You will have to solve the epidemic of homelessness and crime in high-density areas of the United States before people will accept using mass transit. I fully support doing so - I would for example support a national project to build cheap concrete housing for all who need it - but that's the barrier.
I used to live in Portland and Tri-Met and my bike were my two means of transportation for many years. I would absolutely not use public transportation in that city today.
The entire west coast is really bad about its strategy for tackling homelessness. The central issue there is the federal government needs to massively ramp up housing, it can’t be solved at a local level (there’s a role to play for cities but basically you need nationwide housing reform.)
Chicago and NYC have massively used transit systems despite their homeless populations. I lived in Chicago and I miss a real transit system here in TX badly.
That is to say, we don’t need to do A before B. We need to do A & B
Seattle is fine. I've lived here and commuted via bus almost exclusively for 10 years now. The bus stop I catch is right at 3rd and Pine, with is the "scary drug dealing" corner that tourists are warned to stay away from.[0] I've never had a problem with homeless people either on the bus, at the stop, or while commuting. Over literally thousands of trips, I can probably count on one hand the number of fistfights I've seen - I saw more fights outside a bar in Pittsburgh in 2 years.
Some people are just scared of homeless people, poor people, or non-white people (or a mixture of the three). For those people, the issue isn't the actual safety, but their own discomfort or anxiety.
I'd bet that the injury rates on commuting even the scary bus routes here are comparable to or below the injury rate from driving.
The NYC subway is "massively used" but it isn't universally used, and for good reason. It's a national embarassment, both objectively and using an informal international standard scale for equivalent cities. As a result, the NYC subway is somewhere between intolerable and unwokrable for another massive part of the population who can't abide its relative lack of reliability, the danger, the filth or a combination of these.
I don’t understand how more state control is preferable. I live in California and the state government is not very in tune to the needs of my locality and seems very corrupt.
Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
> Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
Because substantially all cities do not want housing growth. They're all operating under the same set of incentives.
In order to have a vote in local elections, you have to be a resident. In localities with predominantly owner-occupied properties, this implies that you're a property owner. So you vote for policies that increase local housing costs, because you've got yours and you want its price to go up rather than down.
Suppose there are people in San Francisco who would like to move to San Jose or Los Angeles or San Diego, and vice versa. Everyone in San Francisco wants their property in San Francisco to get more expensive and the properties they might buy anywhere else to get less expensive, and likewise for every other city. But since only the people already in San Francisco can vote in San Francisco, the interests of all the people who want to move there are not being represented, and likewise the interests of all the people in San Francisco who want to move to San Jose but don't get a vote in San Jose.
If you move this to the state level, all of the people in San Jose and Los Angeles and San Diego can vote to lower housing costs in San Francisco and vice versa, and since the people outside of a given city outnumber the people in it, the balance could shift in favor of housing affordability instead of the untenable status quo.
That's when they resort to the bribery which they call rent control. Instead of building more housing, they give existing tenants (who can vote in the jurisdiction) lower rents than prospective tenants (who can't). Which moves enough tenants to the other side of the ballot to keep the construction restrictions in place, and further reduces the incentive for new construction, raising long-term rents even more.
Prohibiting rent control at the state level would be a great move because economists broadly agree that it's a terrible idea and then you get all the previously paid off tenants whose rent would increase clamoring for other measures to get housing costs down and increase the incentive for new construction. (Many other states sensibly already prohibit it at the state level.)
In California rent control is established by a referendum so it requires either another referendum to repeal or a some large majority in the legislature (which is unlikely to pass since the legislators understand that it's likely to be their last legislation). You cannot take away free/cheap stuff from people in a democracy, nobody is going to vote for that.
Rent control is a huge pain the ass because it's simultaneously supported by fatcats who know exactly what it does (i.e. raise overall housing costs) and naive idealists who think they're sticking it to the fatcats.
We don't allow a Hokou style of internal migration controls in the US, and we shouldn't allow places to block population growth. Both of these systems lead to massive inequality, lack of opportunity, and bad outcomes.
If you want to wall off your city, it should come with consequences such that you are not allowed to pay for services at a wage less than that which would suppprt somebody living in your city. Typical homes values are at $2.5M? That requires income of $500K to purchase, so no more nurses or cashiers or anybody else's enabling your life that does not get paid at that level.
Your taking of property is a continuous denial of other people living in a place. You paid a fix price, sure, but when the value increases, you are now taking far more away from the rest of society.
Land is not made by human hands. You should have the right to the fruits of your labor, but land is our common birthright, and just by being born first your should not be absolved from paying for what you are taking from everyone else.
Cities councils not wanting housing is why we’re in a mess in the first place. Why would it make sense to do more of the same and expect a different outcome. That’s the definition of something.
Outcomes change as the needs of the municipality change. Members get voted in and out. Do you think there is a misalignment between the city council and the constituents? Or is this what the residents want?
> Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
Because it’s being enforced on everyone not just those who like things the way they are. The bar is always higher when you want to force people to do something.
> Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
Because "Fuck you, I've got mine" is no way to organize society. Local control enabled a race to the bottom of trying to fob the poors off on someone else.
I think most municipalities see growth as a general good. The issue starts when the cost of growth starts to outweigh the benefits. Roads/water/utilities/waste management are all municipal services that need to be able to handle the growth.
You're right of course, but our capitalist societies are organized around making profit, and pulling the ladder from under them is profitable for those who managed to climb the ladder first.
This won't change until properties stop being good investment vehicles, and that won't change since land is finite and demand for housing in desirable areas is always growing, therefore increasing the opportunity for profit and wealth accumulation.
If your city is also not getting state roads, state universities, state law enforcement, and state fire protection then great. Any city that refuses to get on board with state housing policy should be cutoff from all of the above.
Aren't those things all already handled by the city in most cities? (Except state universities, which aren't in many cities anyway.) That's why fire and police departments are named after the city they operate in, and mayors talk about fixing potholes.
The hostility of not wanting new people around you or any population growth seems to warrant the much more minor reciprocal hostility of forcing that population to island themselves.
I don't think people who insist their city should not grow are hostile. I think they are just ignorant and deluded. They are either not aware of, or choosing to ignore, the fact that their cities are economically dependent on neighboring cities to house their workforces, and to absorb their own natural increases.
That's what's happening in California. Newsom[1] and the legislature are on a war path against nimby's, muni and county planning departments.
City of Berkeley used 'noise' as a reason to block a UC Berkeley student housing project on environmental grounds. State just passed a law to make that illegal.
Judge just told Beverly Hills they can't issue any permits until they comply with state law.
[1] Newsom wants to be president and he knows he isn't going to get there on diversity and pronouns. He has to focus on jobs, housing, and crime.
> a national project to build cheap concrete housing for all who need it
Out of curiosity, have you looked into this?
This was basically the NYCHA approach in the '30s-'50s. Then we got the '70s-80s, and for sure some good came from these developments -- rap music! -- but by all accounts they were not wonderful places to live. Not only because they often segregated poverty, but also because they were poorly maintained, like so many other state-owned housing schemes.
Housing is expensive, yes, and we need more of it, yes. But low-cost housing without other support is not a solution to the "epidemic of homelessness and crime" in cities. We need better plans to help people get out of poverty, treatment for addiction and other mental health problems, integration into society, meaningful work, etc. etc.
I'm not picking on you in particular (you do say "for example", so perhaps you already know the above!) but other should know that the mere availability of cheap or even free housing is not a panacea for social ills.
People don't build cities since we're not in the wild west anymore. Elected leaders along with legislators and property investors do, and their interest is to make a lot of money for themselves while offering you the bare minimum, not provide other less fortunate humans with nice walkable cities.
> People don't build cities since we're not in the wild west anymore.
I think you're confused about the meaning. It's not about brand new cities, it's about allowing construction of certain builds in areas to increase the density of cities, which by extension would lead to amenities in walking distance.
Zoning reforms work, they've been employed in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
Minneapolis & St Paul have a light rail that was pretty decent pre covid, now it is a homeless shelter on rails. Practically no policing so there is open drug trade & usage.
We didn't really try it, we tried to kill it. It was segregated, not funded enough to maintain the housing, and policy was designed in a way to make it fail.
All other advanced nations besides the US do (or did) public housing quite effectively. Even very conservative places like Singapore have amazing public housing.
Many many people want to live in a concrete jungle, which is why NYC is so popular.
Public housing in the US did not fail because it was in large concrete towers. It failed because it was isolated from the economic community, it was not maintained, and it was sabotaged on the funding side.
Mass produced cement blocks are a fantastic way to live, and much of the rest of the world uses to great effect, some for public housing, but also for middle class and upper class housing.
It's so weird that so many in the US have this odd fixation that because they personally don't want that concert box, that so many others would kit absolutely looooove to live there. Check out Asia some time, or basically anywhere else in the world.
The small mindedness of "I don't like it therefore nobody ever could and you should never be allowed to live differently than the way I like" is a very destructive force in the US. We have apparently lost the ability to "let live" in "live and let live. "
You're right, we need truly integrated housing. It does work. My ~$2.5M home is an 1/8 mile from subsidized housing. Outside of boomers on nextdoor who think every package delivery person is casing their home, it works completely fine.
The "silo" isn't the problem, it's the lack of opportunities for employment, lack of access to basic amenities, etc.
People in wealthy silos, in downtowns, do fantastically. The problem was the systemic racism in the US, that enabled such a state of disinvestment and segregation, not the particular form of architecture.
That is an incredibly offensive and racist thing to even concieve, much less try to put into somebody else's mouth.
The problem of public housing's inaccessibility, being cut off from jobs and basic necessities, is well documented. Segregation has been a huge problem in the US because it has been used to deny basic opportunity to Black people, not because a lot of Black people are living together.
