Cars Kill Cities | Hacker News Reader

Cars Kill Cities

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189 pointsJakob217 comments

The post is right, and even more so for developing world cities that emerged before cars were around.

However the post is also naive. Cars are usually much faster, provide much better shelter from the weather, and are much less tiring than trying to lug bags from one place to another on buses or other public transport. They also place far fewer constraints on when you can travel.

Of course it's possible to structure one's life so as to deal with all of the issues. I have lived half of my adult life without a car, including 4 years in the SF Bay Area, and I managed.

But let's stop pretending that there isn't a trade off. Cars are very very convenient. The key to reducing the need for cars is not just good public transport - it's services that reduce the reliance on traveling to get chores done. Things like grocery deliveries, laundry pickup, and amazon.com.

It would be a lot easier to rely solely on public transport if you never had to carry anything.

Self driving electric cars that people pay for on a subscription model (rather than ownership) are the future I'd like to see. I hope it happens during my lifetime.

Taxis are a reasonable "turking" of this concept.

And zipcar.

Zipcar is great - I love it. But as far as a "self-driving car network" goes, one of the big advantages is that you don't need to worry about parking on either end. A higher percentage of cars are in the process of getting someone from point A to point B rather than taking up space somewhere.

Taxis in general don't fully turk the concept, at least not in areas without reliable taxi volume. It's reasonable as long as you can rely on the taxi to show up within a decent amount of time of requesting it or expect to see one in passing in a short amount of time.

Uber et al. have done a lot to help with this in my experience, but I've had many times where I'm in a location that taxis aren't typically in the immediate vicinity. Calling the cab company has often led to lots of waiting, not knowing when the car will get there, with cars sometimes never showing up at all. Knowing that the car is definitely coming to you (whether it's a self driving car, Uber, or any other service that tracks the vehicle's location) help remove that uncertainty and definitely makes it an acceptable option in more areas.

That reliability and knowledge justify the extra cost for taking Uber (or requesting a self driving car some day) to me, more than the comfort or style of a town car compared to a cab.

Agreed on all parts - for me, I live in DC, in a neighborhood with good cab density, and Uber is in the cab business as well as the swanky car business. I'll launch the app, hail a cab, and by the time I ride down the elevator of my building, there's a cab parked out front waiting for me. It's a reasonable approximation of the future.

True; although one major problem is that for n taxis, you have to pay for n cars and n human salaries, and human salaries end up being the biggest proportion in the final price.

How much will the cost be reduced when we don't have to pay for human drivers anymore? Will we see 50$ a month (2013 dollars) plans for 50 hours of "chauffeuring"? (a quick google search shows that the average american spends ~40h driving a year)

In some areas, rent to medallion holders might end up being the biggest proportion in the final price...

According to [this resarch](http://www.schallerconsult.com/taxi/taxifb.pdf), 57% of the fare (including tip) goes to the driver, 24% to vehicle and gas, 15% to the owner, and 4% to other expenses.

So, the driver is a pretty substantial portion of that. Taking the driver out of the equation would substantially reduce the costs. If you increased medallion availability as well, and the owners were able to work with lower margins (or they were cooperatively owned), you could get the cost down even further, to maybe 1/3 of what taxis currently cost. That would be a huge difference in affordability for everyday use.

Nice!

"That would be a huge difference in affordability for everyday use."

Very true.

Taxis are a lot more expensive than self-driving cars. The driver takes something like 60% of the fare you pay for a taxi; I'm sure insurance eats up another sizeable chunk, and if self-driving cars are ever allowed on the streets, they will have to be safer than human drivers, and thus will have lower insurance costs. Furthermore, eliminating the driver means that you could use even smaller, cheaper cars, or fit more people or belongings per car, making self-driving cars more efficient.

Taxis drivers also really frustrating to deal with (the majority in my city, at least); I can't count the number of taxi drivers who haven't been able to find my house, so I've had to play phone tag with dispatch while waiting 45 minutes for a cab that should have been there in 10, then finally hike down the hill, get in, and had them start the meter while they drove up it to pick up my belongings.

>Taxis are a lot more expensive than self-driving cars.

But they have the advantage of actually existing. Whatever relatively near-term possibilities there may be for cars to operate on "autopilot" on certain highways, an urban environment where taxis are most common is probably one of the last places you'll see self-driving cars.

Sure. I'm just pointing out how these hypothetical self driving taxis/car shares would be a substantial improvement over actual taxis, enough so that they would be able to displace more than just the niche that taxis currently occupy but also car sharing programs like Zipcar and probably a substantial portion of car ownership.

I think that I'll see them in my lifetime; I don't know if it'll be in 5 years (though I think that would be pushing it), 10 years, or 30 years, but I'm pretty sure they will come about, and will be a huge improvement over our current system of letting distracted, impatient people try to pilot cars through chaotic conditions.

Yep. I've used Zipcar in lieu of a car before (and now own a car that I use maybe once every two weeks), but there was just enough friction due to having to walk to the nearest available car (the closest location to us wasn't always available, so we'd have to walk a few blocks further for the closest available car), having to pay for the time when the car is just parked at your destination before you return it, and not being suitable for the kind of longer range, weekend or week long trips that are a lot of what we need a car for.

If the cars were self-driving, however, that would solve the majority of those problems. No need to hike to find the closest car, it would come to you. No need to pay for the time that it's parked while at your destination, it could be used by other people, and another car could come pick you up when you needed to leave. No need to return the car to where you picked it up, it would just go back to the closest available station and they'd rebalance themselves automatically.

Subscriptions sure are convenient (and lucrative), but there's also something to be said for the certainty of an owned asset that will always be there, even if you run out of money later.

when electric cars, or alternative fuels, become more prevalent and we have the ability for self driving cars the effect will become even more pronounced.

With self driving cars and dedicated roads or lanes for them; we already have special toll lanes in many cities; the distance one lives from work may become a non factor. Throw in better tools for telework and cities may simply become the home to two groups, those who can afford their secure enclaves and those trapped by government subsidies.

Cars gave freedom to many people, freedom to move about as they want, freedom to shop where they want, and freedom to live where they want and still do work. Automation will increase all of those options. Cities will need to reinvent themselves to be relevant.

The odd thing to me about cars is that people pick the most unusual use cases and then buy their cars off of that. So my dad likes to haul plywood once in a while, so he bought a pick-up. But 99.99% of the time he could use a subcompact. Likewise everyone knows people who have two kids and buy a van/SUV because they want an extra seat or two. You can always rent a car if you get into these sorts of situations, and it would be much cheaper than buying a huge car that runs with one person in it 90%+ of the time.

It may not be unreasonable if the overhead to rent is high. It's coming down, though I have no idea what ranges are "too high" or where things currently stand relative to that.

It's not even the monetary cost of renting, it's the time cost. If I have a pickup truck the time cost for me to buy something off of CL is driving there, inspecting it and then buying it. Done.

If I have to rent a pickup to transport it back then I've got two choices. I can either rent the vehicle prior to looking at the item or after I decide to buy it for sure. If I always-rent then I'll kill at least 2hrs per CL purchase due to having to go to somewhere to rent said vehicle. If I rent-after-inspection I'll save those 2hrs when I don't buy at the expense of making two trips every time I do buy. Neither one is an attractive option.

Two hours according to what they pay me is no joke in terms of cash so in either case if this happens say twice a month I've paid for the total difference between owning a subcompact and a pickup truck: note, gas, insurance, etc.

I don't actually own a pickup truck and most of the time the things I pick up fit in my Forester just fine. But it's not unreasonable to make such a decision when you think through how much of a disaster it is to try and rent a vehicle on a semi-regular basis.

"It's not even the monetary cost of renting, it's the time cost."

Absolutely. I'd definitely meant for that to be a part of "overhead" but it probably is worth calling out explicitly.

For most hauling cases, you can rent a truck/van from Home Depot for $20/hour or so. It takes about five minutes to do. Obviously that isn't everyone's use case, but Enterprise will pick you up, or Zip Car or even cabs is a valid possibility. None of these are all that difficult.

Like I said, it's been falling. Transportation to/from Home Depot is time and expense. Enterprise will pick you up, but there's slop in when exactly that will be, and it still doesn't entirely remove the time to/from the rental car place. The nearest ZipCar isn't always available. And nonetheless, these might be fantastic options for most people. My only points were that overhead shouldn't be overlooked, but that it's been falling. If you look at it and determine that, for your situation, it's less, then great! That will be the case in an increasing number of situations; I make no claim at all about how many or few.

Not difficult on an absolute scale, but definitely more difficult than getting your keys, going out into the driveway and driving off.

So it depends on how frequently you use a truck as an input into the cost of owning vs cost of renting equation. At once per year it absolutely makes sense to rent. At once per day it absolutely makes sense to own. Many use cases fall in between.

For the price delta between my Yaris and a gigantic 4x4 crew cab pickup truck, including capital cost, interest, insurance, gas, maint, tires, if I buy a small car I'll never, ever have to buy anything used again off craigslist.

This is stereotypical penny wise pound foolish behavior. WRT to OP's relative hauling some plywood occasionally, for the price difference between a commuter car and a monster truck he could find a young man, pay his living expenses while he completes a complete carpentry apprenticeship, and pay the young man for some materials, and the young-ish journeyman could come out and do all the work for him as a thank you.

Another way to put it is the price differential is about 3x what I paid for a new roof on my house... all to haul some plywood...

When I put in a patio I had a flatbed truck deliver two pallets of bricks, two pallets of gravel and a pallet of sand bags. The delivery fee was roughly the delta between one months payment for a car vs a truck. You'd be surprised how much labor you can get out of a truck driver for $200 or $300 or so, and he was probably happy with me because the job only took him maybe 2-3 hours total.

Sure but you're calculating the ideal case for you and worst-case for the truck. Not everyone buys a gigantic 4x4 crew cab pickup. There are plenty of regular bed length, single cab RWD pickups on the road and they don't cost $60k to buy.

