My favorite are the threads about how we need to get rid of cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling. :)
I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do with the popularization of human-centric design movements that question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of transportation that American cities have operated from since about the 1950s. An easy example is the idea of "induced demand" [1] that shows even from a pure engineering perspective that the cost-benefit math for cars has long been unfairly weighted towards cars by outside forces.
We're seeing a lot of pressure around housing and energy and social policy in general which in turn is making us question decisions we've made, culturally, in history, like can we really sustain the building of less dense housing for our growing population? Does it make sense to give every family 0.75 acres of grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage, when those things are only used some of the time? Might there be better ways to approach the utilization of that space as a population?
I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss concerns like that out of hand. Can the US ever totally get rid of cars? No, not for a hundred years at least. Having a good 80 years of city planning being focused around every adult having their own vehicle is of course going to e difficult to move away from, and there are certain lifestyles (rural living, farming, regions where building trains is more impractical) that it'll just never be a great idea... but I still think it's worth interrogating these assumptions we've carried to see if there's a better way we could be living life.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_trans...
A standard suburban house doesn't sit on 0.75 acres. 0.2 is typical. Though you're probably low on the driveway and garage :).
I'd like to see a better argument for why we shouldn't live this way. There are relatively large metros (e.g. Portland) that are predominantly suburban single family homes, and so far it seems to work fine. Sure, we could compress Portland into a 10 mile by 10 mile square, but why? Would it actually make our lives better? By what metric?
The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such that we don't treat people as people unless they're shrouded in a big rolling box of metal. Of course it'll vary from person to person and family to family. I think urban environments offer children much more freedom than corresponding suburban environments, while being safer. There's much more mobility and access to things outside of the house, which I'd argue significantly enriches childhood experience and leads to more adaptable adults.
As an adult, I'm overjoyed by the ease with which I can get to things around my city. I never have to deal with traffic, I can walk to three different grocery stores in under fifteen minutes. I have dozens of restaurants in similar distance, and I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home. I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads. I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers. (A co-worker of mine lives out in the suburbs of our city, which are denser than most, and takes the light rail into work; half an hour on the train, 5 minute walk from the station. If he took a car, we'd need parking for him and everyone else that had one, and roads for it [see again, induced demand in my post above], and I wouldn't be able to walk to work myself). A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads. Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn.
As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from. We can invest in more public services since we're not committed endlessly to maintaining the cost-sink of asphalt plains. [1] Public transit is an amazing economic equalizer as well: In a suburban environment, you must have a reliable car to make it to work. If you're too poor (or just starting out) to afford a car, or if it's unreliable, that's going to severely curtail your available job pool. (There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences; my highschool girlfriend spent two hours on the bus, one way, to work, because her family only had one car, and her mother needed it for her job. That's four hours a day she can't use to cook, or study [she could try, but a bus is far from an ideal study environment], or sleep. If our town had better transit, or if our town wasn't so dense that it took two hours to travel from house to shopping district, it'd be a very different story.)
This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society. I feel like putting these at the end really undercuts their significance, but we never seem to talk about these facts. Car accidents are the eighth-leading cause of death in the US [2]. Imagine the economic savings, and the amount of medical resources, we could free up by reducing that. Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...
This is just unhelpful, tired rhetoric. Everyone has the same rights whether they're in a car or not. Moreover, public transit literally depends on much larger "metal boxes".
It sounds like you live in a magical city.
In Chicago, it's much faster to get around by car than it is to take the train or bus. In general, if you're taking the bus or train anywhere, it's almost always a 45 minute trip one-way and it can easily be double that if you have a transfer.
I like that I can walk to a few grocery stores and restaurants, but if I want to go to a specialty shop or visit a restaurant in a different neighborhood or even just make a big trip in inclimate weather I can do so much more quickly/easily with a car than without. Of course, rideshare is a thing, but a round trip to another neighborhood can easily run anywhere from $60-120 and even then you have to wait for drivers and even then they might blow you off (maybe I'm just unlucky here, but it seems like 5-10% of drivers blow me off, especially if I ordered a ride just before a price surge).
> I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home
This isn't much of a problem for me--if I want more than a couple of drinks (rare), I just make arrangements in advance (DD or walking or rideshare or public transit). If I don't make arrangements, I don't drink. I don't know what could be more convenient than this (I see the logic in doing the inconvenient-but-safe thing all the time, but it means missing out on a lot of convenience unnecessarily).
> I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads.
