Only by traveling to places that were developed before cars took a chokehold on the world can people realize how nice it is to live without them absolutely everywhere.
Many Americans get a taste of that when they vacation to Europe. They often choose to leave their suburb and spend their 2 weeks in urban environments like Barcelona, London, Munich, Paris, Rome, etc., that where built for people and not cars, because it's so pleasant to live like that, and because letting cities develop for people first leads to cities that people actually want to be in, with car-free streets, plazas, promenades, etc. (Yes, today those places are also full of cars. But, unlike American cities, their skeletons are people-first and cars are the invasive element.)
It could be argued that so many problems of American life - weight gain, loneliness, fracturing of the social fabric - stem from how we've isolated ourselves in unwalkable suburbs, where there's no spontaneous social interaction because everyone's always in a car, and where our only exercise is the walk from the parking lot to our desk.
What's depressing is visiting developing countries and seeing them start to ape the worst of American car life. Places like Colombia, which I visit often, are building shopping malls, big-box stores, parking lots, suburbs, and freeways, while after almost 100 years of that type of car-first development in America we're only just starting to realize that actually it might not be that great.
What I don't like about this is that people (even urbanist bloggers) tend to form their opinions on their experience as tourists, while reality is much more nuanced and full of tradeoffs.
Case in point: I once visited my friend in Bilbao and the one thing I couldn't get over was that despite this being a beautiful, walkable, full of life city jobs were hard to come by and low-paid. Youth unemployment in particular in Spain stands at a whopping 46%.
NYC is beautiful, walkable, full of life, and you sure can find a job there. Same with the Boston area.
I've lived in both walkable and car-dependent areas for years. I am one of the people who grew up in a car-dependent small city who couldn't imagine not owning a car 10 years ago.
Now that I've lived in both, sure, there might be tradeoffs living in a walkable neighborhood, but if you build a neighborhood with the amenities you need, walking for most things is simply amazing. Having a car is useful for getting out, but it now becomes a "once in awhile" thing, almost a luxury, if you have a nice market and some restaurants nearby. And then you can do things like ZipCar or other options for the rare times you need to drive.
But if anything, Europe is too car centric as well. The consumer upper middle class and child bearing families still seek out suburbs unfortunately.
I always talk about this but live in a utopian dystopian socialist modernist neighborhood complex from the 1960’s. There is a health clinic downstairs, schools, library, market-shops, park areas all 5 minute elevator ride down. Most residents still have cars unfortunately - the parking area is packed with them.
Those are caused mainly by cars. Take away the cars and there’s a lot more space and fresh air for everyone.
Every time I go there, I make a point of using public transport, and it’s maddening how a 20-minute journey by bus becomes hellish because the station was moved, but no one knows why or where or cares.
It doesn’t need more than someone in charge who cares.
The reforms and improvements have consistently made things worse.
Now the city is completely changing bus routes.
Maybe you’ll have a ride to work. Maybe not. Maybe it will be quick. Maybe not.
People’s entire lives are being rearranged.
The folks at the lowest level of importantance are folks who send their kids to private schools.
The municipality is like “not our problem - public schools offer free transit. You’re chosing to send your kid to a private school, you drive them yourself.”
Note how the city is telling people to use cars, not public transit, because the city doesnt endorse what they’re using it for.
And if you want to take a bus to church Sunday morning? Hahahahahah! There would probably be a lawsuit from church/state people.
Etc.
I simply don’t have confidence public transit will be there when I need it.
Even when cars are prioritized, traffic makes even the smallest errands a problem eventually; roads simply don't scale.
And cars are by far the loudest thing about cities at almost all times. They make the very air hostile with pollution and heat. And, worst of all:
> I simply hop in my vehicle and can be anywhere I want in 3-15 minutes
You do this at the direct expense of everyone else in your city. You make the streets unwalkable and the city unlivable. You are insulated from the sounds and dangers that you are creating around you. (I'm just using you as an example, I don't actually blame you for taking the only option you've been given.)
Italy isn't perfect and I could talk about that country's problems a lot, but in terms of transportation, it was more a "right tool for the job" place than here, where we'd walk to many things, ride bikes to others, take the train occasionally, city busses some, and yes, use the car too for some stuff.
