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Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

From an efficiency point of view public transportation makes a lot of sense.

From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I do look forward to travelling to the Netherlands one day and I will enthusiastically use public transit there just as a personal experiment to see if my experience differs enough from the subway transit in Montreal or Toronto that gave me nightmares and has me thinking every time I travel there: "Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this."

The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers. I don't see myself ever not being a driver. I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.

It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.

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I don’t enjoy the 15 minutes I spend packed in the NY subway when I have to take it during rush hour, but I do enjoy hopping on the subway off-peak when the cars are half empty and I get a seat and open my subway book.

Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life. But I do really enjoy driving on new routes when the road is half empty.

My two observations are that bumper-to-bumper traffic feels much more stressful to me (a lot more honking, people trying to cut into faster lanes, etc) than the subway (crammed and sometimes there’s a homeless person with bad BO), and that I spend much less time on the rush hour subway than in traffic jams in the past (even during rush hour, the subways are not that packed until you get into Manhattan).

Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time.

At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car.

But transportation is not Car vs the World™ no matter how many people (online) want it to be. It's a question of "how do you get people where they want/need to be". And that is a multi-faceted question with complex solutions - and the car will be part of it except in extreme/absurd situations that are so rare as to be ignored (like the "islands with no cars" (they have cars) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_islands).

One of the best ways to discuss transportation is to NOT do "r/fuckcars" which makes everyone defensive and hate you, but instead talk about how the benefits are for everyone - grade separation of rail is nice, but it's also self enforcing (trains will crush cars). But grade separation for bikes and pedestrians is a win for everyone! Cars don't like bikes next to them, and bikes don't like being next to cars. Cars don't mind driving a few miles out of their way, but pedestrians just don't want to deviate from the crow-flight line unless rabidly enforced.

How come nobody ever points out that roads are “unprofitable”?

Because they aren't. They enable almost all economic activity that involves moving things or people around.

That same argument should apply to public transport then. You can't on one hand argue that roads don't need to be profitable in the traditional sense because of their benefits and the turn around and ignore the same for public transport.

Even if you don't demand profitability, there still needs to be cost/benefit analysis done.

Do you build one rail line or two? Do you build one bus route or two? Do you expand a road or build a new one?

Making it a train vs car or rail vs road obscures the problem AND the solution.

Objectively they are not profitable. If you count gas taxes that are collected, we're only covering about a quarter of the cost to maintain them.

Roads are not generating direct revenue, which is how you determine profit. There's no model where roads are profitable.

Additionally, we've been moving goods and services by rail for approximately two centuries in the United States - long before a car was on a road. Roads are not a requirement to move goods around.

I remember pointing this out to someone who said public transportation was unprofitable and his response was "I don't care".

People tend not to point it out because most don't actually care about the profitability at all, it's just a meme opinion they present because they prefer cars and look at it like a competition. Other meme opinions that get used:

- disabled people need cars and you want to take cars away from them! (fake disability advocacy - disability advocates who have spent 10 minutes thinking about this know that disability is a spectrum and that many disabilities prevent people from being able to use cars or they are unable pay for the necessary modifications to be able to drive; also no one said anything about taking cars away from people)

- cyclists are a danger to pedestrians and cars! (rhetorical trick to get people to think bikes pose a greater danger to pedestrians than cars)

- buses are ugly! (so is your car)

- it increases traffic (so does your car)

- not everyone wants to ride a bike/walk/take the bus (no one said you have to)

They say these things even in non-adversarial contexts. Like in a discussion about wanting more pedestrian infrastructure and bike paths, they will say "just use [existing bike path], some of us have JOBS and ERRANDS to run" as if people only walk/bike for leisure. No, you don't understand, I'm trying to get as far away from the horrible drivers with Texas/Florida plates as possible!!

Someone’s going to push this and the result will be billing the bus for road usage per person …

> At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car.

Or driving with no passengers at all, not uncommon for the buses where I live at certain times and routes.

It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. You can optimize equipment usage by running more buses on heavily used routes but you can't encourage new ridership on new routes without running enough buses to make it at least somewhat convenient. If you miss your bus and have to wait an hour or more for the next one, most people don't find that very appealing.

But at some point if you're running a whole bus to move a small number of people, you need to admit it's not worth it and eliminate that route. It would be more economical to just give those people taxi rides.

There was a city that did that - the busses were "on demand" - much more like a taxi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI1yM9mzCAE

Minibuses are a thing. You could easily run them at off-times and on more sparsely-used routes.

Great, let's do that when the negative externalities of cars are properly priced into their usage. This is the number one reason that's causing such sentiments, and rightly so. Expecting people to approach it differently before that is fixed is unrealistic. Currently, cars are subsidized to an absurdly higher level than public transit. That's the status quo. A change of that status quo means moving car subsidies to public transit subsidies, unless you raise taxes, which will make the exact same people defensive and hate you.

> Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time. >

Hold on, if we talk about efficiency and profitability, you also need to compare to roads. You can't on one hand subsidise road/car travel and at the same time demand profitability from public transport.

If we would make road charges actually cover the costs it would become completely unsustainable in rural areas and would likely not become profitable in urban centers (factoring the price of the real estate of roads into the equation would likely increase cost significantly) except for rush hour.

The main thing that will bring cost of public transport down is going to be self driving, not cars but trains.

Who is paying for these unprofitable roads?

If it's the people (eventually) then it's just accounting.

All these things can be referenced, and checked. Rural roads are paved because they're used (the ones that aren't - they're gravel or mud).

> Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life.

Being on a motorcycle in a jurisdiction where lane filtering is allowed/tolerated is awesome during rush hour (or any hour, really).

