Driving is more expensive than you think (2020)
news.harvard.edu
news.harvard.edu
He still ran the numbers.
I was too young to fully understand but basically accounting for every cost it was cheaper to call a cab or rent a car for every situation that actually requires a private vehicle, plus it saved loads of time overall (repairs, maintenance, checks, cleaning...) and headaches in general.
The discussion stuck to me, and I'm always amazed at how it became a realization for so many people decades after.
Granted, this was Western Europe where public transit is ages ahead of most of the US.
I'm in a sub-sub-urb of a big city in the US so a car is a necessity; I don't like it, but it's what it is. But even if I lived near a train station (and I have used them in the UK, New York, and Western Europe), not having a car is still a cost in time. How much I never put to paper, but it's not zero. (I'm also discounting the cost and hassle of having a car in a "big city" - when I lived in NY, no way I'd own a car there.)
The other thing is quality of life. Walking, biking, and even using transit are better for your health – the first two can meet your exercise needs - and they all allow you to do something other than sit immobile looking at a tailpipe, so you have to make a fuzzy comparison in many cases. Where I live, driving can be as fast as riding a bike if you’re lucky on traffic but even if I take transit it’s only like 10 minutes slower so I’d have to weight 30 minutes of reading and 15 minutes of walking against 25 minutes of driving.
The problem in the United States is that a lot of infrastructure was deliberately built to exclude poor people so there aren’t great options in many suburbs for improving transit or bike access short of building road connections through someone’s bank yard. This has a nasty ratchet as cars have been getting more expensive while those suburbs age and need maintenance far in excess of what the property taxes cover.
I'm an independent hourly consultant so my time has a literal dollar rate, but only if I would be working vs whatever activity is in question.
Assuming I 1: have work available I can contribute quality work to in the time allotted and 2: that I actually would be doing that work in this time slot are two things that rarely match up with when I'm doing personal activities that require transit. One obvious exception is going to or from a client site during the workweek, but with a phone hotspot I can start billing on the bus. Something I can't do driving.
If 1 and 2 above are not both true then my hourly rate is not at all my billed rate and is instead some subjective measure of value. I have yet to determine if that measure of value is best expressed in dollars. So far I'm beginning to think it isn't. Instead, reversed feels better. "Is it worth X dollars to not have to carry my groceries home on a bus?"
I calculated I'm at least saving $1000/month, I live near a car sharing service spot, a major bus stop and the train, so we get to love car-free.
I'd argue that having a car sharing service really highlights how much you spend for a car when is just "sitting there". You see the expense going up when you don't use it. If there was a similar calculator but for your own car, it would make it way easier to think twice about owning one
Of course, there are tradeoffs there; my house cost a _lot_ more than a house in the middle of nowhere, certainly. But all in all I'm glad I avoided tethering myself to a car (I do plan to learn at some point, as it feels like the sort of thing I should be able to do before I'm 40, but I can't see myself actually buying one).
But at least they’ve both had and have not had cars.
Not to your point, if you’ve never had a car or even experienced the joys of driving itself or simply being able to go far away on a moment’s notice, your “gladness” of its avoidance may ring as hollow as the blind individual who is “glad” they aren’t bound to the tyranny of visual entertainments. I mean, that’s a nice story you’re telling yourself, but do you really have to information to know?
In particular, once you have children, a vehicle becomes a near-necessity anywhere outside a city.
Buy intercity bus ticket on internet, 15 minute bus journey to where the intercity buses congregate, get on bus. Or train, but Irish Rail likes to charge roughly 2x as much for same-day intercity tickets as next day.
Now, if you want to go to the middle of nowhere, that's harder, I suppose, but towns and cities are easy enough (caveat: Ireland's transport system is rather poorly designed and ~everything radiates out of Dublin, so this probably only works well if you live _in_ Dublin).
As I say, I do plan to get around to learning to drive at some point (my last attempt was foiled by covid; I got a provisional license in Feb 2020), but honestly it's hard to prioritise.
Kids would be more of an issue, granted. I mostly walked or got the bus to school, but I do think that’s less common these days. As a late-30s gay man, not something I have to personally worry about too much, tho.
I own a car after living for years without one, and for every “I can go away on a moment’s notice” (what they sell you) there is 100 times you spend in traffic at rush hour moving at 4mph.
There’s something truly liberating in living in a city where you can just take the bus to a fancy restaurant, get drunk and not put other lives in danger. Or just walk to the park, the playground or the library.
Where I live, If you were shooting long range rifle on a 900+ meter range, public transit isn't going to have service that area because it's 90 minutes outside of the city on dirt roads. The more modern pistol / carbine shooting facility nowadays are outside of city limits as well. You get similar issues with if you play paintball, airsoft, if you're into mountain biking, hunting, fishing, etc. Most of the ways to access those are out in far flung rural areas that you can't get to by bus.
If things in the city are what interest you then I can see where you're coming from. Me personally it isn't overly interesting though. I detest bars, I don't eat out, I haven't watched a movie in the last decade, I find live music and theater dull, boring, and uninteresting, and most of my shopping is done at Costco, the grocery store, or online. So... more or less that cuts out 99.99999% of the venues inside of a city for me personally.
