What exactly is the alternative to cars?
The idea of abandoning a car is silly at this point because it's just not going to happen. Maybe if urban sprawl wasn't a thing we could figure something out. On my team, I live the closest to work at 6 miles, with many of my coworkers commuting 40+ minutes. There's no complete replacement for that. Even when I was a public transportation commuter at a previous job in a different city, I had to drive a few miles on a highway to get to the bus depot. The anti-car sentiment seem to me to be localized in tighter packed cities with better public transit, which is a minority of the cities in America (sorry for being so US-centric, I haven't lived or worked outside of the States).
You also might enjoy sports cars, as I do, and enjoy owning a very well-designed vehicle that does 0-60 in under four seconds and is a joy to drive on the windy roads near my house -- though it would be nice to add a self-driving car to the garage too. (HN trivia: I had lunch with Steve Jobs in 1989, and he drove up in a black Porsche 911. Larry Page bought a Tesla roadster. I recall Cypress Semiconductor CEO TJ Rodgers telling me about his Mercedes; you can probably track down the interview if you're interested.)
Also: I don't live in a downtown area. Nor do I live in suburban sprawl. But "sprawl is just a subsidy for cars" is a weak argument that gets the facts wrong: car commuters are subsidizing public transportation via gas and other taxes, not the other way around.
Here's Randal O'Toole on single-family homes in the SF Bay area: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/do-single-family... "The vast majority of population growth continues to be in low-density suburbs. Surveys of millennials show that more than three out of four aspire to live in a single-family home with a yard. The data also show that crowding people together isn’t really effective at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions or addressing other urban concerns. Population densities in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose urban areas have already grown by nearly 60 percent since 1990, yet per-capita driving still has increased."
I do apologize in advance for injecting facts into a religious argument about that loathsome invention known as the automobile. :)
False dichotomy: sprawl vs. 20th floor apartment. There are many single family homes with yards in dense urban areas. Note in this aerial image how the compact residential areas with grid streets are bracketed by commercial corridors on major streets. Walkable access to work, shopping, entertainment, and long-haul transportation are the features lacking in "sprawl". https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8412554,-122.2511705,700m/da...
You claim about gas buyers subsidizing transit has already been addressed in your other post. I will just add that every time I get on the bus I have to disgorge another $2.10 whereas every time I get on the freeway I pay no direct user fee.
Your data about per-capita driving is also obsolete. According to FHWA data, per-capita vehicle miles traveled has fallen 8 years in a row. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring... It's not back to 1990 levels yet, certainly, but it's headed there and is mostly a matter of demographics.
Do you have numbers for this? Last I checked, gas taxes didn't cover the costs for road construction and maintenance, let alone have enough left over to subsidize public transportation.
http://reason.com/archives/2012/02/14/house-aims-to-stop-hig... >>Every time you buy a gallon of gas in this nation, you pay 18.2 cents to Uncle Sam. The original rationalization for the federal gas tax was that it was collected in a "Highway Trust Fund" and used to pay for road infrastructure. In 1983, a transit account was created [pdf], diverting 20 percent of the trust fund to pay for the mass transit dreams of local potentates.<<
That's not counting $$$ coming from general FedGov income tax revenue. Because far more people use cars regularly than use public transport regularly, those are additional subsidies extracted (involuntarily) from automobile and truck owners.
Related, with an entertaining headline: http://reason.com/blog/2012/06/22/breaking-affluent-well-edu...
I'll stop here because I have a policy against arguing with libertarians on the internet, but in case you are interested in facts from actual research rather than from political mouthpieces here's one. The URL says it all:
http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pa...
(OK, the reason is pretty obvious: it's the only way to make the numbers come out "right".)
Good luck with that.
Also the nice thing about not being a superstitious throwback is I don't have to find any place to worship, walking distance or otherwise.
They ARE awesome, but often come at the expense of time. I live in Tokyo, which has an amazing public transportation network.
Including walking to/from stations and bus stops, taking the bus/train costs me around 80 minutes of my day each way -- that's over 2 1/2 hours of my day.