It's awesome but eventually I discovered people wanted to kill me for that honor, and mostly stopped it.

I in fact did that too for a while. Definitely the most fun form of commute.

That said, my biggest gripe with driving/riding as a commute is that I get really bored of taking the exact same route every single day.

I love my personal car bubble as much or more than most people (though maybe not as much as you), but at some point we have to get over ourselves. We're all so spoiled. Why the hell do we deserve to all have our own giant speed machines careening through cities where people (including us drivers!) are trying to live? It doesn't make any sense and it's a shame that we've let it go so far, especially in the US.

It should be discouraged (financially, logistically, socially) to drive in dense urban places. Obviously, in order to achieve that, these urban places need to have alternative means of transportation.

Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.

I'm more dependent on my car(s) when I got the first newborn than I ever was.

> Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.

I hear this all the time yet right now am traveling in Amsterdam and see many parents trucking their kids around in bicycles without issue. Actually I remember seeing this in SF as well, and in Taiwan and Japan I see incredibly young children riding public transit on their own.

Most of these bike moms/dads still have a car at home.

As long as those cars are at home in the garage instead of on the road that's fine. The point is having fewer cars on the road, not fewer cars in general. Riding around on a bicycle and having a car for exceptional circumstances and a once a year road trip is healthier and safer than driving that car around every single day.

That also depends on weather around the year in a given country. Here in Poland travelling on a bike ranges from uncomfortable to impossible for 1/3 of the year.

It must be much worse than the weather in Norway and Finland, then. Or perhaps just an infrastructure problem? I imagine if they didn't clear the roads then driving could get pretty challenging too.

In Amsterdam I guarantee you they don’t.

Source: grew up there.

How do you know? I know many parents who move their kids around in bikes (many of those live in cities with less than 200k people) who specifically opted not own cars.

I particular I know that many schools in Germany have car free zones around them due to the problems that car drop offs cause (there is nothing worse as a rushed parent in an SUV dropping their kids off at school. The number of near misses I have seen and experienced makes we want to globally forbid cars within 2 km of a school).

That is definitely not true in many parts of Japan.

We lived in Sydney until our oldest child was three, and never owned a car. Your statement is reasonable: for driving around small kids, car is essential. We instead took ferries, buses, trains and so on. From the hospital we took a taxi (or the modern equivalent), by the way.

I have a 4 year old and an 18 month old, and I don't own a car (nor does my partner).

We rent a car ~10-20 times a year, but that's usually for vacations or trips out of the city to visit family. Regular weekly family life we use buses, the underground (metro), trains, or sometimes taxis.

We are considering eventually getting a car, but we've managed for 4 years with children to not need one and it's not been an issue.

(I live in London, United Kingdom)

Sure, it works in your context, you live in a city with 9 million people and you sometimes rent a car - fine. I live in a city 100x smaller. I literally don't know a person that doesn't own a car, or at least has access to a car.

The context actually get far more granular than it. I lived without a car for 25 years of my life, buses and trains were enough. But all it takes to require a car is having a home 3-4 km from the city center bus stops (which probably covers >50% of population). Unless someone likes walking 1h one way in -10 deg in winter to get to work each day.

It sounds like your city is about the same size as the city featured in this article, which has a population of 83,000.

This is a problem with city design, not city size.

That's exactly what "making cities work for people instead of cars" is all about.

A city 100x smaller is a city with 90k population. That's half of the population of the Upper West Side. And the UWS has an area of only 5 square kilometers. Unless you specifically choose to, you are not going to walk 3-4 km.

You don't live in a city. You live in a suburb.

-10deg winters are certainly going to put a stop to much walking or biking, regardless of whether that's Celsius or Fahrenheit.

Not much of Europe ever gets that low though. Edinburgh occasionally overnight, but it's rarely below about -4c / 24f during commute hours. Berlin mostly the same, Stockholm's maybe the only big European capital that gets to "walking for an hour stands a serious chance of killing you" temperatures for days at a time.

London has abysmal transport situation - any time I needed to traverse through city, it was 3+ hours of buses and trains/subway mix. Of course doing the same with car would be even worse.

Imagine when people don't live in such shitholes, and spend weekends travelling ie to nature or mountains or culture or history or whatever, on non-congested roads. Heck, imagine going to nature even evenings after work, ie for rock climbing. Public transport would be 2-3x that travel time, if possible at all. Also, much more expensive compared to a single car drive, even when accounting all taxes, maintenance and purchasing costs of a car.

Thats how most of Europe lives. City center folks can keep their car-free existence, just please for god's sake don't force it down everybody else's throats like that's the only way to live.

Some people would happily lose half of paycheck to avoid such life, exactly because they spent part of their lives in city centers and know very well what lifestyle they reject, if they can and can afford it. Quadruple that for families with small kids, like my own.

> Thats how most of Europe lives.

THIS. Europe doesn't end on Paris. People visit huge metropolies and base their judgement on this, which really skews the perspective.

I don't understand how you can spend 3+ hours getting around London. I live in Bristol and when we go to visit London, it takes about 3 hours including the train all the way from Bristol to London. Getting from A to B in London is probably 30-40 minutes tops using the underground.

Really depends where you are. But not in a major city, in the UK its not.

Ask me how i know

Yet, most cars you see in the streets are single-occupancy.

A single newborn can be handled without a car (if you spend used car prices on a stroller system!) - but if you have three kids under three, or five under 7, a car greatly simplifies things - or you need to hire additional wranglers.

It's not about the good times (on a good day, moving five kids by walking/stroller is easy) - it's about the bad times, the crying, the screaming, the attempted suicides, etc.

