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Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

Or how about infrastructure? The fact someone needs a car is itself a failure.

That’s an attempt to inject an urbanist hobby horse into a discussion of poverty. The vast majority of poor Americans have a car. It gives people tremendous flexibility in taking advantage of different employment and housing opportunities.

If anything I’d argue that transit puts poor people at a disadvantage. My wife’s family comes from rural poverty (like reliant on hunting for meat). Access to cars is never the problem. And cars mean that if someone loses their job or their housing, they can pick up and move to a different town where there might be opportunities.

The transit-dependent urban poor are completely dependent on what opportunities might exist near the transit lines. That also makes them tremendously reliant on the city central planners, who are often incompetent.

Car ownership is highly correlated with income, people in the bottom 10%ile of income are much less likely to have a car than people of higher income. If you look at modeshare for people in the bottom 10% it’s a much much larger share of biking, public transit, walking, and carpooling than others. Cars are one of the top sources of bankruptcy for people in the bottom 10% of income (car repairs, car accidents, making car payments). Car dependent life is a huge stressor to people in the bottom 10% of income

That is only in cities. Across the majority of the US your statement is not true. Poor people across the Midwest and South need a car because walking, biking, bussing, and trains are not available to them.

The poorest people in the Midwest can be seen walking down the sides of busy highways that have no sidewalks, carrying large loads of groceries for miles at a time.

You're just echoing my point. This city centric view that "cars aren't needed", "cars are a failure" is not helpful. The Midwest and South do not have the density to support those statements, moreover, most folks end up having to budget for a car first, then a home because of this.

Making cars easier to afford and maintain would benefit the South and Midwest a lot more.

Poor across the Midwest and south want a car but often live without. The difference is simply how important people consider cars and how expensive they are to keep. Being able to park for free makes a huge difference at the edge.

That's not true to my experience at all. We usually budgeted for a car first and a house second. Mass transit in most forms isn't cost efficient below a certain density, so at most you'll have a light bus system or rail system available to you.

In regards to your "often live without" statement, I met very few people in the South who didn't have cars. For the reasons I stated above, they're practically a necessity. Data also doesn't indicate that people are often going without cars except in major, wealthy cities: https://www.governing.com/archive/car-ownership-numbers-of-v...

From your 2015 data: Miami, Florida has 19.9% of households without cars, New Orleans, Louisiana at 18.8%. Even Birmingham, Alabama is at 15.8% and Atlanta, Georgia has 15.2% of households without cars.

That’s much higher than say Arlington, Virginia at 13.4% which is connected to one of the best public transportation networks in the US.

A handful of places on that list sat at 2% without cars, but most of the south was over 5% without cars largely due to poverty.

PS: Not that I think the data is very accurate Murrieta, California seemingly went from 3.5% (2015) down to 0.7% (2016) which seems extremely unlikely for a single year. The poor are often missed in official statistics like census unless significant effort is used to track them.

20% of a city not having a car sounds pretty typical, and from that data looks average. The wealthiest cities seem to correlate to not having cars, with San Francisco leading. The smaller towns on that list, and especially the ones in the Midwest and South are anywhere from single digit to 20%, with Cleveland having the highest number. So what's your point?

Edit: the whole point of my reply was to say that mass transit is effective in dense, wealthy cities. In the Midwest and South those same sentiments will not work because our highest density is in the middle of the city. The farther you go out is quickly drops off. Given that, it makes sense to make cars cheaper and easier to maintain for people there, while focusing on mass transit in areas where it will work. Unfortunately, in areas like SF (where I currently live) it's NIMBYs who get in the way and waste everyone's time while acting like they support mass transit expansion.

New Orleans, Louisiana where 18.8% of households live without cars has a 23.7% poverty rate and a median income of $41,604, that’s well below the national average.

Dallas Texas where 10.2% of households live without cars has a 18.9% poverty rate, median income of $52,580, so it’s larger, wealthier, and denser yet has significantly more cars.

Also, 20% is unusually high. Nationwide it’s about 8.7% and that’s heavily influenced by NYC. Excluding just NYC and that number falls closer to 7%.

PS: It’s really region specific but in general the wealthy are more likely to own a car in their area but different areas don’t have anything close to the same breakdown. https://slate.com/business/2019/05/maps-car-ownership-income.... Just look at El Paso vs San Jose on the bottom graph.

>New Orleans, Louisiana where 18.8% of households live without cars has a 23.7% poverty rate and a median income of $41,604, that’s well below the national average. Dallas Texas where 10.2% of households live without cars has a 18.9% poverty rate, median income of $52,580, so it’s larger, wealthier, and denser yet has significantly more cars.