If I take a taxi directly from my apartment to work, it takes about 15-20 minutes to get directly to work. Let's call it 40 minutes of my day.
I can get back two hours of my life every single day with point-to-point transport. That's two hours I could be catching up with friends, reading a book, cooking, exercising, etc. It matters so often to me that I end up paying the 4000 yen or so it costs to take a taxi twice a day a horrifying number of times.
This is to say nothing of the fact that I can sit in the taxi and read a book or something rather than being crammed and crushed in public transport.
> Including walking to/from stations and bus stops, taking the bus/train costs me around 80 minutes of my day each way
That's not actually how we define "amazing public transportation network". My experience of public transit in Seattle is "about 5 minutes away from a bus stop, anywhere, and about 30 minutes to anywhere I care to go in the city, and maybe an hour if I go across the lake to Bellevue or Redmond".
The fact that it takes you longer for traveling within the city than it does for me to change cities suggests to me that Tokyo's public transit is either ridiculously bad or you have an extremely unusual case.
It's pretty comparatively amazing to me. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania in a town with no buses or taxis. The closest train/bus station was about 50 minutes away by car.
My apartment has a bus stop right outside its door, but I have to travel the entire bus line to get to where I want to go, and that's 15 minutes from work.
There's a train station five minutes from work and two others within ten minutes from work, but none of them go directly to the station closest to my apartment.
... and that would be the problem, in much of the USA.
Add in reasonable public transportation between places, and we're talking more like within 5-10 miles.
I simply don't believe that there's an area anywhere around an urban center where you can't find all of that within ~75-300 square miles, as most urban areas simply aren't that big.
I thought we were talking about expanding it to sub-urban areas too, and in those places finding all those things within distance is much much harder.
You (or whoever is arguing for it) would rather not live in a world that has tainted nature with roads and automobiles.
Why does it have to be one way or another? In the present, there are plenty of places to go and see nature that hasn't been tainted by cars and roads.
Many of the people in this thread write as if cars are manifestly obviously bad, and that we should go to great lengths to remove or drastically reduce them from society.
I guess I didn't get the memo.
Look at this thread. Most of what I see are people advocating "sin taxes" and the like. Or, increasing subsidies to shape a world more fitting of what they want.
Thanks for the insult saraid216! Is there anything else about me that you'd care to attack? (If not, feel free to take a look at my comment history. I'm sure you can find something. If it'll make you feel better, I'm all ears.)
Cars aren't manifestly bad, but that kind of neighborhood is.
You're not wrong, but I'm not sure it's really relevant to what I'm saying. So what, some suburbs aren't ideal to my particular way of life? Yeah? So?
> Cars aren't manifestly bad, but that kind of neighborhood is.
sigh...
It seems you're trying to portray any detractors of suburbs as radical tree-huggers, whilst ignoring the fact that the kind of suburban sprawl happening today has a ton of other downsides, and fails to even meet your own standards for a nice neighborhood.
Edit: To give you some context, I live on the opposite side of town from the neighborhood I linked to. My neighborhood is much lower-density than that one, but while still unquestionably suburban, has schools and a large variety of shops within walking distance and safely accessible by foot and greenways and bike routes leading toward the city centers. My neighborhood was built in the 1970s. There are similar neighborhoods in the area covering a broad range of density and property values. We don't even have a mass-transit system worth mentioning, but it's still a much better place for getting around without a car. Yes, suburbs can be done well. But at least in my area, the new residential development is mostly comically tragic, and it's affecting what people mean by suburban sprawl.
I'm saying the dual of "my way of life is better."
Someone else brought up that there are subsidies supporting my way of life though. I'm fine with removing those. But I personally haven't seen that position advocated in this thread. So I didn't account for it.
> radical tree-huggers
Radical tree huggers? Come now. No need for the flamebait. I love nature. I frequent it whenever I get the chance. But I don't feel entitled to it wherever I happen to be.
> whilst ignoring the fact that the kind of suburban sprawl happening today has a ton of other downsides, and fails to even meet your own standards for a nice neighborhood.
