How the Car Keeps Americans Apart
citylab.com
citylab.com
Obvs doesn’t apply if u don’t plan on it, but curious if anyone has found a solution in US cities.
Of course, hygiene is important any place, but specially the city. Now, on the other hand, maybe it does strengthen your immunity... but it's also not fun getting sick cuz you forgot about washing after MUNI.
Kids are prone to go from dirty surface to face without thinking.
At least in Japan, while vomit in the late evenings is an issue, you know those systems get washed --not so for MUNI.
But I'm torn about pushing winter cycling on people. I realize that if it's miserable for somebody, then they're not going to do it. I happen to love cycling and bikes, so the idea of riding during the winter just means more chances to ride under different conditions, and a chance to tinker with one more bike.
In terms of ditching the car altogether, that's a toss up. For most families, to understand their commuting situation, you have to draw the triangle from the two parents jobs to school or day care, possibly different schools if they have more than one kid. For a while, my daily commute was a labyrinth involving dropping people off at different locations before turning the minivan around and heading for work. But today, everybody takes a bus or rides their bikes. Our high school has basically no student parking. Cars are part of our transportation mix, but we try to minimize their use.
At one point it had been so long since I drove to work, that I forgot about a big construction project, and got lost.
As for cold, the kids can stay under a bubble canopy if it's really bad. I have this bike, though we've never bothered with a canopy, we just dress them warm (in New England): https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=workcycles%20kr8%20...:
A block and a half away is one of the best playgrounds in the city, and three blocks the other direction is another fine playground. Both of them are packed with kids at all hours of the day. When we go visit family in the midwest, we make a point to take walks and visit the neighborhood playgrounds. We're almost always the only people there. Of course people have their yards so nobody needs the playground... I think something is lost.
Walk a few blocks in any direction from our house and you'll see tons of wonderful daycares, family-friendly restaurants, and other parents' necessities, most of them locally owned and operated by another member of the community.
We travel all around the city, we take the train. My son passes the time on the ride charming the other passengers and subway surfing. It's much more civilized than strapping him into a car seat and not looking at him for an hour every day.
I'll grant you that New York City is something of an outlier as far as American cities go.
Being out and about means I feel a real sense of community and have really gotten to know my neighbors.
When we see our friends from the suburbs its amazing how cooped up they are, how unlikely they are to leave the house, and how unattached they feel from their surroundings. Its too easy for them to play in their basement or yard.
Staying in the city has given me and my family a much higher quality of life.
I never said I didn't have a car when needed, just that my day to day is much more enriched by not needing one (and being forced to get out of the house).
I will always choose to spend my time exploring the mountains with my kids, but if they choose soccer/baseball/etc then its just medium walk or short bus ride away.
We do frequently use a car (when leaving the city, for instance), but we don't have any reason to own a car. And more critically, we aren't chained to it in the way that so many friends and family are, by virtue of every necessity lying well beyond walking distance tucked inside a giant parking lot.
I will say as far as cities go those effected with homelessness were not as aggressive towards me/us as I’ve experienced in other cities, but they were extremely aggressive towards each other and didn’t make it feel like a very welcoming place for families.
Perhaps the few days my family was there gave me an inaccurate impression. I’ve been there numerous times for business and always enjoyed the city, but those times tended to involve a lot more Lyft rides and eating/drinking at higher price point restaurants than walking around exploring the city and time in the parks. With my family we were mostly in the First Hill, Downtown, Pioneer Square, and a bit in Belltown neighborhoods.
I’d guess if we define city living as an affluent neighborhood within city limits that one can live/work/play in without getting in a vehicle there are areas that fit the bill in nearly every city assuming that one has the correct income and profession to slot into it.
With that said, you visited what I would consider some of the worst places in the city to spend time with kids.
However, I cannot find a single public basketball court in either neighborhood you mentioned, and I can see maybe one park per neighborhood that can each support 1 open space sports game which means my friends and I would have likely had no opportunity to find an open space to play a sport game when growing up due to how crowded parks are.
Add on the homeless problem here and it should come as no surprise my GF and I are planning on moving back to my midwest hometown once we start trying to have kids.
There's Gilman Playground in Ballard with baseball park. It also has tennis courts. There's another baseball park at NW 63rd St and 20th Ave NW, and another one at 60th and 26th. There are more baseball parks in Woodland Park, and they also have soccer fields. Ballard High School has a football stadium, though I don't know how easily accessible it is to non-students. There's another baseball park/football/soccer stadium at Local Heights Playfield.
But yeah, if you're into basketball, you're probably out of luck if you're looking for any outside basketball place, it's not really that popular here.
Over time, what I've come to appreciate the most is the middle ground, something that is incredibly rare but does exist within pockets of larger cities and that's the ability to easily choose between walking, taking public transit, biking or driving to really any destination. All of the big cities in the pacific northwest (portland, seattle, vancouver) do this well, in addition to areas outside of the city centers in the north east as well as some of the first ring suburbs.
We, at least, do have the option of driving if we need to: we just walk a few blocks to the car share and off we go.
We do this year round: snow, rain, or sunshine.
We live in downtown Bellevue, so we don’t need to drive to hit the park, mall, or grocery store
So in car-dependent places, they have no autonomy until they're nearly adults. I think it's much more healthy for them to slowly and steadily expand their autonomy, rather than a sudden discontinuous break when they learn to drive.
The same argument applies in reverse to old people too. In places with good transit and walkability they can stay independent and active longer, with no sudden loss of freedom when they can no longer safely drive vehicles at high speed.
Walking and transit are both overwhelmingly safer than cars (most things are).
When kids are small you just push them in a stroller. Once they're too big for a stroller, they're big enough to walk everywhere that you can walk. It's really not that complicated. Suburban kids who never walk anywhere may whine about needing to walk two miles, but my kids have been doing that since before they could walk unassisted, it's perfectly normal to them.
I do also have a Dutch-style cargo bike which we use a lot around our neighborhood. It's wonderful.
