Why? It is not just about the cost. It is about over a million people dying every year. It is about pollution. It is about noise. It is about ugly roads taking up huge amounts of space. It is about entire cities messed up because of urban sprawl.
Rich urbanites having ugly roads in their field of vision is not remotely comparable to middle and working class people having to move in with roommates or triple their commute times.
It sounds like it just increases their health risks and lowers the quality of their landscapes over those other options.
In practice, I think you're likely to eliminate people's current perfectly good option just to lift public transit from abysmal to mediocre. It would depend on the proposal.
It doesn't have to be Manhattan like densities either. Many German cities, for example, are full of 4, 5, 6 story buildings. Dense enough to support frequent transit and common enough to not have astronomical rents.
I live about five kilometers from the office and ride my bike. I pay about twelve Euros per square meter rent. My apartment even has a big yard, I just have to share it with the other tenants. A grocery store is right across the street. The next one is ten minutes walk away.
Live can be pretty nice if city planning isn't completely screwed up.
Mountain View looks like a small town in order to protect the habitat of a burrowing owl.
There's always some reason not to densify where people have already settled. We sprawl because it's the only thing we can get away with.
If you think about it, if someone drives to another city to do his work, he is likely building a service that others then use. Users of the service / product thus benefit from the road, indirectly. We accept that the cost of this transportation and whole service by the employee/worker is covered by the client of the product service - isn't driving and costs associated to it the same?
My point it - it's all very connected with EVERYTHING that we consume in modern world. It's not like someone who never owned a car is not benefiting from roads (and thus shouldn't pay for their use) in a myriad ways.
And yet roads are not packed just with lorries and trucks. So without people driving around in their huge personal vehicles maybe there would be little less roads required?
You don't get to just pretend driving is some kind of vice, like smoking, that we just need to discourage people from.
I mean, i'm all for having humans no longer drive asap, but that doesn't mean we'll be done with roads and travel. Also people need to remember that these "trucks" come in many shapes and sizes, and a big truck will move the inventory most of the way on interstates, and then vans / smaller trucks actually deliver in many cases. Especially within cities where traffic and space would make driving a fullsized haul impossible.
Imo, people shouldn't be driving - but people should be traveling still. The world wide delivery system cannot be moved into city limits.
The acres of parking, sprawl and mega roads within cities are gobbling up productive land, generating pollution and driving up commuting and real estate costs, all while sucking down massive amounts infrastructure dollars and subsidizes.
Here in the Finnish capital Helsinki we had all of 2 traffic fatalities last year. A low anomaly for sure, but because the first only occurred half way in the year, it was widely reported and I still remember the cause: an elderly pedestrian getting hit by a tram.
Now this is, of course, just a single case, but you can't possibly claim that the only form of transport that causes casualties is driving – because it's not true. (Actually, the conditions here are pretty treacherous as I'm writing this: much harder to fall down and injure yourself while sitting in a car, don't you think?)
For me, driving a car instead of using public transport is making my one-way commute in 15 minutes instead of an hour. How much would you value 1.5 hours of your time every single day – not to even mention to comfort?
http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_...
http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-e...
I wouldn't hesitate to guess sedentary auto-oriented lifestyles also have an enormous health cost, along with stress from road noise, traffic etc.
Quoting the linked paper:
> Conclusion: The home environment appears to play an > important role in the spread of influenza in adults, > but not the use of public transport.
Personally, I find public transit much less stressful than driving in a large city. Probably because I'm used to one, but not the other.
> Personally, I find public transit much less stressful than driving in a large city.
I'll agree with that, with the added asterisk that I try to avoid high-traffic times in both cases (and actually large cities in general).
Some will not "exercise" unless forced, sure. For others, the best way to promote exercise is to promote free time.
Even if the commuter has to spend the same time on transit, they have time to relax, read, work etc.
This is ignoring the strides we can make with bike infrastructure which provides excercise along with the commute, even in low density suburban areas. Or encouraging remote work, which eliminates the commute entirely and frees up much more time.
Sprawl exists because people want to be connected to cities without paying downtown luxury condo rents, and it's the only viable option (considering public school quality, neighborhood safety, etc.) we're being given.
When the only place where zoning and planning boards allow density is a relatively tiny downtown, surrounded by low density development, it's no surprise prices shoot through the roof.
That's a very America centric view.
Well it turns out driving takes a long time too, but you're really just being a moving couch potato.
Use of Metropolitan public transport is not associated with the flu (and considering the way it's transmitted it's a very good candidate for a disease that would spread in that environment).
I don't want to get into the whole driving debate. Just wanted this fact out there.
Recent bus or tram use within five days of symptom onset was associated with an almost six-fold increased risk of consulting for ARI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision
>Road injuries occurred in about 54 million people in 2013.[1] This resulted in 1.4 million deaths in 2013, up from 1.1 million deaths in 1990.[2]
The citation: GBD 2013 Mortality and Causes of Death, Collaborators (17 December 2014). "Global, regional, and national age-sex specific all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 240 causes of death, 1990-2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013.". Lancet. 385: 117–71. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(14)61682-2. PMC 4340604 . PMID 25530442.