Poor people in these cities don’t feel disadvantaged for not having a car. I fact most people in these cities don’t have a car regardless of income level
lived with a car in California for 20yrs, Lived without in some of those other cities for 15. without was way better. When I really needed a vehicle to carry something I could get a taxi.
Trains are slow when poorly designed. good train systems have multiple levels of express trains.
I don't know much about European cities but maybe it's easier to build housing there than it is here because that's always the main issue in north america.
The only reason people live in the suburbs where everyone is forced to drive is because a) housing it cheaper and b) its safer (most EU cities probably dont have anywhere near the crime levels of the US) c) its easier to raise kids because decent schools dont have waiting lists and basic stuff like grocery stores are cheaper
I know it's a meme on Reddit but people living outside metropolitian areas aren't there simply because they are pro-car.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265710941_Zoned_Out...
As an aside, the countryside can survive without cities but cities cannot survive without the countryside. Perhaps consider your dependences before brazenly brushing them off.
Cities need farms (a few people and a few roads) they don’t need suburbs (people wasting resources, living large, and stealing tax resources from the cities to subsidize their lifestyle)
farming and suburbia are subsidized out the wazoo. and a lot of Ag doesn't go to feed people... you're bark is much, much worst than your bite.
Instead, the recent trend has been that wealthy areas near downtown (e.g. Buckhead) have been trying to incorporate so that they're no longer subsidizing the rest of the city.
> I guess I don't deserve decent infrastructure in your world view?
You can have whatever connection to the rest of your state your community and the state can afford and decide upon.
FWiW I've very much been there, I grew up in the most remote corner of a state 3x larger than Texas with a population (then) of under 1 million.
We graded our own airstrip, 150 km of road, maintained our own vehicles and aircraft, fed and managed our horses and camels, loaded and unloaded ships off the mud flats at low tide.
That is… extremely silly. You can’t make an inherently expensive activity cheap because you’d like it to be. Cars take up so much space that’s expensive to build and maintain. They crash into things and people constantly. The pollute the air, and they are extremely expensive to own and repair, with a total lifetime measured in a couple decades, if you’re lucky. That’s not getting cheap. It’s like saying that single family homes in Manhattan should be cheap, then everything will be better. Cars and mansions don’t fit in cities. They can’t be cheap!
Trains, my friend. We need trains. Busses first, but eventually trains.
Trains are not the solution. Even the best train systems are much slower than point to point car transportation. When I go to Tokyo on business, I take Ubers, not the (excellent) train system, because cars are faster and more convenient. In Japan, 80% of households have a car. In Tokyo prefecture, there are about 40 cars per 100 households. In Osaka it’s 65 per 100.
Unfortunately, EVs do not solve the problem of air pollution from motor vehicles: tires produce a LOT of particulates.
https://theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyres-pr...
100 gallons of gasoline produce ~1 ton of CO2, and it costs ~600$/ton to perform CO2 air capture.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...
It’s also extremely inconvenient with three kids, especially if you’re trying to bring a stroller onto the train during rush hour. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every city with excellent public transit is also dying because people aren’t having kids.
My kids hated the bjorn and so did my (very third world communist country) foreign wife. I liked it.
The stroller also has storage space for, for example, the medicine bag that keeps my last kid alive in case he swallows <insert long list of allergens>. The stroller has everything ready to go except the baby and we don't have to don our various accessories.
Finally, as Europeans, we find those Americans and their various polyester bags (back, front, bjorn, fanny, etc) look ridiculous. One looks like a marine about to assault Fallujah. The stroller has a dignity to it that all those bags lack.
In fact, despite the smell of urine, I used to love Atlantas MARTA for its brilliant airport exit.
There's nothing inherently undignified of public transportation system. America's indignity comes from our inability to clean.
They wouldn't be if everyone was in a car.
Average commute time in greater Tokyo is double that: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu...
Have you ever flown over Texas?
I don’t know about Singapore or Hong Kong. But I suspect rich people there drive rather than taking public transit.
Source:
>>> Differences between cities [public transportation vs car transportation times] mainly concern the magnitude of the ratio, where the car is remarkably faster than public transit in Los Angeles but _not that much in Tokyo and Seoul._ (Emphasis mine)
```
PT travel time (minutes) Min: 9 Max: 121 Mean: 52.8
Car travel time (minutes) Min: 11 Max: 123 Mean: 41.8
PT travel cost (¥). Min: 110 Max: 1290 Mean: 430.8
Car travel cost (¥) Min: 149 Max: 6138 Mean:2102.6
```
Source: Altieri, M., Silva, C., & Terabe, S. (2021). Keep pushing! Analysing public transit and car competitiveness in Tokyo. Case Studies on Transport Policy, 9(2), 457–465. doi:10.1016/j.cstp.2021.02
Fwiw, my experience is same as OP. In Shanghai, it is far faster to take a Didi than public transit. It's typically a 20 minute door to door vs 40.
