Hacker News Reader

Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com