How extreme car dependency is driving Americans to unhappiness | Hacker News Reader

How extreme car dependency is driving Americans to unhappiness

theguardian.com

53 pointsdoener54 comments

The finding that using a car occasionally but not being required to certainly resonates with me. I grew up in a fully car dependent rural place, have always been “into”cars, and love a spirited drive on country roads. Now, I’ve lived in Brooklyn for nearly 15 years now and still own a fun-to-drive car that I use once a week or less.

The combination of being able to do 95% of regular errands on foot and the rest via transit, plus having access to a car to go places outside of the city on a whim is really quite a privilege and a nice way to live. Whenever we spend significant time in places where you must use a car to do anything outside of the house (e.g. visiting family in both my wife’s and my own rural hometowns), I really appreciate not having to do that every day. It seems to me that car dependency has some kind of effect of making people angrier—even some of the kindest people display surprising hostility behind the wheel, and moving around in isolation cuts out a lot of micro/transient social interactions that can actually brighten a day.

At this point I think there are so few places in America where you can live like this, it means people have a limited frame of reference for what’s possible—lifestyles that don’t involve a car for almost every activity are so different, you get stuck on questions like “how will I get all of the groceries home when I shop once a week.” I wish we could build more variety into our cityscapes and provide viable alternatives rather than effectively mandating car dependency by law. The price of homes in what car-optional places do exist certainly suggests a lot of market demand.

The amount of household wealth we throw away on cars, just to be able to participate in the economy, is BONKERS. In the past ten years my wife and I have spent a combined $30k on two vehicles for our 4-person family, and that was through months of bargain-hunting. I've count myself lucky to have gotten away with spending so little, yet even that amount represents to me a gigantic hole in our savings, wasted on depreciating assets.

Isn't that still roughly an order of magnitude less than what one spends for housing, in an area with access to economic opportunities?

People have always needed housing and will always need housing. They haven't always needed to individually purchase and maintain a 2,000lb machine every 5–10 years in order to participate in society at a basic level. In Amsterdam or Montreal I still need somewhere to live, but I can treat car ownership as a luxury rather than a basic necessity.

>People have always needed housing and will always need housing.

Right, but not all housing is priced the same. Having a car allows you to live further away from the city center where real estate prices are astronomical. You might argue "we should invest in public transit instead!" or similar, but at least in the US, that's unlikely to materialize, and might not even be economical (eg. for suburbs).

Apart from lower costs, suburb housing usually has more space, features like yards for pets or kids, less crime, parks and things that aren’t as crowded or littered (with needles in the city parks near me), better schools, shorter travel times between common family activities, etc. Suburbs aren’t popular for some irrational reason like HN often paints - they simply have better quality of life for many people, especially those who are 30+ or have families.

The attractiveness of the American suburban compromise is just an accident of American policy choices, and that suburban compromise has major downsides that we’ve been frog-boiled into accepting (see TFA). Different policies would make urban living much more attractive than suburbs, as is the case in much of the rest of the developed world. So when you say “better”… yeah, fine, if we’re going to refuse to govern constructively and responsibly, yes, suburbs are probably a better choice in that landscape.

A house is an asset that can grow in value over time and build wealth, while a car loses value as you use it. Housing costs are higher but can provide long-term stability and access to better jobs and schools. A car helps you get to opportunities but doesn’t create wealth.

That’s cheap. Good job on that!

That doesn’t sound like that includes gas and maintenance costs. I’m sure that easily doubles the overall cost you listed.

Not an efficient use of any of our money.

You're right, it doesn't include gas, maintenance, or insurance.

The car began as a luxurious convenience for the wealthy to avoid public transit. Then it enabled the vast expansion of the suburbs.

The problem is the suburban home is a prison. If you are in one, and don’t have access to a functioning car with a person to drive it, you can’t go anywhere. Even a healthy person will have to walk very far to reach anything.

And so the car became associated with freedom. Of course, people who live in cities with public transit don’t need a car to be free.

