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Comment by mgraczyk | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a car and absolutely hate the car-centric culture of American cities (I live in SF).

That being said, this article is completely wrong and draws the wrong conclusions. People were anti-car early on because most people didn't have cars. Later, people stopped being anti-car because most people had cars. The article would have you believe that at no point in time did the majority of people want car-centric city streets and that it was forced on them by a small minority of people interested in selling cars. That simply isn't the case. Vocal opposition to cars faded away as more people owned them.

It's important to understand the status quo correctly if we ever want to change things. The sad reality is that most people want cars, even in dense cities. As I look out my apartment window on a Sunday morning, with pleasant weather and a walkable green neighborhood, I still count far more cars going by than people on foot or bicycle. Hopefully that would change if we made it easier and safer for people to walk, but it's not productive to pretend most people secretly hate cars.

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> As I look out my apartment window on a Sunday morning, with pleasant weather and a walkable green neighborhood, I still count far more cars going by than people on foot or bicycle.

And how much dedicated infrastructure is there, in terms of space and money, for walking vs biking vs driving?

People always ignore this, that driving even in "walkable" neighborhoods generally still has ENORMOUSLY more money and more land dedicated to it. If you look at how much space the road takes up, vs sidewalks and protected bike lanes, and how much money those things cost to build -- it's not even close.

That, plus in the US there's usually a lack of mixed use zoning, so there's hardly anywhere to walk to (though I don't know whether this is the case for your neighborhood in particular).

At the intersection I'm looking at, it's around 2/3 for cars, 1/3 for peds, 0 dedicated for biking. However, SF is actually pretty good about this. There are two "slow streets" within 1 block of me that are mostly car-free. There are also 2 streets within 3 blocks of me that have dedicated bike lanes with raised barriers.

Sounds like what I'd expect in SF, as someone from the bay area. Much better than average for the US, but still a long ways to go.

It's not just land. Walking paths cost far less than and require less maintenance and drainage than smooth impermeable asphalt roads with curbs. "Intersections" for pedestrians are simply paths, with no signage or expensive signals required.

Drivers rushing about at 20-30mph pose a danger to people on foot, on bikes, on scooters, in strollers, etc.

Slow Streets (also called open streets), and really a half measure as it stands. To make them fully low-car, they need to be one-way for cars, alternating directions, so that there is no reason to be on the street if it's not your final destination. It would also be helpful if the intersections were genuine roundabouts.

I live in SF too, but calling our infrastructure "good" is really setting a low bar. We want about 10%-15% of the streets primarily serving bicycles, with pedestrians getting another 10% of roadways. That should be the goal.

I agree with you and the slow streets, that would be a better design.

As for goals, what we currently have is good for me, where I live. There are many areas in the city where it would be impractical not to have a car. I believe the goal should be to make it possible to live without a car anywhere in the city. I don't really care about the specifics of proportions of infrastructure.

>what we currently have is good for me, where I live. There are many areas in the city where it would be impractical not to have a car

So, i see this as a bit myopic though. The combination of the rising developing countries and climate change mean that fuel should slowly increase in price over our lifetimes. We ought to prepare. Providing a network of about 10% of streets to be effectively car-free is a great way to plan for that, while allowing people to use cheaper (see: wealth building) alternatives in the meanwhile.

I don't see the car going away in our lifetime, nor would i want it to, but as a low-car person myself, i feel that people should be able to bike most anywhere in town without needing to wear a helmet. Children should be able to bike to school. Grandmas should be able to bike. People don't bike because it's legitimately dangerous, even under current paradigms. It shouldn't be. A few slow streets and some bike lanes is vastly insufficient.

That's not what I said. I said that right now not everyone can avoid car ownership and the goal should be to change that. I'm saying the goal should be to make it possible for nobody to need a car. I'm objecting to the 10% number, which seems arbitrary to me.

I think 10% is low, if anything. Something like the superblocks in Spain would be great.

Can you imagine someone saying that a city is actually pretty good about driving because even though 75% of the houses are completely inaccessible by cars, there’s 1 road a block away that you can drive a car in and 2 more roads within 3 blocks of you?

Most Americans don’t even realize how auto centric their entire thinking is.

No, that's not right and doesn't make sense. I can bike on the road in front, and I can even park a bike here. If the road were a block away, the driver would have to get out and walk a block to go home. And actually a lot of people do that with street parking and would say it's "pretty good"!

Why does the amount of money and land spent influence the behavior of individuals? Cars are larger than bicycles, so I would expect their infrastructure to take up more space.

People are less likely to bike if there aren't protected bike lanes. People are less likely to walk if there are no sidewalks, etc

This is really noticeable in places in the US where things are close enough together to walk or bike but nearly every trip is still made by car because there's no safe way to do anything else. There's actually quite a bit of stuff within easy biking distance of where I live, but up until recently there was no safe way to actually bike there because all the infrastructure was high-speed, multi-lane streets without even a shoulder. Recently the city has been investing more in wide, separated paths for biking and walking places and it's starting to make a difference.

Unfortunately having a safe path is not enough - there's a significant cultural component.

I'm currently residing in a house on the outskirts of a small (population 50k) town.

The other day we were visited by a friend from around here - she drove to our place.

The way to her home is 1,5km - half of which goes through the main district, with sidewalks and exclusively single-lane streets, and the other along a 30km/h street with detached houses and very little traffic.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that most of her trips are likely not as easy or safe as that one. I wouldn’t expect her to get used to riding a bike when 95% of the time it’s infeasible or unsafe.

It’s not worth the mental effort for most to say “is this specific trip a bike trip?” and “which are the safe routes to get there, which are probably different than my driving routes?” Most people just never try at all because there aren’t enough opportunities to make it worthwhile, and not enough safe roads to know how to navigate.

