It doesn't contend with the fact that having a car is ridiculously useful. It is intensely amusing when I see people in other nations comment on how useful getting a car has been in their daily life. And I don't think people realize just how many cars Americans have.
That is, there may be a caste system, but as this congestion pricing shows, the catch is that we have a ton of cars. And people use them because they are convenient as hell.
People should not forget that Europe has tons of car friendly towns and suburbs and many people live there. You can choose your lifestyle.
It is a lot like people wanting city life to look a lot like college life. Without wanting to live in dormitories where people are also raising kids.
Granted, college dormitory is a hyperbolic. More realistic, will be your standard smaller apartment blocks.
I have friends who chose to move into cities and sold their cars in the process. The pros of the cities outweighed the pros of car ownership for them. They also don't have to spend money on car maintenance, insurance, or gas. They can move around the city fine with public transit and ride sharing. They rent cars to make long trips.
Absolute statements rarely are absolute, particularly when the motivations and preferences of individuals are in the mix.
The reason we don't really see this is that in the US 99% of cities are built exclusively for cars. Of those that have transit, those are very obviously an afterthought.
For NYC, it's not that having a car sucks. It's that the city isn't built for them. So you're going to be stuck in traffic.
Prior to congestion pricing, a lot of people were driving because they're, well, stupid. Often it's faster to literally walk alongside the cars than be in them, because that's how severe the traffic was/is in lower Manhattan. But they didn't want to take the train for whatever reason, so they drove instead. And wasted time and money.
At the end of the day, cars take up way more space, and they're wildly expensive. Many of the cost of cars are actually subsidized, not the other way around. Consider free parking - that parking spot actually costs thousands of dollars a year. But drivers aren't paying it.
In regards to congestion, that costs money. It's not free to have thousands of cars essentially idling for hours of the day. But that's a cost everyone pays - even though most people commute by subway. That's a problem. That's going to break a lot of incentives.
I happily take the train and ferry in New York over a car. For some journeys, e.g. into Long Island with a group, renting a car would actually be cheaper.
If you haven’t spent any time not driving, it’s hard to imagine the luxury going car-free brings. Not the least of which is the ridiculous amount of privacy and law-enforcement interference we tolerate for drivers.
They're wildly nice if only a few people have them. The more do, and the more parts of a city cater to cars, the worse they get, even as they also become totally necessary (so, not having them also gets far, far worse, even untenable).
I was introduced to this notion reading an analysis from some French social-philosopher and was initially like "that... can't be right, surely?" so ran conservative numbers on my own situation, with an average-or-better commute distance for my city, a cheap paid-off car, and nearly double median individual income for my city, and... yep, dude was right, living in a city designed around cars was costing me time, not saving it. It'd be a ton worse for people with worse commutes and lower-earning jobs. They were getting totally screwed on the deal.
was it Jacques Ellul? He made a real impact on me, his analysis that people adapt to the machine rather than the other way around, even will internalize its value system. In modern society, "efficiency" remains the sole aspiration, which is a technological value, not a human one. fwiw - don't recall if he wrote a lot about cars though.
In a city, a carshare is much more practical in my opinion. No need to stress about street parking and getting tickets on days that they clean the street. Or wasting 10 minutes finding parking. Or worrying about car maintenance. Or spending a few grand annually on car insurance, maintenance, and gas.
All this worry for what? A weekend getaway twice a month? Buying in bulk once a month?
Here is the place for a good public transport, even in US it should be trivial to make it financially self-sufficient and attractive. People always choose whats best for them (cost or time wise). European city centers work like that and everybody normal accepts that.
And, I can agree it is the kind of thing that can save time for anyone, but will spend time for everyone.
Celebrities, politicians, billionaires all ride the subway all the time. New Yorkers know to keep to themselves out of politeness not safety and honestly are more likely to step up and defend someone famous being harassed than join in. We're all just trying to get to where we're going and the subway is almost always the fastest and most convenient way (not to mention cheapest) to do that.
According to you? Riding subway in NYC and you'd see plenty of rich people. Go to any station near the financial district, or Park Ave.
Which is to say: his case studies examining the details of specific cities, evaluating transit system design etc. are great. But his analysis of why the bad things are bad (especially when he starts blaming people and ascribing motivations) is utterly insufferable.
Happy to say I missed that one.
But yes, I completely agree with all of that. I'd love more of the analyses of why some systems work and less of the vitriol against everyone who isn't already totally on board.
Not Just Bikes is like the Joe Rogan of these people in that whenever I see one of his videos recommended on YouTube, I know I’ll be hearing about it from people trying to pass the ideas off as common knowledge within two weeks.
I think you are mad because they are right, and your only refuge is to recycle hipster memes of the 2010s. Just personally visiting cities and suburbs from (still car loving!) Germans v/s most US cities validates the fuckcars camp. The example my Chilean city should follow is certainly not Dallas, no matter how cringe NJB might be.
