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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I've always found the "cars are freedom" angle a little odd. There's no bigger interface between your typical middle class American and the police/legal system than the automobile. The very fact of driving a dangerous two-ton machine around on expensive publicly-owned infrastructure spawns registration, taxation, regulation, enforcement (traffic cops, DUI checkpoints, ticketing, traffic courts), etc. A car isn't freedom, it's just the easiest way to get in trouble with the law.

Another thing I find interesting is that suburbia is spawning manufactured human-scale areas. E.g. Atlantic station in Atlanta: http://vccusa.com/i/projects/atlantic_station1.jpg. Reston Town Center in Virginia: http://www.fairfaxcountyeda.org/sites/default/files/photos/r.... They're planning on building an above-street level plaza in Tysons near the new Silver Line stop, because the street level of that area is beyond redemption: http://assets.macerichepicenter.com/FileManager/Tysons/Heade....

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Ever owned a car before? How about being able to hop in your vehicle and drive anywhere in the entire country whenever you want just because you feel like it? That's why cars are freedom. Ask any recently-turned 16-year-old what it's like actually being able to go places. You could also just step on the gas pedal, drive across the country and feel the freedom yourself. Your comment has some good side-points to add to the discussion of cars for sure but by far the biggest point has gone about 3,099 miles over your head (Boston to San Francisco). To add to the OP: I think the ideal mix would be traditional cities where walking/biking are the ideal (like older parts of Europe) and then something like the interstate system/cars to allow freedom and mobility across the entire country (USA). I live in a city and ride my bike anywhere downtown, but my car is absolutely essential to go anywhere else. Freedom!

Sounds like you have a crap public transportation system if the kids under 16 can't "go to places".

EDIT: You don't need a car to allow cross-country mobility; trains are more than adequate. Here in Europe you can travel from Portugal to Finland on rail, and we can visit up to 30 countries for less than $500 with an InterRail pass.

I live downtown in a major city with relatively good public transport options now (Seattle), but before I lived in small-town New England where public transportation is essentially nonexistent. If you can't drive you're not going anywhere. Most of America doesn't have access to good public transport -- you either aren't American or you know this already and are just spoiled by living in a city. Hey, I am too! :)

>If you can't drive you're not going anywhere. Most of America doesn't have access to good public transport

This is the problem. Would cars be worth their expense and inconvenience if there were decent public transportation, walkable cities, or people could generally live near where they worked?

Maybe, maybe not, but that doesn't really mean anything in the context of this discussion. Most of the world doesn't have decent public transportation, in part because it's difficult and expensive to create decent public transportation, and in part because public transportation isn't a great fit for where most of the people of the world live. Unless you're suggesting that everyone should be relocated to arcologies so we could all give up our cars, the fact of the matter is that public transport isn't always an option, and may not ever be an option for anyone who doesn't live in a hyperdense urban area, which most people would consider to be hell on earth (not me, but I have an affinity for big cities).

In the developed world, while there's ample examples for great public transport, I have a hard time saying what percentage of it has decent coverage (whatever that is). Maybe it's as simple as saying it's mostly shit in the US and mostly decent in Europe, with the rest of the developed world also split, so about 50/50.

Most of the world doesn't have decent public transport because most of the world is -- rapidly -- developing. In the same vein, most of the world doesn't have decent internet access (I'm not saying the two are very similar in other regards). It's a bit early to say whether the developing world will end up with decent public transport. They're certainly trying with some success. They're also acquiring cars at an astounding rate, they're going to have to do major infrastructure works at enormous cost either way, hopefully they're smart about it.

As for the rest; living without a car doesn't require anybody to live in an arcology or in a "hyperdense" urban area. Most of the world (ie >50%) already lives in an urban area. There are lots of medium-sized or even big cities that aren't hyperdense by any sensible definition of that word. I don't think most people consider it hell on earth.

> I live downtown in a major city with relatively good public transport options now (Seattle),

Having lived in Seattle, Berlin, New York, Montreal, and San Francisco, I would say that Seattle's transit is unusably bad (as is SF's, the other 3 are rather good).

I think the issue here isn't that cars aren't necessary in the States (obviously they are), rather that that's a result of insanely pro-car anti-anything-else public policy in the States, and not because driving is 'naturally' so empowering. It's hard to think of a wealthy country where a city as large as Seattle would have such terrible non-car transportation, yet Seattle is even above average by American standards.

> ... Portugal to Finland ...

Not without going through Russia. There is no longer any passenger train connection between Finland and Sweden, so that would require either going through Saint Petersburg or crossing the Baltic by ship. You can however do the trip by car; it's just going to cost _a lot_.