My visits to the US have been fairly limited, and mostly to San Francisco, so I’m not sure how typical this is, but one thing that surprised me about San Francisco was that, while there’s a reasonably extensive public transport system in the actual city, it more or less stops dead once you leave. Here, it certainly fades out, but areas where suburban becomes rural are often fairly accessible.
>but one thing that surprised me about San Francisco was that, while there’s a reasonably extensive public transport system in the actual city, it more or less stops dead once you leave.
I suppose it's a jurisdiction issue. The city here is quick to expand bus service whenever the borders expand or to new communities, but they do not service anything outside of the limits whatsoever. There's little in the way of public transit outside of the municipal level.
they'd ask why you aren't shooting across your own land at 5,000 meter and who calls 900m long range anyway? ( watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE )
But, so far so... good? It's working surprisingly well so far, though I do find the routes operated by the private company a little less reliable than the Dublin Bus ones. It probably helped that this was done as part of an overall expansion, not just a re-allocation; Dublin Bus lost about 15% of its fleet but got replacements; AFAIK it kept all its drivers.
Old people in rural areas are in real trouble, more so because the same has happened to healthcare which in turn led to a whole wave of hospital closures. And that doesn't seem to have ended. Highly annoying because it was those old people in the first place that helped to pay for all of the infra we use daily.
The end result of 4 liberal conservative cabinets in sequence.
Even today, a cab to anywhere (even 3 miles) would cost me at least $10 each direction, and we have at least 5 such trips weekly. This easily surpasses the cost of the car, including depreciation and fuel.
One thing to note though is that costs can be drastically lower if you a) buy used, and b) learn how to do most maintenance yourself.
Most things that typically go wrong with a vehicle aren't that difficult to fix, and parts aren't that expensive, but a mechanic's hourly labor costs tend to add up very quickly.
However, the trigger that made me buying a car was to start having kids. Between groceries, medical visits and leisure, it started to be very, very complex to manage it without a car.
Most public transportation infrastructure is hostile to strollers and babies; you don't want to see a crackhead do his thing next to your newborn (classic in the french subway); peak hour in a bus is hell with a baby; taxis often won't take you if you don't have a child seat, which is quite inconvenient, etc etc.
Until we solve those problems, and I believe we won't, then I'll use my car.
Aside from this, in many european cities, it will get stolen if you leave it in the street a bit too long.
Main problem currently is with bikes, where I live (Riga). Everyone rides on the sidewalk, making it a very dangerous place for pedestrians and kids. I would be keen to forbid bikes in the city center (and electric scooter), as bikers really can't seem to understand that they should go on the road.
It happens in many cities, and those are the ones where bike riders are the most respectful usually.
Ask any deaf/old/parent about how it feels to walk while being overtaken at 25km/h by bike riders with headset on the head and phones in their hands. If you don't care about the weakest on the road, you don't deserve to be protected.
I don't see how a children wouldn't be injured while sitting in the front of a cargo bike, protected only by a thin slice of wood. Please show me a crash test.
- Did you drive on the sidewalk? If yes, you basically transfered the risk to other walkers. - How is the infrastructure? In many countries you'll see potholes for instance. - In case of a frontal crash, what is your % estimation that none of the kids will be injured?
I rode a bike in Paris for 3 years, and it's as hostile as it can get for bikes. Never had a problem,never rode on a sidewalk. Why? I know how to behave with cars. I stop at red lights. I ride in the middle of the road to prevent them from overtaking me dangerously. I'm speedy and I can keep the pace with a late taxi driver if needed.
This kind of reasoning confirms that indeed, bikers are not reasonable and bikes should be forbidden on sidewalks.
Nowhere I said that bike should ride on the sidewalk or have priority over walkers ...
My wife, while pregnant, got hit by a cyclist while crossing in Paris. She was well aware of what she was doing, had a very expensive bike and surely was riding everyday to work. But heh, can't slow down to let the peasants cross the road, right?
How about a cargo bike at 20km/h? I can twist my foot while jumping on the ground, however I wouldn't say that base jumping is the same since you go up in the air in both cases.
So yeah, I probably wouldn't take my infant on busy roads shared with cars, but i absolutely would put on a cycle path.
I used to be much more sympathetic to these types of articles when I lived in Seattle. Buses in Seattle were generally quite nice and more predictable (Google maps would usually give you a good estimate on your arrival time). Biking was a much nicer experience.
I think cities looking to make better public transit should copy the Seattle model rather than the NYC model.
What is the “Seattle model” vs. “NYC model”?
They are vastly different places. For one, NYC has over 3x—and Manhattan over 8x—the population density of Seattle.
Many times in NYC, the subway is as fast or faster than a car. Folks often complain their “schedule is at the mercy” of a train, but forget that the same is true of car travel with traffic, road closures, etc. Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of things about NYCT that suck, but being worse than car travel in NYC (for areas with subway service) is not one of them.
And yes, NYC needs a better bike experience. Still, Citi Bike had 114,000 rides per day last month (a far cry from ~3 million weekday subway rides).
Citi Bike ridership indicates a lot of pent up demand for missing-middle transit, but the execution is pretty bad compared to on-demand bikes in Seattle (although I haven't been back there in a few years and I've heard it's gotten worse there too, so, grain of salt). The electric Citi Bikes are chronically unavailable, meaning you're stuck with huge clunkers that make you work up a sweat at the first hill. Also it can cost 2-3x as much as the bus or metro for a single trip. It makes way more sense to own your own bike, but that still doesn't fix the fact that half your trips invariably contain some section of "cross this four lane road without a marked bike lane".
