice urban places to hang out in. There’s no need to make it a moral crusade; just offer a better product and more people will use it.
It’s odd to me that these anti-car polemics never talk about why Americans don’t want to ride public transit
Yes they do. US public transit is terrible and various groups like Strong Towns describe this and explain why. Things like the way buses wind-up the first thing cut in budget crises etc are important parts of the barrier to ending a car-based urbanism.
I think the ops point was that even if they want to, they don’t want to. I can’t comment on the MN light rail now as I haven’t been on it for a few years, but the green line used to be essentially an open air drug market and the blue line I almost got stabbed. Add in a few instances of homeless on homeless violence and driving starts looking like a great option. That’s not even covering how poorly ran it is. I want to ride it… but I don’t want to ride it.
That is a self-reinforcing cycle. There have been long and successful campaigns by car companies and other self-interested entities in the US to associate public transportation with being poor. Just like how a city street is safer per-capita if there are more people on it, public transit is safer if it is more well-used.
I see this in seattle. When I am commuting in the morning or in the evening my bus is full of yuppies and working class people getting to their job. But if I take the bus on the weekend or during the off hours when well-adjusted people are not on it, the bus is a much less inviting place.
I don't know how to solve the problem other than to believe in the system and hope that other people do as well.
While I'm with you on fare enforcement, there are costs associated with fare collection. Usually it takes passengers time to pull out change and they can be confused about how and where to pay, adding to delays. Building the infrastructure for fare payment at gates is expensive and requires security to maintain and dissuade vandals.
Boudin's recall in SF also shows that there's certainly support for a tougher on crime stance, whether or not you agree with it.
In 2023, any transit system that requires more than quickly tapping your phone, wallet, watch, etc to the the turnstile is decades behind the world technologically and the inconvenience of looking for change is a problem because of the city council or state not investing in public transit. The vast majority of mass transit riders are not tourists from the suburbs using the system as a novelty that would be confused anyway.
I am personally not a fan of NFC becoming the standard in the US, since it requires strategically placing credit cards in your wallet instead of using a card specifically made for transit fare, but it does make it so large swathes of the population never even have to think about going to a fare machine.
A system that relies on turnstiles is decades behind as well. Best practices in much of Europe use proof of payment and cheap monthly passes relative to single tickets, so most users have monthly passes.
This cuts down on access time, infrastructure cost, fare collection cost, and minimizes marginal cost per trip for users (i.e. zero).
In Germany, they just introduced a monthly 49€ ticket that covers transit (and regional trains) for the whole country.
I usually compare how far behind the US is to Japan. How does a system without turnstiles work in Europe? In Japan, the shinkansen can still actually be used with their cards and tapping pass the turnstile, but nearly everyone besides business passengers buys a ticket for the one off far trips. I can't even imagine short trip subways not having a turnstile.
Even in the US, monthly swipe passes have been a thing in even the systems that used tokens.
But monthly passes, for example in NYC, are expensive relative to single tickets, so adoption is relatively low.
If everyone has a monthly pass, fare evasion is less of an issue even in an open system. Fares are checked on a sampling basis with fines for not having a ticket.
Last time I took an U-Bahn in Berlin, a guy was urinating in front of me.
I have not seen such sociopathic behaviour in public transport in Tokyo, Singapore, Taipei, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing. All are turnstile based. I feel that they are strictly better in almost all dimensions than e.g. Berlin's public transport. In all you pay with some variant of NFC tech, e.g. your phone. Zero effort.
Fine-grained access control also allows for better understanding of train usage, and capacity planning.
Asian cities are very different from the West, so not sure lessons apply. Although Berlin is probably more affordable in PPP terms, and relative to population has more rapid transit than those asian cities (500km for 4.6Mio ppl).
In virtually all dimensions, Berlin transit is better than every US system, Except NYC. Which is ironically the only place Ive ever seen anybody pee in the subway, and that one is supposedly “protected” by turnstiles.
The US has a homelessness epidemic, Berlin has some problems in this area as well. This is a problem thats orthogonal to the transit system, and has to be solved by society at large. Turnstiles don’t solve homelessness.
I did not bring up US public transport as an example of "best practises". I agree that Berlin has a extensive and well-developed public transport, and that is commendable.
> Turnstiles don’t solve homelessness.
Nobody claims they do. My anecdote illustrated the opposite direction: barriers remove one related cluster of reasons, related to personal safety, why some avoid public transport and prefer to drive by car, namely the fear to be accosted by vagrants, pickpockets, and other forms of sociopathy.
Do you think this has something to do with the fact that turnstile jumping has been effectively legalised (in the sense of not being prosecuted) in NY?
Question for you: can you quantify, what fraction of crime and other forms of sociopathy in the NY public transport system you estimate to be committed by passengers who paid their fare? (My estimation: less than 1 percent.)
I don't think it's reasonable to assume that a simple metal gate alone can completely solve complex social dysfunction, a simple metal gate can however help, and, when we refer to turnstile access being desirable, we implicitly assume that we can reasonably expect turnstile use being adhered to, and violations punished with at least moderately high probability.
We created a society where homeless people have so few means, they turn to public transit just to have a roof over their heads and stay warm. Then we lament how public transit has become “undesirable”, never recognizing the active steps we take to make it so.
I've noted that public transit is unpleasant 'cause it's underfunded and poorly planned. There's not much money for security, the routes are bad and irregular and so only those with no other choice ride it and so it's the very poor and that can result in bad behavior - plus those aiming to victimize step in as well.
It's a self reinforcing cycle. Public transit sucks, ergo it is cut, it becomes worse is less useful, ridership declines, nobody is riding it, defunded more - rinse wash repeat. See transit is horrible... Seeing well done public transit is eye opening. We also don't consider sometimes that driving is terrible too in cities. 30 minutes to get down an on ramp, 30 more to go across a bridge. At some point bad public transit and grid locked cities is just.. dystopian. Fundamentally a problem of scale, personal cars just can't move many millions in and out of a city, the math of how much time and space that requires doesn't work.
This sounds sooo surreal as a guy living in Europe. Maybe you Americans should really look into how social welfare actually reduces these problems and make _everyone_ better off?
Giving free good housing to the homeless has a cost, but is way cheaper than having all this prisons, aggressive cops, literal slums/no-go-areas, security groups, … and a significant share of current homeless/drugusers will contribute to society again over time instead of causing costs.
The US doesn't spend less on social welfare then most European countries per capita [1], it actually spends more than Netherlands and Japan who are renowned for their public transport.
Maybe the same problem like in healthcare, where the US spends _a lot_ of money but there are lots of middlemen companies (including insurances) siphoning off the money, and also charge the customers?
Looks like all this money that is spent for some reason doesn’t reach the target somehow, or only a small fraction of it. Sounds insanely wasteful compared to non-privatized operations, as if the system is designed to make private individuals rich instead of focussing on solving the original problem
> Unless we imprison like 20% of the population, busses in most American states will never be clean or safe.
What a horrific philosophy, albeit one shared by a disturbingly large percentage of Americans. Do people in this country really believe they can imprison their way out of every problem? Is fascism really the answer here?
A more humane solution is to actually create a social safety net and redistribute some of the country's vast wealth to help improve the quality of life for the people who are down on their luck, rather than to house them in prisons.
The reason these people are homeless a lot of the times is because they lack housing. Drug usage and crime are a side-effect of this [1].
Denser housing -> Better (frequent, reliable) public transport -> more people use it -> More people want to live in denser housing -> More denser housing is developed -> less homeless.
This is the formula for how Manhattan, brooklyn, and queens were developed by real estate companies. Builders wanted to be near public transport because they knew they could build large apartment buildings and get a bunch of money in rent because a bunch of people wanted to live near public transport so they could get places quickly and reliably.
[1]: Also if we legalized all drugs people wouldn't be forced to turn to criminal organizations. We already do this with alcohol.
People steal bud light because they can’t afford or don’t want to pay for it, not because it’s illegal to have or consume. The war on drugs had done untold damage to our society by reframing drug problems as a moral problem rather than a medical problem. Black markets pop up immediately once things are banned because, as long as there is a market for it, supply will meet demand.
America is already imprisoning more people than any other comparable country and does not have all that much more crime overall. And crime in America is now significantly lower then a generation ago, despite all the fearmongering.
Fear in America has zero to do with reality of crime.
> It’s odd to me that these anti-car polemics never talk about why Americans don’t want to ride public transit, while people in most other countries have zero issues adopting it wholesale.
This is talked about if you follow urbanism communities. In addition to the reasons you mentioned, it just doesn't go to where people want to be. The last century of urban planning in the US has left transit and alternative modes of transportation as an afterthought or not thought of at all.
Land use is a major problem. In my particular city, half of the stations are surrounded by parking lots instead of actual destinations. Transit in the US has been treated as a band aid to car traffic, pollution, and costs. If it were funded and prioritized appropriately, we would see more transit oriented development and ridership.
Lack of ridership is seen as a reason to decrease funding. But when ridership increases, you get improved safety because there are more eyes to witness and report a crime.
I don't think most people make it moralistic crusade, but those kinds of comments and attitudes get the most attention. If you delve into the communities and read the relevant books, you may find that nuance is actually appreciated and discussed quite a bit.
I lived in Denmark for a year a few years ago during University and lived with a Family, and remember that for most families not living within the densest core of the city owned one car but used transit for most if not all local trips.
The thing is, the entire society (at least in Copenhagen) is built around car-lite life (for example small corner grocery everywhere instead of large supermarkets). Additionally there is such low abject poverty that there is little tension with crime, homelessness etc.
My point is, lack of interest in public transit is merely symptomatic of larger issues we as Americans face, such as sprawl, existing infrastructure, crime, inequality etc.
Exactly my perception of Denmark. The core of Copenhagen is very bike friendly and many people cycle to work (though there are a lot of cars as well). The rest of the country is pretty car-dependent, though cycling is still more practical than in many American cities and towns. The smaller towns are walkable in the core but surrounded by farmland where you need a car to get anywhere.
low crime is not just a given, its a result of the design. A properly designed dense city planning reduces crime by default(people are less likely to commit crime if other people are watching and public spaces and buildings are designed for this purpose. Not just this- the social housing is cool too because it blocks concentration of marginalised people in one place, making it unsafe and rather spreads those people evenly across the city. There are many subtle things that are implemented in nordic countries to reduce crimes and its super interesting
Do you think cleanliness and perceived safety* are more important than more frequent and faster public transit? I'm not asking in a combatitive way, just discussing. I think these are all important for encouraging Americans to use public transit more, but, imo, convenience is the single thing biggest factor that gets the general population to take up something in this country. If a car is more convenient than a bus, then most people will choose the car.
*I say "perceived safety," because vibes seem to matter more than actual safety. Like, the stats on car wrecks, drunk driving, distracted driving, and so on are alarming. But when I think of someone concerned about "safety," I imagine someone being uncomfortable around people they feel are sketchy.
In somewhere like SF, yeah, definitely, in my experience. Riding the BART is disgusting.
I think an interesting thing to remember about perceived safety, statistical safety, and actual safety, is that they are all different things -- you can't just look at stats to determine actual safety.
E.g., I was involved in a couple of incidents involving attacks in SF that I am sure were not reflected in the stats. (As well as numerous thefts, though that's not a safety issue per se.)
Safety and speed are tied together; if you have to wait 15 minutes at a bus stop for the next bus that has all sorts of safety implications, if a bus arrives every 2 minutes it will feel very different.
Convenience is a big part of it, sure, but even Americans will use transit when it works for them, even if it is not faster (it is almost NEVER faster than driving a car unless you do strange restrictions or include a very-high-speed segment).
But you only need a few bad experiences on transit to put you off it when you have other options.
I’m not sure I’d say more important, but definitely of equal importance. Especially in terms of how people perceive public transit; i.e. is it just for people that can’t afford a car, or is it clean, comfortable, and a viable alternative to a car?
Of course cleanliness and safety is important. It sucks to ride in a stinking bus next to a passing out hobo. Wether it's 20 minutes or 40 minutes. Same applies if you have to carefully watch your backpack to not have it's bottom cut.
The thing is that "safety" isn't just about like, whether you'll actually die or be injured.
Spending time around degenerates degrades your life. It changes how you see people around you. It makes you see other people as threats first and people second.
Trauma is real too. Seeing someone nod out from being on drugs, or fights, or whatever else, puts you on edge.
Absolutely agree, as someone who has taken public transit in Southern California, it's the absolute worst. It's disgusting, terrifying, and also inconvenient.
Seeing tons of videos online of interactions on the New York subway system, I can say that I have no interest in that form of transportation. The recent drama about Penny/Neely is just one of many such interactions you can find on the subway. I can link dozens of videos of insane, disturbing interactions that take place on the NY subway to which I would never subject my family.
If we somehow create subways that are as clean, safe, and convenient as those in Japan I would probably consider using it, but until then I will definitely be pro-car.
Yes I rode the NYC subway for 20 years. When you are young and edgy, you can deal with it, even though I found it regularly traumatizing at that time as well (delays, trains stuck in tunnels, 100 degree subway platforms, crushing crowds, intense inconvenience if you have to carry anything beyond a single bag).
The ultimate misery, when trains fell behind and youd spend an hour or more on a completely packed, sweltering platform watching train after train fully stuffed shoulder to shoulder pass through not stopping since each train is full, until one comes where you yourself have to shove yourself and your bags into the doorway and hope the doors can close so you can just get home. Never again. I suspect anti car people just don't see these things as that big of a deal. They're young. It's all exciting to them, I guess. I didn't have a car at all back then either, the city / commuter life seemed perfect to me for many years until I began to realize I hated these things.
Forget about the crime, mental illness, and homeless issues, just being shoved among "regular" people every day, all averting gazes and attempting to cope with dense crowding among people you don't know, by the time I was older I had become a strict remote worker, and when I had a kid we were out of there at last.
I have an EV now and getting to drive is like the best part of my day. I live very far from dense cities. A lot of people genuinely like to live this way and the posts here talking about the "car industrial complex" somehow coercing us all into some way we wouldn't otherwise prefer should consider that a lot of people really don't like crowds.
I am anti car, but not anti car for everyone in all cases.
"I suspect anti car people just don't see these things as that big of a deal."
I do see it, and it is a huge deal. Those problems seem like issues of underfunding (a d more).. the amount spent on roads is just astronomical. If there were any kind of equity of personal vs public transport, the subway would be gold plated! (Perhaps not, but funding easily could be tripled and still not be at an equitable share of subsidy funding [yes, I do want those property tax dollars back and to stop paying for endless tarmac!])
Bottom line, the issues I do think are seen. It's that they are symptoms of neglect and a culture that does not value public transit (despite personal transit does not scale to what is needed!). I'm emphasizing that personal transit is a non-solution. Hence without a first rate public system, traffic, gridlock - nobody wins.
You are still safer riding that public transit then riding a car. And it is usable when you are too old/sick to drive. And it is nitnlike traffic jam were unheard of for cars.
What you're saying is, frankly, very naive. If you think critically, you must realize the cognitive bias here. There's something like 2 million people riding the MTA every day and they statistically hardly ever have problems as extreme as the Penny/Neely situation. If you go on YouTube or Reddit, you'll see thousands of road rage incidents, and that's not stopping you from being pro-car. It's not acceptable that families have to be on alert when riding the subway and gov't should definitely work to improve the situation, but the same can be said about American roads. It would be amazing if the MTA could be as efficient/on time as the Tokyo system, or as pretty as the Stockholm stations, but the same is true for many aspects of public infrastructure across the US.
While true, the point of a moral crusade is that city planners generally cannot go against their constituents' wishes, so if they are all house and car people, nothing will be done to favor denser housing or a better light rail experience. Changing the minds of people and getting them involved will create a feedback loop of people complaining to their city, attending meetings, and pushing for projects that solve these things. It can't happen in the shadows because the money to do these projects won't get allocated without support.
Those residents are basically pulling up the ladder behind them, and it's depressing to see.
Appealing to their moral side seems... perhaps necessary, because it seems a vocal minority simply do not want multi-family housing in their neighborhood at all. Look at the pushback by NIMBYs at city meetings across the US when anything like somewhat dense housing is proposed: right off the bat, I have literally never heard of any community collectively saying, "this sounds reasonable." I would be happy to be proven wrong.
Instead, it's pushback after pushback, claiming everything from character of the neighborhood to shadows from a tall building (even if the building is only 5 stories high, and most buildings in the neighborhood are 3 stories tall).
There's also conspicuously rare talk from those NIMBYs claiming what they do want. Instead, at the start of a project, it's always vague, "well not THAT many units!" or "well the traffic will get SO much worse!"
I've never seen specifics like, "We need 30 units or less in this proposal because of reason X and Y." Instead, it's just negotiation trying to get it as low as possible. Basically, trying to pull up the ladder as much as possible to minimize people moving to the area to folks who can afford a fairly expensive single family home.
Any single family home is fairly expensive now it seems these days, across the USA, relatively to the area it's in.
It's depressing, and I'm not sure how to get people to change those attitudes.
One thought: have people attend these meetings who are not yet residents of the neighborhoods, but would consider it if they could move into one of these developments. Of course, NIMBYs would likely be outraged that folks from outside of their neighborhood are levying their opinion... even though the NIMBYs themselves are not vocalizing considering the opinions of people who want to move to the area.
I’ve been trying to commute by train in the Bay Area and I’m probably going to give up based on this.
The VTA train smells of pot and the CalTrain often smells of sewage. Periodically there are crazy people yelling on the VTA and regularly there are people having could-have-been-an-email loud conferences calls on CalTrain.
I really like trains and dislike car dependent cities. But it’s hard for me to walk-the-talk when it’s so unpleasant so consistently.
All these issues arise from political priorities. If you want good public transit, you must build it as infrastructure for the middle class. If the target audience is not the middle class, nobody really cares if your public transit works. You want to build a city where using public transit is the default, and driving is for situations where people have special needs.
Public transit is not a social program. Whether the poor can afford public transit on their own is mostly irrelevant. If you want social programs, start separate social programs. Don't ruin other programs with unrelated goals.
This is a big part of it. Almost unironcially you could make public transit work better by giving every single homeless person in the city a car, and then spending money on keeping the transit operational, safe, and clean.
34% of kids ride a school bus to school, and that's basically transit designed for the middle class.
> I’d start by making the stations and buses/subways beautiful, clean, safe places that are just nice urban places to be in
I spent yesterday travelling around Greater London using only public transport, coupled with quite a lot of (fairly brisk) walking ... my phone said my day involved 20591 steps and 98 heart points.
When you don't have access to a car, you have to think quite differently about mundane things like going to a supermarket.
"Where is the closest supermarket to my current location" for the car user becomes "where is any supermarket which is close to a public transport stop I can readily reach from my current location" which I find isn't handled nearly as well by all our favourite mapping services. Things like fares and fare zones become of interest, not just raw distances and traffic on routes.
> There’s no need to make it a moral crusade [..]
Unfortunately there seems to be no broad agreement on exactly how you make places "beautiful, clean [and] safe" if they aren't.
There is plenty of broad agreement, you just have to look at Japan, or China, or Singapore, or Turkey, Poland, or Switzerland, or Korea, or another dozen countries around the world that have clean, safe, and (sufficiently) beautiful public transport systems. The bar is really not that high.
> There is plenty of broad agreement, you just have to look at Japan, or China, or Singapore, or Turkey, Poland, or Switzerland, or Korea, or another dozen countries around the world that have clean, safe, and (sufficiently) beautiful public transport systems. The bar is really not that high.
So all those cities/countries where public transport is not clean and safe have to just copy - for instance - Singapore or China?
Along with some of the other great answers you're getting, just look at the difference in funding. Highway expansions and arterials are granted huge federal dollars. But look at how much funding your local bus system gets. I can guarantee you almost any freeway widening project in a given location in the US is apportioned more money than the local transit network, except for a few prominent exceptions like NYC.
Part of this is a structural issue. The Federal government has a robust system of funding road network expansion but has no equivalent system of funding transit. Even after the passage of the recent infrastructure bill, look at the apportionment to maintaining Federal roadway compared to Federal transit funding. You can't compare a budget Android phone for a developing market with a flagship Android or a new iPhone.
That’s because driving throws out all the externalities outside the window: pollution, noise, violence, the cost of roads, cutting cities with hostile canyons…
Saying driving is better is like saying littering is more convenient than picking up your trash.
That's usually the final straw people will put up with a decent amount but once they realize how much time they're spending - bam.
And part of the problem is that the only real way to get competitive fair box recovery (which shouldn't really be a goal, imo) is to pack the vehicles to standing-room only, which makes it hard to read a book or do something else.
On occasion that sounds nice. But usually I'd rather get somewhere faster than spending a lot more time in transit. And you can listen to music and podcasts while driving.
Only when you feel safe. I use public transport in Asia and do the listed things, but I wouldn't do that in NYC because I might get pickpocketed, for instance.
It’s odd to me we insist on traveling so much for career. Modern businesses seem to exist to soak up easy luxury rather than generate net new ideas and services.
There’s tons of work todo and new potential colleagues in our neighborhoods. Nurses and teachers could quit and start local collectives.
But the grind and exploitation of hustle culture and bloated adminispheres seems so normal no one can see around it.
> There’s tons of work todo
> hustle culture and bloated adminispheres seems so normal
A lot of useful work that could be done is building better stuff, physically improving the local infrastructure and environment. That requires tradesmen doing hands-on labor. Giant portions of our labor pool wouldn't be caught dead doing that kind of work. That's why we have a flood of bullshit jobs where people shuffle paper in air-conditioned offices, float around to conferences, stay at business hotels, etc...
It's a chicken-and-egg concern. If there was a higher amount of passenger load on public transit there would be more eyes, accountability, and generally a feeling of being around people who are going somewhere rather than using the trains and buses as living rooms. Safety in numbers and all that.
I think social perception plays a big role too. In most countries where public transit is widely used, it’s used across nearly every social class. No one thinks that riding the bus is something only poor people do.
That isn’t the case in America, where riding the bus absolutely has a low social status. So I think making public transit more of a prestige product (safe, clean, well-designed, etc.) would help break that and make it more socially acceptable for middle and upper class people.
I remember visiting Germany for work years ago, and was pleased to find that my hotel was literally on the same block as a tram/trolley that went to next door to the company; super nice Eurotransit done Right™ for the win!
A short walk from the hotel and a quick ride and I was there for the day; and when I mentioned it to the manager he was flabbergasted because the tram is for poor people he must give me a ride back in his Audi.
That only applies to developed countries. In China, a lot of people use public transit, but richer people will prefer taxis, ubers, or their own cars. There are a lot of taxis also, that are cheap enough for daily commutes if you are middle class. I lived on a subway route in Beijing that went close enough to my work, but it was so crowded (often nowhere to sit on a 25 minute ride) that I just paid for the taxi anyways. Traffic was horrible, so it made sense to take the subway if traveling during rush-hour (if you can fit on, of course), but I re-arranged my work schedule to mostly avoid that.
In Paris, buses are a little slower than light rail, so they tend to be associated with higher status, parents with prams, and elderly people, who have more time and would rather enjoy the view. Middle-class people take the metro. The working class lives in the suburbs and takes the regional trains.
I disagree. I lived in NYC for 10 years without a car and used public transit for everything. There are plenty of passengers, and that didn't matter. It was just a larger captive audience for whoever was having their mental breakdown.
The US's approach attacks public transit from both ends. Transit is gutted, cars are prioritized, making transit not good enough. And social services are gutted, the poor and the unwell are demonized, and then the only people riding transit are scary. And these two feed into each other; by making transit inefficient to use, and making expensive cars necessary, poverty is increased.
You want to have a more holistic view of living together. Public healthcare is part of that.
Whether people in crisis are on the side of the road (and easier to ignore with a lifted car hood) or in your train car, they aren’t getting the help they need.
There's a cause and effect issue here. It requires lot of money to go from an unloved public transit system used only by the poorest individuals to a fast, reliable, clean system that the wealthier classes with options would choose to use over their personal vehicles.
But, that investment is generally decided on by that same wealthier class that is currently choosing their personal vehicle.
It's impossible to start the economic ball rolling without some evangelizing to capture hearts and minds of those that aren't currently using or interested in investing in the mass transit system.
while people in most other countries have zero issues adopting it wholesale
Because on average they don't value personal freedom as much as Americans: There's something innately offputting about the thought of getting on a vehicle that is mostly out of one's own control, along with many others, and being taken somewhere instead of controlling one's own vehicle to a destination.
Obviously, this causes public transit to evolve to a bare minimum service.
I think they/we value personal freedom, but in a different way, especially in well designed cities/countries. Being able to get into a train/bus and arrive to destination without the hassle of searching for parking, being concentrated on road, avoid drinking alcohol, and spending a s** ton of money on buying car and fuel and taxes for them, like all this adds up and freedom of movement by car takes other freedoms from the people. Also it's interesting that americans value their freedom of movement so much but bike optimised infra is almost nonexistent and bikes are even more "pro freedom" since you don't need to take exams, register the bike, pay for fuel, you can usually drink some alcohol no problem and in case of ebikes you can charge them at home and ebikes can cover big distances as well but still, US is designed for cars&big cars only
There's a story in my (EU) city of when a bus driver near the end of his shift drove the bus up to his house absentmindedly much to surprise of the passengers.
I've heard that researchers determined that - roughly speaking - traffic congestion increases until the fastest way to get to your destination is through modes of transportation that are not cars.
The LA Metro system actually is quite beautiful and far cleaner than say, the NYC or DC systems (cynics will say that's because it isn't used as much).
I think income is a big factor: average Americans can afford to run cars, and have for a very long time - this is not so much the case in most countries.
I grew up in NYC with the most amazing public transport system out there in the world and still absolutely despised taking the bus. Try 100 degree 100 humidity summers while waiting for the bus or the inverse. It's really not compelling. Car > Taxi > Subway > Bus (I'd rather skip the trip entirely)
Depending on the route and the time of day you'll find homeless, nodded out addicts, groups of bored young people looking for a happening, insane people, and sanitary issues.
Depends where and when you're going, and some is just plain luck, or lack of it.
I genuinely think the answer is _way_ simpler and less dramatic than people think.
In general, a city is more walkable and dense the earlier it developed. NYC and Boston are walkable cos they're old. Parts of Chicago are, but it did most of it's growing post-car so most of it isn't. LA did practically almost all it's growing post-car and so is awful for walkers.
It's the same in Europe - most of London is walkable because it hit a multi-million population pre-car. Milton Keynes is a concrete car-jungle because it only developed post-war.
That's wrong. Many, many cities had walkable neighborhoods bulldozed and replaced with highways and parking lots, intentionally. In both the US and the EU. Many of the most walkable places have been reclaimed from cars.
Well, is it generally true though? I don't even think it's very useful to talk about... compared to discussing how car manufacturers and sellers have intentionally stripped us of good urban design over the last century, and the ways in which some cities have undone some of that damage.
I’ve lived in several barely finished neighbourhoods and all were walkable: Hammarby Sjöstad in Stokholm, Jätkassari in Helsinki, the new Ancoats in Manchester…
All smelled of fresh paint and wet concrete. All were built with the intent to be walkable, and all are wonderful places to live. I never felt the need for a car once. What matters is not the age but the intent of the designers.
One way to make public transit safe and clean would be to provide housing, addition treatment, and mental health services. There are a lot of people with serious behavioral problems who use public transit as rolling mental hospitals because they have no where else to go.
It's too late to do this, it's not possible in a country that isn't all-white. Even in Europe usability of public transport deteriorates as other races mix in. Now there's no fix.
I find this article to be too high-minded. Most Americans don't own cars or support car-friendly policies due to some notion of car=freedom or some other culture wars nonsense.
Americans own cars because most of them live in single-family houses on large plots of land, and that doesn't make public transit for daily commuting a realistic possibility. In Paris car ownership is very low, maybe 1/3 of adults, but in rural France the car ownership rate is easily 95%+. I haven't seen a single developed area in the world that has violated the rule that low density = high car ownership and vice versa.
The other rule that I have never seen violated is that the large majority of middle and upper income people do not want to live near low income people, due to crime or other reasons. In Europe, poor people live in the suburbs, so the middle income live in the city with high density housing. In the US and some other places (south asia), low income people live near the business center, so the middle income live in low density housing in the suburbs. These are for historical reasons and cannot be easily changed.
America actually has a huge public transportation system servicing most homes in the US. It’s the bus system for public schools. Running local loops to pick people up in moderately high density neighborhoods with 1 acre per house or less every half hour or so is actually pretty easy. Just read up on the old trolly networks before cars took off.
The real reason Americans own cars is because we’re rich enough to afford a more expensive and more convenient system. Public Transit at scale is surprisingly cheap when compared to all the costs associated with car ownership * 10’s of thousands of people in even a fairly small community.
I lived in Copenhagen’s suburbs, Østerbro, for several years and the public transit—trains and buses with the occasional taxi—were finely grained enough schedule-wise for me to easily work as an appointment-based professional (video/film editing, compositing and FX). I LOVED not having to deal with a car.
