I think the question that anyone that rejects cars would ask is "why do you choose to live 60km from your work?".
- I don't have any meaningful control over where I'm allowed to work
- I don't have any meaningful control over where my spouse is allowed to work
- I only have a tiny amount of control over where I'm allowed to live (most of it prices us out, despite being above-average income)
- even if I do exercise some control, it can be changed or stripped from me by others at any time. (You may get laid off and have to find a new office. Or your office may move away from you -- when you are hired, the office might only have been 12 miles away, but later they moved the office so it's now 25 miles away)
- You may not always be allowed to move in response to those changes (you might not be able to afford to move your whole house every two years, when job situations for you/your spouse change. And if you have kids, doing this super disrupts any chance they may have at a social life via school)
- You may not even be allowed to change home or school locations. (Divorced people exist, shared-custody children exist and are in some places, the most common form of parenting in 2023, you might not be allowed to relocate your kids schools ever)
A lot of anti-transportation "15 minute city" idealists like to handwave away how incredibly complicated it is, to magically get your entire life to line up such that you don't ever have to travel medium-sized distances. That is an extreme luxury that most people will never have.
Otherwise you are spot on. If your company moves offices within the same city's MSA they assume you can get there. If they move office to a different city they will pay to move you.
Even that assumes you don't have relatively specific hobbies. Which I guess is true for many people, but it's highly unlikely that (for example) my preferred martial arts instructor and my preferred dance instructor are going to be within 15 minutes of where I live.
And of course, your girlfriend/boyfriend, if you don't live together.
Your rudeness aside, what I'm getting at is that I'll likely have to leave once or twice a day even not accounting for work. I live in a European city and get everywhere by car BTW.
And that's exactly why remote work should be the norm (for the professions where it is at all possible)
Because even if I could, work is unstable, I can't keep moving.
Because I have a girlfriend, any move closer to work is further away for her.
Because my family and friends are here, and I need to take care of my parents.
This is the third largest US city and one with comparably few major thoroughfares (compared to many other large US cities). It seems that it’s just really hard for public transit to beat cars at any distance.
Moreover, lots of people are constrained on where they can work and live. I think a lot of the anti-car rhetoric in America seems to assume everyone is a healthy, childless, young urban professional who aspires to live in the densest habitat he can find, and this is a very unrealistic portrait of Americans.
To be clear though, I would like to see more walkable places, and while "people over cars" is hopelessly vague and verging on ideology, I probably agree with some of what people envision when they make this statement. I think it would be great if our urban and semiurban environments had more, smaller shops and more safe infrastructure for bikes and cars. More separation of fast moving car traffic from side streets. Etc. But we have a loooong way to go before bikes or public transit are more practical than cars, and as others have pointed out even the most bike-friendly countries in the world still have high (and growing) rates of car ownership.
Cars are undeniably handy for all but some people in the densest environments, but we still need to take care not to overfit to cars.
> Whenever I've heard people make that argument, what they actually mean is "The huge house I want to live in I can afford if I spend an hour a day in the car...."
Or it's because it would require 3x-6x their income to afford to live anyplace closer. A major factor of employee shortages is exactly that. There are no homes within 50 mi (often much further) of that job that can be afforded with those wages.
We live 45mi out from a (until recently, inexpensive) US metro area and we require 4 incomes to cover basic expenses.
If Americans were okay with living in Tokyo sized abodes, then there would be sufficient density for sufficient housing and job opportunities to exist in a region that could support sufficient public transit.
Americans would be okay living in “Tokyo sized abodes” if they knew what that actually meant and didn’t assume all of Tokyo looks like Shibuya. One thing I’ll grant is that garages are rare, because they count as finished space for property tax purposes.
Tokyo is actually a great example of what a city without car-centric planning and free parking everywhere can be like and a perfect example of a “15 minute city”. It’s not only about transit, but what transit and walkability encourages. I lived there for 6 years in a very residential neighborhood, but I was still within 10 minutes walking of virtually any daily necessity, 5 or so grocery stores, dozens if not hundreds of restaurants, 3 public baths, one of which was a legit onsen, a few furniture stores, and even 2 aquarium shops. I’m trying to think of a counter example and I can only think of one thing that wasn’t a ten minute walk away: a movie theatre, although there were multiple within a 15 minute train ride.
Given the choice between a some of the shitty living situations I dealt with while living in the US, and an affordable, compact efficient apartment. I'll take the latter
I have friends who bought an apartment in a small town next to the city where the jobs are because they didn't have the credit score for anything closer to work.
This is the reality (and realty) people in the market for living space are currently facing.
I'm not one to discount the cost of a long commute, and I'm hopeful that more remote and flexible work options will make it so people have less time commuting. But people like to own cars because in most cases they can be incredibly useful, and ignoring that fact won't help people transition off them.
You're missing the forest for the trees. If you live in a mid-sized city in the Netherlands and want to limit yourself to a 1 hour commute by public transit, there are just as many, if not more opportunities than if you live in a mid sized city in the US like Richmond because the Netherlands is that much denser, and transit optimizes for commercial centers. The difference that in the Netherlands, you still have the option of commuting by car, whereas, in the US you'd have to move.
Conflicting ideas such as these crop up all the time. For instance, "commuting in a car is dead time, at least I can read/work on the train". A reasonable position at face value, but entirely useless to the person who finishes work at 17:00 and must pick the kids up from school at 17:30. The 30 mins car ride may be "dead time", but the 60 mins by public transport obviously doesn't work for them.
I would guess that the "rejecting car ownership" types probably have this as a subset of a broader philosophy where they've somewhat rejected wealth in favour of something else, or already have the economic freedom to make such a choice.
Public transport is one alternative but I think small personal transport devices are more promising.
That doesn't mean it's not viable to live in the middle, but I think these are some pretty good arguments why it's often preferable to live close to at least one partner's workplace. Obviously it's not going to work for everybody, but if you're thinking about where to buy your house, this may be worth taking into consideration.
I think public transport is pretty good if you live in the Den Haag-Rotterdam-Amsterdam area. Which in America would be considered a single metro area. Something like 5 million people.