Are you suggesting that when poor people get cars, they are better able to drive to work, then make more money? Because that is my take-away from this

No, for one thing many of these people are retired. Anyway, a few poor people making marginally more money isn’t going to move median income, it’s going to show up at the 5th and 10th percentile but largely disappear past the 25th.

So, I am suggesting a car is considered a luxury or unaffordable by large segments of the poor population outside of the largest and richest cities.

Right, which circles back to my main point that the people who are making comments like "cars are a failure", who are usually arguing for mass transit, are not being helpful. What would help the poor in the Midwest and South is cheaper and easier to maintain cars.

That’s well outside of what we where talking about but I think two points are reasonable here.

Poor people who can’t currently afford a car are hardly going to buy a new one, so at best you might start to change things for them a decade from now. Improving transit doesn’t have that delay or all the knock on affects around new car regulations.

Mass transit meanwhile can actually solve the root problem even in rural areas. Hell, America already has mass transit driving past almost every home in America 2 or more commonly 4 times every weekday day for most of the year, their called school busses and they don’t charge their users or cost that much to operate. I am not suggesting we should have free public transit to every home, but it does suggest far more is possible than is currently being done.

Poor people without cars really aren't the issue, if you can't afford a car in America, you are extremely poor and really an outlier. Pretty much anyone working even minimum wage can afford a car. The problem is a ballooning costs of ownership and all the other systemic failures that keep the majority of lower income people ~60% of the US trapped in a situation where they can not accumulate any substantial savings, assets or wealth and are merely surviving.

The reason they can't save is exactly that they're forced to buy a car. It costs several thousand per year for maintenance, insurance and gas. It's the second most expensive thing people spend money on. And all these things should cost even more money, the only reason they don't is government subsidies.

It doesn’t cost several thousand a year to insure and maintain a cheap old Japanese car, which poor parts of the country are full of.

He said: "maintenance, insurance and gas"

It very much does cost several thousand. My insurance alone was almost $1K per year. Gas was about $100 per week, but, in rural areas, that's probably $50 per week. That's about $2,500 per year.

In addition, most poor families have ONE, and only one, car. Putting it in for maintenance not only costs money for the maintenance but also money for alternate transportation.

I had a 20 year old Honda and a 20 year old Pontiac. It cost me about $2K per year for maintenance on each (I calculated that if it reached $5K per year it was time to get a new car). However, because I had two, I could put one in the shop and use the other without thinking. This is a luxury that the poor do not have.

Car-centered suburban development puts anyone who is not a healthy financially stable adult at a huge disadvantage. It is terrible for not only the poor and working class, but also children, families with children, the elderly, the disabled, the sick, tourists arriving by plane/train/bus/boat, etc.

And it is even terrible for well-off healthy adults whenever something happens to their car (say, engine trouble).

Not to mention, car accidents are a significant cause of injury and death, and being habitually sedentary leaves a high proportion of people in horrible physical shape and is a leading cause of ballooning healthcare costs, poor quality of life, and preventable deaths.

It is a tremendously exclusionary, resource inefficient, fragile, and environmentally destructive form of transportation and social organization.

That explains why NYC is full of kids multigenerational families and suburban and rural America isn’t, right?

Anecdotally, both cities and rural areas are full of kids of multigenerational households (I’m having trouble tracking down a good data source; maybe you have data?). But that generally has more to do with poverty than love for a particular place. It is also more common among immigrant and minority groups.

My impression is that car-centric suburbs full of wealthy white people have the fewest multigenerational households.

The elderly are much less independent in a car-centric society, which makes them more likely to end up spending longer in an assisted living facility where families can afford it.

But the immigrants and minorities want to get out of there. I have had several members of my extended family who have lived in NYC after immigrating from Bangladesh. They do it because there’s a large Bangladeshi community and lots of support for new immigrants. But invariably they move out to Long Island as soon as they’re able to do so. The most recent wave is going straight to places like Texas. My FB feed is full of pictures of 3BR houses in the exurbs with pools.

If living in a transit-dependent city with kids and elderly people was so convenient, the immigration pipeline wouldn’t involve people moving to Texas as soon as they can. But that’s exactly what happens. New York City has a huge internal out migration—it would be shrinking without international immigration.

As an aside, most suburbs aren’t full of “wealthy white people.” In the DC area, the places where you’re most likely to encounter multigenerational households is the Virginia suburbs where there are lots of Hispanics and Muslims. DC itself has some of the lowest fertility rates in the country, for both white people and Black people.

