Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality | Hacker News Reader

Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

economist.com

684 pointstosh605 comments

Spent the last 6 months in Seoul and the surrounding cities in Korea. Never needed a car. You can literally do everything without a car, everything is a short walk. I truly believe it makes a huge positive impact on happiness when you can just walk anywhere instead of having to drive. Also you'll notice that in Korea/Japan there are way more small businesses and things to do (eg. karaoke, cafes, etc) because people of this. In America there's relatively less to do because leaving the home is more of a hassle and less interesting, so people just stay in more.

My least favorite thing about living in America is the dependence on cars (outside of a select few cities like NYC). Now that my parents in the suburbs sold their spare car, whenever I go back to visit, I'm stranded there during the weekdays because the nearest bus stop is like a 40 minute walk, and the nearest subway would be maybe a 90 minute walk. If I need to go anywhere, I'm dependent on Uber/Lyft. Even if I get access to a car, there's relatively much less to do as I mentioned above.

In the same situation as you. Currently living with parents out in the suburbs. Plan to move later so I don't need or want a car but I'm basically stuck at home when not working. The only thing there is to do here is cycling which is relatively safe but you can't realistically get anywhere so I do it just for sport. The car culture is pretty bad in Australia as well.

Do you live in Australia? I've lived in Sydney most of my life and I've found it fairly easy to get around with public transport. I'm currently living in Melbourne and it's even better, and has much better support for bikes.

The Bondi to Coogee beach walk is spectacular. I also like that there’s one street which cuts through the entirety of downtown Sydney (George Street).

I lived for a couple of years in the Melbourne CBD (off Lt Lonsdale) and never had a need for a car the whole time.

Different story later living in Elwood and working in Port Melbourne, not having a car to commute along the Esplanade would have been a huge time sink.

The bus comes twice a day to my area and it lines up with school hours.

There are lots of places in Australia where you can ride to work. I've done it in Melbourne and Canberra. It just depends on how far you are from your job. Lots of people can cycle. Few really do though. Even in Canberra where the cycle paths are great it's ~10% of people who ride, perhaps even lower.

I'm about 20km away from work. I sometimes ride in but the road to the city is super unsafe.

As a European living in Australia (Melbourne, specifically), I'm horrified by the cycling infrastructure. It's such an afterthought most places, and you're usually not separated from fast-moving cars. Sometimes the cycle lane literally cuts across a car lane — super dangerous. I don't miss much about the Netherlands, but I definitely miss the cycling amenities. You're a first-class citizen on the road in a way that's hard to describe to cyclists here (especially the fervent ones).

To be fair, good cycling infrastructure is not pervasive in the whole of Europe either. In the Netherlands it is, of course, as in most of northern Europe. But I'm from Spain and in many cities, cycling infrastructure is either almost nonexistent or an afterthough with many insecure spots, just as you describe for Melbourne. And cyclists are definitely second-class citizens. Things have improved a lot in the last ten years (from cycling in cities being almost unthinkable to Melbourne-like) so I hope this comment won't be true in another ten, but we still have a long way to go.

Ability to walk to places and decent public transport is practically universal throughout Europe, though.

I wonder if part of the success of silicon valley can be attributed to this?

In most other places you can spend your time doing interesting things all day long and never get bored. Whereas in SV you just start a business?

How many people would not have began their software ventures if there was enough comedy clubs, pubs, theaters, community centers, beaches etc a short 10mins walk from home?

Actually wondering?

It's a good question, but I think if that were true, we wouldn't see many startups in places like SF and NYC, and quite a lot of them in the middle of nowhere.

For me, interactions with novel people, experiences, and ideas are a big feeder for my own ideas.

Venture Capitalists aren't in the middle of nowhere.

Something attracted the VCs in the first place though.

This is an excellent point. People talk about the important network effects of SV, and that was definitely material before the Internet made distance less relevant. But however much information flows through copper wire, investment doesn't, because VCs expect people to come to them.

Never been to SF (or US for that matter) so genuinely interested if this is a factor - from all the biographies I’ve read and looking from the sidelines it seems to me - novel people + capital + entrepreneurship + technical expertise (post apollo) + boredom are the key sauce for those kinds of things.

And thats not about what SV is today. I was lead to believe the so named HBO show portrays it quite accurately. I was thinking more what it was in the 70s.

Though to be honest living in the mediterranean I vastly prefer the walkable nature oriented laid back kind of places myself. Way more fun (and healthy) to live in. I was just wondering if that boredom thing was a factor

Maybe some people are bored, but definitely not all of them. Stanford is a really exciting, interesting place for people that are intellectually inclined. But Google was born on its campus.

A good comparison is creativity in art. I know people who attend a ton of plays, for example, but that doesn't prevent them from creating new plays. Artists tend to cluster in space and in social networks (that is, schools of art) because they draw inspiration and ambition from other artists and their works.

I think it's not boredom, exactly, but being more interested in creation than consumption. For people inclined to consumption, we now have infinite amounts of entertainment. But plenty of people still like creating things for others, creating things with a real impact on the world. YouTube and GitHub make it clear that there are a lot of those people out there.

That is not my experience with Silicon Valley. My experience is an area of mostly suburbs with small strip malls and 10 block downtowns. Cars are a must and public transit is terrible.

Considering that every other American suburb has these same qualities of being boring, yet did not become Silicon Valley, I'd say this has very little impact on why Silicon Valley is what it is.

I went fishing today and had to drive some very sketchy, not-on-google-maps dirt roads to get to the first spot I tried. What happens to that sort of thing once we're all living in walkable condos and depending on driverless Uber for exceptions?

You rent a car that you can drive yourself to wherever you want. Over the long term in a walkable city, that is definitely cheaper than owning a car.

Or an autonomous vehicle picks you and your friends up and the experience doesn't just start at the time of arrival to the destination.

Assuming it has that skill.

Assuming you have that skill after years of having a computer drive you around.

It's not hard to learn how to drive. Otherwise not ~everybody would be able to do it.

I don't think that self driving cars will replace all cars immediately. That makes little sense from CAPEX perspective, cars are fine for 5, 10, maybe 15 years. You'll not replace an okay car for the latest self driving vehicle, dumping the previous car to the junkyard. Rollout may take decades. And we still don't know when are they coming to the market, that may also take a very long time.

It's not hard to learn how to drive in a society where most people want to learn. A couple of decades after self-driving cars are commonplace there won't be any instructors working in cities, the rules will be very restrictive for what human drivers are allowed to do, and lessons will be astromonically expensive due to the low demand.

I think the world changes enough in a few decades that we can assume it will adjust to the new landscape.

This is a joke. Driving is incredibly easy to self teach with 10 minutes and a parking lot.

I guess this becomes like horse riding. You can still do that and it's not even that expensive.

In Helsinki there are multiple good fishing spots that are accessible with public transport. You can also visit two national parks using regional bus.

Don't let be fooled by the "tourist impression". Staying for some days isn't the same as living in a place, involving commuting to work, bringing children to school, etc

Every city looks nice as a Tourist, but then it's hard if you live there and in the false zone of the city (=farest away)

Having moved from somewhere with working public transportation to the United States (and having lived here for close to a decade), I can assure you it’s not tourist impression.

How many kids do you have? Any more than one and car becomes necessary in my experience.

Define “necessary”.

Of course I would agree it’s necessary in the U.S., but that’s saying very little.

Are you talking about shuttling your kids to school? I know in Japan most kids 6y+ just take themselves on public transport or walking.

How is it done in other countries?

India: School buses come and pick them up. Rest 50% parents drop them on 2-wheelers and car. Close by kids walk to the school with friends if older and with parents if younger.

I walked to school till I could cycle there (~3km). My parents would drive me only if it was pouring or blizzarding.

(Central Alps, Countryside)

Can confirm for Switzerland. Primary school was walking with friends for 2-3km, bikes were also allowed for older kids.

Middle and high schools are usually farther away. So public bus it is. In the morning there are extra buses for students, but they just stop at the normal stops of the line.

Germany: Most (all?) cities have special tickets for pupils. There are separate bus lines in the morning which pick up the pupils from the bus stops and take them directly to school.

In the afternoon there are some special lines too, otherwise you just take a normal line with your pupil ticket.

That's at least how it worked in my time, like 20+ years ago.

Still does generally. Sometimes city administration is picky in granting these tickets, but my city is a special case when it comes to money anyway. In Munich for example the subway is usually crowded with children around 7:30.

I just walked to school. I never needed to take a bus or the car except when I lived far in the countryside. I'm talking about Spain.

Anyway schools sometimes have their own bus, parents pay a private company so the bus takes the students either from their home or very close.

In the uni there was special bus lines that went around all the city to the campus.

> In the uni there was special bus lines that went around all the city to the campus.

I know this from my university city, too. It was arranged that way so that students would not overcrowd the normal bus lines.

Poland, tickets here are free for kids under 7 and for primary school kids with valid school ID... And 50% discount for higher education. That's in addition to long range school busses.

In NL it is mostly bikes. Even for larger distances (10 km and up).

Imagine a world where instead of having to strap your screaming kids in to a car seat for an hour drive in traffic, you walked along a pedestrian street, your kids kicking a ball around, you visit a couple stores, see your kids off to their school, and then walk a couple more blocks to work.

When school is over your kids walk safely back home by themselves because there aren't cars out there threatening their lives.

This sounds way less stressful than your kids being dependent on you and your car for everything they need.

I don't thing this is what codebolt was talking about.

If you can one kid - there is no problem really. Walk him or her to school in the morning, ask grandmother to bring them back etc.

When you have more than one - it is entrily possible they will end up going to different schools and after the school one of them had to go to the music shool and the other one to his hockey team or something etc etc. You simply can't do this without a car.

I was the only child in the family so we never needed a car for this kind of scenario, plus we were living in a relatevely small city (450k), so public transport was more than enough for me, but this is not always the case.

>and then walk a couple more blocks to work.

yeah, now imaging you have two of them going to two different schools, each 40 minutes walking distance from home, different directions and your office in somewhere else too.

It’s definitely possible without a car — people here in Holland do it all the time. Maybe qualify your answer to “suburban America” and similarly (non)designed places?

Point is, it’s not fundamentally impossible to live with 2+ kids and no car.

I live in Russia though. When I went to school (1995-2005) I lived in a 450k city, now it is Moscow. And Moscow have much better public transport than many other places.

My point was about little kids, you won't send them off to a public transport. We are not talking about teenagers here. Not me at least.

Sounds like a problem of where you live(d) rather than intrinsic to cars or lack thereof.

I have 2 kids and live in Berlin and never had nor needed a car. I previously lived for 8 years in Vienna and the same holds true there.

The same will be true to most or all decently-sized western European cities.

As have been pointed out by multiple people, kids are perfectly capable of taking public transit themselves. Kids under ten might need to be accompanied by a guardian, but there are usually two parents in a household, and some grandparents will help, too. Caretakers can be hired in certain cases. Some family “pool” their kids together too, not unlike in the U.S. where parents would take turns to drive neighbors’ kids.

Also, having cars but no public transit doesn’t change the fundamental equation and doesn’t improve the situation much (especially considering the fact that in many places driving in the morning rush hours might even be slower than taking the subway), in fact quite the opposite, teenagers are wholly dependent on parents when they could have been independent.

> You simply can’t do this without a car.

I grew up like that. People have been doing that for decades.

> As have been pointed out by multiple people, kids are perfectly capable of taking public transit themselves.

This is another difference that intersects with other issues in America. In a car, your child is under your control. Moreover, adding to your following point of a child under ten being unaccompanied in public, no American parent would dream of letting their children go out alone and recently, this includes even children in their early teens. Especially in the previous decades, helicopter parenting has reached a new peak in the US, this seems somewhat coincident with a general infantalization of young adults.

It is incredibly common for kids to be alone in cities in the US. I can look out my window right now and see 2 children playing in a park with no supervision.

On my train commute every morning there were school children who get off at my stop because it’s where their school is. Their rides happen at reduced fares as well.

The trope rings very false to me and seems to be about one particular demographic (white and suburban).

If there is an increase in over watching our children it’s because we’ve over indexed on cars, not the reverse.

There have also been cases where families were threatened with/by CPS for letting their children outside without supervision. It's good to know that attitude is not universal, but it does occur.

Those cases are newsworthy, because they are newsworthy.

As kasey_junk implied, this sort of over-protectiveness is not universal in the USA. For example, NYC provides all students that live further than 1/2 mile from their school with a discounted public transit card (soon to be free). While very young kids are rare, tween and teen students can often be seen unaccompanied on mass transit. And even more often walking alone or in groups without parents. No one bats an eye except possibly to complain a bit about the groups of boisterous kids blocking the sidewalk :-)

> no American parent would dream of letting their children go out alone and recently, this includes even children in their early teens

This is, AFAICT, mostly a white suburban “middle-class” (mid-high income working class, including proletarian intelligentsia, really) attitude, rather than something that applies to all American parents.

Along with the other replies, you're right. I will say though, when we're talking about car culture, white suburban middle class types are ones to mostly support it.

So basically we change our quality of life to fit some urban ideal? My kids’ grandparents live in a different state and a different country.

A child on the BART train? You have got to be kidding. With the insane people, mentally ill, the thieves and the homeless, I would’t expose my kids to having to deal with that nonsense. Cars are awesome. Being forced to share public transportation with a bunch of weirdos isn’t progress.

I am riding home right now at 2am from the airport in Hayward to my house in Mountain View. In a car, I’ll be home soon. With public transport, I’m stranded for hours. Public transportation can’t go everywhere.

At least tens of millions of teenage or younger students take public transit to school around the world, somehow few of them seem to fall prey to “the insane people, mentally ill, the thieves and the homeless.”

Last I checked kids don’t tend to wander outside at 2am, and places with public transit tend to have taxis too. (I would add that the last thing I want to do at 2am is to drive myself home; in fact, a couple years back I had an accident due to driving jet-lagged the day following an international flight.)

Your child is probably realistically safer on a train than in your car. Deaths due to traffic accidents per year are much, _much_ greater than deaths on trains through all causes, per passenger km. Of course, people aren't great at assessing risk.

Ah, but so many families have already changed their quality of life to fit the suburban/car-centric ideal.

>A child on the BART train? You have got to be kidding. With the insane people, mentally ill, the thieves and the homeless,

Typical American paranoia.

I’m a huge proponent of the whole “free range kid” thing, and am always looking for ways to encourage my kid’s independence, but there’s no way on earth I’m putting her on BART by herself. This is not a general paranoia about trains or public transportation—it’s a specific observation about BART in particular.

Hell, I won’t take BART through certain stops at certain times of the day and I’m a grown-ass man.

>usually two parents in a household,

That's getting less true as time goes on.

>and some grandparents will help,

If your parents live more then ~45min away (this is probably true for most people) it's probably not realistic to expect them to help out with childcare.

>Caretakers can be hired in certain cases

If you have the $$$ to rationalize it. That said, if you have to choose between a caretaker and a car it's an easy choice for most people.

>I grew up like that. People have been doing that for decades.

People have been enduring hardships for centuries. It's foolish to expect them to voluntarily continue doing so when they have other options. The fact of the matter is that most people who are in a position to own a car find owning a car worth the tradeoffs.

>As have been pointed out by multiple people, kids are perfectly capable of taking public transit themselves.

Sure, after a certain age.

>Kids under ten might need to be accompanied by a guardian, but there are usually two parents in a household, and some grandparents will help, too. Caretakers can be hired in certain cases.

This works out well in a well developed coutry I suppose. In Russia, for example, most people won't have this kind of options. You want your kid safe? You take your kid to the school yourself (before 10).

And again - I've describe certain cases, not just one. We've never had a car too, but for some cases this is a necessity.

I think you're struggling to imagine the impact that good public transport has on a cities design. Schools, parks, shops, sporting facilities all start congregating around transport stops/hubs so basically everywhere you need to take kids is within a 5 minute walk of one another.

> yeah, now imaging you have two of them going to two different schools, each 40 minutes walking distance from home, different directions and your office in somewhere else too.

I can't imagine why you would send them to different schools, unless one is a high school in which case they're old enough to get there by themselves. For most people the school they're taking the kids to is right next to the transit stop they'll be taking to work.

I live in Moscow and we arguably have a very good public transpot system. Not the best, but still.

As of the rest of you comment - here is my answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20632459

Why would they need to walk 40 minutes? In countries with good public school systems, all of the public schools are equally acceptable so you just send them to the nearest one which is generally less than a mile walk away.

I think you're living in a make-believe world of homogeneity. There are vast differences between the quality of schooling - both public or private - even within global metropolises like NYC, London, Paris & Tokyo. Its downright laughable to assume otherwise.

Middle and high school do matter, but I don’t think primary/elementary/grade school — whatever you call it — makes much of a difference. I attended the average neighborhood primary school back in my day, and went on to the most competitive middle school, high school, and university.

Are you really implying a school in Croydon, a large town in south London is going to be functionally and qualitatively equivalent to say a school in Golders Green, an area in the London Borough of Barnet? [1][2]

Equivalent in all the areas one might measure the attractiveness and potential of a school?

[1]

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

[2]

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

edit:typo

I know nothing about schooling in England, but I would imagine the parents’ education as well as socioeconomic status plays a much greater role than elementary schooling, as is the case everywhere else.

The UK is a pretty poor example since it's a very elitist country.

I live in London, and I don't get your point. There are OFSTED Outstanding-rated schools both in Croydon and Golders Green.

You've linked to the wrong wikipedia article, and used the word "town", which leads me to think you don't understand London much.

Is there any reason you linked to wikipedia articles about a part of London with a large Jewish population vs a part of London with a large ethnic minority population?

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

I just realized that. Yes the one you linked is the one I meant to use in my example.

I meant to pick a town/neighborhood with rich inhabitants (per capita) and a town/neighborhood with not so well off inhabitants.

Outside of primary schools with a very strict religious background they are really all the same. You don't look at those with exit metrics and average scores on national tests the way you do with schooling after it.

Probably depends on the country. Here in the Netherlands the difference of quality is really small between public elementary schools. Private schools are practically non-existent.

I lived in France in the south in a small town. The school was a 5 mile drive away. The grocery store was 2 miles away. My young kid went to one school, the older one to another and they were in opposite sides of the commune. In the south of France, everyone has a car. I also spent time in a small town near Bremen, Germany.. A bus game every hour. Things were far apart and yes, there, most people have cars. Suggesting “Europe” is just like Amsterdam is stereotyping and doesn’t represent reality for millions of people who don’t live in larger cities.

I live in Russia and we have different school for example. >Common >Lyceum >Gymnasium

Lyceum and Gymnasium will give you better programs, teachers, resources, special subjects etc. They have fewer seats too obviously. And you don't have too many of them.

Common schools why being generally the same - also usually have different education levels. So before sendingg your kid to one of them you do a research - what kind of teachers does the school has, does it have football field or pool, maybe even you'll look into what have become of it's graduates.

When I was in school (1995-2005) The nearest school was... okay. It wasn't bad, but you don't really expect anything of it. Half boys older than 14 were smoking already, girls not giving two shits about studies, teachers who would just to their 9 to 17 routine. So I was attending Gymnasium 20 minutes away if you take a bus.

Even as an elementary school kid I walked to school by myself or with class mates. My older brother, being in middle school by then would walk over to the next train station in the next town and take the train to his school by himself. I would do the same later-on. If your parents brought you to school every day you'd probably have been made fun of by all the other kids.

I have a different experience - with 3 kids, in a 2M city does't even have a great transport infrastructure (Bucharest). School/kindergarden is within walking distance. Highschool is farther away, indeed (because that's what the elder kid chose - she wanted a school outside the neighbourhood), but she still goes there by public transit. In fact it's probably faster by subway than by car, in the morning. Kids go to english classes, drawing classes, swimming etc. either by walking or public transit.

Maybe it "helps" that the public roads are congested, and I simply wouldn't have time to take them anywhere by car. It definitely helps that I live in a good/central neighbourhood that is well covered by public transit.

I hope this works -- street view of in front of a Japanese kindergarten. Electric 2 seater bikes are the name of the game here for 2 child families.

https://www.google.com/maps/@35.675605,139.6796798,3a,75y,22...

Yep, that's what I saw in Japan recently too (both electric and non-electric). Tons of bikes had a child seat, some of them had 2 child seats.

I also loved how (as you can see in this photo), people just park their bike the way you park a car: you just leave it there, without locking it to something. Here in America bikes like that would be stolen left and right. But I guess that's one of the big differences between a highly industrialized and developed nation and a 3rd-world one.

> yeah, now imaging you have two of them going to two different schools, each 40 minutes walking distance from home, different directions and your office in somewhere else too.

I grew up in a small village (+-70k) in the Netherlands, we had 4 schools within 15 min walking distance and I think twice as many with 15 min cycling distance (all kids go to school by bike here). Why would you send your kids to schools 40 minutes walking distance from home?

edit: added number of inhabitants of the village

Why would you send your kids to schools 40 minutes walking distance from home?

Some times you don't have a choice. Happened to a friend of mine here in Sweden. Their first kid got into the school closest to home. When it was the second kids turn that school was 'full' and they got sent to a school 10 km in the exact opposite direction.

My previous answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20632459

Since the age of 11 I went to school by myself. Sports, dentist appointments and doctors too. It's very common here in Europe and I don't even live in a big city. I see kids on their bikes with a big hockey stick poking out their backpack almost daily.

You mention 40 minute walking distance, that's three kilometres for a child or about 10 minutes by bicycle. Or perhaps five stops on a tram or subway.

It took a lot of stress off my parents that my brother and me were independent from a young age. Living in a society where you don't need cars gives you that flexibility and ease.

Same for me, but I was the only child and as you've said: "Since the age of 11". It is as common here in Russia as it is in Europe.

We were talknig about kids though.

In a lot of European cities kids walk and bike themselves to school.

