[HN Gopher] How to Quit Cars
___________________________________________________________________
How to Quit Cars
Author : amatheus
Score : 110 points
Date : 2023-05-18 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| putnambr wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > 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.
| putnambr wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Surely there is some humour in talking about the low-car
| lifestyle while actually owning three cars. I, for one, was
| greatly entertained.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| mdorazio wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://www.bts.gov/content/us-passenger-miles
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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).
|
| 0: https://www.bankrate.com/loans/auto-loans/average-monthly-
| ca...
|
| 1: https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/car/average-cost-of-
| car-i...
| putnambr wrote:
| 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.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| This still sounds not great :(
| [deleted]
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| lets knock that down to $250/month
|
| 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.
|
| https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-
| loans/average-...
| slondr wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Also, the average is always going to be higher than the
| median. These things tend to follow a lognormal
| distribution.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| About half of all Americans can't cover a $1,000
| emergency.
|
| https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/data-2023-savi
| ngs...
|
| (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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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".
| jvican wrote:
| Isn't it illegal to drive without auto insurance? (At
| least, in California?)
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| Yes it is illegal.
|
| 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?
| dustincoates wrote:
| I was curious so I looked it up, and it seems that 32
| states allow surety bonds:
| https://www.autoinsuresavings.org/surety-bonds-auto-
| insuranc...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| 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.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Sure.
|
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I don't even think having a license is a reasonable
| requirement. I should be able to own and register a car
| without having a license.
|
| I think you can do this in most states; I know you can in
| my state (MA).
| bombcar wrote:
| It's actually possible to own a vehicle without
| registration at all, though they will side-eye you
| sometimes.
|
| The most common is "farm implement operated incidentally
| over a highway".
| maxerickson wrote:
| Laughs in Michigan.
| bombcar wrote:
| It is illegal in many states. But they average something
| like 10-30% of all drivers: https://www.moneygeek.com/ins
| urance/auto/resources/uninsured...
|
| If you never get pulled over, or you know some tricks,
| you slide by.
| majou wrote:
| My car was $1,500 and my insurance is ~$35. I'm lucky enough
| to be able to bother mechanics to teach me repairs though.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| nsvd wrote:
| I also have the cheapest limited liability insurance
| money will buy. It's a cost-benefit gamble I'm willing to
| take.
| User23 wrote:
| No lawyer is even going to bother to sue a judgment proof
| person like that. They're going to be happy to settle for
| whatever insurance offers.
| bertil wrote:
| 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.
| deprecative wrote:
| 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.
| chung8123 wrote:
| 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.
| deprecative wrote:
| 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.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| 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.
| deprecative wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| chung8123 wrote:
| You do the think that is most convenient. If the train is
| faster and easier you do that. If a car is easier you use
| that.
| bertil wrote:
| Making either efficient requires investment, and I'm not
| sure that Americans have invested enough in light rail.
|
| 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.
| nologic01 wrote:
| The issue of quiting cars is nowadays far from just a matter of
| values as the article seems to be implying.
|
| Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and urban
| planning disaster across the world. We are stuck with them. As a
| mode of transport it has grown uncontrollably at the expense of
| all others (except the airplane) and practically everything has
| been shaped to accomodate it.
|
| Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its
| really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and
| arteries transplant on a living person. Even if there was a will
| (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way.
|
| In the best scenario it will be an excruciatingly long
| transformation (~50 yr) as car oriented cities (or city sections)
| get slowly deprecated and the car-free or car-lite segments
| become more desirable, more livable.
| hackermatic wrote:
| In many places, allowing and encouraging infill development and
| upzoning would make carfree life viable more quickly than you'd
| think.
|
| I've lived most of my life in former streetcar suburbs --
| neighborhoods of single-family homes, duplexes, and small
| apartment buildings that were served by a streetcar line every
| few blocks. Today, some of those places require cars to get
| anywhere interesting and back, while some of them have a few
| well-used bus lines and a ton of local restaurants, groceries,
| and hardware stores in easy walking distance.
|
| The density tipping point is really low; a few four-plexes on
| each block, which didn't diminish any of the "neighborhood
| character" or lead to epic struggles to find parking. (I did
| still have a car, I just used it a lot less, and was much
| happier not having to bother.) And it felt a lot nicer than the
| all-or-nothing neighborhoods that are either single-family
| homes or large corporate apartment complexes.
| ohmyzee wrote:
| I don't mean to be rude but are you over 45? There is a will
| with most people under that age in my experience. Or maybe cars
| are important culturally where you live?