This point is tragically under-appreciated. Kids who live in car-dependent suburbs are in a very real sense alienated from the larger society. A twelve-year-old should be able to visit the library, stop by the park, grab a sandwich at a lunch counter, mail a letter, and wander back home all by themselves in an afternoon.
It's no wonder so many kids feel isolated and alone. They are!
It also has far-flung, residential-only, cul-de-sac communities where literally nothing is within safe walking distance. [0]
We call both "suburbs," but they're very different places.
[0] What would somebody who lives here walk to, for example: https://goo.gl/maps/nX5ttfsYJBq
Fun fact- there are more highway miles per capita in KC than any other city in the US: http://www.publicpurpose.com/hwy-tti99ratio.htm
https://goo.gl/maps/Dm76roteRbx
All of which is just to say: political borders are drawn differently in every city, so you can't meaningfully compare cities using political borders.
Does Kansas City (as a region) actually have more highways than most equivalent cities? Maybe. I don't know. That table doesn't tell us that.
If you're talking an older grid-style suburb with corner stores and the like, it's probably something kids can do.
On the other hand, in many of the exurbs/modern suburbs, there's large distances between things and very strict segregation of residential/commercial areas. Car-centric layouts don't help either, with routes between
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Even older suburban areas can have their own problems.
For a personal anecdote, I grew up in a part of NJ that has been settled since 1700s and is rather hilly. (Watchung Mountains). Most of the main roads date from that time and resemble English country lanes in terms of width/geometry more than they resemble typical American roads. Speed limits are 35-45mph, traffic does at least 5 over.
It is absurdly dangerous to walk or bike on any of those roads, and there aren't really any practical solutions to that. They studied adding sidewalks and it was going to cost huge sums of money and require destroying hundreds upon hundreds of mature trees (the roads are thickly lined with forest, and there isn't even an inch of shoulder).
Cutting the speed limit is impractical because they're main roads that people drive 5-20 miles on, that's a significant time hit.
In our immediate vicinity we had everything we needed, day to day: the kids' schools, a grocery store, cafes, a bakery, pizza shop, and a tram stop. All of this was walkable.
The tram stop was what we'd use to go downtown. There is no parking there, and parking is a hassle, and the tram runs frequently, so it was an easy choice.
Lastly, we also had a car, to go for a hike outside town, or go on a trip or something, but many weeks it would just sit there. Most American couples, even without kids, have two that get used all the time.
We lived in a 6-unit building, without much yard, but would frequently go to the park with the kids. As the quote goes, "kids don't need a big yard to play, they need other kids". Back here in the US, they don't use our yard much, but miss having other kids to play with on a spur of the moment basis.
My older daughter goes to school on here own bike 1 mike away and goes over to friends houses on her own. Decent used bikes here are 50-100eu and bike shops are in every little neighborhood. The city is amazingly quiet despite being notably more dense than San Francisco (where we’re from).
All of us love the freedom of not dealing with cars and everything that implies. We could never move back to a “car culture” city again.
At some point in the nearish future I will probably put some kind of kid seat on the back of my bike.
I'm just in the middle, I went back to SEA.
Nothing personal, but I doubt that people are able to commit to any kind of lifestyle' for life. Public transportation can be good, can be miserable, and that perception can change very quickly due to changes in life circumstances.
When I go back to the US, I now don't like driving and try to avoid it. Family and friends get frustrated that I never want to drive.
The answer, in short, is capital. More specifically, it is the form that capitalist enterprise has manifested as in the Gulf. Ever since the discovery of oil, most of the surplus petrodollars have poured into the so-called secondary circuit of infrastructure and real estate. Aside from oil, the region lacks primary productive circuits. As a result, much of the money the state gathered from selling oil abroad was poured directly into the built environment. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/11/gulf-states-oil-capital-e... EDITED for spelling.
Also worth noting is the huge environmental cost of cars - not just in carbon monoxide, huge array of components and metals they require to build, impact on climate change, etc., but also how they create ‘nature barriers’ dividing land corridors for flightless animals. Witness roads in the middle of otherwise pristine forests or road networks that clear huge swaths of wilderness.
I’ve frequently thought how the true cost of cars has been understated, possibly due to the assumed bias that cars are positive pieces of technology, lobbying efforts by vehicle manufacturers, a bias against public transport, etc.
Cars are in many ways, the precursor to the most private of popular, self-focused technologies: the mobile phone.
Cars benefit a private (individual, family) need generally over a public one. It is your car and your ‘asset’. Whilst there are, of course, ‘public cars’ (taxis and ride-sharing), they are not the norm in most cities, in most suburbs, in most places.
We should, as a society, spend more time debating the merits of cars and road networks - especially factoring in the downsides for those with physical disabilities and those on low incomes.
edit: fixed spelling mistake, added last three paragraphs.
Nowadays, I think people are more comfortable riding the three-wheeled cargo bikes, or Christiania Bikes, as they're commonly known.
You can transport a surprising amount of stuff on either type, especially the e-bike versions.
It's one of those books that lots of people have read, but many more people have heard of and mean to get around to reading. It's very good and very thought-provoking. I read it more or less when it came out, and it has stayed with me ever since. (I did re-read it about 10 years ago.)
With respect to the article, the automobile is one of those things that has changed society so thoroughly—and which seemed like such a great idea at the time—that most people can't even imagine the impact or what they've lost. We just take it for granted.
I recently got rid of my car after four years of living in a city. I don't know why I held onto it for so long, but my life has improved dramatically. Not only can I go anywhere I want, but I never have to worry about permits, tickets, or parking.
This lifestyle can't work for people outside of cities, though. There's no way to get anyplace without a car, and there isn't enough density to make uber very effective. No one wants to wait a half hour for a ride.
Being in a city has downsides, but for this reason it's wonderful. There's even an app now where you can just use someone else's car. (Getaround, I think?) I've used it twice: one when I needed to go buy something about 20 miles away, and another to go on a trip a hundred miles away. And the price was very low.