Until you're the only adult in the car, driving along the motorway, and one of the kids in the back starts crying / gets car sick / needs the toilet when you're 15km from the next services. Granted, train toilets with a toddler aren't much fun either.

Don't need a crazy expensive stroller though. A sling when they're small and light, and once they get big and heavy, they're large enough to go in a more basic foldable stroller. The childcare products industry is honestly awful at scamming new or expecting parents into buying shit they don't need.

Singles - I agree. Even doubles, there are reasonable ones.

Find a good cheap triple or higher stroller. Then you're looking at used car prices.

And I agree - a train is nice with a family, because once you're in, you're in.

But a train is more like a plane than a car; it's the subway that's closest to short commuting trips, and they rarely have bathrooms and often subway stops don't have them, either.

(Sometimes the temptation to get an RV with a toilet is high, mind you.)

False. Cargo bikes exist and are capable of hauling kids and groceries. You can get them e-assist, so you don't have to be a dedicated cyclist.

If you need to travel more than ~2-3 miles or so to get groceries or get to school (in a populous area) that's a failure of urban planning.

Yes, there will be some people with mobility limitations who still needs cars, but that's a tiny minority of the overall population.

> Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.

For places like london, paris, amsterdam, you can totally be car free.

So long as you have a pram with space under the seat for storing stuff, its totally not a problem to take kids out and about. The other thing thats invaluable, is that you can concentrate entirely on your kids without worrying about crashing.

Sure, but these are multi-million cities. They have amazing public transport.

The issue I see here is assuming that Europe = Paris/Rome/Amsterdam. Probably due to tourism. It makes the impression that whole EU is just amazing and no one needs a car. It can't be further from the truth.

Pretty rich that you are complaining about generalization now where you made the initial statement that the "Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density" which doesn't seem to have any limits in scope.

You made a clear assertion about the need for cars, regardless of urban density.

But it turns out that actually urban density is pretty good indicator of reasonable public transport. of _course_ there are black spots, rural england lost its trains in the 60s and busses in the 2000s.

But

The british didn't make the tube for tourism, given that they've not built anything transport wise since the 90s (except the Elizabeth line)

Paris didn't make the metro for tourists, because they are french, they're not going to spend money on dirty tourists who get in the way.

the Netherlands didn't make trams for tourists, they can cycle like the rest of us.

Simply untrue in many places. My next-door neighbour rides his bike with his daughter to school then rides to work at the nearby hospital (up a gnarly bank, too). I see many kids walking to school all year round. Kids are more than capable of making their own way to school from the age of 8-10, depending on the distance.

Driving your car is absolutely a choice in many cities, and a poor choice at that.

I mean that's a depressing existence for the kids. I walked and biked around everywhere since I was 6 or 7 years old, I'm extremely thankful I didn't have to rely on my parents being free to drive me around so I could see my friends.

Very wrong. I'm not OP but I have two teens and we raised them from birth in a city and have never owned a car. We rent rarely and only to go on trips to places inaccessible by rail. All kids activities were walking distance or subway. Probably ten times as much as you can find in a suburb too. Also kids learn to ride the subway by high school if not middle school so they can be independent like no place else.

> it's a shame that we've let it go so far,

It's hopeless to expect that things don't end up in this state. A decentralized system will naturally tend to a state of equilibrium balancing between desirability and pain, e.g. people will keep moving to a "nice" area until commutes or prices become unbearable.

I think the only way to end up with an utopia-like metropolis is to run it with a benevolent dictator government SimCity-like, which would probably involve restricted entry leading to very expensive real estate; therefore a lottery or similar admission system into low-cost housing would be needed to balance the needed support population. In other words probably unconstitutional in a dozen different ways and never going to happen.

That "state of equilibrium" is only unavoidable if there are infinite sources and sinks of people. That's a workable approximation if you're only studying one part of a much larger system, in isolation, but when considering the entire world, it falls down. If we have enough nice areas for everyone to live in them, that model stops being applicable.

And, well, a lot of people _can't_ have their own speed bubble.

Most of us, for quite a bit of our lives - when we're under 18 for a start, and over 75ish it isn't really a good idea (yes, I know, no viable alternatives for a lot of people right now, but it's still a bad idea). Whenever we've had a drink. There's a dozen or more medical conditions which can snatch your right to drive away with the stroke of a doctor's pen, and that's before we consider all the common meds which come with a don't drive advisory warning.

And then there's all the other times where it'd sure be nice not to have to. When we're tired, or stressed, or sick, or weather conditions make things dicey. Or when I just wanted to read that book, magazine, blog article, or watch that movie. Or we've got to be someplace with the kids but they actually need our undivided attention.

The point is, even if you drive and like driving, it's just basically civilised to have other affordable options. Even if they're a bit slower or come with other compromises, they should, y'know, exist. And sometimes allowing them to exist comes at a price of making driving your own speed-bubble at the times when you can and want to a little less convenient or more expensive.

The thing that is so great about better transit for folks in cities in America is that it benefits you specifically in the lifestyle choices you want to live. Introducing better transit options gets folks out of their cars and onto the tram or sidewalk and that leaves you with your desire for solitude with more open highways.

> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

Fair but you have to remember that this anti-car lobby is rather tiny in comparison to the pro-car lobby which is every state department of transportation, automaker, insurance company, oil executive, auto dealer, etc. they aren’t as loud and annoying because they don’t have to be, but take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.

> take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.

A bit of a segue, but this is true for just about anything with lots of money and/or power.

Internet marketing, for example.

> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!

>The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!