I now live in the Seattle suburbs, Redmond — very close to the same distance from the work site as in Copenhagen — and there is no way I could realistically rely on public transit to hit appointments unless I left an hour or two early—and, in bad weather, many hours early. I can’t imagine doing what I do without a car.
You might be able to (hypothetically) do it what might aptly be called Seattle's sister city, Vancouver, BC. You do still need to somewhat deliberately find a spot nearish the train, or a major bus route, or just bike, but it seems like it'd be more doable here. Haven't owned a car in years.
Last time I was down in Seattle though, I noticed they were building a massive elevated (40 mile?) train thing quite far north, which looks somewhat impressive if it wraps up in the near future.
I'm not from Seattle, but it sounds like you're talking about the 3 Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Line_(Sound_Transit) which will join the current 1 Line and head north up to Everett, WA. Estimated completion date of either 2037 or 2041 based on funding.
When I visit Seattle I only use public transit or walk to get around. I use the light rail as much as possible, but it only gets you kind of the way to anywhere. Plan on an up to quarter mile walk to a bus stop and then probably an additional bus to actual get to where you want to go. The previous poster is right in that you need to add at least an hour to your transit time to account for waiting for connections.
Also, a large portion of 1 Line's southern section is at-grade with auto traffic.
Looking at things today doesn’t explain how they got this way. The existence of widespread car ownership changed the way Americans built, where they moved, etc.
I’ve done long commutes and I’ve lived close enough to walk to work. If I and millions of other people had prioritized car free lives 20 years ago we would already had noticeably different infrastructure. Instead I’m back to “needing” a car to get around based on these kinds of choices.
While it’s true we own more cars because we can afford them, a large percentage of Americans require them.
Tiny remote communities rarely make enough for transport entities to care. For instance, without vehicles, in the village I live in, we’d probably be connected via bus to the nearby town, where you can do some shopping from a dollar store and get something to eat at restaurants, but to be connected to the various cities? They may have daily shuttles, but the population (<300) may not make this worth it. And as established in the thread public transport sucks and would make running errands impossible.
This doesn’t even compare to the truly remote individuals who live in the country miles out.
Honestly I feel like people who live in cities really lose their sense of scale for how large the US really is and how small a large percentage of communities are. I mean almost 1/3rd of the US population is crammed into less than 1% of the total surface of the USA. Using the 333 most populace cities in the USA gives an average population density of ~3,150/square mile. Out in the country where I live, we’re maybe 50/sqm, and further out that can drop to .25/sqm or lower.
Not to mention the fact that the reason public school buses work is because for the better part of the year the destinations are ironed out and rarely change. Little Æ is going from home to school and back 90% of the time. That simply doesn’t reflect an adult’s lifestyle, because while every child in a given area goes to a single school, jobs are much less localized. Not to mention errands, hobbies, visiting friends.
A bus schedule simply cannot replace the flexibility of a car to a large percentage of America.
> While it’s true we own more cars because we can afford them, a large percentage of Americans require them.
If people stopped buying cars, and stopped voting for people promoting zoning and a car shaped country, shared transports (bus, be they public or private) would take over. The thing is as long as people keep buying and using cars, there is no market for the shared transport. And US people tend to have difficulty to grasp the concept of a non profitability focused public service.
The way it used to work is if your job was in a different town, you moved to that town. Cars are a relatively recent phenomenon and yes in your example they are more convenient, but that’s my point.
I grew up next to farms and a school bus showed up 4x a day to take kids to k-6, or 7-12. It was a long and inconvenient trip, but that’s because we were living in the middle of nowhere.
Historically the majority of farmers globally didn’t own horses. They require quite a lot of effort and food while only being partially useful a few times a year.
I wasn’t necessarily drawing a connection between horses and farmers, as I was tackling each point separately and meant modern farmers.
For one, the mere existence of horses and their relatives were mostly in Africa and Asia, meaning that for a lot of unrecorded and a decent chunk of recorded history whether you had one or not was location dependent. And while yes, horses were expensive, renting them when needed was comparatively cheap.
Additionally, especially in feudalist societies, land was especially difficult to own, and an entire village would work on the land surrounding them. Meaning you rarely had need for any sort of transport that wasn’t your legs, as everything you needed was located in your village.
Contrast all of that to modern farmers, who regularly live on hundreds of acres, miles away from the nearest pocket of civilization. Without private transport they’d be stranded.
Modern farmers still generally live within a days walk of hundreds of other people. 1 million acres is a mega farm and still fits in a 1.6 X 1.6 square mile box while needed several people to operate.
It’s again wealth that allows for the modern system of roads and private vehicles rather than inherent necessity. Remember the post office is sending vehicles to every single one of these properties 6 days a week on the cheap. A bus doing the same would be really inconvenient, but also quite cheap.
> The real reason Americans own cars is because we’re rich enough to afford a more expensive and more convenient system.
Are we? When you zoom in on things like road maintenance backlogs and auto loan delinquencies, it kind of seems like we are not rich enough but have been pretending to be.
They're rich enough to have cars even if some are "pretending" through risky loans. Contrast that to poorer countries where many people can't even pretend to have a car.
Are they, though? Surely some people have unusually expensive loans but the full cost of a car comes from loan interest, depreciation, tolls, insurance, parking, gas, maintenance, taxes and any emergency repairs you have to make when something breaks. That can add up to a lot.
The delinquencies are the ones you hear about. What doesn't get reported, statistically, is when people are balancing absolutely everything in their life on a knife's edge to fit the car in with all their other expenses when they are living on a meager salary (or unemployed).
And that is only on the private individual's side. Costing out car-dependent development in terms of building and maintaining roads, bridges, power lines, water pipes, trash collection, wastewater treatment, fire, police is all monstrously expensive, and it is one reason why when the roads get damaged from use and need repair, they get chronically backlogged and problems keep mounting for years and years.
One thing people notice about Japan and the Netherlands is how immaculately maintained the roads are. They are significantly more pleasant places to drive, specifically because they did not overbuild road infrastructure.
It's the age old "growth fixes the old stuff" (bit of a shameless plug but here you go, https://matthewc.dev/musings/no-roads-for-old-men/ couldn't find the HN discussion link). We expect new development to foot the cost for existing roads and infrastructure.
The majority of those risky loans are for cars much nicer than the absolute minimum. A significant percentage of the population is going to live above their means, even if making millions end up in significant debt.
That’s not quite true. The simple reason Americans drive cars is because it’s impossible to live without one. I spent a week in Austin and the difference between its suburban layout and that of any European city is stark.
It’s really hard for someone who hasn’t lived it to really understand what it means to be able to walk to the shop. Then compare to when that’s not physically possible.
>It’s really hard for someone who hasn’t lived it to really understand what it means to be able to walk to the shop. Then compare to when that’s not physically possible.
I got you, friend. I grew up in the USSR, where private cars were luxury and public transit was so abundant that people referred to locations by the subway stations. The cities were designed for the citizens without cars (no parking anywhere, "microdistricts" in the newly built areas). It objectively sucks. I now live in the USA and can compare, if you have any questions I will be glad to explain what the life without a car is really like.
Until 2 years ago, I lived without a car and walked to work until 2018 (when I switched to remote working). I know the pros and cons. The USSR being shit doesn't make living without a car shit.
Even now, owning a car, I typically walk or ride. If I tried to do this in the USA, I'd be getting scraped off a stroad.
I imagine that if you work at home, have no children and have other people driving cars for you (delivery, taxi etc) it's not that bad. Not many people can afford this lifestyle though.
You didn’t read what I said: I only started WFH in 2018. I used to commute on foot before that.
My fiancé’s mother can’t drive and managed to raise 3 children by herself without a car, too. In the right environment, yes it is possible. No, she’s not rich by any stretch.
I did read it, I don't know what you wanted this to express but I understood it as the admission that walking to work became untenable. 2018 is not 2020, WFH then had a great income/career progression penalty.
And a whole lot of people managed to raise even more children before cars were invented or even horses were domesticated. Eg my gran-gran raised 3 children without running water and electricity (and obviously no horse or car), that does not mean she enjoyed it.
> I understood it as the admission that walking to work became untenable
I don't understand how you inferred that unless you chose to.
> And a whole lot of people managed to raise even more children before cars were invented or even horses were domesticated.
What on earth are you talking about? Either you've never been to London, or any major European city, or you're making spurious comparisons in bad faith.
You mentioned some woman raising children without a car as if it somehow supported your point, I pointed out that somebody doing something in the past is not a proof of that being somehow superior or even acceptable now. Even in the present time millions live and raise children without running water and electricity, should we start arguing that Americans need to quit these too because they cannot imagine living without them?
> It’s really hard for someone who hasn’t lived it to really understand what it means to be able to walk to the shop.
Every time you reply you only further prove this point.
> I pointed out that somebody doing something in the past is not a proof of that being somehow superior or even acceptable now.
Either you’re unable to understand my point because your English comprehension is terrible or you’re arguing in bad faith. Either way, talking to you is a waste of time.
Okay, I see you are being just combative. As I said I lived in the USSR and not as a single childless man working remotely and ordering deliveries too (I was a child myself though).
People got around before cars existed, the ability for people to buy cars resulted in creating a system where they were needed. Now what would have happened if people couldn’t have afford cars? You don’t end up where we are today.
I lived within walking distance of my job and shopping for years near DC. To the point where I would go weeks without driving. But I didn’t sell my car and quickly went back to driving when it was even moderately less convenient.
Recognize that it's a fantasy for everyone to live near their job. As cities grow the mean distance between housing and job grows. It isn't so much social policy or cussedness or selfishness, as it is geometry.
We build cities based on peoples desires not some intrinsic need to separate jobs from homes, but that’s irrelevant here.
Both public transport and cars can both serve low density suburban commuters as demonstration by many cities around the world. America doesn’t lack public transportation because of it’s size, population density, layout etc, it’s simply people choosing driving consistently in how they vote, where they move, and what they do when given the option.
NYC doesn’t have good public transportation because New Yorkers are different, they have it because it’s the only option that scales.
That doesn't make the poor US city design the inevitable outcome, however. Not Just Bikes has some great videos outlining why US design is particularly shocking compared to other countries.
I compare Austin because I've been to Austin, so I saw it for my own eyes. I've been to a range of European cities (especially the UK where I live) and all of them were more walkable than Austin. I'm not the only person to observe this. There's a number of Youtube channels (Not Just Bikes for one) that talk about this in great depth.
Reading comments on this page, the problems with public transport are listed - not safe or clean or uncrowded enough.
But, the only alternative considered is private individual/family transport.
Why is private mass transport not more widely available given that it can solve a lot of these problems?
Having an Uber for buses which does smart scheduling based on current demand, possibly involving transfers so that frequent local routes connect with each other without long delays, should be possible.
Of course, prices will fall when things scale. So, the government can be involved as a facilitator but operations are mostly run by companies which can pay a fee to the government rent necessary infrastructure.
You still have the problem of higher prices for odd hours/locations but sharing costs ahould make it cheaper than uber.
Various places have carpool lots where you can park your car for the day and ride with someone else. They are often illuminated at night and patrolled by police.
No one does Uber for busses because it would be way too expensive. Fares don't even come close to covering the cost of running busses. If a company wasn't just burning money VC money, they would have to charge at least taxi rates to get on the bus and it would be significantly less convenient. Uber for cars is barely profitable now, and they get to be extremely cheap with driver labor.
> America actually has a huge public transportation system servicing most homes in the US. It’s the bus system for public schools.
That quite a straw man, my friend!
A bus that runs twice per day, with a fixed number of passengers, all of which go to the same destination... that's not really the kind of service that can get you free of private cars!
It actually does allow many one car families to stay one car families and saves an amazing amount of driving by parents in aggregate while being very cheap.
Also these busses generally go by homes 4x times per day twice for middle school and twice for high school. They don’t go by every home every time if no kid lives on a street, but in suburbs there’s a lot of school bus traffic.
Expanding that to adults would require more trips and a backbone network between collection points. But, the point still stands that sending busses to most homes in America say 40x or more times a day is hardly impossible when we are already sending them 8x a day on the cheap. Being inconvenient compared to a more expensive car option is the core reason why this doesn’t happen.
Public transportation operated by public entities in the U.S. outside of a handful of large, dense cities always sucks. The reason lies with the "operated by public entities" bit. Heck, even in NYC, private companies built the lion's share of the subway system, then the city "nationalized" them and very little additional development was done.
Around the world governments "nationalize" what they allow themselves to, and at each level they nationalize the most salient and notable industry that's not too small to be small potatoes. In the U.S. the federal government doesn't allow itself to nationalize anything, the States do allow themselves but they can't bring themselves to hurt their industry as they compete with other States, but cities don't see themselves as competing with other cities, and cities allow themselves (and the States allow them to) to nationalize public transportation.
Take Argentina where a strong national government has at times nationalized steel production, oil production, etc., but they wouldn't deign to bother with nationalizing bus service -- it's like it's beneath them -- and so Buenos Aires has one of the most fantastic privately operated public bus systems in the world. You never have to wait more than a few minutes for a bus during business hours. But in the U.S. you're lucky if buses run more often than every 30 minutes at rush hour.
Do you want Americans to not drive their cars so much? Fine, it's easy: allow private companies to operate all public bus services, and also to operate small buses without set routes (a sort of Uber of buses). If you insist on the cities running public transportation then you can be sure that the public transportation system will never ever be good enough that Americans will be happy to relinquish their cars.
It's that simple.
And no, trains won't cut it. Laying tracks down is unbelievably expensive, will never pay for itself, and you can't ever change them afterwards, and you won't be able to place them where people can use them because that would be way too disruptive unless you make it subways, and that's even more unbelievably expensive.
You could also argue that we should try to follow a formula where high population density = low car use and vice versa.
I live in a large European metropolitan region with excellent public transport and bicycle infrastructure - at least comparatively. While both leave massive room for improvement a car is not needed, especially as alternatives like car sharing exist for moving heavy stuff once every few months.
There is quite the large support to completely prohibit car use in the inner city aside from transportation, taxis and deliveries. There are hundreds of streets and places where cars have NO value, take a lot of room, blockade other participants in public life and actively worsen the urban environment for everyone. Getting rid of personal cars in these areas would free up massive amounts of space as parking slots can be reutilized and 3-lane roads become single lane.
I love cars and love driving but I hate hate hate them in inner cities. Dense, well-connected urban centers are very suitable to completely outlaw cars whereas suburban or rural areas are absolutely unsuitable to do so.
Both can be true. America also has a "missing middle" urban planning problem - not that that's by chance. Zoning laws, NIMBYs and mandatory parking all favor this outcome.
But also, compare average car sizes to the EU. The average car in the US is a fuel-guzzling battle tank, side by side. The options for anything else are pretty sparse, but they do exist.
I was surprised by the stat, it does check out. Out 130 M housing units, 90M are single family (on a phone, citation needed, but that us what I found after a quick google)
I've been railing against cars in the US for years and years. The thing is that today most people in the US under the age of 60 grew up in cars, usually in a suburban environment, and it's actually impossible for them to imagine what life without a car might even look like. It's like trying to describe a color. If we can't even visualize an alternative, how are we supposed to achieve the alternative?
Only by traveling to places that were developed before cars took a chokehold on the world can people realize how nice it is to live without them absolutely everywhere.
Many Americans get a taste of that when they vacation to Europe. They often choose to leave their suburb and spend their 2 weeks in urban environments like Barcelona, London, Munich, Paris, Rome, etc., that where built for people and not cars, because it's so pleasant to live like that, and because letting cities develop for people first leads to cities that people actually want to be in, with car-free streets, plazas, promenades, etc. (Yes, today those places are also full of cars. But, unlike American cities, their skeletons are people-first and cars are the invasive element.)
It could be argued that so many problems of American life - weight gain, loneliness, fracturing of the social fabric - stem from how we've isolated ourselves in unwalkable suburbs, where there's no spontaneous social interaction because everyone's always in a car, and where our only exercise is the walk from the parking lot to our desk.
What's depressing is visiting developing countries and seeing them start to ape the worst of American car life. Places like Colombia, which I visit often, are building shopping malls, big-box stores, parking lots, suburbs, and freeways, while after almost 100 years of that type of car-first development in America we're only just starting to realize that actually it might not be that great.
> What's depressing is visiting developing countries and seeing them start to ape the worst of American car life.
What a patronizing take. Cars are freedom - you can go where you like, when you like, with whom you like, and you can do it without dealing with crowded, noisy, sometimes dangerous buses/trams/subways. It's as true in the developing world as it is here.
As for such things happening in Colombia, it turns out that Colombians like the same things as Americans - they just previously didn't have the money to afford them.
Like, what's the alternative? Developing economies go from grinding poverty to bicycle-centric urban planning utopia by... top-down fiat? How do you propose to stop Colombians from voting with their wallets when they choose to eat at chain restaurants, shop at big box stores and then take the freeway back to their air-conditioned 2000 sq ft houses in the suburbs? "Sorry Mr. Middle Class Colombian, I know you really like McDonalds... but trust us, we're saving you from your own bad choices."
This is, of course, the inability to visualize a different life that I referred to in my original post. There are many alternatives to car-oriented life, as cities that grew before cars plainly evidence. Those are the cities that people want to spend their vacations in.
Instead of building shopping malls with parking lots, Colombia could relax zoning to allow chain restaurants and McDonalds near housing, and build dedicated bike lanes to get to them. Instead of building suburbs and freeways, it could build more public space like open pedestrian plazas to give people a feeling of space, and metros/bus rapid transit to make it easy to get around. Colombians who want to live a quiet suburban-style life can still do that in a rural home, which could be connected by rail when traveling to a city is required - but their choice to live a suburban life should not require those of us in cities to give up our space for wide roads to fit their cars and endless free car storage, at the expense of our way of life.
These options aren't the only alternatives Colombians could have, nor are they a fantasy - they exist today in places like Europe and parts of Asia.
Cars are not a requirement for human flourishing. We only designed our lives to make them that way.
It's worth mentioning most European cities didn't skip cars entirely. Amsterdam in the 70s was as much a traffic sewer as Detroit. They just realized they fucked up in the 80s and spent 30+ years correcting course.
Most rebuilt postwar European cities were built for cars. Then the people realized that sucked, often quicker cuz their legs y built environments accommodated cars poorly, and instead we got effective metro systems instead.
They never built the sprawling suburbia that much of the US has now though. Public transit remains viable in places built for humans even if it gets colonized by cars for a few decades. Low density suburbs with winding roads doesn't allow for non car transportation to be viable.
Exactly, cities like Rotterdamn and Berlin were flattened in WWII. They're still much better to live in without a car than any American city except NYC and maybe Montreal.
The excuse that postwar development is the reason for car dependency in north america doesn't hold water.
Sometimes I imagine an alien visiting Earth (America) for the first time and assuming cars enslaved humanity to force us to build convenient paths for them and harvest their food and bring it to convenient locations. I don’t see a practical difference.
By that logic dogs would probably win since you have to literally pick theirs up twice a day with your (admittedly covered) hand instead of scooping it just once in the morning.
Bike is the true freedom vehicle, especially ebike. You don't meed a license, don't need to register it, can park easily, can have a beer and drive after, can cover long distance with electric assist, can charge at home. Netherlands managed to combine it with trains between cities to cover long distances and surprise, even there car infra is very good and people can use a car when they really need it. Problem with US infra isn't that it's designed for cars, it's that it is designed for cars ONLY. You don't have freedom to not drive a car if you don't want compared to NL/Switzerland amd even Germany at some degree (German public infra is not so good). By any measure infra in NL, Switzerland, Barcelona and other similar regions is more pro-freedom since anyone can choose any method of transport and arrive+- comfortable to destination, be that car, motorcycle, train/bus /tram or bike
Only for the wealthy, and the car is the most expensive form of transportation that only the relatively wealthy have access to. For everyone else not wealthy enough to own a car the over investment in car infrastructure has made life worse and made them less free, as the under investment in transportation alternatives limits their access and ability to travel.
BBC's new season of race around the world featured Canada this year, and contestants were staggered at the lack of public transportation options, forced into illegally hitchhiking rides to finish the race. Such is the dearth of transportation options for people who do not own a car.
Trade offs. Everyone has a different situation, but for most people in the world $5000 in a car would enable so many different things they can do that it is worth it (or would be worth it if they could find that $5000 in the first place - for many if they had a car they could earn more than $5000 to pay for it, but lacking the $5000 to get the car in the first place they can't earn enough to buy it)
Here in backwaters of eastern europe, cars are freedom for everybody. If you're poor and live in backcountry... Get a car for €500 and go wherever you want. If you're poor in the city, you can do the same. Just find a makeshift parking spot. E.g. convert an unused lawn into a parking lot with your neighbours.
As someone living in a country with (purportedly) excellent public transport: public transport costs are more expensive than even our nearly 10 dollars a gallon petrol.
Oh this is talking about straight up prices for the trains. Unless you live near the hubs and need to go to another public transport hub you can easily expect your journey to take 2-3 times the time it'd take if you took a car.
Public transit costs money too. Also, if you drive with your family or friends, public transit gets more expensive. But it uses +/- same amount of gas.
Of course there's maintenance and insurance. But, for example, my yearly insurance is €80. With minimum wage of ~ €700-800. It's not exactly a deal breaker if that allows you to live in countryside and avoid obscene rents in big cities.
Freedom? Cars as freedom is such a misconception. They are highly regulated. They take up so much space that they are difficult to store and require subsidized storage everywhere one goes. They create massive amounts of pollution both in particulates and noise, causing health problems to those that have to live near them. Cities are not noisy--cars are noisy. They certainly have their use but the negative externalities are exceptional and are not paid for by the users of the cars.
I don’t own a car, and looking around at all of the people who do, I can’t imagine making all of their sacrifices.
The total cost of owning a car sets you back enough to impact all other aspects of your life. Cars are inconvenient to store, maintain, and keep from getting damaged or stolen, which seems to be a constant source of anxiety. Keep driving for long enough and they’re likely to maim or kill you eventually. And in the end, they’re not even that convenient - people behind wheel seem to always be pissed. No wonder, I’d be pissed too if I had to spend 20 minutes looking for a spot to park my stinky mobile death trap. You can keep your freedom.
Whiles there are downsides to a car, they are small compared to the masssivr upside of being about to go where you feel like it. If you live in one of the few places where there is great transit you may not realize how bad it is for most of us who have to wait for a bus that comes every half and hour, and then drives a slow winding route that is barely faster than walking.
err, yes. Cars are very expensive, but for most they work to get you to a much larger number of places quickly. Time is very important to travel, cars get to a lot of places very fast. We spend a lot of money, but in return we can get a lot of places and do a lot of things that we cannot without.
People fail to realize the car less dream begins to fall apart as soon as you have something niche you enjoy.
If your goal is to simply eat, great, public transit enables this easily with many choices.
If your goal is to eat at a very specific restaurant, 4 miles away, this would take you less than 10 minutes by car, but could easily be 30 to 40 no car, with at least one transfer.
And I don't know, I'm not old by any means, but I've definitely noticed the value of time now. Saving an hour round trip is very valuable (and one of the reasons remote work is so popular).
> If your goal is to eat at a very specific restaurant, 4 miles away, this would take you less than 10 minutes by car, but could easily be 30 to 40 no car, with at least one transfer.
Just tried this out in my city, 6km away to a random point in a dense-ish environment (ie. not out in the suburbs):
* 19 minutes by bike
* 22 minutes by train
* 22 minutes by car
Note that this is a completely unfair comparison. The bike can likely be parked right outside, with the train walking is factored in. For the car this assumes there's parking near where I am, near the destination and that it takes no time at all to find a spot.
The only way to achieve the comparison you've made is to build exactly the kind of car-centric environment being criticized here. Bulldoze the neighboring stores to build car parks. Bulldoze entire neighborhoods to build urban freeways. Rip up tram and train tracks. Defund public transportation. The end result is that maybe your very specific restaurant only takes 10 minutes to get to, but the nearest 30 restauraunts are in a 4 mile radius rather than within walkable distance.
>The only way to achieve the comparison you've made is to build exactly the kind of car-centric environment being criticized here.
Or simply live 10 minutes walking from the nearest subway station? The issue is you need to have both sides of the trip essentially on top of a public transit station. Even the cities with great public transit systems will have plenty of areas where the closest station is half a mile away.
The route I picked included ~12 minutes of walking for the train ride. It would likely take around the same mount if not more walking to use a car park.
Cycling is literally the fastest way to most places within 10km in my city. Trains are second, and cars are the slowest. If your city designed for cars to be the fastest way to get anywhere, there's your problem.
People fail to realize that bike heaven NL still has car infra and people can rent/own a car when they need it. The difference is priority: in that place you'll likely get faster to destination with bus/train/bike because infra is optimised in this way and as we know, people will use the most convenient method
I've lived in Chile the past twelve years. I often say I feel like a time traveller. I feel like I'm from the not too distant future. Chile feels like what California felt like growing up in the 70s and 80s, only with smart phones. People here throw trash wherever ... just like we did in California in the 70s and 80s. People here love their cars, and think of them as a status symbol and an extension of their identity ... just like we did in California in the 70s and 80s. Before I came to Chile I lived in Los Angeles and had to commute each day for over an hour each way. I also lived in Amsterdam and had to commute by bike each day for 20 minutes. I never owned a car the entire time I lived there. I was much better off mentally, physically, and economically in Amsterdam for this reason alone. I was freer too. A lot has changed in Chile since I arrived, especially in car ownership, and car-centric growth. I would not say that it's natural or the obviously best choice to prefer a car-centric future. The future Chile is creating for itself is not the one I would choose. There are alternatives.
> Like, what's the alternative?
Building the infrastructure for cars is a choice. Prioritizing cars over other modes of transportation is a choice. So make different choices.
I live in a small town. It's just six square blocks, but is densely populated with multi-story condos, and lots of shops and restaurants. But the streets are filled with cars. Cars are double parked on the sidewalks, and traffic moves at a snail's pace. It's loud, dirty, and unsafe. We could easily close the streets to cars, encourage people to take mass transit (we have collectivos and busetas) by making it expensive to park outside of the town center, require the numerous gated communities nearby to incorporate more amenities, like markets and pharmacies, to discourage trips by car, make it safer to bike by building ciclovias, and so on. But we don't, because we choose not to, sadly.
These are markets that are being developed actively by car companies. This is not a natural evolution or a so far unmet need for freedom but a political and economical campaign to sell more cars to people in "emerging markets".
> What a patronizing take. Cars are freedom - you can go where you like, when you like, with whom you like, and you can do it without dealing with crowded, noisy, sometimes dangerous buses/trams/subways. It's as true in the developing world as it is here.
It seems like many people would opt for this form of social isolation, an illusion that they are removed from the society that is what actually makes our civilization function. But perhaps this "freedom" of fully isolated mobility for the individual is damaging, both to this individual as well as to the fabric of society as a whole.
Maybe "freedom" to be isolated isn't actually good for us, despite how much many of us seem to want it? Maybe like junk food, or social media, or gatcha games, or many other technological marvels of the last century or so, we have a predisposition for addiction to it, but can fail to notice the damage it is doing to us as we embrace it.
If we focused on building a world where personal vehicles at least weren't required, perhaps we would see what we've been doing to ourselves.
For what it's worth, walkability demands a massive housing price premium in the US, so it is obvious that many people do desire it - just as some people clearly desire the freedom to be apart from their fellow humans.
I don't know how Colombian's feel about it, but to me all of that is pretty god damned miserable. Everyone wants what they didn't have before, so it wouldn't particularly surprise me if that alone is compelling enough.
I don't know how many people are begging to have their urban landscapes and culture bulldozed so people can park their cars on it, and I don't know how many people would be excited by the prospect of watching the infrastructure of their cities slowly crumble because the tax base is spread extremely thin and serviced in the most expensive way possible. Maybe that's just me though idk
Everyone seems to like American style fast-food chains though. No matter where you are in EU at least, it doesn't have anything to do how you get there, there's plenty of Dunkin Doughnuts, McDonald's, KFC, etc..
> "What a patronizing take. Cars are freedom - you can go where you like, when you like, with whom you like, and you can do it without dealing with crowded, noisy, sometimes dangerous buses/trams/subways. It's as true in the developing world as it is here."
Cars are a straight jacket, a two-ton $10k deadweight, you have to drag them everywhere with you, you can't go anywhere without them, you always have to return to where you left them, you have to baby them with concentration - they can't even go in a straight line without your constant guidance and if they could you legally can't let them; you get in one and you are trapped to the roads (no shortcuts down small walkable alleys or through parks), trapped in the flow of traffic (no pausing by a shop window and popping inside for a look), you're charged by the minute by the cost of gasoline, seatbelted into a fixed position for the duration, with an explosive airbag charge constantly pointed at your face because of the high chance you or other people can't safely control them, they're your responsibility when you aren't near them (they stop you from drinking alcohol with friends for example, or for parking irresponsibly), they're amazingly complex and costly systems to maintain, costly to insure. And you pay enormous amounts of tax to maintain the road network which needs to sprawl everywhere at enormous expense.
What's "freedom" about that?