If it was possible for more of her daily needs to be met by bike, with comfortable and safe infrastructure, I’d bet she’d be more open to the idea.

In Seattle non-single occupancy vehicle transportation is encouraged by the government. The bus system is good (relative to the United States as a whole). The city controls sprawl by refusing to extend I think water or sewer outside a line drawn in the 90s. Even with this official backing, they have maxed out the proportion of alternative commuters at 50%. This is similar to Stanford University's experience of alternative commuters reaching a maximum of 50%.

It is in no way "maxed out".

Seattle has better non-car options than average for the US, but it still has a looooong way to go before one could say that the transit or biking options are good; they're still quite bad on average.

Only one subway line, a handful of bus-only lanes, and a handful of protected bike lanes, maybe one or two protected intersections? Seattle has a lot of passable design, but very little that's good.

Seattle has mediocre transit. The buses are fine, but they’re inherently limited in how fast their average speeds can be.

Seattle could greatly increase transit usage by:

- expanding the subway/light rail network.

- provide more than two commuter rail lines (right now you can only commute by rail North-South, from Lakewood to Everett).

- run more than 4 daily trains to/from Everett (at least one per hour for 16 hours is needed for consistent commutes).

- electrify the Sounder corridor to improve acceleration. I suspect the tracks are shared with freight, in which case create dedicated electrified passenger tracks so you can have smaller trains that run more often and at higher speeds.

- through run trains so they don’t have to dwell at a Seattle terminus (which means you could run all 16 of the daily Lakewood trains to Everett as well).

- add 2-4 more Seattle city stops so people getting off the train are closer to where they need to be (this should be done in combination with through running the trains, so the sum of the dwell times at all 5 Seattle stations is no more than the total dwell time at the terminus now).

Trillions of dollars and the majority of our urban land have been dedicated to making driving easy and biking hard. The government built toll-free highways, and mandates builders of housing, retail, and offices to include excessive amounts of parking (parking minimums). Once all of this subsidized infrastructure is built each individual's rational choice is to drive in 30 min instead of risking death by biking or ride a bus for two hours.

The point is whether it's a fair comparison or not. If you allocate enormously more land and money to one mode of transport, no shit it'll probably end up more attractive.

If there were as few dedicated, reasonably safe car lanes as there are bike lanes in the US, hardly anyone would drive, either, unless they really had to.

> Cars are larger than bicycles, so I would expect their infrastructure to take up more space.

That's just an inherent disadvantage for cars, just like being slower is an inherent disadvantage for bikes or walking.

You're basically suggesting that we should forcibly remove the car disadvantage, while of course the disadvantage for walking and biking has to stay. It should be obvious why this makes for an unfair comparison.

> hardly anyone would drive, either, unless they really had to.

What percentage of the US lives in these urban, super dense areas where this is even possible?

1-2%?

Also, weather. Most of the US does not have mild weather like California and has to contend with conditions that make bicycle travel a “fair weather”, novelty activity.

A little bit over 6% of the US's population lives in the NY metro area alone, so it's significantly more than that.

Nobody (reasonable) is talking about making cycling the sole form of travel. It's one of many modes, including all forms of mass transit.

It’s just a ridiculous conversation.

Cars are popular because they solve a real problem for the overwhelming majority of people in the US.

Biking is a novelty in most climates and public transit is only an option if your time is worth very little.

> Cars are popular because they solve a real problem for the overwhelming majority of people in the US.

To be clear: that "real problem" is a manufactured one. The overwhelming majority of people in the US live near urban centers, and could be served not just adequately but well by mass transit. That's how they were served a century ago, when we were a far less urbanized country; the numbers are even further in our favor now.

Where I live, public transit is faster than driving 90% of the time, the same speed 5% of the time, and slower the rest. Cycling is also generally faster than driving, and is perfectly comfortable with the right clothes throughout the year. And that's before we even consider the "fringe" benefits (like being able to read wherever I go, not having to find short- or long-term parking, and not polluting the neighborhood I live in).

> Where I live, public transit is faster than driving 90% of the time, the same speed 5% of the time, and slower the rest.

Despite the benefits that you cite, you’re still selling something most people don’t want. Or, if they do use it they dislike it and still use a car for the majority of their other travel.

Do you have any numbers to substantiate this? Most people in NYC like the subway, even the ones who express grievances about cleanliness, crime, &c. It's a cornerstone of the city's convenience and culture.

At the turn of the century, most people didn't want cars on their city streets; that's what the article we're discussing is all about. What the average American (not just NYer) wants changes over time; I consider my support for public transit to be merely an investment in a perceptual shift that's already taking place.

> Most people in NYC like the subway

It may come as a surprise to people in NYC that, in fact, most people don't live in NYC.

Seriously tho, if you asked most people in the US who utilize public transit they would tell you they do so out of necessity, not choice.

> It may come as a surprise to people in NYC that, in fact, most people don't live in NYC.

What's the point of this? People in NYC overwhelmingly use public transit; they're a logical group to sample from. Correspondingly, it makes no sense to ask people who don't use public transit how they feel about it.

"Most people who utilize public transit" is a mixture of demographics, with overlap: there are a millions of Americans who live in dense urban areas and choose to take public transit because it's faster, cheaper, and more convenient than owning a care. There are also millions of Americans who are economically disenfranchised and rely on ailing bus networks to get to work. The two overlap, but the latter is much larger outside of major cities.

In brief: the US's failure to design and allocate public transit systems (a problem that's been more or less solved in every other country in the world) taints any objective measurement of public transit perception as a whole. If you look at the places where it's even done half right (like NYC), perception is extremely positive.