Exactly. Which means that, if cities are designed sanely, they will be more attractive to people who don't want cars (when I lived in a city during college, I never had a car and never missed having one), and suburbs and rural areas will be more attractive to people who do (as I do now since I like having a detached house and an actual yard).
My lease is up next year and I can't wait to get rid of my car. I won't be replacing it. My car payment is rather high, but even with just the insurance, city parking/tickets, gas, tolls, and maintenance costs, I'm pretty sure I can Uber/Lyft everywhere I need to go for less money and rent a car on the occasion I really need one.
If I want it faster than that, or cheaper, I walk to the home depot a mile away.
If I need something specialized, I either take public transit all the way there, or ride my bike to the S-train station and bring my bike on the train.
If i want to go to the really big hardware warehouse, I catch the tram from just outside my house.
And if i need big things for some reason, I book the share-van, drive there, load it into the back, drive home, unload it, park the van, walk away.
In the city I have the shops around and a lot of transport options (bike, bus, tram, walk, carsharing..) or I can order it online, or, gasp, ask any of my 20 neighbours. Elsewhere your options are far more limited.
I'm not sure. You have to look to other places in the world to see examples of lower density living, though. I live in rural Japan in a small town. Officially I think it is officially 25K people, but that's only because it is more efficient for a single city hall to service a larger area. In reality, I think that it is closer to 5-10K in the town itself and then a spattering of people around the outskirts.
The main street of the town is 6 blocks long, if I remember correctly. I live 2 km away from the "hustle and bustle" of the town ;-) I live in a 3 story walk up apartment building surrounded on 3 sides by rice fields. Here and there, there are similar small apartment buildings, single family homes and small farms. In the walkable area, there are 3 grocery stores, a variety of restaurants, some clothing stores, some hardware stores, one electronics store, many bars (Japan is a drinking society), etc. There are many factories in the area (including TDK, Suzuki, and a few other big ones). There are dentists, doctors, etc, etc, etc.
I have to walk to the "down town" to catch the bus to the nearest big city, which I probably do once a month or so. However, that's it. Near the main street, it is mostly houses and shops, but by the time you get out my way (which is only a 20 minute walk) more than half of the land is farmland. The main street is right by the beach, too, so it only spreads in one direction. That should give you an idea of how small it is.
There are definitely places where it would be very difficult to live without a car, but it's pretty darn rural here and it's extremely comfortable to live if you are able bodied. If you have a bike, you can even easily ride to the next town (or the one after that). When I was teaching in the high school here, most of my students rode from 2 or 3 villages away, because there weren't enough students in the area to fill up the school. So depending on your definition of "city", I think it's completely doable. You just have to intentionally design the towns to be accessible. (It also helps that farms in Japan are extremely small, by law).
I have a four wheel drive, for going out to collect fire wood, go camping, and do generally outdoors things with. I have a race/track car for being a general nuisance to society and shooting flames at people. And then I have a silly little automatic Honda for doing errands around the city when I need something cheap to operate and nimble around tight streets and things.
Having these cars all fit particular requirements I have. However I still end up riding my push-bike or taking the bus, because the normal day-to-day commute doesn't always require storage capacity.
I can certainly understand the reasons that people can be sufficiently happy with doing without a car. I can also understand the reasons why people are forced to need a car. I don't, however, like seeing people vilified or interrogated for being on either side of that fence.
My drive to and from work is long at 1 hour each way but I found it still time well spent catching up on news on the radio. Once in the city I actually enjoy walking everywhere even for distance that my city friends would drive or take an Uber to.
If driving doesn't put a smile on your face you simply have the wrong vehicle.
I have moved our family into progressively rural environments and will continue to do so until the distance to basic necessities is intolerable. In most rural environments there is no meaningful traffic so people aren't that down on being in their vehicles.
For example, LA used to have a great train network for public transportation until the automobile industry made sure to tear it down so people would be forced to drive cars.
In SF/BayArea people want zoning to change so there can be more housing/apartment buildings. Who's blocking that from happening? Homeowners who think that would devalue their properties.
Also, doesn't seem like people in NYC value cars or yards that much (at least not over living in NYC).
De-urbanization was spurred by housing shortages post-WW2 and federal policy seeking to stabilize the housing market. The FHA was created to insure home loans that met a long list of requirements[1], which had biases towards increasing consumption (including cars) and racial segregation. The marketing and growth of suburbia was then promoted by various business interests that would benefit from that increased consumption[2]. The new suburban lifestyle led to the rise of modern conservatism[3]. Most (~85% [3]) of the US lives in metropolitan areas, so rural lifestyles are not typical and it would be vastly less efficient if everyone lived there rather than in cities.
1: https://marketurbanism.com/2017/09/12/financing-suburbia-how...
2: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/...
3: http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/97...
I know it's hard for you to believe, but some people like living in high density areas.
In fact, if we generously estimate that 10 million people live in high density metro areas that don't rely on cars we are looking at less than 3% of the US population. I think that is something to sneeze at.
SF only has a population of one million.
Basically the US has NYC and parts of Chicago as emblems of urban density.
I've lived the big city, high density European lifestyle, I lived it in America too, and in Canada, and I've lived the American and Canadian small town life.
They're both nice. The small town life is great if the community is healthy, and there is a town core that is dense of businesses and shops which you can go to and walk around. It gives you access to nature and land in an unprecedented way. And the small population means you get a feel of community and know others, and events can be hosted on peoples properties.
If the town is struggling, its not that great, and can start to feel depressing and isolated.
The european city style is also great, it feels like a buzzing small town, minus the access to land and nature. The sense of community, knowing your neighbors, being proud and invested in your neighborhood. Being physically active. These are all there. Similar to how you can find that in prosperous small towns too.
In the end, I feel the choice between small town and European style cities is personal. If you prefer nature, enjoy quiet downtime, and peace, small town wins. If you prefer urban landscapes, a buzzing vibrant environment, and constant flux of activities and creativity, European cities would win.