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not
| clear if there is a way._
|
| In Boston there's both a will and a way. I haven't owned a car
| for as long as I've lived here, and the bike lanes are so, so
| much better now than when I first arrived. Neighboring
| Cambridge now has laws on the books requiring bike lanes to be
| added any time that a road is rebuilt. The new light-rail
| extension through Somerville added a bike path alongside most
| of its length, connecting the paths along the downtown
| riverside to the Minuteman bikeway that runs 15 miles out to
| Bedford.
|
| It can be done. But people have to organize and give a fuck.
| hot_gril wrote:
| The silliest mistake I see wasn't creating suburbs but shoving
| roads into denser cities. In some cases this was the result of
| corporate lobbying, like in Los Angeles. Wastes like 1/3 of the
| space and ruins the enjoyment of living there, so people prefer
| suburbs instead.
|
| The little success I keep thinking of is downtown Mountain View
| during covid19. They shut down the roads, so people walk around
| and interact. They still drive to the area and park nearby. If
| they keep this kind of thing up, making these areas desirable
| to live in and growing them, things will become more
| consolidated. Eventually with those fewer "point masses,"
| public transit can go between them. Doesn't make sense
| currently because there are just too many destinations.
|
| Meanwhile those who really want to live in suburbs and drive
| around can still do it. They could even drive to the dense
| areas and park. They'd just be missing out.
| ilyt wrote:
| It's not really "remove cars" problem tho. Cars are fine and
| are needed, you can't move anything big with tram or bike
| easily. It's make other forms of transport more viable for day
| to day stuff
|
| You still need vans and trucks delivering stuff to people and
| businesses. Bus is _far_ more flexible form of transport than
| tram. Just... if you need to wait ages for one and there is no
| stop nearby nobody will want to wait.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It took 50 years for the car to become dominant; it'll take
| another 50 for it to be displaced.
| efitz wrote:
| If people want to live in cities and want to have a car-free
| lifestyle, then more power to you.
|
| Cities are becoming increasingly unaffordable and increasingly
| violent. I think that we are past "peak metro" and that the
| absolute refusal of many people to return to office work is going
| to result in an acceleration of out-migration from cities. This
| in turn will exacerbate other urban problems as the revenue base
| dries up and low wage employees become ever more difficult to
| find in urban areas.
| bertil wrote:
| Do you have any data to support the claim that cities are
| becoming more violent? That's a common trope that is generally
| debunked by police statistics.
| pedroma wrote:
| Can you post some of those police statistics that debunk that
| claim?
| bertil wrote:
| The most famous case for it is here: https://www.ted.com/ta
| lks/steven_pinker_the_surprising_decli...
|
| but there are a lot more cases, generally in the same
| direction, depending on the time frame, whether it's city
| vs. country, race-related, drug-related, enforcement-
| related, from strangers, etc.
|
| Overall, far fewer cases are being given a lot more cover
| while deaths preventable with standard healthcare increase,
| and deaths and life-altering injuries from car accidents
| remain so frequent you'd need a metronome to count them.
| paulddraper wrote:
| San Fransisco crime increased 5% last year. [1]
|
| NYC crime increased 22% last year. [2]
|
| Chicago crime increased 41% last year. [3]
|
| [1] https://missionlocal.org/2023/01/explore-how-crime-
| changed-i...
|
| [2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00071/nypd-citywide-
| crim...
|
| [3] https://www.illinoispolicy.org/chicago-crime-spikes-
| in-2022-...
|
| **
|
| That said, the OP said "violent" and technically the increase
| was almost entirely non-violent crimes (e.g. theft).
| jjxw wrote:
| Also important to note that "last year" includes the tail
| end of the pandemic where crime as a whole fell due to
| lockdowns. SF and NYC fall far below other, less dense,
| cities in the US such as Cleveland Ohio, Lansing Michigan,
| Rockford Illinois, and Anchorage Alaska in violent crime
| rates. Granted, Chicago is in the top 20 in violent crime,
| though, if I had to guess those statistics are driven by
| crime that occurs outside the "urban core".
|
| Perception certainly matters -- perceptions of SF BART and
| MUNI probably are not helping ridership -- but the
| narrative that San Francisco has become an urban hellscape
| is not borne out by the data nor by my personal anecdotal
| experience.
| sva_ wrote:
| > San Fransisco crime increased 5% last year.
|
| If you want to decrease your crime rates, just make crimes
| more legal _tips forehead_.
