In praise of America's car addiction | Hacker News Reader

In praise of America's car addiction

economist.com

20 pointsghaff35 comments

I had a hard time reading this, but this quote really killed me:

> public-transit options between distant suburbia and city centres are roughly comparable in America and Europe

I used to live in America in four different cities, from east to west. I also traveled all over the US.

I now live in Europe, and travel to many countries here as well.

Every time I visit the US these days, I don’t have car access at first. Whether visiting parents or friends in many different parts of the country, it is impossible to exist without a car. I might be able to do a couple things nearby, but not much, and I feel incredibly stranded. The best option is Uber, since one bus an hour that often doesn’t show up at all, is quite hard to plan around.

Meanwhile, every European city that I’ve visited, I haven’t driven a car once. Actually, I’ve never driven a car on this continent despite living here for a year. I’m still able to visit wineries in the countryside of Italy, remote towns with wildlife and hiking, and all of the groceries and restaurants you could possibly need. Only by taking incredibly easy and efficient public transit.

Also in my home country of Europe, I commute to work in a different but nearby town, just like I did in the US. Each commute is similar in length, ~30-35 mins. The difference, is that I pay maybe 60-90 €/month total, for all of my transportation at home. Commuting, visiting friends, going to the further-away park. In the US, it was easily $600-$800 per month for insurance, gas, depreciation, and maintenance, and I didn’t drive that fancy of a car. Multiple that by two for a household and it makes an absolutely enormous difference. Also, it’s a comparably-sized apartment in both places, but in Europe it’s about 30% cheaper and I’m close to the city. It’s just more dense here, which is what makes everything else possible.

So, no, it is not even close.

I don’t know what the article is basing this on, or how true it is, but it and your anecdotes could both be true.

There’s a good bit of selection bias to your statement because you’re starting out in the city, not some random distant suburb.

Just because you can visit some places far away, doesn’t mean that all far away places can easily get to the city.

Maybe not all, but there also aren’t really suburbs here anyways. The “suburbs” are their own mini cities which are also walkable with everything you need. I travel out there often for different things like unique shops.

Each little “suburb town” has a train station which is usually directly connected to the city center

Edit: the suburbs here are usually a bit less dense though, with plenty of row houses and a some single family homes (close together). Still far more compact than the US though.

I do live in a particularly good country (Netherlands), which is definitely worth noting, but I think my experience in lots of traveling helps that I’ve never been limited in where I can go

I don’t doubt there are far fewer suburbs in Europe, but is it possible that what you’re describing also has an element of selection bias.

Since you’ve never driven a car, you’ve never really seen the places that don’t fit the mold you’re describing.

Very true! I’m positive that there are places that don’t fit my experience — but I think the majority does seem to match, at least in the places I’ve been (most of the popular Western European countries)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...

Give the US a few centuries to catch up to European density and let's talk then.

Density of the entire country is not super relevant — the vast vast majority of travel is within a city or two away from where you live.

I’m not saying that nobody should ever drive, and if you have a long ways to go between obscure locations it totally makes sense to drive.

But if the US optimized for the 99% of trips that people make, within 30 miles of where they live, then it just comes down to regular urban planning where density can be “whatever you design”.

But yeah this is specific to cities and suburbs, I’m not trying to imply anything about people who live further out or who are making far-away trips.

If your household only needed one car for the monthly trips to grandmas or out for camping in the wilderness, and you didn’t need to drive at all around your city, that would still be a huge win for Americans today. Especially those with kids who depend on the parents for transportation by car.

The 30 miles on each side of most people in the US includes a lot of open space.

NYC isn't 30 miles east of me. There are rural farms only a few miles west. This is representative of the edge of the most dense metro region in the US.

That's the density argument. Belgium and the Netherlands are 10X more dense than the US in aggregate. That 10X makes things wildly different and it tells you how relatively frequent cities and suburbs are there vs here.

The US does optimize for our open space. We have car infrastructure.

Again, give it a few centuries.

> Suburban bus transport is equally shit in Europe and USA [paraphrased]

Ridiculous thing to say. Suburbs, as a consequence of their low density, must have bad or nonexistent public transport - unless you somehow finance a billion busses driving idly around. Old and big European cities achieve good public transport by having people not live in suburbs.

> Old and big European cities achieve good public transport by having people not live in suburbs.

And by not having huge empty spaces between houses, wide roads, 2-garage houses with long driveways. Ultimately, it's a different geographical and historic reality.

