Automobiles are the most egalitarian form of transportation since walking
ti.org
ti.org
It requires much less maintenance overhead, no license at all to drive, and you can technically take it cross country if you want.
Its fuel and thereby range is not determined by your financial status, only your health.
The car instead has a negative effect on our health and the infrastructure is much more costly and require much more maintenance, the pollution it creates has negative effects on our health too.
Big assumption that health is more easily procured than gas or electricity. The quest for good health is expensive in time and money too and for many people is limited by genetics or bad luck. You can't trade labor for health either and health declines with age limiting mobility.
It’s larger than a transportation issue
While I generally agree with you, surely this is not an egalitarian property of cycling.
Next to cars, bicycles are miles more egalitarian. Don't blame bicycles for the poor health of Americans.
Round where I'm from you see everyone from 7 to 70 cycling. And some very old people get three wheeled bikes so they don't have to worry about losing balance.
I can drift back in time just 20 years and point out that an automobile is the only reason I was able to pursue the career opportunities I did at that time. A bicycle is not fast enough to cover the distances. Mass transit didn't exist or was not available in times that matched those opportunities. Walking didn't work. Etc.
The other big thing to examine is the degree to which the lack of transit is a policy choice. If we took the billions of dollars spent subsidizing private car ownership and spent it on transit, the results would look a lot more like Europe, Asia, South America, or our own country a century ago. There’d be trade offs, of course, but those are important to consider as possibilities as we head into an era where climate change is going to cause many large problems and cars are around a quarter of our total emissions and EVs cut that number in half at best.
It is true that transit policy is a choice but it is one largely driven by economics. There is also an element of personal preference. Public transit is not pleasant or flexible.
Believing that the US would become eurplope or Asia if not for transportation policy is simply untrue. There are some regions that could adapt but the ones most likely to benefit from and use mass transit already have it and barely use it. The simple truth is our cities and geographies are different.
The tradeoffs you gloss over are likely to be much lore significant. They start with the tremendous investment required to add these where they don't exist and end with the mix of economic and quality or life impacts inherent in this type of travel.
EV do not drop total emissions out of the gate. Most start with a higher carbon footprint (and environmental impact) than ice vehicles and do not break even until more than half way through the expected life cycle. You do get some gains after break even but those benefits are mostly on relocation rather than reduction and are reset when the car hits battery replacement. I like EV's but they aren't the panacea they're presented as and come with their own problems.
The bottom line is that the automobile for all of its flaws represents complete freedom of movement not offered by any other means available to the average citizen. And you want to do away with it.
You were referring to your next sentence, it appears:
> It is true that transit policy is a choice but it is one largely driven by economics. There is also an element of personal preference. Public transit is not pleasant or flexible.
It is driven by economics, which is driven by the policy decisions I mentioned. When private car usage is as heavily subsidized as it's been in the United States for the last century, it's not surprising that it can be cheaper for many people but that's just saying that the core principle of economics (people respond to incentives) is still true.
Similarly, your aesthetic preferences are not only not universal but in large part cultural. Sitting in traffic is not pleasant, nor is getting hefty repair bills at inconvenient times, etc. but you've been encultured to think of that as the natural order of things and having spent so much money on cars and car-centric living discourages contemplation on that point.
> Believing that the US would become eurplope or Asia if not for transportation policy is simply untrue. There are some regions that could adapt but the ones most likely to benefit from and use mass transit already have it and barely use it. The simple truth is our cities and geographies are different.
Continuing your trend, this is untrue on all counts. The United States has more land but 80% of the population is urban. In areas where transit is good, people use it heavily. The primary reason people do not use transit is that driving has been massively subsidized and transit systems are typically treated as a last resort for poor people, but that doesn't say people wouldn't use it if we made different decisions. Car centric sprawl has shaped a lot of what Americans who don't travel think of as natural but that's a choice, not a natural law.
The lived experience of the vast majority of US citizens is an illegitimate viewpoint? Whose viewpoints deserve a seat at the table?
You 'could' take it cross country but that depends on your health and financial status...which means you won't because it's incredibly impractical for the vast majority of people.
a car, as bad and costly as it is, shields you from that.
end of femto nitpick
> you can technically take it cross country
And "technically" anyone could take mass transit, yet he shows that (at least in the US) they do not. In the end what matters for public policy is what people and up actually doing, not what they theoretically could do.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/hycbb0/olivi...