Traffic is tedious, but I mostly just avoid traveling during rush hour (not usually a big deal since I can leave later and still get there at the same time as I would if I took the train during rush hour). It wouldn't be a problem at all if I didn't live in a city. Anyway, I don't know what your city's public transit system is like, but in Chicago it's uncommon to get a seat on a train (if you get one, there will usually be someone who needs it more), and the etiquette is to hold your bag rather than wearing it on your back (so we can squeeze an extra 1/4 of a person into the train car). Since your other hand is holding a strap or railing, there's no free hand to hold the book and anyway it's too distracting to me with the pan handlers trying to get my attention or the guys who blast their portable speakers or are trying to start shit with other riders (or straight up smoking weed/cigarettes). Buses are a little nicer, but they are subject to traffic just like cars. Instead, I just drive and listen to a podcast or audiobook; navigation has been a solved problem for a decade thanks to pervasive GPS.
> I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers.
I liked walking to work when the weather was nice, but that's pretty rare in Chicago and anyway there are only so many different routes you can take after which it gets dull. I'm really glad I got a remote gig. I have a ton of time left over, and my wife and I will load up the dog and go to a park or even rent a lake house for a week outside of the city for a nature fix. If we didn't have cars, we would probably stay in our neighborhood rather than spend the extra $100/day on a car rental, but since we have a car anyway the difference is marginal. And the car is convenient for other things too--we can take our dog to the vet or to friends' houses without having to pay an exorbitant rideshare cost, for example. Parking is really only inconvenient downtown during the work week and a few other places (e.g., around the zoo during summer weekends, etc). Otherwise it's like $5-10 for a few hours.
> A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads
Seems a little silly that you're willing to walk 20 minutes but not "wander far from the car". :)
> Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn.
Yeah, this is definitely one of the more stressful aspects of walking around Chicago.
> As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from.
In Chicago, the nicer neighborhoods not only have better roads but also much better public transit options. It turns out the same forces that operate on streets operate on public transit.
> There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences
This favors cars, which waste less time than public transit in the general case.
> This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society.
Accidents are the best argument against cars, IMO. I think we can sharply curtail this with better city planning and more safety features (especially with advancements in self-driving technology). Regarding pollution and maintainability, EVs emit less per person than a diesel city bus (this will continue to improve over time as our energy grid becomes cleaner) and they're also inherently more maintainable (no transmission, engine, exhaust system, etc). Once the high end of the market is saturated, we'll start to see more, simpler models on the low-end, and these will eventually hit the used car market. Fuel will also be cheaper because electricity is cheaper than gasoline.
> Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance.
I'm not sure what that $20k figure is meant to represent. You can get a reliable car for $10k these days, drive it for 5-10 years and turn around and sell it for $2-4k. Of course, you'll have to insure it and pay for gas and maintenance, but that's probably quite a lot less than most couples spend on public transit, rideshare, and car rentals.
Portland has been around for almost 180 years, and people still seem to think it is an attractive place to live. The last couple years have been pretty terrible, but that doesn't seem to be unique to this area, and if anything is more of an urban problem than a suburban one.
I won't tell you what you should like, or what your definition of good is. But for me, I enjoy suburban living more. For example, I drove into downtown Portland a few days ago and watched Hamilton, it's only 20 minutes away. We go to museums, art shows, etc. But, I can turn away from Portland and in less than 20 minutes be in an entirely rural area enjoying nature. 20 minutes farther and I'm approaching Mt. Hood. When I get home, I have my own little square of paradise: no shared walls with strangers, a place for the kids to play, a nice community where everyone sorta knows everyone else. City living is the right answer for some people, but definitely not all of us.
That's not the issue. It's the externalities, the downstream effects, of trying to scale up suburban living to huge numbers of people.
At a small scale, a little town of a few hundred or couple thousand people, things remain walkable. There could be a corner grocery store, one gas station, a few stores clustered together in the town square, courthouse, playground, park, school, church....all nice and wonderful.
But all that disappears when you scale suburbs up to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, then millions of people. The amount of land area gets enormous. Traffic gets enormous. It scales like O(n^2). You get bigger and bigger streets. Bigger and bigger courthouses. Bigger and bigger stores, parking lots, huge shopping malls, and everything keeps getting pushed out by the pressure of it all. It sprawls. The city tries to transform itself into something medium density, as housing prices go up. Office and commercial real estate go up. People want white collar, nice, high-paying jobs. They don't want to be plumbers and electricians and house painters, but executives and managers and have their own businesses.