> Old and big European cities achieve good public transport by having people not live in suburbs.

Yeah, and that sucks. Even in Europe, areas that have money and space to build have adopted pretty car-dependent layouts. In France, 70% of people outside Paris and Lyon drive to work: https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/smart-mobility/europe/feature...

> 70% of people outside Paris and Lyon drive to work

I don't see a problem with this. You use whatever works the best, and for smaller cities and towns that's going to be a car. Public transport only starts to make sense above the 1 million inhabitants mark, and even then it doesn't really get good until 2-3 million.

It has to do with density, not size.

I live in the Netherlands. Most major cities and smaller cities has good public transit and walkable centers. Not even Amsterdam has one 1 million inhabitants.

The general consensus about urban design suggest it's all about density, mixed zoning and separated bike paths and traffic calming.

Of course it's about density, but car-centric cities aren't really forced to become dense until they cross that 2-3 million threshold somewhere. But that's not what I wanted to say. The issue with the Netherlands is that the Randstad is really one big city, and that makes comparisons with other places misleading.

Funny how switzerland with no city above 500‘000 inhabitants has public transport to the furtest edge. Even to villages with only a few hundert people. The whole country only has 9mio peoples.

> Suburbs, as a consequence of their low density, must have bad or nonexistent public transport […]

Please note the silent car-centric in front of "suburb" here.

Suburbs used to be different pre-WW2:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

More generally it is sprawl—when residential is not with-in walking distance of commercial—that is the problem. You want to have cars be optional and not mandatory.

Also, "density" ≠ Manhattan/Hong Kong:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E

Cars are great. The problem is not cars, it's bad planning for walkability and alternate transport. You can have a large, sparse, American suburb, and also have a dense, walkable, bikeable, mostly-quiet city center that feels much more human and safe, and also have long-distance public transport for people who want or need it.

Well, OK, fossil fuel powered cars are a bit of an environmental midpoint, and just moving traffic out of city streets isn't quite enough if they have very nonlocal pollution on top of their local pollutants, but electrification and renewables are both set to make that problem far more sustainable already.

Seems like someone at the economist has been huffing gas again.

We are going to look back at the automotive era without rose colored glasses. For a century, we’ve loved our cars; they certainly haven’t loved us back.

The need for a car to do anything or go anywhere in most cities creates an implicit class divide. Your means of economic activity in any strata is dependent on efficient transportation, which is unavailable to car-less people in most cities not either with an extremely dense downtown or great public transit, which are rare in the US.

Public transit creates a class divide between people who can afford to live near train stations or high-frequency bus lines, and people who cannot. This is true even in places with excellent public transit. And the bar for being able to cross that class divide is much higher than the cost of a second or third hand car.

This is apparent if you just look around the country. Cities with good transit have far more inequality and visible class divides than suburban and rural America. My wife is from the Oregon coast, which is both poor and has no public transit to speak of. Virtually everyone has a car. They’re one of the main assets handed down in poor families. And the social hierarchy is extremely flat.

The Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, tends to be higher in rural vs. urban areas.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8562858/#:~:tex....

The issue isn’t income inequality but lifestyle inequality. Having a nice car versus a beater isn’t a big lifestyle difference in Iowa. Being able to afford to live near a subway station versus living on a bus line is a big lifestyle difference in NYC.

Also, census “metro areas” don’t capture “transit dependent” areas. New York City has the highest GINI in the country: https://www.socialexplorer.com/blog/post/social-explorer-ana.... Boston, Chicago, and New York are also much higher than say Idaho.

NYC's high Gini coefficient I'd wager has more to do with it being the economic center of the world and its disproportionate billionaires than bus line vs. subway line disparity. Likewise Boston and Chicago, their inequality is driven by the economic force of the peaks, not the middle class/lower class.

Why talk about cities' "accessibility zones" in area and not population? Sure, America has 1,160 accessible km²s vs Europe's 430, but that area is far less dense. The average population density of the US is just 94 people per sq mile [1], while Germany stands at 619 pp/mi² [2].

[1]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/built-environm...

[2]: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/germany-popul...

And inhospitable. Don't forget about that one.

I'm not one of the anti car people. But they make a good point. If you live in any sort of populated area that doesn't have a subway, every attempt to move any considerable distance is going to be unduly stressful.

The flip side is, if you live in a sparsely populated area, cars are a lifeline.