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| " increasingly violent"
|
| Where are you getting that data?
| dukeyukey wrote:
| I don't think "increasingly unaffordable" and "acceleration of
| out-migration from cities" can realistically happen at the same
| time. I can definitely say that London's (where I am)
| population is growing, and grew consistently through Covid. A
| quick Google tells me NYC, Seattle, Chicago are all adding
| people at comparable-or-greater rates than the US population is
| growing.
| digging wrote:
| This is weird, misguided fear-mongering.
|
| Cities are increasingly unaffordable largely because of anti-
| urban, car-centric policies (zoning, infrastructure plans).
|
| > If people want to live in cities and want to have a car-free
| lifestyle, then more power to you.
|
| It's really not about what people want, it never has been. It
| is illegal to build walkable areas in almost all of the US.
| Laws need to be changed, immediately, for our well-being and
| the survival of our civilization. And then you can still go
| live in the country if you want to; it's awesome out there and
| you can be even further from the sprawl.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Cities can't continually become unaffordable if all the rich
| people you say are leaving don't come back. It doesn't equate.
| shipscode wrote:
| Agree with you 100%, the next few years are going to be wild
| WRT people moving out of metro areas. The housing costs in NYC
| for example haven't returned to 2016 levels and likely won't in
| the near future.
| kortex wrote:
| 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.
| vlunkr wrote:
| > tragedy of the commons
|
| 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.
| geff82 wrote:
| 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.
| matsemann wrote:
| 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.
| goda90 wrote:
| 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.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| How to quit vim
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| 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.
|
| Far away from civilization.
| skulk wrote:
| 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)
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| cagey wrote:
| 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)
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > (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.
| skulk wrote:
| You don't need a conspiracy, but here is one: https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
|
| 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.
| chung8123 wrote:
| "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]"
| digging wrote:
| 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.
| bambax wrote:
| > _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).
| Havoc wrote:
| The infra has to be there. I've lived in places where of course
| you have a car and I've lived in places where of course you don't
| have a car.
|
| The person wasn't the difference
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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.
| lynx23 wrote:
| 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.
| rwbt wrote:
| 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.
| koch wrote:
| Archived: https://archive.ph/asq7z
| Decabytes wrote:
| When I moved to Michigan I never realized that a suburb could not
| have a side walk. This is not uncommon in Michigan. That means
| that if you walk, or run, rollerblade, skate it has to be done in
| the street. Also lots of things are so much farther in Michigan
| than they were when I lived in Mass. In Mass I could go 3 miles
| in 30 minutes. In Michigan I can go 70 miles in 60 minutes
| olivierlacan wrote:
| Relevant to this issue: https://sidewalk-sea.cs.washington.edu
| csdreamer7 wrote:
| Same in North Carolina (was from California).
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Oh there are whole neighborhoods in the Bay Area with no
| sidewalks.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Los Altos. I feel like that's more to discourage random
| people from loitering.
| digging wrote:
| I feel like loitering, like jay-walking, is a crime
| invented for the purpose of selling cars. There's nothing
| inherently wrong with just hanging out on foot in a place
| where people are meant to be on foot and/or hanging out.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| There are neighborhoods in DC and Denver with no sidewalk. In
| the city proper, sometimes near a transit station.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > 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.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/asq7z
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _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.
|
| See a multitude of article here:
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/category/Public+Transit
| cassac wrote:
| 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.
| tokyolights2 wrote:
| 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.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| What exactly are you adding here?
|
| 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.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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?
| andromeduck wrote:
| They are to most women, at least in my friend group.
| dilap wrote:
| 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.)
| milkytron wrote:
| > 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.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| https://www.strongtowns.org/ is what you're looking for. They
| have deep dives and do really interesting financial analysis.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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.
| karmelapple wrote:
| 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.
| fwungy wrote:
| Come to Sacramento and ride the light rails end to end. It
| isn't rocket surgery.
| BrianHenryIE wrote:
| I don't get what your point is, if you could explain please.
| I live in Sacramento, but I rarely use the light rail. And I
| almost never use cars.
| Dig1t wrote:
| 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.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| 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.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| 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.
| Jayschwa wrote:
| I agree. At its best, public transit can be a better experience
| than driving. But the average experience is often worse than
| driving.
| bertil wrote:
| 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.
