Americans own cars because most of them live in single-family houses on large plots of land, and that doesn't make public transit for daily commuting a realistic possibility. In Paris car ownership is very low, maybe 1/3 of adults, but in rural France the car ownership rate is easily 95%+. I haven't seen a single developed area in the world that has violated the rule that low density = high car ownership and vice versa.
The other rule that I have never seen violated is that the large majority of middle and upper income people do not want to live near low income people, due to crime or other reasons. In Europe, poor people live in the suburbs, so the middle income live in the city with high density housing. In the US and some other places (south asia), low income people live near the business center, so the middle income live in low density housing in the suburbs. These are for historical reasons and cannot be easily changed.
The real reason Americans own cars is because we’re rich enough to afford a more expensive and more convenient system. Public Transit at scale is surprisingly cheap when compared to all the costs associated with car ownership * 10’s of thousands of people in even a fairly small community.
Are we? When you zoom in on things like road maintenance backlogs and auto loan delinquencies, it kind of seems like we are not rich enough but have been pretending to be.
even more so if you price in eco externalities
I now live in the Seattle suburbs, Redmond — very close to the same distance from the work site as in Copenhagen — and there is no way I could realistically rely on public transit to hit appointments unless I left an hour or two early—and, in bad weather, many hours early. I can’t imagine doing what I do without a car.
It’s really hard for someone who hasn’t lived it to really understand what it means to be able to walk to the shop. Then compare to when that’s not physically possible.
Around the world governments "nationalize" what they allow themselves to, and at each level they nationalize the most salient and notable industry that's not too small to be small potatoes. In the U.S. the federal government doesn't allow itself to nationalize anything, the States do allow themselves but they can't bring themselves to hurt their industry as they compete with other States, but cities don't see themselves as competing with other cities, and cities allow themselves (and the States allow them to) to nationalize public transportation.
Take Argentina where a strong national government has at times nationalized steel production, oil production, etc., but they wouldn't deign to bother with nationalizing bus service -- it's like it's beneath them -- and so Buenos Aires has one of the most fantastic privately operated public bus systems in the world. You never have to wait more than a few minutes for a bus during business hours. But in the U.S. you're lucky if buses run more often than every 30 minutes at rush hour.
Do you want Americans to not drive their cars so much? Fine, it's easy: allow private companies to operate all public bus services, and also to operate small buses without set routes (a sort of Uber of buses). If you insist on the cities running public transportation then you can be sure that the public transportation system will never ever be good enough that Americans will be happy to relinquish their cars.
It's that simple.
And no, trains won't cut it. Laying tracks down is unbelievably expensive, will never pay for itself, and you can't ever change them afterwards, and you won't be able to place them where people can use them because that would be way too disruptive unless you make it subways, and that's even more unbelievably expensive.
But also, compare average car sizes to the EU. The average car in the US is a fuel-guzzling battle tank, side by side. The options for anything else are pretty sparse, but they do exist.
Last time I was down in Seattle though, I noticed they were building a massive elevated (40 mile?) train thing quite far north, which looks somewhat impressive if it wraps up in the near future.
It's been almost-illegal to build any other kind of housing for decades.
But, the only alternative considered is private individual/family transport.
Why is private mass transport not more widely available given that it can solve a lot of these problems?
Having an Uber for buses which does smart scheduling based on current demand, possibly involving transfers so that frequent local routes connect with each other without long delays, should be possible.
Of course, prices will fall when things scale. So, the government can be involved as a facilitator but operations are mostly run by companies which can pay a fee to the government rent necessary infrastructure.
You still have the problem of higher prices for odd hours/locations but sharing costs ahould make it cheaper than uber.
When I visit Seattle I only use public transit or walk to get around. I use the light rail as much as possible, but it only gets you kind of the way to anywhere. Plan on an up to quarter mile walk to a bus stop and then probably an additional bus to actual get to where you want to go. The previous poster is right in that you need to add at least an hour to your transit time to account for waiting for connections.
Also, a large portion of 1 Line's southern section is at-grade with auto traffic.
Tiny remote communities rarely make enough for transport entities to care. For instance, without vehicles, in the village I live in, we’d probably be connected via bus to the nearby town, where you can do some shopping from a dollar store and get something to eat at restaurants, but to be connected to the various cities? They may have daily shuttles, but the population (<300) may not make this worth it. And as established in the thread public transport sucks and would make running errands impossible.
This doesn’t even compare to the truly remote individuals who live in the country miles out.
Honestly I feel like people who live in cities really lose their sense of scale for how large the US really is and how small a large percentage of communities are. I mean almost 1/3rd of the US population is crammed into less than 1% of the total surface of the USA. Using the 333 most populace cities in the USA gives an average population density of ~3,150/square mile. Out in the country where I live, we’re maybe 50/sqm, and further out that can drop to .25/sqm or lower.
Not to mention the fact that the reason public school buses work is because for the better part of the year the destinations are ironed out and rarely change. Little Æ is going from home to school and back 90% of the time. That simply doesn’t reflect an adult’s lifestyle, because while every child in a given area goes to a single school, jobs are much less localized. Not to mention errands, hobbies, visiting friends.
A bus schedule simply cannot replace the flexibility of a car to a large percentage of America.
If people stopped buying cars, and stopped voting for people promoting zoning and a car shaped country, shared transports (bus, be they public or private) would take over. The thing is as long as people keep buying and using cars, there is no market for the shared transport. And US people tend to have difficulty to grasp the concept of a non profitability focused public service.