American cities weren't designed for cars, they were bulldozed for cars. Car companies illegally bought up streetcar companies and sent the streetcars for scrap. Cars were killing so many pedestrians that car companies came up with the term "Jaywalker" to mean "country bumpkin walker" and propagandised it into blaming pedestrians for car drivers hitting them. Car companies are pushing SUVs in advertising because SUVs have a legal loophole about being 'light trucks' where they don't have to meet as strict safety and efficiency regulations so they are more profitable; it isn't that "Americans like SUVs", it's that "Americans are being told to want SUVs" so they do.
They stop you dealing with crowded, noisy buses and trams by being crowded, noisy traffic offloading that problem to everyone outside your soundproofed cage.
Walking is freedom - you can go where you like, when you like, with whom you like, and you can do it without dealing with crowded, noisy, sometimes dangerous buses/trams/subways, or rush hour or full car parks or car park fees or tailbacks. And without spending money or needing to be rich, without being confined to a car, without having responsibility of the safety of your passengers and all others around you, without having your attention constantly on controlling a car, without having to divert to a car park, look for a car park, or return to the same car park before you can go anywhere else, without being stuck in traffic, without being stuck to roadways. Walking with metros and trams and trains is freedom with a boost - optional, convenient, power assisted walking. (Bikes can be fun, but designing a city around requiring a bike sucks in the same way that designing a city around requiring a car sucks; design the city around not needing My Personal Metal Transport Vehicle(tm) and then add a little bit of that back in as necessary/helpful/fun).
> "How do you propose to stop Colombians from voting with their wallets when they choose to eat at chain restaurants, shop at big box stores and then take the freeway back to their air-conditioned 2000 sq ft houses in the suburbs?"
What happened in Amsterdam in the 1960s is the Jokinen Plan[1] proposed to demolish some working class neighbourhoods and run a six-lane highway into the city center, assuming that Dutch people would want to live in the suburbs and drive to the city like Americans do. Instead the people voted against it, and it turns out that making safe and convenient pedestrian and bike routes separate from car roads makes walking and biking safer and more pleasant, and so more people walk and bike for journeys instead of driving, which reduces car traffic and fumes and the need for big wide roads, which makes walking and biking even more pleasant. They didn't ban cars by fiat - surprise, lots of people don't want to drive for every single journey. (Possibly because driving is inconvenient, effortful, boring, and it's uncomfortable to be trapped in a fixed position for an hour looking at concrete and car-butts and road signs).
[0] https://i.imgur.com/hzDCcSg.jpeg - this is a "freeway" because you don't pay a toll to drive on it. And because of all the freedom these people are enjoying.
Shall we take my recent trip to London where it was too far to walk and too far and inconvenient for me to drive?[1] Or when I got to London (by train) I then couldn't drive around because I didn't have my freedom-car and instead used the quicker and cheaper underground train? Or where I couldn't ask my coworkers for a lift because none of them bring cars into London because cars are too expensive and inconvenient? Or where freedom-taxis were less convenient to organise and wait for and slower and several times more expensive than the underground?
Or my holiday which involved a ferry and the freedom-car was too expensive to justify bringing on the ferry and too inconvenient to park this side of the ferry, but the train/bus replacement went right to the ferry port?
Or my trip from home to train station which is walkable (if a little boringly far) and I have the freedom to go through town or through the park or through the suburbs, into shops along the way, and straight into the station whereas by car it's 10-20 minutes of stop/start traffic, no meaningful choice of route, no way to stop in anywhere along the way, the train station has almost no on-site parking and the nearby parking isn't gratis? How does car win for 'freedom' there?
Or how about that I have rarely ever driven more than two hours in a day, but if I want to go somewhere far in my car (such as London and back) I would have to commit to driving eight hours - and if I got there and felt unable (tired, ill) to drive back I would be stuck having to drive unsafely because of the freedom-car ball and chain, or arrange a hotel for the night - whereas a train or coach you don't even have to be awake the whole way, let alone concentrating on moving a two-ton vehicle at motorway speeds? Where's the 'freedom' advantage there?
By the time you are doing regular long car journeys it's eating large amounts of your time and money to the point where you are likely only doing that because you are economically trapped by house prices and job locations, rather than because you are free. Cars are good for the medium-short journey of 5-15 miles which is mostly crummy design of putting big box stores and industrial estates with no options except driving, assuming people will drive to them, and thus self-fulfilling prophecy meaning people have to drive to them. Cars are good at this, but an unthinkably expensive way to be good. Next time you see a road, count the cars in terms of $20,000-$60,000 purchase price each. Five cars to a hundred k, fifty cars to a million dollars. Economic boom or burden on the drivers?
From Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours idea, I am well on the way to being a world expert at my old commute, and trundling back and forth over the same bit of motorway for over a decade, ploughing thousands of hours of my life into pushing a pedal and turning a steering wheel, is not a skill worth developing and not any kind of 'freedom' the likes of which the Founding Fathers or the Ancient Philosophers were discussing.
There have been about 110 billion humans on Earth in all history, and over a hundred billion of them lived their entire lives without ever driving twenty minutes to Walmart, driving an hour to the next town for a coffee and a look around, driving eight hours to see Aunt Margaret once every couple of years, driving twenty hours to go skiiing, or driving a week coast to coast to burn some fossil fuels and feel important. And even today, the majority of car journeys are not people free to visit Aunt Margaret, they are people stuck in commutes or driving to stores who would generally prefer not to do that. If everyone who wanted to, could live a high quality of life close to work, how many car commuters would say "I don't want to live close to work and have more free time and less stress, I want my car commute because that's freedom"? Mostly they will say either "I can't afford to live closer to work" or "that's a horrible place to live" not "I love stop-start driving in traffic on a four lane concrete expressway".
[1] Let's it not pass unnoticed that driving is more than just distance and time; driving safely and concentrating and paying proper attention to the signs and conditions and other drivers is effortful and tiring, navigating in unfamiliar areas can be stressful, driving safely is a responsibility. How many drivers are honestly too tired, too distracted, too ill, too medicated, to be safely and responsibly making their journeys on any given day - but have no other reasonable choice but to cross fingers, pray, hope, and push through it?
The replies are full of people that can't imagine life without cars. I grew up in a suburb of Edmonton, I know what it's like to just "know" that cars are freedom and a way to get to ever conceivable place. I left that place 20 years ago and I could make a long reply about what it's like to live in various sized cities in Japan and Europe but let me just say that not needing a car to get from your house in a town to restaurants, grocery stores, shops, parks, etc offers much more freedom than needing a car to get to such things. And there are a lot of places where you can live in a town, even on an acreage and still be in the town and able to get to a train station to get to a nearby city, if your argument is that you can't stand cities and need your space.
Car-people can't imagine a town instead of a suburb and can't imagine that you can get from a town to a city by train or bus. Or that you don't need to travel to some far-off place with a huge car to get a ton of groceries because you can walk a few blocks and pick up the ingredients for dinner.
I love being able to walk a block to the grocery store (though it now closes at 9 PM instead of 11 before Covid, ah well), and I've done that walk during literal national-weather-service-says-you-all-gonna-die blizzards, because walking through snow drifts is easier than trying to drive through them.
As someone who's lived in Manhattan, it's not all a panacea you make it out to be.
Taking the subway is a pain in the butt. If you try to come home when it's after 11pm, you get to wait 30+ min for a train.
When you want to get the groceries, you have to somehow shuffle all that stuff home, either with a cart or just have your hands suffer in the cold, and then have a four-story walk-up.
Sure, it's charming, but living there takes some real grit. By the way, those places are all expensive comparatively.
With my car, I don't have to wait at all and I can go straight home.
I don't believe all these posts against cars are from humans, especially on this website. Surely, technologically savvy folks like us would have learned to appreciate why decentralized systems (like cars) are better than centralized systems (like mass transit) for their flexibility.
> With my car, I don't have to wait at all and I can go straight home.
Manhattan, famous for its congestion-free streets :-)
Calling cars "decentralized" is funny, and more than a little ridiculous: American car culture is a result of centralized planning, both of highways and cities. It'd be more accurate to call them "individualized," with the misaligned incentives and commons failures that that implies.
My point was that they're "decentralized" in the least interesting way: they exist as a "decentralized" structure only by overwhelming centralized effort. Calling them decentralized is like calling suburbia decentralized: it's not even wrong.
Decentralization is not a virtue (or end) in itself when it comes to public infrastructure. Robustness is also not intrinsically tied to it, and there are a variety of senses in which the American road network is not particularly robust: congestion and unsustainable funding schemes are just the first two that come to mind.
I don't believe all these posts against cars are from humans, especially on this website.
I certainly believe they are from humans.
Surely, technologically savvy folks like us would have learned to appreciate why decentralized systems (like cars) are better than centralized systems (like mass transit) for their flexibility.
But many humans are easily persuaded by FUD ("climate crisis" and all that other hogwash.)
- make the remaining 10% incredibly expensive and time limited to short durations which makes it so that spots are always available for someone that actually needs it for something like moving
- cut down every other road to be impassable by cars or extremely limited
- add wide, safe, protected biking/scooter lanes + bike parking in all the freed up space
- lower speed limits everywhere to cut down on noise and increase safety
> make the remaining 10% [of street parking] incredibly expensive and time limited to short durations which makes it so that spots are always available for someone that actually needs it for something like moving
I see you studied the work of Donald Shoup, the author of "The High Cost of Free Parking".
So you still need to have cars and a city designed for them to operate. Edit: What about ambulances, police, fire service, deliveries, postal services…, public transportation…?
Cities existed before cars, including cities with ambulances, police, fire services, deliveries and public transportation. Yes you still need places to move through and ways to move things, cities weren't a single failed monolithic building before cars. What you don't need is 1 million people with 1 million cars and 2 million parking spaces so they can each drive 3 miles to work at 8am and 3 miles home at 6pm and leave their cars unused 23 hours every day.
Many folks like to read these pieces from an extreme viewpoint, that they want to eliminate all cars everywhere.
A few moments thinking and you realize it would only be practical in downtowns, and alleys would still exist. Visit Wash.DC or London if still unsure. Street maps a cheap substitute.
You're arguing against an imagined extreme. Nobody is saying "eliminate streets".
The closest thing to 'eliminating streets' you see people advocating for is streets in urban cores that are pedestrian / bicycle first and car second.
Deliveries can be still go down those streets at off hours and slowly. If necessary emergency vehicles can still access those streets and turn on their sirens to clear people out.
London and Europe have tons of streets like that and most US cities have none.
Old world streets are narrow and sometimes cobblestone. Usually enough.
Compare that with the 50 foot wide boulevards of suburbia, USA. One job I had you couldn’t even cross the street for half a mile because it was built like a freeway.
The space in the suburban US has nothing to do with streets being there or not. It’s a combination of a car culture and availability of space to build housing further apart. The car enables that, sure. But care for what you wish.
The alternative is to build denser, sure. But as someone living in Germany and seeing all the Neubau here… is it really so appealing living on 500m2 surrounded by 50 houses like that where neighbours look into your house? Where in the summer you hear everything what other people do? One has 4 children, another one has a dog barking all day, another one likes playing music loud, the odd one does parties every second night, the couple two houses down fights every evening, every weekend there are a couple of bbqs into a late evening, every day some dude mows his lawn so there’s only the Sunday when nobody mows the lawn… there’s nothing appealing in that kind of neighbourhood. You buy a house, you gonna live in it for years, why getting pissed off with your neighbours every second day?
I don’t know, I guess it’s a matter of perspective. The point of view depends on where you sit. I’d choose the suburbs if given an opportunity. Every time I visit the US, I’m jealous of all that space. I don’t even want a big house, no need for 300m2, 160m2 is good enough. I just wish for space around so I don’t have to listen to others all day every day.
I dunno. I’ve been to all of those European cities and they were nice to visit for a week as a tourist but the density along with everything that goes with it: noise, smells, crowds etc were always a reminder that I only want to be there on a brief visit. I’m my suburban city, I simply hop in my vehicle and can be anywhere I want in 3-15 minutes.
A well designed city makes most errands faster on foot than in a car.
Even when cars are prioritized, traffic makes even the smallest errands a problem eventually; roads simply don't scale.
And cars are by far the loudest thing about cities at almost all times. They make the very air hostile with pollution and heat. And, worst of all:
> I simply hop in my vehicle and can be anywhere I want in 3-15 minutes
You do this at the direct expense of everyone else in your city. You make the streets unwalkable and the city unlivable. You are insulated from the sounds and dangers that you are creating around you. (I'm just using you as an example, I don't actually blame you for taking the only option you've been given.)
IMO the default mode of transport should be scooters. They don't take all that much space than a person(unlike car) but (like car) can move far faster
The infrastructure is all here already. They pollute less (ICE) and the no pollution electric ones are far more affordable than EVs. Like 4 of them fit in one parking space. They have storage space for some small groceries too.
Sadly winter and rain sucks.. i guess at least for rain those scooters with roofs could cover that.
Yeah. Screw scooters. People riding those don’t care about pedestrians. I’ve been knocked out by one of those things. They’re more dangerous than cars. Cars at least move on designated roads while scooters just zip past pedestrians and can come from anywhere at any time.
Context… You can fit well more than 4 kick scooters in a parking space. And kick scooters don’t have internal combustion engines. And motor scooters usually have a storage bin under the seat big enough for a helmet or two, or two bags of groceries.
Are you riding a scooter for your day to day errands? How do you deal with being stuck in the 5pm traffic under 90F sun? How do you ride it when you're a bit unwell (flu, cold)? What do you do with your helmet, boots and protective gear when you go to a restaurant?
The whole point is if we prioritize transport other than cars, we don't have to sit for hours in 90 degree heat. We walk, take the bus/subway, or bike, scooter, etc.
This doesn't even require everybody to live in a city... I'm outside DC and just moment from my front door, I see plenty of opportunities to make transit better and reduce car usage... I'm 1.5 miles from a subway station, but it's impossible to walk to without crossing 1 or more 6 lane roads. There are bike lanes that lead nowhere (literally end a few blocks before the local school then start a few blocks after, then stop before the local shopping center, then start again after). They just built an expensive bike path/running trail as part of an interstate project but they put it right beside the highway - who wants to walk/run/bike 4' from trucks belching diesel fumes and with dangerous sound levels? They could have built the bike path on the other side of the sound wall, but didn't.
> Are you riding a scooter for your day to day errands?
I was driving bicycle for ~10 years and most weather. Scooter would be upgrade.
> How do you deal with being stuck in the 5pm traffic under 90F sun?
You wouldn't if you removed 3/4 of cars and replace them with scooters
> How do you ride it when you're a bit unwell (flu, cold)?
You take a bus. Do you also drive car if you feel terrible ? It's not very safe....
>What do you do with your helmet, boots and protective gear when you go to a restaurant?
I'd imagine if that much traffic moved to scooters the city businesses would accommodate. At least for helmet they often just fit under scooter's seat.
I like scooters on an aesthetic level, but I don't know if it's true that they pollute less: my understanding is that most scooters use relatively dirty two-stroke engines, and that much of SE Asia's urban air pollution can be correlated to heavy scooter use.
They used to be 2-strokes. Probably still are in many parts Asia and Africa.
But, in the US and EU, new scooters are (almost?) all 4-stroke today due to emissions regulations. Many are fuel injected for the same reason. I'm not sure if they're required to have catalysts - but that's a fairly simple fix (for new models).
The default should be walking, the default should never be having to buy a product and drag a product around with you and needing two arms, two eyes, a sense of balance and constant concentration while using it so that you don't injure others with your product, it's as wrong-headed as designing everywhere to need stilts or designing everything to be hot so you need to wear oven gloves all the time. Places and things should serve humans as far as possible, not humans serving capitalism's need to sell things. (And 50 people in a bus fit in ~four car spaces and aren't getting wet in winter).
Saying "we should arrange these two buildings far enough apart so that people have to cycle, because I don't like walking" is not compelling. Strive to arrange them close enough to walk (or wheelchair) because that maximises accessibility to the most people. If people can afford to - and want to - cycle on top of that base, no problem. But don't make cycling or driving or owning a Cessna the default.
The point is that driving should not be required to live a full life, and in fact it's much more pleasant to live without cars everywhere.
The goal of driving is to get from point A to point B. But when point A and point B are a 5 minute walk, why drive at all? Well, in America we designed our cities and suburbs to make the distance between A and B as large as possible. But we didn't have to do that!
It can be but you have to make your choice of housing location priority number one. Then worry about employment, raising a family, etc. Not easy at all which is why so few do it.
You also need a minimum amount of financial comfort and stability, which, in the US, is not easy for many people. Often the poorest neighborhoods are the most car-bound.
Except driving is the only transportation option which regularly results in the death of people walking/biking outside of that car. Walking/biking/rail/bus kill virtually no one, cars kill tens of thousands annually.
Discouraging driving is a reasonable public health measure for a safer society.
Undriveable isn't bad though. We don't really get any value from driving for everyday trips over walking/biking/transit. And any decent walkable designs don't prohibit necessary driving such as delivery and emergency services, so they're not truly undriveable. It is a competition, but dying from cancer is also a form of competition. We don't always have to give both sides equal standing.
Between cities, yeah. But also trains, unlike America. And in Utrecht proper there’s multiple options for getting around that aren’t cars. The Netherlands does a great job (maybe the best) designing for multi-mode transportation, including cars.
I lived in Italy for a number of years, and it's not noisier or smellier than where I now live in Oregon. Truth be told, it was quieter because here in Bend, Oregon, there's a "parkway" that runs right through town and even though we're not at all right next to it, it's quite loud with car noises when the wind blows right (wrong).
Italy isn't perfect and I could talk about that country's problems a lot, but in terms of transportation, it was more a "right tool for the job" place than here, where we'd walk to many things, ride bikes to others, take the train occasionally, city busses some, and yes, use the car too for some stuff.
As someone who just got back from a two-week vacation in Italy, I couldn't agree more. We did sightseeing, groceries, ate out, and travelled extensively without using a car. Public transport and walking made everything easy. It's a failure of imagination in the U.S.
Right. I actually lived in Italy for a number of years without a car, and then got one. I used it sometimes, but it's such a difference from "yeah, occasionally I want to go out somewhere tough to get to without a car, for a hike" and "I literally can't do anything without an automobile", as is the case in most of the US.
For those who live in such cities (and not just visit), everything they want to do is a 3-15 minute walk, not a drive. You can get groceries, stop at a cafe, go to a doctor's appointment, and pick up your kids from school (or better yet, they can walk themselves, because their school is nearby and getting killed by speeding SUVs is not a concern) - all within a 15 minute radius. If the walk is truly too far, a metro stop is often nearby.
I have lived in the USA all my life and I've never been more than 15-20 minute walk from a grocery store of some kind.
And that's in a quite a few areas from pretty dense single-family urban to apartments to what some might call rural.
You can do it but people don't. Hell, walmart is only 30 minute walk away, but I drive most the time. Probably should get my bike fixed and easily accessible ...
I guess it spends where you live. I have done it. Used to have to walk everywhere. Auth the peak, I was walking around 14 miles a day. The walk was short like you mentioned, but I had to cross highway exists over a big hill in scorching humid heat while carrying shit. Not appealing whatsoever.
Frankly the heat is mostly why I stopped walking. I figured at first I might just be out of shape as hell, but I decided to take one today while the rain had cooled down the temperature and it was mostly pleasant. Comparatively I tried to walk the same route a few days back and gave up early because I was drenching in sweat, slunched over, could hardly see in front of me and my head was throbbing.
Infrastructure is a big thing too. When I’ve had to walk in less urban areas with little or no sidewalk, walking on grass next to the road with massive cars zipping past you is unnerving.
Ok I've done that and still hated it. I've spent weeks staying in apartments in France and Italy with a grocery store on the bottom floor, restaurants, and retail a few blocks away. Good suburbs have these things within walking distance too. It is just a much quieter, calmer walk.
I visit Amsterdam periodically for business. In the city center, where there are very few cars, there is far more noise, smells, and crowds than I would care to live with everyday.
Density of people brings those three annoyances, cars or no cars.
Not even that. I live a little outside the centre of Amsterdam (I could walk to De Wallen in probably 30 minutes comfortably.) Most residents don't go into the centre because it's a mass of tourists who haven't learnt how to walk outside of bike lanes. In my neighbourhood, there still aren't that many cars, the footpaths and bike paths are wider, and it's generally calm and quiet, and I sit on a moderately busy road, a small street off it will be much quieter still. There're a few cafes that I go to that are a bit more central, but it's still mostly outside the really busy area.
I think most people's - even a lot of Dutch people's - experience is getting off at Centraal and walking to some bar in the centre, or going through the shopping areas, and then extrapolating that to everywhere else in the city so all they imagine is that busyness.
I have. Most of them seem to be car-centric, to the point where many of my work colleagues living there don’t even have an OV card (and were shocked when I said I had one as a tourist).
Maybe you should move to the moon then, because you either have density that allows you to enjoy nice services and comforts or you live in the boonies where you need a car and perpetuate the inefficient consumption of resources.
Those are huge cities, smaller centers are heaven without being non sense absurdities of two story one family houses. Go to Lausanne, Geneva, Munich, Nice, etc.
I have no idea what it cost in Munich, but the city center undergrounded the commuter trains and the river. The river appears in Englisch Garden from under a road and is a popular surf spot on a standing wave.
>>and it's actually impossible for them to imagine what life without a car might even look like.
I can visualize it just fine... High Density, people stacked onto of each other vertically, small dwellings where you need to shop for food every day or every few days, extreme cold or extreme heat is a problem, as is rain...
Instead i look out to my 3/4 acre homestead, lined with mature tree's and limited density... and say... yes I prefer this. I prefer going to to store every 1 or 2 weeks, I prefer not having an upstairs neighbor stomping around, I prefer not having to deal with stairs or neighbors only separated by a wall...
You know, that's the funny thing, it doesn't have to be like a Judge Dredd world.
I live in what we can describe as a suburb: large streets with parking on both sides, 2000 m² single-family properties, ample space for trees, etc.
But at the same time, school is less than 200 meters away. Drugstore on the street corner. Grocery store (a large one) 300 meters away. Public library less than a kilometer away. _Sidewalks_ on both sides of the street. Cycle paths. Buses on the avenues (avenues are large transit streets, streets are smaller and do not go through, so close to zero traffic).
The same way it is unreasonable to think that less car centric cities would solve all our issues, it's just silly to equate "non car-centric environment" to "dystopian cities where people die on the street whenever there is a bit of cold".
The problem here also is that assume everyone in the area would want to shop at THE grocery store.. and send thier kids to THE school...
I dont shop at the closest store to my home because I prefer the layout and selection of one that is further away, i know people that take their kids to schools across town because they are better than the one closest to me. (in my area schools are not assigned geographically, we have open enrollment at all public schools)
Cars give you that option, with out it you have THE store, and THE school... sorry but count me out of that
To be fair, there are actually two grocery stores at walking distance, but I'm nitpicking here. I know this argument very well: "when you have a car, you can spot rebates week after week and reduce your grocery bill!"
That's true, but most people forget to take into account the cost of the car itself. If you spend 10$ in gas and vehicle depreciation to save 8$ on average on your bill, are you really winning?
When I really need to do a big grocery or to find a specific product which my local store does not have, I rent a car from one of the 5-6 carsharing stations near my place (think ZipCar), it cost me 20$ and I can go where I want. Only, I do not have to pay for a car all the time.
Schools are another topic, of course if you live in a bad neighborhood, it might be problematic, but again with a nice public transportation system, it is not an issue (in my home town, _public_ buses have specific routes for students of a given school, dropping them directly next to the school).
We can always devise a situation where you are "limited" by public/active transport ("I am an ER doctor, what should I do if I get called at 2AM on a winter night to an hospital on the other side of the town to save multiple children lives?"). Sure, in these cases, you should take the car. That doesn't mean that for the overwhelming majority of people, car _would_ not be mandatory (assuming a decent public transportation system and walkable/bikable cities).
> small dwellings where you need to shop for food every day or every few days, extreme cold or extreme heat is a problem, as is rain...
These are very odd things to say. A domestic refrigerator and cupboard holds a week's worth of food easily, you don't need 3/4 acres for that. Temperature management is easier not harder in a larger building. As is good roofing. The idea that when someone else says "the store is nearby" they mean "there is literally only 1 store that I can possibly reach" is also a creative worst-case reading.
IDK, this feels more like a dump of ignorant projected fears than a serious criticism.
I live in a city which has horrible public transit. It’s the result of faddish idea after faddish idea.
The reforms and improvements have consistently made things worse.
Now the city is completely changing bus routes.
Maybe you’ll have a ride to work. Maybe not. Maybe it will be quick. Maybe not.
People’s entire lives are being rearranged.
The folks at the lowest level of importantance are folks who send their kids to private schools.
The municipality is like “not our problem - public schools offer free transit. You’re chosing to send your kid to a private school, you drive them yourself.”
Note how the city is telling people to use cars, not public transit, because the city doesnt endorse what they’re using it for.
And if you want to take a bus to church Sunday morning? Hahahahahah! There would probably be a lawsuit from church/state people.
Etc.
I simply don’t have confidence public transit will be there when I need it.
Unfortunately public transportation resources are limited, but prioritizing the vast majority of lower income public school routes over the vast minority of higher income private school routes makes sense
Schools, public and private, generally employ their own bus drivers.
So it’s not like the anybody at the city transit office is saying “let’s divert resources from public schools to private schools.”
They’re saying “we don’t do schools at all, because the only schools we would be providing services for are private, and we don’t want to encourage people to go to private school.”
Wealthy private schools often have their own buses. Less well off ones, don’t.
So it isn’t even about benefiting the poor over the wealthy.
Catholic schools generally have their own buses, while schools affiliated with historically black churches don’t.
Regarding why I take it personally, the condescending and hostile attitude of city officials make it clear it is personal.
This is specific to where I live now. I’ve lived in places like the Bay Area and New York, and this attitude doesn’t seem to exist.
People from Europe don't realize just how local so much of this stuff is. Where I am (small town America), the public school system pays for the school busses, and they handle all the schools in the district, even the private ones. There's a small charge if you want to use them for non-school children (think: daycare).
This setup may or may not be replicated in the next town ten miles away.
And until you've lived your poor life you don't realize what an absolute ass it is to have transit schedules continually changing on you; and the bus may change when it comes but when you have to be at school or work won't, and so the moment you save enough for a car ...
So the city is saying "schools have their own bus services. Let's prioritize areas and groups that don't."
That makes perfect sense in a constrained system. You sound like you are looking to be the victim no matter what. Without doxxing yourself, care to provide some specific info so we can better understand?
It sounds like they are specifically deprioritizing private schools below where they are in terms of natural demand though? Seems like they should they should just address areas by demand, regardless of the type of demand.
> Many Americans get a taste of that when they vacation to Europe.
What I don't like about this is that people (even urbanist bloggers) tend to form their opinions on their experience as tourists, while reality is much more nuanced and full of tradeoffs.
Case in point: I once visited my friend in Bilbao and the one thing I couldn't get over was that despite this being a beautiful, walkable, full of life city jobs were hard to come by and low-paid. Youth unemployment in particular in Spain stands at a whopping 46%.
Were jobs hard to come by in that city because it was walkable, beautiful, and full of life? I'm guessing not, and there are other factors causing that.
NYC is beautiful, walkable, full of life, and you sure can find a job there. Same with the Boston area.
I've lived in both walkable and car-dependent areas for years. I am one of the people who grew up in a car-dependent small city who couldn't imagine not owning a car 10 years ago.
Now that I've lived in both, sure, there might be tradeoffs living in a walkable neighborhood, but if you build a neighborhood with the amenities you need, walking for most things is simply amazing. Having a car is useful for getting out, but it now becomes a "once in awhile" thing, almost a luxury, if you have a nice market and some restaurants nearby. And then you can do things like ZipCar or other options for the rare times you need to drive.
And pretty much all the people I know in Boston also own cars because they visit friends outside of the city, go out of town for weekend activities that often involve transporting a lot of gear, etc. So, yeah, you can get by day to day but people I know also want a car.
There's nothing wrong with that either. The Dutch, known for their bike and ped friendly streets and great transit, are also known to love their summer trips where they drive around and tow camping trailers. Japanese families in less urban areas frequently have a car for family trips or for shopping for home goods. There's no way transit will ever completely displace the car, the economics will never pencil out.
Having the option to drive when there's copious amounts of transit is empowering. It lets you go hiking into the mountains where it wouldn't be economical to run even a bus at greater than 1 hr headways or haul your ski and snowboarding equipment to the slopes. It lets you ferry around your aging parents who are starting to have cognitive issues. It means when your children are still very young you can keep them from being a nuisance on the bus. Being forced to drive because there's no transit and you know your brake pads are shot and scraping against your rotors but you don't have the money or time to fix your car is dreadful.
If that's the only use, probably. Although a lot of jobs in the Boston area are in the surrounding suburbs and commuter rail is mostly unsuitable for those for people who want to live in the city.
Yeah I mean that’s totally fine. When I lived in Boston it was much more common to see people rent cars for that purpose, but either way it’s completely okay.
