I too would like the car lifestyle ... from 1950.
Sadly, we have created a monster. I suspect many Americans now don't even know what a community without cars would look like, that it could even work at all.
Sadly, we have created a monster. I suspect many Americans now don't even know what a community without cars would look like, that it could even work at all.
The average American wants to live in a detached house that they own. This does not lead to dense cities. It leads to sprawl, which is what we got because it’s what we want.
My girlfriend and I are about to move to the suburbs to be closer to her family, but it’s to an inner-ring suburb with excellent transit back into the city. There are maybe two towns for this in the area that aren’t outrageously priced, and even those two are above average.
See also, “The myth of revealed preference for suburbs”: https://cityobservatory.org/the-myth-of-revealed-preference-...
Same thing. I found that people who could afford cars bought them for the convenience (despite the 100% import duty and $100,000 COE charge for 10 year permit).
And same with detached housing. It’s was pretty much the ideal for families. Constant complaints of noise in apartment buildings, crappy neighbors, limited space.
Don’t get me wrong, many people like the apartment living car-free. Mostly, young, childless people. But when kids came into the picture or even wealth increased and people got older, preferences changed.
Meanwhile, the American suburb seems to have been modeled after manor estates but shrunk down to a level where it doesn't make sense. Each property has more personal land, but not enough to be "self-sufficient". That slight lowering of density prevents easy walkable access to any sort of central community hub, which makes it financially unviable to have a small community shopping district. That makes a shared public transit access point difficult to implement, since there's no community hub. Everything else spirals from there, making cars (and particularly bigger cars - remember, you need to keep the "estate" supplied with the necessities from a store located a 20-30 minute drive away) the only way for a family to function.
I don't want to live in Hong Kong density, but I absolutely don't want to live in the typical American suburbia.
> remember, you need to keep the "estate" supplied with the necessities from a store located a 20-30 minute drive away)
People don't live in the suburbs to start a mini-farm. If you have to drive 20-30 minutes just for necessities you live in a rural area, not suburbs.
Yeah - they could go out. But they’ll come back in and its messy and noisy everywhere.
It’s just the way kids are. I guess folks need to be careful what they wish for. I’m all for accessible and densely populated housing. But I’m used to the noise.
I can watch movies at cinema reference volume at home at 3am and my neighbors don't notice it either.
Your problem isn't with apartment buildings, it's with shoddy american construction standards.
I've lived in all concrete apartment buildings and you can still here some noise as it travels through solid concrete pretty well.
It's only one neighbor out of the 6 I would share separating walls with, but one is all it takes.
Zoning that allows ONLY single-family detached housing, and no retail or business, forces car-dependency.
"Detached home or high-rise apartment in a city" is a false dichotomy.
Not really. Small grocery stores lack variety (by necessity, when their potential market is limited to families living in a 1-2 mile radius). Two restaurants lack variety. It makes for stupidly boring food choices over time.
Frankly, I'd end up not using them, ordering even more over the internet, and interacting even less with folks nearby.
And people living downtown still do the same - driving to same big malls in outskirts, restaurants in other towns etc. The funniest case is when people live downtown and drive to non-downtown workplaces :)
A lot of suburbs are not like that. I've lived in the Bay Area suburbs for most of my life and I don't think I've ever lived more than half a mile from a shopping center with a grocery store and restaurants. Every main road has them. Between the main roads, there are houses.
On the flipside, I don't want a huge place to live, so I am actively trying to find (or build) a small (less than 1800sqft) narrow (3 stories, like a detached townhouse) house that is extremely ecological (passive house standards) in a walkable area. When I considered permanently moving to Europe, places like this were actually not horribly uncommon, although they weren't as common as apartment blocks. In the US, places like this are near impossible to find because most houses are built by "production builders" who optimize for the largest square footage possible on a lot space allowed by local code to increase selling price, and do it as the lowest cost (meets code, maybe, basically same as getting a C grade).
Creating larger spaces that aren't made for cars is great, but people will still need long-range individual transportation.
"Cities are loud and dangerous. This is just life in the big city!" No, no, no, and no. Cars are loud and dangerous. This is a choice. It's not an unavoidable fact of life in cities. We choose to live this way.
Cities aren’t loud, cars are loud: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8
NYC would be so much better if it weren't for all the car traffic. It's not the density that's strangling it, it's the car completely degrading the experience.
> "Cities are loud and dangerous. This is just life in the big city!" No, no, no, and no. Cars are loud and dangerous. This is a choice. It's not an unavoidable fact of life in cities. We choose to live this way.
