American society wasn't always so car-centric. Our future doesn't have to be
yaleclimateconnections.org
yaleclimateconnections.org
I used to live in Portland and Tri-Met and my bike were my two means of transportation for many years. I would absolutely not use public transportation in that city today.
Chicago and NYC have massively used transit systems despite their homeless populations. I lived in Chicago and I miss a real transit system here in TX badly.
That is to say, we don’t need to do A before B. We need to do A & B
Cities have proven they can not responsibly decide how much housing is permitted. Its too corrupt and the incentives are off
Some cities do not want housing/population growth. Why is that not okay?
It means cities and people cant’t behave like selfish children and never pitch in for the group.
Because "Fuck you, I've got mine" is no way to organize society. Local control enabled a race to the bottom of trying to fob the poors off on someone else.
This won't change until properties stop being good investment vehicles, and that won't change since land is finite and demand for housing in desirable areas is always growing, therefore increasing the opportunity for profit and wealth accumulation.
Local democratic governments is the American way.
If you want to wall off your city, it should come with consequences such that you are not allowed to pay for services at a wage less than that which would suppprt somebody living in your city. Typical homes values are at $2.5M? That requires income of $500K to purchase, so no more nurses or cashiers or anybody else's enabling your life that does not get paid at that level.
Your taking of property is a continuous denial of other people living in a place. You paid a fix price, sure, but when the value increases, you are now taking far more away from the rest of society.
Land is not made by human hands. You should have the right to the fruits of your labor, but land is our common birthright, and just by being born first your should not be absolved from paying for what you are taking from everyone else.
Because it’s being enforced on everyone not just those who like things the way they are. The bar is always higher when you want to force people to do something.
Unless one contends that there is no housing crises, then it’s not up for debate that local control got us into this mess.
Because substantially all cities do not want housing growth. They're all operating under the same set of incentives.
In order to have a vote in local elections, you have to be a resident. In localities with predominantly owner-occupied properties, this implies that you're a property owner. So you vote for policies that increase local housing costs, because you've got yours and you want its price to go up rather than down.
Suppose there are people in San Francisco who would like to move to San Jose or Los Angeles or San Diego, and vice versa. Everyone in San Francisco wants their property in San Francisco to get more expensive and the properties they might buy anywhere else to get less expensive, and likewise for every other city. But since only the people already in San Francisco can vote in San Francisco, the interests of all the people who want to move there are not being represented, and likewise the interests of all the people in San Francisco who want to move to San Jose but don't get a vote in San Jose.
If you move this to the state level, all of the people in San Jose and Los Angeles and San Diego can vote to lower housing costs in San Francisco and vice versa, and since the people outside of a given city outnumber the people in it, the balance could shift in favor of housing affordability instead of the untenable status quo.
Prohibiting rent control at the state level would be a great move because economists broadly agree that it's a terrible idea and then you get all the previously paid off tenants whose rent would increase clamoring for other measures to get housing costs down and increase the incentive for new construction. (Many other states sensibly already prohibit it at the state level.)
The cake is a lie.
City of Berkeley used 'noise' as a reason to block a UC Berkeley student housing project on environmental grounds. State just passed a law to make that illegal.
Judge just told Beverly Hills they can't issue any permits until they comply with state law.
[1] Newsom wants to be president and he knows he isn't going to get there on diversity and pronouns. He has to focus on jobs, housing, and crime.
Some people are just scared of homeless people, poor people, or non-white people (or a mixture of the three). For those people, the issue isn't the actual safety, but their own discomfort or anxiety.
I'd bet that the injury rates on commuting even the scary bus routes here are comparable to or below the injury rate from driving.
[0]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/weve-b... - the notoriously conservative Seattle Times.
We've tried that. It didn't go well.
All other advanced nations besides the US do (or did) public housing quite effectively. Even very conservative places like Singapore have amazing public housing.
Somehow people don't want to live in concrete jungle. The ugliness of grey cement destroys our own sense of self worth.
You want public housing? I'm not going to argue for it; there's worse things to spend t tax dollars on. But not mass produced cement blocks.
