TFA mentions "open road" in subtitle, then proceeds with anecdotes of city driving on the coasts sipping chain coffee. That's a very small representation of driving in America.
Subsidized in what way? Cities still have to have roads for buses and delivery trucks and the vast majority of road wear comes from semi-trucks so it isn't the roads themselves. Are you saying the visits are subsidized on the basis of the increased traffic costing the city more money than it receives from the tourist dollars spent by the visitors?
Do you know a lot of major cities with large amounts of free parking?
When city land becomes valuable enough that people in parking lots don't generate more wealth than they would if there wasn't a parking lot, the parking lots get sold and buildings are put there instead.
Such a bizarre practice. Demand on the weekends is highest and logically the parking fees should be highest, not zero.
I'm not one from whom to take advice on the subject, though. I think roads are for driving and parking on them is perverse and I refuse to live anywhere crowded enough to have a bus system.
But seriously. You cannot ignore the the importance that cars have played in America. Ya ya ya, cars are terrible, Europe is better but also much smaller. I am definitely looking to the future and hope we design smarter cities but we cannot ignore the past. None of the options you listed are part of Americana imo.
> we cannot ignore the past. None of the options you listed are part of Americana imo.
To the contrary, commuter rail transit systems, primarily streetcars, were very much a feature of American cities from Cincinnati to San Francisco in the period from the late 1800s through the mid-century. Ignoring them is, as you yourself say, ignoring the past.
But for better or worse I would argue anything before 1900 is not really Americana, probably earlier. I think it holds true across the world. We are talking about nostalgia from childhood or your grandparents, popular media that you consumed. I am not saying to ignore the past but I have never heard of street cars romanticized like car driving in America is. Hell, tourists will come and rent a motorcycle or a car and drive across America. Sorry I confused you.
Maybe if we didn't have to spend billions of dollars per year maintaining an unsustainable highway system we could maybe do something about those needles.
I mean sure but honestly it stems from the constituents and nobody wants to deal with the fix. People love to praise public transportation but nobody wants to accept the costs associated with it. That's the Bay Area.
FYI, the reason that song means something is because this is the train line that Abraham Lincoln signed legislation to create and has been running daily service almost uninterrupted since the end of the Civil War.
Ah yes. This article does resonate. I've been living in Europe for 40 years but I learned to drive in the US. I loved the wide open of the country and the fact that everything is setup with cars in mind. Classic rock radio: that's the ultimate when on a holiday in a rented car in the US. I can fully understand the sentiment of the author.
as problematic as cars are in america (for suburban sprawl, environmental reasons, and equal access to opportunities) there is a uniquely enjoyable element of americana to it. the final fantasy 15 game captured this really well.
For all the faults our driving culture has created, there's definitely something calming for me about the whole thing (once you're outside the crush of big-city traffic).
Kinda related to what the author says in the article, there's just something about hitting the road, either alone or with a friend, playing some classic rock, and just driving (whether or not there's a destination) that gives me space to think and is soothing. Not sure why or if anyone else has the same experience.
I'd always heard that, and so growing up I tried the whole "go for a drive" thing many times. I found it felt good in the moment, but when I got home I was just as wrapped around the axle as when I left. I came to think of it as something like trying to drown your problems in ̶a̶l̶c̶o̶h̶o̶l̶ petrol.
I've found moderate exercise has a more lasting effect.
Driving anywhere in the world is probably my favourite thing to do while on vacation. Spend a few days in the city, then grab a rental car and start driving. You can take the smaller roads, stop at random villages for coffee, stop by the side of the road next to a fruit tree, an overlook, a plaque or just some scenery you like. There's a dizzying array of things you can see and do which are completely inaccessible to users of mass transit.
The vastness of North America certainly has it's own charm and driving the vast distances can put you in a very relaxed, calm, meditative state, which is very different than say, slowly winding your way through the narrow dirt roads Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula. But they're both great and a great way to really understand a place.
The anti-car crowd has missed this, somehow, in their lust to convert all of us to lemmings that can only get around with mass transport. There's an incredible sense of freedom that comes with a car: you can go where you choose, when you choose, without filing a flight plan or getting a ticket or anything other than fueling the thing up.
When you're dealing with something on the scale of North America, it's hard to imagine going without. As a Canadian, there are places here that mass transit can never dream of taking me. Am I to never go to these places?
You realize you can have a lot more enjoyable driving experiences if you enable all the people who only drive for instrumental reasons to get off the roads right? Nobody is "anti-car." People are anti-city-planning-that-requires-you-to-use-a-car-every-day-in-order-to-be-a-functioning-member-of-society.
There are actual policies (the easiest one is stopping mandates for huge amounts of free/discounted parking at all new homes & businesses) that make it possible for people who would rather not drive to not drive, and many 'pro-car' people come out to oppose their implementation.
