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Workers need to get to work, and there are tradeoffs. Unless you want your local sewage treatment plant, the fat rendering factory, or the refuse landfill within walking distance of your house.
And this is a good thing, or bad?
I think the GP's point was that there _are_ tradeoffs, _and_ that we as a society ignore and avoid actually measuring and confronting the actual harms this way of life brings (possibly because they are actually standing and overwhelming to face; possibly because the problems seem depressingly intractable; possibly because of the effects of propaganda imposed on us our whole lives by big oil and the auto industry).
This is obviously not true. Proof by contradiction: Assume this is true. Thus, when cars were invented, nobody would've been interested since they don't solve any problem anyone had at the time.
But we know that's not the case. Cars had widespread adoption because turns out convenient transportation is a huge need for most people.
If you want to successfully advocate against cars you need to acknowledge the problems they solve and promote pragmatic alternatives that fill the same need for most people.
Can you explain? If I want to visit a friend 60mi away and I choose to drive my car, how did my car cause the problem?
An argument could be made that if cars didn't exist then I wouldn't know that friend at all, which I suppose does in a sense mean that a car caused my problem, but I don't think that's a great argument.
> The convenience you get comes at an unmeasured cost.
Are you referring to city planning, climate change, or something else?
> Car owners are selfish.
Everyone, by necessity, is selfish. For example, every month I have the choice of paying my rent or donating that same money to charity. I (very understandably) choose to pay my rent, which is a selfish decision. This isn't a bad thing. The key is to not be overly selfish.
Owning a car is not overly selfish, though I'd like to know why you think it is.
How did the car cause this problem? And what's the unmeasured cost?
I want space to live, I don't want to be packed in close to the neighbors. So any alternate solution you offer must also solve that.
PS. Please don't give me "strongtowns" links claiming that suburbs cost the city more, because it's not actually true. Strongtowns lives in a weird world where only expensive services "count" as providing value to a city. Places with manufacturing or farming are unimportant to them because those things don't generate as much in tax.
They should rename themselves "Strong Towns Weak County" to be more accurate with their mission statment. (One of their delcared goals is less interstates.)
Farms aren’t typically in the suburbs. (Manufacturing, yes.)
Rural life has historically been one of deep poverty or aristocracy. Suburban living is different, but we’re seeing costs being redistributed to them. Which is fine. I live in a rural suburb, and it should be expensive. It’s a luxury. I probably quintupled my carbon footprint by choosing it. But that’s the trade off.
> any alternate solution you offer must also solve that
More money. I want an aircraft hangar and a horse, that doesn’t mean society owes me one. If you want isolation and access to civilisation, you pay more money. (Hermitting is the alternative.)
Farms are actually usually adjacent to suburbs. As the suburb ends it switches to farm land. So when the farmer wants services he doesn't need to go in the city, he can go to the suburb. He can't go to the city anyway, there's nowhere to park his car, and he has no other way to get there.
> I live in a rural suburb, and it should be expensive. It’s a luxury. I probably quintupled my carbon footprint by choosing it
Suburbs are cheaper than cities. Just look at the salaries of the people that live in both places. And your carbon footprint is probably lower than a city, cities are very wasteful places because they can be: People have more money there.
A small example: In a suburb you buy in bulk and store it. In a city you buy for a day or two. The carbon footprint difference between those two options is huge, it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep the city constantly stocked with retail products because you have to distribute small quantities of everything to so many places, as opposed to a central area with bulk quantities.
I've been in both places. In a city you can buy paper plates for so cheap (relative to your salary) it simply doesn't make sense to have real dishes - you don't have room for them anyway. People waste enormous amounts of goods (relative to suburbs) because the cost of "things" is very low relative to their salary.
No, farmers aren't living in Houston, Phoenix or Sunnyvale.
Surburbs abut cities. Our farms are in rural territory, closer to industry (specifically: logistics) than cul-de-sacs.
> Suburbs are cheaper than cities. Just look at the salaries of the people that live in both places
Look at disposable incomes. Cities have higher-earning, more-productive and lower (on average) cost-paying residents. (Slimmer ones, too [1].) What masks that is the variance and split housing. Go to a suburb, and the dispoable income is around a Ruby Tuesday's tab because it's an inefficient mode of living.
