"Slightly less than one-third of households said they had one personal vehicle1 available for use in 2001. A little more than one-third of households (40 million out of 107 million households) had 2 vehicles and slightly less than one-quarter had 3 or more vehicles available."[0]
This is an unimaginable number of cars. Given that a car costs, on average, $28,400[1] - and lasts around 8 years[2] - holy shit.
That doesn't even take into account the cost of running and fueling a car. At an average of ~15k miles per year, the total cost PER CAR is around $8,776 per year.[3] To our 'median household', which is more likely than not to have one or two cars, that's either 20% or 40% of their income. Since average spending on housing is 30%, that doesn't leave a whole lot left. No wonder we're all in so much debt.
The worst part is, US urban planning means that people are likely unable to work without access to a car.
Imagine a 20% increase in income tax, with the money being used to subsidize an outdated and damaging industry. That's what this is. It is holding back the US economy.
[0]http://www.bts.gov/publications/transportation_statistics_an... [1]http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/autos/aut11.shtm [2]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12040753/ns/business-consumer_ne... [3]http://www.boston.com/cars/newsandreviews/overdrive/2011/04/...
By American standards these are tiny but for EU commuting / shopping / city driving they're fine.
Fiat even has a two cylinder car on the market.
Get rid of the car industry, and the flying jetpack, massive underground subway, or whatever industry will come in to fill the gap. Economics isn't that simple.
NYC would be a lot cheaper if you could buy up some old brownstones, give the tenants end of lease + 6 months to find a new place, tear them down and build an apartment building. It would be very simple to fit a lot more people on manhattan if we just built taller buildings.
It's politics that makes dense cities expensive, not something intrinsic to the cities themselves.
Quantities related to a city’s infrastructure, such as the number of gas stations and the length of paved roads, did scale "sublinearly", meaning that the larger the city, the less of these were required per capita. But measures of economic output and innovation – the number of patents, total wages, GDP, even the pace of walking – scaled "superlinearly", showing increasing returns with size (see Graphs). "The scaling laws say that on average, as a city grows you can predict its output and input, its energy consumption, its wealth creation, its level of crime," says Bettencourt.
But cars remain awesomely effective, because they can go from point to point, and they're so competitive that trains are only really competitive if: * you're going to be traveling for very long distances (but not long enough for airports to be faster), or * traffic is going to be utterly miserable, or * the train is RIGHT THERE and very convenient or, ideally, some combination of the three. (Driving to the commuter rail and having your office be Right There is an acceptable incarnation of point three).
Notice where trains are most effective: the northeast corridor (really dense population, traffic problems, city centers with workplaces served by train/metro), big cities on the west coast (e.g. SF, Seattle).
There are significant diseconomies involved in making a big dense city. "A future without cars" looks like some of those cities and those city's problems - in particular, really expensive housing, especially if you want to raise a family and have multiple bedrooms (or, God forbid, a yard). Remember that median household income in the US is only $44k. If you're reading Hacker News I'll guesstimate you're probably making double that, maybe triple.
Anyway. Gas prices and the relative prices of train commuting/car commuting/real estate may change the dynamic of transportation in the future, but I don't think the densification that it entails is an unabashed good for the common man or that my preference for trains is a substitute for comprehensive realistic transportation policies. And if we must go down that road (so to speak) we're going to need to do a better job of making effective, useful, cost-efficient transportation projects than we have over the past few years.