The infrastructure should support that sort of trip out of the city. It’s intra-city car use that’s a disaster, and our infrastructure should not support that.
That's great, but my point is that if you go to such a place and see all that spontaneous social interaction, you're just seeing people who can afford to eat out and live close to the city centre. That's not how actually life in such places looks like for most.
My (European) city is walkable by any American definition. Tourists enjoy its XIX century architecture, restaurants, boulevards and such. What they don't see is that the 1,6% unemployment rate is there thanks to huge swaths of barely walkable and frankly ugly industrial complexes providing jobs to which people generally drive or commute a significant amount of time in public transport, because with their credit score it made more sense to get something on the outskirts or suburbs. You won't see them in places visited by tourists because that's far from where they live and they generally can't afford going out that often.
Rome is fantastic to visit as a tourist. But I've visited for work, and everyone I interacted with drove from home to work, because they didn't live or work in the central old-town tourist areas but out in the CBD and other parts of the city.
Rome is an excellent example of a city with an extensive local rail system that everyone would love to use. Still, disinvestment and lack of organization have made it unreliable and unusable.
Every time I go there, I make a point of using public transport, and it’s maddening how a 20-minute journey by bus becomes hellish because the station was moved, but no one knows why or where or cares.
It doesn’t need more than someone in charge who cares.
I stayed a block from that giant train station thing but I couldn't (be bothered to) figure out how to get to and from the airport, and I had a lot of luggage and that flat-fee taxi is so easy ...
It's strange that people are so eager to export (and import) urbanism ideas around the world without much understanding of the cultural differences and needs.
> It's strange that people are so eager to export (and import) urbanism ideas around the world without much understanding of the cultural differences and needs.
It's not even just cultural differences and needs. It's the lack of questioning in decisions and groupthink.
Tax per acre used to be a metric that was used in urban planning decisions. That was mostly thrown away when people started to want cars. A primary metric then became level of service. LOS was a way to measure traffic volume but didn't necessarily mean increased net economic output, although it was nearly used as one. It doesn't paint the picture correctly for municipal urban planning in a financial sense.
For sustained economic vitality in a very simplistic form, the infrastructure and municipal services costs should be subtracted from the amount of tax revenue gained from the land. Basically, is this land making the city money or is it costing the city money. This info can be used to adjust taxes, plan better built environments, amongst other things.
If that was regularly being measured throughout the last 100 years and acted upon, I imagine much of the car dependent areas of the world would look a lot different. If you talk to urban planners today about this (which I have), many still don't use it at all.
Because it feels like prosperity. In a town with no public transportation and very few cars, getting a car would feel awesome. And it's just a lot easier for 1 well-off person to buy 1 car than for the entire town to get good public transit.
> it's just a lot easier for 1 well-off person to buy 1 car than for the entire town to get good public transit.
Sure, once the town is already built for cars. If it wasn't, having a car would be a pain with no parking and no space in the streets.
The question is why cities choose/chose to rebuild themselves for cars in the first place, and continuously in the third world as suggested by the OP and the book "Urbanism Imported or Exported: Native Aspirations and Foreign Plans" by Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait.
There are walk-able tourist areas in the US as well that people enjoy, but couldn't imagine living in. The reality in Europe is cars are still the dominate mode of transport for most people. Even if the best walk/bike/transit cities cars have a very large mode share.
> There are walk-able tourist areas in the US as well that people enjoy, but couldn't imagine living in.
Like Disneyland? Of course nobody could live there. But actual walkable neighborhoods tend to be prohibitively expensive because they're extremely desirable.
Door county Wisconsin would be an example of a place where people live. The locals all have cars, but tourists often spend time walking around the town (they drive to the towns)
As a European and as an American… I agree! Sort of - there really are far more walk-able spaces here in the EU in cities.
But if anything, Europe is too car centric as well. The consumer upper middle class and child bearing families still seek out suburbs unfortunately.
I always talk about this but live in a utopian dystopian socialist modernist neighborhood complex from the 1960’s. There is a health clinic downstairs, schools, library, market-shops, park areas all 5 minute elevator ride down. Most residents still have cars unfortunately - the parking area is packed with them.
I have grown up in a country with excellent public transport and not much personal car ownership. I currently live in US and completely disagree with your take on cars.
i would say bike autists equally struggle to imagine what it is like to live anywhere besides the most population-dense, infrastructurally developed 15 square miles on the face of the earth.
i have a very good sense of what it is like to live without a car as i did so for 20 years and it fucking sucks. i have no desire to have to bike 10 miles in 80+ degree heat with a saxophone in one hand and a guitar in the other ever again. i have no desire to experience the vibrant living of being packed into an 11pm vomit comet ever again. i have no desire to have to pad every commute & outing with an extra 45 to 60 minutes of stops ever again.
Sure and that's your choice. But if I, a bike autist, want to live somewhere with density, where do I go? How many open units of housing are available for bike autists? If there was plenty of space for dense and sparse living then people would self-select, based on preferences and time in their life (maybe choosing a suburb when their child is very young and needs a lot of support but moving out once their children need autonomy.) Right now in America, the vast majority of housing is hostile to bike autists. That's why the title of this piece is "How to quit cars" because we've mandated car centric development in the US for almost a century.
> It could be argued that so many problems of American life - weight gain, loneliness, fracturing of the social fabric - stem from how we've isolated ourselves in unwalkable suburbs, where there's no spontaneous social interaction because everyone's always in a car, and where our only exercise is the walk from the parking lot to our desk.
It can be argued but would be false as other societies have more of those but have less car users.
The issue of quiting cars is nowadays far from just a matter of values as the article seems to be implying.
Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and urban planning disaster across the world. We are stuck with them. As a mode of transport it has grown uncontrollably at the expense of all others (except the airplane) and practically everything has been shaped to accomodate it.
Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person. Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way.
In the best scenario it will be an excruciatingly long transformation (~50 yr) as car oriented cities (or city sections) get slowly deprecated and the car-free or car-lite segments become more desirable, more livable.
In many places, allowing and encouraging infill development and upzoning would make carfree life viable more quickly than you'd think.
I've lived most of my life in former streetcar suburbs -- neighborhoods of single-family homes, duplexes, and small apartment buildings that were served by a streetcar line every few blocks. Today, some of those places require cars to get anywhere interesting and back, while some of them have a few well-used bus lines and a ton of local restaurants, groceries, and hardware stores in easy walking distance.
The density tipping point is really low; a few four-plexes on each block, which didn't diminish any of the "neighborhood character" or lead to epic struggles to find parking. (I did still have a car, I just used it a lot less, and was much happier not having to bother.) And it felt a lot nicer than the all-or-nothing neighborhoods that are either single-family homes or large corporate apartment complexes.
Many major and minor cities all across North America were not designed for the car, as much as they may seem so today. They were designed for the streetcar, with commercial blocks strung out along those streetcar corridors.
In older bigger cities these streetcar corridors densified and became commercial districts, while in younger ones they were on the precipice before the car and rigid zoning stopped the transition.
These corridors remain as valuable arteries awaiting a return to their original designs. Simple and affordable upgrades like bus rapid transit, small apartment buildings and bike lanes could once again transition them into being powerful parts of a transportation network that does not rely on car ownership.
> These corridors remain as valuable arteries awaiting a return to their original designs. Simple and affordable upgrades like bus rapid transit, small apartment buildings and bike lanes could once again transition them into being powerful parts of a transportation network that does not rely on car ownership.
Throwing money at public transport doesn't have a good track record in modern North American (US + Canada).
Instead (or in addition) you can try things that are free or even earn money:
- remove other subsidies for car ownership, both explicit and implicit
- consider congestion charges and tolls
Once you enact things like the above, bus rapid transit might even become profitable to run privately. After all streetcars were famously profitable back in the day.
> bus rapid transit might even become profitable to run privately
Growing up in Toronto, I always assumed that public transit just provides transportation and nothing more. Their income comes from tickets and from government subsidies.
In areas of the world where profitable private mass transit exists, the transit company also deals in real estate. They own land near stations before construction and either rent it out or sell it. They build and own malls on popular stations. This is a large reason why financially sustainable private transit companies exist. This is also known as value capture.
The upside to private transit companies is that it is not a political debate about how much to subsidize them - they are self-funding.
Yep, I live in such a town now. It's a 5 minute bike ride downtown, 8 minutes to the downtown of the closest neighboring town, 13 minutes to the next closest. And it would be 12 minutes to a major shopping center with a grocery store but there's no safe route there at the moment - but that's not an impossible change to make!
Point is, you're right, it doesn't take that much density to make getting around without a car viable for many trips.
The silliest mistake I see wasn't creating suburbs but shoving roads into denser cities. In some cases this was the result of corporate lobbying, like in Los Angeles. Wastes like 1/3 of the space and ruins the enjoyment of living there, so people prefer suburbs instead in most places.
The little success I keep thinking of is downtown Mountain View during/after covid19 lockdowns. They shut down the roads, so people walk around and interact. Some still drive to there and park on the perimeter of that big walking area. If they keep this kind of thing up, making these areas desirable to live in and growing them, things will become more consolidated. Eventually with those fewer "point masses," public transit can go between them. Doesn't make sense currently because there are just too many destinations.
Meanwhile those who really want to live in suburbs and drive around can still do it. They could even drive to the dense areas and park. They'd just be missing out.
For one, large arterials were placed where the most marginalized in society lived so that they couldn't protest. Historically black neighborhoods and poor white neighborhoods were flattened to accommodate large arterials.
The other is sprawl. Newer arterials, built after the problematic era, started out as state highways designed for transport. Once interstates were built, due to height and FAR limits in residential and commercial zones, new development sprawled out, sometimes onto these state highways which now had interstate alternatives. Naturally it was mostly low cost housing or commercial real estate as those are the most likely uses that would work adjacent to a large arterial.
It's pretty easy to do, other than the politics, in the highest growth cities. They tend to have so many areas that are severely underdeveloped that it would be economical to upzone them with transit in mind. Many a European city is far less car-centric than they were 30 years ago, just via rebuilding streets that were already dense enough to make sense. A good 50% of my home town is already just for pedestrians and delivery vehicles, and I read streets are changing.
The real problem is both cities that are not growing at all, and cities that are still digging into the car hole.
You might be able to rezone 50 year old suburbs, if just because the houses themselves keep losing value (as the real price increases are just land). But when the house was just built 10 years ago, it's a very tough sell. And if you expect a couple of million people, who are living in very low density suburb, to come downtown for any reason, you either make their transit story hell, or you are stuck wasting a lot of space just to manage their cars: Bad either way.
The cities that aren't growing just are going to have a lot of trouble becoming denser, and the political problem will be even bigger, as every effort to make the area near the city center denser in a city that doesn't grow is just making the outer suburbs less valuable. I am really worried about those cities. As having the infrastructure to support four times the number of people that you have is just a road to fiscal ruin.
It's not really "remove cars" problem tho. Cars are fine and are needed, you can't move anything big with tram or bike easily. It's make other forms of transport more viable for day to day stuff
You still need vans and trucks delivering stuff to people and businesses. Bus is far more flexible form of transport than tram. Just... if you need to wait ages for one and there is no stop nearby nobody will want to wait.
And the key part of Amsterdam is that in the 60s it was packed with cars and not the bike and walk haven it is today. Many people make he mistake thinking Amsterdam has great public transit and bike infrastructure since it’s an old European city and was never car dependant, but they made the same mistakes 50 years ago and reversed course. It’s possible to reverse the damage of car dependency.
By that link, half the kids that live a mile from school are driven in a private car.
That’s bonkers to me. That’s a completely walkable distance if road/sidewalk design allows it. That it frequently doesn’t is a failure on the part of our governments and urban planners.
You're probably dealing with the kind of citizen that waits 2 minutes to park in front of the store... when there's several free spots just 10 metres away. Can't park close enough!
I live a mile from all three schools (they sit on the same piece of property). It's a mile away. There's a trail through the neighborhood to get there and there are zero road crossings (one short tunnel that's 2-lanes long).
The kids are bussed. So, they walk the length of the neighborhood and wait 10-15 minutes for the bus. They could quite literally walk to the school in the same amount of time.
Even worse, many of the parents drive the kids to the end of the neighborhood (all of 2 city blocks, though we're in the 'burbs). And then wait in their cars, engines often idling, watching the kids stand around.
The parents could walk the kids to school and most of the way home again in that time. Assuing they leave from work the second the kids get on the bus, they might save 5 minutes.
It's ridiculous.
Meanwhile, I walk a mile the other direction to the office. I have to cross a 6 lane highway (signaled intersection, but still a mess). One side is housing and golf course, the other side is offices and retail. There is no sane way to get from one to the other without a car. It's some of the laziest urban planning I've seen. And this area (Reston VA) is better than average by orders of magnitude.
> Throwing the kid in the car 2 minutes before the bell works.
It the school is a mile away, unless you live right next to a large road with 60 mph limit and no stops or traffic lights, I doubt you can make it 1 mile in 2 minutes without driving recklessly fast (and in proximity of a school).
I normally will do the umbrella thing, but this time I had to transport a "school project of utmost importance" so the vehicle's siren song of ecological disaster won me over.
2 minutes, 5 minutes, the concept is the same. People are bad at planning and fall back on crutches.
(Part of it is stupid media-fueled disaster porn about how if a kid walks to school without an entire armed battalion of bodyguards they're going to get raped and murdered because something that happened once back in 1989.)
Yes, kids. Not affluent. Lucky enough to live in a place where they assign you a nearby school. There are 5 within walking distance. Maybe 20 within cycling distance (and I mean a 20-minute ride, not a 1-hour backbreaker).
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines so frequently that I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
When you live within walking distance of a grocery store, there's rarely any need for a big shopping trip with many bags; it's easier to just stop by every day or two, perhaps on your way home from work, and bring home a single bag you can easily carry.
In many European cities, you can just walk to a grocery store a few blocks away, and just go every day or two, picking up a few items each time.
You only need one bag, so it’s not a burden at all. Worst case, it’s incredibly easy to add a basket to a bike (or mobility scooter), so you can put your day’s groceries in there.
And as an added benefit of density, grocery stores are more efficient. There is a “general” one with all of the basics — fruit and veggies, cereal, meat, pasta, basic sauces, breads, convenience foods. Those are everywhere. Then if you go a little further, you’ll find specialty stores with “asian foods” or others, which you may not use as often but can get some rarer things there.
In my experience, having done both, it is a bit more time efficient at the Costco, but it also changes what you buy (lots of fresh food doesn't actually do well for two weeks). This is assuming you have the places you need in easy walking distance of course. At one time I had a grocer/butcher/wine shop/etc. all literally on the way I would walk home from subway anyhow, so my overall time was probably even shorter than a big grocery run every 2 weeks. I paid a bit more, but then I got better produce and bread, and could change meal planning on a dime if I saw something good. All tradeoffs I guess.
Yep. I either do it by bike for the big weekly purchase or go to the nearby store (5 minute walk - doable even in the dead of Canadian winter) for smaller everyday stuff.
I guess it depends on how much bulk you are buying at once, but most bikes are compatible with a basket of some kind. A bike trailer could also be an option.
This is sort of an interesting one. The combination of home refrigeration and suburbs created the "weekend shop", but it's not a given that this is optimal or even really desirable.
I think it's a refusal to acknowledge necessary trade-offs. You cannot create a human termite mound with tens of thousands of people per square mile while keeping the exact same forms of infrastructure that serve communities where everyone has their own two acres. I'm a person who enjoys the freedom and solitude of a car. That means I don't get to live in a place that has fifty restaurants within a half-mile and it would be wrong of me to try and force that environment to cater to my needs.
>I think it's a refusal to acknowledge necessary trade-offs. You cannot create a human termite mound with tens of thousands of people per square mile while keeping the exact same forms of infrastructure that serve communities where everyone has their own two acres. I'm a person who enjoys the freedom and solitude of a car. That means I don't get to live in a place that has fifty restaurants within a half-mile and it would be wrong of me to try and force that environment to cater to my needs.
In that case, what's your take on the cost of infrastructure required per capita in relation to property taxes as it pertains to suburban development?
As it stands today, property taxes in suburban areas generally do not cover the cost of infrastructure required for the areas, and hence they get subsidized by high-density areas which have a more sustainable amount of infrastructure per capita.
I don't really have an opinion, as I'm not familiar enough with the math and most of the people who are interested in explaining the math seem to be zealots who would say anything to support their particular view. I also think the debate is muddied because everyone has a different definition of "suburb" and the math is not the same depending on which version you're thinking of. There are also other factors to consider, like dense areas not having to pay for raising and educating the people who move into them but collecting their tax revenue.
The beauty is that there are so many different ways to transport things now than the form factor of car. There are electric utility vehicles the size of golf carts with heat and cooling and a bed for transporting things. There are miniature vans similar to this. They all are quieter, safer, and take up less space than cars. I agree that cars have a place, but by and large their use should not be as catered to as it is now and life should not be centered around them.
Similar chicken-egg problem there too, if such events drive people off, there becomes an even higher concentration of such encounters which drives more people off.
It's always full and losing lots of money? Still may not be a true loss overall if it is just subsidized for the positive externalities on congestion etc.
> Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way.
In Boston there's both a will and a way. I haven't owned a car for as long as I've lived here, and the bike lanes are so, so much better now than when I first arrived. Neighboring Cambridge now has laws on the books requiring bike lanes to be added any time that a road is rebuilt. The new light-rail extension through Somerville added a bike path alongside most of its length, connecting the paths along the downtown riverside to the Minuteman bikeway that runs 15 miles out to Bedford.
It can be done. But people have to organize and give a fuck.
I live in Amsterdam which is arguably a few decades ahead in this process. It is both true that something can be done but also that we are nowhere close to actually closing this issue.
I don't mean to discourage people from switching where and when they can (or give anybody an excuse not to). There are tangible quality of life benefits that can be obtained each step along the way. So if car usage drops, say, from 90% to 60% thats hugely important.
But structural changes in the layout of urban environments are a wicked problem that will keep people busy (and procrastinating) for a long time.
Indeed, I visited Amsterdam for the first time recently and was in awe at what they've done. My dream is to make Boston's infrastructure as close to Amsterdam as we can, even though it will take more than my lifetime to get there.
The construction of the Somerville bike path predates me, so I can't comment on it or whatever funding snafu it might have resulted from, but I can say that the result has been absolutely fantastic, and has turned that area into the thriving heart of Somerville. Every time that I ride along it during the day it is a delight, thick with people going for walks, rollerblading, children out playing, climbing in the trees along the path or enjoying the gardens and art projects that line it. If that's what a boondoggle looks like, then I'll take that over most publicly-funded boondoggles.
A bit part of getting to better places is not worrying too much about the costs. You still need the departments monitoring for fraud, but otherwise once a decision is made you stick with it and move on to the next question. Over time that starts to snowball.
I don't have numbers, but I can tell you that the city government is serious about providing other alternatives to cars. For example, making buses free. [1]
Free buses should not be considered in any city. Spend that money on more frequent routes. People will not use a free bus that only comes once an hour, or doesn't stop close to them. Until your city is covered with transit coming every 5 minutes you need to work on that not cost.
Not even the best transit cities have transit every 5 minutes all over the city. There is a lot of room to improve in them all
It'll only cut down on traffic if all the new arrivals in Boston do not use cars and many older Boston residents also give up their cars. Fundamentally, transit is an investment into infrastructure that has better scaling properties than car-centric development. It's there to absorb further growth in the region.
You don't need to give up the car - you just need to reduce car trips.
The easiest way to do that is reduce commuting trips, as those are very common, but you can reduce trips in other ways, such as allowing more gas stations/convenience stores. If it's a five minute drive to the grocery store but a two minute walk to a 7-11, some of those trips to the grocery store will be replaced with walks to the 7-11.
The ultimate goal is not to reduce "traffic" (however you define it), the goal is to produce dense, livable cities that don't require car ownership in order to live. The reduction in car-related negative externalities is merely one happy side effect of this.
The bike lanes mentioned above all, by physical necessity, come at the expense of cars, either by reducing parking lanes or reducing driving lanes. Even if there were the same amount of traffic, fewer cars would be on the road because there is less road to be on.
Traffic is worse than it ever was. I basically avoid going in for activities any longer. Which is fine. But it's mostly not worth going in to meet people in the city in the evening at this point.
I actually live near commuter rail and will generally take a 90-120 minute total drive + train ride (every hour at most) + subway in for a 9-5 event. It makes zero sense for an evening event. I'll somewhat reluctantly do the 90 minute drive in and hour drive home now and then to go to the theater or some other thing I really want to do.
So it's not as simple as take the bus. (Which doesn't exist.) But that's fine. I mostly just don't go in.
What you say isn't possible is being done with the greatest amount of success in Amsterdam, great success in Copenhagen, and it's picking up steam now in Paris. Just to mention a few.
It's a gradual process, and part of the problem is actually embedded on your analogy, it's not like perform a heart and artery transplant, because there's no single action that can solve the problem, but years, and years of multiple, small and large initiatives, to make car dependency goes down.
The speed of change is very slow. The "greatest amount of success" in the cities you mention has been a decades-long process that merely reduced the car density in select inner parts of the cities.
We are not talking about perfection being the enemy of the good. The congestion of the daily car commute is as real as anywhere.
Ultimately its a question of finding accelerating solutions (the way). The article I commended on focuses too much on a certain value set (the will).
There are good things being invented. Tiny electric cars for example, that in principle could halve the car density. But remember the paradox that more space will simply lead to more traffic.
Ultimately the entire distribution of work, residential and utility/shopping areas must change. This is not shapped so much by individual preferrences around mobility as it is about real eastate and transport economics, incentives for developers, manufacturers and financiers, interplay with local government tax strategies etc.
Its a wicked problem. Being clear about the challenges can only be good. Blind faith doesnt always carry the day.
Odense in Denmark, 200k. Good public transportation, never needed a car when visiting it. Roskilde is even smaller 50k and fine to get around walking, biking or by public transportation.
I'm from Australia, which is close to the size of the continental US but with less than 10% of its population. I know how big and how sparsely populated the US is, and don't really see your point.
Yeah, there are big areas of country Australia and the US where you need a car to get to anything. This is a good reason to have access to a car for some of the population. It's not a reason for the towns themselves to be built with carparks everywhere, no footpaths, massive outlets distributed far apart, bad public transport that doubles as crisis housing for the local homeless population, no pedestrian safety and comfort features like roadside trees, lawns instead of gardens, and everything else that makes up sterile urban sprawl.
In that town in question, I imagine the average household lives on at least quarter acre lots if not more, and that's how they want to live. Does that sound similar to Copenhagen? Is it realistic then to expect a Copenhagen transit style to be functional in that town?
That's just work, and still a pretty low percentage. Lots of folk doing grocery shopping, visiting friends, etc. by other means of transportation (cycling primarily). And where cars do intersect with daily life (i.e. not on the highway), they're integrated way more safely into the infrastructure.
Amsterdam is not an isolated example for the Netherlands where density can easily match a mid sized US city. Further, the density of a downtown district in that same town could easily match the density of a block in Amsterdam (the buildings are only 2 to 4 stories tall)
The examples from those other towns and general strategies employed could easily translate to a smaller town. Alternatively, that smaller town could use towns in the Netherlands as a template for growth rather than say LA
Every once in a while there's a real challenge. Rental e-bikes and e-scooters currently.
The problem is that these are crippled by regulations that only apply to the new transportation modes.
In Los Angeles we put GPS speed limiters and parking enforcement on scooters while letting cars park practically anywhere. You can drive 80mph through a school zone and nobody will do anything unless a cop happens to be there when you do it.
It feels like an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen.
This is what the car lobby wants you to think. The transformation to a better and more livable city free from overwhelming car traffic is closer and faster than you imagine. The primary challenge is the power of the car-industrial complex both inside and outside government and the continued work to destroy and hobble other forms of transit.
Not everyone lives in a city. And certainly not everyone lives in an LA/NYC city.
The city I live in is modest in size, 250k-300k depending on who you ask. It will never be a walkable city. Throughout much of the year, that's asking to die of heatstroke or something. It will never have a subway. Hell, there's only one or two buildings that are more than 5 stories tall. It is hundreds of miles away from any city of comparable size. My in-laws live in a township of about 6000 an hour away.
Are we supposed to give up cars? I have a 6 minute ride to work in the morning if I hit the stop lights wrong. Why would I ride the piss-stinking bus, when it'd add 20 minutes of irritation to my day?
It's not a car-industrial complex that is an obstacle to your imagined utopia. It's that there are people like myself who don't want to make our lives more difficult so that yours gets better. I'd be shocked if there's a non-coastal city or town anywhere in North America that supports your vision.
> Throughout much of the year, that's asking to die of heatstroke or something.
One could say the same about Singapore yet they find ways to make it work.
> It will never have a subway.
250k-300k is about the right size for a small tram network - compare e.g. Ghent.
> Hell, there's only one or two buildings that are more than 5 stories tall.
That's fine if there's no need for them.
> It is hundreds of miles away from any city of comparable size.
Sounds like banning cars from the centres of bigger cities won't really inconvenience you then.
> Are we supposed to give up cars? I have a 6 minute ride to work in the morning if I hit the stop lights wrong.
If traffic isn't a problem then there's no reason to give up cars. But generally as cities grow they reach a point where space is at a premium and cars take up too much of it. Again if we look at Ghent as a good example for a city that size, they have a car-free zone but it's only a few blocks around the very centre (there's a larger zone around it where cars are permitted but subject to emission requirements). It works well, makes for a really nice city centre that you can actually live in.
> Why would I ride the piss-stinking bus
What if I told you it was possible to have busses that don't stink of piss?
> It's not a car-industrial complex that is an obstacle to your imagined utopia. It's that there are people like myself who don't want to make our lives more difficult so that yours gets better.
Why do you think any change must be about making your life more difficult? Your whole post seems to be about looking for every possible problem and not making the slightest effort to look for solutions to them.
Singapore didn't "find ways to make it work". They built that city from the ground up into what it is now.
My city can't time-travel back 100 years and get a do-over. This point of yours is purely asinine.
>> Hell, there's only one or two buildings that are more than 5 stories tall.
>That's fine if there's no need for them.
So you're just incapable of comprehending simple things, or is it a refusal to understand them when doing so would be inconvenient for your argument?
This is a rough description of density. For any half-assed New Yorker scheme to be even marginally viable, I would have had to have described a far different density. Something like Some Sim City 2000 arcology.
> Sounds like banning cars from the centres of bigger cities won't really inconvenience you then.
So go for it. Literally none of the rest of us care. Build a gigantic wall around those big cities too. 500ft tall, topped with razor wire. Tell all the inhabitants that it's to keep us rednecks out.
We'll thank you for it.
> If traffic isn't a problem then there's no reason to give up cars.
Every third comment here is about how they want to get rid of cars far beyond whatever traffic problems it might cause you. I doubt the intention of your movement, such as it is, to only ban them in city centers. Just a year ago, we saw this movement pop up out of nowhere, and I have my doubts that it arose organically.
> What if I told you it was possible to have busses that don't stink of piss?
How do you propose that? Any anti-piss-stink policy would subvert your other social policies.
> Why do you think any change must be about making your life more difficult?
Because this is all so transparent.
> Your whole post seems to be about looking for every possible problem a
I wish I lived in a reality where purposely ignoring every possible problem was not only expected but celebrated.
> and not making the slightest effort to look for solutions to them.
I have zero interest in trying to solve the intractable problems your wishful thinking has dreamed up. I have even less interest than that in doing so for free. Offer me salary of $250,000/year with well-defined bonuses, and I can grind through at least a few of them.
> Singapore didn't "find ways to make it work". They built that city from the ground up into what it is now.
Nonsense. Like every healthy city, it's been continuously rebuilt.
> This is a rough description of density.
Right. Bigger cities need more tall buildings (or rather, find more tall buildings worthwhile). Smaller cities don't. I don't know what it is you think I don't get.
> So go for it. Literally none of the rest of us care.
Then why are you posting about how much you don't care, and how all these schemes must be stopped?
> Every third comment here is about how they want to get rid of cars far beyond whatever traffic problems it might cause you. I doubt the intention of your movement, such as it is, to only ban them in city centers.
There are lots of people with their own intentions, but as far as I'm concerned as long as you're remediating your pollution (properly remediating it, not just buying some certificates that say you promise to not cut down some trees or something) and not killing/injuring people I don't care about you driving where there's space for it. Car drivers demanding a bunch of space in the city is what I take issue with.
> Just a year ago, we saw this movement pop up out of nowhere, and I have my doubts that it arose organically.
Now you're getting into conspiracy theory - maybe try making some friends under 45. The younger generation aren't into cars just as they aren't into guitar rock. It's been going on far longer than a year (I've been saying this stuff at least 6 years), the pandemic just made it a bit more visible.
> How do you propose that? Any anti-piss-stink policy would subvert your other social policies.
I don't know, my city doesn't have the problem, because voters wouldn't stand for it if they did. Maybe start holding your government to higher standards.
> I have zero interest in trying to solve the intractable problems your wishful thinking has dreamed up.