I've also lived in both cities and Seattle's buses are timely and clean. MTA buses are much, much worse.
One thing we did in Dublin that greatly improved intermodal journeys was a travel card that works across everything. You tap it on rail/bus/tram, you’re debited 2 eur, and anything else you get on in the next 90 minutes, you’re charged nothing. This replaced a baroquely complex staging system, and it’s amazing how much simpler it has made things.
Cities like Seattle and Boston have generally OK public transit. But pretty much everyone I know personally (tends towards older) in Boston still owns a car because they do frequent weekend activities and regularly visit friends outside the city.
I (French) lived in Boston for 9 months and I was pleasantly surprised how good the city is for cycling, there was not that many dedicated infrastructures (except along the Charles river, which still help a lot) but the reasonable density of the left bank means there's lots of small streets with very few cars and you can go pretty easily from one place to another: I was commuting from center Somerville to Chinatown and except during the few months with 2 meters of snow everywhere, cycling was much more pleasant and faster than public transport, and I would never have considered driving a car there given the cost and traffic.
Oh I didn't know it was a only French thing to name places this way. TIL
To add to that, the rate of car ownership has actually been increasing here, although I should acknowledge Boston’s percentage of young professionals is greater than in previous decades. Also, our MBTA ridership is still below pre-pandemic levels
You're probably right about young professionals. I'd guess that relatively few mid-career+ professionals don't own a car. But I know a number of recent hires at my company who were typically interns at a university in the city and quite a few are basically continuing their college lifestyle for now (including leaning on their friends who do own cars).
I think last time I looked, both T and commuter rail ridership were still way down. Maybe a bit over 50%. I know when I take the train in a train that would be packed standing room only starting at at least Waltham there are almost always empty seats today.
Also, the stations were very… urine-y. Noticed this in San Francisco as well; both cities’ public transport infra could greatly benefit from more public toilets. (I’m being semi-serious here; I expect it puts users off and it seems to mostly be an American thing).
Generally liked Seattle, but worst rail journeys I’ve had in a while.
During my trip to Seattle recently, I was really unimpressed with transit. It looked robust where I stayed in SLU, but it’s not really extensive. As far as anecdotes go, the one time I took the train, to get to SeaTac, some crazy guy tried to fight me.
[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/seattle-area-transit-ridership...
So all your complaints on NYC transit and bike lanes illustrate that money should be redirected to improve those ...
The MTA creates a lot of its own issues though. The bare minimum for a public transit system, in my opinion, should be reliable estimates of how long it will take you to get somewhere, but for non-rush hour trips estimates on the MTA are pretty hit or miss. I've heard this is because the switch operators are all running on some ancient system which is impossible to computerize, but for a system that has tens of billions of dollars in funding I find it hard to buy that they've exhausted every possible option.
> Using publicly available data, the authors put the annual public tab at $35.7 billion, which amounts to about $14,000 for every household in the state. Those that do own vehicles pony up an additional $12,000 on average in direct costs.
Also FTA:
“Beyond those for individual drivers, road maintenance, snow removal, and policing, there are less-obvious ones, such as those associated with […] lost productivity from sitting in traffic”
All other things staying equal, those costs may increase when replacing cars with something else (e.g. bicycles and public transport)
“The team also went through the overall state budget and those of various agencies like the Department of Conservation and Recreation to calculate all the money going to roads”
Part of those costs are for transporting goods (e.g. to shops), or for maintenance due to wear from public transport.
There also are costs that won’t fully go away if people stop driving cars (for example, they may get stuff delivered bro their homes instead of fetching it themselves. That may induce fewer public costs, but it won’t induce zero public costs)
The money nondrivers pay in taxes for roads aren’t a subsidy to drivers, it’s the cost they pay for the safety and convenience we expect from modern civilization
http://lncarden.weebly.com/uploads/2/8/3/6/28369831/1419566_...
A lot of those four lane roads can’t be sized down without blocking emergency vehicles’ basic mobility. They’re sized for worst case scenarios and at least in my small hometown, for example, meant to allow large numbers of emergency vehicles to move quickly between suburban sprawls in case of large fire or earthquake.
Unless you are on a narrow one way street (not common in the us I believe) I would say that congestion is the limiting factor for emergency vehicule mobility. And there is quite a lot of study that wider street do not reduce congestion.
Congestion is a separate problem from road design and it's not the limiting factor most of the time. Emergency vehicles need a grid of arteries with two lanes in each direction so cars can pull over in normal traffic conditions to let them through. These arteries lead into smaller 1 or 2 lane roads which don't see much traffic so there's little risk of the emergency vehicle getting impeded. In the suburbs of my city, for example, these arteries are placed every 1/2 mile to every mile depending on population density, which super-stroads every four-ish miles.
Areas with real congestion like main thoroughfares and city cores need different solutions like specific road designs (no center dividers) so that emergency vehicles can move onto oncoming traffic.
I've seen emergency vehicles handle two-lane roads (i.e. one lane per direction) well by having drivers in both directions pull over to the edge of their lane and driving in the middle of the road.