Even when I lived in the US as a kid me and my friends would bike to elementary school. But this was in the early 90's before everyone went completely neurotic

"yeah, now imaging you have two of them going to two different schools, each 40 minutes walking distance from home"

How old are these kids? Can they not walk themselves?

Let's say 8 and 9. They can, but they should not at that age. Not before 11-12.

> When you have more than one - it is entrily possible they will end up going to different schools and after the school one of them had to go to the music shool and the other one to his hockey team or something etc etc. You simply can't do this without a car.

In a city designed for walking and bicyling, you can do that by bike. And once they're old enough, they can do it on their own bike.

Of course the city needs to be designed for that. In a city designed only for cars, you're going to need a car for everything. The big issue here is: how do we want to design our cities?

> now imaging you have two of them going to two different schools, each 40 minutes walking distance from home, different directions and your office in somewhere else too.

If they're going to two different schools, most likely one of them is going to secondary school and can ride their own bike, or one of them is going to a special needs school and gets picked up. At least, that's how it works around here.

In any case, I don't consider 40 minutes a suitable distance for walking: take a bike. It's only a few minutes that way.

That said, my wife did insist I get a driver's license when we had kids, and I did. I rarely use it, and certainly for moving kids around the city, a light cargo bike is more practical in Amsterdam.

>If they're going to two different schools, most likely one of them is going to secondary school and can ride their own bike, or one of them is going to a special needs school and gets picked up. At least, that's how it works around here.

My other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20632459

As for the 'secondary' school - I, for example, was attending a Gymnasium as main and a musical Lyceum as a secondary. Both since 6-7 years old. And that's pretty common over here.

A single kid going to two different schools is extremely rare here, but as it happens, that's exactly what my son has doing since he was 8: a regular school just around the corner, and a "day a week" school for gifted children which is a bit further away. I take him there by bike. A car wouldn't add much value for me there.

But Amsterdam is a sizable yet compact city, which makes everything easy to reach. In a differently designed city, or a smaller town where you might have to travel to another town, things can be completely different.

I have one, I live in our second largest city (Aarhus). I’ve lived in Aalborg and Odense as well (two other relatively large cities by Danish standards).

I’m 36 and I’ve never taken a drivers license because I’ve never needed it.

I am sorry but I've noticed to be a bit different in Copenhagen. I've been living here for 3 years, and the number of cars have grown quite a lot to my perception, specially between families (maybe just because they are luxury cars and Teslas everywhere).

I am 36 have one little child and feel like I am missing a bit of the country because I don't have a car, even if I have made few trips by train.

Also, a lot of my decisions are now driving by whether it is a short walk distance from home or not. Public transport in Copenhagen is respectful but a bit slow in my opinion (I am from NY), specially if I want to go to the edge of the city or suburbs - which I might want when I decide to settle roots here and buy myself a home (prices in Copenhagen are all time high).

You're hitting on a point that drives a lot of the disconnects in these sorts of discussions.

There are a lot of places where you don't need to own a car or even have a drivers license. And you constrain your activities accordingly. You may rely to some degree on friends with cars (though this tends to become less and less practical as you get older). Or you rent cars as needed if you have a license.

But you probably just tend to forgo activities that involve driving out to the country every other weekend or hauling a lot of gear around or visiting people you can't get to easily with public transit.

As a visitor, I rarely have a rental car in SF (and never if I'm solely going to be in the city) for example. But it means I am going to be pretty much staying in the city rather than taking a hike somewhere for half a day. I do know a couple that live in SF without a car but they do short-term and longer-term rentals all the time.

There’s a world of difference between having a car and using it sparingly (or just renting one sparingly) and having to have a car for every goddamn thing in life. Many friends of mine back in my home country have cars, but they don’t need to drive if they want to say grab a snack at 11pm. For me however, the barrier of stepping out of my home is pretty high, and the decision to anything unplanned and unnecessary is usually why bother. I guess it’s different for people who enjoy driving, but I don’t.

You don't need to own a car to take weekend trips to the country or even a quick trip hauling some gear: just rent one. Here in the US, we have "Zipcar" which lets you rent a car on the spot for a short term; in Europe, I saw "Car2Go" which is probably similar.

>As a visitor, I rarely have a rental car in SF for example. But it means I am going to be pretty much staying in the city rather than taking a hike somewhere for half a day.

I'm in DC, and I've frequently gone on hikes outside the city and seen people drive to the trailhead in a Zipcar.

To the people who say you need a car if you have kids - this is how we do it in Copenhagen:

https://live.staticflickr.com/3662/3465284112_5aab494014_b.j...

A transporter bike can carry 2-3 kids easily. It's the most convenient, cheap and healthy option. As soon as the kids are old enough they get their own bike.

Of course, it's convenient to have access to a car a couple of times a month. But definitely not on a daily basis.

Not sure why people are down voting you, but I think this time it may not be the general HN negativity, but simply because they think you are attempting a bad joke.

This is exactly how many parents in Copenhagen drive their kids around. I would say that around half of all young parents in Copenhagen get a transporter bike like this one.

We were leaving Copenhagen for America shortly after our youngest was born but otherwise we would have biked the kids around as well.

We have transporters in the US, they are called cars. And they have air conditioning. The entire world doesn’t have to be just like the Netherlands. Try riding one of those transporter bikes in the Colorado mountains in winter or in south Florida in the summer.

That's why they invented e-bikes.

Those cargo bikes, like Nihola aren't that cheap though.

Sure, this doesn't work everywhere. But think of Los Angeles. Very high population density, apart from a few hills it's mostly flat and the climate is nice. To get to any place 1 mile away I'd have to go by car. Often there is congestion and I have to wait in traffic. Plus, there is no direct route to the place so have to go a huge detour - perhaps even shortly on a highway. This could be so much easier and healthier by bike - if the city was built for this.

Bottom-line: some cities can never be be great for bikes. But most can but just aren't.

As someone who commutes by bike regularly, transporters are one of the primary reasons for why it is so miserable.

They usually go 15km/h or even slower (presumably due to the extra weight and/or overprotective new parents), and they're so wide that they take up the whole lane, preventing you from overtaking them. And since we usually have grade-separated bike lanes here (supposedly the holy grail, according to HN!) you can't even spill into the car lane temporarily.

> and they're so wide that they take up the whole lane, preventing you from overtaking them.

This is a problem with lanes that are too small. An effect of giving most space to cars and sharing the left-overs between bikes and people walking.

As another commenter said: require city council to build wider bike lanes. Another example from Copenhagen:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/Dronning...

You can easily ride 3 bikes next to each other (and also four if you want). A single slow transporter won't block the traffic on wide lanes like this.

Hi fellow Copenhagener,

There are few things that make Copenhagen attractive to own a Christiania bike:

1- Very flat city and mild climate, although wet sometimes. 2- The city if fairly small geographically. 3- Public transit is a bit slow. 4- Very high taxes on cars. When I compare to Malmö, I have the impression most people there own cars. 5- Vast majority of people I know who live outside Copenhagen main neighborhoods own a car. Bearing in mind that outside Copenhagen isn't that far in distance but enough to degrade commute and life style without a car.

In my experience as a kid in a three-child family without a car, it worked fine. Though agreed that it would've been trickier if any of us had had some gear-intensive hobby like ice hockey.

Only one, but we moved to the city to the country (massively lower CoL) and having to strap the damn kid in to the car every time we go anywhere is pretty annoying. We really miss being able to walk places.

Same here. Moved from Europe to SF. I missed taking walks and seeing plenty of things. Things are really quiet here.

Can’t be that bad in SF. I first lived in SV then in Greater NY Area, but not in the cities. In either case there’s like one or two small grocery stores within walking distance, I can’t even do proper shopping without a car, unless I’m willing to bike for forty minutes or more in the two-feet-wide bike lanes (sometimes nonexistent) without any separation from motor traffic. (And in the latter area, should I choose to bike, I would be the only cyclist in miles.)

Often the school is within biking distance of where you live, or they can take the bus - contrary to what many Americans think, even 6 year olds are capable of doing this alone, and they will not be kidnapped.

Commuting to work usually involves getting on the bus/subway only a short walk away. It's more stress free than sitting in traffic.

If anything, the pros of walkability and good public transport compounds over time in daily life.

American cities definitely don't look nice as a tourist. SF for example is terrible if you don't Uber everywhere.

I didn’t particularly love SF, but this is a weird view. We spent 5 days there walking most places with the occasional (unimpressive) PT trip. It was fine. The Tenderloin is certainly sketchy, but the city is very walkable and quite nice to walk around due to the hills and they way they reveal views of the bay.

Really? SF is one of the best, IMO. You can actually take long walks, it actually has a subway (plus busses, trams), it has sidewalks almost everywhere..... sure, less parks than one would like/ a bit too much concrete, lots of homeless people, etc. but hey, it's a big USA city, what did you expect?

Compare it to e.g. the nearby San Jose - SF is so much better that it's not even funny. What US city would you consider more "walkable"/ tourist friendly? MAYBE NY, if we only include Manhattan and nothing else.

Agreed.

For a week or so tourism SF, Manhattan, Seattle downtown, Boston. Cities I can think to not be very walkable are LA and DC perhaps.

You can walk in SF, I also did it, but the difference is that you don't really see much of the city if you do, compared to Berlin, London, or Tokyo. In those cities you can go from pretty much anywhere in the city to anywhere in less than an hour with public transport and on foot. Less than half an hour if you restrict yourself to the touristy center area. That is just not possible in SF.

>You can walk in SF, I also did it, but the difference is that you don't really see much of the city if you do

What are you talking about? The first time I visited SF I just stumbled upon Haight-Ashbury and Japantown by walking around.

Anecdotal, but as a visitor I found it far harder to get around than, say, London. There's a public transport system, but in terms of frequency and reach it was not what you'd find in a large European city.

>MAYBE NY, if we only include Manhattan and nothing else.

Yep, NYC is not very walkable if you leave Manhattan island. One big difference though with NYC is the naming and the political boundaries. NYC is very unique in America because it's one really big city with different "boroughs", all very different from each other. If it were any city, it wouldn't be like this: all those places would actually be separate cities, all part of the same metro area. (NYC has this too, with Jersey City, Newark, Stamford, etc. all being part of the metro area, but it's remarkable that so much of the metro area is actually one city.) Just look at LA for instance: LA itself is a pretty small part of the metro area, with many other towns and cities comprising it.

Public transportation is also full of impolite people, un-assimilated people etc... which makes the commute very unpleasant. Taking the bus/metro everyday at the worse hour, in summer, with rednecks all around you is definitely not the good side of transportation. As soon as i'll get a car, i'll never get back into public transportation

This and a dozen very closely related and tangential things concerning safety, sanitation, hygiene & propriety of people using public transportation is the reason people like me would never opt for it. Unless standards in those aspects of public transit were raised to such a high degree that they were no longer a threat or annoyance, a car would be exponentially more preferable.

I think people on HN seem to underestimate how small of a cross section, the fashionable opinions on HN appeal to and how unrealistic they are, once you bring into full view the jarring realities of modern life and how people cope with them.

Keep in mind this is specific to the US, in Paris you have a lot of suits going to the office using the public transportation (me included), though it depends on the line and the hour of the day.

Is it not more out of necessity though? Would those people not prefer to drive if that was a viable option? In Paris specifically, the public transportation is fairly unpleasant - a lot of homeless people, antisocial behavior, bad odours, etc. Not sure how it is during rush hour, but probably uncomfortably packed too, so the ideal that Americans seem to have of sitting in a pleasant train reading a book or doing some work doesn't quite apply.

It depends but for me definitely not. I have a car and much prefer public transports instead of having to be stuck in traffic then having the hassle of parking the car. I feel way more free in the city without my car, and the journey is faster as well.

You are right that it’s quite packed in the rush hour, but you can still read a book standing.

Regarding the other issues you cite it really depends of the line. The one I take regularly (RER A) is very calm and clean. And keep in mind that there are more than 1 million passengers every day. Touristic areas are certainly problematic but it’s a completely different issue (to put it simply a lot of touristic areas in Paris are dirty and/or in sketchy neighborhoods to start with. Parisians usually don’t go or work there).

Source: taking public transports nearly everyday since more than 15 years in the area. I love my car but for road trips and going to the countryside.

Sure, but assuming there was little traffic and there was plenty of parking available?

My point is that when comparing imperfect reality with perfect "grass on the other side", the "other side" will likely win. For example, given the unaffordability and small size/low quality of dwellings available in London, American perfectly manicured suburbs with plenty of space and big open highways may start to look somewhat appealing.

In the end, it all depends on the actual reality of it - how busy the roads are, how easy it is to find parking, how clean/nice/empty/reliable the public transport is etc. Idealizing one option over the others as can be seen in this thread seems silly. If there is a "silver bullet", it is probably in decentralizing work more such that more people can walk/cycle to work while living in a nice village, while also having clean/fast/efficient public transportation available as well as a great road system to reach the more remote locations / get to places when a car is just more convenient.

Assumption would require razing whole city, with costs to all other users, especially pedestrians. So no, it is not going to happen.

Even with new laws requiring buildings to provide underground parking places, it won't be enough. It's never enough.

The suburbs exist in Greater London area too, just as they do near Warsaw. They have similar style to American ones, but more nearby services and are built in clusters. That makes them much more accessible to foot traffic.

I am living in Prague now and you really don't need a car here. The same applies to Antwerp that I visited this year. I am not sure how well you know Europe, but there are many cities where you don't need a car and public transport is even faster (often it can be harder to find parking lot than just walk from the metro station).

As if us public transit users aren't living in reality. Yeah okay bud.

- Public transit is publicly funded. For improvements in safety, cleanliness etc to happen, the systems need (public) money. But you will never pay fares because you're scared to take transit, and you probably would never vote in favor of a ballot measure to allocate more tax money to transit because you happen have a car and don't believe improved transit would benefit you anyway.

- The population using public transit generally reflects the fact that our culture encourages anyone with enough money/resources to purchase and use a car -- leaving behind everyone who can't (e.g. cash poor, disabled). This scares off the more sensitive potential transit users who'd rather pretend these folks don't exist.

The jarring reality is that most Americans (and their political leadership) are classist, sheltered, and have a "fuck you, I got mine" attitude.

Source: US lifelong resident of various large cities, no driver's license at the age of 31.

> Public transit is publicly funded. For improvements in safety, cleanliness etc to happen, the systems need (public) money.

All you are admitting here is that the Government can't provide a compelling alternative to a more expensive form of transport.

> But you will never pay fares because you're scared to take transit, and you probably would never vote in favor of a ballot measure to allocate more tax money to transit because you happen have a car and don't believe improved transit would benefit you anyway.

Why vote to increase spending on something that doesn't benefit you? People won't and you won't convince anyone. This is an unrealistic standard you expect of other people, plus the high and mighty tone you are using won't win people over.

> The population using public transit generally reflects the fact that our culture encourages anyone with enough money/resources to purchase and use a car -- leaving behind everyone who can't (e.g. cash poor, disabled). This scares off the more sensitive potential transit users who'd rather pretend these folks don't exist.

This is such a biased representation of what the real problem is and you conveniently ignore things like violent thugs on public transport (I've experienced this several times in the UK), rowdy teenagers, drunks and the mentally ill.

I used to have a guy who stank and wore a soccer ball on his head catch the same bus, large groups of teenage boys vandalising the train coaches or playing loud music on a quiet carriage and they are far from the worst I've encountered.

No I don't want to have to deal with possibility of violence, nutcases and other general unpleasantness so I won't take the train (I am in the UK).

> The jarring reality is that most Americans (and their political leadership) are classist, sheltered, and have a "fuck you, I got mine" attitude.

I doubt they are. What they want to do is get on with their life with as little hassle as possible, like most people do.

> Source: US lifelong resident of various large cities, no driver's license at the age of 31.

So no real evidence what-so-ever other than your very biased opinion.

>This is such a biased representation of what the real problem is and you conveniently ignore things like violent thugs on public transport (I've experienced this several times in the UK), rowdy teenagers, drunks and the mentally ill.

Except these problems don't seem to exist at all on Japanese or German trains.

Maybe there's just something seriously wrong with your country.

> Except these problems don't seem to exist at all on Japanese or German trains.

Lets see if that is true:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/18/german-train-axe...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/10/knife-attack-jap...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/25/tokyo-knife-at...

https://www.scotsman.com/news/world/big-increase-in-sex-assa...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-07/women-subjected-to-da...

Doesn't seem that much better to me.

So you cherry-pick a few examples (one of which wasn't on public transit at all), and you think that's better than a place where 30,000 people per year are killed in auto crashes? Your likelihood of dying on a train in Japan are almost nil, whereas your likelihood of dying in your car on American roads are actually pretty significant, and it's one of the biggest causes of death of non-elderly people.

I did not cherry-pick, I took some examples off of duck duck go to prove a point that everywhere has their problems and you probably shouldn't be criticising my country (which is quite rude) while completely ignoring the point I was making about public transport being quite unpleasant experience in general and why people quite rightly want to avoid it.

The Government wherever that is will have to sort out those problems rather than just try guilty people into not using their cars.

> you probably shouldn't be criticising my country (which is quite rude)

You're the one criticizing your country, not me. You're the one who said public transit there sucks, not me. I've never been there, so I can't comment on the Underground, but I've been to Germany and Japan and the public transit there is absolutely fantastic. It's not even that bad here in DC, though the reliability isn't that great.

>ignoring the point I was making about public transport being quite unpleasant experience in general and why people quite rightly want to avoid it.

No, I'm not ignoring your point at all, I'm calling it out as ignorant, which it is, because there's plenty of other places in the world with excellent public transit.

If you have to quote a three year old article to demonstrate that people do get (occasionally) assaulted on a Japanese train, then yes, it does seem much better to me.

I didn't quote mine. I literally put in "Japanese Train Attack" and pulled some links off the first page to prove that it isn't quite as perfect as it was claimed. I don't like the fact that the UK is demonised constantly because despite a lot of the problems over here we still do a lot of things right.

Also it doesn't address the very valid point I was making is that until public transport is pleasant and reliable (neither is true in the UK, I dunno about anywhere else and don't claim to) people will not use it if they have an alternative.

No amount of guilting such as the comment I was originally replying to will change that.

Obviously you've never been outside your country if you've never seen pleasant and reliable public transit. Even as an American, I've seen plenty of pleasant and reliable public transit, though it's usually outside my country.

Stop claiming that other countries suck when it's only yours that has seems to have a big problem.

Based on your response I'd say my opinion's no more biased than yours!

> All you are admitting here is that the Government can't provide a compelling alternative to a more expensive form of transport. > Why vote to increase spending on something that doesn't benefit you? People won't and you won't convince anyone. This is an unrealistic standard you expect of other people, plus the high and mighty tone you are using won't win people over.

I really don't get why so many folks insist on positioning Government as some sort of "other" entity, as if its functioning isn't directly affected by voters. Anyways, why support transit? Because it _does_ benefit you as a car user but you and your leadership refuses to see it. It's well documented that improving alternate modes of transportation helps alleviate traffic congestion by shifting some drivers to other modes, thus producing less wear and tear on the roads(and your car) and helping drivers get to where they're going faster and safer. Sorry, that's how it works.

> No I don't want to have to deal with possibility of violence, nutcases and other general unpleasantness so I won't take the train

I mean, sure. That's your right. But you _have_ an alternative, whereas many folks have no other choice but to risk the trip, so how exactly is not supporting transit not a "fuck you, I got mine" attitude?

Spent 6 years in the US as a European. By far the worst part on a daily basis was the missing public transportation due to the enormous focus on cars. Many towns didn't even attempt to be accessible to anyone without a car.

I sometimes waited for hours in NY state blizzards to catch a bus before I was able to afford a car. I walked 2-3 hours to a mall and to Walmart when all other students went home for break. Bus service was irregular and spotty.

We have shittier bus services in small towns and villages as well and people often use cars for convenience. But public transport is still present at a minimum level.

I honestly don't get this dependence and focus on cars in the US. Must be some former Detroit lobbyism that led to this.

There's an old conspiracy, although its accuracy is debatable, google the "General Motors streetcar conspiracy." Another potential possibility is many cities scrapped their streetcars for spare metal during WWII. Along with that, market forces and lobbying and policy by people like Robert Moses, the current form of America was created.

They lost court cases over it, I don't think it is fair to call its accuracy debatable.

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

The debatable aspect is how much of an impact it had. Many other cities without a similar conspiracy also got rid of their streetcars.

These things all happened. But a huge part is simply that people live in suburbs built at a time when people could afford cars. So they did. Just as their grandparents moved out to districts served by streetcars as soon as they could, for the same reasons -- affordable floor area, cleaner air, less noise.

The central part of most EU cities is pre-1914, when cars were a curiosity. And for decades after that, cars were nowhere near as affordable to citizens as they were in the US, because the US was just much richer in (say) 1960.

The veracity of the story notwithstanding, the core of the conspiracy, though, was to push buses over streetcars, not cars.

...Because (per the conspiracy) the manufacturers of cars knew that busses were unpleasant to ride in (compared to trolley cars) and that most people would prefer to own a car over riding in one.

The market forces element is the one that people tend to ignore in these types of conversations. Americans couldn't wait to move out to the suburbs.

The car industry influence played a role but is always overplayed in these kinds of discussions, and ignore equally if not more important factors.

-On macro scale, the US is bigger, more spread out, with tons of land, and there's something in the American psyche that pushes Americans to expand, settle, and use all of it.

-On a micro scale, and as a consequence of the first point, Americans are accustomed to homes that are much bigger, have yards, and are more adverse to sharing a wall with a neighbor. Sure there have been exceptions like tenements in NYC, but even in those cases those residents could wait to get their own Levittown cape cod in a residential subdivision.

-Finally, a ton of this growth happened at right after cars became mainstream and affordable, but before the long terms downsides of car based societies were well understood. Therefore, a huge majority of infrastructure investments were made on what people wanted (cars and space), and not public transit.