Minor note that 2/3 of Atlanta was destroyed in 1864.
So in contrast to other major American cities, it had the benefit of being mostly planned in an automotive era.
Add in the fact that the surrounding geography doesn't preclude expansion in any direction, and it's essentially a "best-case" city for cars.
Even LA became an automobile city, and it has much more substantial barriers to expansion. Now that it's built out, LA is developing a pretty expansive metro system, but it will take decades to truly cover the region. It would have been nice to at least lay the main lines of the metro when land was cheap. One thing China got right is learning from these mistakes and building out their metros ahead of their city growth.
I think mass transit can be great in the right contexts. For ATL, I think it makes the most sense in the few sq miles of city proper, not 20+ mi out.
what in the absolute f** are you talking about? have you ever experienced the sudden death of a loved one? what about the network impact of someone dying? even if you want to look at it through a capitalistic lens, think of the reduction in capability people going through that trauma. the amount of resources it takes in the health care, and public service sectors. you're off loading the immense costs of a person dying onto folks at random like an inverse and more likely lottery.
since you're so confidently in having the empirical measures of what outweighs what, at what point would a public transit system start to be a "good cost tradeoff" in your framework? cause there's a logical end goal you could get to: individualized transport with an experienced driver; and then work backwards from there until you balance the cost of implementation with those tens of thousands of death. would it be $1,000/day/person? $500/day/person?
though more than likely you're speaking like this because you've lived your entire life transported by car, benefiting off of the externalized costs passed off to the less fortunate, and you fear having your subsidized conveniences justifiably going away.
That you see this tragedy as a benefit reveals the grotesquerie of you world view. You also do not address the downstream effects of that lost life in terms of grief, material loss, and reduced capacity. (You’re not even a good capitalist.)
May you never experience the losing end of a “more comfortable and convenient life”.
1. deaths directly by car are not the only deaths to account for. look at the history of lead poisoning from gasoline and the ramifications we're still reckoning with today from that. think of the rubber, heavy metal pollution we are just finding out today is driving critical ecosystems rapidly to extinction (in my neck of the woods: salmon). the death from the resource gathering required only for cars. there are so, so many externalized costs you don't consider even tho i'd argue that due to no experience with it yourself that the violence associated with a death by car is no easily written off as a statistic.
2. the environment built for cars is the only environment that can be. you've been duped by automobile manufactures, oil barons, and the affluent class that needs their chose mode of transportation adopted and subsidized by the masses. i see many more countries with better public transit and less folks living with cars all with better measures of comfort and convenience. you have exact measures to compare number of deaths, population, and road miles, but there's no way to measure whether those miles were worth it for anyone because of the baked in assumptions of no other choice. but what is always measurable is that deaths are directly caused by the existence of cars, and that death impacts people greatly.
rethink your assumptions and misanthropy.
There’s no country that can afford to be car dependent where most people don’t drive. Even in Sweden and Japan, which have amazing public transit systems, 80% of households own a car.
You make a decision to get into the car with eyes open and most people are okay with the deal & the odds.
I have a feeling your response is because you’ve lost someone, so sorry about that. Life ends up more or less as a shit lottery and sometimes you get lucky (unlucky)
And props for being a responder and seeing it with your own eyes. I actually think it should be more widely spread, showing it on the nightly news, etc. it’s an effective strategy to make more careful drivers.
"nicer" and "cleaner" mean the same thing, and I'll give those to you. When you create a transit system that poor people can't afford to use... you don't see poor people anymore. But they didn't disappear, and you didn't solve a problem.
My larger point is that public policy is a meta-market. We subsidize the suburbs because the majority of people like the suburbs. The net migration patterns in this country are to places like Dallas and Atlanta because that's where more people want to live.
I would love to see an experiment where we make a 1200 sq-ft apartment in a dense, walkable neighborhood, the same price as a 3000 sq-ft McMansion outside Dallas, by actually building the former. I predict… unexpected migration, but who knows. That’s a hard experiment to run.
Traffic is a hard problem. There is no single solution that fits everywhere, and you will never be able to go everywhere with your preferred means of transit. At least if you are not a major political leader such as the US president. If you are, you can just stop the normal traffic and let the peasants wait.
Of course, commuting to sit in front of a computer all day is pretty absurd. Maybe unnecessary commuting is the real problem.
