Everything about cars is a scam. Buying, insurance, and infrastructure. If you live somewhere where you have to drive, you are a captive audience. We need other methods of transportation to compete with cars to reduce overall transportation costs.
I don't think you appreciate just how incredibly massive this country is. I have to drive 15 miles to work everyday. If I couldn't drive, I would literally just starve and die (or, I suppose start working as a local farmhand).
It's funny, I feel the same way about people who live in small areas and don't have the ability to independently go anywhere they want at any time without having to rely on someone else. The "walkable city" feels like a hellscape archetype for the most captive audience you could ever possibly conceive...
On the other hand, I don’t think you appreciate how much vehicle usage in this country is tied to round trip commutes to and from an urban center
I don’t think anyone is arguing that a rural lifestyle should exist on bikes and trains because that doesn’t make sense. However people who live adjacent to a city and go into the city every day, aren’t living a rural lifestyle.
> It's funny, I feel the same way about people who live in small areas and don't have the ability to independently go anywhere they want at any time without having to rely on someone else. The "walkable city" feels like a hellscape archetype for the most captive audience you could ever possibly conceive...
These are not mutually exclusive concepts unless you live in Manhattan.
I live a 10 minute walk to a subway station that brings me downtown to work. I also have a driveway and a car, and sometimes I drive to the parking garage next to my work. I also drive all over New England on the weekends.
People really, really do not understand what living rural is like.
The same criticism applies equally well to rural dwellers about urban life which is why someone rural could be shocked by the idea someone might actively choose to to travel by high quality public transportation.
I have lived both rural and urban and actively choose urban. Rural is a fine choice too, but rural dwellers shouldn't expect their energy intensive and economically expensive lifestyle to be subsidized by urban dwellers forever. Maintaining a huge road network with relatively low utilization is massively expensive and western rural life is currently among the most carbon intensive lifestyles.
> Maintaining a huge road network with relatively low utilization is massively expensive and western rural life is currently among the most carbon intensive lifestyles.
Yet it's necessary, and cheaper than the alternative when you have industry which must exist in a rural setting (such as farming). Attempting to mandate public transport for rural settings would cost more, and may even be more carbon intensive.
So as much as people who live in rural areas shouldn't dictate how public transport is instituted in dense urban areas, neither should urbanites dictate how transport in rural areas is managed.
Farmers get a pass since they are producing things on the land. Everyone else who chooses to live rural or exurban doesn't get to object to urban dwellers wanting quality transit or to reduce the prominence of cars in urban spaces.
And the people who maintain farmers' equipment?
Purchasers of farmers' goods?
The people who sell food to farmers?
The people who maintain infrastructure?
Mail?
Which is to say, where there are farmers (or ranchers etc), there is a whole city nearby who supports them. And cities imply infrastructure - like roads.
Farms take land, but cities should not. They should be designed to be effective in most ways by minimizing distance travelled for most common trips.
"I would literally starve and die". This is a sad, sad comment. I would laugh but I just find it so sad that you've got all these able bodied adults unable to get around without wheelchairs.
Wall-E isn't about the future.
I suspect that some of this is a result of humans being increasingly unable to estimate true distances. In my city, it can take 45 minutes to drive 3 miles, so most non-bikers understand 3 miles to be an insurmountable distance.
Of course, if you do walk a mile then that's a "hike". In British that's also just called a walk.
Having experienced the public transit systems in Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, and the midwest US. It's entirely obvious who is failing.
Though, despite our short comings, in a lot of cities it _is_ possible to use public transit, I did for years and it sucked and I had to compensate with Uber more often then I would have liked but at least I didn't have a car payment (in hindsight I should have just bought a car, but it was a humbling experience that I don't regret.)
> Having experienced the public transit systems in Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore
The Seoul Metro, widely considered to be one of the best in the world, also lost like a billion dollars a year for the past decade or so, with the shortfall made up for by taxes. The story is similar for many transit systems around the world as well as around the US.
Now, you could argue that it's worth it, but let's at least make sure we know that there is also a public transit tax, as well.
Transportation infrastructure of any mode is massively expensive and is undertaken to facilitate all sorts of economic activity. Public transportation being held to a standard of direct profit is something no other public infrastructure is expected to achieve.
But I do mean to imply that often times comparisons are made between car-centric cities and public transit-centric cities without any close attention to the actual costs involved, nor a sober cost-benefit analysis. It seems like it's usually categorical statements like "public transit is better and cars shouldn't exist" or "you'll pry the steering wheel from my cold, dead fingers".
> Public transportation being held to a standard of direct profit is something no other public infrastructure is expected to achieve.
Perhaps most people don't think about it, but even roads and bridges need to be profitable one way or another. There are many famous examples of "bridges to nowhere"-type public works projects throughout history where some massive infrastructure work was done in a place that won't use that level of infrastructure, usually through corruption. Everyone loses when that happens.
I guess public transit systems seem to be unfairly targeted for (as you said) "a standard of direct profit" because it's usually built and maintained by a centralized authority, vs. roads which are built and maintained by many different layers of government, with more diffuse paths of revenues and expenditures.
That figure, of course, does not include the amount of money that we spent on our cars to drive on those highways. Maintenance. Insurance. Fees.
It does not capture deaths from car accidents (over 4,000, children among them) life changing injuries and maimings (many more than 4,000), choking air pollution, the thousands of tons of tire plastic that washed into the Pacific that year, and obviously the carbon emissions, which probably approached a hundred million tons. Smaller things as well; the stress, the noise, billions of hours spent sitting in traffic. The natural environment that was destroyed to build roads and highways.
If you spent 4 billion to cut that incomprehensible number by just 10 percent you would come out ahead -- not by a little but by a monstrous lot.
Sorry that came off very heated. I really do hate cars, it's not really directed at you.
The Seoul Capital Region is 26 million people crammed in a 4,500 square mile metropolitan area.
California is 40 million spread across 156,000 square miles.
It makes sense that CA gets more funding for roads and highways given that the population is much less dense.
Even when you factor in Metropolitan areas in CA, the distances are much larger - the Bay Area has the same population and area as the state of Massachusetts (9,000 square miles and 9 million people), yet I don't see subway connecting Boston to Worcester or Springfield.
That's functionally the same ask that a lot of Public transit supporters (which I am btw) are pushing for, and it doesn't make sense. The area is way too large for a system like the Boston T or the NYC Subway to be created, and the Bay's current setup of local subways (Muni/VTA) mixed with commuter rails (BART/Caltrain/ACE) makes more sense given the size.
You would think corporations would finally place their offices in more liveable areas but for some reason they feel the need to build in city centers, and inconvenience their employees.
> propping up highly toxic industries such as commercial real estate, restaurants, oil, and of course car sales and manufacturing
This reminds me of the assertion that inflation is below 2% now, if we exclude food, energy, shelter, and used cars[0]. Life is great, if we don't meet in person to do work, break bread together, and get ourselves around to provide goods and services?
What's left, if you remove the "highly toxic" industries?
[0]: https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1712494317024026761