While the car allows one to break free of a suburban home, it is itself another prison. Owning and using a car means you must find a place to park it. Pay to fuel it. Pay for insurance. Pay for a new car every once in awhile. Pay to maintain it. If anything happens to the car, you have to take care of it. Any moment your life can be interrupted and ruined if there is any car related issue to take care of. Time lost sitting in traffic. Serious injuries or even lives lost to crashes.

Sold my car over a decade ago, and haven’t owned another one since. I get in a car only a handful of times per year, if at all. One of the best decisions I ever made.

>The problem is the suburban home is a prison. If you are in one, and don’t have access to a functioning car with a person to drive it, you can’t go anywhere. Even a healthy person will have to walk very far to reach anything.

>While the car allows one to break free of a suburban home, it is itself another prison. Owning and using a car means you must find a place to park it. Pay to fuel it. Pay for insurance. Pay for a new car every once in awhile. Pay to maintain it. If anything happens to the car, you have to take care of it. Any moment your life can be interrupted and ruined if there is any car related issue to take care of. Time lost sitting in traffic. Serious injuries or even lives lost to crashes.

Those are all downsides, but characterizing them as "a prison" is a stretch. For instance, if you live in the city and are forced to rely on public transport, how are the associated downsides not similarly "a prison"? For instance, having to wait 30 minutes for a bus, that might stop operating at 10pm, is arguably more of a hassle than trying to figure out parking or whatever. Does that make public transit "a prison"?

> Does that make public transit "a prison"?

No. It makes that specific type of low quality public transport a prison. Following the metaphor, a low-security prison, or house arrest, but one none-the-less.

Good public transit needs headways no more than about 10 minutes apart, not 30 minutes, and it needs to run much later than 10pm, and even later on Friday and Saturday nights to provide a good alternative to drunk driving.

There may be occasional problems with even the best public transit system. But even if the public transit system is completely failed, living in a dense urban environment is not a prison. You can reach a grocery store, a restaurant, a movie theater, a bar, a drug store, a park, your friend’s place, or whatever else you need within walking distance. Even a person with limited mobility can reach everything they need. Public transit is only for things you need occasionally that are a bit further away.

My suburb is a 15-20 minute walk from grocery stores and pubs, sports fields, parks, etc. So that depends on where you live. That is not a long walk, that is the exact number of minutes people push for with "15 minute cities".

Overall I view suburbs as probably a net negative for all of the space wasted.

It’s entirely possible to have well-connected suburbs, via rail or tram for dense ones and bus for less dense.

I get that US suburbs are typically not like that, but it’s not _really_ a problem for suburbs _in general_.

a. That depends on the suburb. One can live well enough in some close-in suburbs without using a car, at least without using it much.

b. The prison aspect does offer a degree of parental control, until the offspring are old enough to drive.

Your "b" just makes me think of The Amish and the like in a way. Once the kids find out the rest of the world, totally unequipped for it, it's either retreat to the suburbs or go bananas

> The results were “surprising”, Saadaoui said, and could be the result of a number of negative impacts of driving, such as the stress of continually navigating roads and traffic, the loss of physical activity from not walking anywhere, a reduced engagement with other people and the growing financial burden of owning and maintaining a vehicle.

These results are only surprising for someone living under a rock LOL. Still, they're so carbrained that they will continue to vote against their best interests to continue to have the whole place dominated by cars.

And even this comment will get a lot of explanations why cars and the infrastructure as it is is absolutely necessary for them. Yes, given your setting you built and the only pov you can imagine! The opposite is easy, fun, and proven in many places to work well and better;)

I remember the brain melting experience I had when I arrived in Madrid and saw that there were two circular subway lines, I can’t even catch a bus anywhere where I live or buy bread without driving because there are no sidewalks, that was like arriving at the Star Trek universe.

Some people are living in the future and don’t even notice it.