> In a city you can buy paper plates for so cheap (relative to your salary) it simply doesn't make sense to have real dishes
I've rarely eaten a meal on a paper plate in a city. Only in suburbs, frequently at get-togethers. It's tedious to go out and buy bulky crap, so you buy durable dishes once.
> In a suburb you buy in bulk and store it
See above about the incentives around purchasing disposable crap wastefully, as well as unhealthy processed (albeit shelf stable) foods.
Again, I agree with rural/suburban living. But it should be expensive. With most of the world now in cities, we'll see those costs increasingly redistributed. (Exhibit A: congestion pricing.)
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/08/7213737...
That's not even true. They live right next to it. I pulled up Houston on Google Maps and there was an ad for "Dewberry Farm" right there.
The center of Houston is dense city, surrounded by a ring of suburb, surrounded by a ring of farms.
Are we not looking at the same map?
(Phoenix doesn't count, it's a desert, no farms there.)
A get together doesn't count in terms of dishes, I'm talking about day to day. Every person I've visited in a city uses far more disposable stuff that the suburban person I've visited.
I've lived in all kinds of places (not farm though), and I've found suburban to be the least wasteful, and cities to be the most wasteful. Rural is hard to categorize - they tend to be more self sufficient.
Maximum efficiency would be racks of sleeping capsules stacked in a back room of the office where you work.
I'm glad maximizing efficiency isn't the one and only criteria for housing.
Nah … they’re burning gasoline
You end up using less energy than your city dwelling friends.
This (and basically your entire argument) is flat out incorrect. A McMansion uses vastly more energy to build and maintain than an apartment, and apartment dwellers in a city don't need to drive to work, to school, to the shops, for a night out, etc.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/01/suburbanites-lead-th...
But this study doesn't include that.
It's really not hard to check for yourself: Compare the prices of some item in an urban store vs a suburban store - it's way cheaper out of the city. That extra cost is there because of the extra energy it takes.
So the question becomes how much would you be willing to pay for your preferences or why should others pay for your preferences.
This is not actually true. The cost is a wash because the roads last longer.
And the urban tax payer plans to eat what exactly, and buy what goods, without the suburbs? Just because the tax value of what suburbs make is lower that doesn't make it less needed.
> This is not actually true. The cost is a wash because the roads last longer.
Is that's why providers are falling all over themselves to build fiber infrastructure in the country? Ah no they don't, instead the government created big subsidy programs to get rural areas connected. You seriously don't understand how infrastructure is build finances and ages if you think the cost of infrastructure in the country is the same as in urban areas. And I'm not even talking about infrastructure like hospitals that require staff to run.
> And the urban tax payer plans to eat what exactly, and buy what goods, without the suburbs? Just because the tax value of what suburbs make is lower that doesn't make it less needed.
Since when is food grown in the suburbs? Also just because food is grown in the country does not mean that lots of people need to live there.
Fiber infrastructure is well available in suburbs, much earlier than in cities because it's much cheaper in the suburbs.
And rural areas grow food, and depend on the nearby suburbs for services.
> Also just because food is grown in the country does not mean that lots of people need to live there.
Sounds miserable for the "sacrificial" people who you'll put there to grow food for you. Do you not realize that if you want people to live there, you need nearby suburbs and small cities?
Strongtowns actually want fewer interstates, to really make sure farm dwellers have no opportunity to go anywhere else.
Among many, many, many "unmeasured" costs is the fact you're stealing people's freedom. I want to live in a flat above a shop in a 5 story building with no car and you propose making it effectively illegal to build such a structure because it's infeasible unless you tear down neighbouring buildings (ruining the neighbourhood in the process) to build parking.
Rather I was pushing not to remove them in a place that already has them, because I'm against artificially forcing a city to change underneath people who are already there.
I originally found their arguments convincing but what you wrote made me reconsider. Could you elaborate?
Cities are expensive places to live and mostly produce services with high taxes. The city costs a lot, but also generates a lot. And cities are necessary, because we do need those services. (Programmers, accountants, lawyers, doctors.)