But suburban sprawl really doesn't support those things very well. People get pushed miles and miles from their jobs. Traffic becomes a nightmare. The prices go off the charts. Tradespeople get pushed out. Culture takes a dive. No more walking or biking when those freeways go up.
Bad examples of sprawl are places like Houston and Los Angeles, even the Bay Area now. I spent 4 years in LA, 5 in the Bay Area. LA is truly mind-blowing. The entire basin is just one big grid of endless permutations of the same concrete jungle, here or there less dense or more dense, a few bright spots, but OMG and endless labyrinth of Stapleses, Starbuckses, McD's and strip malls...
But LA in the 1930s wasn't that. It was just a few towns here and there and some downtown. It was literally a few spots in the desert where people had little nuclei of the small-town living. It just grew without real direction and was completely powered by oil and cars.
With respect to prices, these are self-regulating. If prices go up, things either get denser and/or people move elsewhere.
> Culture takes a dive.
Again, suburbs aren't my thing, but it seems really offensive/chauvinistic to imply that suburban culture is lesser than urban culture. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding, and in the spirit of charity I want to give you the opportunity to set the record straight.
> No more walking or biking when those freeways go up.
Is this intrinsic to suburbs, or is it an artifact of how suburbs were planned at the time that suburbs exploded in popularity? Can suburbs be designed to be more walkable/bikeable (I would actually be surprised if they aren't already)?
No, I meant that culture takes a dive from small-town culture, where you know your neighbors and shop owners.
Here's another video [2] that discusses how city tax revenue is primarily earned in their dense downtown regions, and spent on their more distributed suburban environments.
Others in the comments have discussed this, but the issues with towns being walkable and cyclist friendly tend to intersect directly with anti-goals if car design. Places aren't walkable if there's huge roads and parking lots that people have to traverse in order to get to them. Similarly, cars are quite hazardous to pedestrians and cyclists. If we're optimizing for human-scale environments, we're inherently car-hostile. Similarly, if we're optimizing for efficiency of cars, then we're hostile to human-scale design. The ideas are largely antithetical.
You can get some hybridization--metra trains from city cores to the suburbs, street cars or trams along main suburban drags alongside with automobiles, but one system constrains the other.
Historically, highway systems have segregated neighborhoods whose citizens were poorer, and relied disproportionately on public transit or bikes and walking. If you have to go half a mile out of your way to find an overpass over the highway to get to the nearest grocery, and that overpass has a litter-covered sidewalk barely two feet wide, we definitely aren't building our suburbs to be walkable or bikable.
[1]: https://youtu.be/UX4KklvCDmg [2]: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI
I'm not sure if this is really clear to people who don't live here, but I think it's important to note that 'suburbs' doesn't really mean just one thing. Portland is mostly suburbs, for example. I think it's tempting to think suburbia must be endless miles of tract housing with no business, no retail. While that happens, it's not at all universal.
> Can suburbs be designed to be more walkable/bikeable (I would actually be surprised if they aren't already)?
Can't speak for everywhere in the US, but in the places I've lived, this is standard. Part of the cost of building a house is putting sidewalks in. So the problem isn't walkability. The problem, where it exists, is a lack of anything to walk to. But that shouldn't be that hard to address -- knock down some houses and zone for commercial. Build small cities out of suburbs. (I expect that already happens, it certainly happened decades ago in places with long established suburbs).
I live in a country with relatively good public transport, relatively great one in the capital and few other large cities, with public bikes and biking lanes.
Then 2020 came, and due to covid, no more public transport (for some time). Want to go to work? Too bad. Want to go to the larger (and cheaper) store... nope. Order food delivery from a large supermarket chain? Good luck, people don't want to go to crowded stores, and delivery slots are full 2 minutes after midnight.
I know it's an extreme situation, but it made people rethink what they need for their independece, and cars came high on the list.
Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US because we've made it impossible to be independent unless you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To me, that's the opposite of independence.
Yes, COVID is an extreme situation--but I don't think it's reasonable to plan our daily lives around extreme situations. I see this when people buy their cars--Is it reasonable to buy a pickup truck if you're only going to tow or haul something once a year with it? Is the excess spend in car payment, insurance, gas usage, consumables, and safety hazard worth that convenience? Why not just rent the truck when you need it?
On the other hand, even in my urban environment, I can get to another neighborhood in less than half the time it would take me to get there by train or bus (especially if there is a transfer involved). It's also a lot more comfortable than waiting on a platform/bus stop exposed to the elements only to squeeze myself into a small box (that smells at once of urine, vomit, BO, and cigarette smoke) with dozens of strangers, some of whom are panhandling, blasting music, threatening other commuters, etc.