> 3BR houses in the exurbs with pools

People with kids who move from the city to the suburbs/exurbs are doing their kids a disservice (all else equal; obviously there are some compensating advantages in moving from say a 1-bedroom apartment to a 3-bedroom house on a large lot). The kids generally end up dependent, immobile, and isolated.

Land is certainly much cheaper though, and a lot of the material waste involved is subsidized by the federal government or borrowed from future local taxpayers, and there is no price put on a wide range of negative externalities. Sustainably and accurately pricing the full range of costs and harms from suburbia would render it unaffordable for most.

Unfortunately national, state, and local policy in the USA is substantially organized around entrenching and extending car dependency. The places where people can easily live without cars tend to have high housing prices and generally higher cost of living. In other parts of the world, there is not such a steep price premium for housing density and walkable neighborhoods.

> People with kids who move from the city to the suburbs/exurbs are doing their kids a disservice (all else equal; obviously there are some compensating advantages in moving from say a 1-bedroom apartment to a 3-bedroom house on a large lot). The kids generally end up dependent, immobile, and isolated.

LOL. My kid was incredibly isolated when we lived in DC because there were no other families.

DC is chock full of families, with a birth rate above the national average.

Just because you were living in a neighborhood full of 20-something yuppies or retirees or whoever, that doesn’t mean there are no kids in the city.

Or maybe you just felt culturally alienated from the families with kids in DC, most of whom are less wealthy than yourself?

I disagree with this necessarily being an attempt to inject an urban hobby horse into a discussion on poverty. I have lived in compact towns where the main reason to own a vehicle was to service neighbouring industries (agriculture, forestry, petrochemical). Everything within town was within walking distance. Contrast that to the suburbs of larger cities, where it may be difficult to find a single employer within walking distance.

I recognize those towns are not universal. Then again, the situation of your wife's family is not universal either. Which is the crux of the problem with discussions such as this one: people like to reach for generalities that reflect their own life experiences or observations, when the reality is that those perspectives represents a narrow worldview. Heck, even the people who study poverty for a living cannot come up with a consistent narrative (as demonstrated by the opening paragraphs of the article) since it will be influenced by the questions they ask and how they conduct their research.

In some cases, it's the hobby horse of people with barriers to driving who have studied the space and wish the US was more like it used to be and more like some other countries still are.

Yeah, what are those countries which are geographically vast, diverse and rich and rely on transit system for daily commute needs?

Sweden. I've never needed a car and live 50km from a city. The only people that need cars are those that literally live in the middle of the forest or need them for work.

That's certainly NOT generalisable to Sweden as a whole. Rural Sweden is definitely not accessible by public transport as a whole.

Has never been a problem in either Blekinge or Kalmar... almost every village has a bus line. I specifically excluded "literally living in the woods" though.

But what about the time an planning of using public transport vs car?

A bus comes by my house every hour, sometimes more often. Why would you need more granularity than that? And if you really did, you could still rent a car, truck, hire a taxi or rideshare, or whatever...

You have an appointment at 10:00am, it’s 20mins away by car, 30mins away by bus and 90 minutes long.

To take the bus you get ready and wait by 9am. Get to the place at 9:30am, wait until 10:00am for the appointment, and hopefully it doesn’t run late and let’s you take the 12:00pm bus to get home by 12:30. There goes 4 hours for a 90 minute appointment. With a car this same round trip could be done in 2.5hours ish, and you could make other stops along the way.

Granularity is important, and some places are coincidentally structured to be more difficult to survive in, the poorer you are.

This is very contrived. I've never in 20 years had such a problem. Don't make appointments for yourself that are extremely inconvenient... and of course you could do other things while you're in town.

I have had such problems, and I live in a village 10 km from Prague. Gaps in bus schedules can be very uncomfortable, and you often get no choice scheduling the important appointments such as a CT scan; you will be happy to get any at all.

What? When you make an appointment for something you need to have done you cannot control the time you are going to be given for the appointment... It is unavoidable, and even more, the lower in the food chain you are the less control you have over it: you cannot call a more expensive but more convenient service, you cannot choose to be diagnosed by a private doctor instead of accepting the time given by the subsidized service, and so on, moving out is not possible because you can't pay to move your stuff. Poverty traps you in ways you will only understand once you experience it.

> When you make an appointment for something you need to have done you cannot control the time you are going to be given for the appointment...

I can. I'm not sure why you can't. Maybe because you're not in Sweden? If it's not an emergency, you have a choice of times. If it's an emergency, you can just go now. The only difficult case is with rare specialists which have a first-come-first-serve queue system, but you can still either let them know when you're available or just wait longer. It's trivial and free to reschedule.

