I live in a city with very few car parks, and lots of closely packed homes, shops, parks and paths. I haven’t needed a car for grocery shopping in the past 5 years, I didn’t even have easy access to car until summer 2021.
>I'LL TELL you this, but you'll have to promise that it will go no further. Not long after we moved here we had the people next door round for dinner and - I swear this is true - they drove.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/bryson-s-am...
Cars are objectively not just a "huge waste of space", but offer clear benefits along with a high social, environmental, and economic cost. People obviously do not teleport, but that doesn't mean that cars are the only method of transport and that we can't totally legitimately complain about the negative effects. And yes, we all know how to walk – but your little sliver of experience contributes nothing except to tell us all that some people live in areas where they don't have to drive.
I clicked on these comments expecting some interesting contributions that I didn't necessarily get from the article, and instead we all get exposed to this dumb pettiness and learn nothing about a really interesting and challenging topic. Lame.
Think something like the Smart ForTwo, Fiat500, Mazda Miata, or Japan's Kei cars. If you want something slightly larger, see things like the Honda Fit, etc. Other countries have various cars of similar size and flavor as well. Such cars would serve a big majority of the US driving populate just fine.
> Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.
CEO: This vehicle is great with its extremely low friction yet stiff mechanical couplings, impossibly lightweight yet stiff wheels and essentially zero operating cost. Let's build one with a cabin to protect the user from the elements.
Engineer: But that would require four wheels which is much less efficient than two.
CEO: OK.
Engineer: And it would be so heavy that nobody could pedal it, we'd need a motor.
CEO: OK.
Engineer: But that motor itself would weigh more than the user! And that's without all the gearboxes, thicker axles and stronger chassis needed to support this thing.
CEO: OK.
Engineer: This would require an incredible amount of additional fuel to even move itself around!
CEO: Who cares? This stuff comes out of the ground.
Engineer: Oh yeah!
Fast forward to today and that cabin is a climate controlled living room complete with armchairs, sofa, hi-fi and entertainment system. Oh and we can't get rid of them now because we have 100 years of town planning, infrastructure and culture built on top of them. So let's make them electric (and even heavier). Sigh...
The bicycle is a highly efficient machine for getting exercise, commuting to work, and letting lil Johnny out to explore with his friends on summer vacation. It’s never going to replace all transportation needs of a family.
It is of course only applicable in an urbanized area (even small cities can and do work like that). Not all the time, but below-freezing does not by itself mean prohibitively cold. Urbanized area means it is never near-total darkness for good and for bad.
EDIT: Ooops misread the message
Disabled people and kids may not be able to drive. Public transportation can give them more independence (also in other countries, disabled people use single passenger electric vehicles to get around and that works fine).
I generally feel more secure when taking public transportation when I'm in a well lit area with more people. Walking down suburban or sparse city streets is a lot scarier.
I've traveled to cities with and without public transportation and I've always preferred the cities with public transportation. It's cheaper and simpler than trying to drive in a new area.
I can see public transportation being difficult if you need to transport equipment but we shouldn't be building cities for the edge cases. Other cities do just fine with transporting work equipment despite being mostly built for public transit (eg. New York City). In fact, by supporting 99% of use cases with public transit, you free up road capacity for the edge cases. It's a win-win.
- More and better public transport
- Disabled people can go where they need to more easily
- Streets will be less dangerous
- You have more shops nearby
Excessive parking lots are the cause of almost all of the problems you mention. Keeping parking lots around won't fix the problems caused by parking lots.
(The exceptions are vacations and transporting equipment. You probably need a car for that. Depending on how often you go on vacation or transport equipment, you may or may not need your own personal car sitting idle 98 % of the year. But if you do, great, you're in the small minority we should build parking lots for. We don't need very many parking lots for you.)
Ever tried imagining building a life that isn't centred around using a car?
but i didn't. i made sure that i lived somewhere with a direct bus to work and it turned out to be fine. same in los angeles later. also auckland, nz.
with that experience i concluded that i won't need a car, ever. it is all about arranging how you live.
Some people act so entitled... Not everyone has the same circumstances and infrastructure around them. Go to a poor part of eastern Europe. My mother has 2 buses to the nearest city in an entire day... (Not mentioning it takes like 5-6x more time.)
Why is building more bus stops, more metro stops, more train stops, more bike lanes, so terrible? And how is forcing car ownership better?
Or 480€ if you get it trough your employer, which amounts to 40€ a month.
And very few people have a travelcard for the entire city, just you payg on your phone/watch/card for what you use. Unless you literally are crossing London 10 times a week an annual travel card is meaningless.
If your weekly travel sees you routinely hitting the cap then a travel card may represent better value.
The annual london travel card is much cheaper than operating a car. Not to mention public transport is london is an order of magnitude faster than car for most intra-city journeys.
Also, poor Eastern Europe people use more public transport, vause cars are more expensive.
a similar location in the US would have no busses at all.
remote places exist. if you live there you may need a car. but that doesn't translate to needing a car everywhere.
You could park your car near a metro stop, or train station on the edge of the city and use public transport to complete your journey.
That way city dwellers don’t need to sacrifice huge amounts of space for cars they don’t use, along with dealing with the consequences of urban heat islands. And you don’t need to spend you life sat in traffic because there will never be enough roads in major cities for everyone to travel by car.
Get rid of cars in town, leave a few single-lane roads with a 10mph limit for deliveries etc at specific times.
What if grandpa walks with a cane and your wife is 9 months pregnant? What if it’s below freezing and there’s 8 inches of snow on the ground? All of this to cut out a handful of parking spaces for a town of 500 in the middle of the Great Plains?