I didn't ignore anything. I never said suburbs were always the best. I didn't even say that I prefer every suburb to any city. I didn't speak with exact precision because the details of "my way of life" weren't crucial to my point.
I didn't say any of this because I never argued that suburbs were, in any way, shape or form better than cities. I merely stated that I prefer them. And that's enough.
Edit: Many of the subsidies the car-only lifestyle gets are really negative externalities the burden of which is shared by everyone: the public health nightmare of obesity, pollution in the form of smog and runoff, political downsides of dependence on oil. How could those be dealt with in a way that doesn't feel to you like an unjust sin tax or someone forcing their way of life on you?
I don't want subsidies. I don't want any of them. Get rid of them. Car subsidies are just as much an imposition as sin taxes are.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Automobiles, and in general, industrialization, come with a cost. Externalities (positive or negative) that are a result of hundreds of millions of people acting cannot be eliminated without coercion. And of course, coercion introduces its own form of externality.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. I'd rather we all plead our case to persuade others than shove it down everyone else's throats.
"Oh but that would be great if only people weren't idiots..."
And around in circles we go.
If you feel the desire to press me more for my view on taxes (because you perceive some inconsistency), and in general, government, then I implore you not to. It's a waste of time, and in all probability, we will vehemently disagree.
If you don't think taxation or other government intervention are justified in order to achieve a Pareto improvement that the free market demonstrably cannot achieve on its own, then yeah, talking government with you is a waste of time.
Are you referring to the free market that caused suburbs to become a thing only "due to the subsidization of the automobile infrastructure"?[1]
So somehow, people are blaming sprawl on the subsidization of automobiles---which, let's not kid ourselves, is done only by government and corporations in bed with government---but you, you, are saying that this is really a demonstrable failure of a free market? (Which, of course, you proclaim because it doesn't meet some arbitrary standard that seems impossible to measure. Which apparently---and conveniently---seems to line up with what you happen to like as a way of life.)
Have I got that right? Or are you referencing some other failure?
But yeah, in my area the cost of upgrading the road network is mostly not borne by the people moving to the area and necessitating the new and wider roads. That's one of the reasons our new housing developments are too big.
> "Which apparently---and conveniently---seems to line up with what you happen to like as a way of life."
This is not a coincidence, suspicious or otherwise. It is part of the definition of Pareto efficiency.
I truthfully don't see anything to disagree with you there. I think it'd be fantastic to live in a small town with good public transit (even if only good bike paths). There are unfortunately few of them where I live (central Massachusetts). Hell, I love a good bike path. I've been on the one up in Burlington, VT. It's awesome. Same with paths in Amherst and around Cambridge.
But the fact that I can walk/bike/scooter down to the corner pub in my little town has very very little to do with why I have a car. For example, my parents live about 25 minutes away. Some of my good friends live 35 minutes away. When I visit, it's common for me to lug stuff back and forth (whether it be food or other various items). My job is about 45-60 minutes away in the city. (That's by car. Want to know how long it'd take with public transit? Over two hours. And it's just as expensive as owning a car!)
There's just no viable way for me to do that with anything other than a car. And some day, when kids get added to the mix, I fret to think of how much more difficult it would be without a car. Hell, I even live in walking distance to the T! (That's the commuter rail that goes from Worcester to Boston.)
It's important to recognize that the long commutes came about because of cars. Because it was possible to take the open road to get to work, sprawl was a reasonable option. And then everyone joined in on the fun and the open road vanished. It's a bait-and-switch.
This doesn't mean that getting rid of cars will automatically fix things, but deliberately removing our dependence on them will absolutely help because part of that action is fixing things.
Specifically in my case, the company I work for is located in my city (despite recent sale to an SF-based one). They chose a prestigious address over being near where the already sparse urban living was, and even that is geared at singles and young couples. I couldn't live near work if I wanted to.
