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Comment by village-idiot | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who's believed that the key to sustainable futures is simply swapping out ICE for electric motors simply is being wishful at best, willfully difficult at worse.

The biggest problem I have with electric cars is that they continue to encourage low density low efficiency suburbs with hours long commutes into the high density cities. This is economically unsustainable, roads are expensive, and will only get worse as EVs pay no gas tax and weigh more than their ICE cousins. Considering that America's road system is in bad need of repair and we don't have the will or funds to fix it, doubling down on them is not a wise call.

Also, it's not like producing an EV is a carbon neutral act.

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The ship sailed on low-density suburbs 60 years ago. We're past the point of return on those. Outside of San Francisco, Manhattan, and downtown Chicago, most people live in the 'burbs and that's not changing. We will be living with this housing stock for decades--if not centuries--to come. It's best to engineer around that reality, not to daydream of an Amsterdam-like utopia that will never happen for 99% of this country.

You are far too certain. 70 years ago a prognosticator wouldn't be considered insane to say "the ship sailed on cities 50 years ago, Americans live in downtown and that's not changing". These things do change, often quite quickly.

Personally, I think the Boomers are in for a big shock when they try to sell their homes for a "fair" price, and discover that Millennials neither want nor can afford large suburban homes. Once that happens the market (and politics probably) are going to do some really freaky things.

> Millennials neither want nor can afford large suburban homes

I see this often. Very few people want large homes when they are either single or don't have kids.

As soon as you do have kids and they start to grow to an age where they want to play outside, having space to run, play sports, be away from traffic, have their own room, etc gets a lot higher on your priority list.

You can also get a suburban home without it being "large" and still get a lot of space to go with it. People used to get "starter homes" and then periodically trade up if/when their incomes increased or they had some equity in the home.

It seems like the biggest barrier to this today is that people want to go straight to the HGTV home. I can't tell you how many people I've known who, straight out of school, overextend to the most expensive house they can afford.

If you want more house, for your money...that usually means buying farther away from density.

You act like Millenials don't already have children, when the oldest members of that cohort are 37.

That's because it's a known trend:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/josephcoughlin/2018/06/11/mille...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/singletons/201804/sh...

https://www.parents.com/parents-magazine/parents-perspective...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/upshot/americans-are-havi...

Yeah, so that reinforces my point. Millenials aren't going to buy up those suburban homes.

Anecdote of one. 36, wife and two kids. Have a quarter acre of land, a pool, and a 2600 sq ft house in a Tier 2 city for ~$200k. Why would I ever choose higher density and city living? I would not pay more for a lower quality of life (and distance means little to me, as I work from home and my kids don't go to school).

I happily bought my suburban home instead of living close to others in a condo or a townhouse.

Buying suburban for me would replace my 30m walking commute for a 1.5h driving commute, all for a yard I wouldn't have time to use with my commute. Not a good trade for me.

I also don't have any kids and won't be having them.

Fair points. My commute is 20 minutes (long enough for one NPR podcast and a Dunkin Dounts coffee on the way), and I only go into the office a few days each month. My employer even installed an EV charger for me!

That sounds about perfect for a driving commute.

How old are you? I was quite sure that I wouldn't have kids, either, but I randomly met a nice girl who lived in the (urban) apartment upstairs from me and next thing I knew, I was 38, married, and watching my son being born. It comes at you fast and unexpected and it wasn't at all the life-ruining thing that I was sure it was when I was 28. Here in my early 40s, my only regret is not doing it earlier.

Old enough and married long enough to make me changing my mind unlikely.

FWIW, what works for you as a childless person is not super relevant to what works, in general. In the long term, earth will be filled mostly with people who have children.

Make that an anecdote of 4 - you, I, and 2 neighbors. Also, better school quality compared to the urban core.