The Ford F150 base model goes for $25k or so.

http://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/pricing/

A base model Yaris goes for $14k.

http://www.toyota.com/yaris/#!/Welcome

And that's presuming you're buying new! There are a great many used pickups for sale and the parts tend to change less frequently because pickup design parameters change much more slowly than car design parameters do. Because the design changes more slowly parts tend to be around longer and cheaper. And because the design of a pickup is driven by the need to have a 4x6-8ft long bed they tend to have roomy engine compartments in order to keep the proportions "correct"

By your own admission if you did at least one project per month requiring the use of a truck you would be spending the same amount of money. Perhaps that's money well spent to you, but you're not everyone.

There's no "right" answer here, only a spectrum of options that are better or worse depending on your personal preferences and the kinds of activities you undertake.

I think you proved their point. An $11k premium in addition to lower gas mileage.

Is it really that odd? We do the exact same thing with computers. How often, exactly, are we max'ing all 16GB of RAM and pegging all eight cores of our workstations? Couldn't we "just" rent time on EC2 when we need more?

Yes, it's a pain in the butt to farm out most types of compute to EC2. Yes, it can quickly get expensive. Yes, you can save money buying a $40 Sempron. All these arguments and obstacles can be applied just as well to buying a 2-seater subcompact and renting other cars, so before we decry it as "weird" and "making no sense", maybe we should reflect on our own decisions?

1. Buying extra RAM or a faster CPU is almost always super cheap compared to buying a bigger car (consider both initial price and reduction in fuel efficiency).

2. Farming computing out to EC2 is nothing like renting a car.

I lived car-dependent in Atlanta, without a car in Chicago and New York, and am car-dependent again in Wilmington, DE. The burden of carrying things never matched the hassle of circling around somewhere looking for a parking spot.

Indeed, living in the New York City suburbs with a baby and no car (but on a train line) was way more convenient than living in Wilmington with a car. Running down the block to the store and shoving some items in the stroller basket is infinitely easier than putting the baby in a car seat, folding the stroller into the trunk, driving 12 miles to the strip mall, taking the baby out of the car seat, unfolding the stroller out of the trunk, putting the baby back in the car seat, folding the stroller into the trunk, driving 12 miles back from the strip mall, then finally taking the baby back out of the car seat and unfolding the stroller out of the trunk.

It's as inconvenient and frustrating as it sounds.

People have preferences, sure, but I'm sick of subsidizing suburbanization with my tax dollars. The public sector spends about $150 billion per year building and maintaining highways: http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/120x.... That's not counting local roads and streets. Nobody blinks an eye at that. But they freak out that Amtrak has been given $13 billion in federal subsidies in the 40 years since 1972.

And don't get me started on the tax breaks for mortgages that disproportionately benefits suburbanites, etc. My wife and I have no problem with how much taxes we pay, but it drives us crazy that my parents pay a substantially lower rate despite making more money because they can deduct fully deduct the interest on their $1 million mortgage for their suburban McMansion. Meanwhile, my wife and I are phased out of student loan and childcare deductions despite making less money.

> People have preferences, sure, but I'm sick of subsidizing suburbanization with my tax dollars. The public sector spends about $150 billion per year building and maintaining highways: http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/120x.... That's not counting local roads and streets. Nobody blinks an eye at that. But they freak out that Amtrak has been given $13 billion in federal subsidies in the 40 years since 1972.

Wow, never thought about it like that. Thanks for the comment.

> Cars are usually much faster, provide much better shelter from the weather...

If only there was such a thing as a car that you could call on-demand, make use of when you wanted it, and then got rid of it when you were done.

Even better, what about one that comes with a driver?

A crazy idea, I know.

If you live in the right neighborhood, a car is a nuisance. I can go somewhere and just walk right in. I don't have to spend time finding a parking spot, paying for parking, dealing with parking tickets, and all that related nuisance. Having owned a car, I found it shapes your decisions a lot. Things are only convenient if they're convenient to get to in a car.

Considering how much money I'm not spending on a car, a cab is a bargain. If I need more than that, rent a van by the hour.

The following page estimates the true cost of car ownership at approximately $1.38/mile: http://commutesolutions.org/external/calc.html

That's still quite a bit cheaper than taxi fares or the minimum $2.75 that Uber charges. Assuming that you spend $20k on purchasing the car, you'd make up for the cost of the car in just under 15,000 miles driven compared to taking Uber at the quoted rate.

Yeah, I don't really understand why people figure that self-driving cars/taxis/Uber/ZipCar would ever be cheaper per mile. They pay to operate their vehicles same as you do, except they also need to have some profit on top.

High fixed costs and economies of scale.

Cars are high fixed cost capital goods. A taxi will be driven far more over the course of its lifetime than a personal car, so the fixed cost per mile is much lower.

Also, economies of scale make purchases and maintenance and repair cheaper.

These are two reasons to believe taxis should be cheaper than personal ownership.

Finally, let me point to airplanes. It makes far more sense to rent an airplane than buy one because almost no one travels enough to justify the purchase. Cars are analogous.

Edit: When I say cars are analogous, I mean that there are analogues between the situations. Both are vehicles with high fixed cost that can be either bought or rented. The situation is comparable, though obviously not the same. All I'm saying is that it's conceivable that someday the conditions could change so that it's more sensible to rent than buy.

>Cars are analogous.

No they aren't. Many people need a car every day. Almost nobody needs a plane every day.

I don't want to argue pointlessly, but while your conclusion may be right, I think your logic makes some leaps. Why is day the natural time scale? No one needs a plane every hour and no one needs a car every hour either. By that time scale, they are the same. Also, everyone needs a plane every year and needs a car every year too. On that time scale they are also the same. Only in a cherry-picked intermediate time scale are they different. :) I think your answer would be improved if you could justify why the daily time scale is most relevant.

You are being overly pedantic. Try s/every day/frequently/g and see how you go...

Pardon me, but what is s/g?

"s/every day/frequently/g” is a UNIX-y way of saying “substitute ‘frequently’ in place of ‘every day’ in the entire document”.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed#Substitution .)

Thanks!

The time scale in fact can go the other direction and still favor cars. It's about cost per use.

If you drive every day like many Americans, it's cheaper to own a car than to use a cab. The number of people that fly enough to need their own plane is effectively zero.

Most people are in a situation where they're forced to use a car every day. This situation could be resolved through smarter planning, better urban design, and alternative methods of transportation.

Two hundred years ago nobody needed a car because it didn't exist. Now people need it because parts of society are so entangled with it that it's nearly impossible to pull them apart.

If somehow planes had wrangled their way into our lifestyle the same way, then yes, people would need a plane every day. How else would they get home to their chalet in an inaccessible part the woods six hundred miles from the office at the end of a work-day?

These are two reasons to believe taxis should be cheaper than personal ownership.

Well, could be. But the cabbie's wages quickly eat into those gains.

It makes far more sense to rent an airplane than buy one because almost no one travels enough to justify the purchase. Cars are analogous.

Hardly. A 737 lasts for decades and spends nearly a full half of that time in the air; of course no one flies that much. Cars on the other hand, if driven slightly over the US average- say, 20,000miles/year- will hit 200,000 miles in just 10 years, and most cars are _done_ by 200k.

There are some interesting value engineering issues where car parts are designed to fall apart more or less simultaneously at a certain point under normal commuter operating conditions, whereas aircraft are designed to last "forever" more or less.

Its going to be a very strange maintenance challenge. I suspect one will never be totaled by having the heater core rot out after 16 years, like my last car.

You could probably find a car value engineered for long distance taxi/commercial type service. I imagine it would be somewhat different than a normal car, internally, although I don't know enough automotive engineering to tell exactly how.

I imagine it would be somewhat different than a normal car

Usually beefier in every regard, more expensive, and less performant. (Power/MPG/etc all directly conflict with durability/longevity) Longer chassis & softer suspension to reduce vibration & impacts. Just think of the Crown Vic. There's a reason it has been the commercial estate car for so long.

Didn't Ford cancel the Crown Victoria line?

I think the point is that you can live near transit and take advantage of cabs as needed and still come out ahead. When we lived in Chicago, my wife and I would take cabs all the time, especially on weekends or when the weather was bad. I think we spent maybe $100-200/month on cab fare. Now I have a car, and spend $150/month on insurance, $200+/month on parking, $300/month on gas. Averaged over the year, consumables (tires, brakes) and maintenance probably cost $100/month. And it's a paid off car, so I'm not even counting the car payment!

The indirect auto costs are paid by everyone (and pollution is attributable to the bus riders as well), so it gives an incentive to own a cheap reliable car that isn't depreciating much. If I take my kid to someplace 1 mile away it's $3.75 and 15 minutes by bus, or ~$0.80 and 5 minutes by car. I do prefer to walk if it's only a mile.

What if you only travel maybe fifty miles by car per month?

If you don't have a car all the time, you don't use it nearly as often. I do not spend anywhere near $20K per year on cab fare, and can't imagine coming even close.

I'm an avid cyclist and motorcyclist. I've gone skydiving and SCUBA diving. Yet some of the most frightening moments in my life have been in the back of San Francisco taxis.

The sooner robots replace taxi drivers, the better. And the taxis will probably still feel gross inside.

That's the thing that worries me about self-driving taxis replacing my car. Taxis are relatively gross and designed to be easy to clean. I don't see shared vehicles having the comfort of a privately-owned vehicle.

Everybody knows this is true, of course. I live three miles from work. To get here this morning I could have walked 3 blocks to the light rail station near my apartment, then another 4 or so blocks from the destination station to my office. This is pretty convenient, especially in St. Louis, where the vast, vast majority of residents don't have options nearly that good.

But I didn't do it. It was 16F degrees when I left the house this morning. I drove my car.

I'll add that I'm a supporter of our transit system. I moved to my current apartment in part to be near it (and it plays a role in deciding where I'd like to work). But even after configuring my life about as much as is possible in this city to make the train an option, the car is still very often the most convenient, hassle-free option.