| falcolas wrote:
| And worse includes slower by 2x or more than driving, even
| with all the BS driving includes like traffic jams and
| finding parking.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| slondr wrote:
| This is a false dichotomy, no?
|
| 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.
| sum1zideas wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| HPsquared wrote:
| 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.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| It's horrible by design - to sell cars.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| 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.
| bertil wrote:
| I've lived in several barely finished neighbourhoods and all
| were walkable: Hammarby Sjostad in Stokholm, Jatkassari 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.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| So have I. That's why I said _general_.
| digging wrote:
| 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.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Yes, I've lived in a couple of them. That's why I said
| _general_.
| digging wrote:
| 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.
| MarkSweep wrote:
| 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.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| I used to take Caltrain fairly regularly and never once
| smelled sewage. The drunken baseball fans were a problem
| though.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| 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.
| logifail wrote:
| > 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| logifail wrote:
| > 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?
|
| Q: What's stopping them?
|
| That's what I mean about lack of broad agreement.
| uoaei wrote:
| 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.
| Jayschwa wrote:
| 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.
| digging wrote:
| 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.
| bertil wrote:
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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(tm) 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.
|
| Which took twice as long hahahaha.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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.
| bertil wrote:
| 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.
| acabal wrote:
| 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.
| User23 wrote:
| It's easy for extraurban people to imagine what life without a
| car is like because the Amish are a thing. And most people
| don't want that lifestyle.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > 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%.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| bertil wrote:
| 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.
| karmelapple wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| 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. 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.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| 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.
| davidw wrote:
| 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.
| ivirshup wrote:
| Currently living in Munich, it is the quietest place I ever
| lived. Also super clean, like more than Singapore.
| acabal wrote:
| 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.
|
| Living in such places is eye-opening!
| bertil wrote:
| > noise, smells, crowds
|
| Those are caused mainly by cars. Take away the cars and
| there's a lot more space and fresh air for everyone.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| cpursley wrote:
| That's Amsterdam. Go visit some less touristy cities in
| The Netherlands.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I have. Most of them seem to be car-centric, to the point
| where many of my work colleagues don't even have an OV
| card (and were shocked when I said I had one as a
| tourist).
| digging wrote:
| 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.)
| HPsquared wrote:
| Car-centric design makes things unwalkable; other models
| make things undriveable. It's a competition.
| digging wrote:
| 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.
| google234123 wrote:
| Some places are really hot/humid you know, it's nice not
| to have to bike and need a shower for a small errand
| acabal wrote:
| 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!
| cpursley wrote:
| The Netherlands begs to differ.
| ilyt wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| digging wrote:
| > 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.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| 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.
| cpursley wrote:
| You are spot on - I have a thesis that most of Americas issue
| stem from its poorly thought out build environment.
|
| Recommended reading:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125313.The_Geography_of_...
| thefourthchime wrote:
| 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.
| progrus wrote:
| And for women, the subway is not just a 24/7 whimsical, wild,
| and grimy place, like it is for me...
| cal5k wrote:
| > 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."
| acabal wrote:
| > Like, what's the alternative?
|
| 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. Those aren't the only alternatives. Cars are not a
| requirement for human flourishing. We only designed our lives
| to make them that way.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > What's depressing is visiting developing countries and seeing
| them start to ape the worst of American car life.
|
| 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.
| digging wrote:
| 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.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > 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.
| milkytron wrote:
| > 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.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| 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.
| myroon5 wrote:
| Feels like you're taking reasonable prioritization
| personally. Over 90 percent of students attend public school:
|
| 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 transit 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
| finnh wrote:
| Wow the first sentence was the most Gopnik sentence ever - even
| before the em dash!
|
| I don't typically check the byline before I start reading, but
| Gopnik always gives himself away. This one set a record.
| bit_logic wrote:
| Here's a radical idea: disband and shutdown the public bus
| system. Before you reply with an angry post, read the rest of the
| plan. These systems take hundreds of millions of public funds and
| are completely ineffective in suburban areas (most of the
| country). Take that money and give a "rideshare card" with funds
| automatically filled every month (lower income will get more free
| funds). Either work with Uber/Lyft or start a similar government
| rideshare service. Something like this will actually get people
| to consider giving up their cars.
|
| After a while, certain high usage routes will be noticed in the
| rideshare data. It will become obvious which streets and
| destinations could be optimally served with high capacity buses.
| Now is the time to bring in bus routes. Setup these bus routes
| and offer a discount for using them.