That said, I'd be surprised if anyone prefers the American style cities and suburbs. Its like the worst of both worlds. You get a medium sized house, big enough that maintenance is a chore, yet too small to have the space for serious house endeavors. A yard, but too small to have it be a place to enjoy nature. Its not quiet, yet also not buzzing. It lacks creativity and the feeling of community, and everywhere is hard to get too, too far to walk, too crouded to drive.
That's what I think people complain about. I personally hate them with a passion.
When I was growing up I lived in the suburbs, I hated it so far from everything, very infrequent public transport (lucky to get one bus an hour). Maybe worst of all as a young geek poor internet speed. I was stuck on dial up for years because it was all we had...
I vowed when I left my parent's home I'd live closer to the city. But it is just so expensive (especially rent) there is no way I can justify it. So I suffer through all the long commutes, traffic congestion hell etc.
Condos in Perth near the CBD are surprisingly very affordable, though there are fewer good jobs.
It's not exactly the most progressive of places, however. But personally I love it.
NB: I'm currently in the position of purchasing land in Perth and you can get some good sub-$200k deals on 350-400 square metre blocks within 20 minutes to the city too if you look around.
I'm looking in the near future so would be keen to know where to look.
I guess I just wonder sometime, what if we designed a city where cars took second place, and high density, public transit, walk-ability, bike-ability, e-bike, car share, etc, was made the priority. Would it make for nicer cities, which are more livable and affordable?
I don't know, maybe not, but it seems as long as Car are still around, we'll never try it out.
EDIT: Generally, dense cities in the European style are like that because they were designed prior to the existence of Cars, and thus Cars have never been able to enter them successfully, too small roads, and weird road networks. Since they were made for walking, they're automatically higher density. But, those cities were also designed before public transit, e-bike, bikes, scooters, package delivery, car share, etc. So I feel like we could do much better then those today.
It's mostly about driving in cities / commuting to work, not driving across America and living in the rural countryside.
The times, and with it many people's preferences, are always changing.
It's wonderful that you have found the place that suits you. Likewise, a growing number of people value higher density living, just as you do low density living.
> An urbanized area consists of densely developed territory that contains 50,000 or more people.
Still 70% of the US population.
1) Go hiking, snowboarding, mountain biking 2) Drive fast on road courses 3) Come home from the airport after midnight 4) Purchase more than 2 bags of groceries (including TP, laundry detergent et al) 5) Go on road trips 6) Isolate myself from the mentally ill or obnoxious behaviors and smells I'm surrounded by, including their fecal matter 7) Isolate myself from the constant crime that I am surrounded by 8) Isolate myself from the constant excessive sound that I am surrounded by 9) Easily move around tools and supplies to maintain my home
on and on it goes. A life without a car is a life of either hiring everything out (expensive), doing without (no hikes for me) or constantly renting (what's the point?)
A motorcycle is one potential solution but they are incredibly dangerous and not very practical in many parts of the country due to weather.
I thought it would be really annoying to live without a car, but it's actually quite nice, and I save so much money on fuel and maintenance.
[1] aside from the road courses. I race gocarts for fun instead.
My posting said > without someone having a car.
Care to share how you go snowboarding, #3 and #5-8 ?
I have read mr money mustache write a lot about what can be accomplished by a bicycle + trailer. But even he still has a low cost car.
Road trips? Rent a car, or fly somewhere interesting and rent a car locally.
#5-8 I handle by not being needlessly paranoid and distrustful of other people. "The mentally ill and their obnoxious smells and fecal matter", seriously?
Obviously when you have a car right there, you tend to gravitate towards it, when all you have is a hammer etc.
I'm sure there's also a big cultural aspect to it. I also thought it would be hell to not have a car anymore, but it has turned out to rather easy and straight forward.
Come to SF sometime. I literally have to dodge poop daily.
As someone who does take public transit on a daily basis and occasionally interacts with the homeless and petty criminals, the dehumanization of people in your own community in your comment is absolutely astounding. These people are your neighbors, whether they smell bad, have become victims of addiction, or have turned to petty crime.
Some people don't like other people. Regardless of whether my neighbors are nice people who have an excess of delicious baked goods or meth addicts, I don't want to interact with them and I have no obligation to them just because of our proximity.
It's perfectly okay to not like being around people, especially people with obnoxious behaviors (whether they are because of a mental illness or otherwise) or people that smell bad.
I always hated driving. I gave up my car more than a decade ago. I am happy to see stats like this.
In spite of how sprawling the US is, I think it is a myth that we have no choice but to build a car-centric America, a myth that serves as self-fulfilling prophecy. And I hate hearing it.
That’s what needs to be fixed.
But usually, people who already live in a city of, say, density X, are pretty strongly opposed to building more and increasing the density to 1.2 X. Also, those 0.2 X new residents naturally are only moving in in the future, so they don't get to vote, either.
Somehow, the attitude of the people who get to enjoy the dense, walkable neighborhoods, would need to change so that they'd be more open to sharing their lifestyle with more new people.
But it stands to reason that if all of your out-goings are paying for the motor then you are going to have less money to spend or invest in other things. If someone has a fancy car it may be leased for x amount per month with restrictions on miles driven, the financing being fairly scammy for the buyer and the auto-maker. Yet we see the gleaming motorcar and assume 'that person must be rich' (rather than pity them for their apparent status anxiety).
We don't see that person on a bicycle and think 'they must be rich', envying them for not outlaying $$$ a month to keep a tin box on the road belching poisons. Instead we are more likely to wonder what is wrong with them. In the last century you would possibly wonder if they got nicked for drink driving and their punishment was to be relegated to two wheels. Luckily attitudes have improved in that respect.
It is the same with houses. The person that rents might have debts but the person with the million dollar mansion and some type of interest only mortgage really does have a million dollars of debt hanging around their neck. Yet we perceive them to be rich. By this logic the homeless guy in the park is richer than all the neighbours beholden to banks rentseeking them with their mortgage products for 25 year periods.
