I don't quite understand your point about the "technological and class divide" widen[ing]. Good public transportation (as in places like Japan) drastically reduces the cost of moving around the city/country. In the United States, for most people, owning a car (an expensive up-front cost with expensive monthly payments) is a prerequisite to finding and keeping a job. Public transportation adds to our social safety net.
You need to be realistic. You are never going to win hearts and minds by railing against cars - Americans love their cars, and for good reason. A bus is not going to pick you up at your front door the second you walk out, and it's not going to drop you directly where you want to go. Cars are a tremendous convenience. And they are not nearly as expensive as people seem here seem to think - they are certainly cheaper than city rent.
It may make sense to reduce the number of cars in city centers, but so few Americans live or go near city centers. You have to understand that HN is not a representative sample of the world population. Not everybody is a single, young person trying to start their own businesses.
Our cities would be dramatically cheaper to live in with fewer cars. Less parking and road space allows higher density. Transit is cheaper. Walking and biking is healthier and will increase life expectancy.
Not everyone is driving-age, can afford a car or can afford to have parking. Car drivers are not a representative sample of the world population.
You seem to be forgetting that buildings can't be moved and big infrastructure projects go into the billions. The USA was build with cars in mind, you can't simply undo all that and now ask people to simply get rid of their cars when everything was built specifically for cars.
The solution is not more roadways to magically reduce congestion. It's to build public transit today before it gets more expensive. See the success of the Delhi Metro in India, for example, where New Delhi was never built with a local subway system in mind. [2]
[0] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/09/citylab-unive... [1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/04/why-new-york-... [2] https://www.globalmasstransit.net/archive.php?id=26471
However, as I said, I believe you (and greenonion) are oversimplifying a complex problem. If you've ever been to any US city, you will see just how much influence the car has had in the development of the entire country. From the principles that you are stating, and that I believe are empirically correct, to the implementation of any viable solution there is a gargantuan gap, and I don't see any solutions being presented. Just "cars are bad, we should use public transport".
And yes, I have been to US cities multiple times, and I don't see why the challenges there are so very different. New Delhi is denser than New York. Its traffic situation was as bad as New York. I am not saying implementation is easy. I am saying implementation is feasible. It's a matter of public and political will. What's holding it back is not that somehow the problem is so complex that it can't be solved.
Adding to the point of induced demand on traffic, thankfully it works the other way too. The traffic situation does not get significantly worse when roads are reduced. The Alaskan viaduct highway in Seattle is an example of this.
Edit: And I have seen the transformation of Vancouver to accommodate bike lanes too, and while Vancouver is nowhere as dense, my point is that the traffic situation did not actually get worse when bike lanes were introduced.
It's a way to make you look like an out-of-touch loony, who therefore gets ignored. If you want to reduce car use in the US, dial down the rhetoric, and work on increasing the convenience of not using a car. You're going to win more hearts and minds by making available something better than you are by constantly carping about the existing situation.
Walking, biking, taking the bus, carpooling are incredibly convenient for anyone willing to try, and I certainly support efforts to improve the facilities for these at all opportunities.
There are uncomfortable truths that need to be addressed about cars, however, and you don't get anywhere by avoiding it. Imagine if there were an easily preventable disease causing ~40000 deaths every year that would actually save us money to solve and help the climate situation as well. Would you ask to temper the rhetoric?
I still drive because biking is A. pretty physically grueling in a number of common weather conditions ( greater than 100 degree or less than 32 degree temps for much of the year, carrying my bike up 2-3 flights of stairs... ) B. Going to take 2-3x the time per day, before time spent showering on each end of an hour-long ride in brutal heat... Public transit is a 1+ mile walk/ride on either end of it (same problems as above), means I can only get in/out of work at specific times, and still takes 2-3x longer than driving.
That's before we get into the 2000 serious injury-causing accidents that people get in on bikes per year in my state, many of which are in my county. I really hate cars, but I'm mostly driving slow and on low-speed roads. I'm very unlikely to die or be seriously injured. That's not something I can rely on on a bike commute.
I'm looking to move closer to the office so I can mitigate some of these because I earnestly hate driving this much, but I wouldn't claim that that's going to make biking/walking "incredibly convenient", just acceptably less inconvenient.
