I can't assume where you are from but, as a non-American who lived in distinct parts of the US, I can tell you a bit about why a car is essential for living to many Americans.

Firstly, the US is different from many parts of the world. Not only it's massive, but swaths of American urbanization are shaped around cars as a basic necessity, especially with the adoption of suburbs. Most of the US outside of big cities are car-first towns both in infrastructure, planning, and services.

In turn, having a car for many Americans is more than an efficient way to get around, it is the only way to move safely and reliably.

Many parts of the US have no public transportation, no reliable ride-sharing, no safe way to bike (both the roads and the culture are hostile towards cyclists).

For more information, I'd suggest reading on the phenomena called "Automotive city" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_city

It's mostly self-fulfilling too: "No one wants to walk to these stores anyway, so when we didn't build sidewalks"...

Europe has a population density twice that of the 48 lower US states. In addition, roughly a third of all people in the US live in a mere 500 cities (if you account for metro areas, that number increases). Even if those cities had great public transit, it would leave the remaining areas far less populated in reality. Less than 30 people per square mile is very common outside cities with a lot of midwest states having something like 5-7 people per square mile (or less).

It may be hard for people in many places to grasp, but even in eastern states there are many, many areas where you could pick a direction and walk many miles without seeing anyone.

Below a certain population density (likely in the hundreds to low thousands per square mile), public transportation simply is not feasible.

I don't think it's so much about density as it is about planning. Even in a massive area, the correct way to distrubute people in it is so that they can access what they need with ease. Let people live next to the store, their office, the bus stop and so on. How far apart clusters of people are will determine the overall density. Density doesn't say much about whether people are clustered or more evenly spread out however.

It should be noted that this was not an accident, but the result of a concerted effort by corporate interests with major influence in state and federal gov't via professional connections and their control of the labor market. This not only involved the dismantling of existing, car-agnostic infrastructure - clearly, as most major American cities existed and were designed to provide for the needs of its residents before the existence of the automobile - but also represented yet another chapter in the history of collusion between private and gov't entities in the interest of maintaining America's toxic race and class order.

>most major American cities existed and were designed to provide for the needs of its residents before the existence of the automobile

Most major American cities that existed before the car still have public transportation. NYC is a prime example of somewhere you can live without a car. Most other cities still have functioning bus systems, though not great.

It's the suburbs where you really need a car, and the development of suburbs was spurred in large part by the car. So you have your historical order wrong.

Suburbs aren't cities, though it's true that the modern suburb owes its existence to "urban renewal" initiatives which dovetailed with auto infrastructure development (hence the freeway which cuts through the historically black quarter of so many cities, which it connects to said suburbs). Additionally, many of the older small towns had public transit into cities via rail/streetcar.

I would be interested in reading more about this topic if you have any recommended references?

I'm not the GP, but I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am... might be a good fit if you're interested in this arena.

The history and politics of this shift were discussed quite thoroughly in Happy City by Charles Montgomery: https://thehappycity.com/the-book/

Check out "The War on Cars", it's a fantastic podcast: https://thewaroncars.org/

Maybe that explains cities that were dense and got less dense.

But mostly it’s the suburbs and small towns where cars are totally necessary. Those areas were settled less densely because everyone already had a car. They never had subways and bus routes.

Are there any first world cities that substantially grew in area since 1920 that aren’t primary automotive cities?

What's your point?

Outside of a very small number of major metro areas, cities in America are not livable without a car.

And I say that as someone who really, really despises how required car ownership is, and who has spent a lot of time trying to find alternatives.

Even in reasonably large metro areas where there is a decent bus system, and a passable metro (Atlanta, in this case) a nice E-bike is still nowhere near enough to replace my car.

I've managed to replace the car for my daily commute with a ~40 minute Marta ride, and an additional 20 minutes on the bike (Would be an additional 40+ if I used the buses), but the metro doesn't come within 20 miles of either of my parents houses, nor does it get me to my brother who lives in Athens, GA. Nor does it get me anywhere close to my grandparents. I wouldn't have been able to visit my now wife while dating without a car.

I'm assuming you're not American, but if you haven't visited for a while, I suspect you're just wrong about any sense of scale you might have. Atlanta alone has a metro area of 8400 square miles. Houston is 10,000 square miles.

My wife's family has this problem. They're from Taiwan. When I first visited they warned me about a long car ride to see some family in the country. Long meant 40 minutes.