But it completely ignores that a suburb where the locals commute to a warehouse or a factory also provides value. The tax value is lower - so in strongtowns' mind it's worthless.
But I hope it's obvious that without those employees all the cities would have nothing to eat (all those packaged foods are made somewhere after all) and nothing to buy (cities for the most part manufacture nothing).
You need both types of places in the world, and I think people should be allowed to live where they chose without people pressuring them to move to a city.
They make an "exception" for rural areas because farms are an obvious need, but they want the farms to exist without any cities nearby. The farmers are expected to travel to the nearest large city when they need city services (obviously not something they can do very often).
They also have a goal of less interstates - they don't want people driving around a lot. How they expect to ship things I'm not sure (trains maybe?) But also how they expect people to get any enjoyment out of life I'm also not sure. Just stay put in your area and do your job I suppose?
There's so much more to criticize:
He's the usual city growth plan: The edge of a city becomes those "hated" suburbs. As the suburb fills up with people it becomes worth it to subdivide lots and build more houses, over time it becomes dense like a city.
They instead want to skip the suburb step and just directly build very densely on the edge of the city.
Their calculations on roads:
Suburbs need way more roads per person. But suburban roads cost a lot less per mile - like way less. Suburban roads also last much much longer (far less traffic). The net result is that the cost per person is basically a wash. They ignore that though.
They don't like having to run long water pipes to the houses, but the costs of those water pipes is minimal over time, they last 100 years. It's just not an expensive enough problem to worry about.
Police have a larger area to deal with, but there's also less crime to deal with.
Anyway I'll stop here.
Have you got a citation on that? I was under the impression that most road wear is caused by heavy trucking and water/frost heaves.
> They don't like having to run long water pipes to the houses, but the costs of those water pipes is minimal over time, they last 100 years. It's just not an expensive enough problem to worry about.
My reading of their materials was that according to them the pipes last 30 years and taxes from the entire county are not enough to cover for that, but I have no way to falsify that claim.
Anyway, in my corner of the world people have been moving to the suburbs as well, but the reason is that the same credit score allows one to get approximately twice the living space in the suburbs, which sounds like a lot until it's mentioned that we're talking about 112m2 or 1200sq ft houses.
I mean no disrespect by this, but I get the feeling that they're catering to a specific demographic and I'm not in it.
How is it not actually true?
Suburbs are not providing value to their nearby cities, they are not factories nor agricultural lands, they are low density housing which require expensive public services like sewers, roads, water pipes, electricity, fire department coverage, policing, while not having enough population density to actually sustain the costs of maintaining the infrastructure.
They're providing people:
https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol21/31/21-31....
It appears that all around the world, whatever we do, we just can't coax people to have children in dense city centres.
In extreme cases like in South Korea, where Seoul is basically cannibalizing the rest of the country, it leads to a demographic collapse. I think this is a point that is not mentioned often enough.
I live in a suburb of Stockholm and lived in a few others previously, the model for a lot of them is to have a small centre with shops, grocers, healthcare, a mass transit station, sports facilities, culture centres, with dense housing around the station with increasingly less dense housing towards the edges of the suburb: smaller apartment buildings, followed by row houses and villas towards the edges. This is much more sustainable model than American suburbia, to the point I've never required a car to live here.
In the USA, Canada, Australia and other extremely car-dependent societies this is not the model for a suburb.
That is simply not true. Suburbs is where all the manufacturing and warehousing is.
They are just wrong, but they'll never admit it.
If they work in the cities it's just the same argument from Strong Towns, live in higher density housing, with services and shops nearby so their way of living is sustainable and not a drain to the city's coffers to provide infrastructure where it's not sustainable.
ADDED; And my experience over a few decades is that almost no one at those companies lived in the city.
Industrial areas are very different from suburbs. The only thing they have in common is both exist outside the city center.
That said, as a regular user of public transport in two Czech cities that have excellent and well-funded public transport (Prague and Ostrava), you probably don't realize many of the downsides.