Having the option to drive when there's copious amounts of transit is empowering. It lets you go hiking into the mountains where it wouldn't be economical to run even a bus at greater than 1 hr headways or haul your ski and snowboarding equipment to the slopes. It lets you ferry around your aging parents who are starting to have cognitive issues. It means when your children are still very young you can keep them from being a nuisance on the bus. Being forced to drive because there's no transit and you know your brake pads are shot and scraping against your rotors but you don't have the money or time to fix your car is dreadful.
A lot of bad decisions were made in Europe stemming from American city planners after the second world war. Like David Jokinen's influence on Amsterdam and The Hague: https://viewpointvancouver.ca/2019/10/27/the-1960s-when-the-...
It's strange that people are so eager to export (and import) urbanism ideas around the world without much understanding of the cultural differences and needs.
Density of people brings those three annoyances, cars or no cars.
Living in such places is eye-opening!
Like Disneyland? Of course nobody could live there. But actual walkable neighborhoods tend to be prohibitively expensive because they're extremely desirable.
Recommended reading:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125313.The_Geography_of_...
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=55
And private school attendance is mostly higher income families:
https://www.educationnext.org/who-goes-private-school-long-t...
Unfortunately public transportation resources are limited, but prioritizing the vast majority of lower income public school routes over the vast minority of higher income private school routes makes sense
The goal of driving is to get from point A to point B. But when point A and point B are a 5 minute walk, why drive at all? Well, in America we designed our cities and suburbs to make the distance between A and B as large as possible. But we didn't have to do that!
Sure, once the town is already built for cars. If it wasn't, having a car would be a pain with no parking and no space in the streets.
The question is why cities choose/chose to rebuild themselves for cars in the first place, and continuously in the third world as suggested by the OP and the book "Urbanism Imported or Exported: Native Aspirations and Foreign Plans" by Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait.
Taking the subway is a pain in the butt. If you try to come home when it's after 11pm, you get to wait 30+ min for a train.
When you want to get the groceries, you have to somehow shuffle all that stuff home, either with a cart or just have your hands suffer in the cold, and then have a four-story walk-up.
Sure, it's charming, but living there takes some real grit. By the way, those places are all expensive comparatively.
What a patronizing take. Cars are freedom - you can go where you like, when you like, with whom you like, and you can do it without dealing with crowded, noisy, sometimes dangerous buses/trams/subways. It's as true in the developing world as it is here.
As for such things happening in Colombia, it turns out that Colombians like the same things as Americans - they just previously didn't have the money to afford them.
Like, what's the alternative? Developing economies go from grinding poverty to bicycle-centric urban planning utopia by... top-down fiat? How do you propose to stop Colombians from voting with their wallets when they choose to eat at chain restaurants, shop at big box stores and then take the freeway back to their air-conditioned 2000 sq ft houses in the suburbs? "Sorry Mr. Middle Class Colombian, I know you really like McDonalds... but trust us, we're saving you from your own bad choices."
It's not even just cultural differences and needs. It's the lack of questioning in decisions and groupthink.
Tax per acre used to be a metric that was used in urban planning decisions. That was mostly thrown away when people started to want cars. A primary metric then became level of service. LOS was a way to measure traffic volume but didn't necessarily mean increased net economic output, although it was nearly used as one. It doesn't paint the picture correctly for municipal urban planning in a financial sense.
For sustained economic vitality in a very simplistic form, the infrastructure and municipal services costs should be subtracted from the amount of tax revenue gained from the land. Basically, is this land making the city money or is it costing the city money. This info can be used to adjust taxes, plan better built environments, amongst other things.
If that was regularly being measured throughout the last 100 years and acted upon, I imagine much of the car dependent areas of the world would look a lot different. If you talk to urban planners today about this (which I have), many still don't use it at all.
The infrastructure is all here already. They pollute less (ICE) and the no pollution electric ones are far more affordable than EVs. Like 4 of them fit in one parking space. They have storage space for some small groceries too.
Sadly winter and rain sucks.. i guess at least for rain those scooters with roofs could cover that.