40 minutes barely gets you across Atlanta. 2 hours gets you to Athens if traffic is decent. 2 hours 30 minutes the a different direction will get you to my family in north GA (and Atlanta is already well in the north half of GA). I can drive south at 80 mph for 4 freaking hours and still be in GA.

> Outside of a very small number of major metro areas, cities in America are not livable without a car.

I guess NYC is one of the "very small number of major metro areas" and yet OP used it to show how you can't live comfortably without a car if you make $2k/month.

I understand how it can be a necessity to have a car, but we are talking about living, so before a car you need a roof, food, water, healthcare and heating. Based on what I've seen those last few months, there are (a lot of) people that owns a car but don't have a roof or can't buy food or can't have healthcare. So to me it's really weird to link "living comfortably" and "having a car".

I think you're talking past each other.

> So to me it's really weird to link "living comfortably" and "having a car".

It depends on where you live. In the vast majority of the US, you simply cannot "live comfortably" without a car. You will be locked in your house/apartment unable to really do much other than get Amazon and some chain store food delivery options. There simply isn't infrastructure available for not having a car to be an option. In these areas, a car is worth more than a roof over your head if you still need it to get to work and other engagements.

In the few major cities in the US where you don't need a car - expenses are crazy. Chicago is considered cheap for a major US city, and is one of perhaps 3 to 6 cities you could say you don't need a vehicle to live in. Even here, you are spending considerable amount of money to be in a decent neighborhood within comfortable walking distance to reliable mass transit. You trade your $300/mo car payment for at least that much more in rent.

Cars are unfortunately a "good deal" in most of the US. They are incredibly cheap compared to many areas of the world, and the vast majority of our population requires them to economically sustain themselves. Very few times does the math work out in the other direction - a $3500 beater car is pretty cheap to maintain when it enables you to pay $1500/mo less in rent if you ignore all other quality of life metrics.

I live in Metro Atlanta (midtown) without a car, and I don't find it too bad. I'm walking distance from work and various amenities. Grocery delivery and Lyft makes it a whole lot easier, and the ~150$ a month saved not owning a car gets you a lot of Lyft, or a rental car if needed.

Camping and visiting family is definitely a bit tricky though.

You have to realize, using miles to convey the "sense of scale" to non-Americans is ironic because... we can't be bothered to understand how much 10000 square "miles" actually is.

Swap miles for km. It’s about the same for arbitrary vastness.

Well under an order of magnitude off.

For those with high school math ability, it's doable to notice that 10000 sqm is the area of a square with side 100 m, so about a patch of 160 km by 160 km.

If it helps, the London metro is ~3200 square miles, and has more than twice the population of Atlanta (14 million vs 6 million).

Paris is ~4600 square miles with 13 million pop.

Berlin's full metro is actually comparable. It's about 11,000 square miles, but it's also nearly 1/10th of ALL of Germany.

Not all non-Americans are daunted by the effort of making a single Google search.

>It's funny how many Americans conflate "living" with the possession of a car...

It's funny how out of touch many non-Americans (and to a greater than one would think extent, upper middle class Americans who live in a few select cities) are with the realities of day to day life in most of the US.

Except in a few select areas where transit is very good and the cost of owning a car is very high owning your own personal means of transportation goes hand in hand with a major quality of life improvement and it compounds your relative earning potential (by giving you more flexibility to work more lucrative jobs or reduce cost of living).

There's a reason it comes third after shelter and employment in the list of things you get as soon as you're out of jail (or a coma).

In many regions of the US, it's a simple necessity to have a car, just as it might be in more rural parts of Europe. I know people who work as farmers in the north of the Netherlands, and a car is as essential a commodity for them as it might be for a rural Midwesterner.

"just as it might be in more rural parts of Europe."

Even europeans often have this urban blindspot. In some places (eg netherlands), you may be able to live conveniently without a car. For a lot of places (eg >50% of ireland), not having a car is a major lifestyle inhibitor. Transport (or lack thereof) dictates a lot of your life... from work opportunities to whether or not you can access a supermarket.

Seriously, yes. There is a certain kind of "Professional Online European" who loves to come into discussions and talk about how things are different "in Europe" based on their existence within the Grachtengordel of Amsterdam or their lives in one of the nice bits of Paris. If you want to know the domestic political result of that kind of attitude, and one that is quite related to the issues of who needs a car or not - the Giles Jaunes are the perfect example.

