> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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....
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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. "
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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…?
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.
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.
- 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".
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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...
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 ...
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.
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
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.
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..
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
> 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.
> 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.
>>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 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.
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.
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.
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”
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 604 ms ] threadParis > Marseille by train is 3:08, not 4:00.
Nice writup, thanks for sharing.
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.
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.
The United States sat out the HSR revolution. China built 26,000 miles in the past 20 years. The US has essentially nothing.
Personally, I think the creation of China’s subway system is even more impressive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems#:~:text=....
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).
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.
> ~1 million people
Here I am in a town of 8k thinking it'd be nice if they finally connect these two bike paths.
Pacific Surfliner is one, and it boards millions per year.
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.
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.
I don't typically check the byline before I start reading, but Gopnik always gives himself away. This one set a record.
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.
People want good public transportation, and they recognize that they aren't going to get it in a car-centric society
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....
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.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
Additionally the cost to own a newly acquired new or used car has substantially increased over the past few years.
edits: infrastructure, private
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.
Much of our housing shortage is directly due to parking minimums and its resulting tacit ban on high-density housing.
what you get is people parking on the sidewalk
what you get is people leaving garbage bins out all week to "protect" their spot
what you get is legit road-rage level violence over people blocking driveways or protecting spots or leaving cars parked too long
people have cars, they need a place to put them, even in fantasyland
"If this harmful, expensive thing isn't free, a few people will steal it."
"Better make it free forever then, and force all of society to pay for it, whether they use it or not."
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.
Suburbs are awash with parking. Maybe we should require parking to be "behind" stores instead of in front.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWjtpzCIfA
In my area, the lot is full, but the buses are fairly empty, as there is not enough parking to support the bus station.
I agree about zoning for density. That’s not the problem in this case.
There’s nothing wrong with individually owned vehicles in rural areas. Work with that, instead of fighting it.
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.
> 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.
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.
Because what everyone needs is a SUV that weighs 9000 pounds and can accelerate to 60 MPH in 3.5 seconds.
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.
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.
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).
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.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/15/cars/car-loan-interest-rates-...
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.
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.
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.
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!
In the past he railed against car usage: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/04/18/get-rich-with-bik... , https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/07/27/rent-vs-buy/ , https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/10/24/get-rich-with-con...
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'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.
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.
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. "
By this logic, since planes can cover longer distances in shorter times than trains, should we quit trains in favor of planes?
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 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.
This was in Amsterdam Schipol.
And I also distinctly remember being unable to drop my bag at EWR for being "too late" to do so.
Always better to be early, so people will factor that in.
That is indeed a universal thing when you have bags to check. I just don't consider that a "have to" since you don't have to check a bag to fly.
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.
The former is fine, since it's an improvement to society. 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.
Building such places is not easy where they don't already exist. It isn't impossible, but you need to start there.
Not necessarily. It's entirely possible that changing those incentives will improve things, overall.
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.
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.
So... maybe?
Virtually no one is taking the train from Chicago to Seattle, even when the train is full, its to get on the train, go 4-5 stops and exit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I will ask travellers who use airports to understand the cost of an airport and air travel. Yes. Absolutely. Hiding the cost does not help
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
0: https://www.bankrate.com/loans/auto-loans/average-monthly-ca...
1: https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/car/average-cost-of-car-i...
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.
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.
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?
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.
If you never get pulled over, or you know some tricks, you slide by.
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.
I think you can do this in most states; I know you can in my state (MA).
The most common is "farm implement operated incidentally over a highway".
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/average-...
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/data-2023-savings...
(Used) car prices continue to climb.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2023/05/15/new-use...
Subprime auto loans continue to be fairly popular, Investopedia is claiming about 40% of used car loans are subprime.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/subprime_auto_loans.asp https://www.consumerreports.org/car-financing/many-americans...
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Actually, making cars efficient doesn’t work as soon as you reach a certain scale, and I suspect that scale is less than 40k people.
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.
There are literally several plot points in mad men where he drives drunk back from the city.
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.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/us-passenger-miles
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which took twice as long hahahaha.
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.
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.
At some point I realized that I was spending my time at home doing what I was paid to do at work and I bought a Mac and moved on with my life.
The car as personal private time is also huge, it's one of the last private defended areas we have.
That means there is a ton of pent up demand. Why can't NY meet this demand? The tracks are already there!
"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.
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.
Driving somewhere for 30 minutes means you waste 30 minutes of your life in transport.
Taking a train somewhere for 50 minutes means you can do something else for 50 minutes. Read a book, browse the internet, write a poem, whatever.
Saying driving is better is like saying littering is more convenient than picking up your trash.
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.
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...