These people are just the inverse of the equal(ly stupid) and opposite idiots who think all the problems in society are the result of cars or some other mis-allocation of resources toward transportation. They're incredibly small incredibly stupid groups who's extreme(ly stupid) opinions anchor the discourse, to the detriment of all the adults in the room.

You see this pattern of crap on every issue too, not just cars/transportation.

The case for public transit in the US would be strengthened if it weren't used largely as a vehicle for money laundering public funds into private funds. Another problem is that security tends to be poorly enforced, the last time I rode a public train there was a knife fight in our car over some ear-splitting gang music being played on the wrong turf (lol, literally the turf the train happened to be passing through at that moment as it passed momentarily from a latino to black neighborhood) which did not even alarm most the passengers.

Normal people don't want to ride on a vehicle used for turf wars, robbery getaway express, and as a homeless sleeping center. Normal people are alarmed when ear-splitting rap music is being played provocatively, normal people get alarmed when lethal weapons are pulled out for immediate use in a crowded box. An occasion before that, a schizophrenic person tried to corner me in the back of a train car while going on an increasingly aggressive rant about how the government is out to get us.

And this would bother me even less if I weren't disarmed, because of course it was illegal for me to carry a gun or knife to protect myself from the literal knife fights surrounding me on the train. I presume anyone poor enough to need public transit with half a brain in that town bought, borrowed, or stole a bicycle.

Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit. Plan your route so you get access to a seat, settle in with a book or music. The other people melt away. Whereas driving a car involves constant interaction with other drivers which in many places (including rural areas, not to single out pickup drivers but there is a pattern) can be quite fraught.

Agreed - it was a bit of an adjustment moving to NYC and dealing with a packed subway but now I quite enjoy the density and people watching as a feature of the experience.

> Plan your route so you get access to a seat

What do you mean specifically? Most of people working regular jobs don't really get to choose the time for their transit. They generally want to get to work as late as possible and get out of work as early as possible. Which means more people, because everyone wants this.

Fun fact, when I was at high school, some students going home by bus would go backwards the bus path and get inside a few stops away from the school, just so they can guarantee a seat and not have to stand up for 60 minutes.

Sometimes if you walk to a previous stop or come in from a different line you can find a seat more easily. If it makes sense you could even go a couple stops "backwards" if the train reverses at that point. Shifting your schedule might be another option. At one phase I took standing as a challenge and drastically improved my balance over a couple of years, though it's not fun when the car is really crowded.

Sure, but at this point we are just hacking the system. Which is fine, I guess, no harm is done, but it feels wrong :)

Honestly this is one of the undersold advantages of public transit. It can be fun to optimize your path and switch things up both on a macro and micro timescale. In a car since I'm constantly aware of what I'm doing, taking a less efficient path feels like I'm wasting a part of my life. Taking a less efficient path on public transit feels like I'm taking more time to stop and appreciate my surroundings. Especially because sometimes that alternate path gives me a better view.

A coworker once told me his view of his commute drastically changed when he realized he could take the ferry to work. He got fresh air, it was less cramped, and it only took an extra 5-10 minutes.

In Beijing I would often take the long way around on a subway loop line so I could get a seat. The subway is just always crowded, and you could be standing for an hour if you don’t plan your route right. Most of the time I would just plan my day around a very early taxi ride to get to work and then return before the awful rush hour they had, but that was 10 years ago and I’m afraid it wouldn’t be an option anymore (I left Beijing in 2016), so smashing into the subway would be necessary, if you do some clever route adjustments you plan your trip through big transfer points where lots of people get off, guaranteeing yourself a seat (worked on my last trip there in April).

What a dream, planning a seat, in which country is such pleasure possible outside August?

> Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit.

That is physically impossible. Again, it's a "me problem", I'm not trying to say that the world needs to accommodate my unique personality, but if other people are within speaking distance of me with no partition, they cannot "melt away."

When I was younger, discovering my mysophonia and autism, my mother would used to say things to me like "just tune out the noise." If only! I mean, how do I develop that super-power? Please, it would change my life so much for the better. I don't know what that means.

The thing that practically defines mysophonia is an inability to do that with trigger sounds.

But for me it's not just noise. I can't relax in the presence of other people. I guess it could be an extreme form of social anxiety. But it's not so much that I feel fear or anxious ... it's that I am hyper-alert when other people are around me. If I can see someone out of the corner of my eye, my brain can't go "just ignore them." It's not wired that way.

One of my trigger sounds, speaking of mysophonia, is actually people talking. I don't like listening to the sound of people speaking amongst each other. I don't know anyone else that has that particular trigger sound. But if I'm minding my own business somewhere and suddenly I hear people having a conversation ... it can send me into an autistic meltdown.

And yeah, you can put on noise cancelling headphones in public. Which I do when I'm in those situations. If it was just the noise alone then it would be a problem that is not insurmountable. Though it would still be a problem.

But reading a book? Impossible for me when there is even a single other person in the room.

Again, it's a me problem. I'm not saying the world should change for me. All I'm saying is please don't take away my car. It's the only thing that enables me to be at all mobile.

Government policy should not be formed on the basis of "me" problems. (Not merely yours, but generally.)

I have some of that, especially when I haven't been out for a while. Moving to a place where English isn't the main language helped me quite a bit to get into the right headspace. Also realizing no one really cares about me. This is fun: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sheeple.png

>I don't see myself ever not being a driver.

Cars aren't getting cheaper, car maintenance has become absurdly expensive (compared to what it was), auto insurance is set to get far more expensive, and making your entire lifestyle dependent on the existence of cheap gasoline is not a great strategy. A lot of people will simply be priced out of driving.

