I love “car-infested”. Taking public transport and living densely is my version of hell.
Neighborhoods for cars:
* Noise
* Pollution
* Dangerous for all, especially children and cyclists
* Discourages simple outside exercise like walking or jogging
* Forces car ownership. You can't do anything without a car.
* Massive amounts of space are required for roadways, parking etc.
* Sprawl. Everything has to be spread out.
* Anything immediately outside your home is unpleasant.
Neighborhoods for people:
* Quiet
* Less pollution
* Safe. Children can play outside and go to the park or shops by themselves, or visit their friends by foot or bike. (I sent my 7 year old to get a couple things from the supermarket last week.)
* Biking and walking is pleasant
* You don't need to buy a car
* The neighborhood isn't full of ugly car parks.
* neighborhood is compact, making biking and walking much more viable.
* more space for public green areas
I enjoy biking, public transport and the density to support a nice shopping/bar/party street within walking distance, but what do I know, living in the second most livable city.
I also like gardening and farming, wood and metal working and generally doing all kinds of projects involving metal casting, glass blowing, pottery making etc. I would never be able to do comfortably living in a city.
The only downside to car culture is environmental concerns that I really hope electric cars fix.
How are they supposed to fix it?
In many countries we still burn gas & coal for electricty.
The cars need to be produced, which is alot more resource intensive than building better public transports, since a train transports hundreds of individuals at once, and can serve the transportation needs of thousands over the course of a day, the amount of material and energy for fabrication per-passenger is far lower. And thats's not even taking into account total service-time and cost of recycling.
The cars need parking spots when not in use, which requires space that could otherwise be used for housing/parks/recreation/businesses. Public Transport systems have far fewer downtimes (even when I dont ride the train, someone else does). Plus, they are more space efficient to begin with.
And of course cars need roads. Lots of them, and no matter how many are built, there still seem to be traffic jams.
That really is a problem with the city streets. In the Netherlands, bikes are considered such an essential mode of transport that they often have priority over cars.
You'd think that'd result in dutch cities being hell for drivers, but they're really not. Because you're not competing for space with all the people that can choose another mode of transport. Unlike most places in the US where everyone is forced to use a car because good alternatives are nonexistent.
You're not going to drive fast in a dutch city, but you'll also not get "stuck in traffic".
But yes, I think your concern is more about that you wouldn't enjoy living in a city to begin with. Which is fair enough, most of these things you enjoy aren't great if you don't have a workshop and/or plenty of space (though I have to note that amount of pottery workshops in my city is quite high which is nice because it makes it more accessible to people who can't own all the equipment).
They won't fix it, because we still need to make cars.
If you get an older car that you can repair yourself and keep going long past its point of planned obsolescence, and convert it to run on a cleaner fuel like propane, then your ecological impact will be a lot less.
So something like the London tube, where millionaires sit next to people that have been unemployed for the past 2 decades sounds like hell to them.
The biggest problem with DB is that they're privatized (but state-owned). They've been cutting large parts of the rail network off for good and instead invest in large infrastructure projects with dubious benefits (and then DB executives retire as executies in construction companies hired for these projects).
The rare case where you have to take a lot of luggage can always be covered by taxis. In no way is that more annoying than finding parking, sitting in traffic, taking your car to maintenance etc.
Also, it sounds like you're talking about long-distance services here. But this thread is about local to regional services where people don't generally carry around baggage.
Can I ask where that is?
2. Living in a city means living densely (for some definition of dense). If you don't like that, you should probably not live in a city in the first place.
3. Dutch cities are not really that dense in my experience.
I live in a mixed used era, in a 5 story appartment block, which is the high end of density around here. I have two tram lines within 400 meters and an S-Bahn station less than 100m away.
And also, dutch cities allow for bikes, if public transport isn't your thing.
The equivalent mid-density construction is basically nonexistent in new construction today because of exclusionary zoning. It's only recently that some states have started forcibly re-legalizing this sort of thing by overriding local zoning codes, and it will still take decades at best for new construction to really catch up.
I'm genuinely curious, as I feel the opposite