This is, of course, the inability to visualize a different life that I referred to in my original post. There are many alternatives to car-oriented life, as cities that grew before cars plainly evidence. Those are the cities that people want to spend their vacations in.
Instead of building shopping malls with parking lots, Colombia could relax zoning to allow chain restaurants and McDonalds near housing, and build dedicated bike lanes to get to them. Instead of building suburbs and freeways, it could build more public space like open pedestrian plazas to give people a feeling of space, and metros/bus rapid transit to make it easy to get around. Colombians who want to live a quiet suburban-style life can still do that in a rural home, which could be connected by rail when traveling to a city is required - but their choice to live a suburban life should not require those of us in cities to give up our space for wide roads to fit their cars and endless free car storage, at the expense of our way of life.
These options aren't the only alternatives Colombians could have, nor are they a fantasy - they exist today in places like Europe and parts of Asia.
Cars are not a requirement for human flourishing. We only designed our lives to make them that way.
The infrastructure should support that sort of trip out of the city. It’s intra-city car use that’s a disaster, and our infrastructure should not support that.
So it’s not like the anybody at the city transit office is saying “let’s divert resources from public schools to private schools.”
They’re saying “we don’t do schools at all, because the only schools we would be providing services for are private, and we don’t want to encourage people to go to private school.”
Wealthy private schools often have their own buses. Less well off ones, don’t.
So it isn’t even about benefiting the poor over the wealthy.
Catholic schools generally have their own buses, while schools affiliated with historically black churches don’t.
Regarding why I take it personally, the condescending and hostile attitude of city officials make it clear it is personal.
This is specific to where I live now. I’ve lived in places like the Bay Area and New York, and this attitude doesn’t seem to exist.
(I'll extend it to a ¼—15 minute walk. I happen to live above a kiosk, it is nearer than the car in the basement.)
Surely you're not suffering from an inability to visualize vacationing outside of a city?
Most of the people in the US under the age of 100 grew up in cars.
> without dealing with crowded, noisy, sometimes dangerous buses
Yes because cars are neither noisy or dangerous nor do the occupy any space in cities.
> Like, what's the alternative?
There are alternatives to building very car centric infrastructure.
> How do you propose to stop Colombians
He didn't.
It can be argued but would be false as other societies have more of those but have less car users.
Many folks like to read these pieces from an extreme viewpoint, that they want to eliminate all cars everywhere.
A few moments thinking and you realize it would only be practical in downtowns, and alleys would still exist. Visit Wash.DC or London if still unsure. Street maps a cheap substitute.
- remove 90% of street parking
- make the remaining 10% incredibly expensive and time limited to short durations which makes it so that spots are always available for someone that actually needs it for something like moving
- cut down every other road to be impassable by cars or extremely limited
- add wide, safe, protected biking/scooter lanes + bike parking in all the freed up space
- lower speed limits everywhere to cut down on noise and increase safety
I can visualize it just fine... High Density, people stacked onto of each other vertically, small dwellings where you need to shop for food every day or every few days, extreme cold or extreme heat is a problem, as is rain...
Instead i look out to my 3/4 acre homestead, lined with mature tree's and limited density... and say... yes I prefer this. I prefer going to to store every 1 or 2 weeks, I prefer not having an upstairs neighbor stomping around, I prefer not having to deal with stairs or neighbors only separated by a wall...
The closest thing to 'eliminating streets' you see people advocating for is streets in urban cores that are pedestrian / bicycle first and car second.
Deliveries can be still go down those streets at off hours and slowly. If necessary emergency vehicles can still access those streets and turn on their sirens to clear people out.
London and Europe have tons of streets like that and most US cities have none.
Car-people can't imagine a town instead of a suburb and can't imagine that you can get from a town to a city by train or bus. Or that you don't need to travel to some far-off place with a huge car to get a ton of groceries because you can walk a few blocks and pick up the ingredients for dinner.
Only for the wealthy, and the car is the most expensive form of transportation that only the relatively wealthy have access to. For everyone else not wealthy enough to own a car the over investment in car infrastructure has made life worse and made them less free, as the under investment in transportation alternatives limits their access and ability to travel.
BBC's new season of race around the world featured Canada this year, and contestants were staggered at the lack of public transportation options, forced into illegally hitchhiking rides to finish the race. Such is the dearth of transportation options for people who do not own a car.