Yep! This is the "smart for the individual, dumb for the group" type of a dilemma. It absolutely makes sense for you to do this, individually. As a society, it's rather undesirable for people to live this way. Your lifestyle is being subsidized by (mostly poorer) people living in dense areas [1], and by the externalities we all deal with: pollution from extra driving, lawn care (leaf blowers, gas powered lawn mowers, weed wackers, etc), otherwise unnecessary infrastructure (bridges, plumbing, electric lines, roads, sewage, etc.)

It doesn't make you a bad person to be taking advantage of bad policies. But cities do need to incentivize sustainable living over unsustainable suburban sprawl.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/9/5/but-rich-people...

I don't disagree. Simply price what it'll cost me to live in low density housing away from other people and I'm happy to pay. I will pay whatever it costs to not live in a dense urban core (to your points about environmental impact, we own two Teslas, have solar panels on the roof, have an electric lawnmower, and consume most of our power on site).

Sprawl is not unsustainable if you internalize the external costs, and I'll argue it'll get cheaper as mobility moves to electric vehicles and trucks, new infrastructure (with higher longevity) is built in new subdivisions instead of trying to replace 100+ year old gas, water, and sewer mains, etc.

@village-idiot: To your deleted comment, yes, my Teslas have a carbon impact during their manufacturing, but it is less than the SUV and pickup truck we used to own. It is very difficult to have no impact whatsoever on the Earth; optimize the best you can.

Yes, but fewer people are having children, which reduces the demand for suburban living.

The suburbs also have less attraction for me as a parent. In the old days you could let your kids roam a suburb freely - now you can't. So why not live in a city? You have the same restrictions, but also a lot more distractions such as free museums.

Why can't you let your kids roam in a suburb?

I suppose my kids could technically "roam" but they won't have anywhere to go that's interesting. Most kids can't even walk or bike to school in the suburbs.

Interesting is also very different for a kid. Kids get interested in bugs, the woods, forts, climbing on trees.

In the suburbs I've lived in, there are no forts, woods, or trees that you can climb, without being told off by whomever owns the property the tree is on.

Ahh. I'm lucky enough that my kids have some trails, two parks, a lake, a water park etc. within walking/biking distance to roam to. Not to mention friends' yards. And roam they do.

There’s an increasing social pressure since the 1980s to supervise children at all times because of “stranger danger”. Parents have had the cops called on them for letting their kids play in the yard.

Nothing structural has changed about letting kids roam, but the social side has.

Busybodies who call the cops when they see children without a nearby supervising adult?

Statistically, it is much safer to let your kids roam today than it was 30 years ago. Violent crimes are down quite a lot across the board.

My kids roam freely every day in our suburb. They are 6 and 3 years old. Suburbs like mine are awesome: most residential streets here have no outlets and don't have a lot of car traffic as a result. My boys have friends up and down the block and we know everybody in every house on the street. It's a fantastic way for kids to grow up.

Somehow Americans managed to have large families 100 years ago without the palatial McMansions. You don't need a large home unless you're running on the real estate investment treadmill.

The suburbs have less air and noise pollution, which is good for the children but overall it's a dull and isolated environment. Playing alone in the backyard just because that is the only place where a child can go out of the house is quite sad.

In Europe the children can go to a shared park or a playground. Strolling along a street is also safe and quite pleasant when there is little traffic. There is more space and things to do than you can have in your backyard. And more importantly, they get to play with other children.

We live in the suburbs. Our kids play with other kids at the local park all the time. But you're insane if you can't see the huge advantage to being able to just let the kids out into the backyard.

This sounds exactly like the US suburbs I've been in!

I'm a Millennial (by some definitions) with kids. I don't want "more house"; instead I want my kids to have access to things to foster their independence and growth.

I have a lot of friends, with kids, who have had to look farther out into the suburbs because of home prices and inventory. And nothing in this price range is HGTV material, believe me.

There's some more nuance here than "urban-jungle" vs "suburbia".