Public housing in the US did not fail because it was in large concrete towers. It failed because it was isolated from the economic community, it was not maintained, and it was sabotaged on the funding side.
Mass produced cement blocks are a fantastic way to live, and much of the rest of the world uses to great effect, some for public housing, but also for middle class and upper class housing.
It's so weird that so many in the US have this odd fixation that because they personally don't want that concert box, that so many others would kit absolutely looooove to live there. Check out Asia some time, or basically anywhere else in the world.
The small mindedness of "I don't like it therefore nobody ever could and you should never be allowed to live differently than the way I like" is a very destructive force in the US. We have apparently lost the ability to "let live" in "live and let live. "
Aside from some Art Deco here and there (looking at you Chrysler building, you sexy you!), the actual city is hideous.
People in wealthy silos, in downtowns, do fantastically. The problem was the systemic racism in the US, that enabled such a state of disinvestment and segregation, not the particular form of architecture.
The problem of public housing's inaccessibility, being cut off from jobs and basic necessities, is well documented. Segregation has been a huge problem in the US because it has been used to deny basic opportunity to Black people, not because a lot of Black people are living together.
Why didn't it go well?
FWIW, the communist regimes did that in Eastern Europe, and for all the nasty shit they did, that was one of the few things that did more good than harm. It's how apartments in Bucharest are still relatively affordable despite the massive migration and gentrification.
Unless of course, the way the US tried it was the "malicious compliance way" which was designed to fail from the start, then I'm not surprised it didn't go well.
Out of curiosity, have you looked into this?
This was basically the NYCHA approach in the '30s-'50s. Then we got the '70s-80s, and for sure some good came from these developments -- rap music! -- but by all accounts they were not wonderful places to live. Not only because they often segregated poverty, but also because they were poorly maintained, like so many other state-owned housing schemes.
Housing is expensive, yes, and we need more of it, yes. But low-cost housing without other support is not a solution to the "epidemic of homelessness and crime" in cities. We need better plans to help people get out of poverty, treatment for addiction and other mental health problems, integration into society, meaningful work, etc. etc.
I'm not picking on you in particular (you do say "for example", so perhaps you already know the above!) but other should know that the mere availability of cheap or even free housing is not a panacea for social ills.
If you let people build 15 min cities where walking/cycling makes sense, they will.
People don't build cities since we're not in the wild west anymore. Elected leaders along with legislators and property investors do, and their interest is to make a lot of money for themselves while offering you the bare minimum, not provide other less fortunate humans with nice walkable cities.
I think you're confused about the meaning. It's not about brand new cities, it's about allowing construction of certain builds in areas to increase the density of cities, which by extension would lead to amenities in walking distance.
Zoning reforms work, they've been employed in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
The Henry George Theorem (Sitglitz 1977) states that (in the right conditions) funding of public goods like transit and freeways increases the land value and therefore land rents by more than the investment amount. Namely, it creates value, but for whoever owns the land.
Changing to less car centric development has the potential to vastly increase value. I'd advocate for a land value tax to fund the public investment, but would be happy with whatever non-car centric options are made available, honestly.
People seem to think that there is some pendulum that swings in directions when it comes to infrastructure. It's really not. These things happen in cascades. Once a new mode is dominate, it takes over until it outlives it's usefulness and then collapses.
The LA Red Car is exactly this scenario, as is long haul rail transportation. And if you've been reading the Chuck Marhon for the last decade, you might see the suburban development pattern leaning toward a similar cascade.
I don't see the automobile disappearing from the American city any time soon (the hoi polloi love the idea of the damn things too much even if the hate being in traffic), but you can live car free in so many American cities these days, it's really shocking.
I've never heard anyone with small kids say that kids biking to school is fine in the US
Sadly for tech geek, EU job market is quite a bit harder than the US. Luckily, remote consulting allows me, for now, to live basically anywhere.
Maybe this is normal for Americans, but for me it was a car hellscape. I don't own a car living in London, and there just isn't the same need.
My "need" for a car is driven by things that make life worth living, none of which are found in a city. OTOH, I can appreciate that city life works for some people and I would never try to impose a rural or suburban life on them.
Not exactly a shocking discovery that a product explicitly designed to be an alternative fueled car is still a car.