That's an implementation detail of a very old and underinvested system.
In contrast with Vancouver's automated skytrain, waits for trains are typically 2-4 minutes.
Better things are possible
I've lived in Chile the past twelve years. I often say I feel like a time traveller. I feel like I'm from the not too distant future. Chile feels like what California felt like growing up in the 70s and 80s, only with smart phones. People here throw trash wherever ... just like we did in California in the 70s and 80s. People here love their cars, and think of them as a status symbol and an extension of their identity ... just like we did in California in the 70s and 80s. Before I came to Chile I lived in Los Angeles and had to commute each day for over an hour each way. I also lived in Amsterdam and had to commute by bike each day for 20 minutes. I never owned a car the entire time I lived there. I was much better off mentally, physically, and economically in Amsterdam for this reason alone. I was freer too. A lot has changed in Chile since I arrived, especially in car ownership, and car-centric growth. I would not say that it's natural or the obviously best choice to prefer a car-centric future. The future Chile is creating for itself is not the one I would choose. There are alternatives.
> Like, what's the alternative?
Building the infrastructure for cars is a choice. Prioritizing cars over other modes of transportation is a choice. So make different choices.
I live in a small town. It's just six square blocks, but is densely populated with multi-story condos, and lots of shops and restaurants. But the streets are filled with cars. Cars are double parked on the sidewalks, and traffic moves at a snail's pace. It's loud, dirty, and unsafe. We could easily close the streets to cars, encourage people to take mass transit (we have collectivos and busetas) by making it expensive to park outside of the town center, require the numerous gated communities nearby to incorporate more amenities, like markets and pharmacies, to discourage trips by car, make it safer to bike by building ciclovias, and so on. But we don't, because we choose not to, sadly.
Discouraging driving is a reasonable public health measure for a safer society.
I see you studied the work of Donald Shoup, the author of "The High Cost of Free Parking".
As for parking, well, it's market price. It's expensive because parking has been subsidized as the default in vast majority of the world.
Cars are a straight jacket, a two-ton $10k deadweight, you have to drag them everywhere with you, you can't go anywhere without them, you always have to return to where you left them, you have to baby them with concentration - they can't even go in a straight line without your constant guidance and if they could you legally can't let them; you get in one and you are trapped to the roads (no shortcuts down small walkable alleys or through parks), trapped in the flow of traffic (no pausing by a shop window and popping inside for a look), you're charged by the minute by the cost of gasoline, seatbelted into a fixed position for the duration, with an explosive airbag charge constantly pointed at your face because of the high chance you or other people can't safely control them, they're your responsibility when you aren't near them (they stop you from drinking alcohol with friends for example, or for parking irresponsibly), they're amazingly complex and costly systems to maintain, costly to insure. And you pay enormous amounts of tax to maintain the road network which needs to sprawl everywhere at enormous expense.
What's "freedom" about that?
American cities weren't designed for cars, they were bulldozed for cars. Car companies illegally bought up streetcar companies and sent the streetcars for scrap. Cars were killing so many pedestrians that car companies came up with the term "Jaywalker" to mean "country bumpkin walker" and propagandised it into blaming pedestrians for car drivers hitting them. Car companies are pushing SUVs in advertising because SUVs have a legal loophole about being 'light trucks' where they don't have to meet as strict safety and efficiency regulations so they are more profitable; it isn't that "Americans like SUVs", it's that "Americans are being told to want SUVs" so they do.
They stop you dealing with crowded, noisy buses and trams by being crowded, noisy traffic offloading that problem to everyone outside your soundproofed cage.
Walking is freedom - you can go where you like, when you like, with whom you like, and you can do it without dealing with crowded, noisy, sometimes dangerous buses/trams/subways, or rush hour or full car parks or car park fees or tailbacks. And without spending money or needing to be rich, without being confined to a car, without having responsibility of the safety of your passengers and all others around you, without having your attention constantly on controlling a car, without having to divert to a car park, look for a car park, or return to the same car park before you can go anywhere else, without being stuck in traffic, without being stuck to roadways. Walking with metros and trams and trains is freedom with a boost - optional, convenient, power assisted walking. (Bikes can be fun, but designing a city around requiring a bike sucks in the same way that designing a city around requiring a car sucks; design the city around not needing My Personal Metal Transport Vehicle(tm) and then add a little bit of that back in as necessary/helpful/fun).