I live in a small city of about 60k. To get to work I drive through a city of 350k, 50k, 20k, then into a city of 250k. Each of these cities is 5-10 miles apart. It's a straight shot on the freeway, there isn't much traffic. We average 75mph on the freeway with room for people to go faster and slower. America is a big place. Problems New Yorkers have with cars/parking are different that much of the country.

So you think it’s a good idea to judge whether people like driving vs mass transit based on areas that have no mass transit vs areas which have both?

That seems illogical at best.

People in areas that have high quality mass transit almost always prefer mass transit over cars. And areas which have decent biking infrastructure overwhelmingly prefer biking over other alternatives.

People don't like their existing, crappy public transit, sure. The whole idea is to get good public transit instead.

Americans who take the train in Tokyo or Seoul find it to be just fine. Ditto for Americans biking in Amsterdam or Copenhagen.

> Where I live, public transit is faster than driving 90% of the time

Do you live in Manhattan? I can't think of anywhere else in the US where that could be true.

Commute to work here (pre-covid) was just under 30 minutes. On public transit, according to google maps, it's about 90 minutes. That's if schedule lines up just right with bus schedules, otherwise it is more time.

> Cycling is also generally faster than driving

As a frequent cyclist, I did ride to work at least once a week (pre-covid). But that takes 2hr 30min. It was great fun and exercise, but not really practical by any measure. And then I had to take a shower at work after arriving, so it was more like 3 hours home to desk.

> To be clear: that "real problem" is a manufactured one.

So it's not a manufactured problem, it is reality for mostly everyone.

I live in central Brooklyn, in a residential neighborhood. My commute (to lower Manhattan) is around 35 minutes door-to-door, including a 10 minute walk on each end. The equivalent drive would be about 50 minutes at the same time of day, not including parking.

My most recent cycling commute was just under 35 minutes as well; a bit over 7 miles.

“Manufactured” doesn’t mean it isn’t real, it means that it’s a problem we’ve created for ourselves. That, in turn, means we can undo it.

Cars are popular because they're both useful and enjoy extraordinarily strong government support going back decades, both in explicit funding and also in regulatory policies. It's no surprise that the mode with the deck stacked in its favor managed to win.

Cars are popular because government has built infrastructure for them.

The idea that bicycling and mass transit are a novelty and dedicating 75% of the most valuable real estate in the world to tonnes of metal to transport 1 person at a time while killing 50k Americans a year is just normal is ridiculous and little more than a reflection of the pervasiveness of auto centric thinking.

> What percentage of the US lives in these urban, super dense areas where this is even possible?

> 1-2%?

>100M people live in the top 10 metropolitan areas in the US (all over 4M people) [1]. Rural people in the US vastly overestimate their own importance.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183600/population-of-met...

> Also, weather. Most of the US does not have mild weather like California and has to contend with conditions that make bicycle travel a “fair weather”, novelty activity.

You have sen the videos of people in Finnland commuting by bike in winter? Living in a nordic country I can tell you it is easily possible to bike all year round even here.

Metro area != urban

Good luck without a car in pretty much any suburb. Your time has to be worth nothing to make biking or public transit work for your needs.

You essentially need to be in a hyper dense, urban area to live without a car. Most Americans have no interest in living like that.

> You have sen the videos of people in Finnland commuting by bike in winter? Living in a nordic country I can tell you it is easily possible to bike all year round even here.

And I live in MN where biking in the snow would be possible (and fun!), but again, only as a novelty. The percentage of people who would be willing to commute in the manner this is so low you could round it to 0.

Most Americans “prefer” that because it’s all they’ve seen.

In reality, most Americans prefer European cities over anything they have themselves. Which is a huge reason why they spend tons of money to live in little hotel rooms in the middle of well run European cities.

Also, countries like Switzerland, Netherlands, etc have suburbs and excellent mass transit connecting those suburbs.

Sure, mass transit isn’t possible in American style suburbs because American style suburbs have literally been designed around cars.

So much wrongness to unpack here.

1. Part of the way we built around cars is exactly the kind of zoning that resulted in super spread out, super low density living. This isn't an accident of geography, this is an intended outcome of these government regulations. This is also fixable over time through rezoning.

2. Even with minimal changes to existing zoning, biking would be highly practical for many trips for many, perhaps most people within the US, with good bike infrastructure. Most Americans don't live in rural areas, they live in urban or suburban areas. There are usually some things within bikeable distance of a few miles from where people live, there just aren't good bike lanes or paths to get there.

3. As Germans would say, no bad weather, only bad clothing.

> biking would be highly practical for many trips for many, perhaps most people within the US, with good bike infrastructure.

I don’t disagree with your idea, it’s just that you’re selling something no one wants.

Replacing a car lane with a bike lane is insanity and destroys something functional to create a cute novelty for a small group of people.

It's a cute novelty now precisely because it's impractical and unsafe. Having good infrastructure changes that. In places with good bike infra, it's a great way to get around.

We just had a classic example of the ridiculous car centric US govt.

They are about to pass a bill to reduce emissions.

It gives EVs $7500 in tax credits and it extends the amount of tax credits companies like Tesla and GM can get.

But they eliminated the tax credit (which was set upto $900) for eBikes.

I cant think of a more backwards action.

I'm not suggesting anything except that given two roads in a spherical universe, both going to same hypothetical place, I'd expect the one built for cars to be larger than the one built for bikes due to basic logic.

Your response, and several of its ridiculous peers are just stuffing words into my mouth.

Yes, I am acutely aware that many parts of the US have some shitty bike infrastructure, but in the parts that have good/improving bike infrastructure I still observe a slow uptake of bicyclists. As to the OP's point, we reap what we sow.

Because the infrastructure spend and land allocation is not evenly spread. In most places, there is a dedicated lane for cars heading each way, possibly with parking or at least a decent shoulder on either side of the road.