An alternative setup that does not require four car lanes is what is in front of my house: A four-lane road where the outer two lanes are for cars and the inner two lanes are for trams only. Emergency vehicles use the tram lanes as required. Makes it much nicer to cross as a pedestrian, too, since you're only crossing single car lanes at a time.
As someone to lives in 'downtown' Toronto, where streets are two lanes in each direction, and we have street parking outside of rush hour that takes up one lane, and we have streetcars: emergency vehicles seem to be able to get around just fine.
I will just say compare the space dedicated to cars between a random american city and Amsterdam, so much space wasted and so much more infrastructure to maintain; and I believe emergency vehicule are still able to circulate (might even be faster with less cars ?).
Sorry that was poorly phrased. I mean that road design has to respond to congestion so that it's not a limiting factor to emergency service mobility. A low density suburb can afford to have a four lane road every mile with beautiful center dividers with plants whereas downtown needs four lane streets every block and they have to be completely flat to accommodate emergency vehicles moving into oncoming traffic lanes to get around congestion.
City planning/permitting is (usually) supposed to prevent situations where congestion might become a problem as a matter of life and death. For example, a large housing development next to my house was recently forced to stop building after completing less than 20% of the planned units because they miscalculated worst case traffic flow. Wildfires are a concern and the fire marshal calculated that the roads feeding into the development would not be able to handle all the traffic from people evacuating and emergency vehicles coming in.
> I will just say compare the space dedicated to cars between a random american city and Amsterdam, so much space wasted and so much more infrastructure to maintain; and I believe emergency vehicule are still able to circulate (might even be faster with less cars ?).
The average American city has a third to a fifth the population density of Amsterdam, awful biking infrastructure, and little to no public transportation. The density and age of old world cities have so many side effects that I think it's impossible to meaningfully compare them with American cities.
That said, don't read this as an endorsement of urban planning in the average American city. Here in SoCal even the suburbs are relatively dense and well designed (tons of parking lots notwithstanding) but I've seen some really awful examples like Salt Lake City where it seems every other street is a six lane megastroad.
There were roads before cars and trucks:
> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” He considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.
* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic
Various goods and services managed to be delivered even before cars/trucks. FedEx is experimenting/using cargo bikes for example:
* https://curbsidecycle.com/blogs/blog/fedex-launches-first-no...
The 'extra' use by personal vehicles and non-essential transport trucks adds to shortened lifespans and higher maintenance costs.
You are lucky! Currently the average cost of a new car is ~$48k. Not including fuel, if I priced out a car to around $40k and took a loan at 5% interest for five years. I would already be looking at about $10k a year. Add in insurance, fuel, excise tax, registration, inspection, etc. it would go up to ~$13k for the first 5 years.
My fifteen year old car costs about $6,000 for me this year (with repairs, oil changes, and fuel costs, insurance, etc.). If I lived in an urban environment with good transit like NYC it would cost me about $2k-$3k a year in commuter costs if I traveled by bus and subway every day round trip.
Well no, because the new 40K car doesn't evaporate after 10 years. You can sell it for some money or just keep using it longer to bring your yearly average down.
Also nobody needs a new 40K car. If you can afford it want to enjoy that, have fun. But if you're trying to bring transportation costs down, buy a used 10K car and drive that one for ten years.
Averages going to average.
The direct costs of someone with a VW versus and Audi versus a Porsche are going to be different.
Also: depreciation doesn't show up on a dealer work order or credit card statement, but it's a real thing.
The noise of trains also reduces the value of the properties next to the tracks.
Just no contest between trains and cars.
It doesn't really matter which "exhaust" technology is used; at highway speeds that is the most irrelevant part of the noise (the pollution side is another story), with the air/wooshing sounds dominating heavily.
As the article mentions, increasing rail infrastructure would logically include regional connections first. It's not like we'd be building a train track everywhere there's a road
That said, it’s also very important to remember that things come in different flavors: the noise of a massive freight train pulled by diesel-electric locomotives is usually an order of magnitude greater than a light passenger train pulled by an electric motor, and all of those are generally better than busy car traffic which is less consistent and has outliers (boy racers, vehicles which aren’t or shouldn’t be street legal, etc.).
We live near a multipurpose rail corridor and I notice one particular CSX locomotive more than anything else, followed by regular freight trains and automobile traffic. The electric metro trains and newer electric buses are almost unnoticeable.
Trains are a low rumble for a couple of seconds every ten minutes ago. Cars are a constant whining noise. It is bad enough that I can't work in my home office with the window open next to a busy street, but trains aren't an issue at all.
To be fair, I do live in a country where almost all trains are electric and do not honk at railroad crossings.
So you can have both high-density development around train stations and car parks for people who need to drive. It's not an XOR situation. The U.S. just tends to be wasteful with its land, because it has so much of it.
> The noise of trains also reduces the value of the properties next to the tracks.
There are probably edge-cases where this is so, but in general being near a train station tends to boost property values. Now, obviously being near the station but far from the line would be ideal, but near station near line is probably better than "no train".
(This is assuming commuter service, where if you're near the line you're probably near a station. I suppose long distance lines with no commuter service running through built up areas would be an exception, but that's unusual in most places).