> "How do you propose to stop Colombians from voting with their wallets when they choose to eat at chain restaurants, shop at big box stores and then take the freeway back to their air-conditioned 2000 sq ft houses in the suburbs?"
What happened in Amsterdam in the 1960s is the Jokinen Plan[1] proposed to demolish some working class neighbourhoods and run a six-lane highway into the city center, assuming that Dutch people would want to live in the suburbs and drive to the city like Americans do. Instead the people voted against it, and it turns out that making safe and convenient pedestrian and bike routes separate from car roads makes walking and biking safer and more pleasant, and so more people walk and bike for journeys instead of driving, which reduces car traffic and fumes and the need for big wide roads, which makes walking and biking even more pleasant. They didn't ban cars by fiat - surprise, lots of people don't want to drive for every single journey. (Possibly because driving is inconvenient, effortful, boring, and it's uncomfortable to be trapped in a fixed position for an hour looking at concrete and car-butts and road signs).
[0] https://i.imgur.com/hzDCcSg.jpeg - this is a "freeway" because you don't pay a toll to drive on it. And because of all the freedom these people are enjoying.
Most rebuilt postwar European cities were built for cars. Then the people realized that sucked, often quicker cuz their legs y built environments accommodated cars poorly, and instead we got effective metro systems instead.
If your goal is to simply eat, great, public transit enables this easily with many choices.
If your goal is to eat at a very specific restaurant, 4 miles away, this would take you less than 10 minutes by car, but could easily be 30 to 40 no car, with at least one transfer.
And I don't know, I'm not old by any means, but I've definitely noticed the value of time now. Saving an hour round trip is very valuable (and one of the reasons remote work is so popular).
Old world streets are narrow and sometimes cobblestone. Usually enough.
Compare that with the 50 foot wide boulevards of suburbia, USA. One job I had you couldn’t even cross the street for half a mile because it was built like a freeway.
I don't believe all these posts against cars are from humans, especially on this website. Surely, technologically savvy folks like us would have learned to appreciate why decentralized systems (like cars) are better than centralized systems (like mass transit) for their flexibility.
The above applies to most counties where someone is likely to read this.
The total cost of owning a car sets you back enough to impact all other aspects of your life. Cars are inconvenient to store, maintain, and keep from getting damaged or stolen, which seems to be a constant source of anxiety. Keep driving for long enough and they’re likely to maim or kill you eventually. And in the end, they’re not even that convenient - people behind wheel seem to always be pissed. No wonder, I’d be pissed too if I had to spend 20 minutes looking for a spot to park my stinky mobile death trap. You can keep your freedom.
Manhattan, famous for its congestion-free streets :-)
Calling cars "decentralized" is funny, and more than a little ridiculous: American car culture is a result of centralized planning, both of highways and cities. It'd be more accurate to call them "individualized," with the misaligned incentives and commons failures that that implies.
A vacation is not the same as living somewhere.
And that's in a quite a few areas from pretty dense single-family urban to apartments to what some might call rural.
You can do it but people don't. Hell, walmart is only 30 minute walk away, but I drive most the time. Probably should get my bike fixed and easily accessible ...
Frankly the heat is mostly why I stopped walking. I figured at first I might just be out of shape as hell, but I decided to take one today while the rain had cooled down the temperature and it was mostly pleasant. Comparatively I tried to walk the same route a few days back and gave up early because I was drenching in sweat, slunched over, could hardly see in front of me and my head was throbbing.
Infrastructure is a big thing too. When I’ve had to walk in less urban areas with little or no sidewalk, walking on grass next to the road with massive cars zipping past you is unnerving.
This setup may or may not be replicated in the next town ten miles away.
And until you've lived your poor life you don't realize what an absolute ass it is to have transit schedules continually changing on you; and the bus may change when it comes but when you have to be at school or work won't, and so the moment you save enough for a car ...
But the car adds to that.
Or look how packed with cars Europe is, even in the tiny streets of Sienna they wedge little cars in everywhere.
