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Comment by bredren | Hacker News Reader

I’m hopeful many people will wake up to the misery that cars and commuting inflicts on themselves.

The United States has been consumed with car culture which has bled time and resources from individuals like yourself. But it also is responsible for endless tragedy in the form of accidents and financial overextension.

Car culture, partly driven by commuting, has inflated the need for some systems and created entire rent-seeking businesses that could be any number of more useful and interesting investments of human time and capital.

I believe a silver lining of the Coronavirus and the actions of political representatives and appointees that have allowed covid to foster will ultimately result in progression in many outdated norms we experienced up through 2020.

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I feel the same. The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me. As someone who grew up pretty poor it always fascinated me that my family and neighbors would buy cars worth 20k - 30k which would be enough to provide a very basic/safe way of living for the foreseeable future. I would take the peace of mind I would of had over having a status symbol that random people on the highway could look at for a few seconds on a trip.

Also driving is such a waste of human potential, I don't think the amount of attention needed to drive safely is worth the monotony/tediousness of driving. It's wasted time on a large scale.

> The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me

I have no interest in cars and find it quite ridiculous that they can be seen as a social status, so I agree with your statement. But, people have different interests... some will spend their money travelling or playing golf, and some people just like cars!

I think that's fair but I think the amount of people that think they're into cars is far more than the amount of people that are actually into cars.

Not trying to be a gatekeeper but if I think about myself I know I "felt social pressure" (grew up in a culture that glorifies this material item and sets an expect ion of success/fulfillment) to get a car. I guess you could argue that social pressures like this can grow naturally and I suppose I agree that they can but I don't think this one grew naturally and for some people promotes values that they may not hold.

Cars as status symbols, I think, is troubling at the scale they're at. If you enjoy to ride around or appreciate their engineering then by all means.

Even as I type this I think if you want to splurge on a Car that you will just take social media pictures with to make you feel good and show others then I think you should, more power to you, do what makes you happy.

I guess my problem is that "what makes you happy" .. "is a fancy car" (you can go in debt to get) is a message that is "loud" and unlike a house (arguably the other functional yet status symbol) is within reach of people who it isn't in their best interest to get.

I think it's a nuanced subject because as most things in life it's mixed up in all aspects of human life like financial education and personal responsibility but what I'm saying is that current "car culture" (to sweep away all the nuance) doesn't feel right to me right now and I think causes a lot of harm.

I agree. It's not just cars, it's also smart phones, expensive watches, clothes, and so on. At the same time, it is what provides a fake boost of the ponzi-scheme economy. Without all of this wasteful consumption there would be no SP500.

> find it quite ridiculous that they can be seen as a social status

Yeah, I wonder when the perception will shift to represent reality. I sometimes see people with cars that are more expensive than you'd expect by the neighbourhood, but my default first thought is that it's either leased or backed by a loan, so nothing to really brag about.

Most cars are not purchased outright so I'm not sure what your point is.

Why is it ridiculous? Literally anything can be a social status symbol. What does a reasonable social status symbol look like in your view?

Status symbols in general are ridiculous vanity.

How about something that requires hard work, sacrifice, and effort to attain. For example, is most social circles, having a faster car is a source of pride and admiration. Driving a fast car requires money and the ability to press a gas pedal. Wouldn’t it be better if training to be fast runner or fast cyclist was instead the thing being judged?

Low income neighborhoods would be among the biggest beneficiaries of high quality cycling infrastructure, but a lot of people tend to reject it as gentrification.

It's wasted time on a large scale.

So is cooking, eating, sleeping, daydreaming...

I won't try to glorify a banal commute, but moving from place to place is pretty fundamental to living.

There is something about commuting that is a net stress inducer (whether by car or something else), whereas cooking is somehow relaxing.

Yeah, for me. But it is definitely not true for lot of people. My friends would drive long and through traffic to get some rather average restaurant food but cooking is pain.

I can feel stressed cooking, but usually that's from an Internal desire to create something good. It's also avoidable with frozen or delivery (or asking my wife to cook). The end result is often enjoyable, too.