Only been to Madrid once, but was very impressed by the design of the subway - as I remember, they have the different lines colour coded and there's matching coloured lines on the floor/walls so you just follow the relevant colour to get to the correct platform.

> they're so carbrained that they will continue to vote against their best interests to continue to have the whole place dominated by cars.

This is an arrogant statement. It's more likely that you don't appreciate or agree with what their best interests are.

Mostly because they say things like "bike lanes make car congestion worse", when the evidence is generally that bike lanes improve car transit times.

Or claim they don't want bike lanes because cyclists break the law all the time, while not noticing how motorists break the law even more often - in a multi-ton vehicle - nor realizing how much infrastructure has had to be put into place to physically prevent motorists from breaking the law even more often.

Or claim they don't want their tax dollars to support rich people in lycra, while they simply don't see the poor people who use a bike to get around.

Or say they need a car to transport the kids around to sports events or band practice, when their 13 year old could cycle in their own should a real bike system exist.

Bike lanes can even offer an alternative routing that an ambulance can use when a traffic jam blocks the road, because cyclists can pull their bikes to the side far easier than a driver can pull a car to the side. I suspect some of these drivers may like faster medical services when having a heart attack.

People waste a full hour to drop the kids to the elementary my kid goes to because there is an infinite amount of cars dropping a single kid each.

I just ride a bike through some grass (cos there’s no connection between my neighborhood sidewalk to the sidewalk in the school neighborhood) and get there in 10 minutes.

People should be asking for a sidewalk and signaling so kids can ride to school but instead it’s just “more lanes” or “pick them up faster”.

The car dependency—which I’ve had to live with my whole life—doesn’t bother me as much as what’s happening with trucks specifically. It’s like the only remaining trucks for sale are all monster trucks.

That's where the profit margins are at the moment

But market efficiency blah blah blah market efficiency !

Ah, yes, the market distorted by different EPA fuel standards for cars and trucks.

Knock knock

Who's there?

Oh, it's the changes to the EPCA of 1975 the auto industry lobby asked for!

I’m hopeful then next gen of micro EVs and autonomy drop the cost per mile by an order of magnitude below existing public transportation costs.

This will justify the public owning and maintaining these types of hybrid networks.

You’re gonna have issues with road capacity; cars just aren’t a particularly efficient use of it.

For instance, to pick a car at random, a Toyota Corolla is about 4.5 meters long, and will typically hold one or two people, with an absolute max of five. A double-decker bus holds about 80 people and is about 10 meters long. A 50 meter long tram set will hold about 4-500 people depending on configuration. The number of people on the roads in buses and trams in busy cities at peak times simply would not fit on those same roads in cars.

That sounds awful. If it's cheaper we will use it more and become even more dependent on it. So we'll have more of the awful car infrastructure and less of the better alternatives.

>>“Seattle has a solid bus system but everyone who can afford a car has a car."

The "solid" descriptor is doing a LOT of heavy lifting there. While IDK specifically about the Seattle system, experience with other systems (Boston, NYC) shows that "good enough" often isn't.

If the system is not reliably on time, as in 99%+, its value degrades exponentially. When people rely on public transport to get to work, and they have consequences for being late even a couple times per year, if it isn't 100% reliable, they MUST take the earlier bus/train/trolley, and thereby waste every day the interval between rides. Same if it is overcrowded and they cannot reliably get on the ride.

Sure, similar 'leave early due to traffic' considerations are also rampant for automobile transport, but it is much more in your own control. Leaving 2min late in a car will rarely make you 35min late because you missed that train. Same for staying late at work. If you need an extra 10min, commuting by car you'll probably get home 9min later (evening rush-hour clearing a bit), but with the train, that 10min will reliably cost you 50min. And if you can't rely on the trains running on time it might be even worse.

If the people running public transport really want to substantially increase ridership and decrease auto traffic, they MUST upgrade their standards from "good enough for government work" to much closer to Swiss trains, where I could reliably watch the train start motion in the exact second the second hand ticked past the minute of scheduled departure.