Want to say that again when you want to go somewhere farther than you can walk in a reasonable time?
I certainly believe they are from humans.
Surely, technologically savvy folks like us would have learned to appreciate why decentralized systems (like cars) are better than centralized systems (like mass transit) for their flexibility.
But many humans are easily persuaded by FUD ("climate crisis" and all that other hogwash.)
Here in backwaters of eastern europe, cars are freedom for everybody. If you're poor and live in backcountry... Get a car for €500 and go wherever you want. If you're poor in the city, you can do the same. Just find a makeshift parking spot. E.g. convert an unused lawn into a parking lot with your neighbours.
The same way it is unreasonable to think that less car centric cities would solve all our issues, it's just silly to equate "non car-centric environment" to "dystopian cities where people die on the street whenever there is a bit of cold".
I don't know how many people are begging to have their urban landscapes and culture bulldozed so people can park their cars on it, and I don't know how many people would be excited by the prospect of watching the infrastructure of their cities slowly crumble because the tax base is spread extremely thin and serviced in the most expensive way possible. Maybe that's just me though idk
Everyone seems to like American style fast-food chains though. No matter where you are in EU at least, it doesn't have anything to do how you get there, there's plenty of Dunkin Doughnuts, McDonald's, KFC, etc..
Just tried this out in my city, 6km away to a random point in a dense-ish environment (ie. not out in the suburbs):
* 19 minutes by bike
* 22 minutes by train
* 22 minutes by car
Note that this is a completely unfair comparison. The bike can likely be parked right outside, with the train walking is factored in. For the car this assumes there's parking near where I am, near the destination and that it takes no time at all to find a spot.
The only way to achieve the comparison you've made is to build exactly the kind of car-centric environment being criticized here. Bulldoze the neighboring stores to build car parks. Bulldoze entire neighborhoods to build urban freeways. Rip up tram and train tracks. Defund public transportation. The end result is that maybe your very specific restaurant only takes 10 minutes to get to, but the nearest 30 restauraunts are in a 4 mile radius rather than within walkable distance.
My (European) city is walkable by any American definition. Tourists enjoy its XIX century architecture, restaurants, boulevards and such. What they don't see is that the 1,6% unemployment rate is there thanks to huge swaths of barely walkable and frankly ugly industrial complexes providing jobs to which people generally drive or commute a significant amount of time in public transport, because with their credit score it made more sense to get something on the outskirts or suburbs. You won't see them in places visited by tourists because that's far from where they live and they generally can't afford going out that often.
The excuse that postwar development is the reason for car dependency in north america doesn't hold water.
Of course there's maintenance and insurance. But, for example, my yearly insurance is €80. With minimum wage of ~ €700-800. It's not exactly a deal breaker if that allows you to live in countryside and avoid obscene rents in big cities.
I dont shop at the closest store to my home because I prefer the layout and selection of one that is further away, i know people that take their kids to schools across town because they are better than the one closest to me. (in my area schools are not assigned geographically, we have open enrollment at all public schools)
Cars give you that option, with out it you have THE store, and THE school... sorry but count me out of that
Whiles there are downsides to a car, they are small compared to the masssivr upside of being about to go where you feel like it. If you live in one of the few places where there is great transit you may not realize how bad it is for most of us who have to wait for a bus that comes every half and hour, and then drives a slow winding route that is barely faster than walking.
But, in the US and EU, new scooters are (almost?) all 4-stroke today due to emissions regulations. Many are fuel injected for the same reason. I'm not sure if they're required to have catalysts - but that's a fairly simple fix (for new models).
This doesn't even require everybody to live in a city... I'm outside DC and just moment from my front door, I see plenty of opportunities to make transit better and reduce car usage... I'm 1.5 miles from a subway station, but it's impossible to walk to without crossing 1 or more 6 lane roads. There are bike lanes that lead nowhere (literally end a few blocks before the local school then start a few blocks after, then stop before the local shopping center, then start again after). They just built an expensive bike path/running trail as part of an interstate project but they put it right beside the highway - who wants to walk/run/bike 4' from trucks belching diesel fumes and with dangerous sound levels? They could have built the bike path on the other side of the sound wall, but didn't.