-Now, while many of the problems of car based societies are better understood, that doesn't nullify the often ignored benefits of car based societies. Also, for public transit to work at a massive scale, people would have increasingly do two things that Americans intrinsically hate: Move closer together and pay more taxes. There may be a growing population that finds that appealing, but the silent majority in this case is an enormous and entrenched one.

I've been for the last 6 months, spending maybe half that time living with a Korean family. I think I'm past the "tourist" phase.

Also I only mentioned Korea because I happen to be there right now, but functional transportation and not needing a car is also prevalent in Japan and much of Europe. America is pretty unique in its sprawl and car-dependence.

It's the case not just in Korea and Japan but in most cities outside of America. It's one of American peculiarities, like checks or no public health care.

China has a fantastic subway system in most big cities, for example. I once took a subway ride from the Shenzhen airport to the Hong Kong border, crossed the border, switched to another subway and arrived in downtown Hong Kong. That's around 65km (40 miles) by public subway!

There is public health care in US. Medicare for old people, Medicaid for poor people, and anyone without insurance can go to the ER. It may not be great, but it does exist.

This seems like a pedantic point. The US AFAIK is the only healthcare system that is as dysfunctional as it is in the first world.

While traveling outside the US, I have found many people think Americans are cold and heartless and just let people die. It is an understandable conclusion the way people talk about the US system in the media and internet, but it also isn't true. The US has dysfunctional, public healthcare but it isn't so dysfunctional that you just die if you fall or get an ear infection without insurance. So saying the US has "no public health care" is not only incorrect but it is also overly dramatic.

But you are fucked with a huge bill that would cripple your life in a way that you might as well be dead.

And folks do skip going to the doctor, ration their medicines, and other such things.

Folks suffer until things are an emergency as well and hospitals won't always help if you, say, need surgery for cancer that isn't presently killing you and isn't an emergency.

Yes, it is dysfunctional. No one is arguing otherwise.

The government reimburses hospitals for ER visits if the patient can't pay.

Hospital will gladly send you to collections and fuck your credit, though.

Citation? Genuinely curious.

The source is my wife who is a clinical pharmacist at a large hospital which has a sizable uninsured patient population. Here is the first result on Google which does talk a little about federal funding for "uncompensated care" [1] starting near the halfway point.

My wife's hospital was hit hard by ACA because it reduced federal funding for uncompensated care. The idea was that the funding could be cut because more people overall would be insured. Unfortunately enough of their patients still are without insurance that the funding shortage led to two rounds of layoffs. They seem to have adjusted to the new financial reality now and are hiring again. But the first couple years after ACA passed were tough.

I guess it would be more accurate to say that the federal government funds uninsured ER visits, but the funding falls short of what is necessary especially after ACA.

1. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/07/03/who-...

But there are people who choose to die rather than risk bankrupting their family with uncontrollable medical costs.

So there's plenty of drama. Medical bankruptcy in particular is something that I don't think occurs anywhere else.

> So there's plenty of drama. Medical bankruptcy in particular is something that I don't think occurs anywhere else.

I doubt the veracity of this oft-repeated meme, but I'll let Snopes provide the detailed analysis: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/643000-bankruptcies-in-the...

I would appreciate similarly-detailed evidence to the contrary.

This paper from the American Journal of Public Health says ~530k/year.

http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304901

The summary of that Snopes article is that while medical bankruptcy in the US is indeed far more common than anywhere else, it's not entirely unheard of outside the US. Not all medical expenses are always covered, and disability can always lead to financial difficulties anywhere. Though medical bankruptcy is still significantly less common; in the US it's the leading cause of personal bankruptcies, in other countries it's a lesser cause.

> There is public health care in US. Medicare for old people, Medicaid for poor people, and anyone without insurance can go to the ER. It may not be great, but it does exist.

There is some public healthcare but no universal healthcare.

ER is not healthcare. You do not get treatment for chronic diseases, cancer etc. ER only treats you for the life or health threatening consequences of not getting treatment.

For cancer, yes. For chronic diseases that can treated with a pill like heart disease and diabetes, they will prescribe the pills. People should use the word universal if that is what they mean.

Most people outside US when they say public healthcare they mean what's known in US as universal one.

What's more, Medicaid costs about as much per American citizen as the NHS costs per British citizen. The only difference is that NHS also covers all those British citizens, whereas Medicare only covers a small group.

So Americans are already paying for socialised health care, they're just not receiving it.

I wouldn't say most cities unfortunately. European cities are quite walkable and not as sprawling as American ones. But it is still pretty easy to end up were only cars can go not that far from the city center, or where there is only the occasional bus. Asia is really the leader in public transport now. I think the article is slightly misleading. Currently in Europe things like bike infrastructure and public transport is sort of like the development of drones. Everyone is saying they are doing it to claim they are keeping up, but not a lot is happening. It isn't like Shenzhen were every year there is a new pedestrian street, bikes, subway line, train line or something became electrified.

I live in Europe (in Prague right now) and I never needed to own a car here. I would say it depends on the city in Europe. However, if you occasionally happen to be outside of the city center where only cars go you would call Uber. I am fine with that when 90% of my daily transport is covered by public transport.

I live in Germany, and use the bike, e-scooter/bikes/... and public transport for everything.

I have owned a car before, and I did not use those other transportation methods any less. We don't own a car anymore because it does not make economic sense for us.

When we need to travel by car inside the city, we just use Uber (~30 EUR/month is what we currently pay). When we need a car for a couple of hours to pick up stuff, we use one of the car sharing vendors. We can get "the right car" for whatever we need for ~4 hours with gas for less than ~20 EUR (~once every two months). When we want to travel around with a car, we just rent a high end one for the weekend for ~300 EUR. We do that once every two months, although in the summer a bit more often. This means we end up paying ~3000-3500 EUR/year in rentals/uber.

If we were to own a high end car, we would at least have to pay 30.000 EUR/year for a used one with 100k kms. On top, we need to pay insurance (~500-600EUR/year), parking (~150EUR/month where we live), maintenance (~200/year), handle some other burdens (wheel changes, etc.), and if for whatever reason we need a different car (to pick up something big), we still need to rent that. That puts the costs of owning a car at 2300-2400EUR/year + unforeseen maintenance + gas + rentals + (30.000 EUR - reselling value) / (years until re-selling).

Where we live, unless one uses the car at least every weekend, it makes no sense owning one. At one weekend usage per month, you can just rent, and are more flexible.

Your estimated costs are pretty average, but I found the €30k figure curious. Used cars are dirt cheap in Germany, and they are often in really good shape and well maintained compared to used cars in other countries.

I occasionally drive a 20 year old Opel that was purchased 7 years ago for €2500. It works great. I ride my bike most of the time, but it's really handy to have a car to haul kids or heavy/bulky stuff.

€30k is only a little under the annual salary in Germany, so I'm suspicious that this figure is somewhat overblown as well.

€30k is enough for pretty much any new entry level or basic trim car outside of Audi/BMW/Porsche.

Cars are important status symbols in Germany, and people who can afford it often do exactly as described--buy a new or slightly used Audi/BMW/Mercedes, use it for a while, keep it in absolutely immaculate condition, and sell it on a couple of years later for close to what they paid for it. Those higher end cars often go through many owners until they no longer pass inspection and finally get exported. 'Ordinary' people are more likely to drive lower end cars, which seem to have a different life cycle, ending as student cars and getting crushed instead of exported. That's my impression anyway, could be wrong. My experience (see Opel reference above) is that those lower end cars can be had for pretty cheap and often in great shape. With a little care, you can keep them running for ages on the cheap.

And then those sold cars end up in Poland. Reuse, then recycle. ;)

If you have kids, especially more than one, a no-car city center is a nightmare. Even in Europe.

That very much depends on the city. I had no problem getting around Paris/Amsterdam/London/Rome when I was traveling with my friend's family (3 kids). A car would have been a bigger nightmare with traffic and parking and we weren't even staying in the central areas.

But it also depends on how and where you live and work specifically. If I lived in a many of the areas outside of the Périphérique in Paris, not owning a car would probably impact your overall quality of life, but I'd still not want to take it into the city.

Rome should not be on that list IMO. Its public transport is terrible, at least in the centre. Still preferable to having to drive there though, that's for sure. I'm sure it's not true of every part of the city, but I was unpleasantly surprised by inadequate rush hour bus service. Haven't seen buses that packed since my childhood in 1990s Ukraine.

vienna is definitely not a nightmare with kids and no car. even disregarding the subway and public transport, i see plenty of people riding around with bike trailers (fits two) if the weather permits.

How about you raise your kids without the big trust-no-one bubble mover?

I have 2 kids and live in Berlin car-less without trouble.

We use public transit and bicycles (lots of parents have cargo bikes for transporting little kids e.g. https://www.babboe.de/lastenraeder/big).

I also have a hard time seeing how a "high end car" is a fair comparison to not having a car at all.

Anyway, could you also elaborate on your parking situation? Is this mostly destination parking? I'm just a bit surprised, since a resident parking permit is like €20 for two years here in berlin [0].

[0] https://service.berlin.de/dienstleistung/121721/ (german)

It's the same reason why you can have vending machines everywhere in Japan but not in the US. Uniformly high cultural level (relatively speaking), as well as a high level of trust (justified) probably has a lot to do with it.

I don't see how a lack of uniform culture and trust prevents vending machines elsewhere, or what it has to do with vending machine proliferation?

In japan you even have vending machines to pay for your restaurant food inside the restaurant, where your usually paying upfront. And some parking lots have per stall locks that don't let you drive away until you pay. You could argue that is symbolic of lower "trust".

I think the parent comment is referring to vandalism. See any public machine in any big US cities.

The "vending machines" inside restaurants are only there to increase efficiency and reduce labor needs, because there's a labor shortage of sorts in Japan.

For stuff outside, they just don't have problems with vandalism and theft the way America does, so it makes it much more feasible to have lots of vending machines outside: no one is going to deface them or break into them.

This is also really useful for bicycling. Bikes in Japan all seem to have little locks on the back which go through the rear wheel's spokes, so someone can't just hop on and pedal away. But there's nothing stopping someone from picking the bike up and carrying it away, putting it on a truck, etc. But theft is almost nonexistent in Japan, so people just leave their bike parked on the sidewalk and don't worry about it, and this makes biking very easy and feasible, whereas in the US you have to worry about someone stealing it if it isn't U-locked to something completely immovable, and even then someone might steal parts off of it.

How is this about culture and not about economics? People presumably don't steal bikes for fun but to fence them, because that's the best way for them to keep themselves from starving.

Having a country with starving people is absolutely about culture. The culture of that country doesn't allow any social welfare programs, so people become like that.

I don't buy your labor shortage thesis because the vending machines are also commonplace inside restaurants in Korea, and there is certainly no labor shortage here. I think it's more of a cultural thing - Koreans (and Japanese) value efficiency more than Americans when it comes to eating out. Korean dining is the most standardized and efficient I've seen in the world.

Depends on the city, really. I live in Dublin, which has a not-great public transport system (a couple of train lines, a couple of tram lines, a vast, sprawling, slow bus system). I don't have a use for a car (on the rare occasion I need to go to the suburbs, I can use the bus system), but some people certainly do. When I visit German cities, though, I'm always kind of amazed anyone bothers having a car.

That gap is being bridged by scooters (electric rental ones, but also private ones, non electric ones) and bikes (same here, rental but also private ones)

In general people are less reticent to bring a foldable bike in the subway for instance.

Checks? France loves checks and use them more than Americans.

No public health care? That isn’t true either. Medicaid and Medicare are public health care.

Another legitimate peculiarity of Americans is the vastly higher disposable income compared to most other countries. Even with all of the “free” stuff, the French have lower wages and far less disposable income than Americans.

> No public health care? That isn’t true either. Medicaid and Medicare are public health care.

I think you know that "public healthcare" was referring to universal healthcare in this context. US is the only western democracy without universal healthcare.

Yeah that's what I meant. Too late to edit comment!

Switzerland and the Netherlands healthcare is private though people are obligated to get a plan. Works great and cheaper than here in France which is horribly expensive for anyone with a decent wage.

The Dutch and especially Swiss healthcare systems are actually among the most expensive in Europe. France is cheaper per capita.

Yes per capita, that's why I said "for anyone with a decent wage". France has one of the highest unemployment rate in OCDE, so for all these people it is indeed cheap, in fact free. But for those actually making more than the minimum wage (and for anyone making close to a SV salary or the French equivalent), you end up paying way way more than the Dutch and the Swiss.

The French have the RIB system, wherein you can send a snapshot of what your account details are, and the bills are automatically deducted from there. In practice, that means you need to use cheques MUCH less frequently than in the US. What's worse, the US doesn't have an easy way to transfer money electronically between banks! Thus requiring even more cheques.

Why would you need checks at all if you can just pay by card or transfer money using your bank online page?

It's often the other way around. Companies sometimes prefer to pay you, reimburements etc, via a cheque.

It's because the USA decided paypal was the way to do C2C transfers between banks and decided not to develop their own as a result.

You also have venmo, square cash, fb messenger, etc.

> The French have the RIB system

When living in France I never came across the use case you describe, at least not in this form. But I did often come across people wanting money from me sending their RIB as an image attachment to emails rather than copying and pasting their IBAN into the body of the mail like elsewhere in Europe.

That's more or less what I meant, except with utility companies instead of people. Apologies if I made it sound fancier. Having lived in the US and France, I think the places where cheques were used a lot was in bills-type things. That's why I brought this example up.

Don't forget we also spend less on feeding ourselves than anyone else in the world[0].

[0]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-mu...

That's partly due to lower food standards, surely? Salmonella causes hundreds of deaths per year in the US but I believe almost zero in the US.

My guess would be agricultural subsidies more than food standards.

Really? The US spends about 1% of its budget on agricultural subsidies compared to the EU's 40%.

The EU's budget is tiny, though. It doesn't maintain armies, police, infrastructure, health care or any sort of social security. Farm subsidies are among the few things the EU spends money on. The rest is paid by member states. So this is not a meaningful comparison.

A meaningful comparison is difficult, granted. If anything, doesn't that make OP's point about food prices being low due to agricultural subsidies less tenable though?

No less tenable than the food standards proposition, unless you have data that shows the difference in industry expenditures on food quality.

I found a USDA publication [1] which is a little dated but raises a large number of factors that affect food household expenditure differences between the US and EU. Broadly speaking these are:

- Food prices inc. agricultural protection & consumption taxation;

- Income;

- Food availability;

- Consumption patterns;

- Preference trends inc. health, food safety, production process & taste;

- Demographic trends;

- Retailing & regulation (e.g. consolidation laws).

Some of the factors it highlights that may cause lower expenditure on food in the US than in the EU are:

- Lower food pricing due to protection & taxation;

- Food safety concerns in the EU since mad cow disease and dioxin in chicken feed (and foot & mouth disease in the UK) leading to lower confidence in food supply regulation;

- Greater willingness in the EU to pay more for higher animal welfare in the food chain;

- Higher proportion of organically grown food across the EU and differing definitions of "organic";

- Longer history of consolidation laws in the US.

Apologies I missed copying the actual reference in my last post: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/40408/30646_wr...

EU budget does subsidize infrastructure and some R&D grants.

If you are going to make inflammatory statements like that, at least back them up with data. Per Table 3[1], the Americans and Europe have roughly the same death rate from salmonella.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4668831/

It was inflammatory and for that I apologise.

Table 6 of p.10 [1] shows zero deaths from salmonella in the UK for the period 2006-2015.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

In the context of public healthcare the OP felt like an unwarranted and overly simplistic diversion, which I think is why I got frustrated.

EDIT: I also realised I typed "US" twice in my original comment; the second should be "UK".

> Checks? France loves checks and use them more than Americans.

I am afraid your data is outdated: it is now used for less than 15% of payments, mainly by old people or for C2C payments.

I am in my late twenties and have emitted only 3 checks from my account, in my entire life.

I had to use them years ago to pay some club for the kids (UK), and every time I was sweating - where do i write the amount? Where the name? Is it readable? Did I mark the end correctly?... Thank $deity banks phased them out.

15% is still a lot more than in many other countries. Checks are certainly on the way out, but in rural southern France, there are still places where you can pay with check but not with pin card.

How long did that take?

Dunno about China, but you can go from one end of the city to the other in Delhi - a distance of nearly 40km by car - in under 1 hour by metro.

I can't speak for mainland China, but if it's anything like Taiwan, there's probably an illusion of accessibility brought on by the sheer size of the cities/transportation infrastructure that you don't really notice until you've lived there a while.

The subway systems in Taipei and Kaohsiung are great, but it's easy to ignore just how much of each city isn't serviced by underground or above ground rail, and are only accessible via public transportation through spotty bus networks.

In New York you don't need a car either. But this isn't good enough. A Car-free city means no one is allowed to use automobiles for personal transportation. I'm sick of non-necessary car use ruining the quality of life for everyone else.

> It's the case not just in Korea and Japan but in most cities outside of America. It's one of American peculiarities, like checks or no public health care.

As opposed to the peculiarity of Japan, where cash (often in envelopes) is used for a lot of stuff (instead of cards). :)

This European spent a couple of carless months in Pittsburgh and found the public transit pretty decent. Only ride-hailed a handful of times. I do realize that Pittsburgh is probably not a median US city, but serves to remind us in the old world that there's a huge variety of different sorts of places in the US.

It isn't. It's also an older city and it depends on where in a city you are. Try living this way in a suburb of LA, your quality of life without a car will be greatly reduced.

When I moved to the USA for a few months from Europe, I was surprised by the fact that you simply can't walk to places. There are so huge spaces between things except for maybe city centers. (I was mostly in CA and FL)

I've been in Houston this year and it shocked me how difficult is to move there without a car.

I was saved by Uber and Lyft many times just because both my hotel and the office were really far away from public transport.

I wouldn't be surprised if Houston is the worst city in the nation when it comes to "walkability". It's so spread out.

Yes, this is very true. That is how European cities from US cities. In Europe cities are built for pedestrians, in US for cars. All these US suburbs areas with one-store buildings are making transportation ineffective because the US city is often more spread. However, there are some positive things happening, like walkability studies in US cities. Hopefully, that will help in the near future.

Never needed a car in the past four years in Milan and the year before in Bologna, Italy, and when it happened I could rely on car-sharing services or very cheap rentals.

But I'm originally from Rome, where I spent most of my life, and without a car in Rome you're pretty much f*ed.

You are ignoring the number one problem. Population Density, dense areas need public transport less dense areas require custom transport. You argument here is against small towns and in favour or ultra dense cities. Public transport is just a mean to complain.

I absolutely hate this argument. In Europe, you take the train and there is literal farm land in between stations. While there are lots of small towns and villages close together in a way that you don't necessarily see in North America, the average density is considerably less than Los Angeles, for example. There is no good reason LA couldn't be crisscrossed by trains instead of by freeways.

This doesn't even seem to follow, in my experience, and their argument definitely makes sense to me as someone that's lived in an urban European city, an urban American city, and some American suburbs and traveled around all of these places extensively.

Why do trains work well in many European countries? When there's farmland between stations (or even between some bus stops in the city where I currently live), it means that because you normally want to go somewhere that's not farmland, you're very likely to want to go somewhere near a station. The density around specific points (train stations, bus/tram plazas, etc.) is particularly high which makes the last-mile or last-kilometer problem largely a non-issue.

If you build this in the LA metro area, it might serve the people who live very close to stations well, but everyone else who lives somewhere in the middle between two stations (which would be a higher percentage than people living in European farmland) would need to find a way to get home from the station.

I agree with you. In the case of LA metro area, it is just too spread city = badly designed.

If you imagine even fast public transport, to get from one side of LA to the other side, it would still require a lot of stops in the low population density areas. Let's say every stop would cost you 5 minutes which means that even a car could be faster than public transport.

There is no way every stop costs you 5 minutes, more like 1 minute. I am not a fan of buses because they are in the same traffic as cars plus they have to stop as you say. There are some mitigations like dedicated bus lanes that can swing the speed equation back in favour of buses. What you really want, however, is feeder buses taking people to the train, and it is easy to design a rail system that beats cars for speed in a city (basically any urban rail I've ever seen).

1 minute with the vehicle slowing down and speeding up again? If it is bus it goes to the bus stop, other cars have to allow it to go back to the main road.

Edit: 5 minutes would be way too much if I think about it again - you are right.

You don't have to allow cars to go on the same lanes as buses. In Europe it is very common with separate bus lanes.

You can have a distinction between local and express trains, where the express trains skip all the small stops

In practice, this is solved by having two layers of lines on the same tracks - one which stops everywhere and one express line connecting bigger stops.

Density would rapidly increase around stations if planning allowed for it. See all along the Skytrain in the Greater Vancouver area (British Columbia). For people in between or away from stations, you need good integration with the bus network. Anywhere where there is enough traffic to cause congestion has enough traffic to support good public transit which definitely covers most of LA.

In similar vein, I've seen a lot of people use the same argument against high speed inter-city rail (ie cities in the US are far apart), yet the low density interior of China is connected by high speed rail all the way to Ürümqi.

Going coast-to-coast in the US on rail would take a long time, even with a bullet train, so it just wouldn't be competitive with airplanes.

However, going up and down the coasts would make perfect sense for HSR. Traveling from LA to SanFran, for instance, would be much better on a bullet train than an airplane, and the travel time would probably be similar (airplanes have lots of wasted overhead time). The northeast corridor would also be a great place for a bullet train (no, the Acela is not a bullet train). NY-Chicago or DC-Chicago would probably be a good route too.

The problem in the US is just a total lack of political will, and an idiotic aversion on the part of the populace to using trains.

> In Europe, you take the train and there is literal farm land in between stations.

This is quite literally my commute. On the way home, I depart from a central London station and after about 20 minutes, I'm passing through farms and rolling hills. This isn't even a cherry-picked example with a new high speed line, it is a line that is about 150 years old!

I don't favor "ultra dense cities". I don't like how uncomfortably dense NYC is - overcrowded sidewalks, lackluster amount of green and parks, noise pollution, dirty, garbage smell. But I think Korea and Japan manage to strike comfortable mediums.