FWIW, the communist regimes did that in Eastern Europe, and for all the nasty shit they did, that was one of the few things that did more good than harm. It's how apartments in Bucharest are still relatively affordable despite the massive migration and gentrification.
Unless of course, the way the US tried it was the "malicious compliance way" which was designed to fail from the start, then I'm not surprised it didn't go well.
The history of the LA area "Red Car" transit system makes for interesting reading (covered well on WikiPedia). A large well used, electric, urban rail system that no longer exists. Primarily because it was originally funded by the developers of the "beach" cities as a way to increase the value of their housing developments, since residents were able to commute to jobs downtown and elsewhere. However, once the houses were all built and sold, there was no incentive to keep funding the street cars and the system eventually closed. Many of the disused lines were used as the basis for new freeways, ironically.
Transit (and freeways) as property development schemes are very underecognized, thanks for pointing this out.
The Henry George Theorem (Sitglitz 1977) states that (in the right conditions) funding of public goods like transit and freeways increases the land value and therefore land rents by more than the investment amount. Namely, it creates value, but for whoever owns the land.
Changing to less car centric development has the potential to vastly increase value. I'd advocate for a land value tax to fund the public investment, but would be happy with whatever non-car centric options are made available, honestly.
I talk about this a lot when I discuss transportation policy (not a professional or anything, just been interested in for two decades).
People seem to think that there is some pendulum that swings in directions when it comes to infrastructure. It's really not. These things happen in cascades. Once a new mode is dominate, it takes over until it outlives it's usefulness and then collapses.
The LA Red Car is exactly this scenario, as is long haul rail transportation. And if you've been reading the Chuck Marhon for the last decade, you might see the suburban development pattern leaning toward a similar cascade.
I don't see the automobile disappearing from the American city any time soon (the hoi polloi love the idea of the damn things too much even if the hate being in traffic), but you can live car free in so many American cities these days, it's really shocking.
I shouldn't have needed to move to the Netherlands to feel safe with my kids biking to school. The US is a wasteland and when you've seen otherwise it just seems like a nightmarish hellscape of stroads.
You didn't need to. I bet most places in the US are safe for your kids to bike to school. I see kids walking and biking to and from school all the time in my neighborhood. Never heard of any problems with it.
I am interested about your experience since mine is quite different. In the last 10 years I have lived in Vancouver, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Sunnyvale, Saratoga and now in Spain. I was also choosing “walkable” neighborhoods and in my experience there is almost no places in the US or Canada I would feel safe letting my daughter ride her bike to school. For example, I was biking ~4 days a week from Saratoga to Mountain View and the schools surroundings were the most dangerous section of my commute. Lines of parents dropping their child's with gigantic SUVs ready to right hook my ass. I was having close calls almost every other days and this is in some of the wealthiest zip code in the US. I am sure there is some places where walking and biking is possible but this is the exception.
Davis is one of the only examples i could think of. I do know some folks in MTV who are lucky enough so they walk their children to school but unless you live a few blocks away and you don’t have to cross a 2-3 lanes stroad on the way, it is possible.
Sadly for tech geek, EU job market is quite a bit harder than the US. Luckily, remote consulting allows me, for now, to live basically anywhere.
Unhelpful without giving a location. In Denver (a supposedly bike friendly city) I would never let my children ride to school. Not due to crime, but thanks to unruly motorists who are driving commercial sized pickup trucks and SUVs like they're sportscars.
I just spent a week in New Jersey. It was not possible to get anywhere without a car. I had to take a lot of Ubers from my hotel. Surrounded by large multi lane roads and car parks. No pavement to walk even if you wanted to. Every business needed a huge car park. Everything was incredibly spread out.
Maybe this is normal for Americans, but for me it was a car hellscape. I don't own a car living in London, and there just isn't the same need.
This is so normal for Americans that you'll see people in this thread vehemently defending this hellscape against any criticism, since they can't imagine an alternative. A resident of London who doesn't own a car is a prisoner in their own home, in the mind of the average American.
It is normal for urban and near urban America. Too many people without enough sense, crowded in too small a space. On darker days, I think we need a more effective plague to shrink the population.
My "need" for a car is driven by things that make life worth living, none of which are found in a city. OTOH, I can appreciate that city life works for some people and I would never try to impose a rural or suburban life on them.
And yet the fact it needs to be explained in order to proceed in a discussion on the matter says a lot about the cultural normalization of the car.
Many do not consider resource consumption in production and disposal, as well as emissions as regards particulate matter (road and tire wear), when engaging in topics like this, so clearly this insight is not as obvious to many as it ought to be.
Yeah, I get it... I'm just continuously surprised by what constitutes insight. The idea of shifting away from our car-centered urban designs is pretty old; AFAIK the electric car was always seen as a way to get away from the disadvantages of gasoline while still remaining compatible with car-centered urban designs. Otherwise the EVs we'd be talking about would be the far easier to achieve electric scooters or bicycles.