Many do not consider resource consumption in production and disposal, as well as emissions as regards particulate matter (road and tire wear), when engaging in topics like this, so clearly this insight is not as obvious to many as it ought to be.
- higher personal freedom - you can go anywhere, anytime. With transit / walking, you can go some places, some of the time. This is huge and opens up a lot of possibilities for work, vacations, socializing, healthcare.
- bulk stores like Costco is only possible because people have cars. You will have to pry my Costco membership card from my cold, dead hands.
It's a lot cheaper to let people drive in to a central bulk store like this and buy what they want in large quantities than to have a network of tiny, walkable stores and try to predict demand and optimally distribute goods to them with delivery vans.
Costco users in urban areas would disagree with your assessment that it's only possible with cars. I'm looking at this Costco in Soma right now and watching people walk out with enough bulk goods to carry in their granny carts or bags in hands.
I used to bike past it on my morning commute and it was heart-poundingly dangerous. Drivers will jump in front of you and slam on the brakes so they can get into the parking garage entrance. The taxis aggressively pulling out from the stop just add to the thrill.
I personally go shopping by bike, but I notice there are some things I can't readily buy that way, like furniture. (I did successfully buy a microwave by bike, but a larger appliance than that would be pretty daunting.)
I have family visiting me right now in the big city from the small town, and it's weird for us to notice how different things are.
The goal is to be less car-centric.
Those 10 kids, once they get older, will want to go to places, meet friends, and participate in activities. If the only option is a car, then you or someone else must be their chauffeur. Quite a few parents do it, but not all enjoy it.
If the place you live were less car-centric, you could give each of the older kids a bus pass and let them go places on their own, or your kids could walk and bike places on routes which are not shared with cars.
Transit in car-centric areas is generally under-funded, with low frequency service, so really only those who have far more time than money are likely to use it (see previous paragraph). Nor are the routes oriented towards parks, the beach, the local library, or other places kids would go to to meet their friends.
Taking a bus can also be confusing for a beginner. I didn't start using the bus until visiting the UK in my late twenties. I didn't know how to pay, I didn't know how to request a stop, I didn't know what I could ask of the driver, I didn't know the route or what the stop looked like, and more.
If you don't have the experience yourself, and your kid hasn't been with you on the bus to learn from you, then of course you are unlikely to want your kid to use the bus.
On the other hand, go to the UK and you'll see that kids take the regular bus to/from school, along with people doing the work commute or running errands.
There isn't a fleet of student-only school buses, because the mass transit system has enough capacity and frequency. There I am on a double-decker bus on my second day in the UK and to my surprise the bus stops near a school and a gaggle of teens (okay, maybe 15-20) climb aboard.
And the UK is pretty car-centric compared to what I've heard about the Netherlands.
There is an environmental cost to using only cars to get your essential things. We need to start considering them now
One blind spot that I'm aware of is where you are, need, and point of service don't always align. For example, my medications cost a lot more if I go to the Walgreens a quarter mile away versus the CVS a mile and a half away. My partner has a special needs child and she needs to be able to get the child to a variety of services during the day a few times a month. Driving makes it possible. Public transit would make her unemployable.
Cheaper for who? Car ownership can be a huge financial burden compared to transit.
You ever see the bill for a bit of rail, or a subway, or a bus line? These things are horrendously expensive to build, maintain, and run. The money comes from taxes. Now that tax money might be better spent on other things poor and homeless people need, or might be better off circulating in the economy and not taxed at all.
But freezing all that value in the form of public transit isn't going to yield the best payoff for society.
Or the bill for lung cancer due to living next to a busy road?
Or the bill for hearing loss due to noise pollution?
Or the bill for having a kid getting hit and killed by a 3 ton pickup truck?
Or the bill for birds choking on oil after a spill?
...
I can go on.
Of course, some people call this slice of heaven a "nightmarish hellscape of stroads" [0] but thank goodness those people can move somewhere else and leave our cars alone.
Bulk stores like Costco are only necessary because people live in such sprawling communities. In places where you live a short walk from a grocery store, you can practice just-in-time logistics, and buy whatever you need as soon as you need it.