But yes, accessible public transportation will generally require increased density. Most people in Korea live in apartments, so it's easier to make accessible public transportation.

> You can literally do everything without a car, everything is a short walk

when you are young and single. By the time you have kids this changes everything.

We live outside of Boston with two kids, now 3y and 5y. We're about 10min from the subway, and we've never had a car. We do a lot of walking with our kids, and when they were younger we used the stroller more. I'm as happy with this as I was before kids.

The difference is that most people can't afford to live just a few minutes away from the subway. City centers are very expensive. You can't expect people to live with the same standards if they have to walk for 1 hour to get to the nearest public transport.

My parent post is saying that even in situations where walking is very practical it stops working after you have kids, and I strongly disagree there.

As for the question of how generalizable this is, the US situation is much worse than other cities around the world. Boston has very good public transit for the US, but it's still pretty minimal globally, and we could build out transit far better. It's also only expensive to live near transit, or generally to live in cities, because we've massively restricted housing construction. Allow people to construct tall dense buildings, use the tax money to build out transit, and for the price of an apartment in the cheapest part of Boston today you can have something better that's a short walk from a transit stop that will get you all over the city faster than the T does today.

That's the thing though - where I'm living right now in Korea you can! I'm not exaggerating when I say that everything is walking distance here - school, hospital, grocery store, kids entertainment places, food, etc. There are multiple playgrounds literally outside my building. And I don't live in some city center, it's a residential area.

I live in Beijing and I spend 20 mins riding share bike to work every day. I don't drive because I don't find it useful. I have a driving license but almost never used it, there are many, many people also having a license without driving cars.

Almost colleagues owning cars don't drive on workdays because the metro is good (crowed by less crowded than driving and parking).

It's not just one city like NYC, at least all moderate to major cities in China are friendly if you don't have a car.

I've been to SF and the silicon valley, and I'm pretty annoyed I almost cannot go anywhere without driving.

The difference might be related to how do people build the city, in order to make one way to suck less than another. In Beijing, it seems to be not driving suck less than driving.

Do think of the other perspective though, all those local places for going out are so popular partly because housing is so small and expensive that staying home for the evening just isn't that attractive a proposition

True. But I never really enjoyed staying home for the evening in my big house in the suburbs either.

People stay home in the US because they have a house with plenty of things to do at home. Why go to a karaoke bar when you have a piano in your house? Why go to a cafe when you have a nice kitchen to cook your own meal? Why do A when you have B? The large houses people have in the US enables and enforces a lifestyle very different from what you get in other cities. This is just a fact - you are allowed to hate it or like it.

I don't want to have a karaoke bar nearby - it might be fun (I've never been to one), but at home I have my wood saws, music, computers, food, thread. Those are just the things I've used this week at home (note that it is Tuesday as I write this: the week is only three days old) to entertain myself.

It's not about stuff, it's about having other people. Some ( apparently a whole lot more than I thought) people find the lack of social interaction in American towns and cities depressing and alienating. Moreover you may have a lot things to keep you entertained in your home, but I doubt that yours is reflective of the average American home. Most people (I'm guessing now) probably just watch T.V and argue online...

Probably cultural. I have, as many spaniards, many things to do at home but I prefer public spaces (restaurants, bars, museums, concerts...).

As Mazoni says in one of his songs:

"Quan sortim a la nit no entrem mai en un local amb poca gent i no ho entenc perquè després només parlem entre nosaltres"

What translates to something like:

"When we go out at night we never enter a place with few people And I do not understand it because after all we talk only among us"

For sure it's a tradeoff - more space + privacy/isolation vs. less space + more people and things to do outside your home. Houses in America are way bigger than the rest of the world because everything is so spread out.

I prefer living in an apartment in a nice city vs. living in a big house in the suburbs. But it's totally fine to feel the opposite.

The problem is that in the U.S., the only real city of any scale that's truly carless that I've ever seen is NYC. It's fun for a year or two, but it's too "city" in all the negative ways and very expensive so not a place I'd want to live in long-term (unless I stumbled onto enough millions to buy a brownstown in Brooklyn Heights or something).

As much as I agree. It will feel weird to leave (if it happens) the car centric world..

But it's probably an improvement in most dimensions anyways.

I’m personally not a huge fan of driving everywhere. But I wonder whether HN’s view on this isn’t out of touch with the average middle class American’s. The average American commute is 48 minutes round trip, significantly shorter than France (71 minutes), Italy (65 minutes), or Spain (61 minutes): https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling...

That’s mainly because Europe has higher public transit use, and public transit is slow. Parisians who work and commute by public transit spend an average of 116 minutes a day on public transit: https://www.thelocal.fr/20160418/parisians-spend-23-days-a-y....

Viewed from a different perspective, a country where most people can spend 48 minutes a day commuting, because it’s rich enough for everyone to afford a car,[1] might be considered better than one where many people have to endure two-hour public transit commutes. Maybe utopia isn’t Paris, with rich people living in beautiful walkable downtowns, but rather Houston, where middle class people can afford big houses with a pool and a short, direct commute.

[1] The median disposable income per US household is a staggering 50% higher than for a French household.

Maybe that average Parisian commute is slower, but more pleasant. Walking and taking in the environment is certainly more positive for the body and mood (on average). You also encounter tons of other people, building social value, even without any direct interactions. Reading or daydreaming also become options when not focused on the road. Time isn't the only measurement.

You are probably correct that the average American, however, doesn't see it from that perspective.

Depends on the environment and the people. I'd often take the long way through campus: pleasant architecture and landscaping, light filtered through tall buildings and trees, chance encounters with classmates and professors, lots of porous buildings with stuff going on.

The walking parts of my Bay Area transit commute, on the other hand, were urine vapor mingled with pot smoke, harsh direct sunlight bouncing off concrete, dozens of homeless people in varying levels of distress, shitty decaying $1.5 million houses, random commercial and industrial facilities with no windows or public access, lifeless expanses of "open space." A $22 parking fee is well worth it to avoid being a pedestrian anywhere near Civic Center Station.

>dozens of homeless people in varying levels of distress

The homelessness problems in the US vs EU is a whole other topic.

Curious, what is your quick take on it. It's partially related to this topic. Many small cities in N.America give homeless people free bus tickets to NYC or California, so they don't have to deal with them. This allows small cities no to worry about public transit, and widens the urban/rural divide.

I'm not an expert but there are large swathes of rough sleepers in SF, SJ, NY, Austin, LA, etc. And even though the % of population in the US who are classified as homeless in the US is less than e.g. UK, there's nothing on that scale of rough sleepers scale in comparable or larger cities like London, Paris (maybe 17de?), etc.

I don't know if the definitions of homelessness plays a part in the different %s but the suffering of homelessness seems higher in the US than EU.

No, it isn’t. The homelessness issues in cities drive the popularity of suburbia, suburban style planning, avoidance of walking/transit, and the need for cars/parking downtown (since few want their kids to grow up where they work, especially outside top 10 cities). Car dependence is far and away the most effective “solution” to visible homelessness, and that’s part of why people are so attached to it.

Urban planning and public transportation also feed back into homelessness by prohibiting cheap housing types (like SROs) and making it nearly impossible to hold a job without owning a car in good repair (bus delays and cancellations will get you fired).

Paris subway outside the city center lines isn't necessarily pleasant.

> Maybe that average Parisian commute is slower, but more pleasant.

LMAO. Try Ligne 13 or Ligne 1 for your commute. Or any RER.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b22yKsTvynQ Pleasant is not the first word coming to my mind. And you're gonna enjoy the experience a lot more during the winter (lot of homeless people live there because it's 30°C) or summer.

Yeah, a pleasant stroll through the relaxing romantic fog of scooter emissions...

http://aqicn.org/map/paris/ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48762911

I tend to agree, but I think it's worth considering that public transit commutes might be longer because people find time on public transit more pleasant, and are willing to do more of it.

To look at two extremes, 45 minutes of bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go driving is a lot less compelling than 45 minutes of reading on a commuter train with a comfortable seat.

> people find time on public transit more pleasant, and are willing to do more of it.

My knowledge of "popular" underground (London) or metro (Paris) lines makes that very unlikely, they're hot, way overcrowded, and odd-smelling when they don't outright stink.

Very useful and convenient, and can be pleasant outside of peak hours, but back when I worked in Paris despite not being a morning person I switched my work hours to take the metro way off-peak (between 6 and 7) so I could commute with some fresh air and have more than "no room whatsoever".

On the most populated lines, the trains are packed line sardine cans, and I don't know now but 20 years back there was no AC let alone AC which could handle a car packed to the brim in high summer.

Just to be clear: I didn't regret not having a car one bit, and given my commute was directly through Paris (from one near suburb to an other on the opposite side of the city) I don't think commuting by car would have been more pleasant. Couldn't have commuted reading books for starters, that's an advantage of a somewhat lengthy train commute (bus is less comfortable for reading especially if you tend to get car sickness, and obviously you can't read in your car though I guess audiobooks might be an option these days).

> I switched my work hours to take the metro way off-peak (between 6 and 7)

Yeah, I did the same, and sometimes I feel this is the second most productive time of the day.

London’s public transport consists of trains and buses, not just the tube. And there are several air-conditioned ‘metro’ lines, all the sub-surface lines. The others are hot and horrible, I agree, but the public transport network in London is second to none. It also includes bicycles if you want the wind in your hair.

My experience, on trains, is similar to yours, though perhaps less unpleasant.

I've been taken trains at around 06:30 for about four years and it's such a big difference to a more standard office hour. I can relax, I can sleep without having somebody sat next to me, I can work and best of all I don't have to drive.

London has incredible public transport and only one line has no AC so it’s hot (edit) this is completely wrong, actually quite a few lines lack AC.. On being overcrowded - sure, during rush hour. Even then you marvel at the TfL’s efficiency - during rush hour I’ve counted one underground train every 20 seconds. 20 seconds! And this keeps on going for an hour or more.

Huh? None of the deep lines have AC

Really? I was under the impression Central was one of the few. Maybe it’s an air circulation thing, but for someone reason I can only think of the northern and central as being insanely hot. Will google.

edit you’re right I’ve just changed the post above.

Are you sure we live in the same city?

The Central line during summer is so hot it wouldn't be legal to transport cattle on it.

The Northern line regularly has packed platforms going north in the morning.

The Metropolitan has been undergoing "modernisation" for over a decade...

EDIT trains also frequently run late OR early

They break under the slightest deviation in nature - rain, snow, heat and leaves on the track all caused breakdown in service every year

And let's not forget the dreaded "signal failure".

By comparison my experiences in Munich, China, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore and Hong Kong have all illustrated what an efficient metro system can be. Though they obviously have 50+ years less infrastructure baggage to lit around

The Central line was the one I was thinking of. I was wrong and I’ve edited the post above.

The reason for this is clear tho - those lines are sometimes upwards of 100\80 years old.

It’s still probably the one of the best public transport systems I’ve ever encountered, and imo perhaps one of the best ones in Europe.

edit I haven’t been to Munich but I’ve been to Cologne & Berlin, I found London beat their transport systems particularly in clarity and signage. I find TfL signage systems to be some of clearest in the world, and I give them great credit for that. Their design is excellent and makes it virtually impossible to get lost.

Some of the older tech was more reliable that the stuff put in the 70's (My dad an EE did some consulting for TFL a few years ago)

Come visit us in Switzerland, my friend! And say goodbye to delays, overpopulation, climate woes and all the rest of it. And I'm only being slightly hyperbolic.

In Munich the SBahn is what you described. Not being on time/trains cancelled is the norm. When it snows in Norway the SBahn here breaks down.

Lived temporarily in Seoul and Osaka last year for three months, then moved to Berlin.

The trains were always on time in Seoul and Osaka when I had to take them (though to be fair, not very often) but in the first week of being in Berlin, like 60% of the time the "trains are running at an irregular interval". I definitely don't trust the U/S-Bahn in Berlin, but it's still one of my most favourite public transport systems in a city I've lived in. Lived there for 2 years and never had to use a car.

I've used the S-Bahn for 20 years (nowadays I can use the U-Bahn) and sure, it has its problems, but you are very, very hyperbolic. Most of the time it works just fine, whether the weather is good or bad. Sometimes the central tunnel is blocked, which is a problem for a system with one tunnel. That's why we build a second one. Meanwhile, cars are stuck in traffic almost all the time. The only way to cross the city in a car without being stuck is driving very early (say before 07:00 in the morning) and very late (21:00 or later).

That's just BS. Do you work for DB? ;-) Sure the U-Bahn is slightly better but with SBahn.. "störung" or "zug fällt aus" is the norm. Off the top of my head the last 5~6 rides I've taken with SBahn every single time the train was either:

- late

- a service was skipped

- broke down half way through the journey

Come to think of it actually just last week I was forced to take the train and ofc the next service "zug fällt aus". Then after some ~40 mins of waiting there was the next service. A group of kids shouted "Oh mein Gott, s-bahn!". Great summary of the quality of the service.

Just because the vehicle traffic also sucks doesn't redeem S/UBahn by any factor!

I don't work for DB, thanks for asking ;-)

I just did a quick vote with my coworkers who travel by S-Bahn/train every day: Out of all their trips they take one got cancelled or was late this and last week. That's for ten people and using it every day.

I have the feeling you almost never use S-Bahn and think because you had bad luck with the few trips you do all of S-Bahn must always be late/broken.

edit: Full disclosure, there seems to be a breakdown in service (because of a problem in the tunnel) right now.

Another Muenchener here, and I second ensiferum's take - Sbahn is significantly worse than Ubahn, in all measures. ie, if you want to go to the airport, you always schedule an extra hour, just in case you get dumped out in Ismaning or Unterschleissheim (with the confidently delivered excuse "dieser zug faehrt nicht weiter") and need to uber / wait for the next overly full train (whose signage may or may not be correct).

On top of that, unexplained, sudden, irrational waiting time extensions until finally 'zug faellt aus'.. really? if the train doesn't exist, just tell us so we can make other plans now and not in 30 mins. Besides, the posters communicating all of the recent schedule changes due to work are horribly complicated, written in long essay form when all they really need to say is what stops are out of service when (how non-german speakers navigate this nonsense is beyond the imagination). On top of that, the MVG's recent absurdist claim that all schedule changes will be conveniently available per MVG app :DDDD riiiiight... if you read the thirty page long yellow text!

I'm not denying any of these and am absolutely not saying metros are bad, I'm just pointing out that in my experience there's very little chance "public transit commutes" are considered "more pleasant" than car commutes. They're mostly a different kind of unpleasant.

Even the best metro systems in the world are going to be hell when full to the brim (e.g. Tokyo's attendant pushing people so they pack tighter and the doors can close).

Public transport is not just metro. It's also trains, trams, busses, etc. Especially trains are good for getting a bit of work done, or whatever. Someone I know commutes from Rotterdam to Amsterdam and uses it as a chance to get through TV shows.

For Paris, it depends on the line. I'm taking line 10 daily (and a bit of T2) and it's confortable enough.

When I lived in Paris, I used (for various jobs) lines 2, 6 and 13 to commute, also RER B. The mere idea of getting a seat during rush hour was delusional.

I remember once, at Denfert-Rochereau, I had to let two RER go to the south without me, as there was litteraly no place for me to go inside. Could not even put a foot in.

I'm lucky, especially since I take line 10 from the terminus to go back home, I'm sure to have a seat.

> 45 minutes of reading on a commuter train with a comfortable seat

I've never seen that train. The ones I am in - when I am in them, I avoid them as much as I can - are crowded and reading is definitely not going to happen, standing is more common than sitting.

Have you actually commuted long distance > 70 Miles each way?

I worked out in the UK it costs (after allowing for tax) £10k pa to commute the 70 miles to central London - and thats not counting the costs of the extra hour and a half out of your day.

Or you could live somewhere like Newark in Nottinghamshire where the train is an hour and ten minutes into Kings Cross and it'll cost you £6,000 a year.

Plus house prices/rents are cheaper too.

I'm so glad I live basically on the East Coast mainline, it's the only decent line in the entire country.

Apart from when they screwed people living in Bedford and Luton.

Houston is indeed utopia (at least for some), there are not enough resources on this planet to get a large house with pool to 7 billion people.

Pool and all the space in the world don't matter if you rarely use it or have friends/family over. When everyone is so distant, even if in the same city, getting together is harder. Being in a city with more places to meetup and more ways to get there just makes it more convenient and likely to have fun

Don't need your own pool if the building has one. People just have to get more used to sharing common spaces. Even the suburban floorplan could be stacked up a dozen plus stories if people wanted that.

Time on a train is at least semi-productive time. You can read HN! Which, face it, is what you'd be doing anyway. Time in a car is just spent staring at the road.

I like to call my family and girlfriend during my commutes. It’s much nicer to do that in the privacy and comfort of a car than in public transportation. There’s also audiobooks and music.

Oh, so you're that weirdo who always makes everyone around him in the vehicle listen to his loud phone conversations, making it next to impossible to focus on a book, or whatever else they were trying to do. :)

I think the GP's point is that talking on phone can be done without disturbing anybody else when you're in your own car

Ah, I seem to have misread GGP. My apologies.

Not sure why you're getting down-voted as having people talking (often loudly) on their phone on public transport makes it unpleasant for everyone else. I try and save calls for the car part of my commute, but then get accused of only calling cause I have nothing better to do...

You do appreciated the relative silence (no one on their phone or talking above a whisper) on trains in Japan.

Brisbane trains on the other hand - you need to wear noise-cancelling headphones (music optional) to block out other people's conversations - even in the quiet carriages.

> Not sure why you're getting down-voted

Maybe because just speaking on the phone in traffic makes a lot less attentive so you're prone to create accidents.

I would consider talking hands-free (if you're holding a phone you deserve to lose your license) no more distracting than listening to music.

There are worst things like eating or talking to someone else in the car. (look at the road not the person when you're talking)

Just phoning, even hands-free, is distracting.

actually it is and that has been tested. People on the phone drive more or less like drunk people. It's because of brain engagement.

Listening to music is passive (yes, even if you happen to be singing along, as you're just parroting memorized lyrics), whereas during a phone call, you have to focus on what the other party is saying, and formulate sentences to answer them.

That affects your attention on driving.

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

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-18024-008

>The results indicate that passenger conversations differ from cell phone conversations because the surrounding traffic not only becomes a topic of the conversation, helping driver and passenger to share situation awareness, but the driving condition also has a direct influence on the complexity of the conversation, thereby mitigating the potential negative effects of a conversation on driving.

Thanks for the links, learnt something new. The bit about the cognitive load preparing to speak or speaking rather than passive listening was interesting.

Yes, when talking to someone in the car they should be aware of the traffic and pause the conversation, where you have to tell the person on the other end of the phone that you need to go.

That doesn't seem like a good reason to receive downvotes.

In the extremely unlikely event that there's room to hold your phone in front of your face, and you have a free hand (usually it's one on the overhead rail, one holding your bag).

It has happened for me, but only if I board at the beginning of the line or commute several hours off peak.

That is certainly not extremely unlikely, at least not in any European country I've been to. I'd say at least 80% of the travelers look at their phones, a book, paper etc. I can do it almost any time I choose to.

I spent a year commuting by train and read so many books, it was great.

Actually no, here in this German state better bring a book along, because that mobile connection between cities will drop down to G or even go away quite often.

But you can do old style, work offline and then profit from train stop at a station to sync the data.

Yeah, back when I used to take the train to work (about 35m each way) I got so much more reading done than I do nowadays.

It’s also worth remembering how comfortable cars are compared to being packed like a sardine in public transit next to total strangers, some of whom are rude or unhygienic.

To be fair, that's not something you escape when you're driving at all. You still have to deal with rude drivers, people that cut you off, honk, road rage etc.

And I don't think in my entire college life of taking public transit to and from school did I ever really encounter anyone or anything that made my day worse. In fact it was the opposite, since one of the things that still stands out in my mind is the day a complete stranger decided to give out roses to men and women aboard the bus I was riding, myself included.

It was such a small thing, but something that really stuck with me.

I'm personally uncomfortable driving even really nice cars, 'cause you have to pay careful attention to not kill someone. I mean, driving can be fun or exciting - but it's not comfortable or relaxing, I would argue, at least not driving in places where there are other people.

On public transit, on the other hand, I can relax and read and pretty safely ignore the world. Worst case someone grabs my kindle or my phone and runs. I can afford a new phone. (which hasn't happened to me; I'm just saying, that's the biggest risk I see on public transit from relaxing my vigilance. In a car, well, a lot of people have killed other humans because they let their attention wander or decided to change the radio station at an unlucky moment.)

I mean, I'm not saying that your view of comfort is invalid... I'm just saying it's not universal.

> On public transit, on the other hand, I can relax and read and pretty safely ignore the world. Worst case someone grabs my kindle or my phone and runs.

That surely isn't really the worst case. This happened last Friday in Madrid, just days after someone pushed a mother and her child in front of a train in Germany (and killed the child): https://twitter.com/el_pais/status/1157564725015851008?

Granted, it's still a rare occurrence, but it seems to happen more often lately. The closest I personally came to this kind of public transport experience was standing in the first subway car when some drunk guy fell on the tracks and got killed around 20 years ago. It's not really a reason why I prefer the car these days, but also not exactly a fond memory.

As for feeling uncomfortable driving cars out of fear - most modern cars have good safety measures: https://youtu.be/cMiZa3HgRVE?t=125

The fear I feel when driving is not fear for my own safety, but fear that my actions (or momentary inattention) might lead to the death of another.

I think driving without that consciousness that you could kill someone else is extremely dangerous.

> The fear I feel when driving is not fear for my own safety, but fear that my actions (or momentary inattention) might lead to the death of another.

Did you watch the video? It's (also) about pedestrian/biker safety measures. All new crash tests cover this and you can see very well that cars brake automatically these days.