> you cannot choose to be diagnosed by a private doctor instead of accepting the time given by the subsidized service, and so on, moving out is not possible because you can't pay to move your stuff

I've never needed a private doctor for anything, but this was never a problem for the private dentist or optometrist that I use. It's pretty affordable and flexible here, even for the poorest. If you really cant't afford it and could prove that, the kommun ("county") would just give you money to cover it anyway, including your moving expensive if you need to move for some reason.

> Poverty traps you in ways you will only understand once you experience it.

Grew up poor in the US and am currently in the second to lowest income bracket here due to disability.

Maybe you just aren't aware of how much better things can be.

I was talking of a bracket of poverty you only need 300km south of Sweden to experience. That is, still, not real poverty. And I mean countries with a good safety net and infrastructure even if not as good as in Sweden

Well in New York people commute this much distance. And even I lived about 25-30 miles from Washington DC without car. Is it applicable to whole USA that's the point.

Sorry, when I said city, I meant one with 60,000 people. The nearest city of the kind you're thinking is 5-6 hours away.

I don't use public transit much -- I mostly walk everywhere -- and the OP only said The fact someone needs a car is itself a failure. There's no mention of public transit as a proposed solution.

Well anything could be called failure if alternatives and their pros/cons not discussed.

Good that you could walk everywhere. I can't, my knees hurt walking more than a mile or so. If I have no car and can't afford cab for everything, not sure how I would be better off.

I'm not asking you to give up your car. I'm only asking for a world that isn't so openly hostile to pedestrians and cyclists.

Pedestrians are fine, cyclists have to admit they are doing it for their own personal pleasure at the time and expense of everyone else 99% of the time. I commuted by bicycle for many years because I lived somewhere that it was convenient and appropriate. I didn't impede traffic and delay other people.

Cheap motorbikes need to be more widely available and utilized by any one who is cycling out of necessity in areas not intended for it.

Bicycles should absolute be relegated to specialized infrastructure of which we should build more, but cyclists within regular vehicle traffic is mostly done for enjoyment and only inspires hatred and annoyance at bicycles in general which creates a feedback loop resulting in less support for bicycle infrastructure.

Having to slow down traffic and wait to pass a bicycle only to have them filter back to the front at the next red light and make everyone slow down and pass them again repeatedly is a real contributor to gridlock.

A bicycle takes up a lot less road space than a car, especially when it can smoothly filter through lanes. You know what contributes to gridlock? Too many cars on the road, that's what. Bicycles are not making traffic any worse.

I mentioned infrastructure. Public transit is infrastructure. It's implied and should be obvious.

At one time, I wanted to be an urban planner. Public transit is only one piece of infrastructure.

Zoning and land use significantly impact how people and goods get around.

Poor people in the country back then we’re very bad off. The mobility from cars enabled real improvements for them.

I'm not claiming it didn't.

Poor people historically were worse off in myriad ways. Wanting options for people is trying to throw out the bathwater, not the baby.

I'm not looking to take cars away from anyone. I'm just looking to restore access to some essentials that I grew up with and that I know can be real, even with cars remaining popular and common.

I'm not some extremist looking to eliminate cars. I'm not trying to insist that anyone who can drive and prefers to drive be denied that possibility.

You're right that public transit is inefficient for people living in rural areas, but 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas so to simply discount public transit as an "urbanist hobby horse" seems pretty hand-wavey.

You only have to look to other developed countries to see how fast, cheap, and efficient public transit is not only a major and driving force in the economy, but also a critical part of the social safety net. Just because America's public transit systems have been hobbled by the oil-industry doesn't mean we shouldn't be improving it for everyone's benefit.

Go look at the Census definition of “urban.” Sibley, Iowa, where my wife grew up, is classified as an “urban area.” It’s in the middle of nowhere surrounded by farmland.

Cars have a way of breaking down and causing unpredictable expenses that can push the poor into hardship. The choice between car culture and well-developed mass transit comes down to density. I might believe that even many "urban areas" in the US are still too sprawlish and low-density for mass transit to be genuinely effective, but this is not uniformly true.

>The transit-dependent urban poor are completely dependent on what opportunities might exist near the transit lines

Yes, they are, which is why you build more infrastructure...

> And cars mean that if someone loses their job or their housing, they can pick up and move to a different town where there might be opportunities.

Poor people in Europe can easily hop a train to get to another town or village if needed. In the case of a really rural community, they will have buses to the nearest train station.

> That also makes them tremendously reliant on the city central planners, who are often incompetent.

Aka America’s self fulfilling destiny.

"Poor people in Europe can easily hop a train to get to another town or village if needed."