It's a lot cheaper, both in economic and environmental terms, to build cities where people don't need to drive for their daily needs.
[0] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...
... the prevalence of 2000s Nissan Altimas on the road suggests that a cheap car works pretty well for many people.
Car-centric design is a tax on all of us. It's just less burdensome for some than it is for others.
I've lived in both walk-centric and car-centric modalities. It's a lot cheaper to do a costco trip every two weeks in North America than to walk to Co-op or Waitrose or whatever and buy a single, individually-wrapped-in-plastic apple at a time.
Also, Waitrose is upmarket, so that's more like a Whole Foods apple than a Costco one.
I also get much better quality meat, fruit, and vegetables from Costco than Waitrose. So this is a total no-brainer for me. The only downside for some is you need more upfront money to shop in bulk, even if it works out to be cheaper.
Costco has home grocery delivery too. https://customerservice.costco.com/app/answers/answer_view/a...
It costs more that on the shelf because you are paying for someone to do work for you. Again, how much is your time worth?
Yes, a lot of people love to pick out their own food themselves, and buy in bulk only every couple of weeks, and take it home in their own vehicle. You are one of them, but certainly not everyone is like you. I am not.
The idea of a less car-centric world is to give more options that don't require a car, not to prevent you from using a car.
If the savings in going to Costco is big enough to justify having a car, then one alternative option is to join a car sharing group. Every two weeks, book a vehicle for your Costco run. In effect you're only paying for a day's worth of car ownership rather than 14 days, where most of time the car does nothing.
It seems like people have gotten stuck in this false dichotomy where the only two possibilities are detached single-family homes on an acre of land or 50-story high rises with hundreds of housing units.
An acre of land is 43560 sq ft. That's enough for a 10,000 sq ft per-story multi-story building and dozens of ground-level parking spaces. You can fill a neighborhood with those, put shops on the ground floor and housing above it, and have a walkable neighborhood where every household has one car instead of two.
> bulk stores like Costco is only possible because people have cars. You will have to pry my Costco membership card from my cold, dead hands.
You could pretty easily replace this with ecommerce for bulk goods. It's actually kind of weird that this isn't more popular because bulk purchases should reduce shipping overhead. Why isn't there a Costco truck that drops off a month's supply of groceries at your front door once a month?
And nobody is proposing a law that requires you to knock down your house and build a multi-family unit that fills the lot, but if that's what somebody else wants to do on their property, just let them.
It doesn't matter to me if they build housing as long as it doesn't block my view of the sky and it doesn't add to light pollution.
A lot of the older housing is shit-quality tenements. To give one example of the crappy environment, there was a music festival in downtown, I walked from home (about 3 miles) because I didn't want to add to the parking chaos. I had to walk through a rundown section of town and saw a couple of families with their kids in the yard. The yard was all asphalt. Not a hint of green or dirt.
If we are going to build denser housing with social housing, we have to have green places where kids can play. I am a big fan of rewilding with few trees; that should be the kind of place kids have to play. With dirt to dig into, flowers they can smell, have room to plant a basic garden. let no kid be left inside.
we may not be able to give them a 10,000-square-foot yard, but we can make green commons, and part of their education would be understanding their responsibility to themselves and to others in how to take care of a common space.
As for knocking down my house, well, some "should-ers" have told me that I should do just that. Knock down my house (1930s era) building, put in the 4 to 6 apartments that could fit on the lot, and take a loss on the building to make it affordable.
I wish the single-family homes would stop adding to the light pollution. It seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry with a garage has a motion sensor connected to a million lumens worth of electric light that gets triggered every time the wind blows or a car drives down the street.
> A lot of the older housing is shit-quality tenements.
One of the main problems with housing policy in the US is that there is a group of people who want home values to go up and another group who want housing to be affordable and it should be fairly obvious why they can't both be satisfied at once. So instead we get rubbish political responses like rent control and The Projects and the creation of slums that nominally give poor people somewhere to live while all but purposely making it awful or otherwise restricted to Those People to make sure that no upstanding citizens would ever live there instead of paying four times what it should cost for proper housing.
We have to overcome that in order to have nice things.