As a member of that anti-car crowd, I think most of us would be happy with just banishing cars from city and most residential centers. We want to make cars an option, not a requirement.
Having too many cars also starts to encroach on other peoples freedoms via noise pollution, smog, less open space, etc.
Also, keep in mind we are talking about something that kills and injures a large number of people a year.
Pools kill many people a year, mostly children, but we don't close them because the risk is severly outweighed by their utility. I think your argument is overall sound, but you need to find some better examples that apply. If we really were so outraged about auto deatus we would be clamoring for anti-screen enforcement, which has a larger effect on deaths than drunk driving, street racing, and all gun crime combined.
To be fair, states are starting to ban using non-hands-free phones.
One curious point is that, in a neighboring state, the fine is extremely small. However, insurance companies are treating such citations as a similar risk to having a DWI/DUI citation; construction workers and other drivers are already having a hard time getting hired because their record of having been pulled over for usinga phone makes them too expensive for employers to insure for company vehicles.
> However, insurance companies are treating such citations as a similar risk to having a DWI/DUI citation;
Insurers have a strong financial incentive to have "mass market" infractions that don't really tell you anything about someone's risk in the highest category in any state that uses a points system because the points system provides a "we're all gonna charge these people more" pact with the other insurers and they can get the actual violation data they use for risk assessment in other ways (usually straight from the DMV's api).
I'm not defending phone usage but I think anyone with an IQ above freezing can see that the average instance of it (which around here is people texting at red lights) is not as big of a risk indicator as a DUI citation.
in this case I am just relaying what I heard from some owners of construction / remodelling companies; drivers / workers with a citation for phone use had to pay either 50 or $125 or something along those lines, but were finding out that employers could not or would not hire them due to the insurance costs as a result. Just an anecdote, but I have not known my source to make such stories up (and it would have been strange to do so in the context of the conversation anyway).
As someone who switched sides from the car to the anti-car crowd, I believe that in most ways you're less free with vehicle ownership, as you wind up more locked into "the system" than as a public transportation user.
The system being insurance, parking tickets, revenue grabbing speeding tickets and tolls, fluctuating gas prices, frivolous lawsuits, fender benders and body shops, and so on. People behave at their worst given the psychological distance that their metal box provides them. Not to mention just having to drive the damn thing when you could spend your time focused on something else!
The one big exception that I see is - dun dun dun - global pandemic time. Temporarily, I appreciate the barrier between myself and my fellow citizen. But I just went out and rented a cheap one, and will rid myself of it once the risk of contagion subsides.
Re-reading the end of the "Lemmings" guy's comment more closely, there's one other point that I would like to speak to - After traveling around the world extensively for 100% of the last two years, I definitely prefer public transit in almost every form over driving.
However, one good thing about the U.S. that is true of few other places, is the ability to go on super long road trips, seeing tons of the countryside, and getting far away from other people. This is truly a benefit and a joy.
However, it also comprises 5% of the driving that I wind up doing, the other 95% being shitty commutes and errands fees and tolls and road rage. And finding parking! No need to find parking when using public transit.
I don't miss having a car. Sure, your "freedom to". "Just Hop In And Go Right Now On A Whimsical Fancy". All in that 1950s Golden Glory afterglow.
Here's the other side of the coin: You are missing "freedom from". The stress of driving in traffic. The stress of Those Other Drivers. Parking: finding, paying for, &c. Gas prices. Vehicle maintenance.
Those awesome places one can't get to without a car? This is partly why the car rental business exists; it's not just for Business-Person Just Off The Tarmac.
Different people have different lifestyles, especially when in living in different places.
It's freeing, but it can also be a trap. Countless people just drive through beautiful places, watching idly out the window, and as quickly as they came, leave it in their rear-view. Or maybe they hop out at an easy overlook, spend three minutes, and get back in the car.
I've begun advocating for more focused road trips. Go to one place. Stay there. Find things to do. Camp, hike, run, bike, etc. The popular "let's hit as many places as we can" mode results in never really experiencing any of the places you visit.
<rant> My biggest complaint with driving on highways in the US is that people generally tend to arrange themselves in a checkerboard pattern, taking up all the lanes, despite all the signs that say that the left lane is for passing. I think it's because everyone wants their own lane, so they can cruise. It's not a case of 'a few bad apples'. Anecdotally, about 1/3 of the cars actually let you pass, the others don't give a rat's ass, slowing down the traffic for no reason.
Speaking of cruising, my second complaint is how most don't use cruise control. It's painfully obvious, because the other cars slow down significantly when going up the hill and accelerate downhill. I see the same cars passing me, downhill, then ending up behind me uphill. It's so annoyingly unnecessary. If your car doesn't have adaptive CC, that means you have to turn on/off the CC frequently. The traffic ends up stretching and compressing like a rubber band. It doesn't have to be that bad - just use cruise control.