I'm not going to watch a video. what sort of person do you think I am?

I do have a reasonable knowledge of modern car safety features, and yes, high end (well, high trim level; these features are optional at additional cost on many cars I would call low end.) cars bought in the last few years have automatic braking systems that function reasonably well at low speeds, and that's a great thing that has probably saved many lives.

Certainly, if I buy a car again I will be sure to pay extra for these features

But these features don't make driving safe. These cars are not even close to being self-driving, and these features don't absolve the driver of vigilance.

Now, this doesn't apply to me ('cause I have a good job and can afford a recent car and can pay extra for the requisite options) but most cars still don't have those features. The vast majority of cars that are on the road today, and even many cars on the new-car lot don't have any sort of automatic-braking system.

> I'm not going to watch a video. what sort of person do you think I am?

I wish I knew what some people find so worthy of downvoting about suggesting to watch a crash test video that demonstrates the current state of pedestrian safety measures in cars. Or, what is scary/offensive about videos in general. But I suppose I don't need to understand every personality on the Internet...

I don't think you got downvoted for the jokey insults we're trading. (I also think it's pretty funny that I will go out of my way to avoid watching a video. What kind of person do you think I am?)

I think you got downvoted because it's ridiculous to suggest that current safety features make cars safe compared to most other common methods of transportation, especially for pedestrians and bicyclists.

This is news because it's so rare.

My sister's best friend being killed at age 17 walking on a residential road wasn't news. It isn't even rare, it's a leading cause of death for teenagers.

The dead motorbike rider I saw lying in the road didn't make the news. This is so common ambulance staff call bikers "organ doners".

The "accident" (gross negligence, IIRC) when about 15 were killed on the motorway, including one of my dad's colleagues, did make the news.

Railway (and even bus) deaths are orders of magnitude less frequent.

Depends on your city, but in the european metropolis I lived in, packed public transport was the exception (so was rude behaviour and smell). Contrary to that traffic jams and endless searches for parking lots were the norm when I went by car.

European cities are for historical reasons less practical to commute to by car, because they are dense, have never been planned with cars in mind and there is literally no space for your car. In such a setting a well funded public transport system makes all the sense in the world, because it uses the space more efficiently than the usual one-person-car-commuter.

Actually most major cities were rebuilt after WW2 due to destruction. Prague is an example of a city that wasn't rebuilt and the city centre is unusable by public transport - car is about the longest vehicle that can fit in many turns there. We solve that with underground garages and subway.

In italy it is slow because there’s still lot of traffic and not enough funds for public transport.

HN is generally pro-car. Car are viewed as an absolute necessity, and the climate problem is gonna be solved via a tech-fix by going electric, ignoring that this isn't really a solution.

Finnish anecdote: I commute 35km by bike and train in 60 minutes (round trip). By car, I estimate it would take at least 90 minutes. Train service is reliable and runs 6-10 times per hour between 6am and midnight.

It's an interesting point, but I would like to correct one thing: when people in Paris don't buy cars, in most cases it's not because they don't have the means but because it's highly impractical to drive one.

Besides, the French may have lower disposable income, but they have much longer holidays and work way fewer hours on average.

Time might have an edge, especially if you live in a rural area that doesn't have the population to sustain transit infrastructure and zero traffic, but there are a lot more intangible benefits to avoiding the act of driving.

I live in LA and people drive like assholes. In rush hour people merge no blinker from edge to edge of the highway if one lane is moving a mile an hour faster, causing even more traffic in the process downstream from everyone slamming on the brakes to avoid killing the prick. No one ever lets you in unless you threaten to hit them. You are forced to engage in the ruckus, because if you drive at all defensively you will not go anywhere.

Then there is the streets themselves. Highways peel lanes like onions, forcing constant merging and therefore inevitable traffic. Commonly there are 4 way stops with multilane streets and no one knows who should go first, so with any traffic at all it immediately gridlocks. Visiting friends without a parking space means factoring in circling their entire neighborhood if you aren't blessed with a nearby parking structure.

The whole experience is profoundly frustrating and stressful. On public transport, I can read a book. Maybe I'll learn something instead of fighting in the pits.

I'm in European city with great public transport, and my commute is 50 minutes by bus or 20 minutes by car (one way).

Every time someone says "we should forbid cars in cities", I hear "we should take away 1 hour a day from your family, you should sit in bus instead". (or more likely stand, since the bus is always full)

I'm not fan of that.

Part of the solution is to invest in internet infrastructure and encourage work from home when it is possible. People waste less time and for those who have to get somewhere for their job there is less traffic.

This, so much. I am not needed in cities and should do my part by never setting a foot there again. Just send me specs and I'll code them from home. I'll only leave once a week for groceries.

My commute by car is 45 minutes, 60 minutes by public transport.

I still take public transport. In a car I need to be focused for the full 45 minutes and be stuck in traffic, having nothing to do. In the train I can put my laptop on the table and work for 35 minutes straight before I need to switch to the subway. I can also recline the seat and take a 35 minute nap instead. It's amazing and really adds to my quality of life.

To be fair, people are mostly saying "we should forbid cars in city centers".

Presumably your commute is so much longer on public transport because neither your home nor your job is in the city center and there are fewer lines out there? Not saying that you deserve to suffer if that's the case, but also probably people aren't coming for cars in your neighborhood first.

The recent yellow vest protests in France are interesting for your focus. I believe most of it is driven not by the not-so-high petrol price, but by combination of two facts in France : Real estate is very expensive in cities, more and more disconnected from the average income; jobs are mostly in these places. In short, the tendency is that most French people can't afford to live where they work, or don't want to live in a smaller flat, hence their commute time.

> where middle class people can afford big houses with a pool

And where each person (in the country) consumes twice as much energy as an average French person does [1] and more than 3 times as much water [2]

The "American way of life" is not sustainable.

Mind you, many French can afford a house with a pool as well. The problem is in fact that they do buy houses with pools these days... There were 700k private pools in France in 2000, 1.7 millions in 2012, probably more than 2.5 millions in 2018, making the country the 2nd market after the USA. [3][4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263156/water-consumption...

[3] https://www.planetoscope.com/habitat/1002-les-ventes-de-pisc...

[4] http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-eco/2018/07/23/97002-20180723FI...

You can’t really blame them, with new heat records set every year. Pools are an effective way of keeping cool when temps creep up to 40 degrees C.

France is a weird case (or at least, the case I know better). First of, a lot of those statistic tend to be skew because of Paris, because France tend to be very Paris-centric (its getting better, but Paris is still the center of "everything"). When it come to Paris, a lot of time, it's often faster to take the public transportation than your own car because of the systemic traffic jam at rush hour (which is common for this type of cities). But as more people move out of Paris or take the public transport or other form of transportation (the city has made a lot of effort to be more bicycle friendly in the last years), travel time by car actually start to decrease.

In my own city, car was almost always faster than public transportation. I had different commute time, from 1h30 to 10 minutes, and I could have always shave some of it by taking the car.

But for me, the 10-15 minutes I could have gain from taking the car was nothing compared to the comfort I was gaining by using the public transportation. I can just hop in a tram or in a bus, listen to my music, read a book, ... I don't have to do any of the mental effort that driving require, which is very valuable for me after a day of work. I also feel more safe, if my bus or my tram has an accident, I know I am more protected. And in general, I really do enjoy my city a lot more the less car there is. I grew up mostly in the country side and next the the amazonian forest. The noise, and most importantly, the awful smell created by car traffic is very disturbing to me. Staying for too long next to a busy street will usually give me nausea very quickly. I also feel safer as I don't have to worry about my surrounding has much. Since there is no car, I don't have to check if I am going to be run over. Finally, road are just plain ugly, I rather have green area, pedestrian way, and art lying around.

Its for these reason that I accept all the inconvenience that public transportation brings. I rather have a slightly longer commute by feel good in the city than the opposite.

Car ownership rates in cities have nothing to do with being rich enough to own a car. New York is one of the wealthiest cities in the country but has the lowest rate of car ownership.

> Viewed from a different perspective, a country where most people can spend 48 minutes a day commuting, because it’s rich enough for everyone to afford a car,[1] might be considered better than one where many people have to endure two-hour public transit commutes

You are misinterpreting the data, the 113 minute figure is for ALL public transit travel, not just commuting.

> That’s mainly because Europe has higher public transit use, and public transit is slow.

Where's your evidence for that claim? It seems plausible to me that these countries have a larger fraction of the population living in large metro areas, and big cities inevitably involve longer commutes whether you drive or take transit.

Public transit is not intrinsically slow. If your city has decent transit it is usually much, MUCH faster than driving in rush hour traffic. I live 10 minutes away from work by train; the corresponding drive would take 30 minutes during rush hour. If you want to get from the suburbs to downtown for work, it would take you only 30 minutes on the suburban rail whereas driving would take 90.

You're also missing one the main points of public transit, which is that it is compatible with density whereas auto culture is fundamentally not. In denser cities it is physically impossible for every person with a 9-5 job to be in a single occupancy car on the road at the same time. There is literally not enough space for that to happen. It's not about deciding, as a matter or public policy, whether you want everyone to be able to drive or not. You literally CANNOT, within the laws of physics, accomplish that feat.

> New York is one of the wealthiest cities in the country but has the lowest rate of car ownership.

I think that's part causation too. Cars are expensive things to own and operate with most of that money disappearing from the local community. The money that would have been spent on cars still goes somewhere and I'm betting most of it goes locally.

I prefer my current commute (by bus in an European city) to a shorter commute by car. While I'm on the bus, I read an ebook, HN, use a Duolingo-like app for language learning, or play some mobile games. All of these are things that I'd do at another time in the day anyway, so I am not really wasting time, as I would be if I had to drive.

By the way, is having 50% more disposable income really being richer if you may need to pay six-figure amounts if you need surgery?

You just can't compare commuting on time alone. If you commute by car then 100% of that time is spent sitting down either driving or stuck in traffic. If you commute by public transport then maybe 50% of the time is spent reading, and 50% is spent walking. If you commute by bicycle then 100% of the time is spent cycling.

It's a shame that study only shows a mean aggregate. I'd be interested to see the raw distribution in commute times. Just anecdotally I've known many people in the UK who spend only ten minutes "commuting" to work each day. That rarely seems to be possible in the US from what I've seen.

But, yes, European people don't understand the American way of life. The amount of waste and unsustainable consumption would shock them to the core.

Commuting in cars is why Audible (and their sponsorships) is single-handedly propping up Youtube content creators.

If you commute by public transport then 90% of the time is spent packed like a sardine in a train or a bus, often with no air conditioning.

You're right, mean aggregates don't mean much in this situation. The USA is too diverse of a country. NYC people commute by subway, and walking. Sure it's a long commute but you have ample opportunity to stop and do other things on the way home. If you live in Montana, you can commute home by car, in 10 minutes. But in Montana you are stuck at home, once you get there. What is needed is a 'happiness of commute' index.

For what it’s worth, there is plenty “to do” in those places too. I’m not sure what you mean by “stuck” — maybe your interests are different, but for those who like fishing after work, hiking a remote mountain, playing fetch with the dogs in a big field, or swimming in uncrowded streams — it’s a pretty awesome life. Sure it requires a car. At least to me it’s totally worth it.

I get carsick when I try to read on the bus. My time this morning was 50% walking, and 50% staring out the window at nothing.

It is worth it to not have to drive, but the car is faster by far at no loss.

> at no loss

Lets agree to disagree

I think you've got this almost exactly backwards. People in Paris don't buy cars because they have low utility. A car is slower than public transport for almost any journey in Paris. That's because population density in France is 4x higher than that in the US.

What's also important to remember as well is that commuting by car doesn't scale well. As population density rises, commutes become exponentially longer due to grid lock. So in some ways you can see the direction of movement and France is just further along that direction - as population density increases you're forced to move to more efficient forms of transport.

>That's because population density in France is 4x higher than that in the US.

That's a meaningless statement unless you're comparing the Paris metropolitan area to some similar area in the US. France doesn't have a sparsely populated continental interior to drag down the nation wide population density.

Depends on what you compare it with. Compared with Netherland, rural France is very sparsely populated.

But even in rural Netherland (it exists!) you need a car. We're really talking about cities here. In a well-designed city, you shouldn't need a car unless you need to go to a rural area outside the city.

That assumes a value judgment about what is a “well designed city.” Sprawling car dependent cities offend my personal aesthetic sensibilities, but there is a reason that the biggest internal migration trend in the US is away from cities like New York and to cities like Houston and Phoenix. Being able to easily drive everywhere can be very convenient.

But I think it's unhealthy if it comes at the cost of not being able to walk or bike anywhere. Kids need to be able to get around on their own, as should poor people who might not have a car. Cars have a tendency to clog up city centers, and their main value is outside cities, so designing a city so that cars are mainly for getting out of the city, while most places are easily accessible on foot or by bike, I think that creates a healthier, more fun, and more integrated city.

I admit for me personally it's mostly aesthetics, but this is also the direction that many professional city planners are working towards. At least in Netherland. It wasn't always like that; the 60s and 70s were very car-oriented, until people started to realise what the impact of cars on living spaces was.

> Viewed from a different perspective, a country where most people can spend 48 minutes a day commuting, because it’s rich enough for everyone to afford a car,

What's good for individuals might not necessarily be good for society.

In 100 years, we'll look back at our car obsession as some sort of temporary societal madness. The environmental impact of cars alone is a compelling argument in favor of public transport

I see many people 'cottaging' in the summer. Drive for a couple of hours to a cottage, spend two days there, and drive back. It's not that enjoyable of an experience, really like owning two houses, that you need to clean.

I look at the pictures from 100 years ago of little resorts, and little resort towns. You take a train, spend a week in a pleasant atmosphere. Maybe you own a little cottage near the railway tracks, in a small village. It was more communal and more enjoyable. You can walk into the village in 15 minutes.

In 100 years, we'll still be rich enough to afford cars, just they will be electric and self-driving. People only take public transportation because there's no parking, it's faster and/or cheaper, or they can get other stuff done while on it. All these being equal, people will choose cars.

> People only take public transportation because there's no parking, it's faster and/or cheaper

You're kind of neglecting the advertising-led pressure to own a car. Car companies spend literally billions of dollars convincing you that cars are cool, and that they somehow indicate your status.

I would like to see what data you assumption that public transit is slower than car is based on but I'm quite sure it's not true. From my experience, car as always been slower than walking + public transport. And much more painful and stressful. Those numbers might also mean that having a good public transport infrastructure allows people to work from further away than car does.

Comparing salaries is also quite a broken. You can turn what you says around. Maybe Paris has a great transport system because of better investment in public infrastructure and distribution of wealth. I have no idea if what you say about Houston is true, but if it's the case, maybe the lack of public infrastructure is due to the lack of investment in public transportation, causing the obligation to have car, which is expensive for the most vulnerable households and causing all the environmental issues we all know.

Alas, it is true. I use PT whenever I can, and it’s way more relaxing. But while my commute to the office in the city takes 1:15 using the bike and train, it only takes 0:50 using the car. The difference becomes smaller under various conditions (eg traffic jam), but on average, the car is faster and arguably cheaper. And I hope very much that this will be fixed.

As someone who has been a commuter on public transportation in Dublin, London, and New York I can attest that time is not the only measurement.

For many of us it’s a quiet time or when we read a book, crossword, game, or catchup on news before (and after) work.

Even if driving were a bit faster you can’t do that at the same time.

(My current commute is 25 min and I think it’s too short)

You are cherry picking the second stats of your document, but the first one indicate that France and USA are very similar. For Paris, it is exactly the same number as NYC : 1h30, the number you used it from an error in the article, if you look at the source it separate the home/work duration to the whole transport time in a day (for example to go to a concert after work).

https://www.iau-idf.fr/fileadmin/NewEtudes/Etude_1371/NR_745...

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

Its amazing to me how cheap these changes are, and how much people love them after they are implemented. You go to a neighborhood meeting in the US and all you hear about is "loss of parking", "traffic", but when you remove the cars, everyone loves it.

I never knew loss of parking was even a thing in the US. I can't imagine it being as bad as within European cities where most of the streets (and adjacent buildings) have been built before cars were a thing. Probably one of the main reasons why alternatives to cars are well-received is that cars have never been an option anyways, especially in historic districts.

Big cars are another dimension of this problem. American cars are usually larger because they don't have these types of issues. You won't see a majority of people driving pickup trucks in Europe.

Where I live, the two biggest fears about non-car transportation is that it's a) inconvenient or stressful and full of delays (for public transport) or b) too dangerous (for stuff like electric scooters).

It depends on the city, but there's a weird entitlement in some big, dense American cities from people who feel they have an inherent right to store their car for free or very cheap on public land, when that land is in the middle of a dense city with a ton of competing uses for public land (bike lanes, sidewalks, pickup/delivery zones, street trees, bus lanes, heck even traffic lanes). In the densest cities, these also tend to be more affluent people. Oddly, though, also usually the kind of affluent people who consider themselves environmentalist and liberal. At least that's true in NYC and DC, two cities with substantial neighborhood pushback against reallocating street parking to other uses, happening in well-off neighborhoods that are full of signs promoting liberal causes (Upper West Side NYC, Dupont Circle DC, etc.).

I can see it in lower-density, car-dependent areas, where you arguably need somewhere to park, and poorer residents of apartment buildings without their own off-street parking might be impacted. But the cognitive dissonance around being an affluent liberal in Manhattan and suing to stop a bike lane [1] because you don't want to lose free street parking in Manhattan is absurd. Of course, they're still environmentalist because they support banning straws.

[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/07/30/breaking-upper-west-s...

It's crazy that Manhattan doesn't have a blanket "15 minutes only" rule for parking, no return within an hour, which gives enough time for deliveries and dropoff/pickups, but prevents garaging.

The value of a typical 17 square metre parking space in Manhattan is about $400k [0]. If you want to park your car on the road, rather than paying for a commercial garage, you should be paying for that land.

[0] 22.83 square miles of land in Manhattan is 78304708.32 square metres. Parallel parking space is 2.76m by 6.1m according to https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-size-of-a-standard-parking...

See 35th Ave NE in Seattle.

I live in a mid sized town, and a contentious issue is parking for government employees. The people who have free parking consider it to be a benefit of their jobs.

There was a big hooplah in my neighborhood when a nearby government building converted to being leased from a developer, who immediately started charging for parking. Most of the employees found places to park on the nearby residential streets, annoying the residents due to the added congestion and traffic, including on a street that was already a designated bike thoroughfare.

I certainly support better urban planning, and I get around town by bike whenever possible, but I'm also sympathetic to the short term disruptions that people have adapted to parking arrangements that can change overnight.

> historic districts.

Thing is, historic districts don't make up most of cities, even before the post-war rebuild/new cities expansion.

There is pushback against car-impacting measures in Europe too, make no mistake.

The yellow jackets in France started as a protest against increase in tax on petrol. The previous president in France, Hollande, had to roll back a toll system. It took Paris 2 years of legal battles to close the roads along the Seine.

The major difference, compared witg the US, is that at least in an urban setting, in Europe you can imagine other alternatives.

The problem of the US is that outside of major cities, the entire country was designed and built on the premise of cheap, individual transportation. Everyone has his own little house with a little garden. No town centres. This lack of density means that public transport or bikes will never be able to be able to provide a serious alternative to the automobile, and so people will never given them up.

I don't know how it is in the USA but in France (and I suspect most old European cities) the richer people who can afford to live in the city center are generally in favor of removing cars because they either don't have a car or can afford to pay for a private parking spot while people who live in the suburbs and take their cars to work every day have to suffer the consequences. So you end up with this "class warfare" type situation.

Of course since in practice the richer people who live in the city centers are also those who elect the mayors things still eventually move forward in the direction of fewer cars.

I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.

I take your point but you can't also discount the air quality in cities being quite a big factor as to becoming less dependent on cars. LEV's (Low Emission Vehicles) are taxed less, for example (although the infrastructure is still lacking, perhaps CAV's (Connected Autonomous Vehicles) may one day solve that as parking could be placed further away and there may be more of a 'sharing' system in place, such that you don't really own a car, just dial one up like an Uber)

Do people commute into Paris by car in relatively large numbers? Where on earth do they park?

Certainly in the UK cities I've known people who live in the core are much less likely to own cars, but people from outside rarely commute in by car to the core because it's just too slow.

Medieval city plans just don't suit cars, even where the walls were demolished to make a ring road. I used to joke that there was no way to fix Cambridge's traffic problem without demolishing a college, then someone showed me a 1960s plan that involved taking a corner off St John's.

Well, it depends.

Paris is a bit special, it's not a city which kept a lot of its medieval layout heritage thanks to Napoleon III and Hausmann. You have a lot of Boulevard which are quite large and decently arranged.

As for commuting, it depends also. Basically, the subway is exceptionally dense within Paris (keep in mind that Paris, as an administrative entity is actually very small and dense, roughly 10km in diameter, and you have a station every 500 meters or so in any direction within it). As for the Paris area, the regional trains (RER) are roughly in a star pattern, with the crossing point between the lines in the center of Paris (Chatelet).

All that means that if you live withing Paris, you can easily go anywhere in Paris, but also in most of the Paris area in roughly 1 hour max. If you are in the suburbs and work within Paris, it's pretty much the same. However, if you are in the suburbs, and work in the suburbs, then, it tends to suck, because if you are unlucky, you have to go from your home "suburb" to Paris and then from Paris to your "work" suburb which can be a huge detour.

As an example, I used to live southeast of Paris (Evry), and work in the southwest of Paris (Clamart), in that configuration using a car was the only viable option, and the few times I didn't have my car, taking the transports meant 4 to 5 hours commuting every day. Typically, I drove around 25000km per year in these years.

Then I moved within Paris, and my car became far less useful, I went for 25000km a year to 3000km a year because the public transports became a viable option.

And lately my job got closer to Paris, so I finally sold my car without replacing it.