The only intractable problem here is in your head, and it's only intractable because you want it to be. We know these policies work. We have cities where they're working already.
I recommend re-reading the hacker news comments guidelines. Assuming less about others and speaking for yourself only would make for a better discussion.
It id curious you seem entirely convinced that a car free "them" is necessarily taking from you. When your home town grows to be double the size and experiences gridlock, following the example of other cities, there are other ways to do it (and perhaps those ways aren't negative for you at all)
"We're not coming for your X!" is the lead-in. They need to be entrenched first, before they let anyone know the real play (if indeed they ever do). Plenty of useful idiots who truly believe in the PR spin too... so when they repeat it to you, in their own heads they're not lying. Just telling you a beautiful truth. And if you ever do catch one of the cynical ones who will tell you like it is...
They can be denounced. Or even dismissed as an obvious false flag. "We're the good guys, we'd never say that!"
I did speak for myself. I explained why this doesn't work for me, why I have no interest in it, and how there are millions of other people who will agree with me unless you find a way to deceive them.
Your condescending comment though doesn't make me feel bad for what I've said, it's expected. I'm actually a little amazed about how a group of semi-unorganized humans can do these things without coordination and succeed so often. You're all like some slime mold... no gigantic brain yanking on the marionette strings. And yet the puppet still dances.
> It id curious you seem entirely convinced that a car free "them" is necessarily taking from you.
It's pretty transparent. This won't be pursued in NYC council, this won't be pursued in the NY state legislature. It's a car free "everyone" masquerading as a car free "just them".
And with the onslaught underway, the only possibly opposition strategy with a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding is to throw up every roadblock, aggravate every irritation, stall every effort. Chances are we're not going to be friends, I think.
@NoMoreNicksLeft, the other responses cvan be ignored for now.. Consolidating things into one message, I say this: I find your answers very interesting, if anything because to me they seem completely irrational. That is just to say I do not understand why you are saying what you are, nor am I even really aware of _any_ examples that would adequately back it up. That is my perspective so far (not up for debate, it is a statement of my perception).
> "We're not coming for your X!" is the lead-in
What exactly are you afraid would be that X? We are talking about restricting a quarter mile, a single downtown square block from vehicle traffic and letting people walk in the streets. Is that X possible "your car", and do you plausibly think that allowing a few sections of downtown road become pedestrian zones would then lead to your car being seized from you somehow? Serious question. Can you walk through how that would happen step by step?
> I did speak for myself. I explained why this doesn't work for me, why I have no interest in it, and how there are millions of other people who will agree with me unless you find a way to deceive them.
(A) this is a contradictory statement as you are already assuming there are millions that agree with you. (B) You stated that "literally the rest of us", which also is speaking for a lot people other than yourself.
Where my issue is really with this statement is the complete 'othering' aspect. Are you sure that everyone that disagrees with you is either stupid or has been deceived? Every single one of them? And in no case does that describe any of your points of view? (As an aside, I do often wonder what things I think about others actually do also apply to myself. I think it's a healthy exercise). As far as the hacker new commentary guidelines, we are to explore the reasons for disagreement. So far you've called anyone that has disagreed with you as simply stupid. This strikes me as both arrogant and narrow minded. Perhaps you are simply unaware of things that make other people think otherwise.
I'll end with mentioning that admins have banned this thread. I'm not the only one that thinks you're not in the spirit of hacker news. I regret a bit that I don't actually understand how you've explained the way you feel, and it is a perspective I would like to learn more about.
You also mention, I did speak fir myself and then state there are "millions" that agree and then assume utter malice that "unless they are decieved". I'll point out the contradiction there followed by bad faith.
I'm a bit curious what actual "X" people have actually come for and taken from you. Clean water, the right to not breathe in toxic fumes, seafood free of contaminant, your guns?
Last mention, you say onslaught. From many perspectives that onslaught has been the guarantee of 1/3 of city land dedicated to freeparking, road subsidies payed by federal money and property taxes. Building codes that require space for cars, etc. Perhaps this mode of living does not scale, is unsustainable and does not entirely work for everyone. That is not to say the desire is to change things for everyone, but perhaps allow a grocery store to be built on the bottom floor of an apartment building for those that do want it (currently illegal in many places due to zoning laws). Your arguments at some point seem selfish, that car culture that you have no problem with must be imposed on others in every context.
You mentioned "literally the rest of us", which is not speaking for yourself.
Concrete jungles where there is a giant parking lot and you drive to get from one end to the other is what is at discussion. Perhaps those could be built differently. Towns that are built along a highway and become a giant strip mall, and the good parts are the "old town" where you don't have to walk a mile to simply cross the street. I mean, car culture has won, and it's not at all - all good. The fact you see "conspiracy" and that this is a "grift" I feel says more about your entrenched views than much else.
I did not mean to be condescending. Though, your comments DO violate this communities code of conduct for discussions.
Cities of 200k have good transit in some areas. Look around for inspiration. Most of them do not have English as the native language so it can be hard finding them
I have no desire to be "inspired". Others may wander around hoping to have epiphanies about how everyone else should live, but I don't care how others live as long as they leave me alone. I don't want them to make themselves miserable making it better for me...
It's enough that they don't make things worse for me specifically and spitefully. I do wonder why that wouldn't be good enough for you.
Some changes would make your life better. The naive way most English speakers do transit is worse, but that doesn't mean transit itself would make your life worse if done in a different way.
It may be the case that on average everyone's life would be better. But this seems to be some fundamental misunderstanding of how averages work. Someone's quality of life increases, someone else's goes down. And maybe theirs doesn't go down as much as someone eles's goes up... so the average is up.
But if you're the one poor schmuck whose quality of life goes down. Then it sucks to be you.
I can already see that I am in that group. No thanks.
In the US, public transit will always be an awful, reeking experience unless the cost of that transit rules out those who vandalize, defecate, and litter. It may be different in Japan or Belgium or some place like that... but engineering solutions don't fix sociological problems.
The same status quo that has lousy public transit is the status quo that gets us a lot of "those who vandalize, defecate, and litter". There's no reason we are stuck with that stuff being rampant. There's a strong case that the inequities in our economic system set us up to get those results even.
It's easy in places that became dominated by cars after the fact, like Netherlands and Japan in the 70s or many other European and Asian cities today, but much of American suburbia is designed for cars. There might just not be viable options other than cars or motor vehicles. Corner shops are unviable because a relatively low number of people live within a walking or biking distance.
> Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person
Nonsense.
Ljubljana went from full of cars downtown to a 1 square mile pedestrian area with zero cars. It’s fantastic. And all the major arteries into the city went from 2 lanes to 1 lane + bus.
Amsterdam famously reversed its car centric design in the 1980’s.
Even San Francisco was able to close its main city artery to car traffic and transform many of the big roads with dedicated bus and bike lanes.
And those are just the cities I know about. There’s bound to be more. The feat is completely possible, but takes a while as any large refactoring does.
Another big example is Tokyo. Sure there's cars and roads in Tokyo, but it's absolutely not the major way that people move around. It's a relatively car light city.
Or closer to NA have a look at Vancouver. From a high level looking at the whole region, it's about as devoted to cars as everywhere else in North America, though if you peek down to the neighbourhood level you can see some incredible successes in moving people away from car use. In the near downtown West End area for example, some 45% of the population walks to work.
Honestly it feels like when a city/area gets dense enough people naturally stop using cats because it just isn’t practical. Most trips in SF are faster on a bicycle than by car, for example.
Then when that happens, it’s easy to refactor architecture to be more in line with what people are doing already.
You'd think so but with the anemic enforcement we have in the US this often isn't the case. Who cares if all the parking spots are taken up when you can just double park in a lane and nobody will do anything about it. When you can speed up the shoulder and skip a few traffic jams with no consequences, why not? Red light running has increased multi-fold since the start of the pandemic. In a lot of busy American cities you'll notice that the lack of enforcement on bad driver behavior means that drivers will bend as many rules possible to make their mode convenient for them. It's an inherent dynamic in car centrism here.
I’ve only lived in SF and Ljubljana so can’t speak of other cities, but in both of those we simply ran out of room. Even if you break all the rules, there’s more cars than space and a walk/bicycle/skateboard/scooter becomes the faster mode of transport unless the city decides to demolish hundreds of buildings to make more room.
I also like how most of Paris has sidewalks lined with bollards so you can’t park there even if you wanted to. Although I always end up running into them as a pedestrian … they hit right at crotch level lol
Careful to draw conclusions from SF it’s just about the only place in the US with decent weather year round in the US. Most the rest is baking hot or incredibly wet (or both) in the summer, and if they aren’t they likely have several months of snow in the winter. Some places even manage both.
I also said Ljubljana, a place that regularly hits -15C and +39C in the same year. This does not stop people from biking and walking everywhere year round. It is also built on a swamp so a summer day with 35C and 80% humidity is not uncommon.
Ok a lot less biking in winter, but always lots of walking.
Yeah, my town spends a month or two a year at 40c and 90% humanity. That’s a whole nother level. Like, 99 seconds just standing outside will have you covered in sweat, but the sweat can’t actually evaporate because of how humid it is.
Literally so hot the elderly and otherwise vulnerable are frequently told not to go outside at all in summer. Heat emergencies are a thing.
I don't mean to be rude but are you over 45? There is a will with most people under that age in my experience. Or maybe cars are important culturally where you live?
Many people under 45 don't have the same requirements for transport, though. It's easy to say you don't need a car when you're mobile and don't have to ship kids around.
We try to minimize our car usage - we have one car for our family of 6; I ride an electric scooter to work etc. Not having a car at all though would be basically impossible unless we decided to cut out the kids sport and traveling to visit family.
You're still way ahead of the game compared to so many American families. Most of my neighbors have more cars than licensed drivers at home.
We aren't going to eliminate cars in my lifetime (hopefully I've got a good 40 years or so left) but if we can get more households going car-light that's still significant progress.
I live in New York City and even here I’m really not convinced most people under 45 have a will to get rid of cars. There isn’t a huge passion for them either, more like a resigned acceptance.
What I don't understand is that you can keep the car-centric cities we have and still improve some zones. You could create pedestrian streets, for example. And you could allow shops and commerces to open fronts on more than just a few blocks in a commercial street. Yet US cities refuse to do both. Here in SF we got slow streets, which nobody asked, and basically did not change anything about the topology of the streets. Not a single pedestrian street was created during covid, and restaurants had to fight to turn parking space in parklet. Parklets are being removed everywhere now.
And more importantly, lots of Western European countries are following that, a couple of decades later - so even today, it's possible to make strides in that direction.
I didn't own a car for about 7 years while I lived in different countries. I can't say sometimes I didn't miss it, but I managed just fine.
Last year we moved to the US, and we couldn't last 6 months without a car. I mean, technically we could, but it made life so extremely inconvenient as to not be worth it. Also, the alternative was to use tons of Ubers, which I'm not entirely convinced counts as ditching the car.
Yes indeed, but there's no reason even in the U.S. that we need to stick with private car ownership. We could easily get by and accomplish everything we need, even with the current awful car-dependent situation by actually sharing cars more.
Uber is not the answer really as is, but some form of fewer cars used more often with much less parking needed — that would be an improvement.
If we can then get rid of half the parking lots and fill them in with a mix of medium-density mixed-use development and green space, that could set us up for enough walking/biking/transit contexts that we can take the next step away from car dependency.
I've always suspected that you could do something interesting with a moderate density apartment complex where renting the apartment comes with the ability to use any of the X vehicles the complex owns.
It would be some bit of legal/liability wrangling and maybe some accounting to do it, but imagine if you had 50 families in a building, and ten vehicles available ranging from a small car to a pickup truck to a van to a moving truck. Tune it a bit and there you go!
Yeah, it's a lot easier to imagine a car-free world when you're in New York and you can walk around a corner to a grocery. The rest of us live at least ten minutes from the nearest grocery by car, which makes for about a thirty minute walk, which is fine, unless you need more than two days of food, or it's snowing, or you just don't have an extra hour or so that day.
The shift to trains/bikes is harder, but the shift to buses is not as bad from what I've seen, because it re-uses car infrastructure well, and can be improved with minimal construction (often, just signage making a lane bus-only or similar).
Paint is not good enough. Bike lanes separated from the road by just paint and no significant barrier like bollards or something will not be used much because bikers won't feel safe, and cars will use it as a parking lane.
It's a spectrum. As a biker, of course I prefer real, separated lanes. But there are plenty of roads that I will bike on despite having only painted-on lanes. Others might be less lenient (would only bike on separated lanes) or more lenient (the die-hard lycra warriors). Even just having a painted-on lane is an improvement because it accommodates some people who previously wouldn't have biked, and that's still an improvement, and it's an approach that can be done very cheaply. That doesn't mean we should be satisfied with only painted-on lanes, but I won't let the perfect be the enemy of progress.
I have a strong desire to bike but I won't do it on those lanes. They're not as bad as the painted bike symbols that say "theoretically you can ride a bike on this road" but they're still not going to make me comfortable enough to do it. I'm barely comfortable enough with these other drivers to get into an actual vehicle on the roads due to the maniacs I see out there so bikes are a slim chance.
While that's a step in the right direction, I've biked in areas where this is the approach, and I'll say that if I weren't in a self-destructive phase of my life at that time, I probably wouldn't have risked my life like that.
Paint doesn't make people drive slower--it's at best encouragement, and a lot of people don't. And that's when the bike lane is even clear: often it just gets used as a temporary parking area for Ubers and delivery vehicles, making it fairly useless for bikes during busy times.
Take a look at the paint next time you drive by. Is it marked with black streaks from tires crossing it? Would driving habits change if, say, some large rocks were lined along the paint stripe?
Without at least bollards the road isn't actually thinner, so people don't actually drive slower. And without at least bollards, I wouldn't let my kids ride in a bike lane— which means many other people won't feel safe either. It's unfortunate that politicians get away with this willful disregard.
Naw, due to climate chaos, we'll have widespread civilizational collapse and the plain breakdown of the car-supporting infrastructure within less than 50 years.
I haven't read the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Made_by_Hand series but my impression is that Kunstler would agree with you except with the caveat that there won't be cars or trains or buses overall, mostly just return to actual low-scale functioning like horses.
I hope we keep cars, but they are self driving, electric, cheap and you don’t own one you book one on your app. You might end up sharing it. Some will be mini buses for ride shares.
Best of both worlds. No need to own a car but the convenience is there when you need it.
The political issue I've seen is that the people who are even part of the conversation about reducing car use, tend to be somewhat over-the-top about it. Most people are just apathetic about it, or consider bike traffic to be an annoying indulgence.
For the most part people didn't ride horses to get around town (despite what Westerns depict). Horses were mostly used to pull carts moving goods around like trucks do today. The average city dweller walked or rode trams.
Even so, that's just using a cart and a hired one at that. I mean the analogy of a horse to a car (as in something you owned personally and rode around on) was never really true, at least in cities. Also, speaking of London, the Underground is surprisingly old -- the first parts of the system opened in 1863. Yes, Sherlock Holmes is often depicted as going by hackney, but had he really existed, he could have ridden the Tube.
I've purposefully chosen, and paid the higher rent for, an apartment that's on the greenbelt in my city and close to work so that I can use my car less. As a couple we still own two cars but really only use them to transport our dog to trailheads. The exercise pays dividends, and at just over two miles from work it takes maybe three minutes longer getting to work than driving to a parking garage.
I feel fortunate to make enough money to easily afford the rent, but it's insane that in most places you need a high paying job to escape needing a car. Refugee and low-income housing here is clustered around major streets like six-lane one-way transport corridors. Unless they work downtown or close to a stop on one of the few bus lines that run frequently and reliably, they need cars. Usually the cheapest they can afford, which likely means they need to spend money they don't have to get them passing emissions tests at registration time, deal with breakdowns, high insurance premiums, etc.
It doesn't help that most of the planned transit improvements seemingly are focused on greenification of buses rather than just getting more buses on the road to expand routes, make lines frequent enough to use for commuting, etc.
My city did pass some new zoning codes which heavily cut back on parking requirements, I'm excited to see how that (slowly) pans out. I expect more high-capacity parking structures to go up, fewer surface lots. People might need to walk further or explore other last-mile options, I have hope that will turn people's eyes towards non-vehicle transportation improvements.
I’m surprised by the association that Americans make between suburbs and cars. Sure, it’s common there, but it wasn’t always, and it’s not outside of the USA.
Take something as far back as New York in the 60s depicted in _Mad Men_: Don Draper commutes by train. He lives a little away from the station, but that’s hardly something a well-timed local bus couldn’t easily bridge.
Many people still do today. It’s the same thing in most capitals where I’ve lived, and those big enough to be featured in movies. Suburbanites commute to London, Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Chicago, Tokyo, Moscow, Delhi, Peking, Shanghai, and every large China city by local train. I know places where people don’t, but I can’t think of a single place where that’s not a nightmare.
Light rail is a super slow form of transport in LA and Portland.
I think you are right that cars are reaching a certain tipping point of efficiency but they still beat the public transit in most categories.
Mass transit has the issue in that it tries to serve too many masters. Should it be faster (more expensive, serving few people)? Should it be serving the less wealthy (more stops, less money)? By trying to appease too many groups of people it tends to miss both marks.
I don't remember specifics from the show but probably Don Draper's wife drove him to whatever commuter rail station in Westchester Country or southern Connecticut and he took the train to Grand Central Station and walked to his office on Madison Avenue from there.
If I worked in Boston/Cambridge, I could (and sometimes do) take the train in a similar manner though it takes me 90-120 minutes each way depending upon destination.
He lived in Ossining, NY, which is large enough that many residents would not live within a 30 minute walk from the train station, which also has a small parking lot for geographic reasons, so it made sense that his wife would drive him to the station.
When you live in an average American suburb you cannot walk down the road to a store. You may or may not have a sidewalk. There will not be reliable public transit. You have to get in the car and drive to do anything. There's no other way.
Saying something like "New York" immediately invalidates the rest of your comment as New York (City) is one of the few areas with meaningful public transit.
We worship cars here. Cars are like Freedom Jesus. If you do anything to mess with cars you are a filthy communist who should die according to the general public.
Saying something like "New York" immediately invalidates the rest of your
comment as New York (City)
New York != New York City. Don Draper lived in Ossining, which is about forty (40) miles north of Lower Manhattan (New York City). What's being discussed is commuter rail, not dense intracity transit. Commuter rail systems exist across the country and are absolutely a viable way of getting folks out of cars.
A commuter rail still requires a person to navigate the suburbs to get to the station which requires... cars.
I'm not against public transit. I just understand the reality of the United States. If it helps the poors or minorities with tax dollars we don't do it here.
People find cars the easiest way to get around and they support things to make that easier. The average person wants to be able to travel somewhere easy and when they get there park. If that means more parking and wider roads they may support that. I hate arguments that latch onto a small extremist view and try to paint everyone with that broad stroke. Supporting cars is not some right wing agenda.
Every suburb I have lived in has been walkable for the main items (grocery, bar, getting to public transit). If you want to live in the suburbs and walk you have to make that your priority but it is very doable.
Supporting cars is not the right-wing agenda. Blocking public transit funding and buildouts are.
> Every suburb I have lived in has been walkable for the main items (grocery, bar, getting to public transit).
Every suburb I have ever lived in or been to has not been walkable for any items. No bar, no restaurant, no store, no public transit. There were also no bike lanes nor any sidewalks. I live where I can afford to be within reasonable distance to employment. I don't have control beyond that to decide to live elsewhere.
You pick where you live. If you want to live somewhere that doesn't require a car you need to pick carefully. It does exist in the suburbs from Miami, to Portland, to Seattle, to LA, to Chicago, there are suburbs you don't have to have a car for and almost every major city in the US has that option.
You pick where you live but it's not a matter of having a free choice. You can only live so far from where you work or where employment is. There are constraints on your choice. I live in a place I can afford within reasonable commute to my employer as does nearly anyone else.
Isn't the reason the rent is higher because you can forego a car? For example, the average monthly car payment for a used car is supposedly $526[0] and insurance $168[1]. So if you get rid of that, you can afford nearly $700 more per month in rent (assuming you can still qualify by having household monthly gross income of 3x the rent).
So, in your case, you only really need to make more to afford a walkable lifecycle if you still want to own a car and have the option to use it to drive to places outside of your walking distance. Of course, completely moving to a lifestyle where all travel is public trasit and airport-based is tough to achieve, but it could be a worthwhile price to pay depending on how often you travel and where (since the time investment is also high for cars in the U.S. with how far apart each city is from the next).
If you are rich the payment might be $500. The poor are buying used cars for $5000 and keeping it for a few years, so lets knock that down to $250/month (including maintenance). Their insurance is cheaper as well (if they even bother with it...). You can get your monthly costs even lower if you know how to buy a reliable car that you maintain yourself (or for free by friends/family) - which the poor are likely to do.
I went without a car for a year a few years ago (personal challenge / to save some money), and had a spreadsheet detailing the cost of ownership for a $10k car. Costs:
* Insurance: $640
* Registration: $51
* Repairs: $200
* Depreciation: $300
* Opportunity cost (assuming a 6% ROI on the $10k): $600
All in cost (excluding gas): $1790
At the time, I was comparing the cost of owning a car vs using car2go, uber, etc for a few trips a month. In the end, it basically just showed that owning a car wasn't all that expensive, and the convenience was WELL worth it.
My current car is worth ~$5k, and these numbers are actually a fairly good representation of my costs over the past few years. I take it in once a year to get the oil changed, and do other small repairs, but otherwise it just kinda.. works. Parking and other costs from living in a city might swing this calculus a bit more, but at the end of the day, you don't need a brand new car, and a modest 10 year old car can drive well, without costing you very much.
Until you're poor you don't realize how cheaply you can keep a vehicle running, nor how many people are just driving around without insurance, license, and various other "necessities".
This is the secret underbelly to the car-centric design of the US. People drive illegally all the time. They drive over legal BAC limits, they drive without insurance, they drive unlicensed, they don't pay parking tickets, they drive looking down at their phones and not at the road.
When you're poor and you live in an area completely unserved by public transit and you lose your license because you can't afford to pay parking tickets, are you really going to stop driving and lose your job and become homeless?
We have statistics to show what unlicensed and uninsured driver crash and fatality rates are like and they're a lot higher than the rest of the cohort, but there's still a sizable part of the US population that does all of these things and still uses the same public road infrastructure as everyone else, often out of lack of alternatives.
And to get your car registered in most states, you usually only have to pass an emissions test, have a valid license, and have proof of insurance at the time that you register the car.
This means that 11 out of 12 months, you get to drive around without insurance.
Pretty much illegal everywhere in the US except for a few weird outliers. I think there’s one southern state that lets you have a bond instead of insurance?
Let's not. Average car payments and loan duration continue to rise. NerdWallet is putting the average new car loan at $700/mo for 70 months and the average used car loan at $525 for 68 months. About half of all Americans can't afford a $1,000 emergency, so it's pretty damn unlikely they'll be paying for even a $5,000 car without a loan. If you're poor not only are you taking out a loan you're getting socked with a high interest rate subprime loan that's going to cost you more than a loan to a wealthier person.
Seems like an obvious case of selection bias. Used car loans are going to be a lot higher than average prices people actually pay for cars, because people who take out loans to buy cars are buying more expensive cars than people who don't.
So, no, rich people aren't driving these ballooning loans they're going to the working poor. The excruciatingly poor don't own cars. Defaults were ticking up leading into the pandemic, people are simply living beyond their means at this point. Cars are expensive and have been getting more and more expensive.
In theory, yes, and a lot of lower income people do put that into practice and live in my same apartment complex. These people also usually own cars. The nearest grocery store is about a mile away, and the nearly bus stop is about the same distance. I occassionally bike to the store and have a bike trailer for groceries, but I have felt like I'm risking my life when carefully biking a trailer-full of groceries across the six lane 'street'.
Apart from Uber or hitching a ride from a friend, there's no good transportation option to our airport but I get your point. I think in most cases, given the option between a walkable (to work and restaurants) neighborhood and no car (and no good public transit), and suburbia with a car, most people would choose suburbia. Ease of getting groceries, ease of access to recreation, etc. What's really missing is the transit investment.
If you hit and seriously injure someone, that $35 insurance will not cover the multi-million dollar medical and legal and recompense bills.
This can be a working strategy if you don't have a dollar to your name (whomever you hit won't be able to squeeze blood out of a stone), and never intend to have a dollar to your name, but is generally ill-advised for someone in the middle-class, who has money and assets to lose.
> As a couple we still own two cars but really only use them to transport our dog to trailheads.
You can probably lose one.
When the wife and I left the Bay Area for the midwest we kept only one car. It simplified moving and if we needed another we could get one in the midwest.
Soon we'll have been a single-car family for two years.
Definitely. We actually own three, the intent of the newer one is to replace the other two eventually.
Old cars are a Prius for interstate trips, and an early 2000s Outback for camping/interstate trips where we need to bring more things with. Prius got severely damaged in our parking lot and I used the insurance payout to help with a down payment on a Crosstrek, which will eventually replace the Outback as well.
I feel bad for taking up the (free) parking space, but the cost of ownership of the Outback when infrequently used is something like a $40 insurance premium every six months. That's another benefit of not driving much -- low mileage and safe driver insurance discounts.
People don't realize how cheap it is to keep a vehicle maintained if you don't use it much at all.
And though insurance is officially "tied to the car" it's really tied to the driver; you can't drive more than one car at a time anyway so the third, fourth, tenth vehicle adds less and less.
When I owned two vehicles as a single person it wasn't that cheap to own my two seater car. It was at least a few hundred in insurance, registration, state inspection, some age-related maintenance. I eventually got rid of it for that reason.
> It doesn't help that most of the planned transit improvements seemingly are focused on greenification of buses rather than just getting more buses on the road to expand routes, make lines frequent enough to use for commuting, etc.
Important note here: US public transit use is way down from pre-pandemic levels and might never recover [1]. I've spoken to several city transit representatives about this and they're looking for ways to green and downsize their buses as a result of low demand. Adding more buses not only doesn't help if there aren't enough passengers, it makes things worse because buses are massively expensive (think quarter million dollars each), need expensive drivers and maintenance, etc. That's money that cities could be spending on things like improving housing instead.
When I moved to Michigan I never realized that a suburb could not have a side walk. This is not uncommon in Michigan. That means that if you walk, or run, rollerblade, skate it has to be done in the street. Also lots of things are so much farther in Michigan than they were when I lived in Mass. In Mass I could go 3 miles in 30 minutes. In Michigan I can go 70 miles in 60 minutes
I feel like loitering, like jay-walking, is a crime invented for the purpose of selling cars. There's nothing inherently wrong with just hanging out on foot in a place where people are meant to be on foot and/or hanging out.
If you own a house in a suburb, and some random people are sitting on the sidewalk directly in front of your house instead of going to a nearby park or anything else of interest to them, you might wonder what they're up to.
That's because American suburbs are culture and commerce deserts, designed to sell cars (and to promote racism! but that's not the current topic). If you own a house in a livable neighborhood, with stores down the street, it isn't that weird for people to hang out in any particular spot. There are perfectly non-nefarious things/people they could be waiting for.
This is what I meant in the second half of my previous comment.
Loitering in front of a house just looks suspicious, and I don't think there's any law against it. The crime is if you come back to find litter, or they've messed with your house.
I skimmed the article and I feel like nothing really answers the question to "How to quit cars", aside from pricing parking better. Personally, I'd love to be able to rely on cars less. They are kind of the epitome of tragedy of the commons. But as a lifelong suburbanite with 2 cars in a 2-person household, this is what I'd have to see to quit cars:
- Ability to get a vehicle on-demand (say within 5-10 minutes) 24/7/365, anywhere in Upstate NY, from cities to boonies.
- That vehicle would need to allow me to transport large goods, bulky goods (to an extent), lumber <6', flammable solvents
- also needs to accomodate 2 medium dogs
- I'd need dedicated bike lanes to the nearby shops and groceries before I could even attempt to use that as an option. There's stores only a few miles from me but the roads to get there are treacherous
There's more but those are the bare minimums, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
You can't have that, and also expect to live in a sparsely populated suburb.
I live in a dense city. I have a grocery store next door. I have car sharing cars in my street I can rent. This is feasible, because we're so many people within a few minutes walk. In a suburb this is impossible. Would be far too few people per shop or car.
You're kinda part of the problem talked about in an other comment here: you can't even visualize how things could be different. Basically you could only give up your car if you could live exactly as before..
But why can't your lumber get delivered? Do you need a car with huge dimensions just for the off chance you one time the next five years need to carry something big? Why not then rent something for the occasion?
Why do you constantly need to drive your dogs? Again, the reason is probably rooted in a car centric society. The solution isn't to fix all your needs, just without owning a car. The solution would be to make you able to do your hobbies and live your life without the gigantic sprawl.
I don't think it's impossible, but being in the suburbs makes it an uphill battle. Most suburbs in the United States are built very very intentionally to accomodate car and discourage other modes of transportation. Cul-de-sacs and winding roads only make sense with cars. The logistics of having a bus serve an area like that don't make sense, and even walking these winding, dead-end streets is a much bigger chore than, say, walking on relatively straight streets that try to connect point A to point B efficiently.
