Comment by rplst8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rplst8 | Hacker News Reader

I think the article deviously wraps up a whole host of issues and presents them as "if we didn't have these dang cars around, all these costs would go away."

First, without cars, keeping commute times reasonable requires that you either live very close to your job (which I admit is ideal anyway) or that you have a very, very robust intercity commuter transportation system. Something we're not even close to having.

Second, we can't move everyone and their brother to city center, or even within the city limits. A very large fraction of workers live outside city limits. Moving all these people with in a distance of rail stations that makes building lots of them cost effective would be very difficult from a city planning perspective.

Third, our economy has been operating on the notion (for quite sometime) that home ownership is ideal. Since people have a lot of their personal wealth wrapped up in their home, asking them to move is not really fair either. This affects "non-car users" too when that move is going to raise the prices of housing where the non-car users live.

Fourth, allowing people to move about easily from any city to any city means that there is liquidity in the job market. This is both for car owners and not. The fact that you can buy a car and go somewhere a train or bus doesn't means you can take a new job when the current one doesn't meet your needs.

There are also other costs that are saved (both monetary based and time based ones) for non-car users. Having fewer people in the city limits means that your wait times for services is lower than it could be. It's easier to get in and out of the city on a weekend.

That said, I'd be willing to pay a more direct tax for the convenience of owning a car if it made people feel better.

You're assuming that the thesis is that we need to move to a 100%-car-free society tomorrow. I doubt anyone is calling for that, mainly because, like you say, that's impossible. Everything we've built for the last 80 years has been built under the assumption of pervasive car use.

I take the thesis more like: "Cars are really expensive. We should stop pretending that they are not."

It is not an overnight solution. It took many decades to get to where we are today, and it will take many more decades to reverse.

Second, most American cities are really not that dense. So, yes you could move many more people within city limits or at least closer. The reason people are so far away in the first place is because of subsidized costs.

Third, I agree with you. And that is not quite fair. I am pretty sure when we saw gas prices spike a few years ago, you could also see a dip in house prices for the far out subburbs of cities.

Fourth, If driving were much more expensive, more trains and buses would exist to fill the need and take you many more places.

The article glosses over this, but the taxpayers suffer from many non-monetary costs which often are overlooked: injury risk, noise and air pollution, limited walking mobility, to name a few.

I think the point is that one reason why we've ended up in the situation you describe is because car use has been subsidized. In the early 20th century every major city in the U.S. had a large streetcar network (with 'streetcar suburbs') and access to intercity rail for longer distance commutes / trips.

e.g. Indianapolis served 200 trains a day at its central station in 1900: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_Union_Station

It now serves 7 Amtrak trains a week.

> That said, I'd be willing to pay a more direct tax for the convenience of owning a car if it made people feel better.

I appreciate that— based on the letters section of my local paper, many people completely take for granted the cost of their car ownership, and feel extremely bitter about being asked to take on some of the costs of public transportation upkeep.

Pushing for expansion of remote working would do a world of good with regards to points 1,2 and 4.

I think it addresses number three too! If I can live anywhere I want, I can buy anyhouse I want, and sell it to someone who is looking for similar house-features instead of location, location, location.

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