Driving in traffic stress is external, reduces my faith in humanity, and is most often unavoidable. The end result (was) often that I was at work or home late. Not enjoyable.

For me at least.

I find driving my car quite enjoyable and my commute became much more fun when I started taking the backroads to the office.

I last had an uncomfortably long commute in 2003. I had 4 or 5 routes I could take, varying from almost totally Interstate freeways to almost no freeways at all. There was a small mountain range in the way. So get to work there could have been a pass via a private dirt road, a variation I never tried. Instead I went around the mountain via a freeway. I definitely rotated through the many routes that led to that freeway, especially when I was rested. Also the freeway gradually extended during the time I worked at that place, which added variety. On the other hand some of the non-freeway parts were fairly cranky because some of them were not empty backroads, but shortcuts through fully populated suburbia. But some routes were empty and enjoyable.

Now I have a 9-mile commute and I am using the empty side of the freeway both ways. Sometimes I take a coastal byway on the way home if it's summer.

Personally, I love daydreaming while in public transit (to the extent that often I dread arriving at my final destination), whereas cooking is a constant debate of "will this be edible today or will I have messed up food again" even though the failure chance is relatively low nowadays for me...

> There is something about commuting that is a net stress inducer (whether by car or something else)

Anecdotally I don't think this is true for walking and cycling commutes.

Cooking is not relaxing for me, just so you know.

I disagree with both of those points.

I've definitely had easy / comfy commutes. 10am-7pm workday, missed most traffic, easy 20 min rides, sometimes a little longer in the evening. Drive took me past a grocery store and a liquor store, so I could stop off and grab things. I don't miss it, but it wasn't a soul crushing slog.

I routinely freak out while cooking.

> The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me.

This shouldn’t be depressing, this should give you hope. Imagine a world where even the poorest of people can have access to luxuries of their choosing.

The alternative is a world where if you are poor, you must drive a beat up car or more likely have no car at all, while the upper classes drive shiny brand new cars that become more powerful status symbol, because now the poor unwashed masses can no longer get their grimy hands on them. This widens the inequality gap, and stimulates rage.

And believe me, many people who have grown up with nothing aren’t sophisticated enough to understand the real goal should be “peace of mind” or sound financial decisions, rather than having a new car or whatever. What’s the average savings rate again?

Better to placate them with shiny objects and a consumerized roadmap to happiness than to tell them they’re poor and need to live accordingly so they can find happiness another way, while everybody else gets to be happy by buying cool shit.

The poor neighbourhood where I lived had a statistically extremely low rate of car ownership. If you owned a car at all, it was a cheap second-hand.

There were expensive cars rolling around though: due to rich people were passing through from expansive suburbs to the financial district, creating pollution and externalities that the poor neighbourhood had insufficient power to deal with.

If it makes you feel any better, I live in a wealthy suburb by some major traffic congestion and in the age of Google Maps, has become a major "short cut" so much that backed up cars will block my driveway each morning during rush hour.

So even the well off have to deal with these "externalities".

Our road is also in poor shape and had no shoulder to begin with. It is not meant for this level of traffic.

I would consider myself a car person, it has always saddened me when I see very expensive cars being driven badly by people that don't actually care about driving.

What sort of bad driving makes you sad?

Not understanding when or how to use the gas or brake pedals. Toss a clutch in the mix and it’s a disaster.

Running red lights, getting stuck in intersections, doing 20kmh under the speed limit in the fast lane, drifting between lanes without indicating or looking first, speeding when there's an overtaking lane and then slowing back down when it's finished. The usual.

I bought a new but cheap car and have driven it for slightly more than 100k kilometers. I really like the car and even if I had more money I'd just buy the same car again.

I don't see how cars can be status symbols if you can just buy a 3 year old car at a steep discount. Nobody is going to know the difference between a new car owner that kept his car for more than 3 years and someone who bought a 3 year old used car.

There’s a big difference between car culture and commuting though.