> fat
2. See 1, up to a point. For morbidly obese people, see 1. so you don't become morbidly obese.
> physically disabled people
See 1. For serious disability, most of those people can't drive, either. More than that, cars still have their uses, so I agree. Let's promote cars PRIMARILY for seriously disabled people. Abled bodied people, public transit, bikes, foot/electric scooters.
> OTOH they can't drive a bicycle. That's not very egalitarian.
Entire countries can.
China was initially built on bikes. As was Vietnam. As is the Netherlands.
Countries which are some of the most egalitarian in the world.
Let's not pretend cars are not the middle and upper class comfortable transportation devices. Cars are very, very convenient. Convenience is amazing, but it's also a slow poison.
You can't really be morbidly obese, for example, if you don't have access to a car. I mean, you probably can, but the odds of that happening are so low it's not worth taking about that scenario.
Micromobility overall is more egalitarian than the car will ever be, and better in lots of other ways too.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=mobility+scooter
I guess this is the same old ignorance of the right.
I can also throw meaningless insults, sigh...
Some get three wheeled bikes if they have balance problems.
The intellectual dishonesty here is especially staggering:
> Horses, intercity trains, streetcars, you name it, were always used mainly by the relatively wealthy and were inaccessible to the poor, especially in cities.
In addition to being flat up wrong about streetcars, note how he mixes things like horses which have always been expensive and intercity trains (which serve a different purpose) without mentioning things like buses or bicycles which poor people heavily depend on.
Later, he puts access to a car as a sign of egalitarianism without asking whether that’s a sign of preference or necessity. Someone who looks at percentage of income paid and the difficulty of maintaining employment without a car would come to very different conclusions. That is, of course, if the goal was to learn rather than to find support for the position they started with.
But sky high costs of dense urban living is egalitarian?
It's also again important to consider how much of this is policy. For example, Tokyo is far more affordable that many American urban areas because they didn't have policies preventing density and the city wasn't gutted to provide highways for suburbanites who only contribute minimally to the economy and culture. In the U.S. the history of racism behind the rise of suburbs makes that really complicated because the neighborhoods most likely to be bulldozed or cut off for highway projects / parking lots were the poor neighborhoods, reducing the supply available for low-income residents.
1. And, for example, the median income in NYC is $43k so there are definitely reasons to question stereotypes: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...
1. https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/your-driving-costs
If you live in an outer suburb or more rural area the land costs are pretty low but if you live anywhere near a city it’s not uncommon for that to be adding 20-30% to your housing costs. Even if that’s available a la carte at an apartment complex it means land not being used for people, increasing the per-resident overhead costs, and since parking and traffic concerns are often used to prevent density it reduces the overall supply.
I live in a city and would not get any discount on my property if I decided to park on the street (also free) instead of parking off street.
> AAA selects top-selling, mid-priced models and compares them across six categories: fuel, maintenance/repair/tire costs, insurance, license/registration/taxes, depreciation, and finance charges.
https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...
> I am not sure where you live but in the US we don't buy property by a square foot, we buy lots. You cannot really buy a house on a lot of land and strike out a car-sized portion of driveway for a discount.
Here in the U.S. the lots are sized with the assumption that a large fraction of the space will be used for a driveway and parking spaces or garages and that often is required by zoning codes (the term is “parking minimum”). That means that the decision to focus modern life around car travel instead of other means is implicitly increasing those costs because your house, employer, most businesses, etc. involve extra land purchased to store cars for the ~90-95% of the day where they're idle.
In my neighborhood, that often means roughly half of the total lot size. A transit-oriented design could have significantly more homes available at lower cost since the land is worth more than the structure here.
> I live in a city and would not get any discount on my property if I decided to park on the street (also free) instead of parking off street.
Yes. This is the city subsidizing private car owners — it comes out of your taxes, you just don't get an itemized bill or an explanation of the amenities you're not getting because the space and budget are being devoted to car storage.
If you travel around the country, notice how many cities have narrow sidewalks crowded with people while at most half as many people drive by — that's because the decision was made (probably in the 1950s) that the highest status people would be driving and so things like sidewalks were allocated the space which remains after putting in a wide road and street parking.
It's bad for business but we're so used to it we don't even see the other potential uses of that space and money. It took those pandemic closures to get a lot people to reconsider land allocation in cities and it's generally lead to upticks in sales for adjacent business every time space devoted to cars has been reduced because most of those people driving by never stop on their commute home.
Might have something to do with the fact that there is not much public transport in the US and most can be found in very large cities. Since city dwellers have a higher income on average this is not the least bit surprising.