Tempering the rhetoric in place of actually presenting facts and ideas in a non combative way that offers something of actual tangible value to people will vastly do more to accomplish the goals then trying to shame or beat down ppl.
Look, you need to say that we can prevent these deaths. You really do. But don't say it the way you did. You don't get buy-in that way.
And that's even assuming that it would be allowed on public transportation.
It would be good to hear some kind of solution, rather than just being swept under the rug. Or pushed under the bus, so to speak.
Also, we do not need 'one size fits all' solutions for the entire US. What's appropriate for Wyoming might not be appropriate for the California Bay Area, which is plenty dense.
I'm not sure when "subsidizing" came to mean "giving people something back for the money you took form them in the first place".
I'd love to see a less auto-dependent society, but it's not accurate to say that drivers are subsidized. Perhaps one answer would be to get rid these myriad taxes and fees and just privatize the highways - make it fee for use. Right now, very few drivers ever see the true cost of their transportation choices because it's a little bit here, a little there, and so on.
https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ &&
https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...
Drivers are heavily subsidized.
I wonder if there's any way to come up with a net value overall for those subsidies? For example, pre-K education is fully subsidized in some states and it looks like the total economic results over a long time are very positive. How would you go about figuring out if those road subsidies are too high or too low?
You'd want to look at total benefits (easier movement of people and goods) vs total costs (environment, sedentary lifestyle health problems, wasted space in cities).
You can't have both, you can't complain about congestion yet talk about how Americans love their cars. You get both the congestion and deaths and pollution and GHG's with over-reliance on cars and there is no magic fix to it other than having less people drive.
When we lived in Italy we:
* Walked to the grocery store, nearby pizza place, kids' schools, doctor and barber. Because it's not illegal (zoning) to build those things near where people live!
* Rode bikes downtown when the weather was decent
* Took the tram downtown with the kids.
* Took the car to go hiking in the hills or go visit my wife's parents in a small town 30 minutes away.
I think it's more about city vs countryside than europe vs US
No single mode of transportation solves every use-case. My car is suboptimal when I'm going downtown, as well as for trips longer than 300 miles or so.
At an ordinary population density, supermarkets are about 2 to 5 miles from each other, which is probably 3 to 7 miles by road.
Large stores require many customers in order to remain in business. If supermarkets are closer, then they lose efficiency. Prices must be higher. Variety drops; you'll get just 2 types of cheese and 1 type of apple if the stores have to be smaller.
Without a car, large shopping trips become impossible. A young healthy adult can carry 1 or 2 shopping bags about 0.7 mile without major difficulty, but that just isn't enough. Stores would have to shrink by a factor of 20 to 100 in order to get them close enough, but the efficiency still plunges. Think of the portion of each sale that must support the manager's salary, or the number of stores at which each delivery truck must stop.
Without a car, frozen food can only be purchased in winter. Hot food, such as the fried chicken my supermarket offers, would never be able to get home in good condition.
I did the maths a while ago; even if every house has a quarter-acre block (subtract actual street space from that to get a slightly smaller block) you can fit 4000 houses, about twelve thousand people, within a 1km radius of a mini-downtown point. Twelve thousand people is certainly enough to support a supermarket, a bunch of restaurants, cafes, specialty stores etc (think of what a town of twelve thousand people looks like). The only trick is actually zoning rows of shops in appropriate places.
Of course I still drive to the supermarket anyway, unless I’m only buying a couple of items. This isn’t an argument against cars, it’s just an argument that low(ish) density housing and walkability aren’t incompatible.
More broadly I think that Americans looking for solutions to their city-planning problems should look less at Europe (or god forbid, Asia) and more at Australia, since I think we’ve done a decent (though as always imperfect in implementation) job of combining European and American city planning virtues.
Couple days ago I literally counted >100 varieties of marinara spaghetti sauce in the store. There's no way a walking-distance grocery is going to carry anywhere close to that (ripple effect on to all the people employed in making each specialty) AND do so at Walmart prices.
I live close to the grocery, and there's still no way I'm going to carry supplies for 4 that far (recall as a child doing similar with my mother, that was quite a trek made possible in part by not having a job).
