In practice the market has spoken as to what kind of a form-factor people find the most useful for personal transportation in different climates and economic development scenarios. There’s no reason why ICEs couldn’t have supported the kind of vehicles some people imagine other people need.
The market has spoken, EVs only started gaining traction when they started resembling actual cars in form and function. Think of it as parallel evolution. Dolphins and fish.
Having just spent a week in Utrecht it's very clear that "the market" can certainly show a preference for ebikes over cars.
Look at bentonville Arkansas for an example.
People want this kind of development, they flock to it, and they are willing to pay astronomically high prices to get it. The government keeps the supply low with exclusionary zoning that makes all types of construction except car-centric single family housing illegal.
There basically aren't any properly transit served and walkable areas in Sacramento. Closest would be Midtown and Richmond Grove, but they aren't really very good at all compared to neighborhoods in cities with actual infrastructure.
But despite that they are _still_ some of the most expensive neighborhoods in the area on a cost to sq foot basis. The trend of walkable transit served areas being in high demand is near universal across the US.
edit: comment not commit
Never forget that most statements, especially imprecise ones like the one you quoted can be interpreted in many ways. It is very easy to find an interpretation that is incorrect, especially if you disagree with/dislike the premise.
The reason I say this is that your single example didn't seem to disprove the statement in my eyes. I read the statement as meaning that walkable neighborhoods are in most cases in much higher demand than other neighborhoods in the same region.
I don't really think either of us is wrong, more that the imprecision of the statement and language in general can be unfortunate and cause disagreement.
Also note that nobody will ever respond well to being accused of a logical fallacy. They are useful to understand what is happening and to rile people up. Not so much to convince anyone (that doesn't already agree with you) about anything.
I will break it down for you. The original poster said 'most expensive' not the 'most expensive on a per-sq-ft basis'. You are arbitrarily adding the words on a per-sq-ft basis because you FEEL like its much more useful. You provide 0 evidence to support this.
For example here is evidence that most people besides you feel that total cost is a much more important and useful metric. The follow sites selling homes list total cost as the main metric NOT the price per sq foot: https://www.zillow.com/ https://www.realtor.com/ https://www.movoto.com/ https://www.redfin.com/ https://www.trulia.com/ https://www.homes.com/
Edit: Here are the top three sites on google when you search "most expensive areas to live in the us". A three seems to use median home price not median price per sq ft. https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/most-expensive-cities-i... https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/most-expensive... https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08091...
depends on the person. People might move there because of the "vibe" or "excitement" and that tends to go hand in hand with places you can walk.
If it counts I emigrated in large part to be somewhere nicer to walk, but I am unusual. Not unique, though! Jason Slaughter (of NotJustBikes) moved to Amsterdam from Canada explicitly for its urban design.
I'm not entirely sure that correlation implies causation in this case.
Do most people move to cities specifically because they're somewhat walkable with good public transportation, or do people move to cities for other reasons such as more access to better paying jobs?
Would people in cities rather drive to work if it was possible rather than taking a chance every day that the people next to them on the bus/train weren't some strange/risky people?
The justification for a lot of these zoning laws is explicitly that developers and the market will not provide adequate home sizes or parking, so minimum requirements are forced on developers. When law forces huge houses, no mixed use, and huge minimum parking lots, the only built environment that emerges is a car dependent one. Older US suburban neighborhoods, like the post-WWII suburbs, had smaller (900-1200 sq ft.) homes because these minimum lot and floor area size requirements weren't in place yet.
If you're curious about areas with different land-use requirements, there are cities in the US like Boston, Berkeley, or Emeryville (just off the top of my head) with more permissive zoning laws that have much lower car modeshare than other parts of the US.
Similarly, when I lived in the US I had to go 1.1 miles to the nearest coffee shop (or shop of any sort), and opening a coffee shop in my neighbourhood would have been illegal, and shut down very quickly. And that wasn't even all that far from the downtown of a medium-sized city (Sacramento).
None of which they have in the developing world yet those nations become wealthier people buy cars basically as soon as they can make the economics pencil out. People like to sit in expensive four wheeled air-conditioned boxes more than they like the alternatives.
is not representative of common reality.
It is also not much representative of "market forces", cars have to respect very strict "Urban Access Regulations" (similarly across Europe, but in Holland in particular)
Not that it is bad in general, but Utrecht is not a good example of what will happen around the World and actually make a difference.
China + India will soon be inhabited by 3 billion people combined, Utrecht has only 500 thousand residents. It's basically a glitch in the matrix.
When everyone already drives cars (the US), there’s significant opposition to investment in other types of infrastructure/built in support for investments in car infrastructure. Whereas there are plenty of cities around the global where such constituencies exist for other modes.
But also bikes cause negligible damage to infrastructure and barely require any resources compared to cars, so the costs are usually much lower for bike infrastructure.
This is just BS/lies at the local level.
Moneyed PACs aren't fighting it out over councilor, selectman and planner positions for random suburbs.
Pretty much all the money these candidate dispense is either self raised or comes from an official political party who don't really doll out meaningful amounts to these elections
One would seem to win local elections by being the incumbent, and knocking on a lot of doors.
What about the state and federal subsidies for road infrastructure? A locality that wants to go a different (less car dependent) direction would be leaving that infrastructure money unspent, which isn't fair to the local voters who contributed tax money to the state/feds. They rigged it so that the locals paid for the roads via their tax money, their only choice is to take the money and build more roads, or kiss the money they sent to the state/feds goodbye.
Wouldn't the above kind of hamstring local politicians? Would it be safe to assume that the pro-car lobbyists at those higher level of government want to keep it this way?
I do believe it is both interesting and frustrating that people (in general) fail to challenge the validity and utility of their own beliefs, even when those beliefs have been shown to not hold up under the scrutiny of others. Then, there is also normacy bias.
If lithium becomes scarce, electric vehicles become more expensive. An increase in the price of vehicles produces a similar effect to a decrease in people's incomes, so the market would push people towards smaller vehicles just like in the Third World now.
As a concrete example, tiny electric cars are common in China. Amusingly, the government doesn't like tiny cars because they are hard to regulate. It really is the market that has spoken. https://restofworld.org/2021/tesla-vs-tiny-cars/
It's just never considered because the types of people working on policy in this area aren't motorcyclists.
Gas might cost more without subsidies. Car ownership in cities would cost more to pay for parking. Roads outside of cities would be paid for from local taxes. Trucks would pay more because they damage roads much more than cars, which would encourage rail and boat transport. Etc.
It's not a free market if these things are being paid for by all taxpayers, including those who don't drive, or don't drive as much.
The fact that some US urban areas are less dense and more car dependent than most European urban areas is at least in part due to the reasons I mentioned already. Obviously people who live in rural areas will need and prefer cars but my point is that it is hard to say "Americans prefer cars" when most Americans have never had the opportunity to live somewhere where they don't need a car.
That market contains the heavy lobbying by oil firms and car industry to keep trains at the sorry state they are in.
You are simply wrong.
- I’m not from the US and I’m not talking about the US market;
- I don’t believe “the market” provides some value judgement. Rather, it’s just the aggregate behavior of people under their existing realities. We can and should aim to change those realities, but ignoring them because “they’re wrong” will not yield workable solutions.
There is nothing more shockingly unethical and disgusting to pretend that killing millions of people every year and destroying entire countries is somehow moral because of “the market”.