> Point being, there is a reason people don't walk everywhere, which is that there is a space/time trade off.
While this is right at a surface level, I think it’s more accurate to say that people don’t walk everywhere because in most cases, they cannot. In every North American city, if you step just a bit out of the urban core, or even across the urban core, it will be very difficult to walk to where you need to go. This means that nearly every North American is dependent on a car by default. There is an ingrained car culture that makes change difficult. I would say that car dependency is a result of our city design, rather than the result of cars being good.
It doesn’t have to be this way, it didn’t used to be this way, and it isn’t this way in many parts of the world. Just because cars are a very convenient mode of transportation doesn’t mean that the changes required to support have been positive. There are some very extreme negative externalities:
- Extreme land use requirements. Not only do you need huge roads, but you need huge parking lots everywhere. Nearly half of all land in an American city is dedicated to the car. A lot of that land cannot generate economic value very efficiently. For example, a massive mall will have an even bigger parking lot. But if that area was a walkable neighborhood, it could support many more local businesses and generate more tax income and economic activity.
- Destruction of neighborhoods. Thousands of neighborhoods destroyed and people displaced to build highways right through downtown.
- Acceptance of bad air quality. Cars make air quality pretty bad in cities. Air would be fresher in cities without cars.
- Acceptance of terrible noise pollution. Cars (or any motor vehicle) are very loud, especially at scale. Cities would feel much quieter without cars. And constant exposure to this noise makes people less happy.
And look, I don’t believe cars are the root of evil. My point is that we are dependent on cars because we designed our cities around cars. Yes, of course our economy is stronger because we have an excellent interstate highway system. But that highway didn’t need to cut a city in half and bring noise and pollution right downtown. And yes, trucks and fright and deliveries make lives better. But we didn’t need to abandon local, walkable businesses to get that.
If cities were designed to optimize people’s happiness, we should absolutely see far fewer cars in cities. Because it’s possible to design a city such that you don’t <em>need</em> to drive a car everywhere. And when that happens, people don’t gravitate towards the car nearly as often as they do today. Because driving a car in a city is really not that nice. In fact, it is usually very stressful and involves a lot of waiting.
That is why alternatives work when they are well-supported. And that’s really the point here: people want there to be a reasonable choice <em>besides>/em> cars in cities. There should be options! Cars are just the only viable option for way too many trips because cities are designed only for cars. Providing options is very difficult to accomplish when you dedicate almost half of a cities land and 95% of the public right of way to cars.