Y'all who want pervasive public transit and no cars, yes I see your point - and really don't want to live that way. Do as you like, just don't do it in a way that compels non-urban living to comply. 'scuze me now, I have to get the kids from school - driving them because herds of children on mass transit is a haven for bullies.
Then let's discuss some realistic solutions: Outside of densely populated metros, public transportation is a wash. In my area, small-ish city, we have pretty solid mass transit options but it's still a massive pain in the ass because you end up scheduling your entire day around the bus schedule. And if the bus isn't running when you might need to run an errand out? Oh fuckin well.
People parade around mass transit like it's the end all be all of great things we can do, and being a liberal around most things, I wish that was true. But even the stories about Japan's awesome mass transit make me cringe; stuck in a train for 45 minutes each way? Pass. The hardest conceivable pass.
You know what my commute is? I get in my car and drive from my suburb to a business park. It takes 10 bloody minutes. Even driving my pickup truck, I use roughly 30 gallons of fuel every three weeks.
When I want to run errands, or pop out for lunch, or whatever, I can walk outside and use my vehicle. It's there all the time, 24 hours a day. No app required. No booking required. Certainly no waiting on someone to drive over and get me. There is simply no mass transit option that can equate this, end of.
I'm not saying there aren't improvements to be made and I'm certainly not saying that all mass transit is bad; but to put forward mass transit as a realistic option to get rid of cars, you look like a complete fool to anyone who doesn't live in a city. Pie in the sky fucking nonsense.
If the walk would be unpleasant or otherwise not viable, can't that probably be blamed on car systems as well?
I don't think anyone thinks we can get rid of cars entirely. I'm from a country with the same land area as Japan but with ~115 million fewer people. You can't get rid of private vehicles in a place like that. But you can make urban areas less wasteful and more enjoyable.
You can go a lot more than 1.5mi in 10min if there isn't bad traffic. If 3/10 of those minutes are on a highway that's probably an hour or worth or more of walking.
>If the walk would be unpleasant or otherwise not viable, can't that probably be blamed on car systems as well?
Houston will be hot and Detroit will be cold for several months of the year with or without cars. Having air conditioned boxes that can do last mile transportation is part of why the southern US is as developed as it is. Obviously there becomes a density point where it makes sense to offload a lot of the transportation needs onto public traffic by many cities and suburbs are not there yet.
I see my position as not car-hostile or car-eliminatory but efficiency-maximising. With that said, this:
>Obviously there becomes a density point where it makes sense to offload a lot of the transportation needs onto public traffic by many cities and suburbs are not there yet.
Is a bit hard to swallow when car-default systems allow indefinite suburban growth. Feedback loop.
The primary observation is this: densely-populated areas of human habitation require denser sorts of infrastructure. The most obvious example is housing: by definition you can't have dense habitation if all you have are large-lot single family homes. Transportation is similar: one person per four-door sedan simply doesn't support the density of a city.
For areas that aren't densely populated, like the backwoods and suburbs where I spent the first 28 years of my life, cars are a great solution. But cities require different solutions (which happen to become economically feasible because of their density, benefiting from economies of scale).
You are arguing against a strawman here.
Hey that's pretty great! It sounds like you could be in an area where cars are the right solution to transport. Maybe that's due to population density or roads that were well-planned to get people where they need to go. Unfortunately there are also a lot of places where those things aren't true. In suburbs around Atlanta, Detroit, or Seattle, for example, many people commute 45+ minutes one way in slow-moving traffic. Car insurance can cost $250+ per month, plus gas and maintenance. Personally, I'd much rather spend 45 minutes in a train where I can read, listen to music, check emails, etc.. than in a car where I need to be fully alert. It's much safer too.
> In my area, small-ish city, we have pretty solid mass transit options but it's still a massive pain in the ass because you end up scheduling your entire day around the bus schedule. And if the bus isn't running when you might need to run an errand out?
I don't know the geography / economics of your particular area, but do you think people would be more inclined to use buses if they were more reliable? Adding routes and increasing the frequency of buses might restore some trust in the system. Existing subsidies for cars (public roads, mandatory parking minimums, etc.) could be redirected to public transit for greater effect.