The conclusion of the article is build on this argument and quickly falls apart in Europe. The argument not even true for the US because it is warped by cities like New York City.
Around the world, is there much public transit out of cities? And maybe public transit itself is a red herring. Maybe the right question would be on non-car transit?
> The claim that “accessible public transportation” can produce greater equality ignores the fact that mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite.
skips over a public transport history of the US that has seen the elite (eg Koch brothers) work to sink any public transport effort specifically to increase the per capita use of fossil fuels (and their profits), and planners using infrastructure projects to divide vibrant neighbourhoods and push out those determined as poor, unwanted, etc.
The lived experience of the vast majority of US citizens is an illegitimate viewpoint? Whose viewpoints deserve a seat at the table?
The fact that it's also not true even within the United States (currently in some places, everywhere prior to WWII) similarly confirms that this isn't a deep truth but rather a convoluted restatement that most people will end up using the option which is favored by policy.
Haha. Insanely expensive, I don't doubt, but as good as or better service? Spotted the person who hasn't relied on public transport for more than a month of their life. Compared to light rail, buses are miserable.
I’ve been on gross light rail cars and great buses. Both have their pros and cons, but buses are not “miserable” because bus.
One only has to visit a less wealthy country (just cross the border to Mexico) where the fallacy of the article is evident when the average person’s salary is not enough to buy even a clunker and keep it running (fuel is damn expensive). And public transportation is used massively due to it being the only other option to getting around. “ mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite.” Please what? Has this person ever actually used public transportation? Just get your head out of your iPad and look around. And that’s just one example. I even doubt this holds generally true in the US.
This article is the author’s commentary about the lived experience of US residents. It’s incoherent to allege it’s fallacious because the lived experience in some other country isn’t the same.
The fact is that people in cities are more likely to use public transit, and living near cities correlates strongly with income. But within metropolitan areas, transit is much more egalitarian (by their metric) than private car ownership.
It is pretty clear that most US residents do not have meaningful access to public transport at all, and even fewer have access to high-quality transport (i.e. clean, safe and pleasant vehicles with turn-up-and-go frequency within a short walk). Those that do are naturally concentrated in just a few major (and mainly older) cities—NYC, SF, Boston, Chicago, Washington and the like—which are also some of the most expensive places to live. Even within those cities, housing near transport routes tends to be more valued and thus more expensive. So yes: the people who have the best access to transit tend to be those who have higher incomes. (This is true in Europe too, albeit not so markedly since even less-well-off areas tend to have at least a decent basic service.)
The US, having built itself into a configuration that makes public transport mostly non-viable, can't easily fix this. In that context it probably _does_ make sense to try to provide basic automobiles to those who can't afford them. But don't pretend that this is anything other than a band-aid on the gaping wound that is poor decisions about land-use.
False. Buses are almost universally viable in urban environments.
1. It oversimplifies too many things. That includes public transit availability, costs, etc
2. It’s US centric. The numbers are based on U.S. numbers. Far too many people think other places are like the U.S.
Where I live public transit doesn’t go where low income folks live and work. While there are exceptions, that’s the rule. So, low income earners often have cars that are at least 10 years old to get where they need to go
So does this article really apply outside of the US, RU, and other such places with vast swathes of low-density not-so-economically-integrated populations?
That sounds like a deliberate policy choice? Trains have became more expensive here during Covid, but back when I was using them extensively, a national annual subscription (lump sum, after which the rides were free) only cost a little more than double what insurance+plates alone cost for my car.
The idea that the average income of mass transit users is higher than that of drivers (pre-pandemic) is counter intuitive.
It’s most likely an artifact of the fact that salaries in NYC are high and the bulk of mass transit commuting was in/to/from NYC. I’d be curious to see the same statistics NYC-only and ex-NYC.
I don’t have the data but could likely be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
I don’t know about NYC but here in DC you’ll see the same argument made. The demographics of commuter rail and long-distance subway trips are more affluent because that’s who can live in those suburbs (federal government commuters also get subsidies which are appealing compared to the traffic), while bus ridership had a lot more poor and especially elderly people. Trying to come up with one policy for the average of all 3 systems is going to be misleading in every direction.
It’s clear here in that he uses average US-wide incomes to segment the population in urban areas. NYC has the highest transit ridership: if you make $65,000 a year, you might not be making rent. If you make $25,000 a year, you’re not able to afford to live anywhere near transit, and would be making less than minimum wage in new york state.
all you need to do is compare the cost to take transit to the cost to drive a car to see the weakness in his argument.