As for traffic, the roads are not that bad, and there are quite a lot of rings/partial rings, (Peripherique near Paris, in place of the old city walls from the XIXth century, A86 about 10/15km from the center, and the A104/n104/n118 20/30km away from the center, and quite a few highways radiating from the Peripherique (A13, A6, A1, etc). But it's not enough and there are a lot of traffic jams. As an example, the 40km commute when I lived in the suburbs was taking me ~30 minutes without traffic jams, but typically it was taking me ~1 hour and in some cases, with an accident for example, even 2 hours.

Also, a lot of people tend to live in the east of Paris, where housing is a bit cheaper (like almost every European city in fact, the dominant winds pushing smokes and bad smells west to east). But you have more activities in the West, the biggest being La Defense (business district just west of Paris). Which means a lot of long commutes for these people.

So it really depends on your situation.

On last point that is interesting to note: I grew-up outside of Paris, passing your driving license between 18 and 20 years old is considered normal in such cases. When I started studying in Paris, I was a bit surprised to learn that a good portion of the students native from Paris don't even learn how to drive, or do so much, much, much later.

It seems like it should theoretically be viable to add some commuter rail lines following the same rings as the current peripherical roads, and improve the suburb-to-suburb transit experience.

There is a plan like this for Paris. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_(project)

Commuter rail rings through the suburbs don’t really work, because you need a car at both ends.

No, they do no. Hardly anyone does.

> someone showed me a 1960s plan that involved taking a corner off St John's.

That's to be expected if you get someone from Trinity to draw up the plan!

Cambridge is becoming an incredibly hostile place to get to and around in if you don't live in the city. Partly it's a function of the population growth, but it is pushing people like me to spend more in towns like Bury St Edmunds rather than deal with Cambridge.

This is exactly how it is in the USA too, for about the past 20ish years now.

Wealthy people have largely eliminated poor/middle class people out of the core urban areas, and moved them mostly to the suburbs/exurbs. Then, wealthy people tear down the functional public transportation between the urban city and the rest of the metro (mostly roads and freeways), and replace them with pretty but function-less "public transit" (mostly buses in the midwest).

This is sold, in theory, on being "green". But the new bus system covers less than 5% of the road system it replaces, and their gentrification efforts actually decrease the usefulness of the buses that already existed, since they cut down a small forests worth of trees on the edge of the city every time they displace an previously-urban neighborhood -- so the net result is almost always lower ridership - https://la.curbed.com/2019/5/22/18628524/metro-ridership-dow... - and their attempts to remove cars from the city (through intentional congestion, artificial scarcity, use fees, whatever) move this transportation to less efficient routes far outside the city, where they must burn more gasoline per person to accomplish identical trips, emitting more CO2 per person and in total.

So you get this ridiculous situation where US cities can point to all these shiny new bus lines and bike lanes as "progress", but absolutely no one can afford the housing needed to use any of that, so on a CO2-per-person basis, we've regressed significantly. And 1990's era cities with it's freeways and parking were often better for the environment on a CO2-per-person basis than 2019's cities are today that lack those.

Then, wealthy people tear down the functional public transportation between the urban city and the rest of the metro (mostly roads and freeways), and replace them with pretty but function-less "public transit" (mostly buses in the midwest).

I don't understand... you are saying they replace roads and freeways and replace them with buses?

That's like replacing a glass with water. It makes no sense.

Yes. This is done either for public use (tearing out a lane of public travel, and replacing it with a lane for buses only) or privatizing the street altogether (tearing out a lane, and replacing it with front yards, or restaurant seating, or whatever).

I believe you but have never heard of cities anywhere removing roads or lanes, only adding more. Can you give any examples of cities that have actually done this?

There is a thing called road diet, take 4 lanes (2 each way), reduce it to 2 lane and add turn lanes and bike lane.

Car traffic hopefully slows and makes things safer for pedestrians crossing the road and much safer for cyclist.

The wikipedia only lists a few examples where it has been implemented:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet#Examples_of_implemen...

I believe the person means something like taking an existing 2 or 3 lane road and making one lane a bus lane. So you took away a lane in a way. In Seattle they have done that but the buses work really well when they don't get stuck in car traffic. Buses are often faster than cars here. There's a huge number of buses, they get good use out the special bus lanes. On the freeway it's carpool lanes than include cars and buses. In the city they do have bus only lanes.

If you didn't have buses that go places people need and lots of them then converting a lane to bus only might not be useful. People make exactly the same claims you do about seattle but the bus system here is really effective.

UT Knoxville did this on Cumberland ave and other roads around campus to push people into driving around the campus rather than through it.

Not sure if your question regards the US only, but this is how cities in the Netherlands became bike and pedestrian-friendly starting in the 70s, by removing a lot of roads.

Manhattan at last is turning lanes into bike lanes and returning some places to pedestrians, such as Times Square and some other squares.

Though the examples do show what I consider progress, the tiny amount of changes reinforces your point, like deafening silence.

I spent a lot of time this last weekend walking along such a reduction of road in NYC--Broadway near Times Square has undergone such a road diet.

One example is the conversion of the Embarcadero freeway into a pedestrian friendly waterfront zone, although that's not quite a fair example given that it took an earthquake destroying it to give it the oomph it needed to happen.

For a few years now, every road construction project near my Amsterdam home has removed car lanes. Also parking. Usually the freed space goes to protected cycle paths, but sidewalks, trees, and playgrounds sometimes win some new space as well.

(N.b. there is a plan to add a lane to portions of the outer ring highway, so "more car lanes to reduce traffic" still has some advocates.)

So what you meant to say was that they re-paint existing roads to make it harder for cars and easier for busses. Not that they pull out a road (a piece of infrastructure) and replace it with a bus (a vehicle).

This argument is far too loose to have any bite. You mention urban displacement and gentrification, but this has only happened in certain cities (downtown Kankakee certainly isn't gentrifying the same way that San Francisco is). You mention inefficient bus routes and link to an anecdote from LA, one of the most sprawl heavy, auto-friendly, and challenging metro environments for transit in the entire US. Gentrification and transit can be intertwined issues, but these sorts of hand-wavy accusations are more injurious to the discussion than helpful.

> So you get this ridiculous situation where US cities can point to all these shiny new bus lines and bike lanes as "progress", but absolutely no one can afford the housing needed to use any of that, so on a CO2-per-person basis, we've regressed significantly. And 1990's era cities with it's freeways and parking were often better for the environment on a CO2-per-person basis than 2019's cities are today that lack those.

There's no way this is true. Housing density has increased within cities themselves. Generally things have also become more CO2 efficient within the cities as well. More people live in cities than 20 years ago. If someone in the suburbs drives, it's the same (or less with modern cars). If they use transit, it's less. If they move out of the suburbs or stop commuting, it's also less. Where does the CO2 increase come from?

It's also important to remember that these trends vary vastly depending on the city you talk about. High density cities with good existing public transit infrastructure have very much succeeded and improved public transit, not destroyed it. LA is very much not a good example due to the sprawling nature. I lived in LA for 6 months and would not call it a city but rather 13 connected suburbs. A bus there is indeed a failed project. Heck, even the Expo line they just built to connect the west side is a lot of travel time and not much coverage.

Silicon Valley area is the perfect example. Terrible public transport apart from a very few, select areas and it's inconvenient and expensive. (BART, Caltrain, Lightrail, Amtrak)

I'm from the North East, so maybe I'm off base here, but...

Using Silicon Valley as 'the perfect example' of anything that is supposed to generalize to the rest of the country, or even within 100 miles, seems... bizarre.

>So you end up with this "class warfare" type situation.

This is a weird framing because the very poorest segments of society in Europe also tend to live in urban areas and don't even own a car and rely on public transport, so it's more of a class sandwich.

The very car reliant demographic seems to be what in the United States is called the 'dream hoarder' class, which is to say the largely socio-economic isolated middle class that fled to the suburbs. The same is true for the yellow vests in France. The people participating where generally not poor, which was very obvious when one looked at the demographic makeup of the group, notably, immigrants and people of color were largely absent.

Class isn't purely economic. It is the perception of 'inner city elites' being out of touch with the rest of the country.

In the recent Australian election, the (losing) Labour Party had a policy to target 50% of vehicles being electric by 2030.

The Liberal party jumped on this and ran a scare campaign that Labour was trying to take away the vehicles that Australians love for work and recreation, utes and 4WD/SUVs. It worked, not because any inherent inferiority of electric vehicles but, because people don't want to be told what is best for them by people that don't understand their needs.

Living unsustainably and ignoring pollution and global warming is their "need"?

Politicians running that kind of campaign should be jailed. They probably do much more actual damage than those who support terrorism or racism, which are illegal in most countries.

In a democracy it's generally accepted that the people deserve to get what they want even if it's stupid and bad for them. History mostly indicates that the downsides of this approach are far less bad than the downsides of any system where the people do not get what they want.

In France, not all poor are immigrants/PoC. The "very poorest" are protected/supported by the gov, with government allowance (equivalent to UBI), public housing, free schools, free healthcare, reduced price on public transportation… A good chunk of the yellow vests are people making just enough to not be part of the "very poorest", so don't get all those helps, but have to bear an increasing tax burden. They usually leave the poorer urban areas, often being priced out (as having no access to gov housing grants or public housing) or looking for better conditions of living than the post-war concrete blocks.

> rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.

In Seattle the complaint is it's the other way around. Only the well off can afford to live in the city, and the less well off drive in.

That’s the trope, but in reality, the less well off take the bus in, and the drivers for the most part could live in the city if they decided they didn’t want a yard or a parking spot. Taking road space from cars and giving it to busses/bikes helps the lower and middle classes the most.

> I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.

Over the last 30 years it's been flipping. working class people with no safety net have been priced out/forced out of cities leaving the wealthy, upper middle class, and poor people.

For context, cities in the US used to include the rich, but then "white flight" [1] happened.

Then in the 2000's, young (usually more progressive) people with wealth and white collar jobs began to move back to cities, making that statement not really true today. Of course with this shift came the gentrification and rising urban living cost we see today in places like SF, Seattle, NYC, Boston, and many other popular areas in the US.

So your statement would be more correct in the 60's to the late 90's but not really today. Of course the combination of housing density (lower than Europe) and lack of public transport does indeed make cities more anti-(car commuter) than in Europe, which is also why its so crucial to live within the city itself, thus creating the crazy housing markets.

I think living without cars in medium-high density areas is ideal for many who don't want a rural life, but the US will need major restructuring before that's ever possible, and even then it would only apply to select regions like the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic coast, parts of California along the coast, and a few other major hubs like Atlanta, Chicago, and Seattle. The amount of land the US has all but guaranteed there will always this tension in how people live in rural versus urban areas. I find that the polarization is only growing stronger today interesting, as I'm sure tons of political scientists who have spent more time and research digging into the trend do as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

Ive lived in Chicago for 20 years now. Between the L and Metra systems, Chicago's public works pretty great if you want to get from the suburbs into the Loop. I dont have much experience using rhe CTA or PACE bus systems. The transit system is pretty awful if you need to make an orbital commute, say from west suburbs to north, which I did for 2 years. Morning commute wasn't too bad, typically 40 minutes for 25 miles. Evening commute was typically 60 mins, maybe 90 or 120 depending on the number of accidents for the same 25 miles, on rare occasions 180 mins for bad weather. Conversely, the quickest scheduled public transit for my commute was at 180 mins each way. Had to go all the way into the Loop, then back out again. Faced with a normal 2 hour round driving trip vs 6 hour round public trans trip, yeah, I'm going to drive. New job, pays better, and spend 40 minutes in the car. Yeah, theres public trans options, but itd mean spending 3-4 hours commuting and a shit ton of walking that frankling I'm not up for 9 months of the year (either way too hot or way too cold).

I live in Chicago, and I sold my tesla and my lamborghini and replaced them with subway, a boosted board and a divvy membership. I’ve never been happier. For road trips I still pull out the lil porsche, but that rarely happens any more.

With home delivery of pretty much everything I need, I rely on Wholefoods and Peapod for what I used to have my car for. 5 Years ago that wasn’t an option.

I can certainly understand some rural reservations and concerns.

I live in a suburban area where outside commuter type service there is no mass transit into the city.

So as the city restricts parking I worry about accessibility. Park and rides are also usually a commuter hours only option too.

It won't work in LA because the layout is structurally geared to maximizing distance between necessities, rather than being walkable or having effective public transport.

> ...at least in an urban setting, in Europe...

> The problem of the US is that outside of major cities...

What urban setting does the US have outside its major cities? Arguably, that is one of the major problems.

I'm assuming that "major cities" here is code for "Boston-to-Washington corridor, Chicago, and San Francisco"--the US cities that are the most similar to European cities and generally have strong downtowns, coherent transit systems, and generally dissuade car access to their city centers. This would be in contrast to the urban centers of places like LA or Dallas, where the downtowns are filled with surface parking lots instead of buildings.

In Vienna in 2010 the city decided to transform a huge shopping street into a pedestrian area. There was a lot of fuss and heated discussions. Media reported on it for months. Some people feared the proposed change will lead to fewer customers and this in turn will lead to stores having to close. Public opinion was split but leaning towards the transformation. One segment of the shopping street was kept a street as compromise iirc.

Fast forward to 2019 and people love it. Also the stores are thriving. Now the part that was kept as street feels odd. Change is difficult.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariahilfer_Stra%C3%9Fe#Mariah...

But are they the same stores?

It's probably fine for the landlords, but if you're leasing storespace and selling bulk/heavy goods, or something so specialized that people from afar drive to you, you're going to have trouble.

If you're running a restaurant or cafe, you're in a great situation.

It's a solvable issue, but it may be ignored.

I think the ideal solution is to migrate business which depend on transportation into commercial areas like it has been done in the US from the beginning (because everything could be planned from scratch without "technical debt"). Of course it is hard to convince stores to move out of the historic districts of major towns into these kind of areas, but it actually makes sense for them if they're combined with other businesses and people have to spend less time travelling around to get everything done. I have seen it being done like that here in Europe.

The biggest argument against that around here is that eventually, all stores want to move to these new business areas which causes the town's center to lose attractiveness. That's why it's usually difficult for city administrations to decide about the locations of individual businesses.

I agree. But migration can be difficult when your restaurant supply store is on a 20 year lease.

There’s a store near me that sells just hockey goalie equipment. Moving to pedestrian-only would be a net negative for them since most of their business isn’t local foot traffic.

Good question. Not disagreeing but a bit more context:

You can still get close by car, you just can no longer drive along or cross over the shopping street. You also have access to pretty good public transport options in the area (underground, bus, tram, …).

I can imagine other scenarios and areas where a change like this might be strictly bad for some stores. From what I can tell I don't think this was the case here. Happy to be corrected though if someone knows more.

Those stores tended to already have migrated to the edge of the city during the car era. If you're coming a long way the last thing you want is to drive into the city.

Or they deliver, e.g furniture.

Not true. Sure, one of the largest shopping centers in Europe is south of Vienna now (has been there since 1976), but the street mentioned here was very accessible by car and people (including me) found it very comfortable to park in one of the public garages and go shopping there. There was also a large furniture store with its own pickup spot/garage ("Leiner", closed now after going broke).

This is effectively a solved issue though, isn't it? Even the given example of the Mariahilfer Str. still has road access and as per the wikipedia page "Für den Lieferverkehr ist die Zufahrt und das Halten bis 13 Uhr zulässig." (Access and halting for delivery of goods is allowed until 1pm). Any city off the top of my head with pedestrian-only inner city areas still allow delivery trucks until certain times. Since the vast majority of retailers get their goods delivered in 3.5-7.5t trucks simply because of the volume, I don't see how this is going to change. Shops still need to get their goods somehow and the last thing you want to do is strangle off clothing shops or electronic goods from your city center, leaving only restaurants and cafes. Nobody would go there anymore.

I get that, but now that the mix of customer traffic has changed, the optimal usage of those spaces has changed.

People that want to fill their car with goods in one trip will continue to do so, but it won’t be in the city centre.

Perhaps all along they shouldn’t have, but it was possible/practical before.

Now they will go to the city outskirts to buy larger/bulkier/more good. The sellers thereof will suffer and/or be replaced by car-free friendly businesses (restaurants, cafes, light-weight goods).

That’s all fine long-term, but I’m shedding tears for the businesses that did exist and may not when the environment suddenly changes around them.

> The sellers thereof will suffer and/or be replaced by car-free friendly businesses (restaurants, cafes, light-weight goods).

Not only those, the fans of bicycles and public transport also suffer when they have limited options for shopping at particular places that are only present in the outskirts. In Vienna, IKEA is now opening a store near this "Mariahilfer Straße" at Westbahnhof, where there's also a huge public garage and a huge shopping centre was built a few years ago - you could say that real shopping is moving where the cars can still go in the city centre, while the former shopping street is slowly turning into a tourist promenade with bars, clothes and souvenir stores.

I think people tend to paint things in a strong dichotomy always (black and white). So it is either super car focused or pedestrians only. And if you want to reduce cars therefore you must be the proponent of a pedestrians-only solution.

In reality there are much more nuanced solutions. E.g. if you have a small street with people living in it and the majority of the streets traffic comes from cars taking a shortcut between two main roads, maybe closing that direct connection and creating a dead end is the better solution that boosts the atractivity of the whole street, while at the same time making it more friendly to pedestrians, locals, cyclists etc. Cars can still enter. They just have no reason to do so, except if they live there.

The only downside is the loss of a shortcut, which might have impacted traffic on the main roads negatively.

In traffic there are often situations were all involved sides win if you take something away or encourage certain uses while discouraging others. On other paradox occasions, everybody can lose, if you add more lanes to a street.

In case of Mariahilfer it might be still possible to deliver, but the attractivity as a pure transit street got reduced, simply by showing what the priority is. If this impacts other transit routes also in a positive way, I don’t see why Vienna should do more of this thing — especially if it is willing to win the title of “City most worth living in” also in the future.

> Fast forward to 2019 and people love it.

Some people do, others don't. Currently they are complaining about homeless and drunk people hanging out there.

To be honest, it's more crowded and looks desolate now. The shops aren't deserted, but it's a different crowd. And everybody complains about bicycles going 30 Km/h and endangering pedestrians.

> it's more crowded and looks desolate now.

"desolate" means the opposite of "crowded".

> The shops aren't deserted, but it's a different crowd.

So the shops are missing the kind of people you would like to see shopping, but full of a "different" kind of people. What kind of people are those?

> "desolate" means the opposite of "crowded".

No, it also means:

: showing the effects of abandonment and neglect : DILAPIDATED

> What kind of people are those?

Bums, poor people, slob tourists.

> No, it also means: > : showing the effects of abandonment and neglect : DILAPIDATED

That's a curiously selective reading of that definition.

> Bums, poor people, slob tourists.

And who are these desired, non "Bum", non-tourist wealthy people you wish were shopping there still?

It is the same story everywhere. Businesses complaining and fighting tooth and nail to keep that one parking spot in front of their shop window claiming they will go out of business if the car free street is implemented. Then when it happens business is booming and every shop wants to move in.

It happened with smoking.

The pattern will repeat with flying, decreasing population growth, and moving the economy from producing so much disposable stuff.

But we're still in the stage where everyone thinks of what they'll miss, not what they'll gain.

Not just Europe! Tokyo, for example, is a remarkably pedestrian and bicycle-friendly city, despite also supporting quite heavy traffic in some areas. And of course, the extensive train network completely eliminates the need for a car in daily life.

If you pick a random place on the map (like [1]), you'll see that the high-speed traffic is very well-separated from residential areas, with infrequent intersections. There is also little incentive to take a "shortcut" through residential areas since neighborhood roads are so narrow. The result is that neighborhood are safe and quiet enough that parents feel safe letting their small children walk along the road. I even see wildlife!

See also [2] about mixed-use zoning in Japan.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6405724,139.622306,14.42z

[2] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

The Superblock. This is what makes the these cities so comfortable to live in.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_block#Superblock

And unlike the absolutely terrifying planned city-like look you get from looking at pictures used to represent Superblocks, in Tokyo the superblock mechanism is the logical conclusion of organic development over the decades and has a natural feel, leading to pretty small buildings that are just densely packed together.

Almost all[1] roads in Tokyo are single lane! Not "one lane each direction" but "one lane". The massive avenues are sparse because it turns out you don't need that sort of capacity in most places.

Walking around Tokyo, even European cities feel super wasteful and car-centric with how wide roads are.

[1]: maybe 80%+? Less true in the most popular parts of the city though, where you have the biggest ap't complexes

Oh, interesting! I was just thinking how much space in SF is wasted on roads. I'd love to see them create superblocks and turn some streets into parks, housing, etc.

Tokyo did an amazing job at making it's city pedestrian friendly. Wish more big cities would follow its lead.

It's a lot easier for Europe to go carless than the USA. They have better intra-city public transit for one. Also, most (all?) of their major cities laid out their grids before the invention of the car.

In the USA, even older cities had all but their city centers designed around cars, and if you look at the top 10 cities, 7 of the 10 saw >90% of their road construction after the invention of the car.

That being said, I don't understand why new cities in the US aren't being planned around being carless. I guess it's just so engrained in our culture that it will be hard to overcome?

I think there's a growing realization that designing around car traffic is a losing proposition going forward. There's still a lot of political inertia to overcome, but we're starting to see bills liks SB50 (legislating to build housing around mass transit) be proposed and get traction.

Unfortunately “new cities” develop in places where everyone is used to driving, so it takes a lot to overcome a car centric culture.

I live in a college town in a rural area. The transition to public transportation happens when parking becomes expensive or impractical (such as at the university) so people park and ride on a bus.

But that still requires cars. Frankly cars have value that’s hard to replace when there’s a disperse population. Which maybe is the real problem in the US: there’s a culture around “I want my own land”. It pervades even in progressive circles...

How many such "new cities" are there really? Car culture wasn't a thing until the 1950s and I can't think of a single metropolitan city that was founded after that.