I think we are generally in agreement that most American cities aren't currently set up in a way that makes public transit practical. When I talk about these issues, I'm not saying we should try to retrofit a train system to cities that are otherwise doing just fine. My hope is that articles like this will sway public support in favor of future developments that put an emphasis on people first, not cars. Suburbs originally developed to get away from the danger/congestion/smell of urban areas. But if we can design better urban spaces where people are more comfortable spending time, we can reap the advantages of higher population density. Of course, we can't just copy Japan or Europe. We'll need our own unique system that works for us.
Ever lived in a real city ? Walking 3 minutes to take the metro and take 5 minutes to get to your destination for something that'll take 15 minutes by car is common in cities like Paris ;-). And it prevents you from becoming fat from not doing anything.
Sure there is - for some situations. There is something called "rapid transit". The working definition is "faster than by car". You actually have that in a few places - Chicago, or New York, for instance. But for it to work, you need a couple of things. It has to go many of the places that people want to go. It has to be very frequent - so frequent that you don't check the schedule. And it has to be somewhat slow to use the car.
Car friendly infrastructure widens the technological and class divide. They create a base state where you are required to own and maintain an expensive piece of equipment in order to be an equal member of society. You are required to have parking for those cars, both at home and at your work.
Forcing people to pay thousands of dollars per year to participate in society is highly repressive.
Great, so if we can't all have something, none of us should have it! Forget the fact that the vast majority of families own and benefit from personal transportation, the important thing is that we're all equal, even if the equal case is on average worse for everyone, right?
>Forcing people to pay thousands of dollars per year to participate in society is highly repressive
Is it also repressive to "force" people to hold down jobs to participate in society? To "force" people to commute to work? What about the fact that some people have the luxury of working from home? Should we make that illegal as well?
I do not understand how people can be so focused on equality as to totally ignore the average, greater good. The nature of modern civilization is such that some degree of inequality is inevitable if one optimizes for median welfare.
This is entirely the opposite of what the car-free movement is trying to accomplish.
Car-free is strictly concerned dense urban areas, where private automobiles pretty strictly work against the common good. They are noisy, dangerous, polluting, and fail to create efficient transportation networks. In such places, there is very good reason to believe that car-free would improve quality of life and median welfare for residents.
Obviously car-free is not a realistic option in suburban, semi-urban, and rural areas. No one who is advocating car-free is suggesting we do it there.
Any increase in equality that comes along with it (honestly I'm skeptical it would make much of a difference) would be purely incidental.
"Equality" is perhaps a poor choice of words here. I will say that for people on the cusp—mainly young and poor people—having a car break down can spiral into a really bad situation or even homelessness. When you can't afford to fix your car and your car is required to get to your job, the situation can become untenable quickly.
That may mean people who live in sub-urban and rural areas have to stop at the fringe and catch a bus, walk, or pedal the last leg of their journey, but it doesn't mean they need to give up their cars for transport outside those dense urban areas.
This is a false dichotomy. I didn't suggest "Everyone must give up cars", only that the world should not be designed to FORCE everyone to drive cars.
> Is it also repressive to "force" people to hold down jobs to participate in society?
Hyperbole much? The two concepts aren't even remotely related.
> I do not understand how people can be so focused on equality as to totally ignore the average, greater good.
As if requiring cars is the greater good? It has been demonstrated in many many places that designing infrastructure which enables people to move around safely and reliably without the use of cars improves the quality of life for everyone.
Yes.
> To "force" people to commute to work?
Yes.
> What about the fact that some people have the luxury of working from home? Should we make that illegal as well?
No, that reduces traffic making places more livable.
Regardless, your arguments that public good doesn't matter also nullifies the OP comments argument of widening the class divide by claiming class divides don't matter and should not be ameliorated.
I just can't get over how dystopian this comment is. Aside from being untrue, it is just horribly wrong headed and borderline evil. Essentially you are suggesting we cement the bottom quartile of society into eternal poverty.
Not only is this cruel, it is ultimately terrible for society as a whole as the poor and homeless become increasingly desperate, and turn to crime and drugs; becoming an ever-increasing burden on society.