The inertia of urban planning is measured in decades, while that of the technologies we are developing today is measured in quarters or years. It makes sense why the market logic dictates the fervor for EVs, since market dynamics are inherently myopic, but if we are to address the issues on longer time scales we need to think beyond a market-supremacist outlook. E-scooters and e-bikes are indeed touted as ways to subvert market dynamics to encourage change in the less-temporary features of our living environments.
Yale Climate Connections - didn't expect a politically neutral post from that. But they make a good argument for higher density, which I agree with. But there are some advantages to a car-centric society:
- higher personal freedom - you can go anywhere, anytime. With transit / walking, you can go some places, some of the time. This is huge and opens up a lot of possibilities for work, vacations, socializing, healthcare.
- bulk stores like Costco is only possible because people have cars. You will have to pry my Costco membership card from my cold, dead hands.
It's a lot cheaper to let people drive in to a central bulk store like this and buy what they want in large quantities than to have a network of tiny, walkable stores and try to predict demand and optimally distribute goods to them with delivery vans.
> higher personal freedom - you can go anywhere, anytime. With transit / walking, you can go some places, some of the time. This is huge and opens up a lot of possibilities for work, vacations, socializing, healthcare.
It seems like people have gotten stuck in this false dichotomy where the only two possibilities are detached single-family homes on an acre of land or 50-story high rises with hundreds of housing units.
An acre of land is 43560 sq ft. That's enough for a 10,000 sq ft per-story multi-story building and dozens of ground-level parking spaces. You can fill a neighborhood with those, put shops on the ground floor and housing above it, and have a walkable neighborhood where every household has one car instead of two.
> bulk stores like Costco is only possible because people have cars. You will have to pry my Costco membership card from my cold, dead hands.
You could pretty easily replace this with ecommerce for bulk goods. It's actually kind of weird that this isn't more popular because bulk purchases should reduce shipping overhead. Why isn't there a Costco truck that drops off a month's supply of groceries at your front door once a month?
If you divide the amount of land in Brooklyn by the population, the average person gets ~1049 sq ft of land, not accounting for roads or parking or sidewalks or anything like that. How much of yours would you like to allocate to grass?
none.. I have a 2500sqft house on a 10k sqft lot. I am eradicating the grass, rewilding as much as possible, increasing veggie garden with drip/soaker hose irrigation, expanding strawberry/blueberry patch. it is a multi-year project but it is one of those things that make life worth living.
And that's fine as long as you realize that it isn't physically possible for everyone to do that in many cities. It cannot fit into the land area of the city.
And nobody is proposing a law that requires you to knock down your house and build a multi-family unit that fills the lot, but if that's what somebody else wants to do on their property, just let them.
I agree and I paid a premium on my housing so I could have that yard. Technically, I am within the city (about 500 m from the city limits up against a more rural city. I completely understand the need to build more housing in a denser configuration. Where I live is in an old mill city, and they keep trying to revitalize downtown, but it never seems to take. I think they need to, as we geeks say, scrub and reinstall.
It doesn't matter to me if they build housing as long as it doesn't block my view of the sky and it doesn't add to light pollution.
A lot of the older housing is shit-quality tenements. To give one example of the crappy environment, there was a music festival in downtown, I walked from home (about 3 miles) because I didn't want to add to the parking chaos. I had to walk through a rundown section of town and saw a couple of families with their kids in the yard. The yard was all asphalt. Not a hint of green or dirt.
If we are going to build denser housing with social housing, we have to have green places where kids can play. I am a big fan of rewilding with few trees; that should be the kind of place kids have to play. With dirt to dig into, flowers they can smell, have room to plant a basic garden. let no kid be left inside.
we may not be able to give them a 10,000-square-foot yard, but we can make green commons, and part of their education would be understanding their responsibility to themselves and to others in how to take care of a common space.
As for knocking down my house, well, some "should-ers" have told me that I should do just that. Knock down my house (1930s era) building, put in the 4 to 6 apartments that could fit on the lot, and take a loss on the building to make it affordable.
> It doesn't matter to me if they build housing as long as it doesn't block my view of the sky and it doesn't add to light pollution.
I wish the single-family homes would stop adding to the light pollution. It seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry with a garage has a motion sensor connected to a million lumens worth of electric light that gets triggered every time the wind blows or a car drives down the street.
> A lot of the older housing is shit-quality tenements.
One of the main problems with housing policy in the US is that there is a group of people who want home values to go up and another group who want housing to be affordable and it should be fairly obvious why they can't both be satisfied at once. So instead we get rubbish political responses like rent control and The Projects and the creation of slums that nominally give poor people somewhere to live while all but purposely making it awful or otherwise restricted to Those People to make sure that no upstanding citizens would ever live there instead of paying four times what it should cost for proper housing.
We have to overcome that in order to have nice things.
> If we are going to build denser housing with social housing, we have to have green places where kids can play.