Moreover, my wife and I share a car, and we spend quite a lot less on it (all in: maintenance, fuel, parking, insurance, etc) than we did on public transit + rideshare + car rentals even without amortizing the car payment over the useful lifetime of the car. And of course our time and comfort are also valuable to us.
> Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US because we've made it impossible to be independent unless you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To me, that's the opposite of independence.
This is a feature of the new world (not just the US), and it's a consequence of our post-car development. If Europe had the bulk of its development in the post-car era, it would've turned out the same way. Also, if you're getting around by public transit you need even bigger metal boxes and you need more of them and you have to wait for them and they are often late and you will be packed onto them like cattle and you're limited by where they go (hence the "independence" of the car).
A huge portion of Europe was destroyed.(and consequently rebuilt) in WWI and WWII, which are both firmly in the post-car era. They rebuilt with an emphasis on trains. Where they didn't, or in later years when they chose instead to invest in car development, some of them are now turning back to human-centric development [1].
> ... Need even bigger metal boxes and you need more of them and you have to wait for them and they are often late...
In terms of space-occupation in cars vs buses (or trains), mass transit absolutely wins. This is a trivial argument. There's a dozen versions of this picture [2] that shows the difference between like 80 people commuting via bike, bus, or car. The amount of redundant space taken up by cars is bonkers to me.
"Packed into them like cattle", I'll grant you rush hour gets crowded, but you'll spend less time on the trains than you would trying to cram that many people through the highway. See also the "induced demand" problem of highways.
Moreover, while you're not using your car, it's taking up space doing nothing. While I'm not using the subway, it's working to shuttle the other 1.6 million people who use it (that number varies wildly depending on your city, notably).
To the point of transit times and the, ah, atmosphere of transit: Of course travel time will vary according to how big the transit network is. You see this a lot in sub-urban downtowns. A bus system will exist, but it'll be painfully slow to get from one point to another when compared to a car. I argue this is because the externalities of the disproportionately wealthy-benefiting poor-subsidized road system. Similarly, why is it when we have traffic issues the argument is always "build more lanes! Improve the roads!" But when transit has throughout problems we say "Look, this is why transit never works, and we should invest in roads instead!" You haven't done this overtly, but that idea underlies your argument: cars are better, we shouldn't waste our money on transit.
As for being uncomfortable or dealing with less-than-savory people on mass transi, you're absolutely right that those are unpleasant experiences, and being able to use a car does help avoid them... Just like moving to a wealthier part of town or building a highway to keep the riffraff out would help avoid them, but none of those solve the underlying problem. It is not a fault of the underlying public system that it is so used by people of poorer means or those with mental disorders or simialrt, it is a flaw of the private wealthy systems that it allows people to avoid examples of their fellow citizens whose society has failed them. We shouldn't avoid using transit, or not have transit, because it accidentally functions as a haven for the homeless or mentally unwell or destitute. We should address those failings of our society by providing for those people, the better to enable our public systems to fulfill their original designed function. Importantly though, the public resource is still serving the public. You being able to escape the flawed public systems and escape to your private spaces (car, house, etc) because you have the money to do so is not an indictment of that systems failings, but of your empathy for your fellow citizens.
Put another way, it sounds almost like you're saying "I don't like going to the community doctor, and don't believe we should invest in it more, because it's always full of sick people."
[1]: https://youtu.be/sI-1YNAmWlk [2]: https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-alm...
The cities were already established. They weren't repopulating the continent from scratch.
> In terms of space-occupation in cars vs buses (or trains), mass transit absolutely wins. This is a trivial argument.
Yes, but space-occupation is a foolish thing to optimize for in an environment that isn't constrained by space. This is a trivial argument.
> "Packed into them like cattle", I'll grant you rush hour gets crowded, but you'll spend less time on the trains than you would trying to cram that many people through the highway. See also the "induced demand" problem of highways.
I spend quite a lot less time driving than I would if I took the trains. This is true virtually everywhere in Chicago, and Chicago only has only 3-4 main highways (which is to say it's not an especially car-friendly city and it's 5th ranked for public transit). Most of the time, it's twice as fast to drive as to take public transit, but if you have a transfer it can easily be 4 times slower than driving.
> Moreover, while you're not using your car, it's taking up space doing nothing. While I'm not using the subway, it's working to shuttle the other 1.6 million people who use it (that number varies wildly depending on your city, notably).
Agreed that cars are less space-efficient, disagree that space-efficiency is the paramount variable.