The same cannot be said for sidewalks and bike lanes, which may be non-existent or poorly maintained, and certainly never take precedence over the almighty asphalt.

I agree that we should build sidewalks and (protected) bike lanes to go everywhere cars can go.

If we do this, I still expect it to cost less than the corresponding road network built for cars. I also don't think in this utopian hypothetical that people would choose to drive their car every time simply because the road cost more.

It’s a lot harder to collect taxes from walkers and cyclists to build that infrastructure. Drivers in theory pay for the roads and everything else. Maybe not paying enough but still.

They don't come close to paying for everything else when you take into account things like quality of life, safety, and more. Not everything has a price.

Living in cities with high crime and police that won't stop it with self-defense bans/punishments on those that try to defend themselves seem to be a safety hazard too.

not at prices that people are willing to pay. Suburban-style roads are cheap to build, because developers generally pay the upfront costs and price it into the initial sale price of the development, but taxes in the period that follows aren't nearly high enough to cover the price of resurfacing, repair, and improvements that the city has to cover 20-30 years down the line. Suburbs that have gone through several such cycles are increasingly taking on debt to pay the costs of that maintenance, and older ones are now going bankrupt.

> Drivers in theory pay for the roads and everything else.

What theory? Roads are paid for from everyday taxes/debt issue.

Indeed. You are debunking a commonly repeated myth.

https://uspirg.org/reports/usp/who-pays-roads

> Gas taxes and other fees paid by drivers now cover less than half of road construction and maintenance costs nationally – down from more than 70 percent in the 1960s – with the balance coming chiefly from income, sales and property taxes and other levies on general taxpayers.

· General taxpayers at all levels of government now subsidize highway construction and maintenance to the tune of $69 billion per year – an amount exceeding the expenditure of general tax funds to support transit, bicycling, walking and passenger rail combined.

Actually it's a lot easier. You get more rates and land tax from the denser housing you can have.

Drivers don't pay for roads. They get subsidised by everyone else paying property taxes. The money out of the fuel taxes is insufficient to cover the costs that cars cause.

Why don't road users pay for the land the roads are on? Beyond construction and maintenence. If 1 square foot of land costs $600 (manhattan), and with say an opportunity cost of 2%, that's $12 a year per square foot. A 13' lane would thus cost $156 per foot, or $800k per lane-mile. Assuming an average 4 lanes per street/avenue (including parking) that would be the best part of $2bn a year for roads in Manhattan alone.

Yup. I walk everywhere and hate walking on streets shared with cars.

Another thing people seem to underestimate is that cars wear down a road way faster than any other form of transport. You basically never need to maintain bicycle paths unless the soil subsides.

The number of bikes on my route from the hotel to work yesterday and today in Munich vastly outnumbered the cars. The main roads have good off-road cycle (and now scooter) paths with priority over side roads and decent signalled crossings.

Germany is the home of the automobile, Munich is the HQ of BMW.

Probably still about 4 times as much space for cars as there is for bikes though

People got cars in large part because new development was done in car-specific ways rather than dense ways that support alternatives. I recommend Robert Caro's The Power Broker, which goes into how new development was shaped by roads without planning for rail or mass transit, and how even as this was being built in the 1950s people understood induced demand and how roads couldn't scale and advocated for the inclusion of planning for mass transit but were overruled. This led to sparse suburban development that required cars, but didn't have to be the case. Once it was in place it was prohibitively expensive (and in many cases impossible) to change.

I am also a car-hater in SF and live here specifically because it's one of the 4-5 cities in the US where you can not own a car without it being an immense inconvenience/making yourself into a pariah.

Most people want cars sure, but not the drawbacks. Many people would like to listen to loud music or practice target shooting outside their home, but if everybody did that it'd make for really shitty city living.

I think a lot of people in the US simply don't realize or consciously acknowledge how inconvenient car-centrism is, so they only think of the personal convenience their car gives them, rather than how inconvenient things become when everybody uses cars (ie the conveniences cars afford are in many cases only because we've developed around cars). Most people probably hate not being able to walk a few hundred feet to the store to get some milk, or don't realize how nice it would be (because in a lot of the US it's such a bizarrely foreign concept) to have that as an option. They probably hate that the only way to get to work is to commute during rush hour with tons of traffic, or that their friend in the same urban area is actually 80 miles away, or that everything is covered in asphalt and the air sucks.

I live in the burbs, I also live .25 miles from the grocery. When it's just me and my spouse I'm happy to walk it, we do that on our daily walk anyway. When it's me, my SO, my son, and his SO which it has been all of the pandemic and after... it's too much to carry. Way Way too much for my SO to carry who likes to do the shopping. Car gets it done easily.

I lived about 3 blocks from a grocery in a downtown core for 10 years and rarely drove and walked it then. It was actually more of a hassle. My mom lived about 5 miles away. She'd pick me up on Sundays and we'd go shop. She'd cook dinner then drop me off at my apartment in that downtown core. This was a lot better.

Basically the car was great for the stuff you buy a bit more of and walking is great to pick up the stuff you want for this meal. Then again there were 5 restaurants on my walk from work to home so I just ate out all the time.

Most places are also not SF weather wise. This was in downtown St. Louis. It would be 85-90 the warm part of the year and sub 40 the rest of the year. Walking with heavy grocery bags in that weather or in winter requires changing clothes. Or pop in the car and get more moved and no sweat (literally). You go 5 blocks with a granny grocery cart in 95 weather and you'll need a shower when you get home.

I agree that once kids are in the mix "walk everywhere" gets more challenging.

There are more savvy ways to do it though, like getting stuff delivered - it's not a dichotomy between carrying stuff everywhere and hauling it in a car. It is a bit painful at first to get used to paying an extra $5-10 here and there for delivery, but it's nothing in comparison to the cost of a car, not to mention the time it saves. Any time something is heavy enough that I dread carrying it I just get it delivered (which for groceries, I generally do once every 1-2 weeks).