|
| The current system isn't working, we need to try something
| different.
| ako wrote:
| By what metrics do you determine public bus system isn't
| working, and how would you expect these metrics to change in
| your proposal?
|
| As far as I can tell many people are using public transport,
| including buses, so it seems to work to some extend.
| bit_logic wrote:
| This whole thread exists because the public bus system is a
| failure in the US. How many threads on car dependence has
| there been on HN? The bus system is used only by the lowest
| income members of society who can't afford a car. They suffer
| long transit times, lack of point-to-point mobility, and
| delays. Sure that "works" to some extent for those who have
| no other options. And this leads to other effects like
| decreased health and social mobility. Want to go to college
| after work to improve your life? Can't because the bus routes
| take 2x or 3x the time it would in a car to get there. Want
| to get a checkup for that cough? Again riding the bus takes
| too much time.
|
| You can't force a top-down solution for public transit with
| the road system in the US. The great strength of the US road
| system is point-to-point transportation. Let everyone benefit
| from that instead of running buses that only the poorest use.
| Publicly funded rideshare is the way to do this. After a
| while, the bus routes will naturally appear in the data. This
| is the bottom-up way to build a bus system.
| citrate05 wrote:
| I don't think the problem is that we can't identify routes that
| would get a lot of use. It's that people running public transit
| have been charged with balancing those high-usage routes with
| service that's meant to serve as a social safety net, so that
| people aren't left completely without any transit. These are
| very different goals, and because transit agencies are not
| typically funded well enough to do both well, they are often in
| tension.
|
| Jarett Walker writes well about this coverage vs. ridership
| tradeoff: https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-
| ridership-covera...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| ab_goat wrote:
| 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.
|
| edits: infrastructure, private
| yohannparis wrote:
| 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.
| beznet wrote:
| 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.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| 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.
| mperham wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've only ever heard of parking complaints _in urban areas_.
|
| Suburbs are awash with parking. Maybe we should require
| parking to be "behind" stores instead of in front.
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| the people against parking minimums live in a fantasy world
|
| 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
| dijit wrote:
| but imagine that they weren't _forced_ to own a car and
| could do everything they need to do without one.
| welshwelsh wrote:
| 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.
| pkulak wrote:
| Well now, this is an interesting take that you don't see
| applied to any other resource.
|
| "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."
| thanatropism wrote:
| 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| forever-single laptop-caste urbanites
| brianwawok wrote:
| Not new. Go read 10 year old Mr Money Mustache.
| matsemann wrote:
| 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.
| randcraw wrote:
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| 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".
| bombcar wrote:
| 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."
| dukeyukey wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| pkulak wrote:
| 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.
| fulafel wrote:
| The climate crisis, even with EVs we need to ramp down private
| car usage (and curb its growth in developing countries).
| jeromegv wrote:
| 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.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| $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).
| sum1zideas wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| lantry wrote:
| 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
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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....
| eppp wrote:
| 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.
| shipscode wrote:
| 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.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| It's part degrowth mindset, part climate doomerism, part
| immaturity, and part naivete 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.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| > 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!
| lagniappe wrote:
| 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.
| matsemann wrote:
| 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!
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| 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.
| mrbabbage wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-
| bic...
| Eumenes wrote:
| [flagged]
| josephcsible wrote:
| > 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?
| dfinninger wrote:
| 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.
| some_random wrote:
| Where do you live that takes multiple hours to get through
| security?? Also, https://www.tsa.gov/precheck
| dijit wrote:
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > 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.
| dijit wrote:
| 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.
|
| This was in Amsterdam Schipol.
| josephcsible wrote:
| That must have been some kind of local rule. There's no
| such rule in the US.
| dijit wrote:
| Not a compelling argument, I will always make sure this
| doesn't happen.
|
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > And I also distinctly remember being unable to drop my
| bag at EWR for being "too late" to do so.
|
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The airport in Seattle has had many 75 minute security
| lines lately. I think it has to do with a TSA labor
| shortage than anything.
| Someone wrote:
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > 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.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| Someone wrote:
| > 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.
| lmm wrote:
| 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.
| chung8123 wrote:
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > The latter is not fine, since it's a worsening of
| society.
|
| Not necessarily. It's entirely possible that changing
| those incentives will improve things, overall.
| dijit wrote:
| 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.
|
| So... maybe?
| penjelly wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| I can believe the dating part but that can be covered by having
| and not using, if you really needed to.
| penjelly wrote:
| why would i have a car i dont use?
| bombcar wrote:
| Apparently to impress the lady-types.
| Gigachad wrote:
| 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"
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| 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.