> Similarly, why is it when we have traffic issues the argument is always "build more lanes! Improve the roads!" But when transit has throughout problems we say "Look, this is why transit never works, and we should invest in roads instead!" You haven't done this overtly, but that idea underlies your argument: cars are better, we shouldn't waste our money on transit.
This isn't my argument at all. I'm not universally against public transit--it makes sense in some places and in those places it should be improved and expanded. My whole thesis is that different places have different constraints and thus we shouldn't expect "public transit" to be a panacea.
> As for being uncomfortable or dealing with less-than-savory people on mass transi, you're absolutely right that those are unpleasant experiences, and being able to use a car does help avoid them... Just like moving to a wealthier part of town or building a highway to keep the riffraff out would help avoid them, but none of those solve the underlying problem.
I didn't claim that driving solves social problems, only that it lets people control their own environments. I can't get my city to police or clean public transit appropriately, and I certainly can't get them to fix the underlying social problems; however, I can control my commuting environment by opting to drive. I'm happy to revisit public transit if/when we can solve poverty and mental healthcare, but until that utopia arrives, driving is a nice alternative.
> We shouldn't avoid using transit, or not have transit, because it accidentally functions as a haven for the homeless or mentally unwell or destitute. We should address those failings of our society by providing for those people, the better to enable our public systems to fulfill their original designed function.
These are orthogonal issues. Me driving (or not) doesn't stop my society from addressing its issues. I appreciate that people are more likely to advocate for issues that are visible to them, but that will probably look like cracking down on these people rather than solving ultimate causes (and anyway, our cities have a whole lot of people taking public transit already and yet these issues persist while other parts of the country have fewer problems).
> You being able to escape the flawed public systems and escape to your private spaces (car, house, etc) because you have the money to do so is not an indictment of that systems failings, but of your empathy for your fellow citizens.
I grew up working class, and it doesn't take a lot of money to escape the burden of public transit. We should absolutely expand the franchise to more people, however. Moreover, whether I take public transit or not has no bearing on my willingness to improve society. Please don't make assumptions about my motives, it's rude and unnecessary, and it violates site guidelines.
I think this is mostly a straw man or nut picking. From what I can tell, there aren't many rural people arguing that rural transit policy should be imposed on urban areas, but rather the debate is about whether or not policies that arguably make sense in an urban environment should be imposed on the rest of the country. Notably, rural people have enough exposure to urban environments that they understand that urban environments differ from rural environments, but not so much the other way around: e.g., everyone watches the same entertainment media that is almost invariably set in urban environments and most people have traveled to an urban area for business or pleasure, but there's very little media set in a rural environment and "rural tourism" isn't exactly a popular pastime of urbanites.
> I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do with the popularization of human-centric design movements that question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of transportation that American cities have operated from since about the 1950s. An easy example is the idea of "induced demand" [1] that shows even from a pure engineering perspective that the cost-benefit math for cars has long been unfairly weighted towards cars by outside forces.
Sure, I actually agree with a lot of this. I would like to see American cities and suburbs become more walkable, and I'm sure the car industry lobbied for car-centric planning, jay-walking laws, etc. My criticism isn't that anti-car policies are unfounded or they don't make sense anywhere, but that the anti-car movement is generally ignorant (in a literal sense, not pejoratively) of the non-urban world.
> We're seeing a lot of pressure around housing and energy and social policy in general which in turn is making us question decisions we've made, culturally, in history, like can we really sustain the building of less dense housing for our growing population?
Yes, outside of urban areas we certainly can do this for the foreseeable future. Most of America isn't constrained by space.
> I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss concerns like that out of hand.
No one is dismissing these concerns out of hand--I'm only arguing that the policies that policies which assume a high degree of density don't make sense in areas where that assumption is incorrect. This seems almost tautological.
> but I still think it's worth interrogating these assumptions we've carried to see if there's a better way we could be living life.
Fully agree. I think we could have a lot more productive conversations if we started by reimagining collectively rather than asserting how others should live their lives (without demonstrating any understanding of their concerns).
- Where I live (The Netherlands) you don’t have to live in a city to have good PT. There are places that you cannot reach by train or bus but they are few.
- While sometimes a car is necessary, the cars many people prefer (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary.
It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads for private vehicles is very much a policy decision.
[1] Actually it is what we chose, up until the 1950's, when we chose to build in different ways.
And unaffordable to the vast majority. I'd love to have plenty of walkable city options in the US, but they aren't going to appear overnight by banning cars when you need them to get around places over half of the people in the US live in.