The people who are actually rich as they have inherited the land are dismissive of the nouveau rich, maybe they know the truth at these folk haven't actually got tangible wealth, just big debts to banks and wannabee status anxiety. You can find landed-gentry types wearing the same coat for thirty years and driving round in cars approaching that age, beaten up and full of dog hairs. They might have bought that ancient Volvo new, no finance needed. They might also use it to buy very fine food and drink from the posh supermarket. They don't have status problems like the people in fancy cars do.
America is different to Europe in this aspect, partly because there is this idea that America is the land of freedom and opportunity, in Europe people kind of know their place and don't feel ashamed to do a regular job. In America you have to be a rockstar or die trying. Sense of community doesn't fill the void when life is one of suburban sprawl. In a walkable community you should be able to say hello to a few people just going about your business, a wave and a smile shared with that old guy you see walking his dog every day does give you some sense of belonging in your (little) world. You might grumble about the guy and how his dog walks so slowly with no road sense whatsoever but that passing acknowledgement of existence is a community bond, the smile is real. Driving some shiny behemoth of a vehicle gives you none of that, sure you can wave from the window and hoot your horn but it is still a little mobile prison cell of sorts. You can't actually stop and chat. Sure you are off to see more important, higher status people that have better convo than the doddery neighbour with the dog but you are also spiritually a bit poorer for not being part of a local, walkable community.
But I dislike driving for a commute, I've done as little as 30 minutes and up to 1.5 hours of commute, it's very stressful to be constantly alert for a good chunk of your day just to get from A to B.
I think I've found the best of both worlds; a house that's my family's own space, and Houston Park and Ride stations. I drive 10 minutes to the station, leave my car there and commute on a bus to my job. The stop is about 5 blocks from the building I work at, I'm relatively stress-free and I can choose to make good use of the time spent riding the bus (generally reading books, news, sports, etc.). The bus gets there at the same time I would have in spite of the stops it makes because it uses the HOV when I would be stuck in traffic on the freeway
Cities can have family sized apartments, with the needed amenities in a way that's designed both for cars/walking/biking/ect.
That's unfortunate. One of the things I love about my apartment (Chicago) is that I've got friendly neighbors, it's well kept, there's decent parking, and I've got a deli and 2 grocery stores in walking distance.
I'm a big fan of park and rides though, esp if it connects to rail. They seem like a good compromise to help alleviate congestion from a city and work to collect from lower dense areas where there's not enough density to support rail.
The automobile enabled individuals to find affordable residences and provided middle income and lower income individuals the power to find jobs not within walkable distance of a residence or rail line. The automobile has been a net good for society, especially the low income or middle class.
That's not to say that there's something inherently wrong with the American suburban model, it just doesn't scale well. So much space is wasted on parking lots for vehicles that stand empty most of the day. And rush hour traffic is just not fixable beyond a certain point, no matter how many lanes are added to the highways.
It's just flat-out wrong to claim that non-car commutes only benefit the affluent. That's entirely dependent on how the economics of the community are set up. If there's a will to have everyone commute by public transit, there are many ways to achieve it.
Don't forget that these stretches of black asphalt act as giant heat accumulators, soaking up the sun during the day and keeping temperatures uncomfortably high after the sun goes down.
The best option would be to make neighborhoods walkable/bikeable, implement good public transit as much as possible, and offer an affordable delivery service for bigger items. Going further, it would be beneficial to abolish megastores and return to more human-sized retail outlets.
Indeed. A lot of this sort of infrastructure can and should be built below-ground. Parking garages, warehouses/storage, utilities, the works.
"Going further, it would be beneficial to abolish megastores and return to more human-sized retail outlets."
Not sure if I follow. Megastores are nice as one-stop shops, reducing the need to drive around town to get everything.
I am in favor of making them more modularized/sectionalized, such that they can be rearranged vertically (whether above-ground or below-ground) and reduce the horizontal footprint. Their similarly-sprawling parking lots also can and should be replaced with underground parking garages.
Sterile charmless megastores are a symbol of unrestrained corporatism.
I don't mind department stores, but I do have a problem with Walmart and their ilk.
As an additional bonus, most Wal-Marts (in my observation) will let you park your car there overnight, no questions asked. For someone who's homeless and living out of one's car, or for someone who's traveling and can't afford lodging, that's a pretty huge help.
Biking to the city center is also possible and takes about half an hour as well.
How do i figure? Maintenance. My most common customer comes in complaining about a noise or a smell and stares at her shoes when asked when the last major service was, what the mileage is, or when the last oil change was. Its almost like drivers have learned to internalize their hatred of the commute into the car itself. Like they just dont want to think about any of it.
Bare brake pads, scored rotors, and boiled oil are all so common it hurts. I once had to spend two weeks rebuilding most of a partially seized engine because a customer couldnt understand why his two year old car idled so rough. a $40 oil change could have prevented what ended up being $8000 in parts and service.
I've become apathetic about driving too. It's become mostly unpleasant due to congestion. What you say cuts pretty close for me: A car is an appliance.
But also, cars have gotten so reliable that it's easy to stop thinking about what's going on under the hood.
However, I am now in the third car-free period of my life, and I am not likely to buy a car again anytime soon, unless circumstances force me to do so. I grew in up a small town in the countryside, where I will certainly admit that not having a car would have been a major setback.
But I've since lived in slightly bigger towns, where a car-free existence was easy, and now I live in Copenhagen, where the bicycle is basically king. The only reason I had a car here was because I thought I couldn't do without it.
I see a lot of comments about people not wanting to interact with other people, and expressing fear of diseases, psychopathic homeless and people and a whole host of other -- frankly rather paranoid -- ideas. I use public transport and bike every day, and you absolutely don't have to interact with people, if you don't want to. And besides, people watching can be fun. There are some really bizarre and interesting folks out there.
Have kids? When your kid spikes a fever at 1am and you have no car and you need to go buy some children’s ibuprofen, what are you going to do? I can run to my local 24/7 grocer or Walmart and be back in 10 minutes flat.
My son had a bad reaction to a doctor prescribed medicine and had a seizure early one morning. We were at the hospital in 15 minutes thanks to the modern automobile. We don’t live in a city because we consciously chose the suburbs. I grew up in a walkable city and getting my first car was still one of the highlights of my youth.