A very good public transport and walking and cycling city is great, but it is no substitute for a car, as the >50% of households in London, massive fleets of cars in Netherlands, etc will attest to.
Let’s also not forget that economists often state that in a bad economy it can be a good idea to invest in infrastructure (including roads) as it provides employment and can help boost the economy after the economy has recovered from a recession, due to better logistics.
Certainly a country like The Netherlands benefits a lot from it’s high quality infrastructure. Makes it very quick and easy to transport goods from a harbor like Rotterdam to Germany.
If we think for a minute, railroads are WAY cheaper to set up and maintain, compared to a road covering the same route. They are also more fuel efficient than cars.
We could have a system where parcels are brought to your towns post office by train, you get to the post office by feet.
Freight is also much cheaper to move by train, but poor management moved a LOT of freight out of trains into trucks, because we are in a "just in time" manufacturing paradigm (you want to hold as little inventory as possible and receive loads when they need to be processed), where the flexibility of trucks beats trains.
The sunk cost of roads puts us in a weird, uncomfortable place if we want to move forward with a more efficient/green transportation.
Fixed that for you.
If I benefit by $5k and you lose out by $1k that's a net gain of $4k (yeay), but it's not good or you.
It is good to have well maintained roads. It is not good to have what the U.S. has.
See "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ
We don't care about the densities of entire countries, we care about the densities of where people live: cities.
For the US, 40% of the population lives in counties on a coast:
* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html
200M people live with-in 100 mi (160 km) of a border:
* https://www.aclu.org/documents/constitution-100-mile-border-...
The US population is already highly concentrated:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:County_population_map.web...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_coun...
There are large swaths of the US where there's a whole lotta nothing (population-wise).
The entire eastern seaboard from Boston down to Washington has a population of 50 million and a density of 900/sqm, 3 times the density of France, and 50% higher than Germany, and similar to Benelux (1000/sqm, 30 million)
The "America is big" argument doesn't really apply when you look at regions. Southern California is similar density to Italy and Switzerland.
You can't compare 'New Jersey' with the Netherlands (though, you could compared it to say the province of Utrecht) they are at different levels in the 'org' and that has massive effects for things like public transport. In order to get coast to coast public transport you'd have to take the whole of the country (the United States) into account and then you'll find that that average population density suddenly matters a lot.
Of course you can always chop up that big country into many small pieces and then focus on the few that are above the average of any other country but that's not a useful thing to do.
Sure, but coast-to-coast is not what matters. Moving people between where they need/want to go is what matters. I suppose a very large portion of all trips people in NJ makes on an annual basis is not coast-to-coast. It is within New Jersey or adjacent communities.
So even if you zoom out from let's say NL to all of Europe and you compare Europe with the United States you still end up with a difference in how public transport is arranged. There simply isn't a nearly empty heartland.
Compare public transport in the Berlin metro area (6 million, 500 per square mile) with the bay area (7 million, 1100 per square mile), or the Rhine-Main region (5 million, 1000 per square mile)
While the points you make are interesting, there is a massive swath of the us in between New York and LA, and I think that's where the argument is made.
I'm in Canada with 38 millions individuals in the second largest country in the world, I can assure you it's quite different from Europe. (Edit: just looked it up and we get about 15 people per mile!)
On average, North Americans also drive about double the distance europeans do per year.
95% of Canadians who drive on a commute in 2016 drove for under 1 hour, which can reasonably be approximated to under 50 miles [0]
If you remove the 3 territories the population of Canada doesn't change but the density pretty much doubles. 99.99% of Canadians have never even been to one of the territories. In the US, adding Alaska to the union made no difference to the viability of public transport, but massively reduced population density.
Looking at the density of a large country is meaningless. Just because Scotland has a population density the same as Michigan doesn't mean that the Central Belt can't maintain a decent public transport system. The density of that area of Scotland is around the Netherlands level.
What's important in the density of a specific economic area.
[0] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2019001/article...
You seem to take this to heart so I'll leave you to it.
Thank you for the correction.
For example, we need some amount of farms in rural areas, so we need at a minimum roads to those cars. But we probably also don’t want to force farmers to live completely isolated, so farmers need some amount of rural community. Stores, schools etc… then we need fire, police, water, power. And all of those things require roads for access and maintenance.
Then add in the fact that none of this is centrally planned, and that there’s a definite need for redundancy.
- space-constrained so your urban density doesn't reduce because of cars
- have very good public transportation so that most people stay off the road no matter what, otherwise traffic makes your cars too slow to bring anything.
These conditions are almost never met, but maybe they are in the Netherlands as an exception to the rule.
(Seriously people out East have no idea what a mountain is, and people out west have no idea what a river is in the US)
If anything, being so large and not having waterways should provide a good incentive to use rail transport. Freight trains really suck for short distances, so cross-continental transport is pretty much ideal for them.
Unfortunately the US is stuck with companies like CSX and Union Pacific actively sabotaging rail transport by using "precision-scheduled railroading", actively ripping up tracks and electrification, and strongly resisting any attempts to modernize the network. On paper they are doing great, but their service is really bad and their safety record is abysmal.
There were roads before cars and trucks:
> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” He considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.
* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic
And goods were delivered. Of course we can still allow automobiles for commercial purposes while discouraging their use for private transport (or at least prioritizing non-auto transport).