Even in those European countries that generally have good public transportation, it is simply not the case that nobody needs a car. Many Dutch people I know who commute to work on their bikes also have cars. Anywhere outside the Randstad in NL, not having a car can be majorly inconvenient. In large parts of Groningen, Drenthe or Friesland it will be a substantial barrier to employment. Try living in Workum without a car. I hope you like Jopie Huisman because you're about to become reaaal familiar with his drawings as a sole form of entertainment.

In France, a political elite (btw all of whom do have cars) imposed a fuel tax increase on a population of outer-suburban and rural lower-middle-class workers who have to drive to work. Great result that had.

I think this is important for Americans to understand because if they have pinned their understanding of the art of the possible in terms of what has been done in Europe they should understand that putting in a better bus system is not a panacea and that some places are structurally just not going to be reachable with public transport.

Aye. On point.

A lot of this is just bad policies, and bad economics. Concepts like carbon taxation were intended to govern inter-country problems and large corporations. Applied to consumers, they often amount to simple regional and income discrimination. Country people drive more because they need to, and "pay up or consume less," applied is both heartless and not very efficient anyway. People drive because they need to, and prices must be exorbitant before these policies can eventually drive out the less fortunate.

I don't think most europeans are that fussy about "how" compared to americans. Car size issues, hybrids or electrics are all fine.

Btw, we should be having more pan-european political discourse. These policies are just bad, and unpopular. The fact that they've been "the gold standard" for so long is 50% lack of a decent feedback loop.

> In some places (eg netherlands)

That's because Netherlands changed the country to not rely on cars. It used to rely on cars, just like most countries. It's still far from perfect; there's still loads of places where there are not enough options.

Car-only places is considered restrictive. Similarly, kids should be able to do things on their own. Seems nowadays kids rely on their parents to move them around. That's pretty crazy IMO.

Any other country could do the same. Also people in Netherlands complained that "government is going after cars", etc.

Sure. It's not like roads or tracks are a natural feature.

The problem arise when we "go after cars" without an alternative anywhere in sight. I'm pretty dubious of my government's (ireland) likelihood of achieving netherlands-like transport. I'm all for trying. But, the place to start is not by reducing rural car ownership. The reality is that electric cars will probably arrive before rural public transport... at least here.

In practice, there a lot of implicit and explicit anti-driving laws. Many/most of these take the form of economic "incentives." Most affect rural people more. Rural locals don't have much public transport. A lot of these policies are classist too. Changing vehicle standards affect old cars more, making driving unaffordable to poorer people. Same for petrol taxes. Implicit "policies" like allowing a broken insurance system also results in a lot of class discrimination.

In practice, in ireland, saying "you shouldn't own a car" is like saying you should move to dublin or "you shouldn't go anywhere." In cities it means "take the bus or cycle," but not everyone lives in a city.

Meanwhile, I didn't think it's fair that to have policies which essentially mean "poor people shouldn't drive," which many policies with a rural blindspot are.

I would be totally fine with severe anti-car policies in the city or anywhere alternatives exist.

The population density in the Netherlands is one of the highest in the world, higher than any American state and 14 times higher than the US as a whole. So public transportation infrastructure that makes sense in the Netherlands isn't necessarily going to be practical elsewhere.

While you are correct the Netherlands has a higher pop density it really doesn't matter, for a country as a whole.

See, Russia has a population density of 8.4/km2 (vs 33km2 in US).

But that doesn't stop Russian cities from building public transport. Just like how empty acreage and dessert wouldn't stop US cities from building decent public transport.

What matters is not the average density of the country, but the layouts of the cities.

A good example is NYC. According to your statement it shouldn't have public transport because the average of the country is too sparsely populated, but that doesn't really matter. Just like how the empty tundra in Russia doesn't prevent Moscow or St Peterburg from building public transport.

Indeed. You really have to look at settlement patterns and not just a single scalar density. What makes public transport difficult in the US is that suburbs are dense enough that a lot of people live there but not dense enough to put in efficient public transport. If you drew a histogram of the Russian population sorted by density, you would find that a very large % of the population lived in dense local areas and a relatively small population is spread over the vast rural parts of the country. Not even just tundra, even Russia West of the Urals is very sparsely populated for the most part.

And Canada has one of the lowest population densities, a tenth of the USA, and yet has considerably better public transit (though worse than most of Europe).