Now my kids play soccer and they practice and play 4 days/week all over the local area. Good luck doing that without a car.
The freedom/flexibility a car provides us as individuals is unprecedented in human history. You can drive from NY to LA in 41 hours and you are on your own schedule.
For the folks that don’t like driving, you have plenty of cities to choose from where that’s doable. That’s the beauty of modern society - the choice is yours and we don’t have to judge/demonize one another’s choices.
I could hit 3 bodegas from my front steps with a rock. I don't need to start a truck to get Ibuprofen.
If you build a suburb so that you need a car, then, sure, I guess you'll need a car. But that's not because any of those activities require a car. It's just that your town was built to require it!
If we put a dome over your town and sucked out all the oxygen, then you'd also need spacesuit to perform all those tasks, too. But it wouldn't be because any of those tasks require a space suit. You'd need the space suit because we sucked out all the oxygen.
I didn't build a suburb - it was already here, just like you didn't build the city you live in. I drove to the suburb to begin with of my own free will because I didn't like living in a city (having already done so, Buffalo & Boston.) I'd already made the choice to live a lifestyle that is automobile-inclusive ;)
You don't get to judge or decide for me what is right for me and vice-versa. We all have a choices to make and do the best we can with what we have.
It's interesting that for all the intelligent people on HN, there's a lack of empathy and understanding that everyone has their own perception of reality. What's 'right' and 'real' in your mind may 1) not actually be reality 2) be neither 'right' nor 'wrong', but just a personal preference/opinion. I got a taste of this myself when I stumbled upon this book (and it's second part) https://www.amazon.com/DAY-Through-German-Eyes-Hidden-ebook/... (D-Day through German Eyes.) It's been eye-opening for me because I'd always assumed the Germans troops were evil men who were all bent on conquering Europe.
Also, exclusionary zoning played an enormous role in deciding what those places looked like and they did it in large part to control who got to live there.
Finally, your lifestyle choices have externalities, from the immediately obvious 30k deaths a year, to more dangerous streets for people who choose not to drive, to environmental damage, to cities clogged with the cars of suburban commuters twice a day.
http://science.time.com/2012/09/18/urban-planet-how-growing-...
https://www.prb.org/urbanizationanenvironmentalforcetobereck...
"It’s true that as people in developing nations move from the countryside to the city, the shift may reduce the pressure on land, which could in turn be good for the environment. This is especially so in desperately poor countries like Madagascar, where residents in the countryside slash and burn forests each growing season to clear space for farming. But the real difference is that in developing nations, the move from rural areas to cities often leads to an accompanying increase in income — and that increase in income leads to an increase in the consumption of food and energy, which in turns produces an uptick in carbon emissions."
In other words, wealthier people living in urban areas -- in both city cores and in the suburbs -- are worse for the environment than rural poor folks, and as developing nations urbanize, we can expect to see an increase in these impacts.
People on HN needs to get over themselves. Smart yes, able to see other's perspectives...hardly.
That's such a nonsensical argument. Suburbs weren't designed for elephants, they were created for humans, just like cities. You want to alleviate the dependence on cars in cities, make public transportation as convenient and flexible as having a car. Oh wait, you can't. People have cars because they do provide a perceived benefit, otherwise people would choose the alternative in droves.
Maybe you all should create a pedestrian-only city and live happily ever after.
There is no choice but to build cities in this car-dependent way. Cities are forced to do so by our legal system that has been influenced by the automobile manufacturers and other industries.
Instead of me digging up some citations, just go watch Roger Rabbit. This has been the story for many years.
Without being forced to build in this financially insolvent manner, [1] no community would choose to isolate people from each other in the way that we do now in the United States.
Our neighboring country, Mexico, (among many others) shows that a costly design is not required for urban and suburban environments to work for humans.
The impending arrival self-driving car gives hope that the gigantic proportion of land devoted to car storage can be radically reduced, giving space for more buildings and habitable spaces between the buildings we have already constructed. This is a good sign for the future but we sure took an expensive, circuitous route to get there, all the while losing local power over our communities to industrial interests.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/4/19/the-sprawl-con...
I'm glad I don't live in a place where it's ok to limit people's choices based on someone's opinion on what is or isn't the 'right application.'
I'm sorry about your mother's asthma; my 6 year old son is a type 1 diabetic - that doesn't make it ok for me to go chastising society's choice to put sugar in practically EVERYTHING we eat or to try force society to change because of my son's misfortune.
Your neighbors don't really have a choice as to whether or not they enjoy "hearing its V8 roar from inside the house through several walls/doors" or breathe the extra pollution that some (but not all) large trucks create.
> When your kid spikes a fever at 1am and you have no car and you need to go buy some children’s ibuprofen, what are you going to do? I can run to my local 24/7 grocer or Walmart and be back in 10 minutes flat.
I'm sure your neighbors will love being woken up in the middle of the night. Perhaps some of them would be glad to live in a society where there are reasonable limits on what situations other people can force you into for their own pleasure.
Please note that this comment isn't really directed at you specifically - you might not have close neighbors or they might be truck enthusiasts as well. It's directed at all owners of obnoxiously loud trucks who don't care how it affects other people, which may or may not be you.
You're right, they don't - but since many of them have a truck, it really isn't an issue. I'm honestly not a 'truck enthusiast', but I'd wanted one for the longest time and I'm happy with my choice. It makes trips to Home Depot / Lowes / etc a dream. Going to the mountains on vacation with it has been great as well - having gone up the side of a mountain up a single lane dirt road to a house we rented a couple of years ago (you never know what kind of infrastructure exists when you rent a place on VRBO/HomeAway/etc.) in our minivan was an experience let me tell you. This year we rented another place up in the mountains and having a truck was a godsend.
I don't remote start my truck at night (because I'd like to think I'm not an inconsiderate A-hole) - I only start the truck remotely during the day for a few minutes to get the A/C started since it's over 100 degrees (F) in summertime here. I let my non-truck owning neighbors/friend borrow my truck when they need it - so on the contrary, our neighbors love us.