It is totally possible to live in a walkable area with urban amenities without being inside a dense mega-city. These used to be called "street-car" suburbs-- urban nucleations that exist just outside of the central business districts of medium-to-large cities. They're sort of like cities unto themselves. They're sometimes referred to as "main-street" communities.

Lots of people live in such places and don't realize it or they've managed to give too much away for automobile infrastructure to notice that, YES, it is possible to live such that not every trip necessarily begins and ends with an automobile in a parking space. This can be done in many places _without_ moving to NYC/SF/Chicago.

How much house one needs (if any) is a lifestyle decision that can fluctuate over time. People can adapt. It starts with demanding things like "complete streets" (https://smartgrowthamerica.org/program/national-complete-str...), walkability as a target in new developments and intelligent requirements for parking so that we don't end up with "ocean-of-asphalt" parking lots.

I get what you’re saying but just from a legal and complexity point of view, you’re unlikely to find radical change in suburbia.

It’s just like the issues with rail — because you have so many landowners, the capital costs of transforming a single family block or subdivision to higher density is really expensive or requires eminent domain, which would be politically difficult.

You can have scenarios (especially now that it’s ok to walk away from mortgages) where prices drop. Single family isn’t going away.

> Personally, I think the Boomers are in for a big shock when they try to sell their homes for a "fair" price, and discover that Millennials neither want nor can afford large suburban homes

There are plenty of foreigner investors who'd be happy to buy their property.

> Millennials neither want nor can afford large suburban homes

Due to the economics of supply and demand, if the former clause is true then the latter clause cannot also be true.

There's a lag in between those things where both clauses can definitely be true.

Are you saying Brooklyn, The Bronx, and the neighborhoods outside of downtown Chicago are suburbs?

If so, we may have vastly different ideas about the definition of a city.

Also, Seattle, Philly, Boston, Miami, and lots of other smaller cities are very much unlike living in the suburbs.

I know nothing about the latter three cities, but most of Seattle is made up of low-density, residential-only neighborhoods, very suburban-feeling to my sensibilities - and I'm talking about the city proper, too, not including all the even-more-suburban areas surrounding.

I grew up in Chicago. I've lived in Brooklyn, LA, Seattle, and now I'm back in Chicago.

As far as I'm concerned, there's a ton more "city" in those neighborhoods than those high-rises. Density is only one variable in an incredibly large equasion. Seattle has a good deal of its own as well. Even in neighborhoods as nice as Queen Anne.

That said, I wish most other cities had it as good as Seattle. And I wish Seattle was far more diverse than it is.

That's a false choice. Do the right thing on the margin! Allow lots of new high-density construction. Tax cars entering city centres. Extend metro lines and allow plenty of high-density construction around each station.

Sure, you won't turn Tampa into Rotterdam overnight but those changes are important and they do add up. 50 years of these policies would give us much better, even if not perfect, cities.

They didn't turn Rotterdam into Rotterdam over night either. It took several decades of infrastructure work for the city to become bikeable.

> We will be living with this housing stock for decades--if not centuries--to come.

I had the impression suburban homes tend not to be well-built. They may last a few decades, but that's about it.

Other forms of electric transport, like scooters and electric bikes should be pushed more. Together with decent mass transit they solve the last mile problem quite nicely imho. But unfortunately the car lobby is extremely strong and doesn't want to lose its market.

There's this weird thing that happens in northern climates where all the bikers and scooter riders magically disappear sometime around October and don't reappear until sometime in April. I can't figure out why this happens, we should really aim to understand that before we push bikes and scooters on half the human population. I don't think it's the car lobby that causes this disappearance.

Not all. I just put on my balaklava and some knobby tires. It's not that bad with the right clothes. I wouldn't walk around in Boston winter without my face masks either.

I'm genuinely curious: do you wear glasses? How do you keep them from getting fogged up/iced over when riding in the winter?

Gotta get a face mask with vent holes for your nose/mouth. That lets the moist air escape away from your eyes, reducing fog.