To contrast this experience, I had the pleasure of driving in Portugal (from Porto to Sagres). They have by far the most respectful drivers I've ever seen anywhere (and I drove in Western and Eastern Europe, Middle East and North America). Good job Portugal, the rest of the world's drivers could learn a thing or two from you.
I agree with you that Americans don't know how to use lanes, but I want to push back on the cruise control comment. Many cars have cruise control set differently, and "keep the speedometer at exactly X" is not the algorithm generally in play. I was once part of a caravan with a sedan, pickup truck, and 15 passenger van where we all yelled at each other for not using cruise control until we realized that we all were using cruise control the whole time, but needed to adjust it to not interfere with each other on hilly roads.
If you want the best highway fuel efficiency, programming a cruise control to slow down uphill and go a bit faster downhill is the right way to go. How much faster or slower depends on the engine and current weight of the automobile, which is why the three examples were so wildly different.
on very hilly roads, I like to hit the crest of the hill at least 10 mph below my target speed so I don't have to ride the brakes all the way down. imo, this is fine as long as you don't do it in the left lane.
my car has a standard transmission so cruise control isn't super useful in this situation anyway, as I tend to change gears a lot.
It's a pretty neat feature imo. Not sure if you mean that you specifically didn't want cruise control in your cars, or just happen to be driving cars without it, but my 2000 Toyota Corolla had it, and that's a 20 year old model at this point.
I have a second home in the mountains surrounding LA, and it's such a joy to go out there for a few days. I love driving the curvy mountain roads. It's just exhilarating. Nowadays, with the Covid-19 quarantine, I'm taking circuitous path to go grocery shopping, just to get a little extra "me time" on the road.
I understand why people like driving. I drive plenty and have two cars and live in the USA. There is no option but to drive in most of the US, so people do and it can even be enjoyable. It really is a tragedy of the commons situation though. Great and horrible at the same time.
Anecdote from the old country. I used to live in a relatively small city in the old country ( 50K maybe ). As a kid, I was able to walk just about anywhere. And I did. As most of my friends, I did what I could to get my DL equivalent and as soon as I got it, I drove everywhere I could.
I think this is the point that occasionally is forgotten in these conversations. It is not just that the infrastructure forces behavior ( in US, in most areas it does ), but the convenience factor makes it a very hard proposition to just ban cars from cities ( in a way similar to France's ).
But it is hard to argue against convenience and established routines. People do not like change.
The convenience factor is also engineered. It's not convenient to drive unless there is ample parking at every destination, and policies in the US and many other countries has basically banned building new places without ample parking. Providing this parking requires a large amount of land, which makes walking slow, unpleasant, and dangerous.
Policies dictate required parking? Seems like something developers would naturally do anyways. If you build commercial space without ample parking you're going to have trouble finding tenants...
In other cases, a business benefits from having customers park at neighboring businesses. If parking is provided, it will be taken by customers of other businesses.
I love driving, and thought I'd never give it up until my car died. Now that I've been without one in Vancouver for over a year, it's just not financially sensible to get one for the occasional fun I'd have. Certainly, the sense of freedom is great, but good public transport for $100/month is way better. Renting a car fills the gaps I think so far. It's also super not worth the hassle to maintain and park.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadWhen city land becomes valuable enough that people in parking lots don't generate more wealth than they would if there wasn't a parking lot, the parking lots get sold and buildings are put there instead.
And yes most cities I've been to tend not to charge for parking at night or on the weekends.
I'm not one from whom to take advice on the subject, though. I think roads are for driving and parking on them is perverse and I refuse to live anywhere crowded enough to have a bus system.
I think the last thing the United States needs is more people glorifying the horrendous car culture that has been built up in this country.
But seriously. You cannot ignore the the importance that cars have played in America. Ya ya ya, cars are terrible, Europe is better but also much smaller. I am definitely looking to the future and hope we design smarter cities but we cannot ignore the past. None of the options you listed are part of Americana imo.
To the contrary, commuter rail transit systems, primarily streetcars, were very much a feature of American cities from Cincinnati to San Francisco in the period from the late 1800s through the mid-century. Ignoring them is, as you yourself say, ignoring the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcars_in_North_America
And we not just talking gas tax, billions has been stolen from the general fund to prop up the highway trust fund: https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/budget-explainer-highway-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XyRdJr4LSc
FYI, the reason that song means something is because this is the train line that Abraham Lincoln signed legislation to create and has been running daily service almost uninterrupted since the end of the Civil War.
The Kingston Trio - M.T.A. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7Jw_v3F_Q0
Now, the Illinois Central was a land grant railroad, but it received the land grants in 1850, under President Fillmore, not under Lincoln.