Having a car comes with a great deal of utility and freedom.

Commuting is almost entirely driven by city centers and population density that inflates real estate/rent costs so high that living out farther and driving in seems to not only make sense, but be the rational choice.

Aside from having a sales office in a densely populated area, there’s almost no real value to other functions of a business being located in the middle of a huge city.

There is a great deal of research (eg., see Enrico Moretti and Ed Glaeser) that documents that you’re statement isn’t accurate. There are very strong network effects of educated cities, and unless you believe all future post-COVID network will be over Zoom or Slack (which feels rather dystopian), then post-COVID cities will do just fine.

In fact, you could argue that what will suffer is living close to suburban office nodes in order to save commute times. Even more young people may choose to live in cities if they can avoid the schlep out to their suburban office (think Google bused from SF to Mountain View, but where you only need to take them for big meetings in the office rather than every day).

A lot of research looks like this looks to be deciding on car less way of life and collect facts only to prove that. Seems most people look for ulterior motive in case of oil and tobacco companies research while everything else is obviously right 'science'.

> There are very strong network effects of educated cities.

According to the research you mentioned[1], the "network effect" you mentioned raises wages moderately for uneducated people and a little for educated people. But still nowhere near enough to account for the astronomical rent prices in a city.

They also show that educated cities grow faster than uneducated cities, but don't make a comparison to smaller towns and suburbs.

I see no reason why cities are objectively better. They are convenient for some segment of the population, and they are very unenjoyable for some segment of the population.

[1]https://gulzar05.blogspot.com/2011/02/ode-to-cities.html?m=1

The business network effect is mostly beneficial to the companies, not to the employees. The employees are simply attracted because of the better employment opportunities.

Most of it is centralization. Google is in the bay area so everyone must go there if they want a job. Now apply this to a hundred different companies. Now that major city is absolutely essential if you want a high salary.

Rent prices are just a matter of greed. Cities make themselves business friendly to bring in more taxes but do not pay attention of how to house workers. If they wanted to prevent gentrification they'd start by kicking out companies, not the people that have lived there for decades. The reality is that all this bullshit is about making money. Land owners want a higher ROI so kicking out companies is a no go but building more housing is a no go too.

I agree with you, there are dozens of us who separate commuting from car ownership, but at the same time I feel (at least in the US) the vast majority of the population don't have that separation.

(For my personal case, I have a car and drive a lot, but rarely for commuting. I usually commute by bicycle+Caltrain, and only use car for commuting when it rains, to drive to my nearest Bart station, as I really don't like to bike in the rain. Lucky for me it rarely rains in the Bay Area.)

> Commuting is almost entirely driven by city centers and population density that inflates real estate/rent costs so high

It's actually lack of density that inflates the costs. Nearly every major US city has zoning laws that keep density much lower than what the market would support, which artificially restricts supply and increases prices. If city cores allowed increased density, housing costs would be lower in both the city and the suburbs, and as a bonus, fewer people would need to drive.

Yeah, not a fan of sitting in traffic (commuting is actually entirely fine if not for the traffic), but I LOVE my car- it allows me to go anywhere I want whenever I want, and it allows me to make forward progress by leaving the past behind and going somewhere else (physically and metaphorically true).

I see all the talk of higher density living without car ownership as primarily driven by corporate interests to keep labor more concentrated and more easily controlled (secondarily driven by cohorts of people who haven't experienced anything better than that and therefore wanting to keep status quo), at the expense of quality of life for the average person. The monied interests wouldn't care one way or another in lowering this standard of living, but I'm surprised to see how many ordinary citizens get swept up by the rhetoric.

Interesting point about corporate interests. I do think Pre COVID there was something genuinely charming about living in a human scaled place where you could walk or bike to a bunch of interesting small businesses. Recently I’ve started to see the benefits of space and privacy with everything thats going on and staying in a low density area was an unbelievable increase in quality of life.