>It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

Personal car commuting gets in the way of vital freight trucking. The highway system wasn't built to facilitate people going to work or traveling to see their grandma, it was build to move goods.

>I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future,...

The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. For instance, rural roads, rural hospitals, rural electrification, rural broadband, rural airports, etc. It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".

> The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence.

This is an uncritical viewpoint, you're simply describing a society. It doesn't matter where you live, you're soaking up the labor and capital of the wider net of people. That's what it is to have a civilization, and ours is so deeply interconnected that all relationships are inherently reciprocal. The trivially measurable flow of money doesn't say anything of substance as it's a second order abstraction, only that the mechanisms and pipelines by which money move are situated in cities. It's not urban labor and urban resources that builds, maintains and operates that infrastructure or the social fabric that it serves and is served by.

> It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".

On the contrary, the negative health effects of cities are empirically measurable[1][2][3]. We should be striving at all times as human beings to move past having them at all, and should look to building towards healthier, lower density living and encourage it for anyone who is capable of doing so. We cannot fall into the trap of building, encouraging and valuing objectively worse living conditions in the name of efficiency, the entire point of this whole system is to lead better lives, not to make the numbers go up.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26630577/

[2] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23015685/

[3] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31610855/

> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people.

I get the same independent feeling from others you describe while riding my bike (not a bubble, but that’s a false sense of security in a car giving the 40kish car occupants who die every year in the US). In fact, I generally enjoy that bike experience more than I ever do driving because I never get stuck in car traffic, never get stuck behind a line of cars at a traffic signal. Never need to work about parking, other than finding a secure place to lock up (which some destinations lack). I used to love driving, but I started commuting by bike for work and realized over time that I enjoy biking so much more that I go weeks at this point without ever driving.

FWIW I live in a smaller American city of about 120k people, but is part of a greater metro area.

> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people.

Then, you've experienced poor public transit systems. A good one doesn't make you so packed in because there's enough trains for people to have comfortable amounts of space.

Anyway, it's moot - if your city has lots of people, the only feasible way to move them around is public transit. Trying anything else will fail due to the nature of two things not being able to exist in one place at the same time. One somewhat packed subway car is several hundred square meters of unmoving packed highway.

I wouldn't qualify Tokyo's public transit system as poor. In fact, the only one that might rival it in Europe would be the one in Moscow.

From a perspective of "packing people in"? Tokyo is absolutely poor.

The MTA doesn't have to employ people to pack extra riders into full subway cars.

Tokyo has better public transit than the United States, certainly. However it's public transit options and general design aren't that great by modern standards.

First, they have basically no bicycle infrastructure, and bikes are supposed to go on the sidewalk, so pedestrian cyclist collisions are common.

Second, their many lines are semi privatized and split between many companies. That means inefficient design, upkeep, and construction. What should be a place where two lines interconnect is instead an in-station transfer at best - often instead it's a out-station transfer, where you have to return to street level to get to the station serving that company's line. There's also a annoyance around payment and payment systems for this reason.

Third , they don't run enough trains. Rush hour is insane.

Fourth, they still don't have gates at their platforms, despite their absurdly high suicide rate.

I've just traveled through Brussels, London, and Amsterdam. In my opinion Brussels may have had better per capita transit since their tram system was so ridiculously fast and frequent, and cars had only a narrow area to go, with plenty of room for bicycles, however I didn't see much of the city.

London trains were too expensive and too unreliable. I agree with you in this case, Tokyo is better.

Amsterdam I've only been able to explore a bit but so far I'm very impressed. However for unfathomable reasons they let cars and scooter drive in these tiny roads next to the canals, and even more unfathomably, they give cars tons of the most valuable canal side real estate to park in!! So Tokyo does that better, but Amsterdam so far feels much more liveable.

I haven't seen much else of Europe so can't speak to that!

I of course understand this attitude, but it fills me with hopeless dread that this country will never be able to do anything hard again. Our addiction to cars is one of the hardest to swallow and easiest to fix problems, and yet the will to do so is simply non-existent.

To convince an American to give up on any collective, just point out they'll be mildly inconvenienced. No wonder we never even tried to fight our carbon emissions.

Safety is the much bigger challenge for public transit in the US right now. Since the pandemic, most cities have really eased off of any enforcement of rules or laws in public spaces.

Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.

That safety is illusionary. Cars are dangerous, more dangerous than subways.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-19/new-yo...

I suspect many view intentional harm as being far more traumatic than accidental harm. This is less the case if the person actually dies, although it may still be the case for their families.

Someone crashing into you because they can't be assed to pay attention to the road, or get drunk and drive because they don't have public transport IS "intentional" harm.

Traffic deaths are rarely "accidents".

I suppose even if you sub in "goal to cause death/injury" vs "recklessness that could reasonably be expected to produce injury despite not being the goal" and it would still hold true.

Personally I think it's contentious whether drunk driving etc injuries can be considered "intentional" even if they are expected and reckless. When I think of intentional injuries, I'm thinking of ones where the perpetrator has that as their preferred outcome, something I don't think applies to most drunk driving injuries.

No. Gullible people who believe such nonsense are the bigger challenge ;)

> Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.

This concern never even occurred to me. Are you not far more likely to die in a car crash?

> Are you not far more likely to die in a car crash?

Indeed they are. GP has done an extremely poor job of risk assessment.

How many indiscriminate neck stabbings are there per year in your town? And I can’t help but ask the obvious, how many indiscriminate deaths by car (i.e young child struck by truck) are there?