That said, I currently find myself in a suburb, and bicycling is actually okay. I can bike out of my neighborhood to reach the main streets, and there are actually pretty decent bike commuting paths once I reach them. If you're wanting to haul things like pets and lumber, recent cargo e-bikes can haul a lot. They're expensive, but they exist if that's a priority for you. I think bicycles can be a pretty decent option for people in the suburbs, at least sometimes. Plus, bikes are just fun!
That said, using my car less is a big goal for me, so I sometimes take the less convenient option. My longterm goal is to find a way to leave the suburbs and live in a city, though, so I can be much less card-dependent.
Cul-de-sacs are designed to frustrate cars! It is NOT at all hard to make something like that very walker friendly - just add paths for pedestrians and bikes that slip between the homes in strategic points, and now to drive somewhere you have to go around a whole square mile, but to walk it's direct.
And many suburbs in the USA are actually technically their own towns, some older, some younger, and you can walk around just fine if you plan a bit and want to.
After all, if you live in a town of 10k people almost by definition you can walk everywhere that is available.
I actually have it worse, I live directly on a 35mph (where people regularly do 50+) semi-main "stroad". The only nice thing is the fire department is also on this road, so it gets priority plowing. We get semi-trailers and dump trucks on it.
Walking with the dogs the approx 400' to the nearest cul-de-sac is a harrowing affair. Bike riding is so intimidating that my bike hasn't even gone outside in months. Yeah people ride on it but it's way outside my comfort zone.
Pretty much all of suburbia needs to be magically terraformed, for any of these things to be feasible.
> If you're wanting to haul things like pets and lumber, recent cargo e-bikes can haul a lot.
I don't think you realize how big a 3/4 x 48 x 96 is. I can't even fit it in my Forester without ripping it lengthwise and driving with the hatch propped.
That is the real problem. Suburbs are mostly dense enough to support good transit, but you can't get good transit into cul-de-sacs. The bus takes too long getting down each one, and if you live in the next one it is a waste of time going down it - while if you do live down that one it has to because you don't live in walking distance of a road they can get down. No cul-de-sac alone has enough people to support the bus.
A subway could be dug under everything, but the $$$ are too high. A gondola system could potentially go between houses and so serve a few cul-de-sacs before coming out at a suburban station - this looks like the lowest cost answer, but it still isn't cheap.
You don't need to get into the bag-ends. You just need to let the last mile be walking, and make lots of walking paths that feel like shortcuts.
Then the busses can stay on the straight main roads while all the cars go get lost in the culled sacs, while people walking or on bike have direct paths.
Some studies show people will walk 3/4 of a mile, which is about 15 minutes. That's a "circle" that is 1.5 miles across, which is a an area of about 1132 acres (Ignore that straight roads don't have circles; pretend the "extra" area is support stuff, shops, whatever). 1132 acres of single family housing is 13,000 houses if "close", upwards of 20,000 units if we go to townhomes/rowhouses.
13k dwelling units all within a 3/4 mile walk from the edge; that should support at least one bus.
> Most suburbs in the United States are built very very intentionally to accomodate car and discourage other modes of transportation. Cul-de-sacs and winding roads only make sense with cars. The logistics of having a bus serve an area like that don't make sense, and even walking these winding, dead-end streets is a much bigger chore than, say, walking on relatively straight streets that try to connect point A to point B efficiently.
Well, one could make an on-demand share taxi/microbus service that serves between those cul-de-sacs and the closest avenue that is served by full size fixed-route scheduled buses.
Dedicated bike lanes are totally feasible in a sparsely populated suburb. After all, much larger and more expensive car lanes are already in place. The main problem is that city planners don't even think about it.
Recently there's been a surge of 5-over-1 apartment complexes replacing old businesses and houses along my suburb's main road. Great, more dense housing, that's good. The main road has painted bike lanes in the middle of town, and dedicated multi-use paths further out in each direction. For some of these complexes, they had to tear up the road and sidewalk to add safe entrances. Not only did they NOT add more multi-use paths, but they actually approved the buildings to be closer to the road than ordinances typically allow, making a multi-use path unlikely to ever be put in.
This is the big part; if the people ask the city to do bike paths, they do them! They're insanely cheap when designing and building a new development; you can put them in the storm water runoff areas, etc.
Most sidewalks you see are set back from the road already, leaving a grass median for snow collection, etc. You can put a bike path in that area, if anyone cares.
They absolutely aren't insanely cheap. Folks have been pushing my town for bike lanes for years and it usually gets nowhere. We have like a handful of shitty bike paths and sidewalks that don't actually connect to the important centers.
The main commercial thoroughfare which runs north-south and would be the ideal place for one since it has Walmart, Aldi, Depot, pizza places, etc, doesn't even have a sidewalk. That's how ass-backward this area is designed.
I need to import this whole place into SimCity, bulldoze and redo huge swaths of it.
It does take a bit of will and time, but it's a great thing to grumble about at the council meetings; around here all new developments have to have a sidewalk plan (it's not required to be "both sides" but most do that anyway) and connect to the bike paths. They even had a fundraiser a few years ago to raise money to make a connector path, which is quite nice; every business had a little "bike path" jar and it got done.
> Basically you could only give up your car if you could live exactly as before.
You are basically saying, "Why don't you just radically change your lifestyle?" E.g. I need to drive my dogs and partner to my parent's place (which is only across town) once a week for dinner. This is an activity all of us really enjoy. Despite being only a few miles away, the route is not safely walkable/bikeable. Which means: car, either mine or a rideshare. Rideshare service sucks here (because almost everyone drives). Huge chicken and egg problem.
Some of my hobbies involve building stuff. I can and have had wood delivered. It's an $80 charge (or more) for each delivery. That's a huge dent, and means I have to plan every material I need.
I go camping a few times a year. That would be outright impossible without a dedicated vehicle. I could rent, but again, huge cost.
But my most vital hobby revolves around spinning fire props, which involves numerous bulky large objects, heavy fuel dunks, and flammable fuel.
So yeah, pretty much all my hobbies and things I need to do for mental health revolve around car access. But that's kind of what happens when you spend your whole life in an ultra car centric suburb. I can't imagine anything else because I'd have to terraform all of suburban upstate NY to be more like Europe, and that's not happening (not that I don't want to). This is why the car debate is obnoxious: city folks with limited experience are telling folks with totally different lifestyles "have you considered... not?" and it's incredibly patronizing. I know that's not your intent, but that's how it's usually interpreted.
My one hope is for affordable FSD on-demand ride share with a variety of vehicles. Otherwise having a car (two actually) is a mandatory sunk cost for me.
I think the main problem is how American cities are built: they are not intended to be walkable (the same is true for some modern European suburbs). Compare this with European city centers: having a car there is not a benefit, but a liability. You can get around mega cities such as Paris without having a car (taking a taxi for the 2 occasions a months where you'd need one). I recently visited Milan: we parked the car and then did not need it again once - despite having little kids. Why? Classic European cities are dense. They were built in a time where "walking" was the main means of transportation. And now that policies and opinions change, this older style of building gets fashionable again.
To be fair to the Europeans who own cars (In Europe, for example, the median national share of car owners was 79 percent [1]) life as a tourist is easy; the entire city is doing everything to make your car-free life work.
And every time I've touristed in Europe it's been great wandering around without a car (the times I've driven the backcountry with a car have been fun, too).
But all the people I've worked with when in Europe have a car (sure, it might be small) and drive when it makes sense, which is often.
This is a great way to put it. Quite often these arguments against cars feel completely blind to reality. We've built our cities and culture around having cars, we can't easily change that. Starting with some small regulations, like having bike lanes everywhere, would go a long ways. I would love to not pay for a second car, and gas, and insurance, but where I leave, it's just not reasonable.
Exactly, and team less-cars is not gonna win folks over with the "well just change your whole lifestyle you've lived for 30+ years and/or change the entire topology of the town" rhetoric.
I don't even think if the entire town got together and said "we want a sidewalk on the main drag with Walmart so carless folks don't have to contend with walking on the shoulder with cars doing 55 in a 45" it would go anywhere, cause there's nowhere to even put that without some huge eminent domain grab.
Where exactly would that bike infra go? There's literally nowhere to put a bike lane on 90% of the "strodes" in my town which would actually benefit from one.
It's not just a political or environmental problem, it's purely a "where does this infra even go" situation.
I would have to see the stroads but I can fit bike infra on perhaps the most famous stroad of all, Avenue des Champs-Élysées, so I'm sure I could figure it out.
One thing people don't realize is many US lanes are twelve feet wide, which is much wider than needed for slower traffic (in fact, one of the best ways to slow traffic down is to narrow the lane). An 18-wheeler is 8.5 feet wide, so even a 10 foot lane offers excess room.
If a stroad is three lanes each way, and they're 12 feet each, that's 12 feet that can be recovered simply by reducing lane width, and that doesn't even involve any sidewalk rearrangements.
But bike infra doesn't have to even follow the car infra, you can put a nice bike lane setup one block over from the stroad (more properly the arterial or collector). Nobody really wants to bike next to a bunch of cars anyway.
Unpopular opinion: public transport fundamentally sucks.
I've spent vast amounts of time commuting on public transport and by car.
You can't pay me to ever get on a bus again.
And not just in the US/Canada either. Even in the dense cities of Europe, public transportation << car transport. No bus can ever beat the comfort and convenience of putting a large amount of shopping / luggage in the back, getting in your private bubble, and going directly to your destination.
Then there's the people you meet on public transport. 99 / 100 of them are just people who want to go from A to B. But then there are the trouble-makers and weirdos. Do you really want to be stuck on a bus or train, straining under shopping bags or holiday luggage, with some unpredictable idiot eyeing you?
Some people, like newyorker.com, have a platonic ideal of public transport where we are all happily whisked from A to B on hyper-efficient and advanced vehicles, perhaps humming kumbaya to ourselves. But the reality is that it will always be inconvenient and slow - at best - and dangerous and super unpleasant in reality.
The one instance where public transport works well is when you want to travel 5-10 blocks, there's a lot of traffic, and you are carrying nothing, and there just so happens to be a subway going the right way.
The real way forward is to have electric cars, nuclear power plants, remote work, and maybe this new Musk tunnel thing.
So just being someone that got tired of the commute and moved to a dense European city that's a 2000 years old, there are several assumptions you make I can't agree with.
1. I've absolutely been menaced on the road several times in the USA, you have to share the road with that 1 of 100 idiot too, (in a fast multiton hunk of metal). You've discounted this in your head but treat that same risk on a bus or whatever as impossible to cope with. I get it, everyone has their preference but you're not being equitable in the comparison.
2. Tiny dense European cities suck to drive and park in, but tend to be rather pleasurable on foot as all the services are accessible there, not wallkign through a giant parking lot
3. Driving a car is crazy dangerous by the numbers. Again everyone has their preference and your entitled to yours but again not actually an equitable comparison.
4. You seem to have a high minded view of driving I did not really encounter in 24 years of driving in US cities.
In the end, you're entitled to your preferences and I encourage you to continue driving but please be fair in your comparisons and leave the rest of us to ours.
> Even in the dense cities of Europe, public transportation << car transport.
...and then talks about buses. Buses? Ever heard of trains?
Commuting by car sucks. You have to actively participate in traffic, as opposed to just sitting on the train and reading a book, for example. In most EU large cities trains are faster and more convenient than cars. You also forget the fact that even in the 2x8 lanes of LA motorway systems you still get traffic jams, you cannot imagine what would happen if in an EU city all people would follow your advice.
And if you live closer to your work, you can hop on a bike (an ebike, even!), and enjoy some fresh air. Luckily on this side of the world people are not forced to live in those prison-like residential areas where the only way to get to anywhere is by car.
> maybe this new Musk tunnel thing.
It is inconcievable to me how people can take anything that man says seriously, even as a passing thought. But if you do, just look at the Vegas tunnel, how well that turned out!
Even better, a lot of cities now offer free municipal bikes in good condition at every corner. It's pretty easy to just grab one where you need to go. Some even have municipal e-scooters, though those get in a lot more accidents.
Thirteen years ago I got rid of my car when I moved. I've lived in two different countries and three different cities with a population ranging from 80k to several million. In those thirteen years I've never wanted to buy a car.
I don't agree with you that public transport sucks. But it does suck in some situations.
But when I need to buy some furniture or transport luggage? I'm privileged enough to be able to ask parents and siblings to borrow theirs.
And just to use your own phrasing: Nothing beats getting on the bus in the morning, zooming past the traffic in the dedicated bus lane, reading a book, and having to walk a shorter distance than the people who drive to work have to walk from the parking lot.
But I understand that I'm lucky. I had the opportunity to buy an apartment so that I have a great bus route to work. I have the opportunity to borrow a car when I need one. The weather is warm enough most of the year that I can bike everywhere I want to go. I live five minutes walking distance from a grocery store.
And although electric cars are great; (If I did buy a car I'd probably buy something like the Renault Twizy) they are still cars. They still get stuck in traffic, they still need parking lots. They tear more on the road system due to the increased weight of the battery. The real way forward is to put people in a positition where they don't need a car for most errands. Walkable cities, bike infrastructure.
Many cities offer car sharing for the cases you should need a car or transporter. It's likely more expensive than lending one from a sibling though ;-)
I agree with current funding it's rare to see actually comfortable public transport, though there are some in my experience.
>But then there are the trouble-makers and weirdos. Do you really want to be stuck on a bus or train, straining under shopping bags or holiday luggage, with some unpredictable idiot eyeing you?
I feel this is just as true as with driving a car or walking a street. My friend was hit by a drunkard running red lights (hey received no permanent injury, but did fly in quite an arc). I'm constantly weary of people not using turn signals and not looking to their sides, multiple times I've almost gotten hit. Lots of situations where one driver will stop in front of a zebra crossing, and someone on another lane speeds through like a guillotine. Tons of users signal they're turning in an intersection, then take that signal off and drive straight, leading you to almost T-bone them. Road-ragers like to drive in front of you and hit the brakes, people try to take over constantly when you try to keep a safe distance to the car in front of you.
In general I feel non-professional drivers are unsuited for cars.
Your comment made me smile because I experienced the exact opposite just two days ago.
I usually get around either by bike or public transit, but I had to move some inconveniently shaped items (studio lights for photography), so I decided to rent a shared car. It took me almost 40 minutes for a trip that takes 10 minutes by bike and 15 minutes by public transit. It was also highly unpleasant, because the "weirdos" you mention also exist in car traffic. Only in this case, the "unpredictable idiots" are texting while driving and drifting out of lanes.
I'll need to transport the same things again next week and I'll either find a way to pack things more compactly so that I can take public transit, or I'll take a taxi (still takes longer, but at least I'm not the one dealing with traffic).
You're basically citing all of the pros of car travel, without listing any of the cons.
You're comment also shows a disdain and low opinion of some fictional archetype of people who think public transport is the solution to all of our problems.
The things you list in your "real way forward" are all things that reduce getting in contact with people in public spaces. If this is your personal priority, it explains why you hate public transport so much. Not everyone is like this.
I dislike working from home and only do it twice a week (if I can bring myself to it) to save on gas money. If I weren't dependent on my car for various reasons, I'd happily get rid of it for financial considerations alone.
When you go shopping bulky items you are even encouraged not to take public transportation. It makes it impractical for every one, the buyer and people they are sharing public transportation with. Using a car (or having things delivered to you when it applies) is much more practical, but most people don't go shopping or travel with luggage every day.
> The one instance where public transport works well is when you want to travel 5-10 blocks, there's a lot of traffic, and you are carrying nothing, and there just so happens to be a subway going the right way.
This really depends on each region/city. Cities like Paris or Munich have a very dense network of public transportation - Even getting from point A in city center to point B in a 30km away suburb can be easier using public transportation.
Buses have cavernous storage spaces beneath the passenger floor, atleast here in finland. You can fit practically as many bags as you manage to carry in there.
I think it's fair to point out that the buses with cargo space are mostly used for long distance routes. Local traffic buses used by most cities don't have dedicated space for luggage.
If all the money that was ploughed into car manufacture each year went into public transport (and active travel infrastructure) life would be highly convenient and traffic would cease to be a problem.
As for bulky things, shopping, and taking the kids to school, I use this and would recommend it to anyone.
> No bus can ever beat the comfort and convenience of putting a large amount of shopping / luggage in the back, getting in your private bubble, and going directly to your destination.
I've never owned a car, and never struggled with carrying shopping/luggage. I guess my lifestyle is kind of different to the typical North American style, where I am not buying large amounts of stuff in bulk, such that I cannot carry it. Instead I wear a backpack and take a few tote bags and buy the amount of groceries etc that I can carry. If I did buy something large like a sofa, I'd get it delivered. I'd probably do so even if I had a car, because the delivery people would be able to help with moving it into the house, too.
> The real way forward is to have electric cars, nuclear power plants, remote work, and maybe this new Musk tunnel thing.
It seems you're looking at this very one-dimensionally, only thinking of exhaust emissions. Cars still produce pollution through tyre and brake dust, noise pollution from tyre hum, and of course the source of power for the engine has zero impact on the safety of a vehicle.
to add to this, even the car production is a source of a lot of pollution. The best car to use is the one that you don't own.
Efficient public transportation + shared cars services/rental cars can help a lot with that for people who can't leverage using a bicycle or prefer not to during bad weather.
>95% of my transport is relatively close to home, with no more than a single bag of luggage. Cycling really can't be beat there.
Obviously doesn't work everywhere and for everyone, but I'm confident that it could work in more places than most people (especially outside the Netherlands) think, and where it does, it really is fantastic. Not just for the cyclists themselves, but everyone who isn't in the process of getting from A to B as well.
> Even in the dense cities of Europe, public transportation << car transport. <..> and going directly to your destination.
I won't pretend that there are no exceptions to the pros for public transport. Cars are there for a reason too. Sometimes combo is the best [0].
From stereotypes - I'd agree that LA's public transport is orders of magnitude worse than travelling by car. Though it sounds like OC actually never been in a moderately dense European city. You often _cannot_ go directly to your destination with a car [1] and your travel will often take longer [2]. I probably won't be wrong by saying that it will be an order of magnitude more expensive too [3].
If it's a big city - driving will cost you greatly and you will lose time. If it's a moderate city - driving will cost you a lot and maybe it will take similar amount of time. I don't see where it is a win for cars here?
> convenience of putting a large amount of shopping / luggage in the back
How often do you go shopping/carry luggage to the amounts you can't carry? Personally once every week or two.
P.S. I know that there could be exceptions to the rule, but I had in mind travelling inside the cities for common scenarios as going to work to the city centre.
EDIT: Forgot to add. While going with public transport it's great time to catch up on latest podcasts, scroll news, even do minimal work if that's necessary (emails, chats, etc.) or you can just chill in general. Driving will need my 100% attention on the road and probably 80% of the time will make me super stressed and angry.
Also "this new Musk tunnel thing." - I think I wasted a comment against a troll. :) Musk tunnel is a "metro" with significantly less throughput and traffic jams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NiM_p8n5A
[0] Often businesses are based in big cities, but a lot of people live in the surrounding area. You drive to the city limit, leave car there (often rather cheap/free if you use public transport) and hop onto the express train that takes you to the city center very fast.
[1] Good luck to park your car in the centre of London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, etc. and if you could (e.g. office building has parking) - it will cost you dearly;
[2] Traffic is prioritised for public transport. Separate bus lanes, some streets don't even allow cars, priority for trams. Leaving your car is a nightmare too.
[3] Fuel, insurance, road tolls and/or car taxes, maintenance and car price itself, parking.
Given the article's title, I didn't expect to find the following within:
Public transit is now the cause of the reforming classes,
and the car their villain. The car is the consumer economy
on wheels: atomizing, competitive, inhuman—and implicitly
racist, hiving people off to segregated communities—while
the subway and the train are communal zendos. Good people
ride bicycles and buses; bad people ride in ever-bigger cars.
It seems like a pretty even-handed summation of the situation: the "reforming classes" need a target, thus "Good people ride bicycles and buses; bad people ride in ever-bigger cars."
Another surprise:
People always maintain, similarly, that the big auto
manufacturers killed L.A.’s once efficient public-transit
system, leaving the city at the mercy of polluting and
gridlocked cars. That this is, at best, a very partial
truth does not weaken its claim on our consciousness.
(The surprising part to me is that this is claimed to be a "very partial truth". In the multitudes of HN discussions of "cars evil" articles, this claim is almost always trotted out, and almost never challenged)
> (The surprising part to me is that this is claimed to be a "very partial truth". In the multitudes of HN discussions of "cars evil" articles, this claim is almost always trotted out, and almost never challenged)
Yeah, you don't need a conspiracy to end up where we are. You just need cars to be very-beneficial to owners when most things aren't built up with car infrastructure and most people don't own cars (and they are! That's true!); and for us to start catering to that in our infrastructure-planning since, you know, it's better; and for there to be a hard-to-see-in-the-moment tipping point where suddenly everyone needs a car because everything's built with cars in mind and everything's very far apart now, but also everyone's worse-off, in precisely the ways that cars were suppose to improve things (time savings, especially), plus some others, than if we'd never had widespread private car ownership in the first place (which, there was such a tipping point, and we blew past it many decades ago). Self-interest takes care of the rest.
The default assumption should be that people who benefit from auto sales are actively trying to block public transportation. It's foolish to think otherwise.
"Quinby and Snell held that the destruction of streetcar systems was integral to a larger strategy to push the United States into automobile dependency. Most transit scholars disagree, suggesting that transit system changes were brought about by other factors; economic, social, and political factors such as unrealistic capitalization, fixed fares during inflation, changes in paving and automotive technology, the Great Depression, antitrust action, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, labor unrest, market forces including declining industries' difficulty in attracting capital, rapidly increasing traffic congestion, the Good Roads Movement, urban sprawl, tax policies favoring private vehicle ownership, taxation of fixed infrastructure, franchise repair costs for co-located property, wide diffusion of driving skills, automatic transmission buses, and general enthusiasm for the automobile.[b]
The accuracy of significant elements of Snell's 1974 testimony was challenged in an article published in Transportation Quarterly in 1997 by Cliff Slater.[48]
Recent journalistic revisitings question the idea that GM had a significant impact on the decline of streetcars, suggesting rather that they were setting themselves up to take advantage of the decline as it occurred. Guy Span suggested that Snell and others fell into simplistic conspiracy theory thinking, bordering on paranoid delusions[61] stating,
Clearly, GM waged a war on electric traction. It was indeed an all out assault, but by no means the single reason for the failure of rapid transit. Also, it is just as clear that actions and inactions by government contributed significantly to the elimination of electric traction."[62]"
I take issue with the term "reforming classes." What do that even mean? People who want things to be better aren't a class in any socioeconomic sense. It's just normal.
> The downtown-centered city that we yearn for is, perhaps, an archaic model, and Americans have voted against it with their feet or at least with their accelerators. Those of us who live in and love New York have a hard time with this argument, but it is not without merit. Los Angeles is a different kind of city producing a different kind of civilization, and its symbol, that vast horizontal network of lights dotting the hills in the night, is as affectionately viewed as its polar opposite, the vertical rise of the New York skyline.
Surprisingly good article, thank you for posting it.
I got the sense that Gopnik is aware there may be places in the country outside of New York and Los Angeles — that he has a vague awareness about a sort of middle area where people might not live in apartments or be within a fifteen minute walk of everything in their life. Now, he never actually mentions this liminal space between the coasts, but it seems like he's inferred its existence based on the persistent popularity of cars. I appreciate someone with that kind of perspective writing for the New Yorker.
There are many different environments in the U.S. I grew up on an isolated farm in the midwest, where the nearest neighbors were miles away and the closest shopping some thirty miles. Access to cars gave me, compared to the horse era of my great-grandparents, access to wide swathes of urban culture, not to mention mind-expanding forays to locations in adjacent states beyond any alternative transportation. Without the auto, I would have lived a much more conscripted life, likely never leaving my home state for a life spent roaming around the world. The situation for the current generation in my home town has not changed at all.
On the other hand I lived more than a decade in sites in East Asia, including a long stint in Seoul, and never drove once. The public transportation there largely suffices to meet the needs of the majority of the population, although personal automobiles became increasingly popular in Korea from the 1990s. Within the confines of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong or Singapore cars are absolutely less necessary, and I would be content not driving.
Different environments require varied means of transportation, and among them the personal automobile has its own valued place.
> The fact that it takes six hours to get from Baltimore to Boston, when a faster train can cover the longer distance between Paris and Marseille in four, does not move us to protest the obvious failure of ambition.
We quite often take the car to my parents home near Glasgow from our home on the outskirts of London. The train from London to Glasgow is about 4.5h if it runs to time (that's a pretty big if on the UKs rail network). The drive is about 8 hours including some reasonable stops, often we split it overnight with a stop midway.
The problem is we don't live near Euston station, it would take about 1.5 hours to get to Waterloo then maybe 30 minutes to get across London on the underground. With two small children and the stuff they require for a week it would be excruciating. When we get to the other end we wouldn't have a car to visit the family members were traveling to see and realistically would have to rent a car.
I've done the journey by train more times than I can count, both when I was single and before we had kids. I would be happy to do it again but the cost is easily 5x what it would be to just drive and is far less flexible.
> I would be happy to do it again but the cost is easily 5x what it would be to just drive and is far less flexible.
To me this is a huge part of the problem.
I've wanted to take the train many times in the US, but it also is wildly expensive here. Much faster and cheaper to take a plane in most cases.
I'd think the way to solve this is to tax driving a car appropriately, whether through parking or other methods, to encourage and subsidize train travel. If the cost comes down, I'm guessing many more people would do it.
My wife's small hometown (small meaning ~1 million people) in China was served by an HSR station, so we would often take an 8 hour ride on the HSR (on the Beijing - Guangzhou route) to get there. But an airport opened up recently (a decade after the HSR station opened), I think next time we will just take the plane instead given that it is still a very long train ride from Beijing.
I think in the USA, pre-existing airports have reduced demand for HSR. The US has airports in almost every city with more than 500k people, while that is definitely not true in China (even still).
An 8 hour train ride is outside of what is acceptable for normal train use. Up to about 5 hours on the train most people will prefer the train to flying. For short and medium distance trips trains have several advantages. The train is probably closer to your house and where you are going (air ports are way out on the edge of town in most cases, while train stations are closer to the center). You don't have the long wait for security for the train. You get more legroom on the train. For longer trips an airplane is worth those disadvantages, but not for shorter trips.
Yes, but without an airport in my wife's hometown, 8 hours by HSR is better than flying from Beijing to Changsha or Guangzhou and transferring to HSR.
Chinese HSR stations can be as inconveniently located as airports, so that isn't much of a benefit. Security is a bit better, they mostly make you put your bag through some sort of X-ray machine that I doubt they are looking at.
China HSR isn't that impressive. They mostly built outside of city centers then added new developments around the train station, immensly diminishing the costs and construction time for the HSR, at the cost of convenience for already established citizen (and probably feeding their housng bubble too).
Agree however that some of their subway systems are their most impressive engineering feat and prove that they could have done a better job with their HSR.
It's not just the lack of HSR (trains, power, etc), it's the lack of passenger trains in general. The tracks that exist are simply not suitable for greater than 50mph (80kph), and those that might be are dominated by stupidly long cargo trains.
Lots of US rail infrastructure has been quietly being upgraded, and there are portions outside the north east corridor that can hit the technical minimum for high-speed rail now (125 mph).
Pacific Surfliner is one, and it boards millions per year.
> does not move us to protest the obvious failure of ambition.
Speaking of protest...
After the events of the past few years, I think about protest when I think about public transportation infrastructure.
Seeing people chain themselves together across roadways, railways, and entrances to other infrastructure - it honestly made me more supportive of automobiles.
Less susceptible to be corralled by government or interest groups if we all have personal transportation.
Man people talk... a lot. Complain about cars, postulate on 15 minutes cities, clamor for railways... Meanwhile I've owned three cars in my life, maybe driven 1-2 years total. I lived on the Oregon Coast and then moved to the Treasure Valley in Idaho and the last car I owned was in maybe 2010?
Be the change you want to see in the world. It's that simple. If I can do it where I've lived then I have a hard time believing others can't or that they need regulations or specific infrastructure or something else from the top down. These days with rideshares, smart phones, electric personal transport, etc it is MUCH easier now than it was 10 or 15 years ago.
So what exactly is stopping anyone? The situation is never gonna be conducive to your exact wants and needs but you can and should make at least a small carless change today or even if it's just skipping the car to the next trip to the grocery store.
I like how this comment comes from someone who actually gave up a car but validates my own sentiment and research into people dragging me online. None of the anticar keyboard warriors seem to live in cities or even be 'about that life'. I did the opposite and kept a car in NYC for years, spending 3 hours a week street parking it. If I can do that, surely they can put the effort in to do the opposite if they're so passionate.
This is exactly it! It is entirely possible to live without a car in the USA, millions do it every day.
Does it require choices and perhaps sacrifices? Sure! But you can do it now and the more that choose it the better that choice will become. Work-from-home has made it even more possible.