Contacts are essential. Even without my balaklava, my hat bothers my glasses, making them press into my ears.

Also, my Asian nose doesn't hold glasses very well. Once while biking in the summer (with sweat dripping) they fell off in traffic. I was basically blind. It was terrifying.

Thus, contacts.

> I'm genuinely curious: do you wear glasses? How do you keep them from getting fogged up/iced over when riding in the winter?

Don't waste your time. Pro-cyclists are the most biased and privileged people I've ever met. Just get on your bike, it's so easy! forgets that some people have bad knees. All you need is some goggles when it rains! forgets that people wear glasses. Just wait for the snow to be cleared! forgets that some cities don't clear snow. Just buy knobby tires! forgets that smaller people will struggle with the extra weight. Just wear a face mask! forgets that some cities ban face coverings and certain demographics get looked at strangely if they wear balaklavas

I laugh at the idea that cyclists are privileged people when your entire argument is "I want to sit in my $30k steel box, not have to prepare for changes in weather, not interact with other people, and not work". The idea that someone on a $400 bike who read a weather report and works to commute is "privileged" is ludicrous.

Don't forget the massive infrastructure investments required to support life built on the private car. Maintained roads and gasoline come at an enormous cost to society. The cost of everything is multiplied by driving-based distances.

Also, drivers aren’t even paying their way for roads. The percentage of roads paid for by gas taxes is at 50% and falling. Those of us who commute sans car are chipping in thousands of dollars per year to subsidize road commuters.

The privilege is around ability, not cost. No less than half of my coworkers are constantly complaining about how broken their bodies are, you expect these people to just hop on a bike and go?

Well, if they had done that earlier their bodies probably wouldn’t be so broken. Sitting still is bad for you.

I just find your hatred for cyclists utterly bizarre. Did a cyclist murder a family member and you need revenge, or what?

I absolutely do not hate cyclists, I am one myself. When I lived in the city, I commuted in to work on a bike. I have lived that life and know what it’s about.

What I disagree with is the idea that we can build a society around cycling. I was lucky to be able to live close enough to work and be abled enough to do the ride 5 days a week. And I was lucky that, on days with bad weather, I could work from home because of my job as a software developer.

As I started to look outside of my own life, I saw that not so many people were lucky. Actually, most people weren’t this lucky. How would I ride to work as a construction worker, with all my equipment and rotating job locations? How could I do this as a nurse, where I would be on my feet all day working odd hours? The more and more I considered all the ways people participate in society, the more I realized that the very narrow constraints of cycling just don’t work for most people.

So sure, build the cycling lanes and bike racks, I’m not asking you to rip those up. There are many people who can cycle and we should accommodate them. But that’s it - Just accommodate them. Don’t try to uproot the core structure of our way of life. You’ll want the roadways when you get old and injured can’t ride any more.

Oh, so you made up my position (rip up all the roads), and then got pissed about it. Got it.

This isn't really a fair statement to make. Sure some people will have struggles with using a bike all winter and it may not be possible for them, but it doesn't invalidate the ideas or arguments as a whole. To assume all people for the idea are just biased and privileged based on cherry picked negative situations is just not fair. If you can't cycle then you can't cycle. Just because a few can't do something doesnt mean that this idea as a whole is invalid.

The idea alone isn’t invalid in theory, but in practice. Add up all the people who can’t ride bikes for whatever reasons and you see that we’re exactly where we’re at now; some people ride, most don’t. You seem to think that it’s a small number of people who can’t ride, but I think it’s the opposite.

Some people can't drive due to medical conditions or because they're too young or too old. Should we stop building roads?

Nope, but those people can be driven by someone else. How the hell do I drive my mother to the hospital on my bike?

“I might occasionally need to use a car, therefore I should use it all the time no matter the context” is a very weak argument.