Has been a while since I made that trip, but IIRC the ferries between Finland and Sweden give discounts if you have an Interrail ticket. And they're not that expensivr to begin with, at least if you don't have a car with you.

I'm now living in Berlin instead of Helsinki, and I take trains to go pretty much everywhere in Europe. When you factor in the time of getting from/to airport, security checks etc. it is often nearly as fast and much more comfortable. As I write this, I'm having lunch near the railway station before leaving for a conference in France. Usually I'd eat in the train but now I happened to have the time to spare...

There is some confusion here because of conceptions of Liberty and feeling of liberation when using the word "freedom" - you are both correct.

My new apt is next to Balitmore Penn Station. I can be at BWI within 20 minutes of walking out my front door, and from there anywhere in the country. Yeah, the TSA is oppressive, but there's actually very little actual power other than not letting you board the plane. Cops have real power, and they exercise it over drivers. You know how much you hate getting bossed around by TSA agents? Car ownership is like that, except every day.

Then there is the danger: I got hit by an oil truck merging into my lane. Nearly got run off the road by another truck going through Baltimore Harbor Tunnel (asshole didn't realize until the last minute one of the tunnels was closed). Nearly got killed by a tire falling off a big rig while on the highway. Nearly got killed fishtailing on an icy bridge in New York. That's just the last 18 months. On my commute to Philly I see some poor asshole crashed by the side of the road several times a month. In a year, I've never walked by a murder scene in "dangerous" Philly. I've almost certainly passed by more than one fatal accident in that time.

Car ownership brings your average middle class white American into contact with two things they normally don't have to deal with: death and police oppression.

PS: On the issue of 16 year olds having cars--that's absolutely terrifying. What blows my mind is that I seem alone in finding it terrifying. People worry about their kids in the city, but at least you can buy your way out of that danger. How often do you hear of an upper middle class white or asian kid getting shot in Chicago? Meanwhile, about a dozen teenagers die in car accidents every year in the upper middle class white/asian suburban county where I grew up.

You seem to have a very very bad experience with cops. The majority of people are not afraid of driving any more than being ticketed for jay walking. And as you said, if you want to travel without cars you have to deal with the TSA and that nonsense.

Cars are certainly dangerous. You have a very good point there. But people have so accepted the risk they aren't going to change their entire lifestyle to eliminate it. And in a few years self-driving cars will fix it.

>>You seem to have a very very bad experience with cops.

I don't know of anyone who would describe their experiences with cops as "pleasant."

I mean in terms of dealing with them a lot. I do agree they are not pleasant.

I've been driving for close to 20 years and never have been pulled over. Equating dealing with cops to dealing with the TSA is moronic.

So you never actually had any experience with cops.

I don't see how that invalidates what I said.

I've had experiences with police, but not from driving. You are forced to interact with the TSA when flying, but you aren't forced to interact with the police when driving. Is it that hard to understand how that makes his entire post pointless? It's like complaining about how you have to interact with the FBI every time you fly because you make jokes about bombs.

I would. I've had six or seven interactions with the police in the last eight years or so, and they were all pleasant. Well, except for one guy who yelled at me to slow down, but that wasn't really an interaction.

I have had numerous positive or neutral experiences with cops, and a few bad ones (including numerous tickets and getting arrested, but in all cases I earned those bad experiences). Overall, I would much much rather have cops than not have cops.

Well, there is a right way to interact with the police, and many wrong ways.

E.g. pull over (waaaay over. Much farther than you think is plausible), hands visible at all times, very slow movements, eye contact, dome lights on, shoulder muscles relaxed, etc. Most people do ~0 of these things unless they have been coached.

Failing to do these things, esp. while being young/male/profiled socioeconomic group, can drastically change one's experience with the law.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/A-Speeders-Guide-Avoiding-Tickets/dp/0...

The safest speed to go is the flow of traffic. Sometimes that's 15-20 miles per hour over the speed limit. It's rare that cops ticket safe drivers for speeding, but it happens (IME, about once every 5 years). Tickets themselves weren't a big deal if you're a good driver who gets unlucky occasionally, until insurance got involved and started hiking up the prices. Depending on your state and insurance policy, a $100 speeding ticket can end up costing $1,000 or more.

"Police oppression" might be a bit farther than I'd go, because I rarely get speeding tickets. But the speed limits are under-posted and you can get a nasty insurance hit even while driving safely.

You say you are driving 15-20 miles per hour over the speed limit and then wonder why you are getting tickets and higher insurance...

Even if "but everyone else is doing it" was an excuse, that defeats the argument about excessive law enforcement. If anything there obviously isn't enough law enforcement.

Good points. FYI, Washington, D.C.'s Union Station is an hour train ride away from Penn Station.

Hey man, I share your fear. I hate cars. I hate driving.