> It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads for private vehicles is very much a policy decision.
It's an amalgamation of a hundred years of policy decisions and private investment based around those decisions, and it would take as long to reverse it even if there was political appetite for it. And there's not much appetite for it because most people prefer the convenience and comfort of cars. To that end:
> There's absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is impossible here.
It's not a matter of whether that lifestyle is possible, but whether it's desirable. Most Americans find the convenience and comfort of cars to be preferable to public transit.
As someone with a truck constantly having to lend it for friends to use, I disagree.
Not sure exactly what you meant by insanely oversized, but a lift kit and tires aren't abnormal, they have use for off-roading / mudding which is fairly popular.
It's both a style preference and lifestyle preference. Good luck using a car if you have a lot of outdoor hobbies or work.
Kind of strange to tell a whole population what is or isn't necessary in their life, especially without knowing their reasonings.
This is the kind of absolutist argument that these threads always fall into. You hear someone say "not everyone needs a truck!" or "there are too many trucks!", and hear "You, personally, should not own a truck". No, clearly trucks are useful vehicles and need to exist for people to use. But we also build and deploy way too many of them. Those facts can be true at the same time.
Whether they rent or borrow one, they still needed a truck.
I need mine all the time, as do most others I know. I also listed activities that people like to use them for.
> But we also build and deploy way too many of them. Those facts can be true at the same time.
How many should we allow then? Who should qualify for them? Do recreational activities not qualify? Who gets to decide this? Do we do this for other things?
Yes, but only occasionally! Again, you're thinking we're trying to "take away your truck", when we're just saying (correctly) that most people (like your friends!) don't need them except rarely and are better served by other kind of resource allocation than personal vehicles.
> How many should we allow [...] who should qualify [...] banned [...] who gets to decide
This isn't a good faith argument. No one is advocating for any of that. Please don't.
Again I use mine all the time. I'm not advocating getting rid of cars because some people don't need a truck. I don't believe there are too many trucks or cars, I feel like the people saying there are too many trucks have the obligation to explicitly give reasons as you why.
> This isn't a good faith argument. No one is advocating for any of that. Please don't.
It is in good faith, I assure you. I'm trying to make you realize that what you view as necessary isn't the same for others. You said there are too many. I would like to know what you view as necessary and what the ideal amount would be for you. What uses for trucks are deemed as necessary and what are frivolous.
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/honda-jazz-fit-2007...
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2021_Ford_F150.shtml
And 31-36 for the Fit:
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=noform...
Taking the medians (F150: 18, Fit: 33.5) your statement is true, but barely. Which is not something to rejoice in.
https://i.imgur.com/7huPvde.jpg
What does the insanely large truck have that enables you to off road and explore your hobbies, that the smaller one does not?
The smaller truck will get stuck. I guess you could try to winch yourself out every time it does.
But at that point use the bigger truck to pull a side by side and off road with that.
Even then, who is to say who can get what? I don't see why trucks are one of things people can't buy just because they prefer it.
I'm sure everyone owns something that another person would consider frivolous.
I was responding to GP who said trucks are necessary in rural areas with snow and rough roads. Obviously people can buy what they want, and other people can judge them for their choices as they want.
> I'm sure everyone owns something that another person would consider frivolous.
Definitely. I'm sure there are people who judge my purchases - I wish them well. But most frivolous purchases don't kill pedestrians at alarming rates, or guzzle absurd amounts of gas pointlessly. Pickup trucks are the pit bulls of car ownership.
Just big, uncomfortable, expensive to maintain and operate vehicles that you'd generally use for a specific purpose.
To that point, most of our streets, roads, and parking spaces are much wider than yours, and can accommodate larger vehicles. As others have noted, we have more people in remote areas, and while Netherlands is obviously an agricultural superpower, your farms are smaller than ours (larger farms require larger equipment).
Perhaps that's true in your experience, but I hear this fairly regularly including various subreddits, Twitter, and I've heard it here on HN as well (it's been a while, I don't care to dig through my comment history for links to the specific threads). Specifically, the argument takes one of two forms: either we should extend public transit and cycling infrastructure everywhere (including rural areas) or that we should implement policies that expressly accelerate urbanization and penalize rural life (or a combination).
For example, think about how many times you've seen people say they don't care about gas prices because they don't have a car: they take public transportation (which uses gas..) or walk.
The supply chain consists of things magically appearing in bodegas for their consumption, and that's why their pejoratively-named "flyover country" is and does nothing, they think.