Personally my experiences living in a city have been far louder and had much ruder neighbors than I could dream of than in our current situation (people blaring music at all hours of the night and early morning, driving cars with seemingly no mufflers or motorcyclists whose sole purpose seems to be to irritate everyone sleeping, domestic disputes between deaf people (otherwise why would I have been able to hear them from several houses over, etc.)
Well, no, they are quite able to not account for those. “Should”, not “must”.
> what are you going to do?
err, take a taxi? Or have ibuprofen always at home?
Not everyone can/does live in a city where you're tripping over Taxi/Uber at all hours of the night.
I can cycle to mine in 5 minutes, taxi, uber, run, walk, etc..
Or use one of the car share services near me.
> We were at the hospital in 15 minutes thanks to the modern automobile.
If you live within 3 minutes of a Walmart (3 minutes traveling there, 3 minutes checking out, and 3 minutes returning) and 15 minutes of a hospital you are significantly better located than the average suburbanite.
Most walkable urban areas will have 24 hour convenience stores every few blocks. Most walkable urban areas will have many options for quick travel to medical facilities (Zipcar like services, uber like services, frequent emergency clinics, ambulances).
I think cities have better access to medical care than suburban areas. There are more medical facilities. There are more options in choosing primary care. There are more specialist. There are more alternative treatment options. Try getting antibiotics for strep throat at 2am for less than $250 cash in less than ninety minutes in a suburb.
This is only true in very large cities (NYC, LA, Paris, etc.) In smaller cities my experience is quite the opposite, shops close early and they are far and few between. I'm talking between 200-500k population (my sample size is small, but one city is in the US the other in France, neither had pharmacies within walking distance that were open past 9pm.)
> Try getting antibiotics for strep throat at 2am for less than $250 cash in less than ninety minutes in a suburb
Never been a problem here with a local 24/7 pharmacy that takes insurance so I'm not sure where you're getting your $250 figure from.
Are there many walkable cities with populations in that range?
> I'm not sure where you're getting your $250 figure from.
Including getting the script.
If you don't have health insurance, you're on your own (sadly.)
Don't assume that everyone can live a life of privilege in an upscale urban area.
I don’t know what neighborhoods you were living in, but my experience is that for every dangerous urban neighborhood there’s an equally affordable one that isn’t dangerous if you know where to look.
And it’s not like everyone can afford the privilege of a car either.
Says someone who has never experienced being beat up by a group of young men because of my race in just such a neighborhood as you described.
Growing up in a bad neighborhood, I didn't exactly have a choice to leave (until my parents bought a house in a better neighborhood in my late teen years.) I remember vividly the frozen blood on the concrete sidewalk across the street from my childhood home when leaving to walk to school - someone had been bludgeoned the death in the middle of the night.
Before I had a car, my girlfriend at the time lived in an even worse neighborhood (where shootings were a common/daily occurrence) the anxiety I experienced walking to the bus stop from her house, then waiting downtown for a transfer at a bus stop across the street from public housing, etc - that feeling is so vivid in my memory even though it's been 20 years. Not everyone shares the same experiences, and thus have the same values & priorities. Even after getting a car my troubles weren't quite over. I was nearly carjacked after dropping off the same girlfriend at her house at 11pm on a Friday night - he managed to open the car door, but not before I did a 180 in reverse and sped off.) Because I hadn't learned my lesson, I also had to change a flat tire in the same neighborhood at 3am one night. There's nothing like the threat of being shot or beat up to force you to learn to change a tire in a few minutes.
I'm happy in my suburb with a big backyard and a big dog and my truck (and yes firearms (gasp!)) It's fine if that isn't your cup of tea, just don't judge me for it.
My commute is 30 miles one way. Luckily, I go against all the traffic, so it's a rather relaxing commute. It's one of the few times I get 30-40 minutes to myself a day.
We spend many weekends at my in-laws' place on the lake. Even though it's in the same state, it's a completely different view, weather, and life style. It's about a 200 mile drive and many great conversations have happened on that commute.
I went to college in a completely different state about an 8 or 9 hour drive. It was perfect because I wanted to be away from everyone I knew. I wanted to be self-sufficient. When I was too poor to afford a plane ticket, I could always afford the 3 tanks of gas it took round-trip to drive home whenever I wanted; at any pace I wanted. The reflecting time I had on that commute was pivotal to my career and life choices.
Plenty of out-of-state family vacations have been haphazardly planned over long weekends and a few days of PTO. We never need to worry about leave time, TSA security checkpoints, our fluid bottles being too large, my guitars I bring with me, or anything else. We just get in the car and go.
One of my bucket-list items is as-complete-as-possible trip down Route 66. I want to see America as it was, before vast interstates took you through nowhere to get where you were going.
Roads (and therefore cars) are an integral part to understanding the vastness of the United States. If you haven't experienced it, I highly recommend it.
Lastly, our rental properties all require handyman work. Access to a truck bed most weekends out of the year has saved me countless hours and money renting and borrowing.
I only wish electric vehicles were more available, absolutely no other qualms about the Americans-and-Cars debate.
Seriously, now that uncomfortable weather is largely a solved problem in the modern world, we really would do better to move on to less mundane problems that have yet to be solved.
I can understand that not every city can provide a good transit system, but for cities like ours I wonder if the problem can be solved by creating dedicated bus lanes that are always separate from other lanes throughout the city. When you're stuck in traffic and see the buses whizzing through without delay, it's easy to make the decision to ditch the car and start using the transit.
Vancouver has had a fully automated light rail system since 1986. New lines added in 2000 and 2009. There's significant high rise condo and apartment density around many stations.
City council a very long time ago cancelled a plan to build a freeway from east vancouver to downtown.
Seattle is sort of the opposite of that, it's very much more car dependent. The new light rail line helps a lot but its entry into service date was 22+ years after Vancouver's.