While a 'good enough' system is better than none and will always have some ridership, it is not enough better to make the difference that is needed for full utilization.

>>“Seattle has a solid bus system but everyone who can afford a car has a car."

“Solid” is definitely doing a lot of heavy lifting. Seattle is terribly managed, because it imported mass quantities of Bay Area voters over the last 15 years as the tech industry grew (Amazon), which rapidly changed everything (population, politics, city in general). It had amazing traffic flow up to 10 years ago and you could drive anywhere quickly even in rush hour. But that has changed.

The decade long period of rapid population growth coupled with the war on cars has destroyed what was a highly functional road network. Now there are less lanes to drive on, lots of mostly empty bike lanes, bus lanes that are a waste of space, reduced speed limits to try to force drivers onto public transit, etc. There’s also an insanely expensive light rail (around 100 billion budget so far) that is partially functional and won’t be completed until the 2040s. But to use it you need to take buses to get to the station (parking is full and break-ins are frequent) so it is much too time consuming. The buses themselves are ALWAYS off schedule, to a point where sometimes you can wait more than one cycle on the schedule to see the bus on many routes. Their app to track the buses by GPS is unreliable and misleading. None of the public transit is 24/7 either, despite huge budgets. And with the city facing a massive deficit I doubt there’s more to spend.

A bigger issue is the blight across the city. A decade of soft on crime policies means a lot of public transit feels unsafe. Seattle’s police department is at half the level of staffing it needs to be just to match the average. The light rail can sometimes feel like a mobile homeless shelter, which is a shame because of how new and clean the cars are otherwise. Buses often have drug addicts on them. Low level crimes are common but violent crimes are rising. There was an incident recently that was on national news, where a bus driver got stabbed by a rider. People avoid public transit if they have the means.

I think for the rail system in Seattle to be useful it has to be frequent, 24/7, with matching frequent and 24/7 bus transit feeding into it, and with a massive focus on law enforcement AND prosecution.

There is another alternative: frequent enough that it doesn't matter if you miss a train, because the next is in 5 minutes or so.

YES, that would absolutely work

As long as the infrastructure is good enough that it doesn't delay all the trains/busses (which happens a lot in Boston metro area, unfixed for decades).

At that point, it's just a capital equation - is it more costly to ensure they run 99.995% reliably +/-30sec or just invest enough capital to field and maintain a new train every 5min on average? One advantage of the latter is a lot more redundant equipment available. But also a lot more total wear and maintenance.

But either works

Most of my work career I was able to commute by bicycle. Only in winter was it impossible (snow/ice).

I always surprises me that in areas of the US were bicycle travel could easy be done all year round, it is highly discouraged and in many of those places it can be very dangerous.

I remember visiting some of those areas and I noticed the way the roads were designed made bicycle travel very scary. In one case, I tried to ride somewhere and I really thought I was going to get killed. All I heard was beeping horns and people yelling at me for a short 10 mile (~16km) round trip errand run.

I guess I am lucky being born in a place that the roads were put in place by cows :) These days, the State Gov started promoting this kind of travel, all that is needed is to fix public transportation after decades of corruption.

Edit: I have even ridden through NYC a few times, to me, NYC it is far safer then places I have seen in those areas.

The case of bicycle travel is interesting because from a distance perspective it's practical even in less dense US cities in a way walking isn't. The usual claim why the US is so car focused is that it's spread out, but even in my medium density city there are a lot of things within biking distance of my house. The problem though is that there is no safe way to actually reach a lot of those things by bicycle, you just have to ride on high-speed roads with no separated bike lanes. Fixing that problem wouldn't require restructuring cities or getting rid of cars.

This highlights a problem with car dependency - cars tend to push out other modes of travel until the only way to travel is via cars.