One major difference I noticed from the USA is that it's usually, at least in principle possible to get from any point A to any point B in a Canadian city over about 20,000 people, by public transit, because even small towns often have public transit systems in Canada. (It might take a couple hours, though.) In many US cities, it's simply not possible because there is no public transit system.

After all, in every developed country, most people live in cities. Government policy and funding seems to be most of the difference.

I'm not sure "technically runs a bus, which may or may not be practical to use" is the most useful metric here.

While I certainly agree there are substantial bright spots in parts of Canada for transit investment, there's also big and worsening issues.

Rural inter-city transit has been getting drastically worse out in much of country.

VIA Rail has mostly been in a long-term downward spiral of cuts/"service suspensions" outside the main Ontario/Quebec corridor.

Inter-city buses aren't much better. Recent years have had Greyhound giving up and quitting Western Canada, and Saskatchewan shutting down their inter-city bus company. The result being limited patchwork of services not coming anywhere close to the kind of service that used to be provided.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/29/canada-greyhou...

https://edmontonjournal.com/opinion/columnists/opinion-one-y...

Having lived in both countries, I’m not sure there is that much of a difference. Pretty much all the large US cities have public transport. The only Canadian cities I’ve seen with something close to say NYC are Toronto and Montreal. Getting around mom Skytrain in Vancouver is doable, but painful from a lot of areas.

And of course Canada has one of the lowest population densities when you average the population across the swaths of uninhabited arctic. But 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border in a handful of cities.

Also, you just have to take reality as it exists to an extent. England's population density is high too, but public transport is what it is. They can make it better, if they can. We can't just look at population density, conclude that it could be like the netherlands and proceed as if it is. It isn't.

Regardless, reducing rural car ownership in most places means reducing quality of life. It also reduces economic well being. People have fewer employment options, can't access supermarkets and such...

The whole approach of "make driving expensive" as the main policy vehicle is heartless... The actual way it works is that only wealthier people can drive, and that driving is actually important to people's lives.

It's a totally different proposition in London and in the country. If England (scotland & Wales are more sparse) becomes the netherlands great... but losing your car without gaining regular bus routes is a genuine loss. People need to get around.

Some people tried to grab my young adult daughter.

Safe bet, if they had succeeded she would never have been seen again.

Human trafficking is alive and well in the United States.

Younger ones always go in pairs, and always with adult seeing them.

Crude we were out for a walk the Other day and one kid was several hundred feed in front of us. Car slowed down and was pulling up next to her. Car pulled away quickly when sibling came out of bushes.

May have been nothing, but still a good scare.

I'm dutch, I live in the center of a big city that is extremely bike friendly. At the same time, people are surprised I don't own a car, and I've been considering getting one.

We don't need a car here for most things. But it is still extremely convenient to have one.

Move out of the bigger cities, and things change even more. Bikes are popular, and often used. But very rarely are bikes and public transport able to replace a car. I'd guess like 10% of people go without a car because they don't need it. At the same time, I think almost everyone here will own a bike for just general purpose.

Yeah I know. Most of the people who comment about biking and transit in the netherlands seem to miss the fact that the dutch story is pretty moderate.

20 year olds in cities don't have cars. 40 year olds with kids generally do, and a lot depends on where exactly you live. The Netherlands does a nice job of providing multiple options. The train and bus links ing rural areas are especially impressive, compared to what we (ireland) have. But... it doesn't replace cars. Cars still exist. People use them, just less. It's moderate.

This applies to most of the Nordics as well; once you get outside city limits getting around becomes quite difficult unless you have a car. Once you get further out, it's simply not possible. Many areas simply lack access to public transport, and while a 20 km bike ride can be nice during summer, it's not really an option during winter.

On the other hand, one could live in Copenhagen or Stockholm for an entire lifetime without actually _needing_ a car.

I can imagine the same applies for much of Eastern Europe as well.

I think it is important to note that this isn't just a problem related geography or sprawl. I live in Fairfax County just outside of DC. It's pretty populous (1.15 million) but getting anywhere is still a challenge if you don't live within walking distance of an Orange Line metro stop. This assumes that the metro hasn't caught on fire recently or that the line hasn't been shut down for multiple months for repairs. Bus timetables are so spread out that a 20 minute drive is a 2-3 hour bus ride in a lot of cases.

Sprawl certainly plays a part but lack of investment in public transport is big reason why cars are so essential.