You'll never have the same utility without a car that you will have with one; but you can still have a quite satisfactory, perhaps even enjoyable life.
Amusingly enough on the r/fuckcars subreddit awhile back, they asked about "what cars do you have" and most everyone .... had cars.
I moved 20 years ago into an apartment 5 minutes walking distance from work. It was simple, I like it, and saved tonnes of CO2. I don't even need to use public transporation on a daily basis. Oh, and I don't use much artificial light. I also refuse to use elevators if the target floor is not above 6. I know nobody who beats my energy consumption... Besides, I have acquired these traits long before the "Last Generation" was even BORN! But stil, if I mention that, people get jealous and start to either downplay or outright ridicule me. Well, a good chance to learn something about other people. They like talking, almost nobody likes doing.
My car can take me from my front door to anywhere else in the country that I want to. Often cheaper and/or faster than public transport can in the UK, as well.
My family live a 30 minute drive away, however there are no buses that go directly there. No trains, either.
I would appreciate more public transport, for sure, we absolutely need that as well. More, higher-quality public transport that is ideally available 24 hours.
But nobody is ever going to build that from my front door to my family's. The best I can hope for is to reduce the number of changes I have to make. Right now it would take a bus to the nearest town, another bus to another town in sort of the right direction, another bus to the town center nearest to my family, and then another bus to get me to a street 15 minutes walk away. Even if that drops to two buses, my car will still simply be faster & more convenient.
Quitting cars in cities is a fine goal -- when commuting into cities I tend to get a bus or a train rather than drive, but for everybody that doesn't live in a city, or travels outside of cities, it's simply not possible to get rid of cars. Sheltered personal transport, which largely comes in the form of cars, is not going to go anywhere.
> My car can take me from my front door to anywhere else in the country that I want to.
This is nice, but you absolutely must recognise that the amount you're paying for your car does not begin to match what it costs the country for you to have a car.
Road infrastructure is heavily subsidised by the tax payer.
If you had to pay 3x more to operate your car, would you be more or less likely to be in favour of bolstering public transport?
Population density is definitely a factor, and private vehicle ownership should always be possible. But the sheer size of our current personal vehicles and the tiny amount we pay vs their actual cost to society needs to be addressed.
You forget that the vast majority of taxpayers are those same road users. Even those who don't drive likely still get lifts off of other people. They're not a separate entity. They already are paying for that infrastructure.
And to those who are in the small minority who don't use it, would you also ask childless couples to pay for schools? Or people never intent on flying to pay for airports?
> would you also ask childless couples to pay for schools.
We do.
> people never intent on flying to pay for airports?
We also do.
I think the point I'm making (broadly) is that it appears cheap because a lot of that cost has been bundled into taxes, and spreading taxes over an entire population of people (even those not using roads directly) is going to dilute those costs.
The incidental point then; is that you are not actually paying the entire amount for your usage of the road system.
Heck even if you were to make the argument that "everyone uses the roads" or that everybody at least benefits indirectly: your use of them is adding to wear and tear that is disproportionate to your input to that system.
Please understand that this is not meant as an attack. It's a request to shift your perspective into truly internalising the cost, since you're already paying that cost but not directly; how much would you have to pay directly before you consider changing your mind? How much better do the transport options need to be?
Personally, and I don't require everyone to share my view of course, but living in reach of multiple transport options that are quick, cheap, clean and frequent has really changed my life.
I'm not a heavy drinker, but it's really freeing to not worry about my ability to drink. or to worry about parking, or worry about theft or damage, and also to not worry about getting into a collision (especially when it could just as easily be my fault). It feels extremely liberating. I also understand that cars give similar feelings of liberation in other areas (until you want to drink or park).
So it really is more about understanding convenience trade offs; and really I'm not happy to hear "it's cheap" because honestly; it's not. You're just heavily subsidised.
It frustrates me that nobody seems to think about the cascading effects of subsidizing roads and highways with taxes.
The heaviest users of highways are large shipping trucks and through our taxes we're all subsidizing business models that rely on that infrastructure.
Think about how local businesses, like local farms, are disappearing left and right because they can't compete on pricing and convenience. How much more competitive could they be if we weren't all charitably subsidizing infrastructure largely used by their competitors?
There's not a form of transportation in the USA that is not heavily subsidized, so it's almost not worth bothering with. What roads do the buses drive on? What is the farebox recovery? What are fuel taxes? Who clears the bike paths?
Probably the only unsubsidized form of transportation is walking across a field, wearing down your own path.
In fact, some transit should be sold as enhancing the drivers; those people will never use it but everyone likes fewer cars on the road.
I agree with your last point, it's better to frame things as for societal good, because ultimately it's better for drivers that there's less drivers on the road.
However, I do take exception to your "everything is subsidised" argument; without even digging into it I can tell you for sure that trains have at least an order of magnitude less investment per km than roads do; and that's for existing infrastructure not to mention how much that lack of investment in new infrastructure has taken. -- Put another way: you can give me $1 and another person $1billion and claim that we both received money; the amount is important to acknowledge.
Exactly. So what's the issue with people who don't drive also contributing to road infrastructure?
Yes, a lot of the cost is bundled into taxes. But that isn't unique to roads & cars, that happens everywhere. Again, are you going to ask couples with children to truly internalise the cost of public schooling? Are you going to ask non-travellers to truly internalise the cost of airports? It's just an irrelevant point.
In my city, less than 50% have a car. So the minority is not the ones not using it. Can't remember the last time I got a lift from someone. I literally can't name someone living here I know that own a car.
Having an independent media is essential to quitting cars. I've never heard a discussion on quitting cars on the nightly news, but on YouTube this discussion is made possible. YouTube de-ranking independent media in favor of traditional media could really limit the growth of the "fuck cars" movement.
"I've never heard a discussion on quitting cars on the nightly news"
I've never heard a discussion on quitting cars anywhere offline, to be completely honest.
The amount of people who currently drive cars who think to themselves, "You know what would be better? If I were sitting on some form of public transit right now..." is a very small portion of the real world population I assume (In North America)
> The amount of people who currently drive cars who think to themselves, "You know what would be better? If I were sitting on some form of public transit right now..."
You're looking at it backward. I think almost everyone who sits in traffic or nearly gets in a crash by someone doing something stupid thinks, "Driving is awful." They've just been conditioned to think there's no alternative.
They tend to think driving is awful under those conditions, but still better than not being able to drive. The thing with a car is that you can go anywhere at anytime where there's a road, which is virtually everywhere. You don't have to share the car with strangers, you can transport things in the car too heaving to carry in all sorts of weather.
The convenience is hard to beat even with good public transportation.
> you can go anywhere at anytime where there's a road
Yes, cars are a horrible implementation of socialism. Everyone pays for extensive roads networks and maintenance because cars are impossible to use without them. And then everyone pays for cars and maintenance because traveling is impossible without them. And car dealerships get rich scamming your mother.
You can go anywhere at anytime on foot, as long as somebody doesn't build a wall. Public transit isn't supposed to be door-to-door. It's about enabling true freedom of movement by connecting you across longer distances. Cars are about making all distances long.
more likely they think 'rush hour is awful' or 'traffic is awful', i highly doubt they would prefer to experience the same density of bodies traveling on the bus or train.
I think most people would agree with the following:
"You know what would be better? If I were not sitting in a car right now"
We can both recognize that cars can be necessary in certain conditions AND ideally not a big part of our lives. I think that's reasonable and possible.
Here's a radical idea: disband and shutdown the public bus system. Before you reply with an angry post, read the rest of the plan. These systems take hundreds of millions of public funds and are completely ineffective in suburban areas (most of the country). Take that money and give a "rideshare card" with funds automatically filled every month (lower income will get more free funds). Either work with Uber/Lyft or start a similar government rideshare service. Something like this will actually get people to consider giving up their cars.
After a while, certain high usage routes will be noticed in the rideshare data. It will become obvious which streets and destinations could be optimally served with high capacity buses. Now is the time to bring in bus routes. Setup these bus routes and offer a discount for using them.
The current system isn't working, we need to try something different.
I don't think the problem is that we can't identify routes that would get a lot of use. It's that people running public transit have been charged with balancing those high-usage routes with service that's meant to serve as a social safety net, so that people aren't left completely without any transit. These are very different goals, and because transit agencies are not typically funded well enough to do both well, they are often in tension.
That's a great article and shows exactly the issue. The bus system has become the transportation of last resort. It's not meant for this and isn't good at this. It's only good at highly used routes that can maximize bus capacity. Let rideshare handle these social safety net transportation issues. Ask a low income rider using the bus system, would they prefer to continue using it or get a free rideshare card with a few hundred dollars in it every month? Most would probably very enthusiastically go for the rideshare card.
And I know rideshare has a bad reputation because of Uber/Lyft. But government can create rules they must follow to accept these funds. They can either accept those rules or some other company will. Or maybe a government rideshare service is a better option. This is a classic free market vs government service question and there's many options here. But the important point is allowing everyone to use rideshare as a transportation option.
This is exactly true, and small towns with no transit almost always have a paravan or other setup (usually it's just a minivan that can take a wheelchair and is basically a city-funded taxi).
Heck, the ridership on some extended bus lines is so bad and so expensive the city would have been much better off buying each person a small car and focusing the rest on more used lines.
This whole thread exists because the public bus system is a failure in the US. How many threads on car dependence has there been on HN? The bus system is used only by the lowest income members of society who can't afford a car. They suffer long transit times, lack of point-to-point mobility, and delays. Sure that "works" to some extent for those who have no other options. And this leads to other effects like decreased health and social mobility. Want to go to college after work to improve your life? Can't because the bus routes take 2x or 3x the time it would in a car to get there. Want to get a checkup for that cough? Again riding the bus takes too much time.
You can't force a top-down solution for public transit with the road system in the US. The great strength of the US road system is point-to-point transportation. Let everyone benefit from that instead of running buses that only the poorest use. Publicly funded rideshare is the way to do this. After a while, the bus routes will naturally appear in the data. This is the bottom-up way to build a bus system.
My main problem with ride sharing is that it allows companies to compete with taxi's by exploiting car owner needing extra income.
In the Netherlands we treat public transport as a basic necessity that should be available to everyone. Not everyone can own or drive a car (too old, too young, too poor, physically or mentally not able, hazard on the road for others), and you don’t want to force everyone to move to large cities where public transport is available: cities are more expensive. In addition, public transport usually has less impact on the environment.
Bussed are sized to need though: areas with lower demand are served by smaller, less frequent busses, or busses on demand. You need to call to reserve a ride. Which is almost like ride sharing, but not at the cost of ride sharing car owners.
Public transport has a large positive impact on a society, and as such doesn’t really need to make a profit. E.g., we all benefit if teachers that can’t afford to live in cites, can still travels into cities to teach children there. The entire society, including the economy, benefits from having the population educated well.
One interesting thing I think I've noticed is that public buses in general in the U.S. kind of suck compared to elsewhere. The reason why I think I've hit on is that they kind of don't have a place to go, and so most bus routes kind of meander around their local areas going nowhere in particular. It turns short, as-the-crow-flies, trips into long ones. Anecdotally, I've lived in places where it's literally faster to walk slowly between two locations than take the bus -- the car alternative was less than 1/5th of the bus time.
However, once an area builds real transit, like lightrail, or a subway or something, there's pressure to integrate the systems, and suddenly bus routes will optimize to connect people with those systems.
This is completely anecdotal, but I've noticed massive bus route redesigns in a couple places where transit comes on-line. A 45 minute meandering bus "loop" turning into a 15 minute direct route to the local transit station, which also works well for commuting as offices tend to be in high-density commercial zones near transit so the total commute time is within spitting distance of just driving.
This might be by design - if you have a small amount of buses and drivers, then to service a given area one has to have a small amount of long routes. If there was more money to go around, there could be more drivers, more buses , ability to have more routes, maybe even enough to have a hub and spoke system of routes, maybe even some long “useless” long loop routes too. But since bus services are operated like a business, they often don’t get to expand far enough to be really useful because there isn’t enough demand with the bad routing model to accrue enough capital to grow into usefulness.
If people want to live in cities and want to have a car-free lifestyle, then more power to you.
Cities are becoming increasingly unaffordable and increasingly violent. I think that we are past “peak metro” and that the absolute refusal of many people to return to office work is going to result in an acceleration of out-migration from cities. This in turn will exacerbate other urban problems as the revenue base dries up and low wage employees become ever more difficult to find in urban areas.
Cities are increasingly unaffordable largely because of anti-urban, car-centric policies (zoning, infrastructure plans).
> If people want to live in cities and want to have a car-free lifestyle, then more power to you.
It's really not about what people want, it never has been. It is illegal to build walkable areas in almost all of the US. Laws need to be changed, immediately, for our well-being and the survival of our civilization. And then you can still go live in the country if you want to; it's awesome out there and you can be even further from the sprawl.
I said nothing fear mongering; weird is in the eye of the beholder. Never before in human history have humans lived in densities that they live in modern cities, especially surrounded by strangers. I think that is weird.
There are certainly some places with dumb laws, but I’d want to see evidence that “It’s illegal to build walkable areas in most of the US”. THAT sounds like fear mongering. Every house I have ever bought has had local ordinances requiring sidewalks.
You aren’t allowed to build sidewalks and trails on land you don’t own; I guess that is illegal in the sense that trespass is illegal. Also many areas don’t have the revenue to keep up sidewalks so they don’t build them. That sounds fiscally responsible to me even if a little sad, but is also a far cry from “illegal”.
> Never before in human history have humans lived in densities that they live in modern cities, especially surrounded by strangers.
The Roman empire, which existed from 27 BC to AD 395, had Rome as its capital, and while numbers are subject to discussion given the age, the floor for the density of the city of Rome back then, which had a large number of insulae, or apartment buildings, is 30,000 people/sq km. A more recent estimate put it at 72,150 people per square kilometer *. For reference, Manhattans' population density as of the 2020 census is 72,918 people per square kilometer.
This was 1,600 years ago! That is to say, there is precedent for humans living in the kinds of densities we have today, without anywhere near the kinds of technology we have. There was no electricity, no cars, no Internet back in '400. They most modern revolutionary thing was running water, and even then they used lead pipes for it and had no electrical pumps to pump it up to the 9th floor. One thing that will be familiar to modern readers is that the government came in and imposed regulations, making some buildings illegal due to height restrictions.
The same article (in the abstract) says that the 1M number was the high end of the range of estimates and that a more reliable number is less than half that.
Also, the population of Rome collapsed less than a century later.
You said violence is increasing, which is fear-mongering and needs citation.
> Never before in human history have humans lived in densities that they live in modern cities
Citation badly needed. We're in a crisis of low density in almost every urban area on the planet thanks to the auto industry and zoning laws, which I'll explain below.
> I’d want to see evidence that “It’s illegal to build walkable areas in most of the US”.
Walkability is a complex concept dictated largely by zoning, the practice legally defining the type and qualities of structures that can be built. And zoning, almost everywhere in the US, prohibits walkable urban design: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=walkable+neighborhoods+illegal+due...
I don't think "increasingly unaffordable" and "acceleration of out-migration from cities" can realistically happen at the same time. I can definitely say that London's (where I am) population is growing, and grew consistently through Covid. A quick Google tells me NYC, Seattle, Chicago are all adding people at comparable-or-greater rates than the US population is growing.
Do you have any data to support the claim that cities are becoming more violent? That’s a common trope that is generally debunked by police statistics.
Also important to note that "last year" includes the tail end of the pandemic where crime as a whole fell due to lockdowns. SF and NYC fall far below other, less dense, cities in the US such as Cleveland Ohio, Lansing Michigan, Rockford Illinois, and Anchorage Alaska in violent crime rates. Granted, Chicago is in the top 20 in violent crime, though, if I had to guess those statistics are driven by crime that occurs outside the "urban core".
Perception certainly matters -- perceptions of SF BART and MUNI probably are not helping ridership -- but the narrative that San Francisco has become an urban hellscape is not borne out by the data nor by my personal anecdotal experience.
You can't report a lot of crimes online (assault, Residential Burglaries, Robbery Incidents, Stolen Vehicles, stolen Electric Bicycles) and the police will tell you it's pointless to report minor ones in SF
If a homeless guy punches you in SF, would you really bother to walk to a police station and wait in line and waste a ton of time for literally nothing to happen?
I don't think you can report some of those crimes online in other cities either. Houston (https://www.houstontx.gov/police/online_report.htm) doesn't let you report violent crime nor stolen vehicles. Miami (https://www.miami-police.org/incident_reporting.html) doesn't allow violent crime to be reported either. Smaller cities like the city I grew up nearby like Rogers, Arkansas don't even allow you to file a report online at all.
I don't have time to do a comprehensive survey of how other cities operate online crime reporting, but I'm assuming in good faith that the implication here is that San Francisco's violent crime statistics are under reported if you can't report online. It seems to me that many other cities don't allow you to report online either.
Open to having a good faith discussion on if crime stats in SF are deflated due to underreporting. My guess would be that the base rate of actual people getting assaulted by a homeless guy is pretty low - curious if you have any anecdotal evidence or data to the contrary.
Violent crimes are probably relatively well reported at some violence threshold - something like "did you need medical assistance".
It's property crimes that are below the insurance threshold that will just not be reported; why bother? I had cars broken into and I never reported any of them because it would be pointless; the only time I did report was when the car was stolen - and that only because I didn't want it to turn up burning somewhere and blamed on me.
Chicago isn't even the top 50 worldwide for homicide, let alone the top 20. Several US cities are, though, including places like Cleveland. Chicago puts up big numbers because the city is deceptively big.
but there are a lot more cases, generally in the same direction, depending on the time frame, whether it’s city vs. country, race-related, drug-related, enforcement-related, from strangers, etc.
Overall, far fewer cases are being given a lot more cover while deaths preventable with standard healthcare increase, and deaths and life-altering injuries from car accidents remain so frequent you’d need a metronome to count them.
Agree with you 100%, the next few years are going to be wild WRT people moving out of metro areas. The housing costs in NYC for example haven't returned to 2016 levels and likely won't in the near future.
Can someone explain where this recent flurry (last 2 years or so) of anti-car evangelism has come from?
I can't help but feel that many people who now work remote and therefore don't need to commute suddenly are all for moving to mass transportation...that other people will use to get to work.
It's not just "remote workers telling others what to do", that's a pretty uncharitable view.. It's all walks of life getting behind this movement lately.
As for someone that's been "anti-car" for quite some time, I'm not sure why it's suddenly exploded. But I think lots of people enjoyed the cities more with less traffic during covid, and realized the streets can be made for the people, not metal boxes on wheels.
One other factor is global increase in house/rental prices. Seeing your local government prioritize parking instead of housing, or NIMBYs blocking new development, has angered lots of people and they're now taking action. Or cities spending billions on adding yet another lane to their 26 lane wide highway while the public transportation is famished.
Also, with people feeling the rising cost of living etc, it's easy for people to look for ways to remove what is a huge chunk of their spending: their car.
Additionally, lots of great contents the later years. Strongtowns, NotJustBikes etc is orange pilling lots of people that have already started to be curious about these issue. Driven by memes from fuckcars etc, it's become a movement.
It's always been here. Different places get to the epiphany at different times -- places like the Netherlands figured this out in the 1980s, in the wake of the oil crisis. [1]
The key change of the last few years has been very successful and very high profile car-free / car-light policies, most notably in Paris.
Anecdotally I started getting more on board with this movement from the increased information on urban planning from Youtube channels like Not Just Bikes & City Beautiful. I personally never conceived of walkability, having lived in car-centric suburbia my entire life. I now live in a walkable area and can confirm that, for me, my quality of life has improved.
I had an epiphany at some point when I realized my elementary school was easily within walking distance (~1 mile away) but the thought of walking or biking to school absolutely _never_ crossed my mind because I was in a subdivision and a four-lane split highway with a 55 MPH speed limit separated my house and the school.
I got into running after college and lived in a borough where things were walkable and some decent landmarks were no more than two miles away. Things felt close, and accessible. I went home for Thanksgiving once and realized that, while there were plenty of things that were kind of in range (grocery store ~2.5mi, shopping mall ~3mi, mini-golf ~1.5mi), the fact that it all ran through that highway made everything feel far, and it was never feasible to do anything but drive.
And I'm not even sure the solve needs "make my hometown area dense"! But if you had protected bike lanes on the highway and made everyone slow down a bit to let pedestrians through, that could be a massive improvement for everyone.
Now that people are working from home, it might not be necessary for suburban families to have two cars. I would know, I've been one-car for over four years now I think. Additions like walking paths and bike lanes and better bus access can make a huge difference and can save thousands of dollars a year on vehicle costs.
I think part of it is caused by a growing awareness that we can't have good car infrastructure and good public transportation infrastructure ("can't" in the sense of "not enough political will", rather than "not physically possible").
People want good public transportation, and they recognize that they aren't going to get it in a car-centric society
I would add that cars have become outrageously expensive in the past so-many years as well.
My sister and I watched day-time game shows on days when we were stuck inside during the Summer months as kids in the mid 1970s. Even as kids we knew when watching The Price is Right that the first digit in the price of a new car was a "3".
(Oh, forgot to mention the price of a new car was also only four digits.)
I know, I know, that was nearly five decades ago....
It is not a zero-sum game.
Pushing for abolishing the prefer status of cars over mass-transportation doesn't means to stop people using their cars. But to reveal the real cost (financial, economical, and environmental) of driving.
Please drive as mush as you want, or anybody, but please, don't ask other to subsidize that choice.
The anti car evangelism has been going on for 6+ years if you've lived in an urban area. Your point about the non-affected advocating for public transit is 100% true though. I've been dragged for pro car statements before, and the people dragging me are NEVER actually New Yorkers or Manhattanites, they're always either Brooklyn Transplants or people who are spread randomly across the US.
New Yorkers know that working class people have to commute into Manhattan and often save hours driving instead of taking the train. The pro bike keyboard warriors should go to Manhattan during the work day and ask a worker at any downtown Manhattan restaurant how they get there.
A common expression is "parking is the third rail of local politics". More parking is the number one demand for every aged driver in City Council meetings and absurd parking costs the chief reason why development projects are cancelled.
Much of our housing shortage is directly due to parking minimums and its resulting tacit ban on high-density housing.
Except at the mass transit railheads, where it is severely lacking. If you want suburban people to use mass transit, then stop discouraging them, and give them a place to park their cars (which are necessary to get from their homes to the miles away railheads).
Building giant parking garages ("commuting park and ride") is a failed concept and does not work. No one wants to live around a giant parking area and no one will walk through it to get to the train because there's no housing density nearby. Better to build high density housing around the station with little parking.
Even in suburbs, parking can be used as a talking point to block densification projects. Oh no, we're going to build a 10-storey apartment, where are the residents going to park??//
It's just that, a talking point. If they add a huge parking garage underground the people who don't want the development will find something else to complain about.
Sounds like something the market can solve. Instead of giving limited parking spaces to whoever got there first, sell them to the highest bidder.
Monthly parking in Manhattan is $1000/month. If you want a car, you gotta pay for the space it takes up. We could be using that space for better things.
People parking on the sidewalk? Great! Tow them and fine them, and now the city has another source of revenue.
I have always thought we should do away with free street parking. It is a valuable resource that should be used for the city to make money or turn into something everyone enjoys. This is a direct impact for the poor (like tolling a road) and will be met with serious resistance. What the OP talks about is what happened in the LA suburbs I lived in (SFV). People even got non-working cars that they pushed around to save spots (you can space the cars out so no one can park and tighten them up so you can park).
I think there are a couple factors. There was a generation of people that kept getting their licenses later and didn't have as much interest in driving.
Lately on youtube videos from Strongtowns and notjustbikes are going more viral but there are a lot of different videos out there that are anti car. This all leads to more interest in the topic.
Remote work may have been a factor as well I am not sure. I still get the weird look amongst friends for using the bus but it is becoming a little less (I do own and love cars too).
Edit:
"Are teens really not driving anymore?
Not as much, certainly. The trend has been developing for a while now. In 2013, National Geographic noted a Michigan study showing that the percentage of 19-year-olds with a license had fallen from 87 percent in 1983 to 70 percent in 2010 — and that the percentage of 17-year-old drivers fell from 69 to 43 percent during the same time period. And The Wall Street Journal in 2019 reported that while nearly half of 16-year-olds were driving in the 1980s, just a quarter were by 2017. The Washington Post, drawing on data from the Federal Highway Administration, suggests the number remained at about 25 percent in 2020. "
Significant drop off in licensed drivers was ongoing before covid. From 88ish percent of 16+ year olds in 1990s to 70ish percent by 2015.
Theories all mention urban population growth putting people closer to stuff and friends who are available to run errands since it’s not a one hour one way trip from ruralandia. Taxi/ride share, delivery services, increased investment in walkable neighborhoods… it’s all really happening?
Old numbers I read a while ago. I imagine wfh has made more people realize the same only occasional need for a car.
Similarly drop off in youth participation in contact sports like football was gaining steam before covid. A contraction in college and pro participation is probable in 10+ years.
Especially as AI generated content gets to be able to simulate unique sports with photorealistic visuals; most viewers are at home already.
Propping up the status quo culture of the last 50 years is not really an obligation of future generations.
Much that can be tied to increased insurance for under 18s and additional licensing requirements. In the 90s a kid could get a permit at 15 in CA and a license at 16 without anything exceptionally special.
IIRC now they end up with some sort of restricted license that can't do much beyond go to school and insurance is through the roof.
I have commuted an hour each way for 20 years in a rural area. I hate cars and will evangelize against them at every opportunity. I am glad others are starting to come around.
Bikes are fun, cars are expensive. It's hard to explain. I could drive the same roads for 10 years and you ride it once on the bike and notice all kinds of noises, smells, things to see that you didn't notice before.
I've used https://wandrer.earth/ to track my cycling, and am trying to bike every street where I live. Discovered so many nice things in my neighborhood I never would have seen from a car!
I think part of it is realizing that there are a lot of benefits that come from giving lower priority to cars. You increase density, you can now live in a neighborhood where you can walk to do all your errands, you feel more safe when your kids are outside or crossing the street, you feel more safe biking around and getting exercise at the same time, etc. It comes with a larger movement of urbanism.
Can't say why the movement picked up exactly, just like everything, there are cycles, and after decades of building highways all over our cities and realizing how bad the situation got and how it never really "solved" traffic, there's just a return to a different way of planning cities.
Read the whole article. It is far from anti-car evangelism. If anything its an odyssey into the way social movements and how we move are intertwined, the well known forces of simple luck and shortsightedness that influenced the past, and ends on a note questioning hpw the present zeitgeist will rank next to its peers.
People are waking up to the fact that private car ownership does not scale because infrastructure for it is so expensive and there are severe negative impacts to society because of car proliferation.
Additionally the cost to own a newly acquired new or used car has substantially increased over the past few years.
I don't know, and I'm one of those fully remote people, but here in Central Florida, if you don't have a car, you're pretty much unable to go anywhere. Everything is a 30 minute drive depending on what you're hoping to do for the day and where you live.
I'd agree that the evangelism emphasizes “anti-“ cars rather than “pro-“ alternatives. If it were the latter, I'd see far more constructive suggestions on how to better adopt and improve alternatives to cars — rail, buses, motorcycles, ebikes, bikes, or walking — especially in the neighborhoods most dependent on cars now — suburbs, exurbs, and rural — where a huge fraction of the US lives still and, oddly enough, may grow faster than cities for years to come, especially if remote work continues to rise and insanely high urban real estate prices don't fall.
Indeed. I'll only consider a proposal legitimate if it's of the form "let's leave cars alone and make public transit better", not "let's make cars worse to drive".
I fear the implication is that "we tried to make public transit better, and there's only so much we can do, so the next step is to make cars exceedingly expensive."
There's also the problem that by making public transport better, you're necessarily making driving worse. Like taking money from the roads budget and giving it to the trains budget. Or taking a slice of road away from cars and making a bike lane.
Presenting it as a zero-sum game is part of the problem! It doesn't have to be cars or bikes or trains.
You could take from the hotel tax to pay for trains, or build bike paths that go alongside or orthogonal to roads.
If you go to people and say "cars or trains, pick one" of course cars will win every single time. You want to say "here's a solution to a problem that doesn't make your life worse". Which is why many of the newest suburbs and developments have the best bike/walking options - they're being considered from the start.
There is only so much physical space for transit infrastructure. In many cases, unless you're going to cut down people's homes or businesses, you will be trading off from one mode to another. Exceptions are things like unused green spaces under subway tracks (looking at you, Caltrans) and things like that.
There's also the social design component: making driving uncomfortable increases the relative comfort of public transit, meaning people would be more likely to choose the latter over the former, improving the chances of a critical mass of public transit utilization.
Advocacy has been making some impact; I joke that it's one area where I've consciously allowed Twitter to radicalize me.
I'd imagine the spike in car prices over the past couple of years contributes as well. A car is an expensive investment that eats a huge part of your income just so you can participate in society, and I'm sure plenty of people feel the pain of this.