Sure, and higher density construction is one of the things that allow it. One and two-story homes make extremely inefficient use of land.
Suppose you have to fit 1000 people into a million sq ft of land and you want them to each have 1000 sq ft of indoor living space. If you build one-story buildings, you are not going to have an inch left for a single tree. If you build four-story buildings, they could each have 2000 sq ft and you'd still have half a million square feet left over from which to carve out a nice park or community garden.
> As for knocking down my house, well, some "should-ers" have told me that I should do just that.
Everybody wants to tell everybody else what to do. We need to reject "everything not mandatory is prohibited" and just let different people make different choices.
Giant cities are terrible. Everyone should strive to leave. I do agree that we remove building codes and ordinances that prohibit one from doing what he wants on his own property.
Car-centric design reduces freedom, because it requires an expensive car in order to go anywhere. Nothing says freedom like a $900/month car payment in order to get to work and buy groceries![0]
Bulk stores like Costco are only necessary because people live in such sprawling communities. In places where you live a short walk from a grocery store, you can practice just-in-time logistics, and buy whatever you need as soon as you need it.
It's a lot cheaper, both in economic and environmental terms, to build cities where people don't need to drive for their daily needs.
There's no such thing as a "cheap" car when you compare it to the cost of walking or cycling. You could buy a new pair of shoes and a bike every month for the cost of just insuring and fueling an average car.
Car-centric design is a tax on all of us. It's just less burdensome for some than it is for others.
How much food and water do you keep at home? Are you prepared for an emergency? Needing extra food every day sounds risky, as well as not being a good use of time.
Regardless of the price, it limits access to many necessities only to people able to drive. All children are unable to drive, and anyone who doesn't die young will end their life disabled and unable to drive for the last several-to-many years of it. There's no reason to limit and isolate people this way. It's certainly not "freedom."
Weird strawman. 1000/month buys you a nice new car. You can buy a second-hand one outright for 5k.
I've lived in both walk-centric and car-centric modalities. It's a lot cheaper to do a costco trip every two weeks in North America than to walk to Co-op or Waitrose or whatever and buy a single, individually-wrapped-in-plastic apple at a time.
On the topic of strawman, surely the better comparison would be Tesco home-delivery of the bulk of your biweekly shopping. While that costs more than buying it yourself, how much is your time worth?
Also, Waitrose is upmarket, so that's more like a Whole Foods apple than a Costco one.
I save a ton of time buying in bulk. It’s the main reason I do it; I’m just delighted I also save money.
I also get much better quality meat, fruit, and vegetables from Costco than Waitrose. So this is a total no-brainer for me. The only downside for some is you need more upfront money to shop in bulk, even if it works out to be cheaper.
It costs more that on the shelf because you are paying for someone to do work for you. Again, how much is your time worth?
Yes, a lot of people love to pick out their own food themselves, and buy in bulk only every couple of weeks, and take it home in their own vehicle. You are one of them, but certainly not everyone is like you. I am not.
The idea of a less car-centric world is to give more options that don't require a car, not to prevent you from using a car.
If the savings in going to Costco is big enough to justify having a car, then one alternative option is to join a car sharing group. Every two weeks, book a vehicle for your Costco run. In effect you're only paying for a day's worth of car ownership rather than 14 days, where most of time the car does nothing.
Stores like Costco and Ikea exist in countries with good public transit. They're just one among many types of store. Transit advocacy isn't about eliminating everything except public transit. It can just be about improving transit so that the infrastructure for vehicles isn't overwhelmed with all the people who don't need to use cars and don't have other options.
You ever see the bill for a bit of rail, or a subway, or a bus line? These things are horrendously expensive to build, maintain, and run. The money comes from taxes. Now that tax money might be better spent on other things poor and homeless people need, or might be better off circulating in the economy and not taxed at all.
But freezing all that value in the form of public transit isn't going to yield the best payoff for society.
Freezing it in the hands of Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc... is? You do realize people build all the infrastructure, right? That entire industries are formed? It's quite literally the definition of mobilizing money into the economy.
Very True! It is about choice of transit. The US has NO Choice of Transit. It is either Car or nothing. How very free that is to be limited to 1 choice!
I had a friend in the city who was doing pretty well with Zipcar, where one could somewhat spontaneously rent a car in one's urban neighborhood to use for errands or trips. This could be a good solution in dense environments for Costco runs, especially when the nearest Zipcar lot is just a couple of minutes' walk away.
I personally go shopping by bike, but I notice there are some things I can't readily buy that way, like furniture. (I did successfully buy a microwave by bike, but a larger appliance than that would be pretty daunting.)
I have family visiting me right now in the big city from the small town, and it's weird for us to notice how different things are.
Having to walk a couple of minute just to get to the car is not acceptable. I have five kids (with hopefully at least another five in the future) which requires 10+ minutes just to make sure everything is in the car that we need. There's no way I'm going to hall them down the street to get in the car. The convenience and freedom of having a car in my garage is irreplaceable.