I live in the SF Bay Area. I work in downtown San Francisco. When I lived in SF proper, it would usually be faster to walk somewhere than drive, because of traffic. Then factor in finding parking. Then factor in paying for parking (upwards of $10/hr anywhere important). Add the stress of driving in dense areas, moronic pedestrian tourists who wander into the middle of the the streets, cyclists who seem to have a death wish, and other drivers who act like it's an aggression competition

Now I live across the bay (I got gentrified out of SF), and it's even worse. The freeway nearest me is bumper-to-bumper stop and go across 5 lanes of traffic, for 3 hours in the morning and for 3 hours in the evening. Everyone is just as aggressive, but the speeds have quintupled.

Bignaj mentions freedom. Shortly after buying my car, I went up to Portland for a conference. I thought, FUCK YEAH ROAD TRIP. Well, for one, turns out 11 hours of driving in one day is hard. I looked at the radio at the wrong moment and almost killed myself. I burned about $250 worth of gas round trip. And once I got to Portland, parking was $30 a night. After the trip was over, when I came home, I priced out airplane tickets. A round trip for both my girlfriend and myself, was cheaper than the cost of gas + parking in Portland. It would have saved us the better part of a day's worth of time (at Bay Area tech salaries, $400), and it would have given me a 100% reduction in near-death experiences. Maybe it's because I'm Canadian, and used to Air Canada prices, but airline travel is so cheap in this country that, for the vast majority of places people want to go, flying there is cheaper and easier than driving. I don't see how car = freedom in that regard.

I own a car. I wish I didn't, but I already have it. It's paid in full, I have a flawless driving record so insurance isn't that bad. I like going on day trips hiking. I've run the numbers, renting a car every day I want to hike would be cheaper than buying the car, but the car is already bought and depreciated at this point so too late on that. I would've traded my car for a smart car or scooter years ago if it wasn't for that. And I'd be doing without that if I could afford to live in a walkable place here.

Cars are horrible, and most utilitarian arguments for them are terrible.

And P.S.: That horrifies me too. Every 3 months, one 9/11 worth of americans die in motor vehicle accidents. We haven't declared a war on driving yet

Not every 3 months, every month

The rental option is really compelling. In Seattle, the missus and I use a mix of biking, walking, public transit, Car2go, Zip car, and UberX. Not owning a car, we make a choice each and every time we go somewhere that balances convenience, travel time, and cost. We save heaps of money, and stay in shape by not having a "default drive" option.

When people have already bought a car and paid a flat insurance rate, the marginal cost of another car trip is very low. Thus, people who own cars don't really make a choice very frequently. Their choice has already been pretty much made once at the outset.

Because carsharing services will almost undoubtedly be the first deployments, self-driving cars cannot come quickly enough for me. I think the net effect is that they will drive (har har) more people to adopt carsharing services. Self-driving cars will solve one of the inconveniences of something like Car2go, namely the need to walk some indeterminate distance to a car.

If they can get more people into an a la carte transportation usage model, I anticipate public transit and non-motorized transportation options will benefit greatly. Since trip costs will only be marginal, the choice to do something other than drive will come up routinely.

As self-driving carsharing fleets replace the >90% idle private vehicles of today, we'll need less land for parking. My hope is that on-street land can be given over to wider sidewalks, better quality bicycling infrastructure, and dedicated transit right-of-way, which will make those modes even more competitive.

In part because I've been personally touched by the mass slaughter on our roadways, I left a career in information security to retrain / work as an urban planner focussing on transportation. Oddly, the nearishness of self-driving vehicles is pushing me back in the direction of my former career. I'm bullish enough on the potential of self-driving vehicles to remake the economics and safety of transportation that I'm now pursuing a PhD researching privacy / security aspects of the "smart city"--including on-demand mobility services. If we can get all this suitably right, I think it will be transformative for society.

The rental option is not at all compelling in NYC (where I live). If you want to get away for the weekend, you are looking at a $275 to $350 rental if you go to Jersey to pick it up. Going to Jersey is an extra hour (and $7.50 per person ferry ride), plus once you're over there, you're going to take a taxi to get to the rental place. You could rent in Manhattan, but then you're looking at $500 for the weekend. With all of that, you have to get to the rental place before they close on Friday, and hope the location you are returning to is open late on Sunday.

I got so annoyed when family members would say "just rent a car and come down to visit us". It's not cheap, it's not easy, and it's not fun.

Renting a car in Stamford, CT is cheap, ~$70 a day.

You don't have Zipcar? That's what we use for weekend getaways. The cost and convenience of it makes it an okay deal. We also ride share with friends for hiking, take ferries, trains, bikes, etc.