Or simply live 10 minutes walking from the nearest subway station? The issue is you need to have both sides of the trip essentially on top of a public transit station. Even the cities with great public transit systems will have plenty of areas where the closest station is half a mile away.
Or my holiday which involved a ferry and the freedom-car was too expensive to justify bringing on the ferry and too inconvenient to park this side of the ferry, but the train/bus replacement went right to the ferry port?
Or my trip from home to train station which is walkable (if a little boringly far) and I have the freedom to go through town or through the park or through the suburbs, into shops along the way, and straight into the station whereas by car it's 10-20 minutes of stop/start traffic, no meaningful choice of route, no way to stop in anywhere along the way, the train station has almost no on-site parking and the nearby parking isn't gratis? How does car win for 'freedom' there?
Or how about that I have rarely ever driven more than two hours in a day, but if I want to go somewhere far in my car (such as London and back) I would have to commit to driving eight hours - and if I got there and felt unable (tired, ill) to drive back I would be stuck having to drive unsafely because of the freedom-car ball and chain, or arrange a hotel for the night - whereas a train or coach you don't even have to be awake the whole way, let alone concentrating on moving a two-ton vehicle at motorway speeds? Where's the 'freedom' advantage there?
By the time you are doing regular long car journeys it's eating large amounts of your time and money to the point where you are likely only doing that because you are economically trapped by house prices and job locations, rather than because you are free. Cars are good for the medium-short journey of 5-15 miles which is mostly crummy design of putting big box stores and industrial estates with no options except driving, assuming people will drive to them, and thus self-fulfilling prophecy meaning people have to drive to them. Cars are good at this, but an unthinkably expensive way to be good. Next time you see a road, count the cars in terms of $20,000-$60,000 purchase price each. Five cars to a hundred k, fifty cars to a million dollars. Economic boom or burden on the drivers?
From Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours idea, I am well on the way to being a world expert at my old commute, and trundling back and forth over the same bit of motorway for over a decade, ploughing thousands of hours of my life into pushing a pedal and turning a steering wheel, is not a skill worth developing and not any kind of 'freedom' the likes of which the Founding Fathers or the Ancient Philosophers were discussing.
There have been about 110 billion humans on Earth in all history, and over a hundred billion of them lived their entire lives without ever driving twenty minutes to Walmart, driving an hour to the next town for a coffee and a look around, driving eight hours to see Aunt Margaret once every couple of years, driving twenty hours to go skiiing, or driving a week coast to coast to burn some fossil fuels and feel important. And even today, the majority of car journeys are not people free to visit Aunt Margaret, they are people stuck in commutes or driving to stores who would generally prefer not to do that. If everyone who wanted to, could live a high quality of life close to work, how many car commuters would say "I don't want to live close to work and have more free time and less stress, I want my car commute because that's freedom"? Mostly they will say either "I can't afford to live closer to work" or "that's a horrible place to live" not "I love stop-start driving in traffic on a four lane concrete expressway".
[1] Let's it not pass unnoticed that driving is more than just distance and time; driving safely and concentrating and paying proper attention to the signs and conditions and other drivers is effortful and tiring, navigating in unfamiliar areas can be stressful, driving safely is a responsibility. How many drivers are honestly too tired, too distracted, too ill, too medicated, to be safely and responsibly making their journeys on any given day - but have no other reasonable choice but to cross fingers, pray, hope, and push through it?
[2] Edit: Using this soapbox to call out car adverts showing drivers on almost empty roads, such as this Ford Focus ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-gGFaDZc3k whereas most people's experience of driving is more honestly like this https://evinfo.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/london-traffi...
That makes perfect sense in a constrained system. You sound like you are looking to be the victim no matter what. Without doxxing yourself, care to provide some specific info so we can better understand?
These are very odd things to say. A domestic refrigerator and cupboard holds a week's worth of food easily, you don't need 3/4 acres for that. Temperature management is easier not harder in a larger building. As is good roofing. The idea that when someone else says "the store is nearby" they mean "there is literally only 1 store that I can possibly reach" is also a creative worst-case reading.
IDK, this feels more like a dump of ignorant projected fears than a serious criticism.