Or do keep building more roads. I don't really care. If people love traffic and want to live in their car, there should be a city for them (so long as they are not sucking up federal dollars to do it). The problem is that right now, in NA, all we build are roads. Every city is a shitty carbon copy of the next one. No one is trying anything new.
No one with a head above their shoulders is interested in those Quixotic perspectives anymore , not after witnessing the events of the last 3-4 years.
You and others like you are akin to the sneering know-it-alls who laughed at the idea that dependence on a single source of foreign energy is perhaps not the brightest idea.[1]
At best youre misguided.
At worse youre straight up shill plants of foreign governments that would like us go down a moronic path just like the Germans did with dismantling their nuclear plant infrastructure thanks to eco-shitheads. Meanwhile France has some 52 nuclear power plants and is building more.[2]
[1]
GERMANS LAUGH AT TRUMP when he warns "Germany will become totally dependent Russian energy" UN 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKEycjREgPE
[2]
List of power stations in France - Nuclear
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Fran...
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't post insinuations about [] shilling[] and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
Meanwhile, I see in these comments many such violations while advocating the other side of the issue, and none of them are downvoted, flagged, or chastised.
There is a persistent pattern on one side of the political spectrum to hold their opponents to various rules while allowing themselves to be exempt, and it is prominent on HN as well.
If you are here for open, honest, and civilized discussion, will you vouch for some of the comments which violate no guidelines but were flagged because they are in favor of the use of automobiles? Will you chastise some of the shallow dismissals which are against the use of automobiles?
Sounds reasonable until you see how the Swiss do it. Nobody said that but that's where I feel this conversation is going and the previous commenter did say 'buses first'. Probably to exploit the existing road network and achieve ambitious goals in a piece meal manner.
Colorado is half Switzerland and half Kansas. Literally everyone minus a rounding error lives on the flat part.
For that, we first need density.
And who is against more density in existing cities where naturally more density makes most sense?
More or less the same people arguing against cars.
https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/03/25/letting-aaron-pesk...
https://www.kqed.org/news/11964754/sf-supervisors-to-vote-on...
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing/sf-permitting-paltry...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-drivers-say-war-on...
I’ll give you that. Who else though?
It seems as if most of the rail networks in the us are built to serve people with no other alternative as opposed to providing a better alternative to driving. Speaking of airport connections it blows my mind that US cities haven’t built trains like the Heathrow express.
The rest of your statements are relative to the myriad costs of no cars and other transportation. It's narrative.
>That’s not getting cheap. It’s like saying that single family homes in Manhattan should be cheap, then everything will be better. Cars and mansions don’t fit in cities. They can’t be cheap!
What? Get a grip.
We already have buses and trains. Trains are great but can't go everywhere a car is required. Buses are a poverty pattern and the working class should be elevated away from their necessity rather than toward. The practical tax is such that it is racist to mean to force people into bus transportation.
Automotive transportation has always been the future. It is not only a form of wealth but a form of anti-poverty and anti-strife, as is freedom of movement that they better facilitate.
Bus rapid transit can actually be really nice. You know that rock stars and politicians practically live on buses while they do traveling events? Of course a BRT isn't going to be that private luxury, but even a middle quality charter bus that makes limited stops is pretty darn good. Having dedicated lanes removed the worst part of buses compared to trains.
I used to daily take the AC Transit transbay buses from the East Bay to San Francisco, which are double-decker Greyhounds and have comfortable reclining seating with tables and wifi. The single entrance/exit is a benefit, because it only runs commuter hours and so in the morning it only picks up in the East Bay and drops off in SF. It allows enforcement of fares too. It's a higher fare, but that also attracts a commuter clientele. The main problem with it is that it is too popular and gets crowded, and you're SOL if all the buses are already full at your stop. But that if the flaw is that it is too popular, that's the best and easiest problem to have. Sometimes a regular AC Transit bus would show up and we would all groan and curse.
Segregated services for commuters are great, but catching a bus to shop/recreation/restaurants is miserable and restrictive.
As as aside, developing mass transit always has the problem of being at the whim of the next political goal (subsidised bus routes especially). Roads are physical easy to understand, so less subject to political vs.
???
Yes, roads require less 'active upkeep', an austerity government might stop funding transit but they will not close roads. However, this is more of a feature of the supposed 'independence' of car transport, not 'easy to understand'.
In addition, defunding transit would be a lot harder and weirder if it is in a form that requires actual infrastructure (metro, train, tram) rather than some stops and a schedule (bus). That's one potential reason to trust bus transit projects less.
Do keep in mind that roads aren't free after construction either; they typically require pretty significant upkeep (especially things like repaving, but also e.g. traffic signals).