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.
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.
So all those cities/countries where public transport is not clean and safe have to just copy - for instance - Singapore or China?
Q: What's stopping them?
That's what I mean about lack of broad agreement.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
See a multitude of article here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/category/Public+Transit
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.
That was abandoned. While I was a long-term advocate of public transportation, no longer can recommend it. Certainly not for my family in this city.
Not like a “law and order” candidate is ever getting elected again in this state. Even a more compassionate version I’d support.
Unexpectedly Rio de Janeiro does this a lot better than California.
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.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-t...
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.
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.
Even in the US, monthly swipe passes have been a thing in even the systems that used tokens.
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.
Cost of transport is orthogonal to access.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-t...
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.
I drank one.
Fear in America has zero to do with reality of crime.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...
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
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.
Depends where and when you're going, and some is just plain luck, or lack of it.
I’ve only ever taken the Gold line, and it’s been uneventful. But, as I say, not often.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
34% of kids ride a school bus to school, and that's basically transit designed for the middle class.
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.
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.
No offense to bus drivers they're amazing.
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 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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like Disneyland? Of course nobody could live there. But actual walkable neighborhoods tend to be prohibitively expensive because they're extremely desirable.
Those are caused mainly by cars. Take away the cars and there’s a lot more space and fresh air for everyone.
Density of people brings those three annoyances, cars or no cars.
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.
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.)
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!
As for parking, well, it's market price. It's expensive because parking has been subsidized as the default in vast majority of the world.
Discouraging driving is a reasonable public health measure for a safer society.
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.
I meant the bigger ones driving on roads (small motorcycles), not the small e-scooters. No mixing up passenger and scooter traffic.
My language have separate word for those types but english for some reason don't...
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.
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.
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).
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.
A vacation is not the same as living somewhere.
Living in such places is eye-opening!
(I'll extend it to a ¼—15 minute walk. I happen to live above a kiosk, it is nearer than the car in the basement.)
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 ...
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.
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.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=55
And private school attendance is mostly higher income families:
https://www.educationnext.org/who-goes-private-school-long-t...
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
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.
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 ...
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?
A lot of bad decisions were made in Europe stemming from American city planners after the second world war. Like David Jokinen's influence on Amsterdam and The Hague: https://viewpointvancouver.ca/2019/10/27/the-1960s-when-the-...
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.
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.
Or look how packed with cars Europe is, even in the tiny streets of Sienna they wedge little cars in everywhere.
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.
Recommended reading:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125313.The_Geography_of_...
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.
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.
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 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.
Ever heard of gloves?
- remove 90% of street parking
- 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
I see you studied the work of Donald Shoup, the author of "The High Cost of Free Parking".
That's an implementation detail of a very old and underinvested system.
In contrast with Vancouver's automated skytrain, waits for trains are typically 2-4 minutes.
Better things are possible
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.
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.
Your argument is anti-scientific in a way. We see in nature that decentralized systems are more robust yet you are arguing the opposite.
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.
Who cares about being interesting, I can go around outages in the network with a car where trains can't.
You should be arguing for smaller cars not less of them.
You, ostensibly[1]!
> You should be arguing for smaller cars not less of them.
I'd be more than happy to take both :-)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.)
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.
Surely you're not suffering from an inability to visualize vacationing outside of a city?
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.
The excuse that postwar development is the reason for car dependency in north america doesn't hold water.
> without dealing with crowded, noisy, sometimes dangerous buses
Yes because cars are neither noisy or dangerous nor do the occupy any space in cities.
> Like, what's the alternative?
There are alternatives to building very car centric infrastructure.
> How do you propose to stop Colombians
He didn't.
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.
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.
The above applies to most counties where someone is likely to read this.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Want to say that again when you want to go somewhere farther than you can walk in a reasonable time?
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 ...
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).
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.
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.
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..
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.
Most of the people in the US under the age of 100 grew up in cars.
It can be argued but would be false as other societies have more of those but have less car users.
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...
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".
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
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).
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.
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.
But the car adds to that.
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).
I can't imagine what you mean here by individual transportation. Could you explain a bit more?
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.
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.
I wonder if this would have been the case had cars stayed as diminutive as they were becoming in the mid 70's.
- 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.
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.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-17/a-pew-sur...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not just a political or environmental problem, it's purely a "where does this infra even go" situation.
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.
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.
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).
https://www.radroutenplaner-deutschland.de/veraDNetz_EN.asp
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.
https://www.german-way.com/travel-and-tourism/public-transpo...
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:
https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/berlin/berlin/wohn...
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:
https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/shopping-auto_dealer-c...
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."
Another surprise:
(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.
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,
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.
Far away from civilization.