I think one of the problems in discussing cities is the hazy meaning of "city" that different people have in mind. Many (most?) people who live in cities aren't in the biggest ones, and the dynamics are different eg when bikeable-distance suburban housing is affordable, and distances inside the urban area are walkable.

There are lots of new cities, or at least cities that were founded or built substantially after the invention of the car. Irvine, CA, for example began construction in the 60s and incorporated in the 70s (and now has more than 250K people making it a top 100 city by population). The town I grew up in only incorporated in 1982 (and most every house was built in the 70s to 90s).

Also the city of Mountain House is a planned community for 20,000 that started construction in 2001.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_House,_San_Joaquin_...

There’s not really “new cities” in the sense of someone establishing a new town. There’s just smaller towns growing into small cities, small cities growing to mid-sized, etc...

The problem is those places start car dependent and the US is such that we have a lot of land and there’s not a lot of incentive to urbanize. We want our 40 acres and a mule, with a big fence around our land, and a big sign that says “no trespassing” then we want to drive our cars to get to common areas

> In the USA, even older cities had all but their city centers designed around cars, and if you look at the top 10 cities, 7 of the 10 saw >90% of their road construction after the invention of the car.

I feel like this can be spun as a positive, every street is 3 lanes wide + parking on both sides. So much room to convert for more pedestrian and micromobility space – in European cities it's often either/or.

Are there any new cities in the US?

There are lots of new cities, or at least cities that were founded or built substantially after the invention of the car. Irvine, CA, for example began construction in the 60s and incorporated in the 70s. The town I grew up in only incorporated in 1982 (and most every house was built in the 70s to 90s.

Often the zoning codes specify a minimum number of parking lots per housing unit. Some cities are removing the requirement in some areas, like Buffalo: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/01/buffalo-is-first-to-r...

we build new cities next to existing cities. very few cities spring up in the middle of nowhere. if you want to connect back to the original town, say mountain house to oakland, you’ll drive in to oakland. or drive to bart and bart in. it’s not realistic that everyone lives close enough to public transit that they can bike or walk or bus to it. a big draw of living out of the most populated areas is having your own house and land somewhere quiet. and this is definitely engrained in our culture, it’s the american dream to own your own home

If you want to experience a car-free place in the US, you should check out Mackinac Island in between the Upper and Lower peninsulas of Michigan. Horses, bikes, and feet are the forms of transportation—motorized vehicles have been banned since 1898. There’s great history, Victorian architecture, and Great Lakes beauty. It’s a pure slice of Americana.

How does that work out during the winter up there?

The only thing happening on the island is tourism, which is pretty much gone during the winter, and access to the island is marginal at best when the ferry shuts down for the season. All of the labor is seasonal as well, mostly from overseas.

I went as a kid and recall locals often having snowmobiles as well.

A slightly more populous island in the north lands:

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/us/22ice.html

In general, even legendary levels of snow and ice doesn’t stop thousands of collegiate Michiganders from walking long distances in subzero temps, biking on icy sidewalks, or even skiing/snowshoeing to class (in the UP). Sometimes in shorts.

True story: Kirk Cousins used to one of the intrepid winter-bikers on MSU’s campus. Good thing he didn’t break his $84 million arm.

There are also no cars on Bald Head Island, in southeast North Carolina. There's not even a bridge to the island from the mainland... all access is via boat or ferry (unless you're a really good swimmer).

Boston is also great. Lived there for 10 years and never drove within city limits.

Car free in downtown Minneapolis for a while now and lease out my parking spot for $200/month.

Don't see how it could be any more convenient, easy, affordable and stress free of owning a car. Winter is easy with the Skyway [0].

I've seen people go get Starbucks in their pajama's, I can go to the gym, work, grocery store, Target, and more all through the Skyway when weather is bad.

The two light rails are only a block away and go from downtown to Mall of America and University of Minnesota. I have multiples of bus stops right outside my condo.

I usually just fill up a GoToCard with $20 when needed and go when ever and wherever I please without issues. Which gets me access to any bus or light rails.

The only downside I have so far is that I haven't found a good stop off the bus or light rails where I can conveniently and quickly get to play outdoor pick up hockey.

[0] http://www.skywaymyway.com

Living car-free in Berlin is ridiculously easy. I have my own bicycle, but still grab a Jump bike when I've walked somewhere and need to get home faster/easier.

But this is the summer. I haven't done the winter here yet. That'll be the test.

In the last winters it barely snowed in Berlin, so I know quite a few people who kept riding their bikes all through the year. Of course, use your head - if it is damp and then below zero, be careful. Common sense, really.

If all fails, public transport is decent enough to get you anywhere on foot. It's not perfect, I think mostly because Berlin is spatially huge and comparably empty. Cities like Paris have a much more dense public transport infrastructure. But I think you never need to walk more than ten to fifteen minutes (compared to a max of five minutes in Paris and London), which is acceptable.

There really isn't much of a reason to own a car if you live within the S-Bahn ring.

Just be aware of those tram tracks riding your bike into them can be deadly. At least in Amsterdam

Yeah, my gf wiped out on those last week. Not fun

cycling on snow is quite fun anyway, I've been doing that in Nancy (north-east France) for years, a decade ago

Now with climate crisis, it's not really snowing anymore there

You'll still be able to bike, a life-pro tip is to get some gloves for winter biking.

Biking in the snow can be quite fun, I enjoyed it last winter up here in Seattle. Good gloves, glasses and rain pants are useful to make it an enjoyable ride tho :P

I highly recommend a bank-robber style facemask. But I'm regularly dealing with colder temperatures than Seattle.

Note that these are not legal everywhere.

Banks, for instance...

Intent matters. When it’s -20C, it’s fine. When it’s +30C...

You mean like a ski mask? Because I instantly imagined someone biking while wearing a Beagle Boys style mask and got confused as to why that would help.

Whatever protects your skin from the elements :)

I am lucky to live on the outskirts of Brussels and cycle for 17km to work once or twice a week. I would have done it every day, but I have to put kids in school and pick them up by 17:20.

Schools (and kids, by extension) are a major traffic issue and impediment to cycling.

Cargo bikes! You can easily take one or two children on a cargo bike (yuba for example).

I'm cycling year round in Berlin. It's really no big deal. Get some good gloves and something to protect your ears and you'll be fine. It hardly snows anyway and the roads are cleared fairly quickly when it does.

I wish the UK was a little more forward thinking when it comes to small electric mobility devices but they actively fine you here for using them on public roads and cycle lanes.

Imagine that people have been riding electric scooters for a hundred years and along comes some new technology, a diesel van. It can transport all the things we buy online to our doors and would be beneficial to society. The problem is that there have been a few fatal accidents between vans and scooters. One of the van drivers was a celebrity. The scooter drivers die, no one else gets hurt. The government decides to ban the new vans because they are too dangerous to OTHER people. There is a big uproar and people would rather scooters be banned instead because that solves the problem too (well, except for bicycles and... people).

I live in a suburb of Seattle, I haven’t owned a car for about two years. It used to be owning a car was liberating, but now I think the day I sold my car was one of the most liberating days of my life.

Cars just come with so much baggage. The insurance, maintenance, purchase price, risk of collision, etc.

How frequently do you "share" the road with cars? How many of your neighbors are car-less?

What do you mean "share" the road with cars? I walk almost everywhere. I have a Zipcar account that I use less than once a month and a bus pass that I use even less frequently. It is hard to say how many of my neighbors are car-less, most people seem to own cars, but not out of necessity — it is a pretty rich area.

Last year in the Netherlands more e-bikes were bought than regular bikes. And on average the e-bikes cost twice as much as the regular bikes. What the Dutch have discovered is that an e-bike is more of a substitute for a car rather than for a pedal bike, it's expands the range of running errands up to 10km or 15km while being more convenient and often faster than a car.

This is future of most cities worldwide sooner or later.

As a guy from Poland, I feel like the only obstacle is atrocious weather in winter, which stops 95% people from riding bikes. From March to November it would work just fine though.

The Norwegians say,"There's no such thing as bad weather just bad clothing." :) But more seriously in poor weather if you don't have to pedal very much and you have a "fat tire" e-bike [1] you may find it's quite a bit more comfortable than you expect.

https://www.radpowerbikes.com/products/radrover-electric-fat...

On vacation in Rome this summer, there is so much foot traffic on the major streets there is often no room for cars, and they need to inch forward until the people in front of them notice them and move out of the way.

Seemed like almost all the cars were taxis, too.

So navigating the city with a personal car seemed completely impractical.

Same with Florence and Cinque Terre.

> So navigating the city with a personal car seemed completely impractical.

YMMV, I spent my last 2 holidays in Italy with my car and went pretty much everywhere, including the old town of Siena, the center of Florence, Lucca by car. Italy is exceptionally car-friendly, but some tourists seem to be afraid to go.

Driving in Tuscany can be a bit intimidating. I've done it, albeit before GPS, and in retrospect I'd probably not have driven. That said, you look at getting to and around smaller towns and it can get difficult and time-consuming to depend on busses.

> the center of Florence

You are truly a madman (or madwoman).

From what I hear, traveling between cities in Italy by car is pretty convenient. But driving along side all the people walking in the middle of Firenze streets does not sound like the kind of stress I want while on vacation.

I always used public transport (metro/train/bus) to go to work. Two years ago I had to commute daily by car (just 20 minutes) and felt miserable. For me it was a total waste of time and energy.

Two months ago I switched jobs and started to go to work on my bycicle because the office is just 1 metro station away from home and I have bycicle way from home to work (which is very unusual in Madrid, by the way). This is probably the best job perk I ever had.

I have lived in both Europe and US for years. It is not fair to compare both places as the population density is totally different. You still do need a car if you are living in suburb area in Europe (in my case the Netherlands). And in US there is much less people living in the city.

I'd argue that even the suburbs of Netherlands are super bike-friendly. It's always a reasonable bike ride to the nearest train station, buses fill in the rest, and the roads are setup to be safe for bikers. That's not really the case in most of the US.

I've biked from Amsterdam to Gronigen. I biked through those suburbs. At least 90% of it was on dedicated bike paths (fietspad). And I had choices on which routes to take.

I agree, the biking experience in the US doesn't compare at all to the Dutch experience. Dedicated bike paths are a game-changer. A fully-connected path network takes it to a whole other level.

That is not completely true. 50% of the US population live in just 35 metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Chicago, IL; Philadelphia, PA; Washington, DC; Detroit, MI; Houston, TX; Atlanta, GA; Dallas, TX; Boston, MA; San Bernardino, CA; Phoenix, AZ; Minneapolis, MN; Orange County, CA; San Diego, CA; Nassau, NY; St. Louis, IL; Baltimore, MD; Seattle, WA; Tampa, FL; Oakland, CA; Pittsburgh, PA; Miami, FL; Cleveland, OH; Denver, CO; Newark, NJ; Portland, OR; Kansas City, MO; San Francisco, CA; Fort Worth, TX; San Jose, CA; Cincinnati, OH; Orlando, FL; Sacramento, CA; Fort Lauderdale, FL) that together have 173328 square miles. That is a density of 654 inhabitants per square mile or 253 inhabitants per square kilometer. Compare that with the 232 inhabitants per square kilometer in Germany, or the 118 inhabitants per square kilometer in France. And yes you can live without a car even in rural Germany (at least if you don't have kids).

The 20 densest metropolitan areas contain 25% of the US population and have 400 inhabitants per square kilometer, comparable to the 416 inhabitants per square kilometer averaged over the Netherlands.

The lack of public transport in the US is not a density problem. That is just the excuse because people don't want to change.

EDIT: Before anybody says "but the density in German cities is much higher": I lived for years in a German district with a density of 217 inhabitants per square kilometer, without needing a car.

Forget electric cars, this is how we should be lowering our CO2 emissions.

We made a huge mistake with car oriented design and we need to rebuild our cities the right way.

It's going to be tough doing this in a lot of US cities, especially those which had most of their growth after WW2. So much was built with the assumption that all transportation would be via car (or bus as an afterthought, sometimes). You can probably do it in an old downtown area but good luck trying it in suburbia

The US is seeing a large move back toward cities. It makes a lot of sense -- it's where the capital, culture, resources are concentrated. I don't think we'll see a car-less suburbia in the foreseeable future, but we can certainly build and modify our cities to be walk/bike/transit-first going forward.

There seems to be this ambient feeling that everything is as it will be, ah well, but it took decades of (bad) city planning and massive infrastructure spending to get us our suburban dystopias. It could take decades still for transit-focused cities to become the new norm.

> The US is seeing a large move back toward cities.

Is it really, or are you using "US" to mean white middle class? I googled and can't find a reference for this - do you have one?

Edit: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.GROW?locations=U...

As far as I can tell from this graph, urban population growth in the US was lower in 2018 than it's ever been.

Well, a lot of America is white and middle class. The push to move to suburbs was fueled by the white middle class, who fled the cities during and after desegregation, and was termed the White Flight.

There's a very real displacement problem that's linked to the urban population growth that you seem skeptical of; marginalized communities are being priced out of their long-time homes, being pushed out of urban centers and into suburbs and exurbs.

Anyway, census data shows strong growth of urban areas, and tepid growth of rural areas, which are a shrinking fraction of the US population.

Some cities have seen astonishing growth:

> Among urbanized areas with populations of 1 million or more, the Charlotte, N.C.-S.C., area grew at the fastest rate, increasing by 64.6 percent, followed by the Austin, Texas, area, at 51.1 percent, and Las Vegas-Henderson, Nev., at 43.5 percent.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_censu...

Mind you, "urban" by census definitions is very broad. I live in the middle of about 100 acres with a couple of neighbors 40 miles outside of a major city and I'm considered urban.

A lot or urbanization isn't Brooklyn. It's smaller cities with minimal transit systems.

The smaller the city the less transit system does it need. Local errands can be done by bike, travel to the next city just needs a train station.

EU has the advantage that most of its small and old cities are very dense. I think it makes a lot of sense to start removing cars from their city centers. Cars are not particularly efficient or convenient anyway in narrow streets. That being said I really wonder why Amsterdam still allows cars to drive in its rings.

It's not just the narrowness of the streets: they're also short and not on a grid.

They're not designed for throughput, which really amplifies the benefits of a subway/metro vs. buses/trams.

> It's not just the narrowness of the streets: they're also short and not on a grid.

The US suburbs with their hierarchical residential < collector < highway system were designed for cars, however most networks in the US city centers were designed before the invention of the car.

I feel like it has more to do with degree of urban planning.

Even before the car, a horse and buggy can get through a city faster arranged in a grid withoug having to turn a lot.

Narrow streets are usually the start point/destination, with most of the traffic in the wider boulevards. And city planned before the advent of cars can still be car-friendly, like the Haussmann works in Paris.

We're working on it. Parking is being removed pretty quickly, one of the three major canal rings will go car-free soon. (And by 2030 we hope to allow only electric motors anywhere in the center, but that's driven by air quality rather than land use.)

In many ways developing nations can and do have the option to skip auto-based transit and go directly into mass transit if only because many up and coming consumers don’t have the capital to invest into a depreciating asset.

India, Indonesia, much of LatAm, including Mexico, most of Africa, etc. They could make autos cost prohibitive (in many places they in essence are) and invest heavily in mass transit. Skip roadways and other infra for personal vehicles.

China is in the cusp. They could simply decide to ban cars nationwide after a vigorous campaign promoting transit values.

Most big cities have a majority of the population without cars at this point. These cities naturally favor more legislation against cars and this is causing city administrators to over time introduce more restrictions for cars. E.g. many Dutch cities got a head start on this to make more room for bicyclists in the nineteen seventies already. Simple measures include raising prices for parking and parking permits, introducing park and ride areas where people can park and hop on a bus to the downtown area, making lots of streets one way only and segmenting off different parts of the city such that you can only drive there via the ring road, making large parts of the down town area car free, etc. Cars are for getting in and out of the city not for driving from A to B inside a city.

I live in Berlin which is comparatively car friendly because of the German car manufacturing lobby. You can drive to the downtown area and expect to find street parking. This is very un-european at this point. Forget about doing that in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Madrid, etc. Not a thing there anymore. Even a few decades ago that would have been a bad idea. You'd be stuck in traffic for ages and your only option for parking will be a full (probably) parking garages charging massive fees. These days it's flat out not allowed or at least enormously expensive.

Even so, owning a car does not make much sense in Berlin and most tech people with comparatively decent incomes I know here in the massive startup scene don't own cars and many of the few that do rarely use them.

Visited Berlin last year and was quite surprised by how cycle-UNfriendly it is. For some reason I had expected it to be really progressive

> You can drive to the downtown area and expect to find street parking

I don't think I've ever seen a French city where most streets, including those downtown, don't have street parking. Most of the time it's not free, but it's always there.

I've driven around quite a bit in the south of France. My experience is quite different. Even in smaller towns. E.g Avignon, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse don't have a lot of street parking in the downtown areas. Berlin is different in the sense that you can drive right up to the Alexander Platz and actually have a decent chance of actually parking your car near by. Also not for free obviously. That would be the same as driving to e.g. the Arc de Triomf in Paris or Picadilly circus in London and finding a place to park. It's been a while since I've been too either place but I don't think this is a thing.

Europe has had fantastic public transportation for a long time. I lived in Germany for three years in the 1980s, never had a car, and never felt I needed one. I traveled all over western Europe.

If you ever want to reverse that opinion, I suggest taking London's tube and/or Paris' Metro or RER at peak hour in the morning.

Germany is totally different. Even in Berlin, if a train is a bit packed and I just wait 2-3min for the next one. It’s nothing like packing onto London Underground with the deep tunnels and narrow gauge.

But it’s still the best option. And if not, a bus is probably quicker than a private car stuck in traffic that you can’t even park.

Rush hours are unpleasant, but so is rush hour traffic.

If you compare the throughput of the rush-hour tube vs rush-hour roads, you'll find that it's simply impossible to move this many people so quickly by cars.

.. then try doing the same journey at the same time by car. More comfortable but much slower. And you'll have to pay more to park.

I used to drive into west London for 10am, most days it would take 45 minutes to travel a mile from Hammersmith to Shepherd’s Bush.

Note for others not familiar, if you go Hammersmith Tube Station to Shepherd's Bush Tube Station overland by bicycle then it takes five minutes, depending on traffic lights. That is actual five minutes, as in three hundred seconds.

Clearly both areas are larger than their respective train stations but the stations are representative.

To actually get a tube or other train between the two is not entirely direct, you would probably get on the wrong Hammersmith station at first (there are two), spend five minutes crossing the road to get to the other one. Then at the end a bus or long walk would be needed, so you would soon be in 45 minute territory.

The traffic can be mostly ignored if doing the route by bicycle except on the various mini ring roads they have to keep traffic deadly. Hammersmith itself is like a six lane motorway ring road of hell, easy to die on that one. Then at Shepherd's Bush there is that green bit where the traffic just goes round and round very slowly. On the bike you just go straight without getting sent around these merry-go-rounds of car fumes.

No idea why anyone would want to drive in such parts of London even though I have had to do it for work myself. It is not even driving, just slowly shunting along, blocking the way for 'serious' road users who care about their time and arriving promptly. As a cyclist I don't see myself as a serious road user, I assume those people in cars have more important journeys than mine so I am deferential to them. Yet, if being prompt matters to you and you do work in London, the bicycle is the only reliable means of getting from A to B in a dependably timely manner.

By that definition, those people in their posh cars, inching along, can't really be that serious. If they thought about it properly they would abandon their tin boxes or find better jobs. Travel by car is that silly in London.

Most people are coming from outside of London and what you find is that it is usually quicker to drive in and just sit in the traffic than mess about doing park and rides and then travelling in.

It was far quicker to walk a mile to Twyford station, get the train to Ealing, and the tube to White City (or fast train to Paddington and tube to Shepherds Bush now) than to drive.

It was a long time ago, and I don't work in Shepherds Bush any more, but the trip today would be

  0835 - leave home
  0856 - get slow train to London
  0935 - arrive Ealing 
  0950 - arrive White City
  0955 - arrive at office

  0840 - leave home
  0900 - get fast train to London
  0932 - arrive Paddington
  0950 - arrive White City
  0955 - arrive at office

Driving was

  0800 - leave home
  0900 - arrive Hammersmith flyover turnoff
  0950 - arrive car park
  0955 - arrive at office

It was the hammersmith roundabout that was the real killer.

The reason I drove in for 10AM (once a week) was because I was on 12-14 hour shifts, and driving home after 10pm was about 50 minutes. Very few people working office hours would drive into London, especially Central London, and parking at stations across the south east is often full by 9AM.

Interesting tbh if it was the same amount of time I would just drive in.

Outside of London the train is always slower. I used to live in Manchester and get the train into Stoke. Driving was always faster without exception. Generally it was cheaper as well (I have a crappy old diesel astra that is even cheaper to repair and I will drive it til the wheels fall off).

All things being equal I'd rather take the train - you can read, work, watch TV

The main benefit of driving is not having to wait for a specific train.

From where I live in south cheshire, it's quicker to get the train into Manchester than drive (although quicker to drive to Stoke than train). That's with a 0930 arrival in Picadilly Gardens.

Same to get to Cardiff, Birmingham and certainly London (2h15 to Euston, vs 2h40 to the M25 with no traffic)

If I had to be in Picadilly Gardens for 0900 though it would be faster to drive thanks to the train times.

Virgin trains wants basically another 10-15 a month on top of your journey for internet and you can't take a bike on their trains without phoning ahead first. Cross country aren't much better.

Phone internet doesn't work on the train typically. That combined with the travel sickness after each journey make the car much more appealing.

I will never go back to using the train as long as I can legally drive. They are just garbage in the UK and expensive.

I doubt I will buy a new car either. I own two cars. I have an old 1994 mercedes SL which is kept in a storage garage at the moment and the other car is a 2005 vauxhall astra that is getting up to 400,000 miles and doesn't show any signs of dying just yet. Every newer car I have driven is full of mostly electric crap which tends to break or they have some awful drive by wire nonsense that takes the feeling out of the vehicle.