Roads are public in a way that introducing a toll on an existing road is not politically viable, and maintenance issues are easier to spot.
> The double decker buses are beloved.
You haven't the slightest idea of what you are talking about. See "little to no experience with daily reliance on buses for urban transportation".
If, for example, Denver, CO had an actual functioning transportation network, it would cover a decent chunk of its neighboring suburbs, and these parts will be considered more desirable because you don't have to waste time driving in and out of Denver. And then these parts will be developed faster, providing more housing to people who don't like the hassle of driving and parking, which will create even more public demand to extend existing infrastructure.
That it doesn't happen just means Americans are stuck in the worldview of "I have never seen a functional public transit system in my life; I can't imagine why anyone would waste money on that!"
If denver built out that light rail into a network dense housing could exist in the suburbs at an extremely reasonable cost (suburbs are cheaper than downtown, apartments are cheaper than housing). Like the article says, the neighboring counties/etc just don't want this, as the HOAs/homeowners in the suburbs want to entrench themselves and increase property values.
Buses that can drive in the shoulder are better for people who already take the bus, but they aren't going to get many more people riding the bus. A light rail that actually went all the way to Boulder would help. Or a lightrail that actually went to Golden, and not only the government building 3 miles uphill from downtown Golden.
Our governor adopted budget cuts that forced the public busses to run private ads, then called them an “eyesore.” People—especially poor people or families that don’t want to rely on cars — need reliable public transportation!
I grew up in a region with fairly mediocre transit, but because the living environment is not hostile most things can easily be done by bike unless you need to go to another city. Hell, I biked 8km to school, and while somewhat time consuming it was quite literally free exercise.
When I went to uni, before moving to that city I relied on transit. Because of the low density in the region, trains are only half-hourly (which is by far the most sucky part) and it's on single-track rails so every train stops at all stations. However during rush hour it's still time-competitive with cars, and transfers are generally pretty good because those are the reason transit works in that region at all.
Something like "you need a car to be able to get to (store)" that's mentioned in another comment would be literally unthinkable here. You can get practically anywhere with a bike and a transit card.
I want good inter city rail. I want good urban railway or subway in metropolitan areas. And I want bike lanes for last mile travel.
Once we do that and reduce the demand and congestion on the roads, we can plan new roads accordingly.
right now i cannot even go half a mile to get groceries because someone obsessed with "not modeling poverty" decided there should be no way to safely cross the 6 lane street between me and the grocery store.
But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local public transit.
Both held a license for 20+ years, both in our early 40s with no accidents in that time.
Car maintenance cost varies - haven't had to deal with that yet.
Depending on the study you look at it costs an owner $8 876 per year and society about 1/3 of the lifetime cost in supporting the vehicle (in the form of roads, pollution, infrastructure etc.)
I never had a car in London (where public transport is used by all regardless of income and background). Here in the US we have a long way to go before we level up our public transportation system.
That said, Washington DC's Metro is very good indeed. I hope they extend it further and further out.
Sources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/02/04/lifetime...
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/study-car-ownership-c...
> I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive
Whereas you can usually find a reliable and efficient used car for under $5000 and keep it for quite a bit more than 2 years, with a good driving record and the lower cost vehicle it can cost less than $1000/year to insure, and maintenance is dramatically less expensive if you do it yourself. And I mean the difference is $60 for a part on the internet vs. they charge you $250 for the same part and $500 for the labor to put it in.
By contrast, a monthly NYC subway pass will run you a little over $1500/year, which will in most cases be less but not necessarily a whole lot less. Plus whatever you get stuck paying to Uber whenever you have to go somewhere the subway doesn't.
My first car cost about $750 all-in, not counting equity in the car. My commute dropped from 3 hours to less than 1 hour, even in the notorious Toronto traffic. Suddenly I could go to Costco, and my grocery bill dropped by half, from around $800 to around $400.
I got a good deal both buying and selling, and on the subsequent car, so my true cost was less than the monthly payment.
Public transit makes sense in very dense areas. Everywhere else it’s an expensive boondoggle and the working class is better off driving old clunkers than the damn bus.
Cars are amazing at their current cost, comparatively. And as I said, we should work on making them cheaper.
Toward an ultimate goal of making everyone "richer". Which begins with reducing hidden poverty taxes like unavoidable multi-hour public transportation commutes.
My ultimate dream for society, as a whole, is for everyone to "be rich". I don't necessarily mean having a disgusting surplus of money in the bank, but rather to eliminate the innumerable aspects of being "not rich" that boil down to an endless string of otherwise unnecessary daily sacrifices, sufferings and indignities. Then, at least, we'd begin to see the trauma of poverty be reduced and hopefully eliminated.