Ha! I was going to write almost this exact post -- I can travel from Maplewood to Washington Ave every day by bus in about an hour, or by car in about half an hour.

Put on some proper clothing and take your bike?

I'm carfree in Portland Oregon and I LOVE biking in the icy mornings. What a great way to wake up.

Perhaps you're being facetious, but on the off change that you're just not familiar with 16F (-9C), understand that that's cold. I'm a runner, but I don't go out if it's below 20F--I can't take it no matter what I wear. And a given temperature feels much colder on a bike.

Of course, if it's 16F, there's likely some ice and snow about, and riding a bicycle is treacherous in that. And St. Louis is on the eastern edge of the central time zone, so it'll be pitch dark out when he gets off work, also treacherous given traffic.

Cars are convenient for an individual, but that is because you do out-source most of the negative aspects of them to the society around you. Just image how green, quiet and open streets (the space between buildings) could be without cars or with cars which deliver goods only, especially in bigger cities. The air would be a lot better too, roads need a lot of maintenance, cars need a lot of fuel, create a lot of pollution etc

How do you envision goods being delivered to people then?

They would subsist merely on great clouds of smug, rainbow baths, meditation, and unicorn droppings. The rest of us, of course, will drive a car.

Wow, wheres the argument? I guess you are a very rational, thoughtful person compared to naive hippies like me, so why don't you use your skills?

OK I admit I didn't answer anything. They'd probably bum rides off their friends with cars, just like I did as a kid. Which doesn't scale and is very inconvenient and economically devastating.

There are some interesting real estate issues such that you'd essentially be implementing feudalism where a peasant comes with the land and cannot leave it for other employment. Or the parasitic FIRE sector would have to back off a bit so housing is more of a commodity. Either way isn't happening without much unhappiness.

Unicorns are GMOs and would never be permitted in the same city as rainbow baths.

As I wrote, I am open to keep delivery cars. Freight bicycles are also a good possibility for a lot's of stuff, but that's not my main point. My main point would be that cars do suck as a mean of transporting people as soon as you do calculate with external costs to the environment, health and quality of live for people living in the inner city.

I lived the earlier part of my adult life with a car (15-30), and have now been car free for 8 years or so.

I live in a dense city where you have to win a lottery to buy a car. So I take a taxi most places, which is just as convenient and environmentally probably the same impact (sans the need for parking, taxis are nice in that way).

Our city also has great delivery services, which my wife takes advantage of. She ordered some stuff one morning on Taobao and they were delivered that afternoon, no quadrocopter drone necessary.

> It would be a lot easier to rely solely on public transport if you never had to carry anything.

Amen. American public transit advocates should start looking at this aspect: even if we get density to enable public transport, there are a bunch of other services that are necessary to make car-less practical (local grocery stores, deliveries, etc...)

If you're interested in this topic, Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City are both worth reading. The former explains how "free" parking isn't really free and how it distorts a lot of behavior, and the latter is about what cities are good for and how to build healthy cities in general.

Personally, I wonder why people would want to own a car if they can avoid it: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/why-would-you-want... , but that may be a minority viewpoint.

> The High Cost of Free Parking

convince me that 800 pages is worth it (reviews so far haven't).

They're not worth it. You should spend the time that it would take you to read this book doing some high yield activity instead, like trading stocks or growth hacking your startup. Anything less than that just isn't worth the trouble.

Your sarcasm implies that he doesn't want to put effort into reading what appears to be a bad book because it doesn't have a return, which is a crappy assumption.

People have a limited amount of time, and there are far more good books than any one person could read, let alone bad books.

At least one person who is not the author seems to have liked this book, so I challenge the assumption that it "appears to be a bad book".

And... it's a book, dude. You can check it out from the library or buy it used for ten bucks and stop reading it if you don't like it; that's not going to ruin your life. If you have enough time to reply to my dumb comments on HN, you must certainly have the time to start reading the book for 30 minutes and decide if it's worth continuing or not :)

>At least one person who is not the author seems to have liked this book, so I challenge the assumption that it "appears to be a bad book".

Do you know why user reviews exist?

>If you have enough time to reply to my dumb comments on HN, you must certainly have the time to start reading the book for 30 minutes and decide if it's worth continuing or not :)

That would be valid if it were me considering reading the book and if it took me 30 minutes to reply to the comment.

I don't give a shit about the things you mentioned and I read books and long forms every day, so get off your high horse.

I read most of it, and I can say with mild confidence that it's probably not worth your time. A few years after reading it, I remember the thesis of the book but not much more.

Try the lead essay from Cato Unbound and see what you think. [0] There are a few more good short Shoup pieces linked at the bottom of that page.

I have some personal experience here. I have done training and volunteered as a community organizer and worked with my city council and planning department. I have organized neighborhood groups involved in planning. I have studied urban planning and urban form. Nothing helped me to understand American cities and why they work the way they do more than Dr. Shoup's work in the 1990s that is collected in The High Cost Of Free Parking.

Some of it is gritty and technical econometric research, but a lot of it is creative and insightful. It's not a single narrative, but a fun book to dip into in various places from time to time if you care about how cities work and how urban life can be made better for people.

This short 1997 paper introduced me to Dr. Shoup's work (I read it in 1998) and was like a shining blaze of insight for many readers like me when it first appeared. [1] One key insight is that free parking required by law costs the USA about three times as much as all the money drivers spend on cars and gas plus public subsidies for roads and highways. When you read it, you start to see that parking policy drives urban form much more than zoning or free markets or highway and transit construction or public preferences or anything else at all. A lot of the book is like that.

[0]http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/april-2011/there-aint-no-...

[1 pdf] http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf

Thanks, I'll check that. While I got interested in urban design recently, TBH I fail to grasp all of the anti-automotive concepts that seem to get in fashion recently. Especially when I live in a place where I witness how it may go wrong. On a related note, tomorrow I'm going to "Brasilia, a day in February" as part of a doc festival we have going on around here, if you've studied urban planning you've probably heard a lot about this city, so just dropping in this title here in case you're interested (not that well known as, say, Urbanized and such).

Most of the anti-automotive concepts are rooted in the incompatibility of traditional cities and walkable urbanism with accommodating comfortable motoring. Unless you have infinite resources to build highways and parking deep underground, one or the other has to go.

Brasilia is famous for being extensively and carefully planned according to a mistaken theory that favored motor navigation over pedestrians and uniformity over creativity. I'd be fascinated someday to see what the benefits and drawbacks of that combination would be on the ground. I hope you enjoy it.

From what I've heard from people who have been there (obviously subjective), is that although it has Niemeyer's eye candies, the overal feeling of the whole place to a newcommer is that it's creepy.

Instead, you could read the 21 page paper with the same title and by the same author.

http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf

I don't understand this sentiment. You can read as much of any book as you want. I seldom finish books that I start, my finish rate is under 25%. You can get the big picture from about the first 20% of most books, and decide whether you want the in depth followup. If I don't buy the premise, or I'm mostly convinced by the argument and don't care for the details, or just have better things to do with my time, I'll stop reading.

Adopting this approach is very freeing. I don't fear the booklist. I just start stuff, and freely give up on a whim. I can say that at least the first 50 pages of the High Cost of Free Parking is great. Then I got caught up in something else.

This is a decent, short overview of Shoup's ideas. http://www.lamag.com/features/2011/12/01/between-the-lines

*Donald Shoup

Thanks, fixed!

Why would you want to own a car if you could avoid it?

(correction applied)

Because I can go wherever I want, whenever I want, with my whole family (pets included), with a trunkful of cargo, as I see fit.

I keep a bunch of gear in my car which makes me pretty much independent. No way I'd be hauling "go camping on a moment's notice" stuff and other equipment everywhere on the bus. Nor would I have the basic equipment to fix the bus should it break down.

7 years ago, awaiting dinner sitting at the bar at Longhorns and halfway thru a margarita around 9PM, my wife suggested we go see a new litter of puppies from our dog's breeder. Called to ensure we could, and minutes later we were making the 1,000 mile drive there. Next morning little Crossley was part of the family.

Personal long-range transport is very freeing. Mass transit & communication devices may be convenient, but rely more on others than some of us are comfortable with.

(correction applied)

Thanks, fixed!

Because I can go wherever I want, whenever I want, with my whole family (pets included), with a trunkful of cargo, as I see fit.

But at very high cost, per The High Cost of Free Parking, and at high time costs: I'm struck by the way that, when I lived in Tucson, it took seemingly 30 or 40 minutes to get anywhere. Now I live in New York City and it takes about the same, but the default transportation mode is different!

In my own experience, if you're working outside peak commuting hours, public transport is horrible. Take a cold winter, services 20 minutes apart. One service is missed, cancelled, whatever, you're now there for 40 minutes waiting for your bus. Of course, you don't know that the service is missed, you're just waiting at a pole. And in my case, it was a connecting service, so repeat the process for the second leg of the journey. Sometimes it would have been just as fast to walk the 75 minutes home - though of course, there's no way of knowing from the outset.

My housemates were dyed-in-the-wool public transport users, the 'everything we need' variety, and then I went overseas for three months in which they had use of my car. On return, "we're getting our own car". Driving crosstown for a commute is faster than the 15-minute walk to the bus, the two-leg bus/train commute, and the 10-minute walk from the station.

Carrying your groceries on public transport sucks. Apart from a handful of cities, post-midnight travel sucks. Cancelled services suck. Being squished into someone else's armpit during peak commute sucks. Having to commute (walk) to your commute (bus) then commute again (walk) sucks when the weather is bad. Public transport with more than one leg in the trip sucks. Public transport that doesn't go where you want to go sucks.

Public transport is awesome and there should be much more investment in it, but there are a ton of reasons why personal cars are fantastic.

Bear in mind that you're comparing mostly-decent road transport to generally-awful public transport.

Buses, for example, suck - they're always going to be a worse experience than a car (walking 10+ minutes to the stop at each end + waiting, to be stuck in exactly the same traffic).