"This thing has incredible utility and practicality, therefore I use it for most transportation because it allows for flexible planning - a necessity in an ever-changing world"

As opposed to a bike: "This thing has a very constrained set of operating parameters, therefore I use it occasionally when the situation fits best"

If it's an emergency you call an ambulance, if it's not an emergency you take a taxi.

I don't understand this reasoning.

People use this same logic when others suggest eating healthy and exercising.

"And if someone works three jobs and has ten kids? Hmmmm? Then what?? Gotcha!"

Begins to reek of someone using the condition of others to rationalize why they themselves can't be bothered to do something. Not to mention the fact that you're more privileged in a car than on a bicycle.

Cycling really does attract the same nonsensical aggressive reactions as eating healthy and exercising.

In the Netherlands the fraction of cyclists that keep riding in Winter is much larger than in cities with similar climate. Cycling in winter is not that hard, it's not worse that going on foot. What's important is that snow is removed.

There are sooo many things that you need to do to make cycling in winter possible; snow must be cleared, you need special tires, you need extra warm weather gear, you need to wait for the blizzard to end, etc. etc.

Or I could just get in my car with a light jacket and blast the heat. Rain, shine, snow, blizzard, whatever. I'm good.

Except for the warm clothes the same is true for cars. Snow must be cleared, you need special tires, you shouldn't drive during a blizzard. It's just that you've normalized those things when it comes to cars.

When the snow is cleared you are generally fine with normal tires on bikes btw, because you can just go a little slower.

I live in Minnesota which is a cold weather state. We get lots of snow and winters last a long time. I’m not from Minnesota but have lived here for 18 years. I have never changed tires on my car. I will never bike in the winter time. Too many chances to slip in winter while biking. Pockets of ice, areas that aren’t cleared well, etc.

Studded tires make riding on slippery roads a non issue. The risk is from drivers sliding into you.

Proper biking infrastructure would reduce this risk in all weather.

Also you don't need special tires. As the name implies, all-weather tires work just fine. And I can make it through quite a lot more snow in my car than on my bike (the converse is that it's a lot easier to unstick a bike than a car!). Also the risk of commuting in the winter is a lot greater for cyclists than motorists (i.e., if a car loses control and hits you).

The same goes for driving (well, driving safely at least). You need winter tires, you need an ice scraper, probably a snow shovel and other gear. You probably also shouldn't be driving around in a blizzard, either.

Come to Copenhagen or Amsterdam. We bike in all kinds of weather, backed up by great public transport.

You definitely don't need winter tires; all-season tires work just fine. And an ice scraper (or even a shovel) isn't a burden for motorists. Also, winters in Copenhagen are probably quite a lot warmer than many places in the U.S. (the lowest average monthly temperature is barely below freezing!). Quite a different story from Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, or Des Moines.

Yeah, you actually need winter tires. All season tires are garbage.

I’m guessing you’re not accounting for wear. I can’t tell the difference between my all seasons and winter tires, but the performance gap between summer tires and all seasons (in winter conditions) is enormous.

Wear matters a ton. Winter tires are usually made of very soft rubber to maintain pliability below freezing. Driving them when it gets warm destroys them quickly.

I'm not sure if you meant that as a rebuttal or not, but I completely agree. :)

Depending on the weather, yes you do need winter tires. All-seasons are a compromise, and the only actually good ones wear out really quickly.

I've scrapers are not a burden to carry in a car, but they do cost money, and require physical effort to use.

You should visit Copenhagen in the winter, and enter a dimension of slush, the freezing/thawing cycles make it extremely unpredictable to ride or drive in. Actual steady freezing temperatures are so much easier to deal with.

It hasn’t stopped a lot of us up here in Minneapolis. Other than - possibly - a balaclava, I don’t dress significantly different for winter biking than I do for general winter weather. The effort warms me up quickly.

No one in Amsterdam has special tires on their cycles during winter and everyone here has a winter coat, it really is not a big deal.