Those 10 kids, once they get older, will want to go to places, meet friends, and participate in activities. If the only option is a car, then you or someone else must be their chauffeur. Quite a few parents do it, but not all enjoy it.
If the place you live were less car-centric, you could give each of the older kids a bus pass and let them go places on their own, or your kids could walk and bike places on routes which are not shared with cars.
I grew up in a suburb. I biked around just fine. We have a bus stop just down the street from where I live now. However, I would let my kids carry a gun before I would let them on a bus.
That's likely because you live in a car-centric place where buses are generally only used by poor people, causing it to inherit a stigma.
Transit in car-centric areas is generally under-funded, with low frequency service, so really only those who have far more time than money are likely to use it (see previous paragraph). Nor are the routes oriented towards parks, the beach, the local library, or other places kids would go to to meet their friends.
Taking a bus can also be confusing for a beginner. I didn't start using the bus until visiting the UK in my late twenties. I didn't know how to pay, I didn't know how to request a stop, I didn't know what I could ask of the driver, I didn't know the route or what the stop looked like, and more.
If you don't have the experience yourself, and your kid hasn't been with you on the bus to learn from you, then of course you are unlikely to want your kid to use the bus.
On the other hand, go to the UK and you'll see that kids take the regular bus to/from school, along with people doing the work commute or running errands.
There isn't a fleet of student-only school buses, because the mass transit system has enough capacity and frequency. There I am on a double-decker bus on my second day in the UK and to my surprise the bus stops near a school and a gaggle of teens (okay, maybe 15-20) climb aboard.
And the UK is pretty car-centric compared to what I've heard about the Netherlands.
That’s true but it seems the suburban ideal is to protect children by not allowing them to leave the community without their parents. It’s basically an artificial village.
There are also advantages to a less car-centric society.
- "In 2022 the average vehicle costs $11,450 per year to own and operate. The breakdown of the figure comes to $4,496 for purchasing the vehicle, $3,120 in gasoline and motor oil expenses, and $3,834 in other vehicle-related costs." - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/08/cost-car-ownersh... . If you are in a two-car family, and a less car-centric environment means you only need one car for those Costco runs and wind surfing afternoons, then you can save thousands of dollars.
- You can go out with friends to a bar and drink, and not worry about having a designated driver.
- There's much less need for “Restricted” or “Hardship” License for repeat DUI offenders.
- Kids have higher personal freedom as they don't depend on a parent to drive
- People who aren't able to drive (due to any of many reasons) have higher personal freedom
- During your commute you can read or do other things which occupy your attention.
- You don't have to worry about finding parking or paying for parking.
- Your taxes go down as you don't need to subsidize so much driving infrastructure
Having mass transit access also opens up possibilities for work you can't as easily get with a car. That's why places already have Park&Ride - parking at the job location is too expensive with only car access.
In a less car-centric society there should be little difference between the health car you get with a car and without. Plus, if your health condition means you can't drive, you'll likely have better healthcare access.
> It's a lot cheaper to let people drive in to a central bulk store like this and buy what they want in large quantities than to have a network of tiny, walkable stores and try to predict demand and optimally distribute goods to them with delivery vans.
Cheaper for who? Car ownership can be a huge financial burden compared to transit.
> bulk stores like Costco is only possible because people have cars. You will have to pry my Costco membership card from my cold, dead hands.
Costco users in urban areas would disagree with your assessment that it's only possible with cars. I'm looking at this Costco in Soma right now and watching people walk out with enough bulk goods to carry in their granny carts or bags in hands.
I used to bike past it on my morning commute and it was heart-poundingly dangerous. Drivers will jump in front of you and slam on the brakes so they can get into the parking garage entrance. The taxis aggressively pulling out from the stop just add to the thrill.
I really don’t understand this post. You can obviously have both? Like it’s very super-duper obvious how you can just live in a city and don’t use your car at all, but drive out to get outside of the city.
I live in Vancouver, I go to Costco which is downtown (15 min walk or 7 min metro ride), drive up to skiing or hiking mountains multiple times a month (weather and etc. depended). I don’t even want to point at even better cities in other countries (most of Japan, Switzerland, parts of France and many more) as that’s cheating. But you really can have your cake and eat it too, it’s very much been done multiple times around the world.
Your freedom to drive generally reduces other people's freedom to walk, bike, and take transit. Among other things it's often illegal to build homes where people want to live so that you can park your car there.
Except those other people also want cars. So we all live in a sprawling, low-cost-of-living city and we are happy.
Of course, some people call this slice of heaven a "nightmarish hellscape of stroads" [0] but thank goodness those people can move somewhere else and leave our cars alone.
You can have both. At my home in India I can just walk and get all essentials I need (food medicine etc.) If I need to buy a lot of things I take a car and go to the nearest supermarket.
There is an environmental cost to using only cars to get your essential things. We need to start considering them now
Thank you, I was beginning to think I was the only person with the understanding that transportation is multimodal at the person level.