They are a particular variety of policy wonk that conflates positive claims with normative beliefs. Normative beliefs are a matter of preference.
Consider urban sprawl; the desire to live in a larger home farther from the city center doesn’t go away with trains, the throughput is just more efficient. The question then becomes whether the denizens of a city would prefer to travel by car or by train. Given that car-centric urban sprawl is still ongoing, Americans appear to prefer the car.
A caste system? are you kidding me. CASTE. Like the system where a group of people were called untouchables??? These kinds of extreme comparisons are so utterly unhelpful to literally everyone.
Frankly just on the face of it your claim is completely out of touch with the US cities with decent public transit options (New York, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago). Everyone that lives in NYC that can take the subway takes the subway. I know plenty of hedge funders and traders and big tech workers in NYC who take the subway every day, and plenty of big law partners who take the DC metro to the office.
Obviously there are really big problems with how transit is implemented and treated in most cities in the USA, but you are completely incorrect. In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it
Obviously there's a significant negative feedback loop here.
More importantly, no C-Suite executive, Banker, Socialite, or whatever "upper caste" stand in you want to select gives a shit about sitting next to a Janitor on the train. Hell, they don't give a shit about sitting next to a normal sane person who is homeless. The reason so many people who have a choice don't chose to use public transit is because of low quality service (as always), crime, and a very small number of very visible mentally ill people having daily breakdowns in public.
This is a good thing! NotJustBikes is a huge doomer loser, don't listen to him, there's a really straightforward route to making things better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_New_York_City
> Compared to other big cities, public bathrooms in New York City are rare, as the 1,100 public restrooms result in a rate of 16 per 100,000 residents. Most public restrooms are located in parks; comparatively few other public spaces, including New York City Subway stations, have public restrooms.
> As of 2022, the New York City Subway has 472 stations, 69 of which have public bathrooms. Several homeless people sued the New York City government and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in 1990, claiming that the city and MTA created a "public nuisance" by failing to provide public toilets. A report by the Legal Action Center for the Homeless, who represented the plaintiffs, noted that of 526 public comfort stations surveyed in parks, almost three-quarters were "either closed, filthy, foul-smelling or without toilet paper and soap." In 2010, there were 133 open restrooms in 81 of the system's 468 stations.
There's a great quote on this: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."
I admit I don't have an answer for this. San Francisco's experiments with nifty self-cleaning public toilets have been expensive failures for the most part. I'm not sure where we go from here, given that the problem seems to be cultural/user-based.
Housing, healthcare, mental health, public transit, unemployment, lead abatement, education - all of these policy levers impact the prevalence of the behaviors you describe.
"Cities like Helsinki and Vienna in Europe have seen dramatic reductions in homelessness due to the adaptation of Housing First policies, as have the North American cities Columbus, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Medicine Hat, Alberta."
https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
"A decade ago, Utah set itself an ambitious goal: end chronic homelessness. As of 2015, the state can just about declare victory: The population of chronically homeless people has dropped by 91 percent."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland
"Finland has adopted a Housing First policy, whereby social services assign homeless individuals homes first, and issues like mental health and substance abuse are treated second. Since its launch in 2008, the number of homeless people in Finland has decreased by roughly 30%,[1] though other reports indicate it could be up to 50%. The number of long-term homeless people has fallen by more than 35%. "Sleeping rough", the practice of sleeping outside, has been largely eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains."
Having a stable housing situation turns out to make a whole bunch of other related social changes more feasible.
> If by 'mental health' you mean involuntary commitment, then yes, that will do the job
I mean, I'd start with therapy, addiction services, social supports, and the like. But I do think the complete removal of long-term inpatient mental health in the 50s/60s was an overshoot. Some people need that much help.
(I also believe there's a lot more we can do to prevent people from becoming that "kind of people" in the first place.)
I think the explanation of "some people are bad people" is a lazy explanation. The proportion of bad people to everyone else should be about the same everywhere. We have to take a closer look at incentives and systems in place.
if you can reform the system fine but I don't have conidence. Human nature doesn't deal well with the needed power imbalance.
(I'm not trying to weigh in one way or the other in my comment, but as someone who rides local US transit regularly and has for over 10 years, my patience for using transit as a "solution of last resort" is wearing thin but still remains.)
The system I'm referring to is San Diego's light rail. The 2nd (and last) time I rode it I saw someone get assaulted on the train (and what appeared to be homeless people riding it). The first (and last) time I rode the MARTA train in Atlanta last year, I saw a homeless man passed out sitting in a puddle of his own urine. I will never use public transit again unless there are exigent circumstances. Liberals have completely ruined yet another thing that used to be great.