Or you take a half way approach, only have accessibility spaces in town, so those unable to use a bike, or similar small personal transport device, can drive and park.
As for groceries, we solved that a long time ago. They’re called cargo bikes, you can even get electric versions. Great for filling up with groceries and children.
Also we’re not talking about towns of 500 in the great planes. We’re talking about towns and cities of thousands to millions of people. You would have be an either an idiot or trying to be deliberately obtuse to assume this discussion is talking about villages in arse end of nowhere.
Furthermore, I think you’re really underestimating what it’s like to live in a cold northern place during the winter. There are snowstorms that go on for hours and hours and you need to plough and salt the roads hourly just for cars. Bikes are A LOT less tolerant of poor conditions so it would be even worse. Not to mention the fact that people like to be comfortable so nobody’s going to want to ride a bike in a blizzard. If a city tried to force everyone to use bikes then people would move away.
A bike path capable of taking 200 bikes / hour is always going to be smaller than a road that can take 200 cars / hour. Bikes are physically smaller, you can fit plenty of them into the footprint of a single car.
> Furthermore, I think you’re really underestimating what it’s like to live in a cold northern place during the winter. There are snowstorms that go on for hours and hours and you need to plough and salt the roads hourly just for cars.
Most of the world doesn’t live in these locations. If your city is really so bad that it impossible to move around without a car, then stick with a car. Doesn’t change the fact that most places are perfectly compatible with bikes.
> Not to mention the fact that people like to be comfortable so nobody’s going to want to ride a bike in a blizzard.
Wear a thick coat. There are plenty of places where that have blizzards and the majority of trips are made by bike.
> If a city tried to force everyone to use bikes then people would move away.
There’s more to a city than just the number of cars in it. There are plenty of cities that already punish car driver heavily. Their populations still grow, their economies still grow. Providing enough roads and space for everyone to drive is not a requirement for a successful city, arguably the opposite is true. The worlds largest mega cities have the best public transport, and some of the most punishing and expensive to use road infrastructure. Just look at cities like Tokyo, London and Paris.
2. The total parking area in NYC adds up to TWELVE Central Parks.
3. Cars are a leading cause of death by accident in the world.
4. Driving a car for 1 hour reduces your life expectancy by 20 minutes.
5. They emit toxic fumes and greenhouse gases.
6. Car tires shed microplastics, which might be even more harmful than the toxic fumes they emit.
7. This article.
Now please tell me, what tolerance do these glorified killing machines deserve?
Surely driving a car for 60 minutes ought to reduce your life expectancy by something like 59 minutes, at least -- much like anything you do for 60 minutes.
I'm not just trying to be funny, there's a point here: you'll say "yeah, but it's 20 minutes more than otherwise" and I'll ask "so what is this otherwise?"
Obviously, if you compare to riding an ultralight airplane for 60 minutes, I think the car is going to be better – especially in bad weather. So what's the comparison for this number?
If you're just comparing demographics, I'm forced to point out that correlation is not, in general, direct causation. We might just be observing something else that happens to affect both car usage and life expectancy.
(To be clear, I'm doing this to find the steel man of your argument. I dislike car-centric infrastructure as much as anyone, but I wouldn't want to use weak arguments.)
> So what's the comparison for this number?
In one column you have the age a person died, in another one you have the estimated time they spent driving during their life. Not a rigorous proof of causation, but I mean... which part of the dataset would you like to be in?
Depending on situation, this might be acceptable to some when no other option takes less than 133% more time. But it is something you should definitely take into account. It is also kind of unfair to interpret it like this because cars can screw up traffic for other vehicles too, like traffic jams hinder public transport in my city on a regular basis.
If that were true, a child born with a life expectancy of eighty years would be dead by age forty. Life expectancy is measured in terms of projected age at death, not years remaining to live. An ordinary benign activity should not change your life expectancy very much, almost by definition.
I would not expect a child who drives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — from birth — to live much past the age of forty.
If, on the other hand, you commute one hour per day for five days a week for twenty years that works out to about 217 days or just under 2/3 of a year of lost life expectancy. Is it nothing? Absolutely not. But it’s not as absurd as it would seem.
In places where car ownership is possible, most people will have a car even if they use public transport for work. Why? Families are spread out, shops are in many different places, public transport tends to favour centralised areas like city centres and not other cross-city journeys and even a half mile walk to a bus stop or metro station is signficant if every journey is made that way. Children are often part of a club or whatever and in many cases, getting between all of these things is much quicker in a car than waiting for buses that don't turn up.
I like the idea of low-carbon environmentally friendly transport but it is a choice that in many cases is too big an ask, otherwise everyone would just do it. My car journey to work is 30 minutes. Doing the same journey on public transport would take at least 3 buses and probably 2 hours. Not happening.
Also, a lot of public transport seems expensive but I don't just want to jump on the "why is it so expensive in the UK and not elsewhere" because I don't think the economics are well understood.
Driving in London is expensive and inconvenient. Parking is extortionate, there's the congestion charge, road taxes, fuel duty and insurance. A car is something you get if you're reasonably well off or you need it for work (e.g. you're a tradesman).
Travelcards are expensive too - London is just expensive unfortunately. But that's a Z1-5 travelcard I think you've quoted. There are other ones and IME a lot of very poor people cycle, use the bus pass (£900) or get a Z2-6 (£1800) then walk from there, if indeed they even work in the centre. Also there are discounted rates for the travelcard depending on circumstances.