As someone who's lived in both New York and Los Angeles, I find the car-centric low density city to be a much more pleasant living experience. In either case, my commute to work was around 45 minutes, but in NY I faced a great deal more noise pollution as well as bad weather, crowding etc. A car commute doesn't deal with any of that.

I'm open to arguments about environmental impact (and also others may prefer the NY style of living and that's fine too), but I generally see a lot of negativity about cars on in this (HN) culture that runs counter to my own preferences, and the apparent revealed preferences of a huge portion of Americans. Inflated real estate costs due to lack of mobility also meant I could afford a much bigger place in LA than in Manhattan.

> I’m hopeful many people will wake up to the misery that cars and commuting inflicts on themselves.

> The United States has been consumed with car culture which has bled time and resources from individuals like yourself.

But all of the problems being discussed here are related to commuting; none are related to cars.

Commuting through a big subway system takes just as much time while being much less pleasant.

I worry that you think it would be better if parent wasted 3x as much of his life commuting on public transit instead.

Distance between homes and offices is the problem; cars are the worst solution except for all the others.

Except that cars have influenced the way we build towns and cities: separate everything by non-walkable, non-busable distances because the basic assumption is that everyone has a car.

Public transit "sucks" for a number of reasons, many of them car-related: (-) buses have to share roads with cars, so they have to put up with the congestion they are trying to solve, (-) money that would have been spent on public transit is being spent on road expansions to "solve traffic", and others.

> cars are the worst solution except for all the others.

This doesn't explain cities that have successful public transit systems...

We wouldn't have built our offices and homes so far from each other if the expectation was to walk/bike/bus everywhere.

Unfortunately this is a chicken-and-egg problem, where things may need to get worse temporarily for things to get better.

> This doesn't explain cities that have successful public transit systems...

Do these cities simply have terrible private transit options?

I don’t know anyone who would prefer to take public transport except in cities with poor car infrastructure.

I do know lots of people who would rather walk or bike to work.

You have to explicitly optimise the city for public transit. Quite a lot of European cities do that.

> You have to explicitly optimise the city for public transit. Quite a lot of European cities do that.

Even in those cities very few enjoy taking public transport - and would drive if they had free parking, didn’t have to pay tolls, didn’t think it was terrible for the environment, etc

This is not true, driving in european cities is stressful (narrow streets with irregular layout, high density of pedestrians/cyclists, not enough parking places). The public transit, when done right, is way more convenient.

> would drive if they had free parking, didn’t have to pay tolls, didn’t think it was terrible for the environment, etc

So basically your argument is that people would drive if it weren't terrible in every way? By that logic, people would eat plutonium... if only it were more available, tasted good, and didn't kill you.

That would still make things worse, because cars need roadspace. Getting rid of the road space for cars and making public transit good enough is a pretty good solution.

Which public transit system enables the median earner to own a 2,400sqft single family detached house on a quarter acre in a socioeconomically homogeneous school district?

No system of any kind allows that. With public transit, you pay for it in personal discomfort and rigidness of schedule. With personal automobiles, you simply externalise the negativities – but there's still a huge cost, only no longer paid by the individual.

> the median earner to own a 2,400sqft single family detached house on a quarter acre in a socioeconomically homogeneous school district

Why would that be the goal?

To go along with what chiefofgxbxl wrote, this circumstance need not be the case. It is possible to reallocate more of our limited road space to more efficient ways of moving people instead of concentrating on simply moving cars. This has the effect of bringing transport on par with, or ahead of, driving alone.

Where I live, my commute to work by bus is only 7 minutes slower than doing the same commute driving myself alone. And for those 7 minutes, I do not have to pay any attention except once to remember to get off at the appropriate stop for a transfer. (I could avoid the transfer by walking but I'm not that motivated.) And I am not concerned with not being able to rush out for an emergency because my employer, or my county if my employer did not offer this benefit, will call me a taxi if I need to leave in a hurry and arrived to work without driving myself.