A lot of things that seem to require an automobile do not:
> "'One of the causes of frequent bickerings is the bicycle. The Plumbers' Union has a rule, which is rigidly enforced, prohibiting the members from utilizing the bike in connection with their work. The rule is regarded as necessary to protect the men. When the bicycle came into popular use, the plumbers found that some of their number would go spinning around town on their wheels for the benefit of the bosses. The result was that the plumber without a bike soon found himself at a disadvantage. One of them explained the matter in this wise: "'Suppose two men were sent out on a job and both had practically the same kind and the same amount of work to do. They would both leave the shop at the same time, but the fellow with the wheel would reach the place where the work was to be done before his brother plumber would. If some tool or piece of material had been forgotten, the man with the wheel would go spinning to the shop, while the other fellow would have to walk or take a streetcar. The man with the wheel could make better time on a job in consequence, and the boss would be liable to find him a more desirable man, notwithstanding that it was no fault of the other man. In fact, the man without the wheel might be the fastest and best workman. We want this rule against the bicycle enforced in all the shops.'"
* https://heatinghelp.com/dead-men-tales/bicycles-and-heating-...
The Plumbers' Union banned the used of bicycle as they were considered an unfair competitive advantage.
How many kids do you have?
The way i see it all arguments for reducing reliance on cars comes from people in metropolitan areas enjoying single life and not planning for a family.
Giving the way my generation is with money the hostility most likely comes not from ideological reasons but simply because we are unable to afford them altogether thus it's being masked as some honorable cause instead of petty spite.
I'm certainly not one of those families; my kids are typically transported like little mafia bosses in the back as they plan their crimes.
My older kid, though, started going to a new school, that's quite far away and he walks down to the train station, gets on the train, gets off at the end of the line and takes a light rail subway 2 stops to his school. It's terrifying, as a parent, to send him off like that, but it's been wonderful for him and he's grown tremendously.
The most dangerous part of that commute, btw, is crossing the street to the train station -- it's 1/4th of a mile from my house, but that specific crossing kills a person every 18 months, almost to the day, and has for the past 15 years I've lived in this neighborhood. Any talk about fixing the problem, especially if the fix may inconvenience drivers, will provoke such rage as you wouldn't believe from otherwise seemingly sane people.
So metropolitan area. Do you think its by choice or necessity? The way i see it no one would take their sick kid to the doctors by subway/bike if they had a access to a car.
> will provoke such rage as you wouldn't believe from otherwise seemingly sane people.
That's human, we all participate in recreational outrage when it suits us be it drivers or those who oppose them. Sorry to hear about that crossing and hope your kids will be fine.
This is the "boston / oakland / summerville / cambridge" hipster zone. Some stick it out and some move to Marin or Andover.
[edit]
I should say -- I feel far safer putting my kid on a train than I would letting him carpool to school with other kids his age. Even with the very lethal street crossing. Kids are terrible drivers, especially if you put more than one of them in the car at the same time.
Goes into depth on some of the complexity, with one conclusion that car culture in general is reinforcing for many reasons, including more cars making it more dangerous making cars more attractive.
> Are you suggesting they're a reasonable justification for a $14K annual public subsidy per household (TFA)?
Yes, i would take those numbers with a grain of salt but yes. If you remove roads and cars neither the goods nor people you hire will get to you.
At that point you are left with just leaving for somewhere else and starting the whole 'defund public infrastructure we rely on' campaign all over again - it's shortsighted at best and borderline malicious.
They used to have highways through the city and they destroyed them and prioritized biking and pedestrians. Showing: it can be done.
Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes has two:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA
See also:
> Heather Moore-Farley was pregnant with her third child when the family’s car died on route home from vacation. Her husband’s office was walkable from home, as was a Zipcar share. So to help save both money and the environment, the family decided to see how long they could go without a car. Two days before they welcomed their youngest child, “we ordered a cargo bike and just kept going,” said Moore-Farley, who lives in Oakland. That was 10 years ago. They still haven’t replaced the family car.
* https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a40299756/fa...
> Traipsing 3 kids around to school, daycare, and extracurricular activities wouldn’t be easy. How would they grocery shop to fill all those mouths? What about family vacations, weekend trips away, or heading out to the movies – could they survive?
* https://www.ratehub.ca/blog/the-family-of-5-that-went-car-fr...
> Biking with kids is all the rage in Portland these days, but biking with six kids between the ages of 2 and 11? That’s something I never would have thought possible before I met southeast Portland resident Emily Finch.
* https://bikeportland.org/2012/06/28/with-six-kids-and-no-car...
Also, number of kids and population count of your town please.
Despite living in a suburb, this was actually the case for my kids' first daycare! That particular daycare didn't work out, but there was one about 1.5 miles away instead of 1 mile that we did instead. This is what is possible when neighborhoods are built with mixed uses, rather than being miles of only homes, like the typical poorly-thought-out subdivision.
Also, this aggressive asking "oh yeah how many kids and where" to a second person after me is quite off-putting. I have no desire to share that info with somebody who is asking like that.
City of 1.7 million. Probably what you'd call a single-story streetcar suburb with occasional multi-family building.
Also even if parents need to manually transport under-5s everywhere, this should certainly not be the case with older children.