Now if public transport had the same investment as private, it'd be a different kettle of fish. Take a look at http://carfree.com/intro_cfc.html and http://carfree.com/topology.html as an example of what might be possible with rail and sufficient political will. <5 minutes to a train stop, <30 minutes to anywhere else, <5 minutes to your final destination == max 40 minute trip in a city of 1M people.

Buses don't have to get stuck in the same traffic. Bogota, Columbia and more recently New York City have dedicated cross town bus lanes.

Edit: video of the Bogota bus system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU6ImWY4IBc

If there were more users of public transport (e.g., less parking available, etc), it's likely that service and intervals would improve.

This. I live in Berlin, which invested heavily in public transportation over the decades, leading the majority of my friends to not even having a drivers license (me included). You can get anywhere pretty much anytime, often considerably faster than taking a car, especially on day time when you easily spend 30min just looking for a spot.

Plus if you combine public transport with a decent bike - no car will ever beat you in this city.

Heh, as a new arrival to Berlin I wish it had the quality of transit that Vienna does! :)

There are so many different factors in those two situations that they're barely comparable.

Yes, there are many costs associated with car ownership, and I'm sure there are some in terms of behavior that that book may describe. But depending on where you live there are also costs to not owning a car, including the inability to get anywhere, either at all or in a timely manner.

I'm looking forward to living in a city (thought not in the US) and going without for a while, but the only reason I'll try it is because I know I'm going somewhere with vastly better public transportation and in proximity to the things I need and want to do.

Living without a car makes sense for some people, in some places, in some situations. Sometimes, though, expensive or not, it just doesn't.

I'm struck by the way that, when I lived in Tucson, it took seemingly 30 or 40 minutes to get anywhere.

I'm currently staying in Tucson for a brief spell, and I am struck by the very same thing! It's kinda crazy. I certainly don't live in a completely walkable city neighborhood back east, but I can be at the office in ~25 minutes on my bike, and most errands can be done on my bike or my scooter.

As for high costs, I think it's all a trade-off, right? We're a one car family (I've never actually driven to work in 15+ years), but we travel extensively in our VW van. So, the benefits we get from owning it out-weigh the costs. That said, I've applied the same analysis to owning a car for getting to work--it's far cheaper, and more enjoyable, for me to bike (and occasionally take the bus) rather than deal with another vehicle. I suspect most car-bound commuters (or suburbanites who must drive 15-30 minutes to get anywhere) have done similar math in their head (or on paper), and decided that the benefits of location and car ownership out-weight the costs. Of course, plenty of those folks also likely complain about gas prices and traffic, too!

Even in Japan if you only rely on Public Transportation (and you probably have heard its one of the best out there, worldwide), there are a number of situation where it just does not work. For example: you want to come back later than 11h30 pm ? Bad luck, most of the metro/train lines have stopped.

Or, there's usually always a way to get from point A to B with public transport, but unless you go to major stations or hubs you need to change several times, take an additional bus and walk an additional x minutes. It's very tiring and inefficient, and costly as well, because public transports aren't subsidized here as much as in Europe for example.

And of course, if you ever want to carry something large and heavy with you, welcome to hell, with a number of stations with no elevators and just stairs, and lack of space in trains to even put your stuff.

It's fairly obvious there are excellent use cases for having a car. Or at least renting one when you need it.

ANd that's not even considering : confort, risk of viral transmission (did you take this in account when considering the cost on society ?) and freedom aspects.

Yes, although owning, driving, and parking a car in Japan are not pleasant experiences, either. I remember one drive in particular when traffic was stalled so badly people were just leaving their cars idle to go pee on the side of the road.

I do think the most ideal setup would be public transport for most occasions combined with car rentals / delivery for large items.

Sure, cars suck for some scenarios. Bikes and public transport work much better there. Frankly, I don't like living in those conditions.

Bikes and public transport suck for other scenarios. Right now I'd spend more time just walking to & from bus stops than my entire commute, and biking the 15 miles to work would get me killed by the end of the week.

Live where it suits you. Ticks me off that the public transport crowd wants to actively deny me both my money and preferred mode of transport, when I wish to deny them nothing but my involvement.

> Why would you want to own a car if you could avoid it?

I used to live approximately half a mile from the epicenter of the 6.7 magnitude Northridge earthquake. I was actually at my desk programming at 4:31AM when it hit. It was, by far, the most violent quake I have ever experienced. The vertical component was brutal. It actually shot me up off my chair when it compressed the height adjusting air cylinder and propelled me upwards. I have this vivid memory of being up in the air along with all the books in the bookcases surrounding my desk. The lights went out. We all came down. The shaking begun.

Anyhow, after it stopped I was covered in a pile of books. I made sure everyone was OK, found my car keys and got out of the house. I threw some tools int the back of the car and immediately drove near CSUN where my girlfriend lived and picked her up. Her place was trashed. We helped a few of her neighbors. We gave a few of them rides to nearby friends and family. We also visited some of our friends in the neighborhood to make sure they were OK. Being the guy with a garage full of tools, I probably helped a dozen, if not two dozen, people with various issues from gas main shutoffs to broken water pipes and a whole range of other things that happen during a bad quake. In the days that followed we helped get water and supplies to those in need and generally made ourselves useful to the extent possible. Of course, we had our own issues to deal with, which required frequent trips to the hardware store to haul construction materials.

After that incident I never go to sleep without my gas tank at least half full and never leave my car keys on a table (because I had to dig them out of a pile of stuff when all of it went to the floor). My car was the single most valuable tool during that incident.

Many years later. Now married, living elsewhere, with a young child and a couple of dogs in tow our neighborhood was surrounded by fire. The hills around us just went up in flames. We were told evacuation was imminent. My wife, kid and dogs went into our two SUV's while I went in and out of the house prioritizing what to bring into the cars. We actually had to drive a block away from our home before we were told the situation had reversed and we could go back.

I realize these are extreme examples, but to say that public transportation is all you need is kind of unreasonable. It's almost like saying that the police force is all you need in order to keep you and your family safe. As a tourist I've always enjoyed public transport in Europe. Love it. If I lived there I would most certainly own a car or two. Public transport isn't going to be there when you need it most.

With the advent of electric cars a whole new set of possibilities starts to open up. Electrics with long range capabilities have something no liquid fuel vehicle can offer: easily convertible energy that --with the right equipment-- is compatible with the needs of any home. In the event of an emergency your electric SUV's could very well power your home and basic necessities such as lights, cooking and keeping food safe.

What if you didn't had your car? Would you have lost any property, or have anyone harmed?

Assuming not having your care would have been bad, what is the frequency of such events? Are they, say, more frequent than serious car crashes?

Not to mention the sheer costs of having most people owning their own car, compared to a decent public transportation system (which doesn't exist, I know). Even if cars save more lives than they crush, this money could go to more efficient life-saving effort, such as medical research, or existential risks mitigation.

It's all cost and benefit. Don't let your personal experience get in the way of numbers. They may be abstract, but at that scale, they matter more than your own family.

The problem with decent public transportation in the US is that our cities were not designed for it.

Just one look at a megalopolis like Los Angeles and it becomes clear there's almost no way to exist without your own car outside of a narrow set of locations and life styles.

If you are a single guy or gal living and working in Santa Monica and can bike to work, well, life is good.

The minute you move away from those areas, turn into a family with multiple kids things change. Work might no longer be a bike ride away.

Work for many is anywhere from thirty to sixty miles away from home. Each adult in the family is likely to work at a very different location. Schools are not centralized. You have separate elementary, middle and high schools. Many families have kids in all three at the same time. This means potentially driving and picking-up kids from three different schools at three different locations every day.

Look at Silicon Valley and their commute scenarios.

In general terms, yes, I agree, good mass transportation would be good for many reasons. In practical terms this dream is not really attainable without major structural, cultural and labor changes in most US cities. This, for all intents and purposes, probably means this is a pipe dream.

The original article explains it well. It's okay to own a car, maybe even one per adult in the household (though I would advocate greater car sharing). The original article's point is using the right tool for the job. In your cases the car was the right tool. For many people, especially city dwellers, you can leave your car at home and ride a bicycle for your daily city commutes. If everyone physically able followed this rule.. We'll, we'd probably look a lot like Sweden or those other uber bike friendly European places.

> For many people, especially city dwellers, you can leave your car at home

I do one better: I work from home now. When I had an outside office it was less than five miles away. Now I try to concatenate as many trips as possible into a single loop. Works out well most of the time.

If Tesla hadn't screwed-up the electric SUV design I would have bought in. I'll have to wait for another company to get it right. That's what's missing in my life right now, an honest electric powered SUV. Short of doing a conversion on something like a Suburban I'll have to wait for something like that to become commercially available. Shame that Tesla decided to go for a Gucci-bat-mobile instead of building a true sports-utility vehicle. I have a horrible feeling their SUV is going to be a failure. I hope I am wrong.

I don't understand your last paragraph at all. Inverters aren't all that expensive and will run all those basic necessities you mention from a normal gas-powered car.

Something like a Tesla has some 80+kW available at 500V. This is very different from running an inverter off a 12V lead acid battery. This is power at an entirely different scale. As battery technology evolves I can easily see cars, and particularly trucks, having far more than 80 kW available. A household with a couple of cars would, effectively, have a roving UPS that could provide lots of power during any time of need.

Heck, even a camping trip could change radically if surplus electrical power is available from your electric vehicle. I don't know about you, but I'd rather cook my food with electric power at the campsite than burn wood or charcoal. Over the last year or so I've convinced myself there's very little you can do with a BBQ that you can't do with a skillet and an oven. I am actually considering getting rid of my outdoor BBQ.

The Tesla has a 60 or 85kWh battery. The h is important; it's capacity, not power output. The power output is actually much higher, up to 310kW. But of course that means that if you run it at full bore, you'll only get about 16 minutes out of it. In any case, that kind of power output is vast overkill. A typical house only needs a few hundred watts, and that's easily provided with an inverter on a normal car. So again, I don't really see the advantage here, since both can do the job fine. One major difference is that when your electric car runs out of electricity you are screwed until the power comes back on, while a gas car can potentially be refilled. Even if the gas stations are down, you can stockpile gasoline, while you can't really stockpile electricity.