Personally I don't think cars are a bad thing and I don't want to trade mine for a bike or the bus. I like the freedom a car gives me. I don't have to plan my route to work on anything or anyone. I can leave when I want. I can go to lunch farther away from my office. Yes, it's contributing to climate change, and we need to solve that problem, but I don't think the solution is removing dependance on cars.
It is to a degree: it is a sign of status to be able to afford actual land from which you can bar others, and therefore actually using it isn't terribly surprising. This has been true since before castles were invented. The main difference is that, in those times, it was understood that the occupants were aristocratic elite.
> we are just able to move father away because of cars. Before that, it was horses and carriages. Cars let us move further our, sure.
Right. The issue isn't the combustible engine; it's the attitude that comes with being a car driver, which isn't that much different from being a horse rider. This is coupled with an illusion that you don't lose the connection to the urban center as a consequence (indeed, in many places, you find that another urban center inexorably becomes necessary).
> Yes, it's contributing to climate change, and we need to solve that problem, but I don't think the solution is removing dependance on cars.
The problem that I want to solve is a fundamentally broken social structure incapable of doing things like opposing the NSA in a meaningful sense and the IDL is an exception rather than a rule. Cars contribute to this problem by weakening the social basis by which we commit civic action and by disenfranchising the core of our human populations (the percentage of human beings in urban centers broke 50% a long time ago) in order to service the more far-flung.
This is the essence of the city. Everything is connected. Our democracy is broken and this is part of the reason. People complain about how no one cares about the real issues. Why not? In part because they're exhausted from their commute. Certainly there are other reasons, but this is one and it's big.
You better fix the housing situation first in some areas (cough Bay Area cough).
When driving becomes too expensive there is definitely going to be a lot of abandoned sprawl but there's also plenty of decent places to live. By definition, few people live in the sprawl. It's a shame that they wasted so much of their and your money building out those subdivisions in the middle of nowhere, but that's a sunk cost now.
NIMBY-ism is also a problem in the few places of the Valley that do have decent transport, though I think it's the secondary problem. One place it's noticeable is Palo Alto: why isn't there high density housing near the Palo Alto Caltrain station (which is also conveniently near Stanford and a number of tech companies)? Because Palo Alto homeowners don't want anyone with less than a $1m house to live there. However afaik this is a minority situation in the Valley, and most of it just doesn't have decent transit that could attract high-density housing in the first place. San Jose has also been more development-friendly, although it's too bad there that the VTA light rail is so near-useless, or that area could plausibly have a more urban feel.
Google has repeatedly tried to stimulate residential construction in Mountain View but the city of Mountain View just doesn't want it. We're all waiting for windshield perspective baby boomers to just hurry up and die so we can have proper urban forms on the peninsula. And I'm not talking about high rise, I'm talking about 3-5 stories over street level retail. Mountain View currently has lots of single-story and surface parking lots, even in their "downtown" which I reckon to be at Castro and Villa.
Also no kids or elderly or handicapped or...
It might be that what works perfectly for 20-somethings in socal doesn't work anywhere else for anyone else.
Finally I already live as close to work as financially possible, and its about 20 minutes. And I'm a very well compensated senior developer-type person. I can't live any closer and I'm fairly wealthy, the median income dude is going to have to live much further away.
And I assure you, children and the elderly manage to survive carfree in cities, towns, and villages all over the world. Quite comfortably, in many cases.
I don't consider a twenty-minute car commute very far at all, certainly not out of bicycle range.
In many cases, what takes twenty minutes in a motorcage takes less time on a bicycle!
studies also show that children who venture on their own (walking and biking) establish greater independence and a better happiness index. (and more than likely fewer asthma /allergies if not in a car centric area )
Self-driving cars can help traffic congestion in the sense that, if you can tell your car you don't care how long it takes to get somewhere, it might route you through a longer path and consequently help rebalance the load. Maybe.
(I don't think people will be very excited about dynamic road tolls, but I think it would be at least somewhat effective in shaping behavior)
* http://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/dp... (Warning: Speck's tone is pretty bad.)
* http://www.amazon.com/Happy-City-Transforming-Through-Design...