Yes! Americans have a real lack of imagination when it comes to city life. Makes me sad.
Cities could incorporate suburbs into their boundaries, yet cities don't want to do that, because despite griping about their lack of paying city taxes, they don't want to pay to maintain/manage those spaces.
I really believe the "suburbs cost cities money" statement is overplayed. Between county taxes (which feed back into the cities in those counties) and HOA (for neighborhood maintenance), they are paying for themselves.
The truth is that row houses is the lowest density that still can just barely pay for maintenance of the roads, sewers, water lines, gas lines, electricity lines, and everything else.
Any lower density than that, and the taxes of the residents can't cover the actual costs anymore.
Nobody's going to build a rail system with a thousand subway stations connecting every neighborhood in a US metro area. That would cost like a trillion dollars, plus maintenance. It's just not feasible to cater good public transport to people living that spread out. And no one wants to walk miles to a less-dense rail system or take some slow bus route.
And outside of major cities, I've never heard of someone complain about cars. Most people are perfectly happy with cars. Sure they might think trains are cool, but they wouldn't want to move inward for it or pay whatever cost would be necessary for trains to come outward.
What do you mean in regards to CO2? I'd suggest that many people living a rural lifestyle completely offset their CO2 footprint due to carbon sequestration. I know I have enough trees and vegetation on my acreage to completely offset my carbon emissions. But, of course, to counter your argument I really only need to offset the extra emissions that come with driving an extra n miles into the city.
The infrastructure-to-population cost ratio of urban areas is way, way higher than rural areas. A meter of footpath, road or sewer in a city is reused by (just spitballing numbers) 10x as many people compared to a suburb, and probably 100x vs a rural area. Infrastructure is just much cheaper in cities relative to the served population, because so much less land area needs to be covered.
Since people generally pay the same taxes no matter where they live, the net result is cities generally fund a lot of infrastructure for other areas, as they are so much more efficient.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with this for genuinely rural areas - we do need farms etc, so infrastructure built to serve them is well spent. The issue arises when we sprawl with suburbs, as they don't serve any particular purpose that couldn't be fulfilled by a dense city, but cost much more in terms of infrastructure expense.
I have no problem with people living in suburbs, so long as they bear most of the cost of living that lifestyle, rather than dense urban areas funding them.
That's not what the data says, at least in the US. We consistently see a net change of about 2 million people per year moving out of cities and into the surrounding suburbs: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/12/16/in-2020-few...
And the desire to live in cities is shrinking as well, now at under 20%: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/america...
If there was a 50K population max car-free walkable town with all the necessities available within said town, I would move there in an instant. I've searched for this, in the past, it doesn't exist. I live in the next best, a <50K population town where I can get most necessities via walking/biking, but have to contend with hostile vehicular traffic that is especially daunting on longer routes to the outskirts of town that are only serviced by freeways (like the college I used to work at)-- I am terrified to bicycle on these routes with 85mph traffic brushing past (technically those sections are not "freeways", but are indistinguishable save the signage "begin freeway" [no bikes] "end freeway" [bikes allowed]).
For long range travel, expand passenger trains. There is an Amtrak stop in my town, and I travel via Amtrak extensively to visit friends-- it is a very nice way to travel long distances.
So what would a car-less community I could tolerate look like? Probably a lot like it does right now, just with more commercial entities within a mile or two of my home. It would also be a lot harder for me to access bigger commercial entities (like Walmart, Target, et.al.) since it would involve public transit that is about an hour and a half away (it's 10m by car, fwiw) in a higher density (and cost) city.
Then you can access those things 10m away in a similar amount of time.
For large items you'd use a car or pickup for, businesses would adapt by offering delivery.
It's definitely possible, but the infrastructure investment would be gargantuan.
Same day is a bit of a sticker but you can find towns near major areas where you won’t need your car most days (assuming you can find work).
Use is infrequent, meaning it would either have to be subsidized, which never makes folks in the city happy, or cost an arm and a leg per trip, making it impractical for rural users.
With that population density it's never going to make sense to put something like light rail on that route. So these people will continue to use cars. And that's fine.. hopefully cars continue to get safer and easier on the environment.
I think it's the urban/suburban sprawls akin to LA that really could benefit from better transit/walkability.
No, what you describe is a poorly designed area.
The most charming, vibrant and yet quiet districts of Tokyo or Seoul are densely populated.