I know it's kWh. EE, so I get it.

Don't know where you live but "a few hundred Watts" would only power my computers.

I keep a couple of deep cycle 12V batteries fully charged in the garage. We typically use them as power sources for chargin LiPo's for electric model aircraft at the field or to power the glider launch winch. A nice side effect is that the are available for emergency power if ever needed. I still have a 4 kW propane generator because the 12V batteries are simply not enough. I say this from experience not conjecture.

The refrigerator seems like the only real substantial load. I looked that up, and while it'll draw over 1kW when starting, the continuous load is something like 200W for a modern one. Nothing else is in my house is going to approach that. I'm not going to be running desktop computers during an extended outage, and laptops will add a negligible impact. In colder weather I'd want enough power to run the gas furnace, which I imagine is not a ton. Lights can be kept to a reasonable minimum, and you'd want LED bulbs available for all the lights you'd use during an extended outage anyway, and so also won't be a whole lot. Thus: a few hundred watts.

But let's say you need 2kW. (That's not quite double what a normal car can put out, from my quick research. Typical car systems seem to top out around 1200W, give or take.) The Tesla would be able to provide that no problem, of course, but! It'll only do so for about 22 hours before you run the battery all the way down, at which point you have no electricity and no transportation and no way to remedy either until the power comes back on. If you really do need 4kW then your Tesla will last you half a day, which is just about useless. If your needs are low enough that the Tesla battery could last for a couple of days, then you can run off a regular car too.

Hence the propane generator.

Giving your preference for buying puppies from a breeder, it's not surprising that your opinions about transportation also only revolve around what you want and not what is moral or best for society or your community.

A "rescue" bit my daughter in the face and very nearly destroyed her eye. I'll stick with pets of known social and medical histories, thank you very much. BTW: having a car meant I could race her to medical help without having to wait for public transportation (aka ambulance).

Well - he made it easy for you because based on how he phrased it, you only had to come up with one reason cars are good. You picked some low-hanging fruit (not an ad hominem attack; your reasoning is sound). Cars are a clear solution to certain problems.

That said, I think that these reasons tend to diminish when contrasted with the downsides (not that it matters, but I do own a car, and am not just trying to shill the other side). Example: having a car also contributes to the degeneration of the city. This is a point well-illustrated in the original article. Is it worth owning a car when it is intrinsically tied to urban sprawl and the decay of cultural vibrance? Ownership comes at a cost.

I, too, like to go wherever I want. But it doesn't mean that every active member of the society HAS TO own one. I adore the freedom it gives me on nights/week-ends. But we don't need 2/3 cars per family. Carshare has something to offer too. I am not against cars, but it's way too unbalanced towards cars. Drivers should bear the costs of their habits and not out-source them. City centers must be made more liveable for urban dwellers. That means less surface parking, reducing parking minimums, paid parking, more bike paths, street designs with lower deisgn speed... Some want to live in the suburbs, no one can oppose that, we are free to do so. But if you want to live in a liveable urban neighborhood, this choice needs to be catered too.

Lots of people don't want to live in a city.

For me, living in a city is a horrible existence. So living in the unspoilt countryside a car is pretty useful to get around.

A car is freedom. Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden to some public transport system?

A car is freedom. Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden to some public transport system?

Per the link, I view a car as slavery, and, per The High Cost of Free Parking, car infrastructure is much more expensive than is commonly realized. Owning a car is being a slave to car payments, to saving for the car, to the insurance company, to the repair shop, to the driveway or parking lot, to paying around $10,000 a year in TCO.

Lots of people don't want to live in a city.

Which is good! They shouldn't. The challenges come from the way we've structured an entire society to subsidize parking.

To some extent that's changing, with people like Glaeser, Shoup, and Yglesias in the intellectual vanguard. The issue is also getting more prominent in part because the startling cost of living in many cities and inner-ring suburbs is causing intellectually curious people to ask both why this is happening and how it can be alleviated. Both questions go back to politics.

People throw around the world 'slavery' way too lightly, considering it's historical connotations.

"Freedom", too, for that matter.

meh, 'freedom' has never had a good, solid meaning. Kings have been using that word for centuries.

Slavery, until fairly recently has meant 'owning another human' - I mean, hell, I'll buy the use of slavery to mean 'having a choice between doing what another human wants and dying'

My problem here is expanding it to mean 'having to pay a small fee or suffer discomfort'

Some words have multiple definitions. Here's one of the definitions of the word "slave"... someone entirely dominated by some influence or person; "a slave to fashion"; "a slave to cocaine"; "his mother was his abject slave"

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=slave&allowed_in_fr...

Slavery was turned into "owning another human" by abolitionists who wanted to play up its squick factor. It was previously just a state of submission and would be interchangeable with "servant".

The sense jseliger is using it is in the sense attested from the 1550s: that a car owner has lost resistance to a habit or vice; in this case, the "habit or vice" is the acceptance of car infrastructure in city design and the habit of looking at the world through the needs of one's car, namely to find parking, to calculate finances based on a car's needs.

Thanks. I was not aware of that etymology resource. Interesting that it started out as a racial slur, then became something much less serious, then again became something more serious.

It's not really accurate to call it a racial slur. The concept of race was extremely weak before the 1800s, when eugenics took off, and slackened after WW2 (because Hitler). There were geographical prejudices (you come from a Slavic country) and "civilized" prejudices (you silly barbarians with your shaggy hair), but skin color was rarely, if ever, a factor.

Because, keep in mind: Slavic peoples were and are white.

In this sense, it's more accurate to compare it to jokes about how Polish people are stupid, how the British are always stuffy, how the French don't know how to shower, how Americans only care about money, how women are emotional, etc. A germ of truth, but mainly the kind of overgeneralization we call "stereotype" today.

>In this sense, it's more accurate to compare it to jokes about how Polish people are stupid, how the British are always stuffy, how the French don't know how to shower, how Americans only care about money

Huh. I would have called those examples racism. Maybe "European racism" if I wanted to make a racist statement myself. The joke is that Europeans are just as racist as Americans; they are just more refined about it. The implication, if you tell the joke properly, is that the Americans aren't as educated or refined as the Europeans, and thus can only handle the five colors.

But certainly, from the time of the rise of nationalism onward there has certainly been discrimination and violence along ethnic lines. (and perhaps before? I'm actually really interested in racism before the advent of nationalism, and I don't have much any information.)

But is that proper? calling it racism even when it's not based on Blumenbach's white/black/red/yellow/brown categories? I mean, dividing people into the aryans/poles/slavs and treating them differently based on that classification looks like the same thing to me, save for the fact that the classification takes more effort than Blumenbach's method does.

> I would have called those examples racism.

Yeah, but this breed of joke is basically timeless and global. Read old folklore of any culture and it's full of these backhanded compliments and unsubtle digs at neighboring villages and provinces. Tribalistic derogation (yeah, I just made that term up) basically happens anytime you have two sets of people who can be distinguished at all. Here in Seattle, it's Huskies and Cougars because football teams.

A lot of people can't tell the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant, for instance, but they've cheerfully gone to war over the distinction quite a few times. Is that a race war? It seems less than useful to do so.

Actually, it now occurs to me to look up the etymology of "race": http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=race&allowed_in_fra... I'm not sure what the Arabic ra's has to do with anything, but the earliest attestation there is 1520s. Interesting that the root similarity with other meanings is due to the way a river branches; that would never have occurred to me.

Nationalism, as I countenance it, is a 20th century phenomenon, which leaves a period of 1.5 to 4 centuries for your interest if you agree. I group nationalism, racism, sexism, etc. under the larger umbrella of tribalism, though, which may or may not be academically sane. Nationalism doesn't seem to become a thing until nation-building became a thing as a retrospective reaction to colonialism; you could call some ancient prejudices nationalism but... that doesn't feel right to me.

...I am rambling now.

I think that "nationalism" is generally thought to have really gained traction in the 18th century; Napoleon's France is often described as a nationalist state, and Herder (the dude credited with naming nationalism) was alive around that time. Germany started thinking about becoming Germany not that long afterwards, and did so, incidentally in France, in the 19th century.

Some people suggest that one of the reasons Napoleon was able to do so well militarily in the earlier years was this "Levée en masse" - most other countries at the time being a little hesitant to arm and train the peasantry, for fear they might demand rights. Civilization says that it's the Republic, not Nationalism that is the prerequisite for conscription, but eh.

On racism, yeah, what you are calling Tribalistic derogation - when it is based on inherited characteristics and actually ends in discrimination, functionally sounds a lot like racism, even if it happened before the term was coined.

How did that work in, say, the 16th century? I mean I'm sure that an Italian in France would face some discrimination, but would that be true of his kids? or would his kids or grand-kids be considered French even though they looked a little different?

That's great but you assume that there is a choice. I want to live in a nice city, but I can't. Trillions of dollars, decades of government policies and dozen of agencies with their "homeownership" programs destroyed our cities and permanently put them at a disadvantage. My city alone lost almost 1 million people so far, where blocks with only 2 or 3 houses left standing are plentiful(this isn't even Detroit!) yet the surrounding suburbs are thriving. This didn't happen out of choice. If people like you paid the full price of suburbia or if the situation was reversed and government rewarded city living instead of suburban living then your lifestyle would change really fast.

> I want to live in a nice city, but I can't.

If you want city living badly enough, there are countries that still have viable cities.

I live close enough to my workplace and the basic necessities that I could walk to them if I so choose. Most people who own cars now live so far away from these things that they can no longer live without their four-wheeler. That doesn't seem all that free to me.

The unspoilt countryside can certainly be pleasant, at least for the few that are well-off retired, or don't need access to an urban center to make a decent living, and don't mind driving an hour to do anything.