I think much like the operating systems I use, I am going to resist using any newer tech as long as I am able to.

I use 4G tethering and works really well between Crewe and Manchester (well enough for uninterupted youtube streaming and ssh sessions). Virgin "pendilinos" have free wifi now too. Northern run on the Manchester-Stoke line and don't need bike reservations. YMMV.

Yeh well I gave catching the train a chance (I was riding trains for about 10 years before I could afford a car) and driving is much easier.

> I lived in Germany for three years in the 1980s, never had a car, and never felt I needed one.

You don't know what you're missing. I pity the people who have to use the hot, crowded, smelly, slow public transport every day and don't know any better.

I've got friends in Berlin who have no car. They're a family of four and they go everywhere either on their bikes or public transport.

Last year when they took vacation, they just jumnped on their bikes and spent two weeks on the road cycling. For me it was unthinkable until they told me there are guides telling you which roads are safe for cycling.

I lived in a city with extensive public transportation infrastructure (Moscow) for 7 years without a car. TBH, I would not trade my current suburban US lifestyle for a high density city. Want groceries? Gotta carry them in all the way from the store (which usually within walking distance, but still, shit's heavy unless you buy groceries every day, which can be quite wasteful). Job not within walking distance (which it rarely is)? Say hello to 1-2hrs of daily commute (about 35 min of which for me was walking). Kid has hobbies that aren't within walking distance? Pain. Need to get something from a store that's not nearby (i.e. hardware, household goods)? Long commute _and_ carry stuff as well. Need to get something you can't carry? Gotta rent a car or pay for delivery. It's snowing or raining? Tough luck, gotta walk to the subway and/or store all the same. Etc, etc. Hundreds of these situations where in the US I just get into a car and go wherever I want. I don't even get wet if it's raining outside.

This "car-less" stuff only looks good (on paper) to two categories of people:

  1. Europeans who never had a car and therefore don't fully understand the upsides
  2. Americans who never lived without a car and therefore don't fully understand the downsides

The wheel is 5,000 years old. How did you spend 7 years walking to the grocery store without realizing you could buy a cart instead of carrying your groceries by hand?

Also I live in a dense city and have a 10 minute subway commute. A regular city lifestyle does not involve a 2 hour commute, you just lived too far from work for your own good.

Moscow is quite large, and it is unlikely that your job will be nearby. You should consider yourself lucky if you have only a 10 minute commute, few people are lucky like that. Just getting to the city center (where the job is likely to be) from the periphery (where one is likely to live) can easily take: 10 minutes walking, 5 or so minutes waiting for the right bus to get to the nearest subway station, 5-7 minutes of riding the bus, 15-20 minutes riding the subway (more if there are transfers), etc. That's one way. And it assumes you don't have to ride the bus or walk much on the other end (which is often not the case). In the winter the above ground part of the journey implies -30C weather conditions, slippery sidewalks, and other "fun" challenges.

Good luck with that cart in winter (snow and ice everywhere) or in spring/autumn (puddles and mud everywhere). Good luck with being able to afford to live near work (city centre). No NIMBYs in Moscow means that chances are you will end up living in a massive apartment block on the periphery of the city and could only dream of a nice US suburb where you could have your own big house, lawn, swimming pool etc.

Hi, I moved from the US to Europe and have lived both lifestyles. I'm calling BS on your assertions, AMA.

If you are willing or able to live within reach of public transport or bike/walking, a no-car life is awesome. I did many years of tense heavy US traffic before I moved to NL, and I must say it's so awesome to not own or care about a car.

The US is mostly not designed for car-free situations. That's a long story, but it ends in "limited decent public transport options". To go into that topic would be too political here. Suffice to say, unless you live in a progressive part of the US (or you move to within walking range of your job), you need a car.

Europe has the advantage? of being much older, when cities were more dense. There's no place to affordably park a car, so you must walk or bike, or use a bus/tram (or metro/train if you're lucky).

There are certainly times in summer in the Netherlands during peak time when a full train (standing room only) really truly sucks. But that's less than 1/4 of the year. The rest of the time I can work, sleep, look at the attractive fit people, or even talk to people. My days of driving in big Texas city traffic were certainly not that. (Guns actually do get plucked out of glove boxes and waved as a threat from time to time.)

I think it’s possible to live car-free in many cities in the US but the difference is you can’t conveniently get very far without a car. In Paris not only can you live car-free but you can go all over the place, different countries even, by train, pretty conveniently. In the US you’ll be restricted to travel within the core of a city and that perk comes with a massive premium so it’s likely you can’t even afford it. Living car-free in the US might as well be a status symbol.

I love my electric moped. Riding it around my European big-city, it just feels so comforting. Its so quiet, it doesn't scare ducks.

Scooters are taking over - Vienna is a green city that has had time to refine its transportation culture over a millenia. Parts of it were built for horses.

When I'm on my electric moped, I ride it like a horse. No need to over-do it and speed, or whatever, just pace along at a trot. There's a harmonic spot where the curves and corners of the city suddenly become super-fluid, and I even get all the green lights .. I'm pretty sure its because the physical geometry is designed for horses, and the electric moped drive train can approximate that.

Anyway, I can't wait until all the cars disappear. Europe is going to be even more beautiful.

One problem though: as of today, shared electric moped/scooters are actually worse for the environment than privately-owned ICE cars.

Source: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab2da8

Sort of seems like you didn't read your own quote:

"When e-scooter usage replaces average personal automobile travel, we nearly universally realize a net reduction in environmental impacts."

This is not the same as "actually worse for the environment than privately-owned ICE cars", and I'm guessing you've got a reason for your FUD?

I ride electric, too. Mine is charged by solar power. Sure, it took a lot of carbon to get my systems in place - but that's still 100x better than the daily emissions I'm no longer producing.

I was in Antwerp this year for the first time thus I can agree with the article. It really is super easy to move around with the bike. Countries like Belgium, Holland, and Denmark are famous for that. They even have big parking lots for bicycles next to train stations. So that you can come by train, pick up your bike and continue your way. And they do so despite bad weather.

In general, in the European cities east Berlin wall, the bicycle infrastructure is not that great. Yet, there are European funds that close that gap and you can see many cycling roads in countries like Poland or Hungary.

There are also European bicycle 'highways' called Eurovelo that are being built from the European money. I think Europe is going into the right direction.

Surprising how the comments so far (351) seem to be debating car vs. public transport, while the original article was more about car vs. other means of personal transportation, including bikes, ebikes and scooters:

> Two wheels good, four wheels bad

Most car rides are done with just one person at the wheel (or in the case of Uber/Lyft, a driver and just one rider). The size and weight of the vehicle is the problem.

A bike weights 30% or less of the weight of the rider; a car, 300% or more. That we consider "normal" or even acceptable to move so much metal to transport us, is simply unreasonable and crazy.

let alone if you're on your bike and get slammed by a car

Just left Paris this week. I was surprised to see how many electric scooters are on the road. But out of the experience riding them in central Paris, I found them - 1. being too expensive: riding Lime for 1.5 km cost me 4 euros, way more expensive than metro; 2. being difficult to ride: riding scooter is hard because the acceleration and brake is too sudden for beginners and it's easy to lose control when encountering hard obstacles on the road; 3. central Paris is not scooter-friendly because lots of road are made of stones and there are not many bike-routes as I see.

Was in Europe for six weeks last Summer and I saw plenty of cars. The only city that seemed close to a post-car future was Amerstdam. The others I visited: Dublin, London, Barcelona, Brussels, and Prague all had plenty of cars. Now, that's not to say you needed them, but Amersterdam seemed to be the only one where it was evident that people were really embracing no cars. Of couse those are just cities, I never got out into the countryside much except for Ireland and the Czech Republic. Not much public transit out there.

It's a great idea for cities but despite what many people here are saying, I don't see myself selling my car any time soon.

I live in the Boston area and until about 2 years ago didn't own a car. I don't need it for commute since I bike or take the train. The public transit in Boston and nearby towns is decent. But if you want to go to a town farther away you're usually out of luck. Car sharing is great but it wasn't a good enough solution for me.

Zipcar started in the Boston area and overall there are many options today such as Turo and others. The problem is that these services are at peak demand when you need them the most. During the week there are many Zipcars available in my area but I usually don't need a car then. On the weekend when the weather is nice and I need a car to go hiking, everyone else needs a car too and if I didn't book in advance I need to travel across town for an available car. And twice I did it just to find out there was a problem with the car. (that was the breaking point for me and led me to cancel my Zipcar membership and buy a car).

There are other problems too. Now we have a kid and need a carseat. That makes Uber/Lyft much more of a hassle. We're not gonna travel around carrying a carseat. Many of the people here commenting probably don't have kids.

Having a car on the weekends is just convenient. The carseat is already installed. The hiking/beach gear is all in the trunk. We have a bike rack and go on biking trips (some car sharing companies let you book a car with a rack but those are more limited). For us it wasn't even a big investment, we got a great car for $6500 which we only use on the weekends and so far had no issues.

It is interesting how many comments focus on anecdotal evidence ("it is very hard to live without a car where I live so it can't be done anywhere") or on exceptions ("what if you cannot walk because you're too old?" "what if you need to move your sofa?"...). It is typical for a lot of discussions about cars.

The article is about dense European cities. Not about <insert your prefered coutryside area here>. Nobody argues you do not need a car in the countryside. In cities in the other hand, cars take a lot of (pricey) space, generate noise and pollution. And when you need one, you can rent one, borrow one or use a taxi/uber/lyft.

And as we are talking about dense cities, the usual argument of "but wait, US is not as dense, we need cars!" is moot. US cities need cars because of being designed for cars. That's it, and that could be changed but that would require massive investments.

Indeed, I am a bit tired of all the reasons my city (Amsterdam) is unworkable or simply impossible, because it doesn't resemble [Springfield].

Edging? It's been the case for Europe for a few decades all along. You can live perfectly fine in Berlin without a car. You'll never need it. U-Bahn, S-Bahn, DB work perfectly. Lots of bike lanes everywhere.

I think downtown Palo Alto should close off University to cars, and give it a try. Turn it into a big pedestrian zone, and let the restaurants put seating out in the space that this opens up.

Makes sense as European cities were designed and built before the car. For us in the new world I'm afraid our foundations in suburbia have locked us in.

Kind of.

As a lucky one to live in one of those future cities, yes it is cool to move around.

However living on the suburbs or not being lucky to live in a few selected cities per country and it is back to choosing between 1h - 2h of commute time due to multiple exchanges and schedule times, or do the same way in about 30m.

Good that we are making progress, but not every city is Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Antwerp... nor everyone happens to live in the city center.

I was wondering how people who live in cities in carless mode manage when they have kids. Since I could not find by simply skimming the comments, I searched for "kids" keyword, but so far it only appears twice in 200+ comments. Do people move out of cities immediately when they have kids or they have no opinion about this topic?

“How do people do XYZ without cars” seems like a trivial question to those who live without cars.

I live in an Asian city of 13 million people. Only the exceptionally rich own cars here. (There is a 100% import tax on top of the vast difference in incomes between here and the US.)

Millions of families raise children here without a car just fine. They would be amazed to learn that you think it is impossible.

Even if they moved out of the city, they still wouldn't be able to afford a car, anyway.

I live in Denmark, don't have a kids though. While I bike myself I often see parents who transport their kids in bikes with 2 front wheels and a box. They also got a cover and are thus protected from the elements. Also busses and trains have areas for baby strollers. At some point kids can also bike them self.

I don't know how many are completely carless. I don't think I know a parent who is. Most have one car, but also use public transportation / bike when possible.

It would seem logical that this is easier in cities that existed before the car vs cities that existed after. Those cities would have had sufficient residential and commercial density that the adapted to facilitating travel by car and truck and could more easily adapt back vs what we see with post-car cities that are sprawling.

https://outline.com/hrKMMW

It's curious to me that you see the same arguments and rebuttals in all US v Europe discussions (usually over gun control or transportation). I also find it curious that I find myself reading them every time. Wasn't the FAQ supposed to fix this?

I am visiting Montréal on holdiday today with my family. Old Montreal by the waterfront was a wonderful pedestrian experience. I recently read that they had proposed a highway in the same area back in the 60s. What fools we were.

Edinburgh has some pretty cool plans for making more streets pedestrianised. It also helps that these streets are popular with tourists so doesn't make sense for cars to be going around a medieval city centre.

It sure does, Edinburgh also no plans to make life easier and sustainable for families who actually live here. Train services are unreliable, ever increasing property prices in the city itself and even the satelite towns are getting more expensive. Commuting into Edinburgh is a nightmare and likely to get worse.

Is there a law of headlines which makes anything which groups the whole of Europe demonstrably false? Car free in London or Paris, sure. Car free in Glasgow or Birmingham, no thanks.

It's probably almost as true for the USA.

I am unconvinced about this claim.

Sure there are a lot of movements towards getting cars out of the city, but very little is done to compensate for how to get resources in and out so it will naturally have limits.

The Hague is now building large residential towers next to the three largest train stations. People who will live there will have no right to get a parking permit.

This is kind of tangent, but..

What's the state of startup-ish public transit? Carpooling Ubers or app-based (rather than route-based) bus systems?

Anything interesting happening?

Can't come soon enough.

Cars within dense cities are a cancer.

Most East Asian cities are very walkable, because of the dense population.

Some great examples, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, etc

The flipside of the coin needs to be mentioned too. What Europe is doing around zoning and infrastructure is, as is often the case, the "Big Government" model, compared to the U.S.'s more "Small Government" approach.

I get the impression that, outside of a few major metropolitan areas with real estate booms, most areas within the U.S. have been comparatively more successful than most areas within Europe at enabling decently-sized real estate at affordable prices and at enabling the younger generation to get on the real estate ladder without their parents' help.

Cities where infrastructure is super-dense and everything is walkable, like NYC and many European city centers are nice for young people, students, urban/digital nomads, tourists, etc.

When you get to a certain age and want to settle down and start a family, priorities start to change and you realize how trapped you are, with the European model.

You're paying a fortune to rent a shoebox. Add to that the high taxes and mandatory social security that exists in Europe. This means, you find yourself in a situation where you're wealthy but cash poor, and have little opportunity to accumulate wealth in the form of cash. (The kind of cash that would be needed as a down-payment on larger real estate).

The option that people exercise in the U.S. is "move to the burbs". ...but this option is not so readily available in Europe. Here, high standards of infrastructure are enforced before planning permission for residential development in suburbs/exurbs can even be granted. This means that this kind of real estate is pricey pretty much the day it becomes viable to build there. Further out, in properly rural areas, zoning laws will often permit building there only when buildings have an actual agricultural purpose.

The car plays a pretty important part in that: Rezone a bunch of agricultural land into residential. Build some roads that go there and connect it to the powergrid and telecommunication network. Boom. Affordable real estate. People can move there, and after you have enough people, you can start to think about public transportation, schools, things to do, and all that other stuff. But you do that AFTER it has become economically viable to offer that stuff, not as a prerequisite for allowing people to build there. This is, in my mind, something that the U.S. has a lot of and that we could really use more of in Europe.

>> When you get to a certain age and want to settle down and start a family, priorities start to change and you realize how trapped you are, with the European model.

It's hard to overstate how happy I would be if the street outside my apartment wasn't a canyon of speeding vehicular death for a toddler.

I love everything about living in the city with my child except for the sheer number of cars that pass through in the name of "freedom" and for a lack of decent alternatives. It's a short walk or bicycle ride to any number of amenities, and a short commute to work means I can spend more time at home with him.

I didn't like the car traffic before, and I hate it even more now. If there was a car free city on the US Eastern seaboard with an office for my employer, I would move there in a hot second.

What I'm saying:

Cars are really only a problem in densely populated cities. But they are also the thing that makes less-densely populated areas viable to live at.

Public transport is what makes it possible to live without a car. But public transport is only economically viable in densely populated areas.

So: This equation resolves into something pretty obvious: Have car-free cities, but also continue car-based development of areas of lesser density, probably with "park and ride" being the interface.

Making the car and low population density out to be the devil and a remnant of the past, and car-free high-density development to be the future and solution of all transport-problems is a completely one-sided view.

You said a lot of stuff, and that wasn't my takeaway from it.

What's completely one-sided is development patterns and land regulation in much of the developed world and especially in the United States that favor detached housing and single occupancy vehicle commutes over any other form.

http://archive.is/eUpyE

When the weather is nice in my city every last electric scooter is parked at the beach.

Seems like individual non-fixed prices could be some kind of undiscovered Holy Grail to increase revenue and fix the unequal distribution of scooters. Also, I see scooters being collected at night for charging. Maybe another use-case for such incentives?

Awesome.

Who needs the hype of self driving cars if you can get rid of the cars entirely?

Can't wait :)

When I lived for 4 years in Barcelona I didn't have a car and I lived pretty far from the city center (Horta). I only missed it when I went to the Ikea of Badalona.

Germany love <3

Good! Americas obsession with cars is one of its most glaring deficiencies. Every city should be accessible without a car, however unless you are in NYC, Chicago, or LA, or San Fran, well then that just isn't true.|

I would definitely not include LA on a list for accessible without a car, and San Francisco is debatable.

Somehow, 22% of Angelenos travel to work without a car. That's not as good as San Francisco, but it's a lot better than, say, Nashville.

I have taken several trips to Los Angeles without using a car. It's not convenient, but it works if you allow enough time - the bus lines do at least exist.

A thought in the back of my mind is fear of government oppression in a world without prevalent cars.

If you have a car you can travel hundreds of miles with few limitations and it's particularly hard to quash this even in an oppressive state.

If you only have your feet and public transit you are very limited to distance and location and tracking movements is an easy feature of the system. Things going wrong? The government can shut down the trains at whim.

A car grants a whole lot of freedom that many progressive people are really excited to give away.

Yeah, everyone on this site seems really eager to move to Mega-City One.

Not even necessarily without cars... imagine if you could sell the populous on a car with limited range that took ages to fill back up. If they were gullible enough, you could probably even sell it at a premium. What a wonderful stepping stone to the post freedom era.

Yes, if only said car had some other benefit, like being cheaper to run and maintain.

Imagine if the same car had more than enough range for 95% of people's travel and could be filled up at home for a fraction of the cost. Finally, imagine if there was some other indirect benefit, like helping stop the world burn.

What a dystopian nightmare.

Sadly your snippy little comment doesn't make them any better. They cost more, don't go as far, take longer to refill, and do very little to help stop the world burning. If people need to head to the capital to protest or whatever, electric vehicles make that demonstrably more difficult. There is nothing about them that gives their owners more freedom than they have now. We are definitely in a golden age of freedom, and electric cars are just another method in which that will be chipped away.

an interesting point but such a quintessentially american mindset imo. This thing could potentially used wrong so let's build in all kinds of hedges and failsafes; our freedoms could be impinged in these edge cases so this is a no go, etc.

cannot help but lament the inefficiency and stagnation arising from this culture of distrust

Sorry to the American folks here, this might sound offensive, but I agree with bllguo. As an European colechchristensen's point of view feels alien.

I'd argue that for the average European this kind of comment would seem paranoid bordering on insane.

I guess some cultural differences are found way deeper than you'd expect.

The European point of view about the whole "government opression" thing is that you don't fight tyranny with guns and cars (LOL), but with a population educated about the benefits of democracy. If you've lost the people, nothing can save you.

on the cultural differences.. I've always loved the saying: Europeans see 100km as a long distance, while Americans/Australians see 100 years as a long time.

Well, 100 km is next door when there's a direct rail line and when discussing with my granparents, 100 years is a long time. I get what you mean though

> This thing could potentially used wrong so let's build in all kinds of hedges and failsafes

Lmfao if anything this is a super European mindset. Does this not remind you of another hot button issue? (hint: GUNS)

You think if Hong Kongers had cars it would save their city from being taken by the Chinese Communist Party?

But a police officer can stop your car _right now_ if your passenger-side taillight is broken and then search your vehicle for a variety of things. So many marijuana related arrests have happened exactly this way. With license plate scanners and chips being embedded into cars, the ability to be pervasively tracked in a car is more apparent than ever. In contrast, walking or biking doesn't require registration or licensing by the government.

(As silly as I thought the movie was, the protagonist of the first Jack Reacher movie took the bus everywhere specifically so the government had no records on him, so the idea certainly isn't lost in popular culture either.)

Arguments like this ignore the billions of dollars that maintain and create highways, roads, parking lots that the government already invests in. The blindspot regarding this "freedom" which apparently to some people exists magically is astounding.

The government created the current layout of cities by building highways and making laws and regulations that birthed the city structure we have today. It did not develop organically.

The let me astound you even more that there also exist such things as off-road vehicles, natural roads (think of countries like SA or AUS), and that .gov cannot just bomb all it's roads away in an instant, like they could stop all trains and most flights.

But most people don’t drive off-road vehicles anyway, so redesigning cities to prioritize trains over minivans does nothing to increase the population’s dependence on government infrastructure. The minivans won’t work without the roads the government built either.

> If you only have your feet and public transit you are very limited to distance and location and tracking movements is an easy feature of the system.

I don't know about you, but I feel like if you're trying to avoid being tracked driving around in a large shiny vehicle with a uniquely identifying number mounted on the front and back seems to be about the worst thing you could do.

The US has had gas shortages and gas rationing several times within living memory. Maybe you should take up long-distance bicycling?

> A car grants a whole lot of freedom that many progressive people are really excited to give away.

A car grants dependence on a long supply chain (oil drilling, shipping, processing, storage) of fuel that the government can easily sever. Not only are you dependent on the supply chain but you are dependent on the government and foreign governments to maintain it.

If you really want to be a freedom loving, rugged individualist then you'd get an off road capable bike or a horse.

I'm glad this works for the people who live there and makes them happy. As for myself, I refuse to live in any city dense enough to even have a public transportation system.

In a lot of places, even 100 person villages have a regular bus system. This isn't about density, it's about infrastructure.

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