It's certainly not a necessity in NYC though, which was the example given. In most big cities in the US you're better off not having a car if you're poor, since cars are a big ongoing expense. Hell, I'm very far from poor and I'm best off not having a car in NYC.

I think not having a car in NYC is more of a convenience issue than a cost issue(due to parking etc) to a larger degree. The assumption here is that you are not just barely getting by.

It's both. Insurance and parking are very expensive. If you don't want to pay for parking then you need to budget several hours of your time each week just moving your car around to different parking spots.

..and thank you for reminding me I have to move my car this evening! Insurance is costly compared to other states. I pay about $1200/year for full everything though(windshield damaged and highway touring). A friend of mine was just quoted $3000/year for insurance on an Audi. For that I would ride a bicycle everywhere.

Exactly - in Poland there are some regions which are very poor by any definition, and yet every home will have 2-3 cars simply because it's impossible to get anywhere without one. Yeah there is some public transport, but it's often very infrequent or not going where people need to be.

I think it’s because of the way the country was built. Getting from A to B without a car is drastically worse, and it adds up to a proportionally bad quality of living unless you happen to live in a walkable older city (NYC, Boston for example). In some places like Florida your nearest store could be 4 miles away. The bus here is so underutilized and so inconvenient that I don’t think I’ve ever considered. A 30m drive is a 2h bus ride.

In a lot of rural areas, like where I am, there is no such thing as public transportation. If you don't have a car you can maybe make due during the spring and fall months where the temperatures are reasonable. But it's going to be hell during winter (gets cold enough and there's enough snow a bike won't work for you) and during summer it gets too hot.

I'm a 5 minute drive to the nearest grocery store. For a walk, that's about 3-ish miles. On a bike, not so bad, but also keep in mind there's no bike lane or anything so you're sharing the road with cars. There's some added risk to that.

A car isn't a requirement, but it makes a massive difference in your ability to live.

In many areas of the country it is very, very challenging to get anywhere without one. I don't think access to grocery store / work is necessarily trivial to life.

It's an absolute necessity, it's not a luxury contrary to the way it may be painted or viewed externally. Unless you want to diverge from efficiency expectations in modern society needed to work a job and instead move out to an Amish farm of sorts, you're going to need a car.

I'd love to have a viable efficient public transit system, infrastructure, or culture built around it but it simply doesn't exist for well over the vast majority of Americans. All other transit options simply aren't viable alternatives.

a personal car is a big expense. If you can live comfortably in a region with a personal car then it is a significantly different metric than you can live comfortably without a personal car.

Also the way the U.S is structured living comfortably without a personal car means you must be living somewhere where you can work without that personal car, which is a rare job to have, meaning that you can be locked into your employer. Or is that the funny part you're referring to?

on edit: I see lots of people made my second point as well.

You can get a low end new car with a payment of only around $200/mo and buying used is significantly cheaper still. You don't necessarily need to possess a car, but if you don't have the financial means to possess a car then you really can't afford anything beyond the absolute most basic necessities. In a developed nation, that's barely surviving, not living.

This is yet another surprising thing to a lot of people: cars can be very, very cheap in the US: insurance and gas can cost more than a reliable used car. I just sold a perfectly fine car for less than $2000, having bought it new 10 years ago. Someone else will probably buy that car, after a few cosmetic things are fixed, for $3000 or so. It's spent most of its life south of Pennsylvania, so it doesn't have road salt damage, and will probably last another 10 years or more with regular oil changes, etc.

Well, in most places in the US you literally can't go without a vehicle if you want employment and food. Even if you're physically proximate to food and other activities of daily living, there are often no sidewalks or paths to safely walk or bike there. There's also a social stigma of walking (the person must be poor or lost their license for drunk driving).

> Well, in most places in the US you literally can't go without a vehicle if you want employment and food.

That's due to zoning laws being the way that they are. If you'd change the way you'd build up and zone things it would be possible.

The YouTube channel "Not Just Bikes" goes into this in various videos. I couldn't find the exact video that explained the zoning laws, did find another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98 (kids in Netherlands go to school on their own).

Despite Netherlands being considered great for cyclists there's loads to improve. The channel goes into that detail as well, e.g. that major roads are being closed. See e.g. this video of a big road being closed in Utrecht: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fePpwYCs_JM (different channel)

I am an American that does not own a car since I live in a city and can live without one. However, for the vast majority of Americans a car is a necessity. There are places with no public transportation and no sidewalks. The only way to get around is to drive.