For most people it's not about the supermarket. Those are a dime a dozen and all the same. It's easy to provide those in sufficient amounts everywhere.
Now try it with jobs. Not any job, but your job. Is it possible to have your job be 5 minutes from your home. How about in 5 years when your job is underpaid or unfulfilling? Is your next job also 5 minutes away? Or do you now have to move? And 5 years after that, when you're laid off?
I find that loads of people start out enjoying the car-free experience. And then they get a job in the next town. And/or they get kids, so commute-time takes away from kids-time. Life becomes too busy to spend the extra 30 minutes commuting per day that public transport would cost.
Between the trade-off bad job, no time, and car/public transport, the car quickly becomes the best solution. Even if you don't like driving.
Groceries were a total PITA, maybe if you order a lot of delivery it’s fine, but we cook every meal and needed at least a granny cart at least once a week. And small grocers nearby had terrible vegetables; there is a lot of variance in supermarket quality. Maybe in NYC they have it figured out, but the trade off is everything cost crazy money.
I commuted by bus for this time to work, an hour each way and my hours were beholden to an infrequent bus schedule — it knee capped my career because I had to leave at hard cutoff and never could meet up for lunch or happy hour, and lost 10-15 hrs a week on a bus.
Even subway is so-so, unless they run every 5 minutes and you live and work on top of statio can add up fast, and transferring lines adds a ton of time.
Huge regret trying to live car free in an American city (not NYC).
Yes, living in Manhattan and Brooklyn, this was not a problem. Manhattan had a supermarket on every block. Brooklyn was a little farther, but the variety and quality of the food was excellent. This was a while ago, so don't remember how prices stacked up. Just that on an NYC salary, food was affordable for our family.
Lived in Tokyo and Osaka, but most of that time didn't have to cook much. But remember groceries being very accessible in walking distance.
Vacations in various cities in Italy and Paris, groceries were accessible, very high quality, and affordable.
So I think walkable grocery shopping is a good experience in NYC and big cities outside the US. But probably not great in the median US city.
Supermarkets are close enough (I actually live above one, but were that not there, there are still three others within a five minute walk), that I rarely do a "weekly" shop and just buy my groceries when needed, most of which are of decent to high quality.
It's not really much of an inconvenience to keep a relatively well stocked kitchen without a car here. I'm really struggling to understand how a "granny cart" worth of groceries once a week is a chore? That's a couple of bags worth at most.
Buses could be a bit more frequent here, but they're still good enough that I don't have a hard cut off for when I have to leave the office. I lose maybe 7-8 hours a week on my commute, which is time I'd spend reading anyway.
It wasn’t a couple of bags, it was a cart of about 4 bags at least, including a gallon of milk, often including bags of flour, eggs, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/LS-Folding-Shopping-Basket-Capacity/d...
If you beat public transport by using a car then there just isn't enough public transit or the city isn't dense enough (likely the former, due to the latter). If you live 3km from your job in London or NYC then at least during rush hour it's likely to be faster to use public transport than a car.
> Life becomes too busy to spend the extra 30 minutes commuting per day that public transport would cost.
This is again based on the premise that public transport costs time, rather than saves time or doesn't matter time wise.
People who work in really dense cities but live far outside it so they need to drive from home are already likely to not drive all the way into the city center but rather drive to the edge of the city center, park there more cheaply, and take a train the last 10% of the way. The key is that that traffic in the city center is slower than public transport, including the wait times and walking required. Within some distance from the city center of a city that is dense enough and has enough public transport, this holds true. And it's in this area that private car traffic make little sense at all. But that doesn't mean people can't have cars. Or that suburban people won't drive. You might still want to drive somewhere on the weekend. Or you might need to drive to even reach the public transport.
I live in a town of 125k people, where I can reach any spot by bike or public transport in about 30 minutes. Perfectly commutable. It has a few jobs for people like me, but not enough for a decent amount of variety.
Car-free center can work there too. But for 125k people it might just be a few blocks square in the middle. The math is pretty simple. If density is so low that there can't be stations every 5 minutes of walking, or so low that businesses like large detached grocery stores, gas stations, building material stores and so on could even think of being there, then it's 100% car territory.
But one shouldn't let it become self-fulfilling. If city restaurants have parking then they need a lot of space, which lowers density, and they become unattractive to people who are walking. So a key ingredient for a car free city could be to ensure no establishments have parking lots within a specified distance of the city center. It's nearly impossible to combine parking lots with walkability.
The rest of the city is spacious and has good car accessibility, so you can also get out quickly.
This is a reasonable premise. Because a car is point to point and public transport by definition is not. I agree it is possible to maneuver yourself into a situation where you live immediately next to the subway stop and your job is immediately next to the other subway stop. Public transport will save time then. But that's very rare and also a fragile setup because as soon as you change either home or job, it's no longer true.
So for most people public transport means walking to the nearest stop, taking the subway/bus and then walking to the destination. So yes it takes more time.
If you know you’ll be commuting to The Factory for the next forty years, you can happily take the bus or train or whatever to it. You buy your house and put down roots.
Now cities are larger and your job changes every five to seven years and either you move each time to be near enough, or you let your family stay where everyone they know is, and take the commute on the teeth.
The solution is smaller cities; not larger ones, or going back to longer term employment.