I looked up, i.e. Chicago. There were double the number of homicides vs fatal car accidents. I don't pretend those can be compared 1:1, but I'll note when I took public transit it wasn't just the risk of being on the transit but also getting dumped out near areas that were violent assault / murder hot spots.

The public transit stations I rode in the eastern part of Cleveland would become or already were hood rat hangouts where I would routinely see vicious beatings. I eventually started biking, which was a bit safer, although still then someone tried to rob me at gunpoint when my bicycle got a flat near the public transit line. I finally moved to somewhere with no public transit and haven't dealt with such violent threats since. I learned public transit = robbery/gang express, get further away and you get further away from their getaway -- although many of them know not to 'shit where they eat' by doing it right on the train car. Another plus of getting off public transit was the ability to carry a weapon, in case some jackass tried it again.

You forgot the "who didn’t even pay his fare"... which makes a big difference.

In this particular situation it doesn't appear to, but in many states you only have the right to 'stand your ground' in places you are legally allowed to be, so if you don't pay your fare you eliminate any sort of "stand your ground" defense as to why you stabbed someone you thought was threatening your life rather than ran away.

So this might kill his attorney's opportunity to even claim that the Ukrainian woman was tormenting and threatening his life or something. It's one of those things that sounds irrelevant but turns out to have a gigantic impact on self-defense claims, which really, are the only hope the neck stabber has of not going down for some kind of murder charge.

I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.

Totally get that, some people don't like cities and crowds. But, they should also accept that more space (in this case, access to a car, roads, parking, etc) comes with costs and they should be willing to bear those costs personally.

I would have to admit that even I, I public transit nerd, would prefer an empty subway car. I also don’t like driving when I’m stopped dead in traffic, or biking when it’s next to a highway with no lane, or the bus when I miss my transfer, or walking when it’s pouring rain.

I guess my point is that everything has a worst it can be. The idea, though, is that a city should offer all of them so that you can choose. And a subway at its worst, unlike driving at its worst, will still get you where you need to be on time.

I generally agree but I'll caveat that subway at its worst can be far worse with trains going missing. "Metro apologises" is a running joke around the north east of England for how bad its service became in the past 15 years.

But 40,000+ Americans die in their cars (and run over by others' cars) every year. No subway caveat is ever going to beat that. And at least it's obvious that subways going missing is a _very_ solvable problem. We've completely given up on making driving safer.

EDIT: Sorry, re-read the context, and I think you were countering my claim that a subway will always get you there on time? Yeah. You're right. Subways can absolutely be delayed, go missing, stop running, go on strike, etc. Sorry for going off the "rails" there. :D

No worries, it happens to us all. I was mostly venting at the shocking underinvestment of my local public transport infrastructure and seeing it degrade over the last 20 years!

> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it.

I understand what you mean. I don’t especially love it either. But I honestly 100% prefer that to being stuck in traffic, being attentive to everything everywhere just not to kill anyone.

And I say that while owning a comfortable car.

I truly enjoy and cherish not having to use my car to go to work because I did it in the past and I hated it.

Being stuck in my car alone is far worse for me than being stuck in a train station because my train is late or cancelled.

But it may be my personality. I came from the countryside, so I was using my parent’s car everyday.

When I moved to the nearby city (in Europe) I truly felt not having to care about a car to be absolutely freeing.

Now I’m back in the countryside but near a train station that I use everyday to commute and the idea that I may, somehow , if I change job, need to use my car everyday (which I like, btw) is really frightening to me.

Exiting a train and walking two minutes to catch a tramway or a metro then a bus without real waiting times and without thinking about it then taking another route on the way back because a friend invited you for an afterwork really feels like society is just working.

> Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this.

I don't believe this as a real rule. 10min vs 40min, maybe. 1h commute vs 4h commute? I don't believe that you would prefer spending 8h per day in a car.

> The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers.

The youtuber NotJustBikes keep saying that "the only thing that can improve traffic is viable alternatives to driving".

I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history, and that drivers would actually need to pay for the externality costs they incur, instead of being leaches on society.

>I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history

Get the government out of the road planning/building business and let the chips fall as they may.

There are two big problems with this though.

First is demographics. Of all the people who currently say they want this "enough to be a problem" will immediately do an about face the first time they catch wind of a news story where some bigCo buys the land and puts a toll road through somewhere they don't want it or some inner-ring suburb of the kind they sympathize with the residents of losing out in gets absolutely screwed by some regional infrastructure conglomeration routes around them for not playing ball.

Second is entrenched interests. Government road management is mostly a result of coincidence. Society was building paved roads for cars at the same time that the modern high touch administrative state was on the up and up so of course the state claimed that as one of the things it administered. Had the 20th century administrative state come 50yr later modern roads may very well have ben built out privately like railroads were. It would be a huge fight to get the government's dick out of it because of all the economic and political interests that are inter-twined with the status quo.

> From a quality of life point of view

The only thing that makes my occasional commute to office or distant family not a complete waste of time, is that I can read something or do a ton of language flashcards on the way. (plus a tiny small health benefit that like 20% of the commute is spent on foot.) In a car, even that would be taken away, with me being forced to focus on the road instead.

> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation".

Funnily, that's kinda how I feel about being in a car, having to constantly keep some level of awareness of others moving around.

For the record, I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.

> I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.

Don't wait too long - I did that and had to take the test again! :)

The trouble is that your personal hangups are not compatible with a properly functioning city and the common good. There is no general, indiscriminate right to car ownership and use in the city; "discomfort" is not an especially compelling reason to permit it. So, in the city, someone with your "discomforts" must either accept the discomfort of public transit, or consider living elsewhere. (For the record, no one enjoys being packed in a train. They just deal with it, because there are superior competing goods and because it's preferable to the shitshow of living in a city mired in traffic and jammed with cars.