In this case, that means turning a gimlet eye to the human cost of unavoidable mass transport that isn't rail. Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category. This opens up easier access to work, relationships, housing, and food including breaking down the barriers of food deserts.
Thanks. The commute time was more an aspect of the innate slowness bus transportation combined with the unavoidable route through city side streets. In other words, it would be hard to improve upon. By car, the route is thirty minutes.
Then public transport should be way cheaper than driving, as on transit you have some downtime where you can scroll through your phone, listen to some music, or perhaps even crack open your laptop if you're on a proper train. Driving requires constant attention, so you can't relax or do anything else in the meantime.
At the limit the optimal commute is work from home.
nobody should live in a sprawl or rural area so far they need to commute two hours. make transit and trains fast and cheap and frequent, build opportunities in cities, and design cheap housing in desirable areas.
You don't get to imagine an alternative like "cars for everyone", because it's simply not possible.
I do agree that work-from-home should be a part of the transit solution. But not even the entire software industry can work from home, nevermind all the other industries that sometimes use computers.
> Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category.
You can lament all you want, but the difference in space between a car and an apartment/office building makes the problem you're discussing completely unsolvable.
So, if you really care about making everyone richer, the only question you can ask is how to improve public transit. Anything else is pure make-believe.
Public transport is cheap for an individual, and when many people use it, it reduces traffic and pollution.
Cars have the opposite effect. They are expensive for an individual, and when many people use them, it increases traffic and pollution…
Don’t aim to increase cars on the road, it’s better and cheaper for everyone to improve public transport
To throw some numbers out: A "cheap" used car ($5k), financed over 3 years at 8% is $156.68 per month. At my middle age, decent full coverage insurance is around $100 per month (it would cost a lot more if I were still younger). We're at $256.68 monthly just to have a car that we may elect to drive.
But that doesn't include parking for the car (a place to live with good parking tends to cost more than a place with awful parking). It also doesn't include the costs of actually driving the car, like regular maintenance, stuff that inevitably breaks or wears out, fuel, washing the car, and so on. Let's just make up a number and say that these things average ~$150 per month, for a total of ~$406.68 per month to drive a car.
Now, suppose that a commute is 20 minutes each way using that car, or 1 hour if riding the bus. And that a bus pass costs $62 per month.
And let's say that a person "brings home" $25 per hour worked, and that they work 40 hours in a regular week (173.93 hours in a regular month), and that the commute time counts as unpaid work.
The car commute adds 14.49 hours per month, for 188.42 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $406.68.
The bus commute adds 43.48 hours per month, for 217.41 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $62.
The bus seems cheaper and slower at this point, which we all probably implicitly knew to be true.
--
But if my math is right: By the time transportation is paid for, the person commuting by car has an effective hourly wage of $20.92 for their time+commute. And the person riding the bus has an effective hourly wage of $19.73/hour for their time+commute.
So owning and driving the car may be a better option than taking the bus, depending on a person's specific situation and proclivities. And of course, it's more nuanced than that in ways that are harder to math out.
With a car, commute time is just lost time. A person driving a car must drive that car the entire time; they don't get to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever, but they're only doing that for 40 minutes a day.
With a bus pass, commute time might be productive time. A person riding a bus might decide to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever. So if a person chooses to do so, they can use some of that 43.48 hours riding back and forth to work doing something that has meaning to them.
On the other hand: Owning a cheap(ish) car means being able to travel to places where a bus doesn't go, and do so on a whim, and (optionally) take a mountain of stuff along with them if that is useful for whatever reason.
So yeah, cars are expensive. But buses are also expensive. (Life is expensive.)
Great comment! This is an incredible way to put it.
Colorado has the right idea.
It must be very cultural. I'm pretty well off (as most experienced IT people are), and I travel with Bus (or a Bike) to my job every weekday. Most of my friends and coworkers do the same (I don't even know anyone in my team who drives to work).
I'm sorry about your experience with school bus - this sounds disastrous. But believe me that it's possible to improve. In my (big, European) city public transport and biking infrastructure is pretty good, cheap, and useful.
I took the urban bus to and from school for years: at least 1.5 hours each way. Often two, with at least one transfer.
Outside of the city center, reliance on buses is a massive poverty tax in terms of reduced quality of life.
Remove these bourgeoise policymakers and their unilateral fake goals. Work on real transportation improvements for the people, not to meet the myopic expectations of the ivory tower. That means making transportation maximally fast and low cost. That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation.
No one who actually cares about society will be working to make it mirror the patterns of poverty. Disagreement with that premise should always be held in high suspicion.