Not completely true, there are many rural regions where the train or bus service is very irregular, if not discontinued outright.

One of the reasons why the Yellow Vests in France were so forceful: French countryside is seriously underserved by public transport and living there without a car or with very expensive fuel is hard.

That might be true, in that they are underserved, but that is a huge difference from the USA’s non-service. My experience is in (the French speaking part of) Switzerland, where to get to a remote mountain village you must go by postal bus from the train station. The postal bus only came once every 2 hours, which was a pain, but it was very viable.

I've been to a few of those near Neuchatel, the busses may be sparse, but they're regular and reliable

> The vast majority of poor Americans have a car.

Because they have no choice, and are constantly forced to dump money into it to keep it on the road. This is absolutely pertinent to this discussion. Public transit systems are restricting because they are so poorly implemented.

I live in a small town, but when I was looking into taking the bus to work in the morning, it would have taken two hours each way, every day. That's extremely poor public transit and creates a huge amount of pressure to buy a car instead.

I mean, in highly populated/dense areas sure, but public transportation doesn't really work in rural America.

Trains are super effective for rural areas. I'm more than happy to drive my beat up pickup, tractor, bike, walk or ride a horse down a rural road to the train station. Doing the same on the highway is stressful, as none of those mode of transports are safe at highway speeds. Modern roadways are an artificial monopoly that poor people can't participate in.

Only 20% of America lives in a rural area, so odds are it’s irrelevant to most struggling people.

The census definition of "urban" is kind of absurd. If I'm reading it right, living in a town of 2500 is "urban." If I'm reading it wrong, living in a town of 50,000 is "urban." Either way, you'd likely consider a lot of that 80% rural.

Where is that definition from?

The 2020 census proposes using "385 housing units per square mile as the primary criterion for determining whether a census block qualifies for inclusion in an urban area". Previously it was 1000 people per square mile (or equivalent to the above with 2.6 persons per household).

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/02/19/2021-03...

Note that's only in the "proposed changes section, and that there is still much more information in that document. That change seems to determining how much of a town is an urban tile, but is not the primary designation of urban.

I guess density is the real measure.

While I haven't seen it work very well, it's not the case that it's impossible. My mother has been the superintendent at a number of places in the rural southwest. They manage to get the kids to school via bus.

So it isn't the case that rural public transportation simply can't work.

Poor people often receive an enormous amount of value from owning a car in the form of optionality, which is why the vast majority own one. It is one of the only sources of economic optionality a poor person has.

Even if they don't need a car, they often choose to own one (the cheapest one they can find that is vaguely reliable).

Got it. So how should people get to their jobs at the farms? Or the mines? Or the oil fields? Or the factories? Or the mills?

For sure rural jobs aren’t a great fit for public transportation. But most people commuting to work by car are commuting to offices, retail stores, restaurants, and other places in semi-densely populated areas that could be better served by public transit.

OK, then how do people commute to their jobs (restaurants, shoe stores, or schools) in the small towns that support farms, mines, factories or mills?

I didn't mention small towns. My concern is primarily with the large cities in the United States that have functionally useless or second-class public transportation systems. Places like Phoenix, Houston, and Los Angeles that collectively house tens of millions of people in sufficient density for public transit, but lack effective systems due to poor planning, corruption, and lack of creative problem solving.

Of course there are use-cases for cars, nobody suggested that there aren't. The problem is that the United States in particular has assumed that every transportation issue is best solved with cars.

At human speeds: walk, bike, tractor, hitch a ride on a lorry (max speed 45mph), horse. Trains are useful for connecting longer distances at specific times of the day (commuting). Highways create an artificial monopoly on travel. You cannot easily travel along them, or cross them if you can't drive over 45mph. This speed is only getting higher.

There are studies showing that travel has actually gone down in areas like Mexico with the addition of modern Highways. The poor just can't participate.

nanomonkey says>"There are studies showing that travel has actually gone down in areas like Mexico with the addition of modern Highways. The poor just can't participate."<

More likely the poor used the highway once - to get out of the country and to the city. It isn't that they "can't participate", it's that they are gone.

Okay? So keep the car-centered infrastructure where you genuinely need it, and you can still have the huge net benefit of reliable public transit for the other 80% of people.

A solution doesn't need to be 100% perfect for every situation in order for it to still be worthwhile.

I mean factories and mines usually have A LOT of public transport options. That's a no-brainer, really. Guaranteed thousands of customers at guaranteed schedules.

>how should people get to their jobs at the farms? Or the mines? Or the oil fields? Or the factories? Or the mills

Or how do astronauts get to the ISS? Checkmate. Transportation infrastructure bad.

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