I live in Bay Area and people here think that EU is a utopia where cars do not exist and everyone just walks. They have a cartoonish caricature of EU in their minds.
I would be curious to see what the usage patterns are. A quick google shows that the average mileage for Europeans is around 7k, while the average American drives 12k. So it would seem that Europeans drive about 60% less despite the same access to vehicles…
Btw it does depend where you live but in the Netherlands you can get by without a car mostly fine if you live in a city. The biggest issue is transporting larger goods (basically any IKEA trip), but it's certainly possible (eg by renting).
Only in New York have I met someone like that here; even those who majority took public transit had cars or at least a license.
While I was still living in the Bay Area, once I thought I could walk from the car dealership to the rental car company, because on google maps it looked quite close... big mistake.
Oh, and potholes. I feel like it is a secret plot by the city to punish car owners.
Where do your groceries come from and how should these people taking care of ensuring you get to eat get around?
Obviously before cars were invented it was impossible for people in rural areas to bring food to people in urban areas, so all the people in urban areas starved to death. /s
Humans managed to feed urban areas for millennia before the internal combustion engine was invented. I'm sure if city design was changed such that people could walk, cycle, and take public transit to work and to shops, various ways of getting goods (including food) into urban areas will be thought of.
And putting emphasis on urban layouts where people can get (say) 90% of their day-to-day needs satisfied without relying on automobiles does not preclude cars being available for the remaining 10%. Such layouts simply turn cars from being a need-to-have to a nice-to-have item in one's life.
We're talking about changing the emphasis of urban design. Most "bans" on automobiles focus on person transportation vehicles, and not eliminated commercial delivery. It may in fact be easier for deliveries since all the single-passenger cars will be reduced, thus potentially lowering general traffic volumes.
See the Not Just Bikes channel for various videos by a Canadian who grew up in a car-centric suburb to people-centric Amsterdam:
It would be great if even rural communities didn't need expensive, polluting cars to be able to live their lives, but AFAIK they're not a priority now. Cities are where it's all falling apart.
Urban societies have existed for millennia, and before cars, people weren't all riding around on horses to accomplish their daily life. Personal transport was the exception, not the rule.
People in the US think that stroads and roads and cars are the only way to live, because we have outlawed other forms of living. Our lack of low-car city designs isn't because people don't want them, or because they aren't conducive to modern life, they simply don't exist because they have been banned from the marketplace.
If people really wanted to live packed together like a hive of insects, we would not have suburbs and small towns. People live in high density situations because they have (or perceive that they have) no other choice.
Places like NY have extremely high densities of cultural resources and extremely low densities of housing. This doesn't mean people like the housing, it just means people like the cultural aspects.
This begs a big question: why do we pack all of our cultural institutions into a small area? Is it more cost effective? I would have a hard time buying that due to how many restaurants, businesses, etc close in Manhattan for not being able to catch up with rent. I think it's a cyclical issue we see in other areas. Why is Shenzhen the "only" place that manufactures electronics? It is likely a network effect causing this. Factory A can sell to B, C, and D which can all sell a similar fan out. The same likely happens with cultural institutions. Starting a restaurant supply company? Well, you'll look for the place with the most restaurants. Starting a restaurant? Look for the place with the most supply companies. Want to find a place to live? Look for the place that has the best optimization of {Rent, Entertainment, Food, Employment}. For me and many others: this is NYC (actually NJ with a commute to the city).
A bigger follow up question: Does it need to be this way? I don't think it does. Living in Manhattan/Brooklyn/etc is way more expensive than living in the suburbs of NJ even factoring in double taxes and commute. I currently pay $1,500/month in rent for a 1br 1bath. A friend who lives in Brooklyn (with a 15-20 min shorter commute) pays about $3,500/month and needs to pay $300/month in an MTA card while also spending way more on groceries and cost of living stuff than I do.
If you owned your residence in a suburb even with taxes my guess is it becomes much more financially beneficial even if you need a car. If we got a little smarter and built trains, street cars, buses, subways, etc in suburban areas with sprawl we may not even need cars for most Americans.
If we have separate single-family dwellings than the damage fires and poor maintenance can cause are limited (blast radius). We can, as a society, gradually "roll-forward" new standards in electrical codes / eco friendly by renovating homes as people move.
The only reason we don't have a single family home to give to everyone who wants one is because we haven't built them. Once everything is said and done though the cost of building an apartment complex in NYC is not much cheaper once you factor in the huge fees for doing any sort of construction in NYC.
I personally think that if we, as a country, decided to build walkable small towns that were interconnected by fast moving and reliable public transit and forced businesses who could work remotely to do so many people would much rather live there than in the city.
Something doesn't add up.
And I think it's pretty apparent that quite a lot of restaurant employees rely on public transit, or feed a substantial portion of their income to one car, whose breakdown causes loss of employment. Forcing people to need cars from arbitrary point to point is a regressive tax.
What are you trying to say? You obviously don't need freeways and 6 lane roads running through city centers to deliver supplies to stores and restaurants.
Please take five minutes to look on Google Maps before commenting about neighborhood design in a country 5000 miles away.
they both have roads, the only difference is that the 20th century ones were built around car culture. car culture is not talking about people delivering food for the residents.