Amsterdam the average winter temperature is like 3 degrees Celsius. Where I live it's -10, and it can easily dip into the -20's for weeks and the -30's for days.

How far northern are we talking? There are still a lot of bikers in NYC in my observation, and Amsterdam is pretty far north.

Amsterdam May be at a high latitude but it’s very mild.

There's also these things called "clothes" humans have been using to protect themselves from the elements for quite a while. Humans walked across Siberia with little more than animal skins. I think most can handle a 30 minute bike ride when it's a bit chilly.

It's often not the cold, but the riding surface. Ice, snow, and water really change the dynamics of riding a bike.

The same is true for cars, yet nobody uses that as a reason not to drive a car.

I’m always shocked how few people swap out for winter tires in appropriate climates.

Also distressing was the number of people convinced that all wheel drive made their car safer in the snow.

Isn't it safer, though?

I'm not very experienced with this stuff, but one of the issues is having sufficient traction to make it up hills, and all-wheel drive is superior at that. If you have to roll back down a hill and try again with a running start, that may be doable, but that makes things more chaotic and unpredictable on the roads (compared to making it up the first time). In an ideal world, other drivers would be attentive enough to handle it, but in reality not so much.

Also, more generally, because static friction is greater than dynamic friction, any time your tires lose grip, you have less control over your car at that moment. All-wheel drive means tires are less likely to lose grip when accelerating / applying thrust.

No, it’s more convenient. I personally would argue that AWD can make cars less safe because of the false confidence it provides.

The most important thing you can do with a car is brake and turn, as those affect safety the most.

All cars brake with all four wheels, drive type has absolutely no effect at all. All modern cars have enough braking power to slide on clean concrete, let alone snow and ice. The only thing you can do to improve braking distance is to change your tires.

Steering is only affected by drive type when you’ve got the hammer down, as you may be asking the front tires to propel and steer the car at once (this is partly why FWD cars often understeer). But in a snowy situation you won’t be driving flat out, so which wheels are driving will have little effect on steering, and zero effect if you’re coasting or braking.

What AWD is great at is getting you off the line in low traction scenarios, which is convenient. It also means that you can get an AWD car up to speeds that are unwise in the present conditions (remember that steering is two wheeled in almost all cars).

The only real advantage that AWD has is that AWD cars are typically heavier than their two wheel drive cousins, and weight absolutely confers safety in snow.

> No, it’s more convenient. I personally would argue that AWD can make cars less safe because of the false confidence it provides.

> The most important thing you can do with a car is brake and turn, as those affect safety the most.

Yep, I could notice that when I was leaving north of arctic circle. Each time my driving mates ended up in the ditch (failing to turn on a crossroad), it was with a 4WD. I tried to explain to them that 4WD does not help to brake and turn (especially when their 4WD land rover/cruiser is 50% to 100% heavier than their regular car), to no avail :-(

Luckily most of the landings happened in the snow banks and were relatively smooth, but the lesson was not learned :-( But hey! they finally get to use the 4WD to pull back out of the ditch :-)

I think we really have no argument with each other here because we're talking about two different things: car capabilities vs. overall picture including driver behavior. "AWD vehicles perform better in ice/snow" is a different statement from "you're safer in an AWD vehicle".

Sure. But in other geographies, what kind of clothes can possibly protect from 96-degree heat and 100% humidity?

Look at how Bedouin nomads dress.

Image-searches say their clothing appears to be long-sleeved, multilayered and often head-covering. I can't tell the weight or the fabric-type, but I'm pretty certain they're not minimum-weight synthetics.

That much insulation seems utterly counterproductive for hot-weather exertion, though it probably would at least protect from sunburn.

A shower at your destination

A shower after biking in shitty weather - while certainly helpful - does not address the characteristic sensation-of-imminent-death during biking in shitty weather.

I've commuted on bike in Montreal down to about -10C. No special clothing, no special tires.

