Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was.
The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.
In the early days that advantage was the ability to rapidly traverse relatively developed areas with more convenience. Over time infrastructure and adoption chased each other, but now the most populated parts of the US are developed to the point that there's little way to ease congestion with more road infrastructure. The only way to grow is to sprawl into new cities.
For a long time in population centers the pattern was new car infra. -> more driving convenience -> more cars -> repeat. In cities that's running into bottlenecks.
Today people primarily buy cars out of necessity, but in areas where most people live congestion and a more sprawling environment has diminished much of the time saving advantage.
In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day. The roads were lousy in 1919. But even then, it was better than a mule train.
In Philadelphia's paper in the early 1900s there was a daily column about "pleasure drive" routes and constant advertisements appealing to new drivers with destinations near the city.
That advantage of being able to "get out of the city" is still there, but it's further and further away. For day to day life the experience of walking / transit / biking in a pre-car US city or a modern US city is somewhat comparable in terms of time and enjoyment.
However US cities and suburbs, due to car-centric scale, allow more people to live on larger plots of land.
You think they - we - chose wrong. To put it charitably, we who disagree with you do not feel the need of your opinion on what we should want and should choose.
If you have a better way, show us the better way, and make us want it. Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist. We live them. Don't tell us the parts we enjoy don't exist. We experience them. Don't lecture us, entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.
The irony of your argument is that very few people who want more car-light or car-free cities are "forcing" anything on anyone, but the inverse is absolutely not the case.
A tremendous amount of taxes are allocated only for highways or car-centric revenue. Federal and state politics prevents cities from putting that money elsewhere. Highways were plowed through US cities and are maintained there over the objection of city residents. States intervene to prevent cities from running bus priority lanes. Cars purchases are subsidized where bikes and transit passes are not. Federal road standards, which are applied in cities, are designed for cars and not pedestrians / bikes.
A prominent example is NYC being forced by NY State to cancel congestion pricing.
The list of ways car-centric decision making is forced on dense cities is very long. Very few people are trying to "ban cars" but are instead trying to let cities too dense for cars guide their fate.
I lived in the suburbs from West Mass, I lived in downtown Boston, I lived in Manhattan. Guess where I was the most miserable?
> Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist.
The point is less about "cars vs no cars", but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning. Do you live in the suburbs? Have you ever considered how much your lifestyle is subsidized by those who live downtown? Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?
> entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.
Ask anyone in Amsterdam (which was in the 70s on its way to become as car centric as most North American cities) if they would like to go back to their ways.
This is such a weird line of inquiry.
Yes! It is the largest single QoL improvement I have after my house.
Almost everyone who can afford it buys a car as soon as they can. Yes, even in the UK, even in Europe. It is such a huge boon.
If cars were made more expensive I would sooner work harder to keep the car than give it up.
I don't know what sort of answer you're expecting? Why would I possibly not want a car? The only reason I can think of is if it became so expensive that just paying a personal driver was cheaper.
Second, I don't think you are aware of how much of cities' financial troubles in North America are related to the budget imbalance between suburbs and downtowns.
Third, I'm talking about all the externalities. It's not just gas or street parking. It's also the cost of all those parking lots doing nothing productive. It's the health cost of having an overweight and sedentary population who can't even walk to get groceries. It's the cost of increased air pollution that brings hundreds of thousands of people to the hospital with respiratory issues. It's the cost to a city's economy that wastes a sizeable portion of its GDP to car traffic. Car owners pay only a tiny fraction of that.
Cars are everywhere. American choices to have huge multi lane streets everywhere and parking lots the size of cities are optional.
It's a false dichotomy. Across Europe we have cars, even in London, a public transport mecca with tiny roads, >50% of households have cars.
They are great. Properly super useful. I think that people who deny that utility are ideological zealots to be honest.
Also, you can re-read my original comment. Notice the "the point is less about cars vs no cars, but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning" part, and please realize that talking about London has nothing to do with the original point.
I simply gave my 2c on your question.
> Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?
Yes. I would. And honestly there really isn't much in it. In the US, basically everyone drives. In the UK, pretty much everyone who pays taxes drives.
At least in my situation, I think that if the costs were moved from general taxation to directly falling on car owners, I'd end up net positive!
You, dear sir, have absolutely nothing in common with the average North American who lives in the suburbs. The question was not directed at you.
If you want to at least try to understand the context before jumping to give your opinion and share with us your psycho issues, try watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0
Let me put it this way: if I decide to walk to a restaurant, I would get there faster if there were no cars, and I would enjoy the terrace more if it wasn't for their noise or the ugliness of the parking lot. You can have your convenience, or I can have mine, but it isn't really possible to have both, at least not to the fullest extent.
And that's the problem we have to come to grips with: all the cars you don't drive make your life less pleasant. What is the balance? If the balance is that global quality of life is optimal when 10% of the population of a city has cars, who gets to be in that 10%?
Take the metro as an example. Each additional user is another person in my personal space, they could be smelly, they might mean that I have to stand or scrunch me up in a narrow seat. They make it slower for me to exit the station when there are queues. They could give me airborne diseases like COVID or whatever.