I understand why people want to at least get rid of architectures that create car dependence. Sometimes it's unavoidable, you live 30 miles from a grocery store. Other times it's unavoidable for a different reason, because your entire environment is paved over, and that really sucks.

Ah, conservatives.

I remember some conservative think tank back in the earlier days of the internet released an article praising the Star Wars Empire for being stable, merit-base, and probably something about trains running on time.

Of course cars have utility, but it is my precise critique of economics that it is unable to quantify and thus account for environmental damage that makes it so ineffective for anything beyond a couple years.

Of course the economist is totally oblivious. Economics loves dropping these little "practical common sense" articles "gee howdy did you ever think about that, or a smashed window not being fixed?" while the tools and political structure/influence of economics is used to keep the rich rich, the poor even poorer, and of course lead us on a path to destruction that the great economic minds of the day can offer no real solutions to avert.

Here's how this article should have gone:

Paragraph 1: a summation of the usefulness of the car, which can quite succinctly be summarized in a paragraph. Ok, add two for the amazing technological and scientific basis of the it.

Okay, then you start with BUT... and show you are not completely ignorant of the world.

https://archive.is/ogiUl

There's a threshold around 2-3 million inhabitants where cars just stop working, and you need to start building the Kowloon Cube. If you live in a city with less than 200k inhabitants car-oriented development is the only thing that makes sense. Different city sizes have different optimal solutions. Urbanists pushing for transit-oriented development in small towns are just as wrong as suburbanists pushing for bigger highways in LA.

I mean, I'm in a 90k inhabitants city (130k during summer, coz tourists like my city), I don't have a car and bike/ride bus everywhere.

But since they really developed the bike infrastructure and cut down street parking and limited street access during the day, the city is remarkably less loud, there is a lot more people outside even in winter and the life is overall better, for me. (also we can rent electric cargo bikes for 40 euro per month, and I see a lot of those nowadays).

How do you figure?

Why must it be Kowloon Cube and not any form with an intermediate density?

I live in Trollhättan, a Swedish city of about 60,000 people and don't have a car. It isn't hard. And Saabs were built here, so this isn't some sort of anti-car place.

I used to live in Santa Fe, NM a US city of about 70,000 people. I had a car, but across later visits was there for a couple months without a car and found life much harder.

Santa Fe was founded in 1610 so was a city for 300 years before cars became popular. Its population was about 5,000 in 1912, so most of the build-up was during the car era.

Trollhättan became a city in 1916, when the population was only 15,000, so again most of its build-up was during the car era.

Why does transit-oriented development make sense for Trollhättan but not Santa Fe?

When you say "small town", what size do you mean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town#United_States says it varies by quite a bit - Alabama says a town has a population of under 2,000, while in Connecticut, West Hartford is a town with a population of 64,083.

Could you gave an example of the urbanists you mean? There isn't much need for public transit if you can walk across town in 15 minutes.

Hydrocarbons is a hell of a drug.

Cars are great until they break.

Yeah, I'm a Bernie Sanders voting progressive who generally votes for "complete streets" or other forms of car unfriendly policies.

But make no mistake, cars are freedom. Take all the tradition left-wing shit about "biopower" or "biopolitics" like what Foucault talks about. Apply that sort of thinking to cars vs to mass transit. "The state" defines where mass transit systems will drop you off or not. If you have to be very inconvenienced by the states decision, tough shit. Applying it to cars, I am only limited by my vehicles ability to travel on paved vs unpaved roads. Americans have a unique freedom to buy insane brodozer off-roading gas guzzlers for far cheaper than pretty much anyone else. In many lightly policed places, they can literally drive anywhere they want, and not have to smell the BO of people around them.

I'm still going to vote against them most of the time, but make no mistake, there are very positive and valuable parts of a car based society. Same with individualism. Spend some time in a truly collectivist society, and you'll be begging for some more individualism real quick.

Real freedom would be to not have to deal with the burdens of car ownership. Ideally, I would much rather not have a car for my daily trips, and rent one when the need arises.

As a city slicker, I’ll admit that my appreciation of cars has increased since moving in without one.

I enjoy not having to drive for daily tasks, but being able to put a big Costco haul in your trunk is undeniably nice, a lot of outdoor recreation is (and can only be) practical with a car, and car renting is in a sorry state right now. It’s a pain in the ass and in the wallet, if you like to take trips on the weekends.

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