Think how much better your life would be if you didn't have to worry about cars killing your children, as it's one of the biggest sources of child death.
Imagine the freedom if your kids could go to sports practice, to school, to music lesson, without you driving them everywhere.
People in he Us have some sort of Stockholm Syndrome with cars. Their are our captor but we seem to love them still.
I am not advocating for getting rid of all cars, or even saying that car-dependent areas should be banned! I'm advocating for allowing those who want to choose something other than a car to have that choice. However, the way that US law is constructed, and 99% of land use is planned, a car is needed to fetch a loaf of bread, get to daycare, visit friends, or to perform any of the basics of life. Imagine your house is an island, and every other destination is an island, and your car is the only way to get between them. That's the assumption of the entire US planning professions.
Thank you.
Now I'm in a suburb, and the closest services are about a mile away, so everyone is dependent on a car. I can get most of my day done on bike, and the kids definitely prefer bikes to the car, but as they get older and have needs further out we will be car dependent again
But it doesn't have to be that way. Transit can fill that gap when you want something bigger than a small rural town. However, cars have been baked into most of our suburban design in a way that transit can not grow to fill that gap. We have planned our entire suburban areas around the idea of being stuck in a car for all needs.
My partner and I would honestly prefer a city, but cities have also been planned to keep as many people out as possible, so very few new apartments get built, and when they are built, it's usually almost entirely single and two bedroom apartments because there's such a huge backlog of demand to live in cities.
There is a better life possible, but US law has made it illegal to build.
"Many" is doing a lot of work in your claim.
I recently moved to Houston where it feels like every road is a six lane stroad. If transportation were reduced to mass transit, bike lanes, and commercial transit like deliveries, how many of those roads would we need?
- 1 or 2 car lanes (each way)
- a tram line (one each way on each side of the street, or in the middle)
- a separated, 2 way bike lane on either side of the street
- a separated (from the bike lane) sidewalk
- a canal
As you can imagine, this takes up a lot of space. Despite this, things feel much more walkable. The reason? No enormous parking lots around every store. Parking is generally almost entirely done at P+R parking lots outside of town, then taking public transit in.
You can walk from your home to a cafe or corner shop for fresh produce almost everywhere I lived in Mexico.
Not until I moved back to the US did I remember how us sad Americans (or at least Texans) have to pile into a car just to drive to a cafe, though inside the city/suburbs this is also caused by zoning laws.
Granted, I'm just ranting. But I forgot how bad it was. Fortunately, some of this is very slowly changing. Even Houston is laying down more bike paths: https://houstonbikeplan.org/houston-bike-plan-map/
> In addition those 6-lane highways are all toll roads
6-lane means total lanes, so 3-4 in each direction like Richmond Ave or Westheimer Rd in Houston which you have to take just to get to the gym or grocery store.
But I think you need to go to Houston on Google Maps and look at all of the freeways that are 5-6 lanes in each direction bursting out like tentacles from the center in all directions. It seems like you're not aware that these exist?
Where I live, we don't really have those, but...
> lost productivity from sitting in traffic
That part of the cost equation is flipped upside down here (where I live) if you start looking at any of the currently-available alternatives. Public transit is a nightmare to navigate. What would be a 12-minute drive from my house to the work shop ends up taking a bit over an hour, assuming the buses all arrive on time and you don't end up missing a connection. And there won't be much productivity happening on that trip, the city uses the busses to move high school students around right around the same time I'd be going to and from work. In the summer it would quicker to bike for sure.
Ultimately, though, I've found the best way of all to cut down on the commute: just work from home! Can't do it every day when we're in the middle of a hardware build, but lots of days it works out just fine.
There were roads before cars and trucks:
> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” He considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.
* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic
Various goods managed to be delivered even before cars/trucks.
And it would be possible to restrict/prioritize use towards commercial vehicles.
If I understand it correctly, it means that damage to roads is completely dominated by trucks, as long as you have more than 10,000 cars per truck. Near my home I would estimate it at around 100 cars for every truck.
This means that cars are completely negligible, and that supporting road construction and repair by taxes (ideally, direct taxes on the truck users, which is then rolled on to consumers through higher prices) is correct.
That'd already massively reduce the amount of driving required, as you suddenly no longer need to drive a few miles for your groceries. And because you don't arrive by car the grocery store doesn't need a huge parking lot either.
Nobody is proposing getting rid of all roads, they clearly have value. People are just proposing making it possible to live without requiring a car for something as basic as grocery shopping. As long as cities are built from a car-centric perspective first, they will require a car to live in.
Not saying it's completely equivalent. A lot of these were probably suicides and all, but let's not pretend subways are a magical utopia full of unicorns.
Look up the facts instead of just making shit up and trying to put your crazy words into other people's mouths.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/02/nyc-subway-track-deaths-soar-d...
>In fact, it’s startling the number of deaths underground could even begin to rival the number of deaths above ground, where unlicensed and drunk drivers speed and take fast turns.
>What’s going on? Of 1,365 known subway-track incidents in 2022 (most of which didn’t end in death), about 15% were accidental falls or medical emergencies, a new MTA analysis finds.
>A thankfully surprisingly low number — fewer than 10% — was suicides or suicide attempts.