Those are the negatives.
But without that scale the metro isn't viable, you can't have a train system that only one person uses, so the additional people are useful. They fund it, they campaign to have it put in, etc etc.
The same is true of the road network. Yes, cars being parked on my road affect my quality of life, but the fact that other people drive increases my quality of life because we collectively pay for the road network, petrol stations, R&D into new car designs, we agree that street parking is collectively useful even if that blue car across the road is in the way for me personally, etc.
There is a critical point for both systems at which there are just too many people. I would argue that most humans don't actually enjoy huge population density and are just forced into it by economic factors (e.g. all of the best jobs in the UK are in London).
They used the Lincoln Highway, which wasn't fully paved until the 1930s. In 1919, it was a (bad) dirt road except in cities. In 1919 there was an awful lot of space between cities, especially once you got west of Chicago (that not too far from the truth today, except you might say Omaha instead of Chicago). You can't really compare the convoy experience to walking-vs-driving in cities :)
> The principal objectives of the expedition were to servicetest the special-purpose vehicles developed for use in the first World War, not all gf which were available in time for §uch U§e; and to determine by actual experience the possibility and the problems involved in moving an army across the continent, assuming that railroad facilities, bridges, tunnels, etc. had been damaged or destroyed by agents of an Asiatic enemy.
which makes a lot of sense. great reading: https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/resear...
How can this be true?
The streets in downtown Salt Lake City were famously designed to be able to turn a horse-drawn wagon around. That width turned out to be pretty good for cars when they came - no additional scaling needed.
While individual streets may not have scaled up there were other parts of the built environment that did to accommodate cars.
So in practice it's worse than 10x.
Carriages are not much longer than cars, and they're significantly narrower and articulated in the middle. The simplistic model of "length" breaks down when you want to compare two things of similar size, but it's good enough when we're comparing two things where one is 10x the size of the other.
If you visit old cities in Europe and the Middle East you'll definitely see a difference in size and layout between cities that were built for horses (not even necessarily for carriages, just pack-horses) and cities that weren't. And then you'll see another big shift if you go to e.g. South Africa where all the cities were built in the post-coach era.
The point is that the default mode of transportation requires vastly more space than it used to.
If you look at the average amount of space taken up by a person traveling around if they walk, or take transit, for most trips then they'll on average take significantly less space than using a car.
In the far past some trips were taken via horse + carriage but tons more were taken via walking and transit. Our built world has scaled to account for that increase in space used on trips.
But if 80% of day-to-day trips are walked and 20% are horse-carriages that's much more efficient in terms of space than a world where 80% of trips are via car and 20% are walked.
That additional space manifests in more wider roads to reduce bottlenecks and more large parking lots to store cars at different destinations.
I've phrased this multiple different ways. The concept isn't complex: a car (or horse carriage!) is much bigger than a person walking so if we design a world that encourages more travel via car (or horse carriage!) that world will be less spatially efficient.
But, as I've pointed out repeatedly, in the past far more people walked to take trips than take a horse carriage.
I feel like you are trying to say that it will require less space? Like roads can be made narrower or shorter? Why though? The road width is defined by the vehicle size and the number of lanes, and you don't want to cut the number of lanes below 1 but realistically you want 2 so a broken vehicle won't block traffic for everyone. And there are already not many 3 lanes in each direction roads so you are not saving much. Also most 3+ lanes roads I see are arterials and interstates, people driving those routes usually cannot walk them physically as they are tens if not hundreds of miles.
If every destination needs parking for nearly its peak capacity then that creates substantial sprawl.
Similarly if an area gets a high volume of peak car traffic then over time it will tend to get more arterials and interstates connected to it.
As sprawl and road networks increase it becomes more difficult to get around without a car, incentivizing more cars, which requires more large parking lots / roads.
I live in London, UK. I can use my car to get to places, it just costs more, through congestion charges, parking, and time.
The car hugely, hugely increases my exploration radius vs. walking and public transport.
There is also a value in things being bigger. I remember going to a random grungy arcade bar in LA that had fifty pinball machines. We don't have the space for that, at least, not unless it's an Experience(tm) with a corporate backer .
Other US cities are gradually moving towards that design by adding incrementally more parking and highways, but it's a slow process.
I have no opposition to cars, but designing cities where nearly all trips require a car is an extreme that most people in the US live in. If you own a car you use here and there that's absolutely fine, but if there's nowhere for someone to live where they can comfortably get by without a car that's a bad place to be.
And as I argued in my initial point when everyone needs to drive the congestion and distance between things substantially reduces the advantage of driving in the first place.
If you look at space taken up length-wise in a lane the length of the average car in the US is 14.7 ft. For a person standing on a sidewalk the average person's foot size is ~10 inches. Let's hand wave the math and say cars are 10x longer.
Very loosely our built environment scales 10x to match that new scale. Roads need to be 10x bigger, parking lots take up even more space.
The ultimate result is not that there are far more unique destinations available to the average person, but that they are further away, bigger, and costs are far higher.
Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded.
It's a clear example of the tragedy of the commons.