That was not the norm historically. Average job tenure is longer now that it was in the past. And the typical manufacturing facility lasted nowhere near forty years. The average lifespan of a factory is around 10 years. Most companies aren't around for forty years.
Stats on that?
The norm for most people used to be to work for the same company most of their career (if not all of it) and retire from there with a pension.
Nowadays most people change jobs every couple years.
Stats on that?
That absolutely was not the norm. Again, most companies did not exist long enough for someone to work at one for their entire career. Median job tenure 40 years ago was around 4 years (BLS).
A minority of private workers were covered by pensions at the highest point, and being covered by a pension plan did not mean you got a pension. A company might have required 30 years of service to get a pension. Work there 29 years and 11 months, get fired, no pension. Work somewhere ten years and then decide you hate it? Either work there another 20 years hating it or quit and lose your pension. Job hop for a raise every few years? No pension. Many pensions were not adjusted for inflation. Many pension plans went bankrupt. Pensions sucked. I know, I have one from the 90's. Worked there 7 years, that pension is going to pay me roughly the same monthly amount as I will be able to take from my last year's contributions to my 401K, even if those contributions make no investment returns before I retire.
I have no idea how young people get these fantasy ideas about the past. And do you really want to work in the same place for 40 years? A 401K is better than a pension. A 401K, Roth IRA and HSA is immensely better than a pension.
That's not usually how it worked.
> I have a pension from the 1990's. Worked there 7 years. I'll get around $150 a month when I retire
As you yourself note. You didn't lose your pension by leaving after 7 years, you still get it. Sure it's minimal because you only worked there 7 years instead of 40 but you didn't lose it.
> I have no idea how young people get these fantasy ideas about the past.
I wish I was that young but I also will eventually receive a pension from a company where I worked for a few years in the early 90s. It'll be like $100 but I only worked there a few years.
Different plans had different limits. Mine was 7 years, I stayed just long enough to get it. If I had left a few months earlier, would have lost it. Pensions suck.
I quit a job of mine in the New York metro area, largely because I had to drive there. It was hell. Every time it rained the commute would be twice as long. One wonderful evening coming back home the usually 50 minute drive took 3 hours.
Additionally the stress of having to deal with bumper to bumper traffic and the assholes and distracted drivers on the road was slowly killing me.
I swore after that job to never drive to work again. At least on a bus/train I can usually read a book, twiddle with a laptop or something else that keeps me entertained/relaxed.
Yes.
Further, most people don't live 5 minutes away now, even in car-centric developments. The average commute time has been, for centuries, 30 minutes one-way:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant
* https://archive.is/edypl / https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-29/the-commu...
It's just that with increased speeds the distance has gotten longer in recent decades.
Disclaimer: my household owns two cars.
And even if it were realistic, you'd have more choice by widening the circle anyway. Get an even better job by driving a bit.
But the point is it only happens if it's convenient to be far away. Design your city in a way it's convenient to be nearby and it'll be nearby. The problem is this design is completely at odds with private car ownership.
No. The point is that "work" isn't a generic thing like "supermarket". A specific job is something that needs to fit your personality.
If you're the type of person that really digs working for big tech, you aren't going to find a job you enjoy in some small town. You can probably find a job maintaining the website of the local bank, but are you really going to think that's a good outcome?
Hell, for big tech the jobs aren't even commutable from anywhere if you are willing to commute by car. Or helicopter. But this problem goes for loads of people in loads of jobs. If you can commute further you have more choice. More choice gives you better odds at a job you like.
Car dependence is a feature of sprawling cities. If you make your city dense, the jobs will be there. The fact that everyone has a car makes the jobs be all over the place because if employees can't commute further, the jobs will move to them. It's pure game theory.
The big question is how to jump from a stable state of car dependence to a stable state of mass transit and I don't see a way to do that in general.
How can you possibly have every job be nearby to everyone? That's just not possible. Now factor in job changes or even career changes. Unless your primary criteria for picking a job is to have it nearby, the probability of having jobs far from home approaches 100% over time.
So picking a geographic location based on your field and having a lot of job options is workable for a lot of occupation categories.
- supermarkets are super close
- everything else is super far (including workplaces)
- you don't have a car
in mind. I don't think that in London (the main example in the article) most jobs are a 45 minute drive from central London nor that most people drive to work.
That's probably true in Boston as well. But that's because, if you work 45 minutes out of Boston--of which there are many companies along the Route 128 or 495 corridors--you probably don't live in Boston unless you're a die-hard urbanite willing to put in a long commute to your suburban job. (To be fair, a lot of the west coast companies that established Boston outposts are in town and local suburban companies increasingly have options for people to work in a city office (or remotely) if they want to.)
If you live in a major city, yes.
Mid size cities and smaller, this is much more difficult.
Or there simply aren't homes to move to that are closer because every municipality in the area has tried to build offices rather than homes since the 1970s. And thus the office park around your new job is itself so big as to require a car to traverse it.
All these arguments for car-free cities are mostly supported by young, single and childfree urbanites.
The point is that of course it's true that driving is "easier", but it'd be obviously worse in a lot of ways if we didn't build cities the way we did.
You bring up a lot of good points, but why is this a bad thing?
Massachusetts has park-and-ride, and it's pretty great!
Sure, you need means of transport and to be able to live, and you can't change things over night, but if you would ask people "would you prefer to have a supermarket 5 minutes away or one 20 kilometers away" I doubt anybody would say "no I want only things far to be forced to use a car".