Of course there are a lot of caveats, like using specific delivery services which don't create headaches or charge exorbitant prices. I hate hate hate substitutions/when something is out of stock, but it essentially never happens with Amazon Fresh or Food Rocket (a startup in SF), is rare for Whole Foods, and mildly infrequent with Safeway - none of which have extra markup for delivered goods beyond a transparent delivery fee. I've heard too many horror stories about Instacart or other services to even bother though.

As an aside, that is something I've noticed about car ownership, that people treat all the costs as its own thing without looking at the marginal cost it adds to the various things they do. When deciding to go carless, that was one of the strongest arguments tipping me over. Just what I was paying in insurance and gas was enough to cover all my delivery fees and public transit costs.

Delivery is to carless as AWS Lambda is to serverless. There is no delivery, there is only someone else's car.

But there is much more efficient use of the car. Instead of a personal vehicle spending 99% of its time parked, a delivery van/truck spends 25% of its time making deliveries. They can be routed efficiently to deliver from a hub location to a group of homes.

But once you have a family, that's just not factored into the price. If at about a family of 4 (mine's 5), public transport becomes more expensive than driving a car and renting parking even to go into the city center. Frankly, in the suburbs a car is cheaper even for 1 person. There are some other usable ways to get around (electric scooters, the kind you sit down on) are becoming popular for a good reason.

So I wonder about this increased efficiency. Most modes of transportation, as well as rental prices, are priced per-person. A car helps enormously, especially as the number of people increases. Plus cheaper groceries, cheaper access to everything from furniture to woods, ...

If there's any truth to capitalism, efficiency, when it comes down to it, is price. So for families, even small ones, I think we're dismissing the idea that suburbs are the most efficient possible too quickly.

There's a difference between cars only being used for delivery and everybody going around in a car by themselves. It's like the equivalent of a bus.

Do you think that in places like Hong Kong or New York that there are no delivery vehicles?

I'm pretty aware of the costs of vehicles and delivery. I can afford the vehicles. When I need them they're way easier than hiring a vehicle. I have hobbies you can't fit into an Uber, such as a plasma cutter, and forget renting a U-Haul to look at a lathe or cnc.

I biked everywhere for 7 years when I moved to Seattle, 2800 miles a year. Still was very nice to have the car.

If I feel like snowboarding I can just go. Which was highly dependent on work, especially night skiing, which you can't Uber to, and the one bust required me to only go on Saturday with 4 hour overhead and a 30 minutes Uber in the wrong direction. The opportunity cost of all that planning is worth the $2000 I spend a year on licensing and insuring my vehicles. Gas is gas be it Uber or my car.

Not everyone fits into one mold.

If I have to get deliveries with someone else's car then I've just externalized the car but I'm still very car dependent

> The sad reality is that most people want cars

Why is it sad? I can go the mountains, the beach, work all in under 30 minutes. The user experience is great (minus traffic, but that is orthogonal to the vehicle itself, or compared to alternatives like mass transit that don't go to all of these places in comparable amounts of time or even have service to all these areas). The only viable successor that meets our standard of living will be something like autonomous rideshare, and since that's always 5 years away, and we enjoy the standard of living we have, nothing will change. It is that simple. The point of human progress is to raise our standard of living over time, and convincing people to roll back to inferior alternatives is a fool's errand. The successor to cars needs a similar to superior convenience factor.

> I can go the mountains, the beach, work all in under 30 minutes. The user experience is great (minus traffic, but that is orthogonal to the vehicle itself).

That last part is the logical flaw: you’re acting like traffic is some random coincidence when it’s actually inherent to the design. Cars are inherently inefficient because you’re using over a hundred square feet of space and 2-3 tons of metal to move on average 1-2 people but because they’re familiar people who drive a lot tend to make excuses or simply not recognize those drawbacks - it’s always someone else making traffic, adding another lane will fix it even though that’s never been true anywhere in the world, it’s “under 30 minutes” because they’re thinking the best-case travel times from where they parked to the general vicinity of where they’re going rather than realistic door to door times including traffic, parking, etc.

Similarly, it’s not rolling back the standard of living to acknowledge that this lifestyle is expensive ($11+k USD/driver/year), unhealthy, and soaks up a lot of time. Yes, it’s nice to get in and go and that even works okay in a rural setting but in practice an awful lot of people are spending large fractions of their non-work time sitting in traffic and paying a large quantity of money to do so, all of which lowers the standard of living even before you consider the annual death and life-altering injury rates, effects of pollution (not just fuel but also tire and brake particulates), and the social cost of reserving so much public space for vehicle motion and storage.

> Similarly, it’s not rolling back the standard of living to acknowledge that this lifestyle is expensive ($11+k USD/driver/year), unhealthy, and soaks up a lot of time. Yes, it’s nice to get in and go and that even works okay in a rural setting but in practice ...

I have a family of 5. For me, a car is cheaper, faster, and healthier (less sunlight, less smoke, less pollution (or at least filtered once before it goes in your lungs), more capacity, flexibility in where I go...). It's cheaper for actual transport, for housing, for groceries, holidays, ...

But, frankly, even going to work by myself in the morning the car is still the cheaper and faster option when it's just me by myself. Even if I have a 15/20 minute walk from where I park to where I work (I can, and do, take public transport for that if it's too hot or raining or ...).

And when we're 5 it starts at an order of magnitude cheaper. Except perhaps compared to flying, but compared to public transport it's just not a contest.