I can’t say I’ve ever felt safe in a bike here, anywhere someone can easily drive an F150 over you and not even be charged with a crime is too dangerous for me, not sure if it’s just me but the last few times I’ve visited NYC i saw many more large pick up trucks :(

Actually the last time I rode in NYC was over 25 years ago, before the massive size Pickups. So I wonder if it it changed. I heard there were many bike lanes build there in the last 20 years. Are they being ignored by cars and pickups ?

Drivers don’t respect anything in NYC, not sure why bike lanes would be better. The ones that have the plasticky poles are somewhat better if the poles haven’t been driven over already but I saw a lot of unprotected lanes.

>Drivers don’t respect anything in NYC, not sure why bike lanes would be better.

Nor anywhere else, but where I am at least the roads all have a place a bike can travel on.

To see how bike lanes should be designed, check out Montreal Quebec. Where I am, what 'real' bike lanes that exist all go from nowhere to nowhere with nothing in between.

It's significantly better, but very area dependent. Some routes can still be very dangerous and it's not to the standard of many European cities. Still, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Strange - I submitted this 3 days ago and yet this newer submission isn't tagged as a dupe.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42539218

Your submission didn't garner any comments, I don't remember the threshold, but there needs to be a minimum level of engagement for the subsequent submission to be considered a duplicate.

Thanks - that makes more sense to me now.

I guess it would be better if an attempt to post the same URL would instead just refresh the original submission to give it more visibility, but I suppose there's no real problem to having stale URL submissions.

> “We need to get the voices of those who can’t drive – disabled people, seniors, immigrants, poor folks – into the room because the people making decisions drive everywhere,” she said. “They don’t know what it’s like to have to spend two hours riding the bus.”

Even worse: those really in power - think mayors and other high level city/county officials - usually have dedicated drivers serving their needs. They don't even need to drive themselves or have to go anywhere themselves, not even for grocery shopping or to drop kids off to school, that's all handled by security details, nannies and other servants - because god forbid the elites have to be in spaces with the plebs. Imagine the horrors.

That's also why there is so much push for private aviation and helicopters in the really big cities.

Public transportation should never be thought of as a charity, only for those "disabled people, seniors, immigrants, poor folks". It instills the idea that users should be thankful for any amount of funding (and can't complain when it's arbitrarily cut), and that "normal" people never take public transportation.

Funny title

The Guardian has self proclaimed biases that they openly discuss whenever they ask for more money, so it’s not surprising to see such an unhinged article from them. Cars are great, and create far more happiness than they take away. That’s why they’re wildly popular and why people generally avoid public transit if they can. After all, cars provide fast and convenient transportation, let you carry people and things, on your own schedule, protected from the weather, straight to your destination. They only become inconvenient when cities are overbuilt and too dense, without the right infrastructure to keep traffic flowing smoothly.

Studies like this should be deeply scrutinized because of the biases of their authors (an “urban planning expert”) and their fields. Most studies from academia also have questionable methodology and make vague claims built on bad statistics. This is no different, with the study making weak claims of how something is “associated” with something else, but drawing conclusions that go beyond that. These studies are nevertheless blindly accepted by people who want its claims to be true, as is the case here with the guardian amplifying the study.

As for the article - anytime you see journalists make weird emotional claims like how highways are “fracturing communities”, it’s a signal the article can be safely ignored. Everyday people who aren’t biased would recognize how highways connect people and places. Hyperbolic claims like this reek of activist marketing not serious discussion.

> Studies like this should be deeply scrutinized because of the biases of their authors (an “urban planning expert”) and their fields.

One man’s “bias” is another man’s “expertise”. Who, exactly, would you say is qualified to study this sort of thing?

Did you read the article? It literally says that cars in and of themselves are not actually bad, and that having access to a car corresponds with greater happiness. It’s car-dependency that is the problem.

What we need is a greater variety of transportation options. What if I’m someone who doesn’t want to have to drive everywhere? What if, as one of the passages from the article points out, I’m literally unable to drive due to a disability? Should I therefore be considered an afterthought when it comes to being able to get myself to and from wherever it is that I’d like to go?

Please educate yourself on the issue before making ignorant claims.

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