One blind spot that I'm aware of is where you are, need, and point of service don't always align. For example, my medications cost a lot more if I go to the Walgreens a quarter mile away versus the CVS a mile and a half away. My partner has a special needs child and she needs to be able to get the child to a variety of services during the day a few times a month. Driving makes it possible. Public transit would make her unemployable.
Strong disagree. Having spent good amounts of time in parts of the world where you can operate for months without getting in a car, it felt far more free. The barrier to entry in the US being owning a car, paying insurance and paying for a place to store it is the opposite of freedom.
> In “Fighting Traffic,” Norton argued that car culture was largely forced on an unwilling public by car dealers, manufacturers, automotive clubs, and others who banded together to promote automobile use, calling themselves “motordom.”
The problem of this analysis is that at the time of the protests, cars were a luxury good for the rich. However, as cars have become ubiquitous, the opposition to them goes away and people want more infrastructure in support of them.
American society is heavily suburban and rural, and therefore dependent on cars. None of that is going to change. And thanks for that. American cities are largely inhuman places.
The idea that things can't change, much less that cities of all places can't change, can only be thought by shortening knowledge of history to a tiny window.
Even current American cities have changed drastically in the past 50 years. They will change again.
Specifically, I wasn't commenting on urban living except to imply that a massive part of the population won't be amenable to moving to them. Given a hypothetical that there would even be room.
Cities can change, but just like everything else cities will retain their innate attributes.
Suburbs are not walkable. The assertion only reveals lack of accurate conceptualization of American suburbs. Yes they have made their transport choice: they have cars. Modern cities aren't equivalent to "civilization" in this comparison.
Suburbs can be, see suburbs built pre-WWII which typically had a train line connecting them to the nearby city industrial center which was used for daily commuting of workers who walked or biked to the station.
I agree that the vast majority are not walkable but it doesn't need to be that way. I live near an extremely walkable suburb.
Storefronts at the sidewalk instead of on the other end of sprawling parking lot. Pedestrian crossings in the middle of longer stretches of road (as opposed to only at intersections). Dedicated bike paths throughout the entire town. Schools centrally located on a single campus in the middle of town.
It goes to show what a town can do when the local government decides they want to be more than just a outpost for a larger city.
It'll always be that way. The suburbs are vast. Walkability is the rare exception, not the rule. Due to distance. Some exceptional parts of some suburbs are walkable.
For example, I have in mind the immense suburbs of a second tier US city. These are impossible to redesign, and travel to do simple errands is measured in half mile increments. With expanses of residential housing and heavily trafficked roads inbetween. This is for convenient locations. Much of the housing is less conveniently located.
You're generally right but suburbs _can_ be walkable if they're not designed by idiots. Houten, in the Netherlands, comes to mind. Or a lot of the US streetcar suburbs which these days are generally not considered suburbs - South Park, San Diego to give one example.
Respectfully, "can be" needs to be paired with "rarely". I'm not debating that the rare small section of expansive suburbs is walkable. That's found everywhere, rarely.
The reason that I'm insistent on the distinction is the same reason that I suspect responders are insistent on giving the impression that walkability is generally possible in suburbia. That reason is that the crux of the debate is whether or not the automobile has to remain central to American travel.
My POV is that suburbia is unavoidably car centric, almost all of the time with rare exceptions. Those taking the opposite pov are generally trying to give the impression that walkability is generally possible.
I live in a suburb that is very walkable. It has single family homes, can walk everywhere, and am close to transit. I have been having trouble driving but I can walk or bike for most of my needs.
This is pre-war streetcar suburbs. The difference is that the houses are close together. The garages are mostly in back and tiny. The streets are in a grid, nearly all have sidewalks, and many are narrow which lowers speeds. The main streets have shops and restaurants along them.
Cars give people the freedom to go places and carry luggage that would be impossible or inconvenient on public transport.
Taking this freedom away from people is divisive, bordering on hostile.
Ideologues in metropolitan bubbles talk a lot about getting rid of cars. They disregard, either ignorantly or willfully, the needs of everyone outside their bubble.
Car shares give people this freedom, but for less money.
Despite these "bubbles" in metropolitan areas, they are still ruined by ever present cars.
So you want a car? Great, go live in the 100% of the country that caters to your every need, by law. But please don't get in the way of others that want to build their own paradise. It doesn't concern you and you should mind your own business.
If car centric suburban development gave people what they want, it would be cheaper than the very few places in the US thay allow one to survive by taxi and car share.
It's not necessary for something for something to be cheaper in order for it to be what people want. People regularly pay more for things they prefer. Neither is it being cheaper proof one way or the other.
Housing expenses are a complex system including a balance/imbalance of supply and demand. If suburbs are cheaper like-for-like, that's an indication (but not proof) that there's more supply in suburbs than demand relative to a style of living that's more expensive. Housing preferences are very much multi-dimensional, of which car vs non-car mobility is but one factor. Quality of schools, availability of jobs, need/desire for large amounts of interior or private exterior space, quiet, ease of resale, and hundreds of other factors conspire to set an individual household's willingness/preference to live in a place.