Start putting McMansions and Applebees in the countryside, and it becomes spoiled rather quickly.

> So living in the unspoilt countryside a car is pretty useful to get around.

Countryside is not 'unspoilt' if it features roads and cars, let alone houses and agriculture.

If you live there, it's not unspoilt. If you love nature, stay away from it, you have a bigger footprint in the country than in an urban core.

If you have a partner, it's not about the freedom of owning a car. Many couples/families own multiple cars. You can still own a car for "freedom" but live your daily life with one car less.

One car less.

> Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden > to some public transport system?

With a car you are dependent and beholden to a public transport system. They are called roads and highways.

While I love Shoup's work, I'm not enthusiastic about Glaeser's work.

In particular, I observe that Tokyo, Paris, Barcelona, and Mexico City organize people at adequate density to obtain all Glaeser's benefits without much of his beloved skyscrapers. Because of the shadows, streets, elevator columns, and infrastructure that skyscrapers need, they don't add much to urban life. A comfortable 15k/km^2 density (like Tokyo or Mexico City, half the density of Paris) is plenty enough to promote transit and network effects and build diverse and concentrated arts and business districts without concentrating them in only one part of town. That density is comfortably achieved with median two and three story buildings and plenty of open space in Mexico City and mostly short free standing homes in Tokyo.

Similarly when I lived in Silicon Valley (San Jose/Santa Clara/Sunnyvale anyway) it was all 3-storey buildings and some open space. They razed the last orchard while I lived there; immediately taller buildings started going up. I foresee skyscraper clusters in their future.

You make a good point but Tokyo should not be on your list of cities without many skyscrapers. It has the 5th most skyscrapers of any city in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_with_the_most_sk...

(Sorry, added the 'not', which interestingly people worked out)

Well, in proportion. Tokyo has almost double the population of the world's second largest city, too.

The proportion of all interior space in Tokyo above the 20th story of buildings is infinitesimal.

That's mostly just because Tokyo is so immense: Greater Tokyo is the world's largest city on most measures. However, the skyscrapers are concentrated in a couple of districts, and the vast majority of the city is indeed low-rise (under 10 stories or so even in the immediate city center, under 5 outside it).

Incidentally, most urban planners figure that Tokyo should be more dense instead of forcing people to endure multi-hour commutes, but strict sunlight laws make it very difficult to build tall buildings outside a few designated areas.

Tokyo has lots of high rise. But that's not the point. Lots of medium to big cities do it without high rise buildings. I have lived in a 7-8 thousand poeple/sq mi neighborhood. It's not NYC. It was only 5 levels/4stories high. It feels familiar, it doesn't blocks too much sunlight and it is perfectly livable.

I agree. When my family and I lived in Vancouver BC, we didn't own a car for 3 years, and we have little children. It actually worked quite well. We rode buses / walked / biked to work, rode buses for weekend trips (Vancouver is great in that regard. You can even go to a lot of hiking/skiing spots by bus). And for the occasional out-of-city trip we used a Zipcar. I think that overall, the time you would spend taking care of your own car (repair/fuel/clean/etc), balances out with the time you spend walking/waiting for buses, etc. With the added advantage of physical activity when being forced to walk or bike instead of drive. It is hard to resist the temptation of using a car when you own one. Another advantage of the bus is that you get to do stuff while commuting. I used that time to read books. And I think I've read more books in those 3 years than what I had the 10 years before.

If self-driving cars become a reality, it is interesting to think of what happens to all this space & infrastructure. If the model is that we don't own cars, but rather share them like taxis, then there is no need for parking: the car will just drop you and go to its next trip. If the model is that we own our self-driving cars, it may be that they can be parked at much greater distances (10+ miles) from where we spend time (in much denser structures than today). We can likely eliminate parking from inner cities, both garages and roadside parking.

If we can design roads and grids for computers and not humans, perhaps we can make them much efficient by trading off simplicity. Could we have a complex system of mostly one-way streets?

What interests me is that not just parking garages go away, but what today is a four-lane-width road (with two lanes dedicated to parking) may become a single-lane one-way street. The sidewalk - which used to be 20% of the space - is now 80% of the space. Looking around busy cities, and trying to imagine what it will look like post-self-driving car, is IMHO mind-blowing.

- Self-driving cars will still need to park at off-peak times. Unless they just keep driving in circles.

- Having your car park 10 miles away from you after every trip adds some forty miles of travel per commute. That's forty miles of fuel and forty miles of maintenance, every day.

- I'm also not thrilled about the prospect of already-dense cities shrinking streets to one lane. We call them concrete jungles now- can you imagine if all the roads were only 15 feet across? Goodbye, sky.

Definitely valid points! Personally, I hope that we end up with a shared-ownership model, and that the cars do park 10+ miles away if they are idle, but that this is amortized across a large number of commutes. I also hope that we use the liberated space for sidewalks and green spaces, not for more buildings. Small changes though (whether we own or share our cars, planning policies on urban parking & freed up lanes) will have a huge effect...

- Self-driving cars will still need to park at off-peak times. Unless they just keep driving in circles.

"they can be parked at much greater distances (10+ miles) from where we spend time, in much denser structures than today"

- Having your car park 10 miles away from you after every trip adds some forty miles of travel per commute. That's forty miles of fuel and forty miles of maintenance, every day.

Only if we map 1 car to 1 person. Of course that'd be completely unoptimized - people wouldn't own car, but rather have a "subscription" where they can get a car dispatched at any time (à la Uber). Cars would only park 10 miles away at truly off peak hours; the rest of the time they'd go to service some other customer.

- I'm also not thrilled about the prospect of already-dense cities shrinking streets to one lane. We call them concrete jungles now- can you imagine if all the roads were only 15 feet across? Goodbye, sky.

As the previous poster said, the extra space would go to sidewalks. Outside patios, trees, grass, parks... the things we could do would be amazing. Some older European cities from pre-car eras are built like that, and it's wonderful.

Only if we map 1 car to 1 person

Please read my parent. He said:

If the model is that we own our self-driving cars it may be that they can be parked at much greater distances (10+ miles)

That's what I was replying to.

Some older European cities from pre-car eras are built like that, and it's wonderful.

And a fair number of pre-automobile European cities are built with tiny streets. Hence, part of why micro-cars are so popular in Europe.

> And a fair number of pre-automobile European cities are built with tiny streets. Hence, part of why micro-cars are so popular in Europe.

Fuel in europe costs about as much in euro per liter as it costs in USD/gallon. Well, that's a bit exaggerated but last week I paid ~ 1,50 EUR per liter, so a fuel efficient micro car does not only help you navigate narrow streets but also saves quite some money.

Shrink the street to gain curb space. Look at Broadway in NYC: you have all kinds of events and public markets going on down just about the entire length. Gaining curb space encourages people to walk, which in turn spurs local businesses, which encourages more people to walk (because there are all these awesome storefronts to shop at).

> - I'm also not thrilled about the prospect of already-dense cities shrinking streets to one lane. We call them concrete jungles now- can you imagine if all the roads were only 15 feet across? Goodbye, sky.

Streets in downtown Philadelphia are effectively one lane in each direction (one lane is parking) and there is plenty of sky. You just need to manage the setback requirements. This is one of the densest neighborhoods in Philadelphia (~60k people per square mile): https://maps.google.com/maps?q=rittenhouse+square&hl=en&ll=3....

This is easy enough to fix from a policy standpoint:

(1) make free parking a taxable benefit for companies

(2) tax the hell out of gas/car registration, or at the very least tax it enough to pay for infrastructure

(3) no mandated parking minimums in new construction in cities

(4) get rid of publicly paid for parking

But of course this requires transit alternatives and popular support, which does not exist in places like Atlanta. I live in Orange County, and I bike to work (we have perfect weather and mediocre bike infrastructure), but people love their cars here.

I think a better alternative for 2 would be congestion pricing for downtown areas. An across the board registration hike would be regressive, and disproportionately affect the rural poor.

Ah yes, even better. But that couldn't even fly in NYC, arguably the place with the least car friendly political environment in the US.

I have lived in both car-dependent and transit-based places, and can see advantages to both. Given that the advantages of transit are commonly discussed these days, I thought I'd give some of the advantages of cars.

(1) Cars don't have schedules. You can just jump in your car and go any time of day or night. Cars also don't stop running at 2am, while most transit systems do.

(2) Cars permit sprawl. Sprawl has been bashed to hell and back for some justifiable reasons, but it has one big advantage: it breaks the backs of real estate markets. Sprawling car-dependent regions are much safer from the real estate hyperinflation that plagues cities that are either transit-based or geographically constrained. Bubbles of local real estate inflation surround transit hot spots, creating a two-tier society in which ease of transportation is exponentially (not linearly, as with cars) correlated to income. The poor get loooooong bus->train commutes while the wealthy get fast train->train commutes.

(3) Cars can haul stuff, which gets increasingly important when you have children. Pretty much everything about the suburbs seems idiotic until you have kids, then it seems reasonable.

I can't stress #2 enough. Compare the Los Angeles metro area to the San Francisco bay. The former is a largely car-based sprawling metropolis, while the latter is partly transit-based and also geographically constrained (which for the market does the same thing as transit-dependence). In the LA metro area there are many neighborhoods where poor and working class people can afford to live. In the Bay Area you're spending $3000/month for a crack den. Everyone but professionals and the rich are completely priced out of all but the absolute worst neighborhoods, or are pushed out to the fringes with the longest commutes.

It's funny that transit is often cited as good from an equality point of view as it gives everyone access to mobility without requiring car ownership, but the real estate inflation that it engenders negates this IMHO.

Great insight.

I walked around Tokyo marveling at the infrastructure. Fully enclosed (or perhaps 3/4 enclosed) freeways that explode out of the ground, split off to surface streets, and arch up through the sky and around corners. Well-engineered, rubberized mounting systems and the enclosure mean you only heard the faintest hint of cars rocketing by at speed. Highways branching to high-capacity, multi-lane surface streets, which further branch into narrow neighborhood streets (similar to an alley in the US) meant that pedestrian traffic was quite safe, and generally well-respected.