>An even smaller percentage was assaults — that is, people being pushed to the tracks. (Though with pushes to the tracks comprising three of last year’s 10 subway murders, a 30-year high, a small percentage is too many.)
>In most cases — well more than two-thirds — people ended up on the tracks voluntarily.
>In 20% of total cases, people were clearly mentally ill (but not attempting suicide); in another 10% or so, people were drugged or drunk.
>And in nearly half of total trespassing cases, the MTA or NYPD found people just walking the tracks — walking to homeless encampments on MTA property, writing graffiti, just . . . wandering about.
>Two such trespassers were graffiti writers from France; they died under a Brooklyn train last April.
>And some “accidents” — more and more — are subway surfers.
>Two 15-year-old surfers have been killed in the past four months, and another 15-year-old lost his arm this year.
The numbers you pulled out of your ass are so extremely off from the reality.
https://jknylaw.com/new-york-car-accident-lawyer/statistics
>How Many Car Accidents Are There in NYC Every Year?
>It depends on the year. In 2019, there were a total of 134,224 car accidents in New York City. In 2020, the year of a raging pandemic, reported collisions declined by roughly 50%, for a total of 88,323. In 2021, a year still largely influenced by COVID, accidents increased to a total of 97,059. As of October 2022, there have been 52,341 car accidents year-to-date in the Big Apple based on preliminary data.
>So, despite the fact that NYC came to a near-halt in 2020, there was still an average of 303 car accidents on the city’s streets every single day that year. And things have only gotten worse since then – although it is too early to tell for 2022. [...]
>How Many Accidents in NYC Are Fatal?
>Every year, hundreds of people are killed in car accidents in New York City:
2019: 211 car accident fatalities
2020: 235 car accident fatalities
2021: 245 car accident fatalities
>How Often Are Pedestrians Involving New York Traffic Accidents?
>In 2021, 8.9% of all motor vehicle accidents in the city involved a pedestrian.
>That year, there were a total of 8,693 pedestrian accidents. 7,205 caused an injury, while the remaining 125 were fatal.
>Brooklyn is the most dangerous borough for pedestrians, while Staten Island is the safest:
Brooklyn: 2,956 pedestrian accidents (34.0%)
Queens: 2,002 pedestrian accidents (23.0%)
Bronx: 1,748 pedestrian accidents (20.1%)
Manhattan: 1,740 pedestrian accidents (20.0%)
Staten Island: 247 pedestrian accidents (2.8%)
Statistically speaking, about 3 out of every 5 pedestrian
accidents take place in Brooklyn or Queens.
"But as with everything else in New York in the past three years, things went awry. Last year’s 88 track deaths were 35% above the 2018 and 2019 averages — 65 each year.
For context, 120 pedestrians died above ground last year in crashes with cars or trucks, close to the average of 121 in 2018 and 2019"
You are even repeating them - and nicely moving the goal post from "death" to "injury".
Using "safety " to argue against cars is not productive, "safety" can be applied anywhere and everywhere.
I am fine with the idea of banning cars in certain parts of cities and requiring cities (at least downtown) be walkable.
It's a good thing even for the people who love cars.
Let's start from the need of density. In the past cities was a nightmare but a need, in the modern era they was the motor of any civilization since they was the place where ideas can be exchanged and so evolve, where most enterprises and customers and workers co-exist. But after the first logistic revolution in the '80s most productions have gone outside the city, in entirely artificial distopic district build around mega-factories, where worker's live, but not where customers live, without really exchange of ideas being "isolated big factories". With TLC/IT (bad) evolution we finally got enough bandwidth and work models to work remotely, exchange ideas remotely, the new agorà is on the internet (BBS, nntp news, then the web).
So? So, well, cities once needed for many reasons do exists only for very few reasons, the most prominent is being kind of labor camps for poor who live to work, to earn enough to pay services they need to live. Unable to substantially improve their condition since costs suck most of their earning.
In that sense the cost of public transport is the cost of keeping up a decadent gigantic structure: the city. A shared cost with some other cleptocratic business, but nothing else. This cost is HUGE.
Some, let's say McKinsey dream flying cars https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... and while I'm less optimistic in timetable and scalability terms that's the cheaper theoretical evolution we can hope for. Because IF we will been able to reach a point where we can move anything by air then we can give up roads who are one of the most expensive logistic infra we need anyway for low density area, far less expensive but since so many road not less expensive than the hyper expensive high speed and high capacity roads links between cities.
IF we will reach such goal (and I'm pretty convinced not so fast, but we will) than the best density balance will be leaving and working spread in vast areas in small buildings, perhaps with just few district for things that we still can't do at smaller scale.
As we chosen to go from mainframe to cluster, for mega-ship and mega-plane to smaller ones, so we will do for living.
Collective transportation does not fit AT ALL despite the contrary interested propaganda.
I live in America and make enough money to spend part of my year in various cities across Europe. It saddens me to think that the average American can't imagine how good life can be with fewer cars.
Too bad there are so many careless people like you.
I have been to Singapore. It is a sort of utopia when it comes to mass transit and public transport in general. I suggest people move there if they want to live in a world technically devoid of cars.
A future without indivual personal transport is one I do not personally, want, will vote for or can support. This goes to the core of individual freedom. Yes people from outside the US also care deeply about individual rights.