However it shouldn't be necessary for me to walk in a ditch along a high speed road with no sidewalk just to get to the grocery that is less than half a mile away.
How so? I pay the fair market rate for the resources I use, and the people producing them are happy with the transaction.
Oh and by the way, I drive an electric car, so I don't produce any emissions in the residential areas I drive in (although like all goods, some one-off emissions were produced during manufacture)
You aren’t paying the full price for the roads you use or the parking, or the zoning requirements which force almost every property owner to subsidize your transportation choice. You aren’t paying for the additional healthcare required for the people who live around where you drive, or compensating them for the lowered quality of life, or compensating for the impact your much greater carbon emissions profile has on the entire planet.
> You aren’t paying the full price for the roads you use
The large majority of the cost of roads is a sunk cost, because regardless of whether cars are used for individual transportation, roads would still be needed for delivery trucks, buses and emergency vehicles. The incremental cost of an additional car is generally not going to be more than what the car owner is paying in fuel taxes and property taxes on it.
> or the parking, or the zoning requirements which force almost every property owner to subsidize your transportation choice.
These are both the same thing. If you live in the suburbs, you paid for the space where you park your car. The actual problem is minimum parking requirements in cities, which are stupid and should be gotten rid of, but even if you did there would still be many people who want cars and choose housing that provides parking.
> You aren’t paying for the additional healthcare required for the people who live around where you drive
Modern cars are pretty clean in terms of particulate emissions, to the point that the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air that went into the engine in some of the cities with dirtier air.
> or compensating them for the lowered quality of life
This isn't math. Are you proposing to compensate them for the lowered qualify of life of not having a car? If someone else has kids, do I get to bill them for the cost of having to compete with their kids for scarce resources? Or should I bill them for not having kids and depriving society of their contributions?
Everything everybody does affects the whole of society. At some point you either have to accept that they'll make choices you don't like and in exchange you get to make choices they don't like, or you have to embrace totalitarianism, in which one person gets to make decisions they like and if anybody else doesn't like it they can go to prison.
> or compensating for the impact your much greater carbon emissions profile has on the entire planet.
This isn't really a cars thing, it's a burning fossil fuels thing. You can perfectly well charge an electric car entirely from solar panels.
You might be unfamiliar with it but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. There’s a long academic literature around the cost of road infrastructure to the adjacent communities, and how that’s been disproportionately borne by people who are poor, undervalued minorities, etc. The average American city has a significant fraction of its area committed to car infrastructure for people who don’t live or pay taxes there, and it’s their communities divided by highways or unsafe high-speed roads, their health being lowered by the constant noise, their kids getting asthma at higher rates, and their families having to live with the consequences of fatal car crashes.
This is the kind of research that doesn't support the conclusion you think it does.
Of course living near an overpass isn't any fun. So why do they do it? Because it's cheaper. But if you got rid of the overpass, it wouldn't be cheaper anymore, some upper-middle class professionals would move in there and the poor would have to go find some place they could still afford to live, which will be at least as bad or less affordable or else they'd have already moved there as it is.
The actual problem isn't the overpass, it's the undersupply of housing that isn't next to an overpass. Build enough that they can afford to live someplace nice and they would. Meanwhile you can put industrial plants and warehouses and railroads and power lines next to the overpass instead of residential housing.
More of a society issue than individual. A middle class person will use a lot more resources than a poor person. The poor person will likely be more affected by the environmental change brought about by the resource use, less food secure etc.
I pay large amounts when parking in the nearest town (parking fees are one of the town council's most significant revenue streams, funding all sorts of externalities including homeless housing and business development).
When at home I park on the driveway, which I paid a premium for when buying my house.
I agree and I use public transit almost exclusively. I want better infrastructure for alternative modes of transportation, but every time the subject comes up it gets tangled up with ideological evangelism and comes across as condescending and authoritarian. Instead of framing it as some crusade against cars or using the political hammer of climate doomerism, argue for reduced traffic, better and cheaper options for people to get around, road safety... those are things that everyone can agree on and have been used to support mass transit projects in other countries successfully.
You’re either ignorantly or willfully misunderstanding the problem. Cars existing isn’t bad on its own, it’s the fact that, especially in North America, it’s not only the default but also more often than not the only option people consider
The point of the article is that "the car-centric transportation system now found throughout the U.S. can be traced in part to a deliberate revolution led by a relatively small group of people with a personal stake in the automotive sector ... car culture was largely forced on an unwilling public by car dealers, manufacturers, automotive clubs, and others who banded together to promote automobile use, calling themselves “motordom.”"
If that wasn't authoritarian "re-education" to make choices that /motordom/ considered better, then what was it?
I used to live in Portland and Tri-Met and my bike were my two means of transportation for many years. I would absolutely not use public transportation in that city today.