Sounds like a drug addict TBH. Smoking is great! You get to socialize, have a fidget toy, it's calming, fun, looks cool, etc. (Seriously, it is great! That's why it is addictive)

What if your work was a walkable distance? What if light rail and buses were dense and frequent enough where that was the fastest way to get to work. What if there was a train to go out to the coast? What if you did a rideshare to go junk the mountains?

Pinning it all on self driving at this point imo is continuation of the corrupt car culture that lobbies government and social appeal with absurd efficacy. I don't believe self driving will really ever happen (the complexity is too high), and that solution means that we can maintain the car-centtic status quo and even double down on it. I'm not sure if there were a more comforting idea than that - that we don't have to change anything, just wait for technology and everything we are doing suddenly is good and sustainable. Yet, there are all of the tools available to not require a personal car and have a better travel experience.

*downsides to cars: - super loud - pollution - you are traffic, and by travelling in practically the least space efficient, you are creating traffic - unsustainable, highway funds are often federally granted for new construction, yet the zoning connected by those funds do not generate enough revenue to sustain the upkeep. Each mile of road costs about 10 mil to build and the same to maintain over 50 years. Strip malls and suburbs simply do not generate enough tax revenue to support dozens of miles if roads to connect them. Given we had such a big glut of road building in the 50s, should not be a surprise that America's road system is falling apart. If our infrastructure were sustainable, would we even need "infrastructure week" or a "build back better" (my understanding is both of those were to focus mostly on car-based infrastructure). Point being, if that were sustainable infrastructure, we wouldn't need these one time surges and the roads wouldn't be crumbling like they are today.

Could go on, self driving is not an answer to many of the intrinsic problems to car-centric society.

> What if your work was a walkable distance?

It is a walkable distance, and it’s unsustainably expensive for how little space I get. Not to mention the fact that there aren’t any ownable properties in walking distance to work—renting an apartment is the only option.

Sure, huge investments in creating an amazing mass transit system would be awesome! But that’s nowhere near happening in the next couple decades. So why should I (or anyone) be asked to pay more to rent a tiny apartment near work where I can barely escape the city using existing public transit options?

you shouldn't. you should push for public transit expansion and looser zoning that allows for businesses to be closer to homes.

Ok. Already doing that. Doesn't seem to help, but doing that. In the meantime I do the car thing and live much more comfortably further away.

In Hong Kong, you can go to all of those places in 20 minutes from most populated areas, and you don't need a car to do it. The trains are shielded from rain and are usually well air-conditioned. You don't have to deal with parking and it's much safer.

There are downsides of course, it can be crowded and you have to be around other people. I think those are things people adapt to culturally, while things like dying in a car accident and sitting in traffic are less culturally plastic.

Hong Kong has a density that makes a car near-impossible to use and certainly not faster. Only a helicopter would be faster in Hong Kong. Hell, I'd say in Hong Kong the density of people is so bad, walking has all the disadvantages cars have in suburbs.

You will be constantly breathing in heavy pollution (in fact this is one of the main reasons people still use cars in Hong Kong: to avoid breathing in the street air). It will be hot, even in winter. It will be slow, the streets will be over capacity and slowing you down. Sitting down on the many train/metro/... just never happens at any time people usually travel. It's not fast, not even as fast as walking. You're in danger (despite crime being very low, there's a LOT of problems big crowds cause) ...

Traffic is absolutely not orthogonal to the vehicle itself. Almost everything wrong with cars as a mode of transportation can be boiled down to: they take up too much space for the number of people they transport.

I think you are overlooking the deadly pollution and the unjustifiable violence.

Chances are if you can drive to those things in under 30 minutes, you can probably ebike to them in just over 30 minutes. I bike a lot in my city. For a given 10 minute car ride, the bike trip works out to 12 minutes. In traffic, the bike is faster than the car, because of lanesplitting ensuring you never wait for a light cycle. The car wins out when you have an open freeway, but thats only in the late evenings really in socal. Personally though I generally stick to the parallel running residential roads that hardly see cars at all, even here in busy LA, since I can practically take the entire road and just bike down the middle and avoid people potentially backing out of driveways.

You're looking at on car usage after all the rules were changed, and all those drivers know no better, or worse, have no choice. But imagine a city designed for no car usage! How would all those car driver vote then?

SF has terrible public transport by international standards. You have to rebalance your baseline, I'm afraid.

Right, I would strongly prefer a city designed for less/no car usage. My complaint is that this article misrepresents history and misrepresents the current situation.

Public transit 100 years ago was worse for everyone than car ownership today. Living in a car centric city with a car is an overwhelmingly better lifestyle than riding public transit in the 1910s. At the time that cars became popular, they were a huge improvement in quality of life for the vast majority of people. Today we have technology to build better transit that is an improvement on car ownership for most people, but we're not building it. I'd like the narrative to be "we can do better", not "we used to do better but secret evil forces hurt us".

Something like 22% of Mahattanites and almost half of all Brooklynites live in a household with a car. Sometimes people will say something like, "see, this proves that people don't want a car when they don't need one." But this seems exactly backwards to me. Given the truly staggering cost and difficulty of car ownership in New York, what this says to me is that people really like owning cars, even in places where they aren't necessary. Even in those places, basically everybody who feels rich enough to own one still buys one. Those are very high rates of car ownership in those places, given the costs and availability of good alternatives.

The lesson here is that you can create environments with enough constraints on ownership where people will mostly choose not to own a car (if they aren't simply priced out), but what you cannot do is create a place where most people don't want one.

Even in NYC, a car is an incredibly useful tool. People aren't stupid. They know that. So they like owning them.

Are you assuming that 78% of non-car owners living in New York want a car? Given they don't have one, there is oodles of financing available, wouldn't it be more logical to conclude that the majority not only do not own cars, but do not want them? Perhaps that 22%, a good chunk of them might hate their cars but for whatever reason keep them (travel outside of the city for work, perhaps previously owned and the economics are better to keep them, etc..)