You're right. We should charge them thousands of dollars per month so they can live downtown and walk everywhere instead. Problem solved!
It's not like people buy cars because they want to waste money. A car is an absolutely massive increase in QOL, especially for the majority of Americans who dont live in city centers and who don't want to live in city centers.
When you build cities which requires cars to get around then owning a car is almost essential. When a city is built around other forms of transportation, not so much. All the insurmountable problems like rain and sun happen in the places where bikes are common, it turns out people are just fine without their cars when the infrastructure is good enough.
The big problem with car friendly infrastructure is it takes up so much space, it makes almost every other form of transportation more dangerous and slower.
(Just kidding, you can't afford to. Enjoy your hike! Maybe in 30 years they'll get public transit working where you need it. You'll promptly get priced right out again, but at least you'll know your taxes went to a good cause!)
My intuition says the effect size is going to be a multiple of what it costs to maintain a cheap car.
Probably one of the biggest reasons is real estate increases in the denser areas as parking infrastructure gets phased out. Parking is a massive waste of land.
My guess: real estate costs go down short-term if you add a bunch of supply by getting rid of parking, and then they go right back up, plus some, once the market equilibrates.
Meanwhile, I'll continue to enjoy having 5x the space at half the cost as when I lived in the city, with 5 grocery stores 10 minutes away instead of 2 grocery stores 30 minutes away. Not to mention parks, trees, and nature trails for running.
Similarly, increasing range has had little to no positive effect on housing prices. Look at the insane real estate prices in the California Bay Area or LA which are both very car-first locations.
Once you see it, it stops working so well. (More depressingly, you see this cynical strategy repeated elsewhere and repeated by people who don't actually realize what's going on.)
That's commercial traffic, car-free policies are usually designed with support for commercial vehicles. It's really about eliminating private automobile traffic in city centers. If you mean going to the store to buy large items, delivery is probably the solution there. Deliveries like that can be grouped into a smaller number of larger vehicles, or done at off hours, or only on certain roads, or all sorts of different things.
Car-free isn't the greatest moniker in the world. It really means eliminating private automobile traffic, not eliminating vehicles altogether.
> Also public transport often takes much longer than a car, because it's stopping at every little stop, while a car can go directly, or even take a shortcut in some cases.
This isn't typically true in dense urban areas with high quality transit networks. Those are the areas that are suitable for car-free. Certainly most places would suffer greatly from the elimination of cars, but those areas aren't the target.
"To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,500 people, at least 1,500 of which reside outside institutional group quarters."
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/about/faq/...
The US is big. That the above is urban makes sense in the context that I'm only about a 15 minute drive from a small city and am only about an hour drive from a large city. There are lots of places in the US that are 100+ miles from the nearest Walmart.
Second, you want to force us to live the way you think we should? Feel free to get lost.
You're likely quoting the census, who defines any town with more than 2,500 people as urban.
I promise you, if you went to a town of 2,500 people, you would not have the word "urban" in your head.
EDIT: After a little reflection, this really blows my mind. Over 60 million Americans live in towns of less than 2,500 people. This country is massive.
I'm not suggesting that there are no solution here -- I'm genuinely asking what the solutions are.
The car-free zone makes sense if it's smaller than the area that has public transit. Note that even in the complete absence of public transit, you can still comfortably implement about a quarter-mile radius of car-free area, since a quarter mile walk is only 5 minutes.
In the US what we're mostly talking about is closing individual downtown streets to through traffic (like, say, Market between 5th to 13th, ignoring the City Hall death circle). On NYC 14th street, any car is allowed, as long as it turns off within 2 blocks. This greatly limits the usefulness of the street to through traffic, (and therefore makes it a much better pedestrian and bus environment) without changing the parking situation at all.
Look at many continental European cities.
A mid-sized German city will be full of low to mid density buildings and walk up apartments, few skyscrapers. Mixed use of retail and residential, and very good transit by American standards, connecting to intercity rail transit. Highways frequently terminating or routing outside the city. Plenty of greenspace.
Leipzig, Germany https://www.google.com/maps/place/Leipzig,+Germany/@51.33310...