By contrast, American cities have a couple of arterial freeways, a massive grid of wide-yet-low-capacity surface streets, and neighborhood streets that people speed through in an effort to shave seconds off their commute. And when they get to work, they park in huge parking lots, instead of stacked parking structures (ideally under the target building itself).

American transportation infrastructure is terrible.

I think the road infrastructure pales in comparison to the subway/rail system. The volume of people it moves is incredible. Also remember that it's all built in an earthquake-prone area!

I didn't even bother getting into the rail system, since I assume everyone realizes how advanced it is. I really wanted to put this in though: I've watched Shinkansen pull into the switchyard at night to "go to bed". It's quiet. Here's a bullet train, cruising into a rail yard pretty much in the middle of a neighborhood, idling along after midnight, and you only hear a very muffled motor as it glides by. Compare that to America, where our trains seem to be built solely to meet basic load requirements, and where they honk four times (as long or short as they want) before every crossing that's not guarded with quad-gates.

Quite so. Furthermore, the preponderance of bicycle-riding and perhaps the best public transport network in the world makes Tokyo, in some ways, a role model for urban design. Outside of the big cities　in Japan though, you see the same infrastructure that characterises the US: strip malls and the like. Population density seems to be the major driver and, perhaps contentiously, willingness to subsume one's own freedoms to the common good is a secondary one.

This post is a rant backed up with only anecdotal evidence and an enraged author with a penchant for catchy headlines.

No solutions are offered because no problem is properly presented.

At the other side, the author presented the less fitting anedocte he came up with, saying "see, even if I try hard to refute the hypothesis, I can't". And it's not an extraordinary hypothesis.

I'm genuinely curious: Here in germany we have car-sharing offers that allow you to pick up a car on the street, ride it to where you want to go and then leave it parked there in the larger cities. The fee is usually about half of the fee of a cab. Then there's the same for bicycles. The combination of public transport and car-sharing in berlin is awesome, at least in the city center: I go most ways by public transport and then grab a car or bike if I need to. If I really need to travel long distance by car, I get a rental and I'm coming out ahead financially, even if I throw in the occasional taxi ride because it's late and I'm lazy. From the posts here I get the impression that this doesn't exist in the US - and I can't imagine that.

What you are describing sounds like https://www.car2go.com, which is available in some US cities.

Which just happens to be a German company :)

We have it in Toronto and it's super useful sometimes to quickly get somewhere within the downtown when transit would be slower and cabs more expensive.

A handful of cities in the US have in the last few years gotten a service called car2go, which is exactly what you describe. It's not available in the biggest cities, though. A few cities are also starting to have bicycle-sharing services. It's just not very common, yet.

As a life long ATLien, I want to know when Atlanta was walkable, and if it could have even been considered the same city as it is now. For those of you who don't know, the population of metro Atlanta more than doubled between 1990 and 2010.

Yes, all types of transportation suck in Atlanta, but roads and cars are an extensible, scaleable solution with most of the costs being marginal as opposed to fixed, meaning additional demand can be handled easily. Like others have noted, you offered no real solutions to that problem. MARTA is kind of a joke of a system for anyone that values their time. A trip on MARTA will take about twice the time it would take to drive in a car. At the average commuter distance, you recoup the cost of buying a $5,000 car in a year if you value your time at minimum wage. If you actually care about fixing the problem, fix the economics of alternatives. Don't just go about complaining about the fact that you don't like not being able to walk where you want to go, suggest solutions.

And please try to consider this problem outside of the perspective of being a student, because that honestly seems to be the only perspective you've given to this. A lot of the vehicles you see in Atlanta are work vehicles, and that mobility makes a lot of things possible that you probably are a fan of. You may want to consider the dynamics of the local economy further.

Honestly, I have to say this article isn't up to the standards I'd expect of a fellow Tech student, particularly a PhD candidate. You are very well intentioned and undoubtedly intelligent, but simply pointing out what everyone knows isn't very helpful. I'll be interested to see the future posts you promised.

Before cars invaded Ahmedabad, India, two wheelers and rickshaws were primary modes of transportation for longer distances. Walking and bicycles were used for shorter distances.. Cars were used on occasions.. Traffic issues were non-existent. People starting using cars as primary mode of transportation because everyone else started doing it.. meaning using two wheelers became less safe, more car traffic, increased pollution effects, etc.

Idea is to go back to using cars as only ocassional mode of transportation and for that one option is govt helps reduce traffic for two wheelers/rickshaws/bicycles.. Dedicated lanes for these would help.

FYI, the author of that post address self-driving cars in his next post: http://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/self-driv...

That betrays the basic attitude of these anti-car folks. It's not the cars, but the freedom to live where you want that they detest.

They also detest the democratization of wealth, which invariably results in some form of "sprawl." It's either the horizontal sprawl of endless little palaces of Versailles with their little lawns, or it's the vertical sprawl of monstrous energy-sucking megastructures full of luxury condominiums. But in either case the result of democratized wealth does not give fellatio to agrarian-utopian fantasies.

People can live where they want, but I'm critical of having to subsidize the excessive amount of infrastructure necessary for the lifestyle choice of unnecessarily travelling very large distances. For me it's even worse because I live in a region where the terrain requires a lot of bridges.

"but I'm critical of having to subsidize the excessive amount of infrastructure necessary for the lifestyle choice of unnecessarily travelling very large distances"

Why choose this choice as the the line in the sand?

Are you also critical of having to subsidize the excessive amount of infrastructure necessary for the lifestyle choice of living in a strictly large than necessary place, for example?

Because you subsidize that to a large degree too.

Everyone who has a larger dining room because they have made the lifestyle choice of wanting to host dinner parties. Or large kitchens. Large bedrooms. Large yards. You name it.

It's all strictly unnecessary, and all lifestyle choice. Among other subsidies, all of it takes up valuable space that could be given to the public, or something else done with it. It requires more infrastructure - greater water supplies, greater sanitation requirements, power supplies, gas supplies, what have you.

Yet we subsidize this just the same as you are paying for roads, you are just paying for it in different places.

In truth, we subsidize a large number of lifestyle choices that impact infrastructure (having kids, riding bikes, heck, even buying groceries, you name it).

From what I can tell, it just seems some people are upset that they subsidies don't always match whatever their particular ideology of how cities should be built is.

Just remember there really is no "better" or "worse", when it comes to lifestyle choices, just different (you may impose moral judgements on lifestyle choices depending on ideology and viewpoint of purpose of society, but the truly vast majority of these moral judgements are not universally shared)

Same can be said in the opposite direction. All that parking space and all that road space wasted in cities means removing the freedom to live in the city for many, possibly more than the ones who are currently driving in.

People living further away combined with the current car ownership means more cars on the streets. That's not explicitly stated at the article, but came-on, the author clearly sheers for the improved accessibility, but prefers the shared cars option.

I certainly don't detest the "freedom to live where you want." It's a lack of freedom that I detest. In my city (and most others), it is highly impractical or impossible to go anywhere without a car. There is no freedom I'm choosing how to transport yourself; you drive or you don't go.

My car is kind of a form of taxation in that regard; you can't get around safely without it. There are few sidewalks or bike facilities, so citizens must own a car whether they want to (or can afford to) or not.

Isn't the freedom to choose how to get around as important to you as the freedom to choose where to live?

They're free to live where they want. Just stop expecting the rest of us to pay for the ever-expanding roads and freeways that they feel entitled to reach them.

In the East Bay, I ride a 3000w electric scooter. A kWh of power is a good days ride, commute, shopping and socializing (I tend to charge twice a day, because I can).

Please consider joining me: the more scooters there are the safer we all get to be. It's fun! When you get going fast, you can't even hear the motor, just the wind.

Do people actually want to live in cities, how many of them? - (and whatever for?)

One narrative here goes, there are lots of cars, so it creates an unfriendly environment, so people have to live outside the city and have cars.

But that narrative doesn't make sense for how the cars got there in the first place.

Another narrative goes: cars enabled people to move about quickly, they enjoyed this. One manifestation of this ability was to escape from cities and still get to work. Thus carparks and reasonably fast roads.

Or maybe people just enjoyed moving about quickly even over relatively small distances and it snowballed

For example, I live about five miles away from where I used to work. I could spend 10 minutes walking to the nearest busstop, 15 minutes waiting for that bus, another 10-15 minutes getting to the busstop in town, another 10-15 minutes waiting for the next bus to work, another half hour or so while the bus drives there (takes longer because of stops).

Or I could just get in the car and be there in 16-20 minutes.

An hour and a half vs 16-20 minutes. And this isn't a bad place for public transport. Buses, on average, every 10-15 minutes is pretty good. It just adds up. Heck, given a couple of hours I could probably walk there.

It's far from clear that it makes sense, even under generalised utility, to agree with the author's desire to make cities better places to live at the potential cost to people who may prefer to live elsewhere and drive.

You could also bike there in 30 minutes and get some excercise as a bonus.

High correlation with another post in the board:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2013/12/10/why_cul_de_sac...

Can be a bit of a catch 22 in today's world, where new cities and developments are created assuming high volume / usage of cars.

You can see how dense cities can work very well with very few cars in places like Amsterdam, but there city setup and infrastructure eases walking / biking and is very unfriendly to cars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Amsterdam#Car

I think what we need are exponential tolls based on distance to city center or density of pedestrian traffic around. I couldn't care less about cars on streets dedicated for them, but everywhere else they need to piss off and quickly. They are death machines.

I fond our cities profoundly ugly, but cars serve an essential service. I need a flexible, quick means of secure transport. I need to move a variable number of people from 1-4. I often need to bring tens of kilograms of stuff with me. What else can fill the bill around a large metro area (~3 million people)?

I would love an alternative, to live in beautiful cities, to walk around the way I can overseas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City

Walking + a cart.

