The only thing they've managed is to make car transport worse, and then public transport seems better by comparison.
Why are we devoting so much energy to making people unhappy?
NYC, absolutely. When I lived near NYC I would drive in, park the car in a garage for the whole weekend and never had any need or desire to use it.
SF, not really. Public transport is too fragmented and limited. Most of the time there's no convenient way from point A to B other than to go get the car and re-park elsewhere nearby.
Even people from right outside those cities have such a wildly skewed perspective
“Traffic and parking is so bad!”
Have you consider moving to the city
“Traffic and parking would be worse!”
You don’t drive if you are already inside it
cue confused worldview shaking look
People occasionally want to go to places other than the city where they live.
No more. Public transport is horrible, and I'll never again agree to live in a place without private transport. It doesn't have to be a car - but it needs to be exclusively under my control, and it needs to be close to my front door.
And I don't care that I'm getting non-stop downvotes for my posts in this thread, someone needs to speak to reality rather than utopian dreams. I don't care about the votes, but it's prettyu uncool that downvoted posts are greyed out and hard to read - aren't downvotes meant for offtopic messages? Or is the goal to have a uniform hivemind?
I think in theory I agree with you. I would _prefer_ private transportation, but if I was stuck between private car and public transit, I would pick public transit because the alternative of sitting in a car commuting every day is dreadful compared to the few thousand steps I could get from walking to/from public transit.
Doesn't literally every city permit non-car modes of transport?
Sounds like you should give bicycles a try.
Or unironically, any last-mile foldable vehicle that you can bring with you on public transportation. Will solve most of your issues.
Maybe something like an enclosed golf-cart with a 30 miles range and space for 2 with cargo, (or 4 without)? But it would not be street legal today.
If even in NYC people still want a car, even with all the trouble, what does that tell you about public transport?
And I'm speaking from experience here - I have a ton of friends in NYC who all started without a car "who needs it", and over time every single one bought a car because it's simply too hard without it.
NYC is simply too dense, people need space, there's no reason to jam them all in small homes with little space. Although I suppose some people like that.
What exactly is "too hard" without a car in NYC?
Check out this sweet map: https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars
(I don't own a car in either city)
What is the number of car owners compared to all NYC residents? Of course, there will always be car owners and starting with a population in the millions is going to make that number appear large.
I'm really looking forward to superblocks being established in my district in Munich. It would be so nice if my kids and their friends could play in front of my appartment house without parked and moving cars everywhere.
No one is spending any effort to make anyone unhappy. This is about giving a slightly less enormous amount of consideration to people who want to drive everywhere, so that more consideration can be given to those who are willing to use other modes of transport.
In cities where public transport sucks less, there's more circumstances where it is better, and so more people use them.
Few things in life make me less happy than the externalities of car culture. It fosters among other things: 1) Disconnection from one's community and the natural environment 2) Noise and air pollution imposed on one's neighbors without their consent 3) Worse collective physical health due to replacing walking trips with car trips 4) Excess consumption of all goods, including fossil fuels 5) Risk of serious injury or death for both drivers and pedestrians 6) High stress due to the inevitable presence of traffic 7) Environmental degradation and expansion of the urban/wilderness frontier 8) Repressive political regimes propped up by oil exports
Of course there are positives to cars too but many of the positives only exist due to the problems that the widespread deployment of private cars caused in the first place. We need cars to visit our friends and family or go to work because we constructed a society in which we don't actually live in the same communities as our friends, families and employers because the car allowed us to. We buy things that we don't need because the car allows us. Consumerism fills the void of meaning in our lives that is in no small part due to the disconnection that the car created in the first place.
Personally, although driving a car can be great fun under the right circumstance, I find most of the time it is either tedious or stressful. I would almost always rather be walking, which engages my body and allows my mind to wander without fear that I might seriously injure, or even kill, someone in a moment of inattention. At the same time, whatever mode of transportation I am using: car, biking or walking, I know that I am at risk of being hurt by an inattentive or reckless motorist, of which there are many.
I am making a distinction between private vehicles and vehicles in general. Obviously we need some vehicles to move crucial goods and people with limited mobility. And to occasionally make long journeys. Since the pandemic began, I have been only been in a car about a half a dozen times and I have experienced no material deprivation whatsoever. Of course I have been reliant on trucks delivering groceries to my local stores and the occasional home delivery (which again does not require a private vehicle).
Your fear does make me optimistic though. It suggests that people are waking up to the catastrophe that widespread deployment of private cars has had on human life.
If you're going to compare random mostly unused point to point, that's not what public transit is for.(That is something a car or taxi is needed for)
Public transit is better than a car in a pretty large chunk of NYC.