Even the US used to have this, though they are long drowned in sprawl. Any city that was of decent size pre-WWII usually has street car suburbs - a dense mix of single family homes, shops and apartments usually built around a transit node that connected to the core and region. Look at Shaker/Cleveland Heights and Lakewood in Cleveland. There is a healthy mix of uses and density centered around transit. You can see the pattern they developed around, even if it's vestigial at this point.
"a dense mix of single family homes, shops and apartments"
"a healthy mix of uses and density centered around transit."
Not a big fan of that kind of density, nor are many others. I'd at least like to have my own backyard, and not have my neighbors peering in from a second story.
Low density means there is at least a full building worth of space between houses and ideally several buildings worth.
It means you can stand on every side of your house and look and have difficulty seeing your neighbor.
afaik, most proponents of car-free streets or dense urban development regard parking lots at the border of the dense area ("intercept parking") as a good idea to be encouraged. The point is not to wage war on cars, it's to make downtowns a safe and pleasant place to be.
For the most part, people live within walking or biking distance of a train station that takes them to work. Around each station is a cluster of shops and restaurants. Commercial traffic is well-separated from places where people live, meaning that on neighborhood streets there are virtually no cars. And the result? Children playing. Kindergartners walking themselves to school. Birds chirping. Green spaces. Peace and quiet. All in the middle of one of the world's largest cities.
Outside of Tokyo, the balance is slightly more in favor of cars, but the country's extensive train system means you don't need to own a car to get yourself there. It's easy enough to rent a car locally for a few days when you really need one. Cheaper too compared to the cost of purchasing a car and paying for insurance, parking, maintenance, etc..
All of my co-workers had a car, but they only used them a few times a month except for the couple of coworkers who had hobbies that took them out into rural areas.
And there were buses everywhere. You could take transit from the middle of Tokyo to that onsen in the middle of nowhere. It wouldn't be convenient or fast, but it could be done and we did it all the time. You just had to be careful with your scheduling and have something to read on the bus or someone to chat with.
Nobody used their cars to get groceries. The 7-11 on the corner is crazily well-stocked with reasonable prices, and the grocery store is by the train station you walk to and from every day.
This toot explains it well: https://mspsocial.net/@t54r4n1/100699058171393417
Not every city in the world has to be like New York or San Francisco. Cars should be banned (more or less) in cities. And it should viable for someone to live in a city if they so choose or in a rural area with a car if they so choose. We're failing on both fronts really in America...
That would be the case if constructing and maintaining roads would be as expensive as constructing and maintaining housing, which I don't think is true.
Why? Last I read on the topic, it's because the market is factoring in the potential value of each parcel when built out according to what infrastructure dictates, but without actually building it. So small garages built 50 years ago are getting priced like 8-story apartments.
Actually building to meet the demand is the thing that lowers the rent, and that comes down to raising the inflow of building permits each year. That's the part that has to be solved.
One of the things that Japan does besides having a lot of trains is a standardized national zoning code that makes planning and permitting much more straightforward. Building in Japan is much more of a commodity, and the prices reflect that. And an example of relaxed building rules in the USA is Houston, which has long had a cool yet expanding housing market, but a car-centric one.
The effect of the combination of the trains and low regulation in Japan is that you get dense/cheap cities - and with fast trains, all of Japan acts as a "suburb of Tokyo". Trains and regulation gives you PDX. Cars and low regulation and you get Houston. Cars and regulation and you get regional SF.
By comparing these different outcomes something like a coherent theory occurs: population in the industrial era always tends to urbanize. If we restrict the flow in some way, we get high priced urban areas; the specifics of infrastructure choices are just one factor, and not necessarily the biggest. But population growth itself is a national issue and comes from other demographic factors(immigration, childbearing rates, death rates). And although Tokyo still gets bigger, which is indicative that urbanization isn't "done", Japan as a whole is on the decline.
You'll find plenty of people here who will be happy to argue that living outside of dense cities is unsustainable and has to end. They're wrong. But it's their opinion.
On this very thread.
Mind you, I would agree that it's an opinion held by a minuscule minority. It's also wrong. But it's out there. It's even here on HN.