The solve for is one or more of these:
1. Make cars cheaper, but various market and regulatory forces seem to be conspiring against that
2. Make cities cheaper so you can move to good transit, but housing isn't in great supply there
3. Make public transit better and broader so more people can use it, but this faces opposition from people in the suburbs and exurbs who have car-centric assumptions baked into their lifestyle
1 is a multilayered problem with a lot of entrenched interests, so it's hard to solve. 2 and 3 are persuasion issues first and foremost, and the persuasion battle can be a lot more localized. So it doesn't surprise me that people are fighting those battles.
EDIT: Napkin math plus some searching said it's about $9,000 a year to own and operate a car on average. $750/month to participate in society. That's 8 annual fares for Pittsburgh's public transit, by way of comparison.
$9k a year may be some sort of an average, but there's got to be flex in that, because poor people drive cars and poor people don't make that kind of money.
If you can get a beater for $1k and some insurance, you're basically down to gas (when the beater dies, you get another one or fix it).
~30MPG, ~10K miles a year is about $1200. And even if you can get a car for $1000 (much harder to do post-Covid!), that car is about to rack up a large and unexpected bill. The last year I had our second car, the rust fix to pass inspection was a $2k quote.
And buying cars can be a stressful process, it's not like you can just walk down the street and pick up another $1k beater whenever you want. Car buying often involves arranging rides and childcare for car shopping, and being forced to settle with whatever's out there when you need it.
Yes, you can undercut $9k if you find a cheap car and some luck, or if you know how to work on it yourself, or if you live in an area where salt doesn't destroy your car, if you don't have kids so you can go subcompact, etc. But in my experience, when you buy a cheaper, more high-mileage car, you're not saving a ton vs buying a similarly equipped lower-mileage car. It's more a matter of when you're spending the money.
what is this? around here if the rust can accelerate to 88 mph it's fully considered fine and nobody cares
and I agree the spend is probably worth it (or I wouldn't be waiting for Toyota to start making the damn Sienna again) but the reality is millions of poor people drive clunkers and make it work somehow.
I wasn't able to find anything like "average car payment for low-income Americans", but this link shows that average car payments are pretty evenly spread across the credit score spectrum, with rates inching up as you go down, probably because of higher interest rates. No idea if credit score is a proxy for wealth though.
A ton of concerning stuff here, most notably that two-thirds of these loans have 5.5-7 year terms now, compared to 30% in 2004. The article it links to shows that for 2023 Q1, the average term is 70 months, down payment is $4k, APR is 11.1% (!!!!), so that the monthly payment is $551 even as down payment increases and amount borrowed decreases.
Again, I don't want to say you're wrong: you can find cheap cars, people survive with clunkers. And the most frustrating part about searching this is that I haven't been able to separate the rich people buying Escalades from the poor people buying entry-level vans, so I don't have a sense of demographic makeup here.
But all of the trendlines are pointing towards car payments being bigger than ever and terms longer than ever. Mash that up with higher interest rates and some lingering supply constraints and it's not a healthy market right now, which is why it doesn't surprise me that people are yearning for a different solution that doesn't involve a heavy reliance on cars.
Wow and I thought the CA exhaust sniffing on a dyno was a bit extreme. It's amazing how different states are in the USA in things you never think about.
When you're born into car-dependency, it's the water you swim in. You need someone else to say, "But what if not?". So it starts slow. Very slow. But once it builds, you get an inflection point. I hope we're there now.
People who don't drive want denser cities where things are closer together; but sprawled out cities are all but imposed by car centered development -- highways, parking spaces, etc.
They kind of have that already in malls - which are usually serviced by public transit. I think there's a balance always to be had to not have cities turn into hell scapes in either direction. Cars are in many places essential to avoid being a victim of street crime in this day and age.
Malls are an imperfect substitute for urbanism. Malls have closing hours, streets don't. Malls are usually surrounded by moats of parking so that drivers get priority and pedestrians / transit riders have walk a long and dangerous way into the mall. Malls can kick you out for loitering or if they don't like how you look.
It is true that some people use suburban malls as urban replacements. Teenagers use it for hanging out with friends, seniors use it for walking, and some sit and daydream. But the mall is not a real replacement for urbanism.
Yes, it is not the same thing, but you could also voice the same complaints against city centers without car access. Most urban malls I've seen have access from the sidewalk and parking underground.
> Malls can kick you out for loitering or if they don't like how you look.
That is probably a huge advantage in most people's eyes.
It’s part degrowth mindset, part climate doomerism, part immaturity, and part naïveté due to the urban-living bias in the left Twitter verse and reddit. For the last one it’s a whole lot of people who dominate the conversation live in places where public transportation is a lot more feasible than the other 80% of the US where it’s completely and utterly unworkable.
Pittsburgh used to have a vibrant rail and trolley system. Most American cities that were established before cars did. It's absolutely workable, it's just a question of priorities.
> part immaturity
Explain please?
> degrowth mindset
Not inherently. For many it's just a question of where people want the growth to be, and which modes of transit get priority.
I live about 30 minutes from Pittsburgh in an area that could be called rural (or at least a rural-feeling part of a suburb), and 80% of where I need to travel more or less happens on a straight line of road that follows the Ohio River. There's no inherent reason why that must be a highway instead of a railway.
I have bus stops that are about a mile and three miles away; if one of those was also a train station it would vastly cut down on the amount of driving I'd have to do. I'd enjoy that greatly!
I have never had a car. I never grew up with easy access to a vehicle throughout my entire life and even now I do not have one.
This addiction is wholly alien to me. Cars are luxuries to me. I live in a city 1.5M people and the city is not a walking city imo, and takes 2h+ to get across the city.
I do not travel the entire city unless necessary, and instead I spend most of my time in 1/4 of the city. I bike, scooter, walk, skateboard and generally I don't miss the vehicle.
there are two exceptions. Moving into a new house, and going camping or hiking. Cars are unnecessary for the rest of my lifestyle.
it would only be a negative in many ways - with the costs, the insurance, the parking, the maintenance, the oil changes, the collisions etc. again...going out of the city ...and moving.
How do you transport the groceries? I feel like this is my only problem, 90% of the reason why I need a car. I would be unwilling to use some kind of cargo bike in the winter.
Just carry them, or use a small cart. When the grocery store is small and it's a convenient walk across the neighborhood it's actually a pleasant experience that you can do several times a week.
> The fact that it takes six hours to get from Baltimore to Boston, when a faster train can cover the longer distance between Paris and Marseille in four...
The TGV (high speed train) between Paris and Marseille takes 3 hours and ten minutes, not four hours. The distance is 780 km or 480 miles. The distance between Baltimore and Boston is ~410 miles (660 km).
I quit cars for ~11 years while living abroad, and just got one when my wife was 7 months pregnant. Once the kid is high school, I might be able to quit them again, but kids with their activities make it hard in the states.
> The fact that it takes six hours to get from Baltimore to Boston, when a faster train can cover the longer distance between Paris and Marseille in four, does not move us to protest the obvious failure of ambition.
By this logic, since planes can cover longer distances in shorter times than trains, should we quit trains in favor of planes?
When you factor in a couple hours of wading through security checkpoints (at least in the US), it flips the timescale again for the short/medium trips.
It’s not only that. Even ignoring security checkpoints, jet planes almost always take people from where they do not are to where they do not want to be. Using them to go from where you are to where you want to be means spending additional time to travel to and from the airport.
Trains (most of the time) are a bit better in that regard because stations are more plentiful and often closer to where people want to be.
Cars, bicycles, and feet (mostly in that order; depending on infrastructure, it may be faster to get into your car than to hop on pot your bicycle) are even better.
Speed wise, it’s reversed. If there are no obstructions, speeds are feet < bicycle < car < train < jet plane.
That means that, only looking at trip duration, the detour to an airport and from the destination airport only is worth it for fairly long trips. Similarly, walking can be faster than cycling if you don’t have to go far, cycling can be faster than taking the car, etc.
Unfortunately, people also take trip costs into account, and those often are cheaper for air planes, compared to trains.
So, to ‘quit’ cars, we have to make it easier for people to go to a train station or to hop onto their bicycle and/or have to make it more difficult to hop into their car.
Banning on-street parking, requiring car drivers to walk a few hundred meters to a parking garage cuts multiple ways there. Using less space for parking allows for higher density, which leads to shorter travel distances, and increases the time to hop into one’s car.
> we have to make it easier for people to go to a train station or to hop onto their bicycle and/or have to make it more difficult to hop into their car.
The former is fine, since it's an improvement to society. The latter is not fine, since it's a worsening of society.
I get that humans would rather have the carrot than the stick. However, there are arguably a lot of positive benefits that result from making cars a more inconvenient choice. For example, one design choice that makes cars convenient is that towns and cities in the U.S.A often prioritize parking lots. Parking lots take up a lot of valuable space. If we used that space for something else (housing, a restaurant, a park, a museum, office space, anything really), then it becomes much less convenient for cars to be in the area, but more attractive for people who do not depend on a car. If that happens at scale in area, you also get other nice benefits like less air pollution, less noise pollution, fewer traffic accidents, etc.
The problem is you need to be able to get to that area before you can eliminate cars. If you are not careful you can kill an area because the people who used to drive there cannot anymore and so they just go elsewhere. If you already have a lot of people arriving by something other than cars, then you can replace the parking lot with something else and make better use of the space, but most areas don't have that advantage.
Building such places is not easy where they don't already exist. It isn't impossible, but you need to start there.
Currently car drivers are subsidised; vast amounts of valuable public land are turned over to them to use for free, while they're allowed to spew pollution and kill people on a scale that would get any other activity banned at a fraction of that level.
We don't need to be punitive, but we should make drivers pay their fair share of the costs they impose on the rest of us.
It would be fun to see the numbers on what that fair share is. These threads never have any numbers on how much things cost. From trains, to cars, to bike paths it always amazes me we cannot put prices on things.
> The latter is not fine, since it's a worsening of society.
That’s an opinion, not a fact. IMO, the negative effects for society of it being easy to hop into their cars for so many are plentiful. Cities get worse, the environment is worse of and the population gets less healthy.
You have to arrive at least 1hr early before your scheduled boarding time. 30 minutes boarding, means your "6hr" flight is actually more like 7.5hrs because you need to be at the airport.
Then you need to factor the fact that airports are not often in easy to reach places. (exception: LCY and JFK). That applies to both ends. The times stack up very rapidly.
In theory it's 2hrs to Birmingham from Copenhagen, but that trip will take approx 5hrs when you factor in all the "early arrive" and last mile shenanigans.
> You have to arrive at least 1hr early before your scheduled boarding time.
You don't have to. It's a recommendation. The only true "have to" is that you have to be at the gate before the scheduled end of boarding, which is usually 15 minutes before takeoff.
I've had to wait in the security line for over an hour before. That is proof security is not about terrorists - if it was you would not be allowed to stop until after they verify you don't have a bomb with you. Those lines are a perfect place for a terrorists to kill a lot of people.
Perhaps it is not a universal truth but I have certainly been in situations where my boarding card was not accepted because I was at the entry gates to security (where you scan your boarding card) less than 30 minutes before boarding.
End-to-end the train travel between Stockholm and Malmo is almost exactly the same as the total time it would take to fly from Stockholm Arlanda to CPH and take the train across the bridge to Malmo.
However, people very often are taking the plane instead of the train, partially because it's cheaper, and partially because on paper it looks faster.
Isn't the Acela the big exception to that rule? And it just happens to run between the very two cities in the sentence I quoted, and still slower than air travel.
The USA has TONS of intercity rail that nobody knows or cares about. Here's some by name: Pacific Surfliner, Cascades, Brightline. And that doesn't count things like Metrolink and other commuter rail.
There are more and I don't know them because I don't live near them. Acela isn't the only one.
Surfliner is about 3.5 hrs from LA to San Diego; ain't nobody gonna fly that, but lots of people drive it.
The cultural aspect is so, so huge and as a person unable to drive due to my visual disability I’ve felt it very acutely ever since I was a teenager.
Getting your first car is/was essentially a rite of passage into adulthood, not just a way to get around. All the movies and ads told you that. Pick a girl up to take her somewhere? Nope, can’t do that. Are you even dateable if you can’t drive? Watching all your friends get their license and feeling like you missed out on graduating to adulthood? It’s painful. Want to use buses and trains? That’s cool but be careful of all those ‘bad people’ that want to rob you and don’t travel too late at night or too early in the morning, it’s unsafe!
A car is a symbol of freedom, independence and safety for many people. Freedom to roam about wherever you want, whenever you want as you please, without having to rely on your parents. I don’t blame anyone for thinking this way, it’s what we’ve been fed by culture for as long as I can remember.
Not that these perceptions are accurate when I look back on it, they’re as much to do with my own insecurity as a disabled person as they are to do with general society. It’s nice to know that this isn’t a thing everywhere in the world.
FWIW I don’t hate cars (I think I’m as much of a fan as anyone that grew up with gear-head mates) and over the years I’ve come to terms with never driving and quite like the financial convenience of not owning a car, but still. As others here have alluded to, giving up cars is a huge societal zeitgeist change, not just a change to do with infrastructure.
This is very well said. Just as a fan of fast cars and classics, I appreciate being able to talk the ins and outs with people who are also so inclined. Many of whom are not really into driving, and more into the beauty of the machines. Yes, they're also a teenage symbol of "freedom" - I grew up in LA in the 80s-90s, where rich kids had expensive cars, but cool kids had hot rods or souped up rice rockets. It wasn't just mobility, it was your most expensive and treasured possession. But it's actually a pretty false, limited type of freedom, as I realized when I grew up, sold my Camaro and left the States for 12 years. That sense of freedom from your parents turns out to be a few road trips in your life. It's not like you can just drive down to Patagonia (unless you want to court imminent death a dozen times along the way). In any event, basically no one does it. So the freedom aspect is kinda bunk, like all the other freedoms Americans think they have but never actually test.
In terms of the pure pleasure of driving a difficult-to-drive, classic that I saved and restored from the scrapyard, with a hair trigger clutch, listening to every sound from the engine, I feel like I'm probably one of the only people I know who enjoys doing it every day. But it's driving as an art, just like fixing cars is an art. I think that's the true value of the car culture, not the commercial patina of "freedom" sold with every lease.
As an European who went to Ohio State for a six months exchange it was crazy.
I've witnessed things I just don't see on tv like people going to the post office and actually delivering mail with a giant vacuum.
Even more striking was just how an absurdly huge amount of ghettization and poverty lack of public transport leads to. Columbus was full of jobs and yet people living in suburbs had like no ways to get there unless they had a car.
The area around Ohio State leading towards downtown (the “Short North”) is a really nice and walkable area. It’s a shame that most Columbus residents have to drive to experience it.
My car stays in my garage 80% of the week, I only use it when visiting other cities on the weekends. I chose a relatively dense Brazilian city and I do everything here by bike or on foot (about 6-8mi per day). People have started noticing that I'm looking healthier, fitter. It'd be very very hard to do the same in any American city other than New York, you people are trapped.
While it’s by no means the norm in most of the US, you can definitely live that way in other American cities besides New York. Chicago, DC, San Francisco all come to mind.
I drove and walked all over SF a few months ago, and while I agree it’s feasible, the lack of bike lanes is disheartening, much worse dedicated ones. Your standards are so much lower, it looks like your tax money goes into a blackhole never to be seen again, and I’m saying that from a very corrupt third-world country.
I would say that you'd be hard pressed to find a city of any moderate size where it was not possible. Some would be better than others, but it's possible nearly everywhere.
I wish some ideas from South East Asia taken in western countries
1. More common driving scooter
+ in Thailand / Vietnam / Indonesia driving scooter is very common even for teenagers
+ easy to find (free) parking place and doesn't require so much space
+ they don't consume much fuel
+ still can have 2nd passenger
+ cheap, mass produced and easy available
+ easy to lock and more heavy so less likely to get stolen than bikes
+ have some (small) trunk space for storage (helmet, groceries, etc.)
+ in taiwan you have electric scooters that easy to swap batteries
+ you can still move forward in traffic jam
E-bicycles on the other hand:
- feel less safe when driving >20km/h (small wheels)
- doesn't have indicators, mirrors, lights out of the box
- feel like too fast for sidewalks and too slow for roads (unless have dedicated bicycle lanes)
- much more expensive, most cannot swap battery or replace it
- much less places to park
- easier to steal (and because they are more expensive they are better target)
- no space for groceries or storing helmet/gears
2. Shared taxi. Thailand has kind of public transport called Songthaew [0] (pickup car with 2 benches of seats) that you stop, pay small fee and it distribute people that go along the same direction. Similarly angkot in indonesia. With some modern app this could be probably even better optimized
3. Motorbike taxi - e.g. gojek in Indonesia, grab bike in Thailand
South East Asia is warm. I simply cannot feel safe driving a scooter with a few centimeters of winter ice on the roads. And I'd have to buy even more winter clothes: Wind chills are a thing. (I live in Norway. It snows, more so when you get inland)
And as far as e-bikes: They can have storage, quite a bit of it - just like a regular bike. You just have to get the right model or accessories. People use them with a trailer for their children, too, and there are at least a few around here that are used for goods. People locally use them all the time for groceries and stuff - you just go to the store more often. You can take the batteries inside to charge them: Of course you can swap them out most of the time. If you don't have places to park, that means your city doesn't have bike racks and other such things. A few places here have bike lockers that allow you to keep your bike out of the weather, too.
ive been living without a car on my own for 9 years now. The biggest thing about not having a car is the culture expects it, so youre mildly judged for not having/using one. That impact is bigger when dating too.
Feels very different in Australia. When I tell people I don’t have a car, the general response is something like “yeah good idea, wish I didn’t need mine”
What is the dating culture in the US around this? I’d have thought you’d have an easy time trying to play it as you being very environmentally conscious an in touch with society to impress the more progressive types rather than “I can’t afford a car”
Cars have an effect on culture that is very similar to software in that cars have evolved from being a technological symbol of innovation in the industrial era to a cargo cult of exploitation ironed into the social fabric by commercial and social forces in barely a hundred years:
It's difficult to summarize the impact of commercial and social collusion while understanding the impact on daily decision making as easily as that.
Of course, all the beautiful people ride around in electric cars with their brains being told indirectly to consume the diet of Mr. Creosote by a conspiracy of corporations that have neither their best interests nor well-being at heart.
Two things provide hope. Young people who, when given the choice, choose not to get a driver's license, and old people who've become accustomed to cars but choose to abstain from car transport moving forward and have the freedom, health, and wisdom to choose other alternatives such as 2 feet, 2 wheels, or mass transit instead.
These choices arise from the fact that time (as in slow-* culture) and health are the new wealth for those who have the privilege to recognize and realize such beliefs as differentiators in the life they seek, not yesteryear's symbols of innovation.
From the article: "The electric car is a chimera, producing more pollution in its construction than its existence justifies, and the dream of a driverless car can never be realized."
This is a long winded way to say you can only have agreement on what ought to be if you've already established agreement on a system of values to judge it.
Individual transportation has been a staple of civilization for the last few thousand years. As people all have individual ideas on where to go and when, individual transportation is a close to perfect solution to the problem. The question is more: does it need to be SUVs and pickup trucks?
I had a Renault Twingo (non electric, current model) once and it dawned on me that this is the maximum size a normal person would need on 99% of the days. Offer them with a slightly enlarged trunk and it would be good 100% of the time for a family of 4. Those cars take half the space of an SUV and still provide the same basic benefit of getting to places on your own schedule.
Another related topic: we should not change cars all 3 years. Why not drive them 20-30? Get replacement parts when needed, get the interior freshed up every 15 years and be happy. With the rising of electric cars, the only really critical part has become the batteries (and they seem to last longer than what we all thought).
My parents are in their mid 70s. My dad was almost 60 before he bought his first brand new vehicle. His house was paid off, his kids were out of the house, and he was making $140Kish a year.
The most I've ever paid for a vehicle is $19K for an almost fully loaded compact SUV with about 50K miles on it. The only reason I bought it is because the used $14K SUV I bought in 2014 was totaled in a car wreck. I was 4 payments left from fully paying the car off and had absolutely intended on continuing to drive it for another 8 years or so. Same with this one.
It is what it says. Buses, trains, and planes are mass transportation - you have to travel with other people and make stops with them. Cars, bikes, and walking are individual transportation - you travel alone and navigate yourself.
geff82's observation that individual transportation is the norm forever is in fact true.
But they fail to notice that making a city more walkable and bikeable - with appropriate paths and distances - also promotes individual transport.
I am going hiking in New Mexico next week. I am taking the train there.
After looking at the excellent public transportation in the Santa Fe area, I decided to make the whole vacation car-free.
I’m from Kansas City, and public transportation is pretty much a joke. They have buses and a street car, but you just can’t get around town that way. It would take me an entire day to do things that would take a 1/2 hour in a car.
In Santa Fe, as long as I have a few bus schedules on hand, there is not much to worry about. I’m even couchsurfing with someone that lives 15 miles out of town, and there’s a bus that will get me within a mile.
What’s the worst is where I live now, the ‘burbs. Not quite the freedom and nature of the country, not quite the dazzle and immediacy of the city. At least it’s bike-able.
Anyway, I’m really excited about my trip and getting around in a different way.
I would love to make more trips on a bike rather than a car. Especially for trips less than 5 mile radius. But the city where I live (Los Angeles) has very few protected bike lanes. I'm glad things are gradually moving in the right direction, but boy do we have a long way to go.
Cars are rapidly going electric, silent, and intelligent. The first two improvements will remove the problems with pollution and noise. The idea that the production of an electric car produces a vast amount of waste and pollution is nonsense, big oil propaganda.
The added intelligence will provide benefits further down the road, some of which we don't even know yet. Once cars are smart it promises to radically improve safety, with smart cars able to avoid most accidents, drive drunk people home in the back seat, able to drop the owner at their office door and then find somewhere to park on their own, either in a more spaced-out area or an automated dense public garage.
Cars are not and cannot go silent. Most of their noise comes from tires. Stand near a highway and pay attention to specifically where the noise comes from. It's primarily not the engines.
Trains already exist. They are proven technology. Smart cars have proven to be difficult to make safely. Smart cars will still be less efficient for moving lots of people than trains.
It's not just the cars. It's also the land use. All that extra pavement and other infrastructure for all the low-density land patterns cars necessitate is resource intensive to build and maintain.
This is just like lab grown meat. People think technology that will hit the market at a competitive price point in some indeterminate amount of time will save us from existential problems that are already manifesting. And that technological optimism is interfering with the development of the needed level of urgency.
You forget - this isn't just about the car. It's mostly about the roads. Roads cause all sorts of issues with land use, and even if the cars are clean and intelligent, they still take up lots of room (probably a bit less with EVs that are more situationally aware and non-polluting).
Removing some roads and replacing with more shared/human-centric transport will make a huge difference to the utility of cities. We can do this independently of electrifying vehicles - see superblocks [1]
I'm really surprised this article is gaining any sort of traction on this site, as it hardly talks of anything to do with the headline, yet that hasn't dissuaded hundreds of comments discussing their own ideas to answering the question.
I’m baffled by the ideas in the article’s intro that in the 50’s, cars were somehow the realm of hipsters and bohemians. If anything, cars became more popular with the growing (mostly white) middle class which moved to the newly built and expanded suburbs in the post WW2 years. The GI bill, home financing and other incentives helped growing families (baby boom) move into their new lives. Car ads promoted “All This and Victory Too”. After years of wartime rationing, people were eager to buy new shiny bulbous vehicles to drive on the new Eisenhower-era interstate system.
1. Sell children
2. Sell single family home and move to within walking distance of public transportation
3. Allocate additional time to running errands
I have no intention of ever using public transport again. It is inherently unsatisfactory. It is slow, dangerous, expensive, and uncomfortable (one cannot always find a seat). I apologize, but I will never trade the comfort of my Mercedes Benz or the speed of my electric scooter for my daily commute.
As an American living in Germany I bike to work every day, even in the snow in winter. There are dedicated bicycle paths which are free from obstruction where I can commute, get groceries (I have a special trailer for heavy items), and enjoy a weekend with the family. I can cycle between cities, all the way to the Netherlands, which has even better dedicated cycling routes.
Should I choose public transport, it is ubiquitous and very cheap (even free for some people). Fast and slow trains, streetcars, some subways and buses, but most importantly frequent and with total coverage by law if I remember correctly, no one can be more than 500m from a public transport stop. Even in the countryside you can take public transport everywhere: I have visited rural areas entirely by train and even a farmhouse by bus with a short walk. This is typical European lifestyle at least for the wealthier northern continental countries.
There is a downside, however. Everyone - that is everyone except the very rich and those in the countryside - lives in an apartment. An apartment which, even by lower class American standards, is tiny, dark, grungy, often ridden with mold, and with non-existent amenities. For the price I pay in rent, including exorbitant utility costs, I could get a much nicer place anywhere outside the coastal elite urban cores. My fellow software developers, who are paid far above average for German engineers (or even doctors here) are in the same boat. Tiny and grimy is the norm:
What I wish I saw less of in the car/transit debate was moralizing, and what I wish I saw more of was engineering tradeoffs. You can try to have cars and houses and transit and high salaries and (relatively) low taxes and what you get is NYC or SF - a playground for the rich and a dystopian hellscape for the average middle class worker. If you make transit ubiquitous and affordable with affordable housing and restrictions on cars you get everyone in tiny accommodations, the kind of mass single family home communities and even NYC townhomes and billionaire skyscrapers would never be approved by German town planners. Engineering tradeoffs, which can mean many tiny cars you never see sold in the USA:
Let's have more discussion on the tradeoffs, and maybe we can find solutions of which Larry David would say:
"You're unhappy. I'm unhappy too. Have you heard of Henry Clay? He was the Great Compromiser. A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied, and I think that's what we have here."
What I wonder is if you can combine the two using the higher-speed rail lines. Imaging one shooting out of the city and stopping at smaller but newer "ex urban enclaves" which themselves are quite walkable, but have more breathing room.
Simple thing: I own a car and when the route I want to go has a public transport or e-bike AND the time is acceptable, i usually take it. If not then I take car.
E.g. to my office I commute by bicycle because it's much faster than stand in jam. But on winter I must not take bicycle, or I'll get fully sick and lose 10-14 days. Then I take tram which is second in terms of time.
However when I get my kids to music school, tram is so slow and rare, I have to take car, or I would need to leave 20mins earlier. That's this simple.
So govt, please stop planning how to prevent me from driving my car. Just do your duties, better as you did, and make pub transport better
I bought a car just to avoid some type of people in public transport. I had a weekly encounter with either a homeless person with very bad odor, or somebody aggressive that was usually kicked out by a bus driver or by police.
It was acceptable when I was riding alone but now I have a kid and there's no way I will bring him to this environment.
Unfortunately, our cities are not dealing with these issues adequately.
> They crowd streets, belch carbon, bifurcate communities, and destroy the urban fabric. Will we ever overcome our addiction?
Betteridge's law of headlines says no.
Even extremely well-planned and progressive cities like Portland (which has been expanding light rail for 30 years straight) haven't budged above 15% commuting by public transportation. No city outside SF and NYC have meaningfully addressed this. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/pu...
This is why electrification is so important. North American civilization is dependent on cars and trucking and will always be so when our countries are continental at scale.
Go ahead and quit cars and live in your "you will own nothing" apartments crammed together like livestock in a factory farm. That's what propaganda pieces like this are trying to push you towards.
The rest of us will keep our cars, all of our other property, and stay the hell away from and fight against that emerging authoritarian socialist dystopia as much as possible.
Clearly, the rabidly anti-car fanatics have never experienced the pleasures of driving a comfortable and powerful car on a long highway trip.
Having lived in a place where I don't need a car, I purposefully moved to a location where I can drive my car.
I had to go to the doctor. Punch in address and drive there, park the car and walk in. No need to check at what time public transport shows up, or if it does at all.
While I live at the foothills with direct access to hiking trails, I don't need to drive through 45 minutes of urban unplanned jungle before I can jump on a congested freeway in the case I want to visit another place. No, the freeway is right there.
I want to go do my weekly Costco run. Couldn't do that before. Took too long, so I was stuck paying the inflated prices at Pavilions around the corner.
All of this, plus the fact that I don't need to worry to have a to step over a homeless guy to walk to work, or dodge shit, or being awoken by police 3 times per night make me REALLY happy to be where I am.
Great example of how in the aggregate, perfectly reasonable individual thinking can lead to the construction of desolate hellscapes. (source: grew up in Phoenix, Arizona)
And amusingly enough, once you're "far enough away" from civilization you probably end up in a small town or near one, and suddenly ... it's entirely walkable.
Here’s a better theory: because American public transit is, when compared with the alternatives, not safe, not clean, and not convenient. Take LA, probably the most car-dependent big city in America. Riding the bus or subway in LA is not an enjoyable experience. Nor is it enjoyable to walk around the areas where the stops are. If I were trying to get more people to use public transit, I’d start by making the stations and buses/subways beautiful, clean, safe places that are just nice urban places to hang out in. There’s no need to make it a moral crusade; just offer a better product and more people will use it.