I think one could draw an opposite conclusion from those same numbers.

> Are you assuming that 78% of non-car owners living in New York want a car?

The rate of people who are in principle uninterested or even opposed to car ownership is surely higher in NYC than anywhere else in the country, since there's both a selection effect (people who fit that description move there) and an experiential effect (people who grow up there may not be interested in something they have little exposure to).

What I believe but cannot prove is that the number is nowhere near 78%. I think that defies belief. I sincerely doubt there are more people who think, "the subway is so good there's no possible need for a car" than there are people who simply can't afford the additional costs or are unwilling to endure the unique inconvenience of car ownership in the city.

Cars are useful tools of course. If people used them only for the odd errand or a long distance trip, we wouldn’t have a problem.

Public transit for all our regular trips to work, restaurants, dentist, etc. and private or rented cars for the rest is the way to go towards a prosperous future.

>it's not productive to pretend most people secretly hate cars

Actually, I think that's exactly what we should do.

Most people don't have a strong opinion on cars. They originally bought cars due to marketing. If we talk about how great cars are, most people will agree. If we talk about how terrible cars are, most people will agree.

Don't worry about what people think. Just keep talking about the benefits of walkable carefree cities, and that will become the new popular opinion.

> Just keep talking about the benefits of walkable carefree cities

If you don't worry about what people think, you're never going to understand and address the actual reasons people buy cars.

When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable! They are making choices informed based on their own life experiences that it would be smart to understand and emphasize with, if you want to drive meaningful change.

> When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable!

This is because we plan for the only possible route by car. We prioritize making car access fast in every single aspect of planning, and never once even consider public transit during the planning process, and hope that underfunded transit systems can somehow work around the cars.

A far better system would be to have children be able to walk to school rather than hop in a vehicle. Or school buses, which used to be common in the US to get around the car dependency.

Where I live almost everyone walks their kids to school. Many people having to drive their kids to school or use public transport is a sign of bad urban planning.

> When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable!

I saw a case recently where a woman crashed her car outside her child’s school in London, injuring some children. All very sad and especially compounded by the school only accepting enrolments within 1km of the school due to demand.

1km! And she still drove to pick up the kids!

> When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit

That is dumb, in the US, school buses exist even in the suburbs. You most likely already fun them with taxpayer money for public school. I have even taken school buses for private school.

Many urban areas do not have school busses. I'm not making up anecdotes, here's a recent one from SF: https://abc7news.com/sfmta-parking-tickets-near-chase-center...

Does it sound like she just needs someone to tell her why public transit is great? Or like she has actual challenges using public transit that you don't understand.

Point taken. Where I grew-up they had school busses up to middle school. Then you needed to take public buses. They then gave us a special pass that allowed us to travel during school hours for free. I am not sure that public transit is the problem per-se here, but really the city infrastructure.

> The originally bought cars due to marketing.

That's exactly the sort of wishful delusion that the comment you are replying to was warning about!

There's no evidence this is true and boatloads of evidence that it isn't. For one thing, when people can afford cars, they buy them. And if you've ever spent a lot of time around people who can't afford a car, "affording a car" is one of the main reasons they'll tell you they want more money. And if they do come into money, a car will be the first thing they purchase.

Obviously, you can't divorce people's individual choices from the environment in which they're made (and ours is a particularly car-dependent society), but given the constraints as they actually exist, the fact is that people like owning a car.

A car is social status and a car is freedom.

The same car is not a liability to the extent it should be, considering it's reducing our life expectancy through emissions and tire and road wear particulates, it's burning our planet through inefficient resource usage and it's literally killing people.

People should be able to do whatever they need without a car, within reasonable time frames and reliably (taking 3 buses for 2 hours for a 15 minute car ride is not reasonable) and in parallel to that cars should be taxed like in Norway, they should be a luxury item. Any time you need a car you should first think: do I really? Can I rent one? Etc.

Make no mistake: I think we should properly price the externalities, we should mostly get cars out of the densest urban centers, we should require speed governors and geofencing in all new vehicles, and we should drastically increase the costs on drivers of injuring pedestrians and cyclists (coupled almost certainly with entirely new (and much more expensive) insurance products).

I'm not a huge fan of cars. (More accurately, I'm not a big fan of drivers. Cars are very useful. The 25th percentile driver is a loud, dangerous menace.)

But, do they only like owning a car because existing without one *sucks*? I don’t know that I buy the idea that people inherently want to own cars, just that our urban design makes life really hard to go without one

You can make an urban design in which the tradeoffs of car ownership tip toward non-ownership, but it is very difficult to make a modern city in which car ownership confers no benefit. Even in a place like NYC, where I've lived, you really cannot beat point-to-point for convenience and speed. That doesn't mean every route in NYC is best served by driving. The subway is great! But there will always be situations in which the easiest thing by far would be to drive point-to-point, if you have access to a car.

Urbanists who tell people there is no benefit to car ownership in dense urban areas are performing a sort of gaslighting. Everybody basically knows that's not true. The argument, instead, is that you can create a city in which the cost/benefit analysis changes. This is subtle, but I think the difference matters. You can adjust how people think of the tradeoffs, but you cannot really make them believe cars aren't still useful in those environments.

While I would not say there are no benefits from owning a car point-to-point speed is pretty bad for cars in many European cities due to having too find parking. On many trips I would say the fastest mode of travel is electric scooter.

I like having a car for the occasional long voyage, but I don't want to have to rely on it for everyday trips, because I enjoy walking and living and working in walkable places. I think that's a pretty common position.

My dream would be living in a car free zone, with parking and inter-zone road and rail connections on the exterior, like a superblock. Walking a while or taking a short train to get to my car would be a worthwhile trade off.