New York City recently launched it's CitiBike program and set up bike racks in spots that used to be reserved for street parking and you should have seen people flipping out despite the fact that less than 50% of us actually own cars. And let's not forget about the amount of space we dedicate cars being able to move around.

At this point for a lot of cities, it would require a large amount of infrastructure change. Mass transit in most cities sucks today, so people use cars. To do this right, the city needs to do a massive up-front investment in public transit. And there is no guarantee that this investment will ever pay off.

Yes, it would require a change in infrastructure. No, it is not necessary for the investment to be done upfront. You quickly ramp up cheap mass transit options (bus service segregated from regular vehicular traffic with dedicated lanes, MUCH cheaper than light rail construction) while using permitting/zoning to phase out car-friendly policies.

It won't happen overnight, but its a start.

Bus service does not work. People hate buses, no matter how well designed and efficient their routes are. Buses have an extreme social stigma attached to them.

I love buses. Gives me a chance to read, when I would otherwise be stuck driving.

Unfortunately, just because you hate something doesn't mean we should continue to support policies for wasteful/inefficient transportation.

You know what's wasteful and inefficient? Empty buses driving around all day. My city is full of them!

It's a catch-22. In most cities, the bus service sucks, but poor people can't afford anything else, so as a result, busses are full of poor people. In New York and Chicago, busses are clean and well-maintained because they serve higher income people and tourists as well. Manhattan is a place where you're just as likely to sit on a bus next to a guy making $1m+/year as some disheveled homeless dude.

Reading abut the Google Bus protesters was disappointing. Whatever one's opinion of gentrification, targeting buses seems perverse. I could not discover the protesters' point of contention. Doesn't Google (and other SV companies) already pay the city to use the infrastructure?

that's why we should make new cities with the infrastructure to support a population with zero cars allowed. And make that city an awesome place to live.

As a small business owner who sells a physical good, statements like this scare the hell out of me. You have no idea the kind of monopolization and losses of freedom implementing ideas like this would entail. Cars are democratic. They are a cheap, scaleable way of solving the problem of transportation. Kill cars, and you will destroy a lot of entrepreneurship in things that really matter. You will also be hurting those that start with the least most of all.

Can you explain a little more? It seems on first blush that a no-cars city with good public transport and good support for walking and cycling would be much more democratic than a city where people rely on cars to get to places. Bikes are much cheaper than cars, food is much cheaper than gas. It's much cheaper to take a public transport link to a destination than to take a taxi or rent a car. It seems very counter-intuitive to say "cars are democratic" where then are lot of people who can't afford a car. They also seem much less scalable than the alternatives.

I'm lucky enough to live in a city with lots of shops in walking distance of my apartment. There's a discount supermarket 15 minutes away where I buy most of my food.

If I lived in a city where all the big supermarkets were in strip malls or commercial estates on the outskirts of the city, I'd have to buy my food at smaller convenience-style stores with much higher prices and a poorer selection of goods.

It's hard to argue against his abstract proposition since he didnt really provide an alternative plan, but in general, there are two main factors I'd like to stress.

The first is the loss of mobility and its results. One almost universal facet of the alternatives to cars that people suggest is that they limit where you can enter and exit the system. You can't use a train to navigate to anywhere you want to go: you use it to get close and then use some other way of getting the rest of the way. Remove other transit systems, and this will effectively set property values. Want to open a store? Well, if you're an established player with easy access to capital through the investment bank that handled your last merger, than the cost of leasing or purchasing property with reasonable access via transportation is fairly easy. But if you don't, you're probably not going to be able to afford that. You're going to have to locate yourself in a far less accessible location. And the value proposition of your business now has to overcome this difference as well in addition to regular value you would offer. From a consumer standpoint, this means you have fewer alternatives. Things have to be pretty bad with your existing supplier of a good or service for you to switch if doing so is going to entail a higher inconvenience in terms of access. I saw this all the time in Chicago. People could charge a premium beyond what their higher rent would require simply because they knew that you would be reluctant to walk another 15 minutes to get to someone who was charging 10-20% less per item.

There are additional fixed costs that would go with the logistical concerns a model like this would entail. How are you going to get things to and from your business? The constructs are going to most likely favor established methods. Say we don't allow cars to drive, but we do decide that we need the infrastructure to allow 18-wheelers to get through, and you can use that method instead. Well now you need a loading dock. Now you either need to pay someone else a premium for hauling it for you or buy an 18-wheeler yourself. You can't simply use the car you were already using to commute to your day job while trying to start this new business. You can't sacrifice additional time to lower the cots. You are effectively confined to hiring other people to do it for you because of the system.

In short, it makes the system much more rigid. It leaves fewer feasible alternatives both for the consumer and the provider. It also makes barriers to entry far higher.

If these are the problems that are scaring the hell out of you, it doesn't sound that bad. There are solutions out there to all of these problems.

I don't think we should kill cars. At least not until there is something better to replace them.

You may want a car to get to other cities. But to walk around within the city with no car emissions? No cars zooming by everywhere? With an excellent mass transportation, even one with privacy for its users? I would give up a lot to live in a place like that.

cars are not democratic. They restrict freedom. Just to be able to walk around everywhere within a small city without any cars driving by would a dream for me.

I think you mean, "Mass transit in most American cities sucks today".

I lived most of my life in Los Angeles, having a car was a right of passage. I moved three years ago to New York City and I sold my car (finally) last year. It's amazing how liberating it is, no insurance, parking, gas, maintenance. These things eat into your life and you really don't see it until it's gone.. I'd be glad to never own another car, but if I move again to a place that doesn't support it I guess I'll buy another chunk of metal and watch the quarters fly out the tail pipe..

Self driving cars my pick for best solution. You can have fewer cars services more people with higher efficiency. It's all wins across the board.

I hope the bloggers solution ideas aren't "better public transportation". Public transportation sucks, even in Europe. A pre-requisite to good public transportation is poor infrastructure for private transportation. I view asking for better public transportation as asking for a faster horse. We can do way better than that.

> Public transportation sucks, even in Europe.

Although I've only visited, I thought the public transportation in France was very good. Those buses move super fast. In America it's common to have to ride a bus for over an hour to get to your destination that's not that far by car standards. Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say this?

Self driving cars doesn't change much.

Supposing that there would exist car sharing systems such that a single car may be used throughout the day by several people, then we could cut back on parking spots, but I'm sure there will be many that own their own self driving car and share it with no one.

During morning rush hour the only difference from now would be that commuters could do the crossword puzzle instead of focusing on traffic.

Incorrect. If you have self-driving cars, the entire flow of traffic could be much more efficient, virtually eliminating traffic jams.

You could drive at the speed limit with a lot smaller distance between cars, etc, packing in a greater density of people without sacrificing speed.

I think you'll see some gains in efficiency, but negligible compared to how efficiently we can move people via rapid transit. At the end of the day you're still going to be having most often a single person in a large vehicle that takes up a lot of room on the road.

This has yet to be proven. An efficiency gain does not mean the elimination of traffic jams.

With sufficiently good self-driving systems, it is obviously the case that you can safely drive cars more closely together than you can safely do with people. It is not obviously much smaller - you only get to shrink the portion of time it takes the human to react, not everything else involved in stopping or maneuvering the vehicle.

That's just not true, you can't say that about all european cities. Vienna has excellent public transport for example.

Public transportation sucks at a fundamental level. It's a graph with an extremely limited number of nodes on a completely fixed schedule. That's clearly inferior to free travel from any point to any point.

Given equal travel time I'd pick an autonomous car over train or bus 100% of the time. I'd pick a self driven car 100% of the time when not inebriated. For the most part faster travel time in a train or bus isn't a sign of their superiority but a sign of failure in proper infrastructure for cars. =I've been throughout Europe. Including two weeks in Vienna. I still think public transportation sucks and asking for more is asking for a faster horse.

In the United States I'd argue there isn't a single city with good public transportation. Not one. Some folks will list NYC as a good example. I don't consider a city with the single worst commute time in the entire country as a positive example. [1]

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/longest-...

Cars suck at a fundamental level too, because only a quite limited amount of people can move from "any point" to "any point". Otherwise there everyone is stuck for hours. That does not happen nearly as often with public transport or bikes. You also need to sacrify a fair amount of your cities to cars, parking alone takes a lot of space.

Your infrastructure argument works in both ways: The fact that there's no city with working public transport in the US is a result of communities who primarily plan for cars, nothing more.

Car oriented design is not efficient at all for most city trips and we need to dramatically increase funding for alternatives.

Alongside directing our infrastructure dollars toward supporting a more balanced mix of travelling options, the most sensible thing we can do is to expose more of the real cost of car oriented infrastructure to the end consumer via road fees, bridge tolls and ending free parking.

If most things could be delivered by drones to where you lived, do you think we would space out, or clump together, or stay the same?

I think, for me, I could use my car payment on taxi service if I didnt need to commute or do errands, and it would be about the same. Except I wouldnt have a car, something that breaks down.

Cars kill density, but they don't kill cities. I live in San Diego, a very car friendly city. I can get to almost any store, restaurant, or shop in 15 minutes or less. The key is medium density city with lot's of freeways. High density is not all that it's cracked up to be.

For a forum that spends a lot of time talking about disruption with members who I'm sure pride themselves on their rationality, there is a surprising amount of "damn the torpedoes" defense of the status quo here.

Did you guys see this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882352

David Byrne's book Bicycle Diaries has some fantastic analysis of the effects of cars on cities (particularly American ones). I would highly recommend it!

Wonder when the liberals will wake up and smell the coffee: Private busses are the miracle solution to public transport.

Trying to be as non promotional as possible here.

With my startup I'm working on this problem aiming to make easily setting up private transport a reality.

You can check out my vision here.

http://www.driveless.co/about.html

My contact if is in my profile if you have any comments or criticism.

But they bring in undesirable male nerds.

We can use solar powered vehicles instead..

Eh, IMO, cars are killing democracy, too. I haven't lined up the studies to actually show the causal chain, though. It's something I need to get around to doing.

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