Public transport works best for mass movements of people from point A to point B. E.g. young students going from dormitories to lectures at 8 AM, or many people traveling from a big residential neighbourhood to an industrial plant that employs them. The student thing is still real, the industrial plant isn't anymore. When I was a kid in the 1980s, full buses of workers went to steelworks at the outskirts of Ostrava, nowadays these are either gone, or have automatized to the degree that they employ 5 per cent of the people as before.
There is a lot of tangential relations that public transport doesn't service well. A teacher I know teaches in one village and lives in another. By car, that is 15 minutes. By public transport, some 90 and the route is physically almost three times as long. So selfish of her not to take it, eh! /s
And I can already hear all the good advice: she should "just" find a job closer to her home. Not easy if schools are closing down for lack of kids, and she is a specialist (singing).
Or: the public transport authority should "just" introduce more buses, even if they are inefficient in certain routes. It should "just" pay bus drivers much more to attract some (there is a shortage). Not easy if already a third of the municipal budget goes towards public transport, taxes in CZ are not exactly low and the population is growing older, thus losing its tax base. The costs are very real and a small country with an expensive healthcare system, an expensive pension system and now threatened with Russia cannot really shower much more money on everything at once.
Public transport may yet gain some strength from fully autonomous driving, IF it is ever solved. Unwillingness of people to get into the driver career (the money isn't that bad, but getting up at 4 am and being responsible for dozens of human lives on board are two major negative factors) is a big factor in its overall economy.
But it is, at best, a significant help. Not a panacea. Our lives have grown too disorganized for that. Gone are the days when everyone started their work at 6 am at the sound of the factory whistle and lived in the same worker's colony. (Some of which are still extant here in Ostrava, and now protected as cultural heritage.)
The negatives in turn: getting up at 4AM - wouldn't the preference for early hours and late hours even out over a whole city's population? I know some people who get up really early by choice, and I personally like it at night. Being responsible for dozens of human lives - that can be worn as a badge of pride. Of course you're right that it might put people off, but you just have to look to airline pilots to see an example of a culture where responsibility is held in high esteem.
Do I have a theory of my own? I don't think I can answer it, but I'd guess training and logistics might have something to do with the driver shortage problem. In Czechia, do you have to pay for your own qualification before you get the job? Also, where I am, bus operators will usually only employ people who already live near a depot - that excludes many potential drivers.
Consistent getting up at 4 AM would be probably better than the irregular shifts that are the norm. You get up at 4 AM three days in a row, then you only have duties in the afternoon, because someone fell ill etc.
Driver shortage problem is pretty much across Europe, with poorer countries and cities being somewhat, but not crushingly worse off. I sort-of doubt that there is some low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked. This is a highly diverse market, with thousands of public and private sphere organizations competing for workforce across the entire EU, and having quite a lot of latitude to provide better conditions. Still, the average age of an extant bus driver is slowly creeping into the late 50s and early 60s. The disinterest of the younger generation in a driving career is palpable.
Car ownership is objectively, measurably bad. Are you pretending it's not?
https://www.strongsactown.org/2024/03/17/suburbs-drive-sacra...
Cars are required. But I do agree, I think the trend should be towards smaller cars. And I try and live my values, I share 1 hatchback with my wife.
"It's a really big place" isn't the reason for many having cars in Australia, it's largely due to cities that sprawl beyond the reach and capacity of public transport, it's due to a love of long weekend trips outside cities, etc.
Smaller cars and better use of suburban space would go a long way to reducing Australian personal use of fossil fuels .. which is a relativel small part of the larger use of fossil fuels here.
As much as Australia and the USA are big, most of the trips are very much under 30-50 km of distance, those are easily covered by intercity trains, and in cities mass transit is a much more efficient way to transport people inside of their borders. If there's need to go somewhere unpopulated in a large landmass where this system doesn't cover, I'm totally ok with cars, the issue comes from not having other options that reduce the car dependency.
Comparatively to the total population, in the USA, Canada or Australia very few people are using a car most of their time to cover large distances in swaths of undeveloped land, being a big place correlates to almost never going to the very far off unconnected places exactly because it's so far away and inconvenient.
Cars are required due to urban development policies and lack of passenger rail connecting cities, not because the place is big, in Australia most of the population live relatively close by [0].
[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EW9YTD2XsAIFYNx?format=jpg&name=...