Because the bulk of my transport needs are now handled, I can also see what the transport network can do for me in other areas. As of two years ago, my family moved to a place in our city where we need not own a car, so we sold our last one. If we desire one for a few hours or a day, there are services (far cheaper than the few hundred dollars per month required to maintain one for our exclusive use) that will provide one upon request. They even take care of fuel.

We can make these choices to wean from cars; we choose not to. And at what cost to ourselves, our neighbors, and our planet?

while living close to work is ideal I've always vastly preferred public transport to driving, because I could use time on the train for reading or anything else really, so it wasn't really a waste of time.

Driving you need to pay attention and navigating traffic and worst of all stand in a smog filled traffic jam on a highway, which is absolutely awful.

>Distance between homes and offices is the problem; cars are the worst solution except for all the others.

Cars and their associated infrastructure (roads, parking) cause and/or enable the distance.

I live in a town with good transit that borders a major city with excellent transit, and it's shocking how much people fight everything that would make our town better. Bike lanes, bus lanes, and increased density are routinely rejected because they would make life harder for car drivers.

This image rebuts pretty much all pro car arguments:

https://ggwash.org/view/36573/to-a-pedestrian-a-roads-a-tiny...

I feel like my neighbors would say "yeah that's how it's supposed to be, get a car if you want to be safe"

The underlying message is that they don’t want to be near people who can’t afford cars and the accompanying expenses.

Which is a valid reason, as the data clearly shows the benefits of growing up in neighborhoods with high income earners, and the disadvantages of growing up in neighborhoods with low income earners:

https://opportunityatlas.org/

> the data clearly shows the benefits of growing up in neighborhoods with high income earners, and the disadvantages of growing up in neighborhoods with low income earners

Of course being in a wealthy area is better than being in a poor area. But does the existence of such areas benefit society? What would it look like if more neighborhoods were mixed income and public resources were shared equitably?

Sacrificing individual benefit for societal benefit is always the questions. We’re always making decisions about which tribe to benefit at the expense of another tribe such as individual, family, religious, geographic, racial, socioeconomic, nation state, present, future, etc.

An imbalance will cause discord and disorder. Hopefully you catch yourself on the right side of it. Prioritizing cars is very much a “me and my immediate family” above all else move, and that can be an easy choice when you don’t see others as belonging to your tribe, or vice versa.

What are you going to do? Get rid of all roads?

Roads are still necessary for delivery, garbage disposal, emergency services (fire engine, ambulances, police cars) and construction equipment. The picture is extreme to the point that it fails to deliver it's message.

To me, the picture shows the trade off of prioritizing cars vs walking/biking. You can’t have both.

Fewer cars means fewer lanes are needed. I’ve seen intersections 9 or 10 lanes wide in US cities. How can any senior citizen walk across 9 lanes of traffic, especially at night. One or two lanes is sufficient for all infrastructure like waste removal or emergency services.

But the root of the problem is insufficiently dense living. People have to make a choice to sacrifice their expansive living quarters (such as in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Manhattan, London, etc), otherwise the whole public transit and de-prioritizing motor vehicles doesn’t work.

As I explained in other comments, obviously people do want their space. But is that a luxury they can afford? They’re future generations can afford in terms of infrastructure debt repayments and environmental damage? Health damage from over reliance on cars? I guess we’ll see...but I’m betting not.

There's a lot between what the US has today and eliminating roads. To start, we should have fewer motor vehicle lanes, wider sidewalks, lower speed limits, more protected bike lanes, intersections designed to minimize crossing distance for pedestrians, and centerline hardening for left turns.

You really hit it on the head. Public transit where I live is a nightmare.

It would involve me driving my car something like 15 minutes to the nearest train station and paying for parking (an amenity that is free at my employer's office). Then I'd have to take something like two different trains, followed by two bus rides which would drop me off at a location that is about 3/4th of a mile away from the office. The walk is then along a route that is not pedestrian friendly in any way because it partially along the major access ramps on/off a tollway.