In my experience in Vancouver a great deal more people live a lifestyle that doesn't involve owning a car. Gas is a lot more expensive and insurance is more expensive. Many "normal" people commute daily on transit.
This is from 2002 but I don't think there's anything about it which is less relevant today, regarding suburban architecture/urban design and the lifestyles associated with extensive suburban sprawl:
https://www.weeklystandard.com/david-brooks/patio-man-and-th...
- The Geography of Nowhere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Nowhere
- Suburban Nation https://books.google.ch/books/about/Suburban_Nation.html?id=...
Much of the car-bound design resulted from zoning and simple the-rode-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intentions. The problem is fixable, but it will probably take much clamoring over a generation’s timespan to undo the damage.
The author never shows anything but correlation between transportation method and demographics. It's much more likely that wealth determines your proximity to work / transportation method than vice versa.
This whole article just seems like a thinly veiled "I ride a bike to work and I hate cars -- they probably all voted for Trump cause they're poor and uneducated. Why don't they just get rich and smart and then they can walk to work and we don't need cars anymore and we can all live next to parks?"
> “But it is increasingly clear that in addition to wasted time and productivity, reduced quality of life, and even fatalities, the automobile takes another toll. It may be that cars are not only the chief destroyer of our communities, but are tearing at the nation’s political and social fabric.”
I posit that cars allowed population expansion because resources across a larger area became accessible and that we would have less people in existence if Fordism never happened. So blaming that innovation for wealth inequality is like blaming mass food production for wealth inequality. Why doesn’t everyone just have their own garden with chickens and quinoa? Why would anyone ever eat fast food? Why would anyone eat processed foods?
> “The car and car-dominated infrastructure propelled suburbanization and white flight. They split our society into white, affluent suburbs and poor black and minority cities.” What? I’m pretty sure cities are segregated also, sometimes intentionally in history. This comes off as a pretty weak argument, but I could be convinced with more evidence.
The sidewalks are also deliberately designed to be unpleasant, if they're present at all.
What I hate is that they are usually moving far more slowly than what I and the people behind me would prefer, and that they do so even when passing them by is not possible.
I'm not paid per-hour to commute, and I'm sure as hell not paid to sit behind some shit-for-brains who thinks it's a great idea to block an entire direction of a two-lane road with his slow-ass single-speed bicycle, whilst there is a solid wall of oncoming traffic.
Yes, you have to drive everywhere. It seems that for some people, "having to drive everywhere" is automatically a negative point, by definition. IMO, it's only negative when you do that in San Francisco, where traffic is everywhere, and you can't park anywhere or have to pay exorbitant parking fees.
Take some anecdotes of my current life now. People in SF and cities love to bring up the point of being able to walk to coffee shops, restaurants, bars, parks, and not having to find parking (which is an SF problem). I don't drink, so bars and DUI is not a thing for me. I reach my favorite coffee shop in 10 minutes of local driving (no traffic any time of the day, any day of the week), and there's always ample parking, and there's never a line. Same for all the restaurants I frequent in the east bay (Fremont/Newark/Union City area). Places in the city always have a line; whereas the longest line I've had at my coffee shop was 2 people in front of me. There's always seating available there, unlike most coffee shops in SF. I spend $3 on my favorite coffee there, not $6. This same example works similarly for every other aspect of life really, whether it's restaurants, parks, even urgent care/ER at the hospitals. Drive to get there in 10-15 minutes, there's always parking, no line at the place, and it's cheaper. Same applies for friends, even those who live a city or two away (Milpitas, San Leandro, Castro Valley) -- 15-30 minutes to get there, no traffic.
I live in an older part of town, where houses are generally 50+ years old, so you can imagine the kind of neighborhood. I know each one of my neighbors by names. It's not like I grew up here too; I've only lived here for 5 years since I bought the house.
Pulling from my own experience, I really don't see how the car keeps us apart, and how living in the city is better. Everything is more expensive, there's more wait time, more transportation time, and people are ruder in general because everyone is understandably frustrated with everything, whether it's patience, gentrification issues, homelessness, etc. In the suburb crawl, everything is the opposite of all of above. People are nicer to each other.
I commute to the city for work (because the jobs are mostly in the city), and it's the least favorite part of my life.
I'm sure Americans would be closer together if more things were walkable for more people and I don't oppose investments in walkability. However, some people don't want that, some people are thrilled to drive a big vehicle and burn a gallon or three of gas to pick up a case of beer and log of chewing tobacco.
What virtue do we need to inoculate into Joe Sixpack to get him to participate in a the vegetarian version of personal transportation?
Both have reasonable use cases. Both are fun to tinker with. Both are the main ways people kill other people. And you shouldn't need to use either daily in a civilized society.
That's not even talking about the rest of the problems mass car ownership creates, from climate change to destroying neighborhoods to the health crisis sitting instead of walking creates.
This is either some next-level elitism or a false argument. Does the recluse have no place in society? What about the logger, or the Tractor operator? What about the surgeon who is on call, do you want them to bike to the hospital at 2 AM? I sure as hell don't.
If your argument is that no individual should have to own a car, we already live in that America. If your argument is that no one should have to own in a car, get real.
> we already live in that America.
Perhaps you should visit the old town centres in Europe, or the country villages. You can see what a society built around not using cars looks like.
What I meant when I said "tractor drivers getting to work" is people like my friend who grades and compacts pads for new homes. He drives a 4x4 pickup down a dirt road sometimes for 10+ miles to get to his tractor so he can start working. How does mass transit work for new construction?
Building is a reasonable use case for cars while protecting yourself from polar bears is a reasonable use case for guns [0].
I don't understand why you, and a large number of other people, are being willfully obtuse about this. 10+ miles on dirt roads to get to a tractor is not someone who lives in civilization, it's someone out in the wilderness.
[0] https://www.cntraveler.com/story/alaskan-town-kaktovik-polar...
"Yes guns are dangerous, but they're meant to be. They still don't kill as many people as cars do!"
"Yes cars are dangerous, but they're fulfilling a real need. Transportation is more valuable than violence!"