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| [flagged]
| MrGrumbly wrote:
| "some New Yorker subscriber actually ate avo toast while
| reading this"
|
| This statement is childish, has no basis in reality, and has
| nothing to do with the subject at hand. It contributes nothing.
| Don't do this.
| geff82 wrote:
| 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).
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| 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.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > Individual transportation has been a staple of civilization
| for the last few thousand years.
|
| I can't imagine what you mean here by individual
| transportation. Could you explain a bit more?
| diversionfactor wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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."
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| milsorgen wrote:
| 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.
| shipscode wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Public transit is now the cause of the reforming classes, and
| the car their villain.
|
| I wonder if this would have been the case had cars stayed as
| diminutive as they were becoming in the mid 70's.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| Having an independent media is essential to quitting cars. I've
| never heard a discussion on quitting cars on the nightly news,
| but on YouTube this discussion is made possible. YouTube de-
| ranking independent media in favor of traditional media could
| really limit the growth of the "fuck cars" movement.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| "I've never heard a discussion on quitting cars on the nightly
| news"
|
| I've never heard a discussion on quitting cars anywhere
| offline, to be completely honest.
|
| The amount of people who currently drive cars who think to
| themselves, "You know what would be better? If I were sitting
| on some form of public transit right now..." is a very small
| portion of the real world population I assume (In North
| America)
|
| Sometimes, the internet is not real life...
| kfarr wrote:
| I think most people would agree with the following: "You know
| what would be better? If I were not sitting in a car right
| now"
|
| We can both recognize that cars can be necessary in certain
| conditions AND ideally not a big part of our lives. I think
| that's reasonable and possible.
| juve1996 wrote:
| > "You know what would be better? If I were sitting on some
| form of public transit right now..."
|
| But almost everyone would say "it would be better if there
| was less traffic to deal with."
| digging wrote:
| > The amount of people who currently drive cars who think to
| themselves, "You know what would be better? If I were sitting
| on some form of public transit right now..."
|
| You're looking at it backward. I think almost everyone who
| sits in traffic or nearly gets in a crash by someone doing
| something stupid thinks, "Driving is awful." They've just
| been conditioned to think there's no alternative.
| bertil wrote:
| You can check actual world-wide figures, and car owners are a
| tiny sliver compared to any other mode of transport.
| bearmode wrote:
| 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.
| dijit wrote:
| > 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.
| bearmode wrote:
| 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?
| dijit wrote:
| > 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| matsemann wrote:
| 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.
| swalling wrote:
| > They crowd streets, belch carbon, bifurcate communities, and
| destroy the urban fabric. Will we ever overcome our addiction?
|
| Betteridge's law of headlines says no.
|
| Even extremely well-planned and progressive cities like Portland
| (which has been expanding light rail for 30 years straight)
| haven't budged above 15% commuting by public transportation. No
| city outside SF and NYC have meaningfully addressed this.
| https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/pu...
|
| This is why electrification is so important. North American
| civilization is dependent on cars and trucking and will always be
| so when our countries are continental at scale.
| jcpst wrote:
| I am going hiking in New Mexico next week. I am taking the train
| there.
|
| After looking at the excellent public transportation in the Santa
| Fe area, I decided to make the whole vacation car-free.
|
| I'm from Kansas City, and public transportation is pretty much a
| joke. They have buses and a street car, but you just can't get
| around town that way. It would take me an entire day to do things
| that would take a 1/2 hour in a car.
|
| In Santa Fe, as long as I have a few bus schedules on hand, there
| is not much to worry about. I'm even couchsurfing with someone
| that lives 15 miles out of town, and there's a bus that will get
| me within a mile.
|
| What's the worst is where I live now, the 'burbs. Not quite the
| freedom and nature of the country, not quite the dazzle and
| immediacy of the city. At least it's bike-able.
|
| Anyway, I'm really excited about my trip and getting around in a
| different way.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Paris > Marseille by train is 3:08, not 4:00.
|
| Nice writup, thanks for sharing.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| 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.
| karmelapple wrote:
| > 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.
| melling wrote:
| 3 hours to go 400 miles in France vs 6 hours in the US?
|
| 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=...
| .
| falcolas wrote:
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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).
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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.
| orwin wrote:
| 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.
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