Here in Salt Lake City there are a number of people who commute year round. It really isn't bad as long as the snow is removed - which they do quite well here.

Unfortunately, my bike commute only happens occasionally now that I work in the 'burbs - which, at least here, is where all of the new office complexes are moving.

High altitude snow is also really weird. Back in Denver you just had to get used to snow disappearing and leaving behind dry concrete.

Hour+ long commutes are also just terrible. Terrible to live through psychologically, they waste time with you sitting still and not moving so you get fat and weak, and they are dangerous.

You are absolutely correct, but there is a really weird addendum to this.

There have been a bunch of studies trying to measure the relationship between commuting time and (subjective) quality of life. Most of them find exactly what you'd suspect: longer commutes reduce quality of life.

The weird thing is that they found a small uptick at the absolute extreme edges of commuting, like in the 5+ hour a day range. It's still shittier than a 30 minute commute, but it was better than a 4 hour commute. Nobody really seems to know why this is, but it's there.

Either way, I walk to work. There are few better ways to commute, IMHO.

>"Either way, I walk to work. There are few better ways to commute, IMHO."

The bicycle is one of those ways. It's faster and significantly more efficient.

Bicycling also requires more concentration. I regularly read a book while commuting, which is nice.

Personally, my commute would be too short with a bike. I like a good 20-30 minutes between home and work to clear my head and get in/out of the zone. But that's just me.

I could never read a book while walking, at the very most I'll listen to music, but I also wouldn't do that while biking.

Personal limits of multitasking, I guess :-)

I think it depends a lot on the mode of transportation. An hour driving a car is really awful. An hour sitting in transit or a car someone else is driving is ok-ish because you can at least read a book or something. Though a lot of transit is standing room only which is again rather unpleasant. An hour of walking or cycling IMO is not bad if you have a desk job. Much more pleasant way to get exercise than going to a gym all the time, as many car commuters seem to do.

Another way to look at the problem:

Locating offices unnecessarily in the middle of high-density cities creates long commutes.

locating them in random suburban office parks is much worse, except for those in that particular 'burb.

Even if you are in the suburb it is bad. They office park has no houses within walking distance. Sure technically you are in the same small city, but you may as well be 30 miles apart - either way you will drive to work. (it is possible to bike to work, but you are doing it for exercise or because you are some sort of "new age hippie" - it isn't practical)

I wouldn't want to live in that kind of area, no matter how much I enjoy working in it; the land is far too valuable as office parks.

Why are people willing to spend out their butts for just the right housing, when all they really need is a half-decent car?*

*and perhaps a two-thirds-decent library of hair-raising music or enlightening podcasts

Is it?

Because the traffic in the suburbs is usually nowhere near the level of traffic in the city. The commute time tends to be relative to the traffic density more than the distance.

I drive to the same location, 15 miles away every day. Depending on the time of day and the traffic, the drive will take 15 minutes or 45 minutes.

The commute problem is forcing all of those cars down those same roads at the same time. Locating offices outside of the middle of cities would largely correct the problem.

Lived and worked in the suburbs of Atlanta, can confirm that suburb traffic going cross town of same suburb (Alpharetta) for 5 miles could take similar time as commuting from the same location to Buckhead.

Similarly, going crosstown in Atlanta without highways is also bad.

lol I was going to reply with the Mansell -> Windward Pkwy drive as well :)

The Atlanta suburb is Alpharetta has a night-time population of about 60k people and a day-time population over 120k. Traffic during the day is bad and those office parks aren't exactly close together.

Another example with even worse traffic (but you can usually walk a little bit for lunch time) is Sandy Springs + Dunwoody.

FYI these two job centers are, easily, a 30 minutes drive from each other.

These are scattered all around the city so choosing to live in a suburbs really limits your working options if you need to get to an opposite-side suburb. (60 - 90 minutes one-way would be normal to get from Alpharetta to Marietta with any traffic)

It's bad because some commuters will have to cross the city center to get to the suburban park, and there's no feasibly way to provide commuter oriented public transit.