It seems like many people would opt for this form of social isolation, an illusion that they are removed from the society that is what actually makes our civilization function. But perhaps this "freedom" of fully isolated mobility for the individual is damaging, both to this individual as well as to the fabric of society as a whole.
Maybe "freedom" to be isolated isn't actually good for us, despite how much many of us seem to want it? Maybe like junk food, or social media, or gatcha games, or many other technological marvels of the last century or so, we have a predisposition for addiction to it, but can fail to notice the damage it is doing to us as we embrace it.
If we focused on building a world where personal vehicles at least weren't required, perhaps we would see what we've been doing to ourselves.
For what it's worth, walkability demands a massive housing price premium in the US, so it is obvious that many people do desire it - just as some people clearly desire the freedom to be apart from their fellow humans.
Your argument is anti-scientific in a way. We see in nature that decentralized systems are more robust yet you are arguing the opposite.
Decentralization is not a virtue (or end) in itself when it comes to public infrastructure. Robustness is also not intrinsically tied to it, and there are a variety of senses in which the American road network is not particularly robust: congestion and unsustainable funding schemes are just the first two that come to mind.
That's true, but most people forget to take into account the cost of the car itself. If you spend 10$ in gas and vehicle depreciation to save 8$ on average on your bill, are you really winning?
When I really need to do a big grocery or to find a specific product which my local store does not have, I rent a car from one of the 5-6 carsharing stations near my place (think ZipCar), it cost me 20$ and I can go where I want. Only, I do not have to pay for a car all the time.
Schools are another topic, of course if you live in a bad neighborhood, it might be problematic, but again with a nice public transportation system, it is not an issue (in my home town, _public_ buses have specific routes for students of a given school, dropping them directly next to the school).
We can always devise a situation where you are "limited" by public/active transport ("I am an ER doctor, what should I do if I get called at 2AM on a winter night to an hospital on the other side of the town to save multiple children lives?"). Sure, in these cases, you should take the car. That doesn't mean that for the overwhelming majority of people, car _would_ not be mandatory (assuming a decent public transportation system and walkable/bikable cities).
I meant the bigger ones driving on roads (small motorcycles), not the small e-scooters. No mixing up passenger and scooter traffic.
My language have separate word for those types but english for some reason don't...
I was driving bicycle for ~10 years and most weather. Scooter would be upgrade.
> How do you deal with being stuck in the 5pm traffic under 90F sun?
You wouldn't if you removed 3/4 of cars and replace them with scooters
> How do you ride it when you're a bit unwell (flu, cold)?
You take a bus. Do you also drive car if you feel terrible ? It's not very safe....
>What do you do with your helmet, boots and protective gear when you go to a restaurant?
I'd imagine if that much traffic moved to scooters the city businesses would accommodate. At least for helmet they often just fit under scooter's seat.
Who cares about being interesting, I can go around outages in the network with a car where trains can't.
You should be arguing for smaller cars not less of them.
You, ostensibly[1]!
> You should be arguing for smaller cars not less of them.
I'd be more than happy to take both :-)
The alternative is to build denser, sure. But as someone living in Germany and seeing all the Neubau here… is it really so appealing living on 500m2 surrounded by 50 houses like that where neighbours look into your house? Where in the summer you hear everything what other people do? One has 4 children, another one has a dog barking all day, another one likes playing music loud, the odd one does parties every second night, the couple two houses down fights every evening, every weekend there are a couple of bbqs into a late evening, every day some dude mows his lawn so there’s only the Sunday when nobody mows the lawn… there’s nothing appealing in that kind of neighbourhood. You buy a house, you gonna live in it for years, why getting pissed off with your neighbours every second day?
I don’t know, I guess it’s a matter of perspective. The point of view depends on where you sit. I’d choose the suburbs if given an opportunity. Every time I visit the US, I’m jealous of all that space. I don’t even want a big house, no need for 300m2, 160m2 is good enough. I just wish for space around so I don’t have to listen to others all day every day.
I think most people's - even a lot of Dutch people's - experience is getting off at Centraal and walking to some bar in the centre, or going through the shopping areas, and then extrapolating that to everywhere else in the city so all they imagine is that busyness.