A valuable anecdote - I lived in a city with amazing public transit - cheap and plentiful.

What do people who can afford do with their money? Buy cars.

People act like cars are a forced choice, while completely ignoring the fact that even with the option of great public transit, people still choose cars.

> They originally bought cars due to marketing.

That seems like a wild claim. Everyone I know (and myself) bought cars for the need to get from here to there and back in a pragmatic way.

America has Stockholm Syndrome but for car-based infrastructure.

It's obvious to outsiders and even to Americans who live abroad.

Children and animals don't drive cars. If we forget for a moment that they are not at all important and assumed a level playing field the child would need to give up playing outside so that mostly unfit people only have to walk the bare minimum distance to maximize commerce. Animals would have to accept thick lines of asphalt that one may not walk on with death by car as the chosen punishment. Then surely it is a deal that is good for everyone?

Not that I have any proposals. It's just funny in a dark and morbid way.

The ME ME ME context has more comedy in it. Those roads one looks at as "things for me!" but to a much greater extend they are things for others. Others will come blast their fumes and noise into your neighborhood. Murder your cat, your dog and your kids. But also a parade of suits who got it in their head to serve and enforce a rule set created for you to obey. What is the tax man to do if he cant extremely conveniently get to your house? Is your lawn mowed to spec? That your kids are fine doesn't mean they are yours to keep and neither is your home.

Roads are the great enabler for more and more rules and regulations by designs you only have influence on in theory.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live at the top of some hard to climb mountain surrounded by forest swamps and/or oceans. Surely you could still contribute to society? That your pull requests come in a bit less frequently hardly makes you unproductive.

the MPAA might not care if you are brewing your own liquor and the building inspector might not care you are growing opium, mescaline cacti, shrooms and like licking the psychedelic toads. But all combined they make a formidable army fit to examine every inch of your life. Are those real nikes, is that a stolen rolex? Do you wear a helmet riding that bicycle?

The mailman - the bringer of bad news, over the road.

And in the end your road is perfect for tanks and marching armies coming to murder you.

> The sad reality is that most people want cars

The sad reality is that most people NEED cars

Only the rich can afford to not need cars.

Now back to your regularly scheduled car hate.

> The sad reality is that most people NEED cars

That was a choice, though. We (especially in North America) have decided collectively to build infrastructure in such a way that most people will have strong reasons to use cars, as a result most people want cars. We did not have to do that, or at least there was no compelling reason to do it to the degree that we have.

Well, there was a compelling reason. Massive funds from an auto and oil industry lobby rooted in excuses such as the american car tourist dream and a life in a segregated suburb. Where we arrived is IMO almost wholly corrupt, perhaps one of the biggest astro-turfing campaigns ever seen.

That (roughly, with different emphasis) is a the choice I'm talking about. It was not based purely on rational planning, and it was a choice.

That in turn made it compelling for individuals, often, but that's not the same thing.

It depends on the city honestly. In LA county, cars save you time but you can get everywhere, eventually, on a bus. Again, the key word is eventually, so bring a book and it will be like teleporting. Ridership reflects this. If you can afford to buy convenience you do so. 70% of LA metro riders are very low income, median income for riders on the system is $19,000. In other words most riders can't even entertain the idea of affording a car. Even a 20 year old beater car in CA might be a few hundred alone just to register a year, whereas low income people can ride metro for free.

https://www.nlc.org/article/2021/05/14/expanding-l-a-metros-...

> because most people had cars.

That's mostly an American/European thing though, world wide there are only about 1.5 billion cars, 275 million of these in the United States, another 250 million in Europe. Together those account for ~ 1/3 of the cars but only for about 12% of the world population.

For sure, and some economies were "lucky" enough to wait until the late 20th century to develop. The public transit systems in Singapore, Hong Kong, the entire Pearl River Delta, etc are all IMO far better ways to get around than driving a car in most US cities.

Lucky might be subjective. Standard of living in the suburbs of American might be deemed superior to living in an efficiency apartment in Hong Kong, but that's much less an option for people who live in areas that developed later on, as these areas leaned into true urban levels of density since it's infrastructurally far cheaper per capita. Given the choice, many would prefer to not live in New York levels of density.

For sure, and I want people to have that choice! But I also want the amount paid by people living in the suburbs to more accurately reflect the cost, and I want people who prefer living in denser urban environments to be able to improve their surroundings by removing cars.

I dunno about your interpretation. When did jaywalking become a thing? When did people get kicked off the road so cars to use them, before or after everyone had cars?

It became a thing in different places at different times. I'm curious to learn more about the history actually, because all the sources I can find are specifically oriented around political action and do not present any factual history.

From what I could find about California, jaywalking is not illegal on most streets, but happens to be illegal when crossing most streets in densely populated areas. Specifically, you are not allowed to cross streets that have crosswalks at both ends unless you do it at the crosswalk. The current laws are from 1959 and seem to have been passed specifically to reduce pedestrian fatalities. These laws seems pretty successful at accomplishing that goal, and recent attempts to remove jaywalking laws over racial equality concerns have been blocked in the interest of public safety (rightly, in my opinion).

To answer you question, in CA at least, it appears that pedestrians were kicked off after everyone had cars. Streets are unsafe for pedestrians, but it's because people drive on them, not the other way around.

I contest that people do secretly hate cars, but they don't hate their own car. Put two identical patios adjacent to each other on the same street, and I'd bet that the one furthest away from cars would attract people first if you sufficiently isolate the variable.

Suburbs are basically a symptom of their own car-dependent design. Even they don't want to be near them! But it's fine for an individual if they're driving somewhere else.

Except the reason streets became car-centric was due to lobbying from car companies to remove streetcars.

Once streetcars were gone, people had to own cars.

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