Compare that to the offices in downtown Chicago for example, where a large percentage of the workers arrive at work via Metra (medium distance commuter trains) and el (inner city public transit).

It may sound like a good idea at first but it really isn't.

Switching jobs is much easier if you can essentially keep the same commute. Companies are more efficient if their employees can easily meet with clients, potential recruits, attend conferences or just have coffee with their peers. All the positive spillover effects would go away if each company had its office in some random suburb.

As a Chicagoan, the perceived value of an office's location tends to be directly proportional to how close it is to the center of town. Downtown is well-served by both the intracity bus/train system and the unrelated intercity light rail system. Even offices a mile or two further out can be much more annoying to get to on public transportation.

Think about this: How long is the new-to-trashed cycle for phones? for cars? for homes? The answers are, approximately: 4 years, 16 years and 100 years.

The problem with your top-down utopian "we shall raze and rebuild our cities" rhetoric is that it always crashes against the massive inertia of the existing built-up landscape. No to mention that people genuinely like their houses, but we don't even need to bring that up.

Don’t put words in my mouth.

> Anyone who's believed that the key to sustainable futures is simply swapping out ICE for electric motors simply is being wishful at best, willfully difficult at worse.

Hopefully people aren't literally thinking that, considering that cars are only one piece of the carbon problem. It's not even the biggest piece.

I would recommend you take a visit to the tesla motors subreddit.

There are problems with cars, but returning to the bicycle, an 18th century city technology, is regressive, not the way forward. The car was a great liberator from the congested and dirty density of the city which was once the luxury of only the rich to escape with their estates and private coaches. Make the suburbs more energy efficient, and figuring out an innovative and fairer way of financing roads is the progressive path.

> returning to the bicycle, an 18th century city technology, is regressive, not the way forward

Just because something is old does not mean it is a bad idea. By the way, bicycles were first developed in the 19th century (not 18th) and have been continuously improved since then. And motor vehicles are not much newer, anyway. The Benz Patent Motor Car was sold in the 1880s. For comparison, the most popular type of bike sold today, the "safety bike" became popular in the late 1880s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_bicycle

I've explained cycling to high-tech types as taking advantage of the literal nanotechnology the human body uses. Bikes make use of the human body much more than cars in my view.

You're mistaking the movement per unit energy efficiency of the car vs. The bicycle as the only reason for preferring one over the other. There are a myriad of emergent benefits to people having affordable climate-controlled engined-vehicles with storage that has improved their lives dramatically.

Reread my comment, as I don't know what you are referring to.

I never said bikes are better in every way, or even more efficient. Actually, I think a well designed motor vehicle could easily beat a bike in efficiency, particularly for common diets, but it would be smaller like a bike. E.g., a motorcycle could be better.

My argument was that old technologies aren't necessarily bad and that motor vehicles are nearly as old as bikes, so the age argument also applies to cars. I don't disagree that cars have benefits.

By that logic we really should start ditching pants. They’re absolutely ancient!

Newer is not inherently better.

Well, can I at least have an EV on my bicycle for commuting? To me the biggest challenge once cities get cars off the road is to deal with motorcycle traffic (assuming they're not in a city where cars were always secondary to motorcycles). That allows a wider range (distance from transit) of commuters to avoid fully-powered vehicles.

Ideally I'd love to see more of these bicycle silos, both attached to transit hubs and in office environments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X4YPRAqXnc

They help solve the safety issues with leaving your bicycle somewhere. More traditional parking is great where space and trust allows, too (say, in a private office or behind a monitored door).

Oh yeah. EV bikes are awesome. Far more space efficient than cars (although less than buses), and producing very little extra road wear compared to regular bikes.

I think there’s a quiet bike revolution going on right now, EV bikes went from exotic and home made to common practically overnight. I’m excited to see how this will change our society.

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