Kinda related to what the author says in the article, there's just something about hitting the road, either alone or with a friend, playing some classic rock, and just driving (whether or not there's a destination) that gives me space to think and is soothing. Not sure why or if anyone else has the same experience.
I've found moderate exercise has a more lasting effect.
The vastness of North America certainly has it's own charm and driving the vast distances can put you in a very relaxed, calm, meditative state, which is very different than say, slowly winding your way through the narrow dirt roads Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula. But they're both great and a great way to really understand a place.
When you're dealing with something on the scale of North America, it's hard to imagine going without. As a Canadian, there are places here that mass transit can never dream of taking me. Am I to never go to these places?
Clearly a functional public And private transport infrastructure are both useful to everyone who also leaves their domicile.
Having too many cars also starts to encroach on other peoples freedoms via noise pollution, smog, less open space, etc.
Also, keep in mind we are talking about something that kills and injures a large number of people a year.
One curious point is that, in a neighboring state, the fine is extremely small. However, insurance companies are treating such citations as a similar risk to having a DWI/DUI citation; construction workers and other drivers are already having a hard time getting hired because their record of having been pulled over for usinga phone makes them too expensive for employers to insure for company vehicles.
Insurers have a strong financial incentive to have "mass market" infractions that don't really tell you anything about someone's risk in the highest category in any state that uses a points system because the points system provides a "we're all gonna charge these people more" pact with the other insurers and they can get the actual violation data they use for risk assessment in other ways (usually straight from the DMV's api).
I'm not defending phone usage but I think anyone with an IQ above freezing can see that the average instance of it (which around here is people texting at red lights) is not as big of a risk indicator as a DUI citation.
The system being insurance, parking tickets, revenue grabbing speeding tickets and tolls, fluctuating gas prices, frivolous lawsuits, fender benders and body shops, and so on. People behave at their worst given the psychological distance that their metal box provides them. Not to mention just having to drive the damn thing when you could spend your time focused on something else!
The one big exception that I see is - dun dun dun - global pandemic time. Temporarily, I appreciate the barrier between myself and my fellow citizen. But I just went out and rented a cheap one, and will rid myself of it once the risk of contagion subsides.
However, one good thing about the U.S. that is true of few other places, is the ability to go on super long road trips, seeing tons of the countryside, and getting far away from other people. This is truly a benefit and a joy.
However, it also comprises 5% of the driving that I wind up doing, the other 95% being shitty commutes and errands fees and tolls and road rage. And finding parking! No need to find parking when using public transit.
You could even gasp rent a car at a stop if you want to go further out into the wilderness for a bit. Or bicycles. Or horses. Or hang-gliders.
The places you should only be able to get to with mass transport are city centers, where cars are an incredibly dangerous polluting menace.
Here's the other side of the coin: You are missing "freedom from". The stress of driving in traffic. The stress of Those Other Drivers. Parking: finding, paying for, &c. Gas prices. Vehicle maintenance.
Those awesome places one can't get to without a car? This is partly why the car rental business exists; it's not just for Business-Person Just Off The Tarmac.
Different people have different lifestyles, especially when in living in different places.
I've begun advocating for more focused road trips. Go to one place. Stay there. Find things to do. Camp, hike, run, bike, etc. The popular "let's hit as many places as we can" mode results in never really experiencing any of the places you visit.
Speaking of cruising, my second complaint is how most don't use cruise control. It's painfully obvious, because the other cars slow down significantly when going up the hill and accelerate downhill. I see the same cars passing me, downhill, then ending up behind me uphill. It's so annoyingly unnecessary. If your car doesn't have adaptive CC, that means you have to turn on/off the CC frequently. The traffic ends up stretching and compressing like a rubber band. It doesn't have to be that bad - just use cruise control.
To contrast this experience, I had the pleasure of driving in Portugal (from Porto to Sagres). They have by far the most respectful drivers I've ever seen anywhere (and I drove in Western and Eastern Europe, Middle East and North America). Good job Portugal, the rest of the world's drivers could learn a thing or two from you.
</rant>
If you want the best highway fuel efficiency, programming a cruise control to slow down uphill and go a bit faster downhill is the right way to go. How much faster or slower depends on the engine and current weight of the automobile, which is why the three examples were so wildly different.
my car has a standard transmission so cruise control isn't super useful in this situation anyway, as I tend to change gears a lot.
I think this is the point that occasionally is forgotten in these conversations. It is not just that the infrastructure forces behavior ( in US, in most areas it does ), but the convenience factor makes it a very hard proposition to just ban cars from cities ( in a way similar to France's ).
But it is hard to argue against convenience and established routines. People do not like change.
In other cases, a business benefits from having customers park at neighboring businesses. If parking is provided, it will be taken by customers of other businesses.