> If we are going to build denser housing with social housing, we have to have green places where kids can play.
Sure, and higher density construction is one of the things that allow it. One and two-story homes make extremely inefficient use of land.
Suppose you have to fit 1000 people into a million sq ft of land and you want them to each have 1000 sq ft of indoor living space. If you build one-story buildings, you are not going to have an inch left for a single tree. If you build four-story buildings, they could each have 2000 sq ft and you'd still have half a million square feet left over from which to carve out a nice park or community garden.
> As for knocking down my house, well, some "should-ers" have told me that I should do just that.
Everybody wants to tell everybody else what to do. We need to reject "everything not mandatory is prohibited" and just let different people make different choices.
I live in Vancouver, I go to Costco which is downtown (15 min walk or 7 min metro ride), drive up to skiing or hiking mountains multiple times a month (weather and etc. depended). I don’t even want to point at even better cities in other countries (most of Japan, Switzerland, parts of France and many more) as that’s cheating. But you really can have your cake and eat it too, it’s very much been done multiple times around the world.
- "In 2022 the average vehicle costs $11,450 per year to own and operate. The breakdown of the figure comes to $4,496 for purchasing the vehicle, $3,120 in gasoline and motor oil expenses, and $3,834 in other vehicle-related costs." - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/08/cost-car-ownersh... . If you are in a two-car family, and a less car-centric environment means you only need one car for those Costco runs and wind surfing afternoons, then you can save thousands of dollars.
- You can go out with friends to a bar and drink, and not worry about having a designated driver.
- There's much less need for “Restricted” or “Hardship” License for repeat DUI offenders.
- Kids have higher personal freedom as they don't depend on a parent to drive
- People who aren't able to drive (due to any of many reasons) have higher personal freedom
- During your commute you can read or do other things which occupy your attention.
- You don't have to worry about finding parking or paying for parking.
- Your taxes go down as you don't need to subsidize so much driving infrastructure
Having mass transit access also opens up possibilities for work you can't as easily get with a car. That's why places already have Park&Ride - parking at the job location is too expensive with only car access.
In a less car-centric society there should be little difference between the health car you get with a car and without. Plus, if your health condition means you can't drive, you'll likely have better healthcare access.
Strong disagree. Having spent good amounts of time in parts of the world where you can operate for months without getting in a car, it felt far more free. The barrier to entry in the US being owning a car, paying insurance and paying for a place to store it is the opposite of freedom.
The problem of this analysis is that at the time of the protests, cars were a luxury good for the rich. However, as cars have become ubiquitous, the opposition to them goes away and people want more infrastructure in support of them.
Not to mention the cost of parts.
The idea that things can't change, much less that cities of all places can't change, can only be thought by shortening knowledge of history to a tiny window.
Even current American cities have changed drastically in the past 50 years. They will change again.
Cities can change, but just like everything else cities will retain their innate attributes.
For those who live away from any civilization, they've made their choice about transportation.
Storefronts at the sidewalk instead of on the other end of sprawling parking lot. Pedestrian crossings in the middle of longer stretches of road (as opposed to only at intersections). Dedicated bike paths throughout the entire town. Schools centrally located on a single campus in the middle of town.
It goes to show what a town can do when the local government decides they want to be more than just a outpost for a larger city.
For example, I have in mind the immense suburbs of a second tier US city. These are impossible to redesign, and travel to do simple errands is measured in half mile increments. With expanses of residential housing and heavily trafficked roads inbetween. This is for convenient locations. Much of the housing is less conveniently located.
The reason that I'm insistent on the distinction is the same reason that I suspect responders are insistent on giving the impression that walkability is generally possible in suburbia. That reason is that the crux of the debate is whether or not the automobile has to remain central to American travel.
My POV is that suburbia is unavoidably car centric, almost all of the time with rare exceptions. Those taking the opposite pov are generally trying to give the impression that walkability is generally possible.
This is pre-war streetcar suburbs. The difference is that the houses are close together. The garages are mostly in back and tiny. The streets are in a grid, nearly all have sidewalks, and many are narrow which lowers speeds. The main streets have shops and restaurants along them.
