Bryson's America: Why would you walk?

>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...

In my neighborhood, they'd take a golf cart.

Because suburban design in America is not designed for walking, their neighbor probably need to walk 2 to 3km to reach their next door neighbor.

To quote Bryson's article: "but I have since come to realise that there was nothing especially odd in their driving less than a couple of hundred feet to visit us. Nobody walks anywhere in America nowadays." (emphasis mine)

That's just a half an hour walk. It happens to also be about the distance between my apt and my parent's apt. It's a distance I walk very often.

This tiny thread of comments is a great microcosm of a fundamentally stupid exchange that crushes any hope of a good-faith exchange of ideas or views.

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.

But cars objectively are a huge waste of space. Cars designed for 5 persons have an average usage of one and a half per ride. The passenger space is 3 times bigger than it needs to be. They are a waste of space.

You can say that about most current cars in the US, especially with the proliferation of giant SUVs. But that doesn't make it true about the concept of a personal car in general.

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.

We're just all having some innocent fun at the expense of one another, in order to understand each other's point of view. Or at least that's what I hope this is.

But walking is so slow! If only there was a machine that could amplify the output of your noodley appendages enabling you to perhaps "ride" the machine and go faster while using the same amount of effort and no additional fuel.

In the words of Ivan Illich:

> 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.

In many ways the car is an absurd abuse of bicycle technology that never would have existed without fossil fuels. I imagine the thought process went something like this:

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...

Bicycles are great but you’d never use one to pick up grandma from her house, a 20lb turkey from the butcher shop, and little Jenny from the school Christmas pageant rehearsal, all in one trip with below-freezing temperatures and near-total darkness at 5pm.

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.

I agree that there are certainly legitimate uses for cars. But many countries in a cold climate manage by with more biking per capita. I would say it makes people mobile for longer and the grandma (up to some higher age) would just ride her own bicycle. The turkey will fit on your rear basket no problem. Jenny could also ride a bike home, because she has the school close.

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.

I have picked my daughter up from her dance lesson my on my bike. She is a bit heavy in the trailer, but I'm not in a hurry and I refuse to but the type of laze person who drives 1.5 miles. (though now that it is cold...)

No, you wouldn't. Quite right. In the same way you wouldn't use a car to cross the ocean to grandma's island or trawl for fish. Other solutions exist.

But there's no ocean around most people's homes. Cold cities are very usual. Telling people living in them they should bike is just insensitive to them.

Of course, there are very cold places where much of the population happily bikes. See here for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU&t=800s

Much of the population? I live in one such place with many bikepaths and bicycling tradition where some people bike even in winter despite it looks just like on the video, but I've never seen old people risking it - for good reasons, as falling down can be deadly for them. My own grandma wouldn't be able to get anywhere the public transport doesn't go (many many places even in an EU country) - and she's one of the more mobile, more motivated seniors there. The others would be fucked.

Yeah it's called the bus or the subway. Or my favourite one, the tram/streetcar.

EDIT: Ooops misread the message

No, it's a bicycle.

Not a big fan of doing stuff like hiking or climbing or boating I take it?

People keep making excuses for cars but it goes the other way around too.

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.

Funnily enough, if you replace parking lots with homes, businesses, entertainment, education, and commercial buildings, you are likely to get

- 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.)

This thread is about heat islands and wasted space in cities.

But the topic at hand is heat islands, which is inherently an urban problem. I don’t think anyone here is meaning to suggest rural Montana should ban cars.

If I drive to a remote place in a car, I will need a car to get back. But if I go to a remote place by walking, on a bicycle or public transport, I don't need a car to get back.

Ever tried imagining building a life that isn't centred around using a car?