So yeah. :(

As one of your sibling comments points out, it's only this way because of the prevalence of cars. If we didn't place so much emphasis on making it easy to drive everywhere, we'd see far more housing and offices adjacent to transit hubs.

except that a lot of business isn't in an office. You will never make a meat packing plant, distribution center, mushroom farm, or many other types of work fit in a walkable city. A lot of this is really knowledge worker privilege for people who can exist in dense zoning. A tremendous amount of businesses simply cannot be built close to housing.

The existence of things that don't work well in high density isn't a good argument against density.

Higher density living conditions results in conditions that significantly increase transmission of diseases. Mass transit won't help due to crowded conditions. Other individual transportation options like walking or cycling cannot cover the distance that a powered vehicle can and also are not desireable during low or high temperatures or significant amounts of precipitation.

> walking or cycling cannot cover the distance that a powered vehicle can

The whole point is that in a dense city, you don't need to cover a long distance. 75% of car trips in NYC are under 5 miles, which is an easy distance to cycle with proper infrastructure.

> 75% of car trips in NYC are under 5 miles

What % of people who work in NYC have a commute to work of under 5 miles?

Surely Paris and Hong Kong would be drowning in COVID compared to the US if that was the case :-)

... all else being equal

>Higher density living conditions results in conditions that significantly increase transmission of diseases

Oh, I guess this is why low-density Florida and Texas are doing so well with Coronavirus, and all those super-dense Asian cities are having a tough time managing it.

Of course, if people are super dense between the ears disease transmission starts becoming more of a hazard. General population density evidently has little to do with it.

For me it will be interesting. I have been working from home for 21 weeks now but will put in some office days in the next week. so that my SO can have the house for herself and I have a room with a temperature not reminding me of a Finish Sauna. Not sure how it will feel, but I expect to have my mind at least a little bit less occupied with work after 30 - 40 minutes commuting and listening to audible. Maybe thought I will be shocked how traffic feels and gladly go back to full-time WFH. I will probably experiment with times of commute and number of days per week, thought. hoping that this change of scenery will add stimulus to my days.

Commuting in the UK tends to mean getting and standing on a crowded train for 40 minutes, with a 20 minute walk at each end.

Car culture is a very different problem and affects people who don’t commute

In London maybe. The Beeching report made sure that as soon as you’re outside a major city you are unlikely to be connected to anywhere useful by train.

Manchester picadilly is crammed at peak evening. Northern is known for overcrowded trains.

I miss my commute, but that's probably because I cycle. 20 minutes hard each way, it keeps me quite fit.

I have also spent years cycling between work and home, until my luck ran out and a motorist hit me. I had several close calls before then. I spent a lot of time piecing together a route that keeps me away from vehicular traffic, but there are a few dangerous intersections that I have no choice but to go through in order to go where I have to go, and sure enough one of them was where a motorist broke my hand.

Now, working from home, I often start the day with a bike ride, but since I’m not forced to go between two specific points, I can choose a route that has a lot less risk. I am also not limited by the length of my commute, so rather than 40 minutes of riding split in two 20-minute segments, I can instead ride for a full hour if I want.

When (if?) it’s time to go back into the office, I will go back to using a steel cage with crumple zones and air bags to traverse the dangerous intersections. The cycling for fun and exercise will continue to be on my own terms with whatever routes I think are safest.

If you haven't yet, be sure to call your city councilperson and demand improvements for cycling safety. Probably nothing will happen, but it can't hurt.

Sure:

1. Cycling is only permitted on cycling paths.

2. Cycling may not exceed 5 MPH.

3. Required gear includes leather pants, a leather jacket, a helmet, a mouth guard, a crotch guard, boots, gloves, safety glasses, and a wearable air bag system.

4. Plates (a.k.a. "tags") with inspection stickers are required. Safety inspections will be quarterly.

5. Licenses will be required. Licensing implies consent for random drug testing.

Alternately, make some inexpensive common sense improvements to the streets.

People have woken up to that misery, it's why cutting your commute time by 60 minutes will cost you ~$300-500,000 in the price of your home.

Unfortunately car culture is making a comeback now because nobody wants to use public transport during the pandemic.

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