Around here the middle class can't afford real estate - not in 2022 at least. The credit advisor working for a housing development company who I met the other day told me that 75% of their clients pay cash, because the pool of those who are eligible for a mortgage is so small nowadays.
Housing close to public transport gets expensive really quick. Meanwhile if you have a car you can live in the middle of buttfuck nowhere and actually have the credit score for the property because it costs half of anything close to civilisation.
Of course there are fuel costs and whatnot, but you can work with/around that. There's no going around not having the credit score for a even a one-bedroom apartment in the city.
Here's a collection of European countries where there's no consistent trend in urbanization vs the Netherlands, which apparently are turning into a collection of cities:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?end=2...
I know for a fact that where I live the decrease is caused by people moving to the suburbs - it's a widely talked about topic.
Yes, the elites of poor countries around the world, places with a GDP per capita a 10th of the US one :-))))
One of the first thing poor countries to improve the lives of their wretched (thing people almost starving) is to add bus, tram and train lines so these poor people can go farther away from home to get decent paying jobs.
"Guns are very egalitarian devices! Everybody has at least one and uses it regularly!"
Why are so few of these posted to hacker news?
More and more automobiles is the perfect antidote to a society who's wealth has been built on exclusionary zoning.
It's useless trying to plan any desirable alternative to the status quo in the form of mass transit when everyone sees their home as a get-rich-while-doing-nothing investment ponzi scheme rather than a commodity to be consumed:
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/12/home...
I suspect this isn't the case in many other American cities, because
a. Transit is a luxury good, raising prices and gentrifying an area
b. Transit is the easiest to build to close places (from the CBD), which are often rich
c. Poorer communities just aren't a priority for most cities, at least not until recently.
Anecdotally, in Europe the modal split is probably more even.
[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/11/11/meme-weeding-l...
I see no problem with a US writer speaking to what he finds is best for himself and fellow US citizens. That this would cause so many complaints and potentially have an article flagged is dystopian, like some of us are less equal than others.
Probably ignores the fact that most public transportation infrastructure and people that use it are located in cities where median salaries are higher. Public transportation commuters can still very much have a lower median salary in that area.
> In 2021, only 5.0 percent of workers with incomes under $25,000 a year took transit to work, while the other 95 percent disproportionately have to pay the mostly regressive taxes that are used to support transit.
Probably good that mass transit was avoided during a pandemic. Can't determine how much it says about the taxes "regressivity" though.
> By comparison highways are mainly paid for out of user fees which aren’t regressive because people pay for only what they use.
Not from the US, but this doesn't seem to be true, if i'm reading [the table on this page](https://taxfoundation.org/state-infrastructure-spending/) correctly.
> Of the 4.1 percent of workers who lived in households with no cars in 2021...
My understanding is that life without a car is quite challenging in the US - I'd get one too if I lived there. And yeah, the data [does seem to support it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...). But it's not an argument for cars, just an argument against US urban planning. Requiring an expensive purchase to be able to participate in society is pretty messed up.
> The Times article is correct that debt and the high cost of borrowing for people who have poor credit is a problem, but that is not the fault of the automobile.
> Nor are traffic stops that punitively focus on low-income drivers, which the article also cites, the fault of cars.
And gun violence isn't the gun's fault. It's public-policy-around-the-gun's fault - which is in turn gun advocacy's fault. You can always install metal detectors in schools and put guards everywhere, but you could also, you know, just not have that many guns.* Similarly, you could just put in more public transportation.
> numerous studies have shown that one of the best ways to get people who don’t have access to cars out of poverty is to give them access to an automobile.
I don't believe that we need to choose any single policy over another, but given limited resources I'd prioritize redirecting tax revenue into: - education to give people actual careers - cheap (tax-based, even) healthcare - social safety-nets that support economically vulnerable
Over
> low- or zero-interest loans to low-income people who lack cars so they can buy a decent used or low-cost new car.
Just put in more bus lines. Please. Why do anyone need to take a loan out at all? What happens if they get fired or can't pay the loan for any reason?
* Not going to pretend that anti-gun stances aren't political suicide in the US and that actual feasibility any gun ban is quite questionable. I'm just railing against this denialist blame-shifting attitude and the cartoonish work-arounds it leads to.
Mass transit being used by elites and cars by the poor is far from true in many other places. In fact, mass transit was free in many communist countries, and is still free in cities here and there.