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.
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.