People's aversion to change, even when the change is for something that is objectively better in every way, is really really annoying.
Instead of extensive pointless suburbs where everybody has his house, they built huge 8/10 story buildings.
The buildings were surrounded by parks, benches, places for kids to play.
People aggregated a lot and everything was relatively close (building taller means you can build a lot closer to downtown).
I have lived 6 months in Ohio, Columbus, and I can't but say you live much worse. One thing I noticed is that lack of good public transport is one of the major causes for neighborhoods to become ghettos and poor. You're a guy that lives some 15/20 miles off Columbus and there's a job in the city? Well, if you're that poor that you don't have a car you can't work there either. And nowadays you need at least 2/3k year for insurance alone. This lack of public transport is one of the major reasons why so many areas around big cities become slowly poor and ruined and people have tougher chances to start making a living.
In 2024 with everybody owning a car Polish neighborhoods have transformed. Cars fill every single space. Kids are constrained to small often remote areas. Benches get removed to get more parking spaces. People don't aggregate anymore, there's a much smaller sense of a community.
In many ways, the progress I have seen in Poland made the country just unhappier and lonelier. I would even bluntly say that my parents and my parents parents had it much better. They would party and dance every week, always on some trip or vacation.
Sure, the party would have people bringing their own glasses, salami and something to drink, but people really enjoyed the times.
Cars are just one of the major factors that transformed our cities for worse.
You asked why Polish people bought cars if they didn't need them.
The answer is that they started needing them. Large shopping malls popped up on the outskirts of cities not easily accessible without a car.
Trains and other mass transit didn't really improve to meet the demand for travel from richer populace. Often it deteriorated. People were forced to substitute public offering that didn't keep up with private car ownership. Public enterprises are hard and when the government fails people invest in personal facilities to get by.
People buing cars is a sign of the community dropping the ball on the mobility needs of the people.
The experience here was... not good.
I think what Barcelona has done is a much better model.
Soviet way of building sucked. You guys had it a tad easier, but in USSR-proper the standardisation sucked big time. It's damn fantastic now that building a custom private house in a legal way is doable, even without being a party elite. And soviet style of building wouldn't have happened without totalitarian control.
People aggregating and community is ripped away by interwebs. Although in USSR-proper it was iffy in any case. Yes, people spent a tad more time outside. But community building was very superficial and it was easy to get in trouble with KGB.
Some parts of society did enjoy the times. Other parts just enjoyed drinking their days away. And for many it was quite shitty.
Nowadays there're many more opportunities to enjoy the times. And I'm not talking about spending €€€ for fancy stuff. But the problem is there're too many modern distractions. Which would have been a thing wether soviet union survived or not. Just like soviets couldn't solve alcoholism which was the distraction #1 at the time.
Todays new developments are done in roughly the soviet style. Blocks of flats. With minor adjustments like parking (also underground), lifts that go to ground level for accesibility and border fences to increase the sense of security, top level huge flats with huge terraces for the rich, thicker walls for acustic and thermal comfort.
I think at least 90% of newly created housing in post-commie city in central Europe is built this way. It just makes sense.
Which works nicely if people have no choice and no needs beyond what is available in the block. And as long as whole city is just a repetition of identical blocks with identical facilities - it sorta does work.
Modern development here throws away all of that. Custom buildings with highly customised apartments. Multiple identical buildings is rare, let alone identical copy-pasta neighbourhoods. From high-raises to low-raises to townhouses to detached houses.
On top of that, many soviet planning ideas were based on idea that you work in same place your whole life and possibly get an apartment close to your workplace. That assumption does not work anymore (for better or worse). And let's not talk about running small businesses targeting niche demographics.
This is exactly what they did for "the projects" in big American cities and these were almost universally viewed as failures.
It's no surprise that a country with a better public transport, such as the UK, made its projects a largely successful experiment. In Eastern Europe this kind of housing too was aimed at the masses, not the poor.
I would not say that the issue was the city planning per se. The US is filled by poor neighborhoods/open space ghettos too.
If it were objectively better in every way, I'd give my car up obviously. But there's the _small_ matter of major inconvenience with places inaccessible by public transport, erratic public transport, bad last-mile solutions with private transportation waiting to fleece us for all we're worth, leaving me questioning my life choices when the last mile costs 10x what 90% of the journey cost me in public transport, not to mention the overall experience of having to switch between multiple modes of transport each way.
Climate change...yes, but I'm not altruistic enough to go through this everyday.
Where do you live? I see places becoming inaccessible by car due to missing parking places and traffic jams and just love to take a bike / scooter / public transport (which could be much better even if we'd put more focus there, and would also help the poorer people) or by feet. The very few occasions I need a car could be handled by car sharing or delivery services.. I regret having bought one (:
I live in a city with advanced public transit system (of course, comparing to other NA apparently, not other continents). Theoretically, I can go around without much driving. But there are always moments that driving a car helps a lot. One example is going to Costco. A second example is to lay one's feet 50+ kms away from home. A third one is to go to a clinic whenever I would like.
Cars enable flexibility. I think it's pretty hard to convince people to drop it, UNLESS the culture completely changes. Culture change would bring economical and political changes as well -- but that's a multi-decade process. This is why, may I say, that a car free policy is practically impossible for most, if not every NA city.
When cars first became affordable in the US in the 1910's, due to mass production and financing, they were very quickly adopted in massive numbers. So I don't think it is fair to say that people have an aversion to change.
Are you sure the annoyance isn't that they just don't want the changes you want them to want?
"Aversion to change" that I would like to force onto others.
My city has the best public transit system in NA but still I can't imagine it be car free. It's going to literally kill people.
They existed but they were incredibly shitty, literally.