Taking this freedom away from people is divisive, bordering on hostile.
Ideologues in metropolitan bubbles talk a lot about getting rid of cars. They disregard, either ignorantly or willfully, the needs of everyone outside their bubble.
If that wasn't authoritarian "re-education" to make choices that /motordom/ considered better, then what was it?
Oh and by the way, I drive an electric car, so I don't produce any emissions in the residential areas I drive in (although like all goods, some one-off emissions were produced during manufacture)
The large majority of the cost of roads is a sunk cost, because regardless of whether cars are used for individual transportation, roads would still be needed for delivery trucks, buses and emergency vehicles. The incremental cost of an additional car is generally not going to be more than what the car owner is paying in fuel taxes and property taxes on it.
> or the parking, or the zoning requirements which force almost every property owner to subsidize your transportation choice.
These are both the same thing. If you live in the suburbs, you paid for the space where you park your car. The actual problem is minimum parking requirements in cities, which are stupid and should be gotten rid of, but even if you did there would still be many people who want cars and choose housing that provides parking.
> You aren’t paying for the additional healthcare required for the people who live around where you drive
Modern cars are pretty clean in terms of particulate emissions, to the point that the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air that went into the engine in some of the cities with dirtier air.
> or compensating them for the lowered quality of life
This isn't math. Are you proposing to compensate them for the lowered qualify of life of not having a car? If someone else has kids, do I get to bill them for the cost of having to compete with their kids for scarce resources? Or should I bill them for not having kids and depriving society of their contributions?
Everything everybody does affects the whole of society. At some point you either have to accept that they'll make choices you don't like and in exchange you get to make choices they don't like, or you have to embrace totalitarianism, in which one person gets to make decisions they like and if anybody else doesn't like it they can go to prison.
> or compensating for the impact your much greater carbon emissions profile has on the entire planet.
This isn't really a cars thing, it's a burning fossil fuels thing. You can perfectly well charge an electric car entirely from solar panels.
You might be unfamiliar with it but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. There’s a long academic literature around the cost of road infrastructure to the adjacent communities, and how that’s been disproportionately borne by people who are poor, undervalued minorities, etc. The average American city has a significant fraction of its area committed to car infrastructure for people who don’t live or pay taxes there, and it’s their communities divided by highways or unsafe high-speed roads, their health being lowered by the constant noise, their kids getting asthma at higher rates, and their families having to live with the consequences of fatal car crashes.
Of course living near an overpass isn't any fun. So why do they do it? Because it's cheaper. But if you got rid of the overpass, it wouldn't be cheaper anymore, some upper-middle class professionals would move in there and the poor would have to go find some place they could still afford to live, which will be at least as bad or less affordable or else they'd have already moved there as it is.
The actual problem isn't the overpass, it's the undersupply of housing that isn't next to an overpass. Build enough that they can afford to live someplace nice and they would. Meanwhile you can put industrial plants and warehouses and railroads and power lines next to the overpass instead of residential housing.
When at home I park on the driveway, which I paid a premium for when buying my house.
However it shouldn't be necessary for me to walk in a ditch along a high speed road with no sidewalk just to get to the grocery that is less than half a mile away.
Car shares give people this freedom, but for less money.
Despite these "bubbles" in metropolitan areas, they are still ruined by ever present cars.
So you want a car? Great, go live in the 100% of the country that caters to your every need, by law. But please don't get in the way of others that want to build their own paradise. It doesn't concern you and you should mind your own business.
But they evidently don't, because people prefer to own cars, and that's why they own cars.
Don't condescend people by pretending you know what's best for them.
Housing expenses are a complex system including a balance/imbalance of supply and demand. If suburbs are cheaper like-for-like, that's an indication (but not proof) that there's more supply in suburbs than demand relative to a style of living that's more expensive. Housing preferences are very much multi-dimensional, of which car vs non-car mobility is but one factor. Quality of schools, availability of jobs, need/desire for large amounts of interior or private exterior space, quiet, ease of resale, and hundreds of other factors conspire to set an individual household's willingness/preference to live in a place.
Where it does conflict, it is my business and I have the same right to engage in the discussion as you do.