That quite a straw man, my friend!
A bus that runs twice per day, with a fixed number of passengers, all of which go to the same destination... that's not really the kind of service that can get you free of private cars!
That is because social housing is everywhere.
Also fast trains means no need to live in London to work there.
Why not? Busses exist.
I live in a large European metropolitan region with excellent public transport and bicycle infrastructure - at least comparatively. While both leave massive room for improvement a car is not needed, especially as alternatives like car sharing exist for moving heavy stuff once every few months.
There is quite the large support to completely prohibit car use in the inner city aside from transportation, taxis and deliveries. There are hundreds of streets and places where cars have NO value, take a lot of room, blockade other participants in public life and actively worsen the urban environment for everyone. Getting rid of personal cars in these areas would free up massive amounts of space as parking slots can be reutilized and 3-lane roads become single lane.
I love cars and love driving but I hate hate hate them in inner cities. Dense, well-connected urban centers are very suitable to completely outlaw cars whereas suburban or rural areas are absolutely unsuitable to do so.
An improvement doesn't have to be 100% on day 1.
The delinquencies are the ones you hear about. What doesn't get reported, statistically, is when people are balancing absolutely everything in their life on a knife's edge to fit the car in with all their other expenses when they are living on a meager salary (or unemployed).
And that is only on the private individual's side. Costing out car-dependent development in terms of building and maintaining roads, bridges, power lines, water pipes, trash collection, wastewater treatment, fire, police is all monstrously expensive, and it is one reason why when the roads get damaged from use and need repair, they get chronically backlogged and problems keep mounting for years and years.
One thing people notice about Japan and the Netherlands is how immaculately maintained the roads are. They are significantly more pleasant places to drive, specifically because they did not overbuild road infrastructure.
Also these busses generally go by homes 4x times per day twice for middle school and twice for high school. They don’t go by every home every time if no kid lives on a street, but in suburbs there’s a lot of school bus traffic.
Expanding that to adults would require more trips and a backbone network between collection points. But, the point still stands that sending busses to most homes in America say 40x or more times a day is hardly impossible when we are already sending them 8x a day on the cheap. Being inconvenient compared to a more expensive car option is the core reason why this doesn’t happen.
I lived within walking distance of my job and shopping for years near DC. To the point where I would go weeks without driving. But I didn’t sell my car and quickly went back to driving when it was even moderately less convenient.
I grew up next to farms and a school bus showed up 4x a day to take kids to k-6, or 7-12. It was a long and inconvenient trip, but that’s because we were living in the middle of nowhere.
I’ve done long commutes and I’ve lived close enough to walk to work. If I and millions of other people had prioritized car free lives 20 years ago we would already had noticeably different infrastructure. Instead I’m back to “needing” a car to get around based on these kinds of choices.
I got you, friend. I grew up in the USSR, where private cars were luxury and public transit was so abundant that people referred to locations by the subway stations. The cities were designed for the citizens without cars (no parking anywhere, "microdistricts" in the newly built areas). It objectively sucks. I now live in the USA and can compare, if you have any questions I will be glad to explain what the life without a car is really like.
Even now, owning a car, I typically walk or ride. If I tried to do this in the USA, I'd be getting scraped off a stroad.
Both public transport and cars can both serve low density suburban commuters as demonstration by many cities around the world. America doesn’t lack public transportation because of it’s size, population density, layout etc, it’s simply people choosing driving consistently in how they vote, where they move, and what they do when given the option.
NYC doesn’t have good public transportation because New Yorkers are different, they have it because it’s the only option that scales.
My fiancé’s mother can’t drive and managed to raise 3 children by herself without a car, too. In the right environment, yes it is possible. No, she’s not rich by any stretch.
And a whole lot of people managed to raise even more children before cars were invented or even horses were domesticated. Eg my gran-gran raised 3 children without running water and electricity (and obviously no horse or car), that does not mean she enjoyed it.
I don't understand how you inferred that unless you chose to.
> And a whole lot of people managed to raise even more children before cars were invented or even horses were domesticated.
What on earth are you talking about? Either you've never been to London, or any major European city, or you're making spurious comparisons in bad faith.
Every time you reply you only further prove this point.
> I pointed out that somebody doing something in the past is not a proof of that being somehow superior or even acceptable now.
Either you’re unable to understand my point because your English comprehension is terrible or you’re arguing in bad faith. Either way, talking to you is a waste of time.
Farmers are a perfect example of why some globalized public transport is impossible and why private transport is required for society to function.
For one, the mere existence of horses and their relatives were mostly in Africa and Asia, meaning that for a lot of unrecorded and a decent chunk of recorded history whether you had one or not was location dependent. And while yes, horses were expensive, renting them when needed was comparatively cheap.
Additionally, especially in feudalist societies, land was especially difficult to own, and an entire village would work on the land surrounding them. Meaning you rarely had need for any sort of transport that wasn’t your legs, as everything you needed was located in your village.
Contrast all of that to modern farmers, who regularly live on hundreds of acres, miles away from the nearest pocket of civilization. Without private transport they’d be stranded.
It’s again wealth that allows for the modern system of roads and private vehicles rather than inherent necessity. Remember the post office is sending vehicles to every single one of these properties 6 days a week on the cheap. A bus doing the same would be really inconvenient, but also quite cheap.
You are plainly, objectively, and hilariously wrong