> I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people

Hard agree, but so long as I have a seat, it means I can have a nap.

One of the things that I can't do driving (safely!) is have a nap.

> Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.

I’m not sure why you have a right to solitude while out in public. While I sympathize with your desires, your need for a private bubble while moving about in the world has negative consequences for those around you. This is, quite simply, an anti-social attitude.

Note that public transport in the Netherlands isn't particularly good, cycling is.

> just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.

Have you tried taking a walk in a forest, a desert, or on an ice sheet? Plenty of solitude to go around...

Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases, but also have higher marginal costs. They also take up a lot of space, which in a dense city where space is at a premium makes them even more expensive due to the cost of things like parking and big roads.

The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.

>The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.

And then you instantly run into the problem wherein people lie in all sorts of ways in order to justify distorting the market to their benefit or preference.

True, infrastructure is tricky because you can't have a truly free market due to the impracticality of building, for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly. So instead you end up having to make some decisions about what to supply in a non-market based way, and that's fraught with all sorts of inefficiencies and politics.

I think there's certainly room for our approach to be a lot more market-like than it currently is though. On the demand side at least it's pretty straightforward to charge people for what they use based on marginal costs incurred, and use those funds to build out more/better infrastructure.

> for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly

Worked fine for the railroad and they started off with not just competing networks but competing form factors (gauges).

As long as users are fairly liquid and can direct themselves at whatever option they consider superior it will probably mostly all work out.

Gen Z on the whole don’t agree with either of you. Younger people don’t want to have to drive or to take on the burden of vehicle maintenance or the considerable risk of being in an accident.

Cramped trains and buses and symptoms of under investment they do not need to be this way. Switzerland deeply values trains and as the saying goes once the business class actively uses trains the whole dynamic changes.

Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.

Their loss. But that's simply yet another reason to move towards a market-based approach; people can choose whatever works best for them as an individual even if others think it's a terrible choice.

Let trains where people are packed like sardines compete with trains with face to face seating and with self-driving cars with the same features, and people can chose whichever they prefer based on cost, convenience, and personal preference.

As someone that lived in Switzerland, that is great as long as one doesn't live in small towns outside train lines, with buses that only go up to 9PM during the week, or hardly run during weekends.

Then again, one gets to enjoy the countryside and nature.

>Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.

Not for all the other people around you, no.

> Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases,

I completely disagree. On a train or bus I can stand up and stretch my legs, I'm not cramped into a single valid sitting position. I don't get motion sickness on trains or busses like I do in cars, and don't feel claustrophobic. Also in cars I'm constantly stuck in traffic and can't do anything, whereas a bus or train no matter what's happening I can just read a book or people watch or whatever.

In many S and RE trains in Germany you do get to strecht a lot, assuming you manage to get into the wagon.

>I'm not cramped into a single valid sitting position.

No during rush hour you're more likely to be cramped into a single valid standing position.

This isn't my experience, but I understand some countries have overloaded public transit systems. When I've been in those countries, it's been simple enough to just let an overloaded train pass and grab the next one.

Ok but you let that train pass you might lose the connection to the bus at the other end. Or the next train or bus might not be for half an hour. Now you're late to wherever you were going.

Right, so, again, it sounds like your public transit is underfunded or something. Where I live I can depend on there being another train within 8 minutes no matter where I'm going, or a bus, or I can just hop on a ubike and I can be confident there'll be a space and station within a couple hundred meters.

I sympathize with people that aren't so lucky, but, if Taipei can figure it out, there's really no excuse elsewhere. Good public transit really is the only viable way to move people. The private car is, objectively, the worst.

During the rush hour, the next train is going to be just as packed. And if you wait long enough for things to quiet down, you're not going to be at work on time.

This doesn't happen to me where I live. It's time to increase your city's transportation budget!

Then you would have to make the case in such a way that car infrastructure costs reside with car users only, and not spread over tax payers who don't want to pay for your choices.

That's hard to do in practice, I think. To take the inverse example: in NYC tolls on cars are used to pay for capital projects for the public transportation system. If these "independent" components were truly as independent as you imply income taxes + fares would cover the MTA, but they don't.

Each style of transportation is going to have different levels of cost associated with it, likely changing as one or the other has seemingly stable infrastructure for its needs at the time. It really seems like a more useful perspective is to look at the transportation system as a whole and consider any contribution to car infrastructure, public transport, etc as a contribution which makes the whole system better as a whole.

That's not an unreasonable take in my opinion, but then the point of the person I'm responding to is 'let's silo costs and let the market decide' and if we're going to do that, however unpractical, I'd bet a lot of money that driving a car would become unaffordable.

I'd take that bet, were I a betting man. There are 0.85 vehicles per capita in the US. Making roads an average of 1/0.85 = 17.6% more expensive for car owners is very unlikely to break the bank for any significant number of people.

The current cost of owning and operating an automobile is around 12K USD assuming 15K miles driven yearly according to BTS [0]. This would push it up to a little over 14K USD.

Then there's oil and gas subsidies that should be taken into account, since around 24% of oil consumption is from cars and light trucks. [1]

Then there's some other factors that are hard to quantify but have a huge impact on taxes, like how low density suburbs are subsidised by high density cities [2] as an effect of car-first infrastructure. It's not as simple as just the cost of roads.

[0] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-cost-owning-and-operatin...

[1] https://carsbibles.com/what-percentage-of-oil-is-used-for-ca...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

This wouldn't increase the total cost of "owning and operating an automobile" by 17.6%, just the portion of that which funds road construction. Hard to quantify exactly how much that is since it's currently just part of your taxes. I don't think it's included in the BTS numbers. At the federal level at least it's pretty insignificant, only 2% of the Federal budget at most (I doubt most would even notice a 17.6% * 2% = 0.35% increase in their federal taxes). If I'm reading things right, the DOT budget is an even lower percentage of my state taxes. I think most road construction is funded at a more local level than that though so it's hard to say the exact impact without looking at individual villages/towns/cities.

Oil and gas subsidies are an entirely separate debate which would have almost no effect on the costs of some types of cars (electric) anyway, so it's rather pointless to bring up in this context.

That Not Just Bikes video isn't showing "low density suburbs" being "subsidised by high density cities", it's showing low density parts of a city are subsided by high-density parts of that same city. That's still a fair point, but when I think of the suburbs I think of areas outside city limits, usually with their own separate governments and separate tax system. Those survive just fine without any such subsidies; low density parts of a city would be fine without them too.

>> Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.

Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment. Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport. I want a yard where my dog can hang out unsupervised without worry about stranger dogs coming around. I want to set off fireworks on holidays. Listen to a country-western station. That is the lifestyle that a great many people dream of living.

I used to work with a guy from Belgium. He is now in Canada. The guy works in IT (secure stuff, government) but he loves animals. So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day. Doing that means he can have a hobby farm where he keeps a few horses. He bought an old tractor and is looking at growing/bailing his own hay next season. His lab just had puppies. His kids are growing up on a "farm" but go to a great school and have faster internet than I do in my "big city" apartment. Such a lifestyle just isn't possible without easy personal transportation.

Switzerland seems to have kind of the perfect blend of a solution (apart from the lack of space in general): it is _very_ car centric, almost everyone has a car, like in the US. On the other hand, to commute to work from their little sleeping villages they use the excellent train network which makes it possible to do the daily commute faster than by car. And many people use their ebikes, if for nothing else, just to get to the train station...

Despite all this, property prices in Zürich (city), for example are sky-rocketing (much more than in the neighbouring villages), and for any available rental flat the viewing queue is usually longer than you can count. How is that possible, if nobody wants to live in a city?... Some people might appreciate a 15 minute walk to their workplace, or a shop open after midnight on the next street, or just the buzzing life of a city in general.

Good points but maybe cities offer something more than just proximity. I think cities is about the culture, meeting people and vibes.

In switzerland you pay income taxes based on your city/neighborhood.

This means that cities have generally higher income taxes as they offer more services.

But here's the catch, since suburbs and neighboring villages have lower income taxes...property is still expensive, because high earners are going to raise the prices in order to pay less taxes.

It's a very balanced system.

In any case, most Swiss cities have pedestrian downtowns and areas combined with normal car-friendly roads.

>> How is that possible, if nobody wants to live in a city?

Some do, but many need to for work. As mobility for non-rich average people is reduced, more and more people simply must be in the city for work/services. (That is the only reason I am in a city. I would escape in a heartbeat if my job allowed it.) Where personal transport is cheaper and more available, people flock to suburbs and even "exurbs", which are a big thing now in Texas.

My example: I am often on 1-hour 24/7 recall (military, I don't get to choose my work location). That means I suffer on both ends. I need to be in the city and I must either live/sleep/shop within mile of work or have instant access to a personal vehicle. I guess could setup a cot and sleep beside my desk. That would reduce congestion. But is that a life anyone wants to live?

> I would hazard that most in fact don't.

Considering that, almost by definition, urban environments house a magnitude more people than rural areas, I'd wager a guess that indeed most people do want walkable cities, or at least they would if they weren't brainwashed by car lobbyists to believe that covering an entire continent in asphalt just to park our metal boxes wasn't an idiotic use of space and resources.

> Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store.

I'm not really familiar with what a "boutique" corner store means here, but fair enough if you don't, though this sounds like more of a "I'm used to doing things my way" type of thing. I buy groceries 3 times a week on my way back home from wherever I might've been, it takes me no longer than 5-10 minutes, all I need is a single backpack, and it's a 2 minute cycle from the store to my house. And it's an actual house, with a garden and all the other fancy stuff people have in the suburbs. At the same time, I know people who have cargo bikes and do the once-every-2-weeks shopping sprees that you're talking about.

> So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day.

Some of my colleagues take a 1-2h train journey once a week, and they live in farmland as well. I understand the US is very large, but rural doesn't have to necessitate a lack of transport options either.

There's a huge spectrum between dense city center and suburbia; at present, I do consider my area to be "walkable", but it's not anywhere close to a dense city and there sure aren't "corporate HQs" anywhere nearby.

I do value having several gyms and restaurants (and friends) within just a short bike ride from my current house; and since one of the gyms I visit regularly is in the shopping mall, if I have an interest to cook something specific, I can buy whatever's necessary with like 5-10 mins of extra overhead.

And I do go to the local convenience store more or less daily anyway, if only for some snack, produce or fresh bread. There's a shop in each direction wherever I'd want to go, so the only way for me _not_ to inadvertently pass by one would be if I didn't leave my home at all entire day.

I'm not discounting anyone's general preference for country life, it's perfectly valid; I'm just saying that some of the things you're saying seem overexaggerated.

> Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment.

That does not match statistics for pretty much anywhere in the world. urban/metro areas are growing while rural communities are dying.

>Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport.

I grew up in a city of 70k completely walkable, we had a supermarket 5min walk from the house. Why would I ever want to have to go on large shopping runs, if I can just walk up to the supermarket?

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