Zipcar. CityCarShare. A number of other organizations.

Zipcar now have differential pricing (i.e. more expensive on weekends), so a 24 hour rent Mon - Fri is under $100.

Expensive, you may say. But... I pay only $70 per year for a full insurance waiver, all fuel is included, and there are no maintenance costs or other hidden costs.

Last Zipcar I got I used almost a full fuel-tank worth in a 24 hour period. Subtracting fuel from the price put the days rental at about $40. And there's a pod across the street from my apartment (and about a zillion other pods nearby, here in Berkeley CA).

I have friends with a 2-kid family in Manhattan and no car. They use Alamo, and claim it's cheap and easy.

Renting is expensive. Owning a car is also expensive, with more 'hidden' costs that people frequently ignore.

Airports are a fine substitute if you're going from one major city to another, but I sure wouldn't have flown from Houghton to Traverse. It was only when I moved to Boston that not having a car meant freedom.

Cars provide an illusion of freedom. Yes, you can get in the car and go "anywhere" on a very extensive and well-maintained road network. A good thing? Absolutely. On the other hand, a saccade in your attention (and those happen to everyone, albeit rarely) can have fatal consequences, you can be ticketed for driving at an objectively safe speed (posted speed limits can be well below design speeds, often by intention) and total costs, amortized, are somewhere near $20-30 per hour of driving. (Gas is only a small part of it.) Then there's parking, which is a fucking nightmare if you go anywhere interesting in a populated area. Having access to a car for a weekend trip is great; the car-dependent lifestyle is the absence of freedom.

Suburbia was supposed to kill the urban "slum landlords" but, for the average "middle class" (actually upper-working class; true middle class starts around 85th percentile) American, the car is the new landlord. So many people work hard just to afford the car they need in order to get to work. It's a huge waste of resources.

Also, I think that the suburban lifestyle is largely about control, especially when it comes to children. The suburban parent has to set up "play dates" and thus gets to control who the kids' friends are and make sure they're only exposed to the "right" social classes. The downside of this is that depriving children and adolescents of so much independence just makes parenting a monstrous, 18-year, chore. The "Calvin and Hobbes" childhood is impossible when the land is cut to pieces by roads. Since the current crop of kids is so controlled by their parents that they need a chaperone just to take a piss in the woods, the result for "middle class" parents is that having children means they no longer have a life. (The true middle class and upper-middle-class suffer less sacrifice; they can afford nannies and boarding schools and such.) It's not a way to live, IMO.

That said, I'm not as much of a booster of the "traditional city" as the OP. You simply can't have a city like New York without a lot of public transit. The wealth generation that comes from large cities (2+ million) is that they allow extreme economic specialization, but you don't get that unless people have rapid access to a large number of people.

Also, as ugly as the 20+ story apartment buildings may be, we're going to need them in order to make housing affordable... and that may just be a losing battle at this point. We also need to stop letting corrupt foreign officials buy real estate in New York and San Francisco, but that's another issue for another time.

I'll add that freedom, or free-feeling, is more complex than it might seem at first. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, miles outside of a small town, so I've been the 16 year old you describe. I get that.

Other people have taken the opposite point, talking about the freedom of not having to own a car to go about their daily lives. I've lived in a number of megacities with fantastic transit, so I get that, too.

But common to both things is the assumption that there are things you want to get to in the first place. Where are those things? How much effort does it take to get to them? What's the opportunity cost, or additional utility, in making the journey? What circumstances causes those things to exist in the first place?

One of the major lessons of my adolescence was that the ability to translocate from nothing to a much further away nothing is a dubious sort of freedom.

I grew up in NYC and after a number of years avoiding a driver's license, I did get one (but like in 2006). It was "freeing" to own a car, but the glamour of it faded. I moved to Staten Island for a few years, and there, you need to have a car. When I got a chance to move to Manhattan, the real weight of having a car starts to set in:

a. You have to constantly move the car because of alternate side parking (the amount of times it was required, I thought, was overly-excessive in the neighborhood where I lived), b. The fact there is very little space to park which caused me to spend a lot of time just looking for parking (I'd give up and go to the only place I knew that had gobs of space - Riverside and 122nd, near Grant's Tomb :P), c. The cost of fueling the car, mostly used just to find parking, d. The fear of damage, from dings from careless people swinging taxi doors or the time when someone threw a brick through the passenger side window to see if they can find anything in my car, e. The insurance cost (glad I owned the car outright and that insurance was cheaper in Manhattan), f. The fact that parking garages in Manhattan are absurdly expensive ($400-$500/month around where I lived ... only the wealthy can eat that cost).

All this, just to have a weekend drive to upstate NY. That was the only enjoyable part of having the car. Otherwise, the burden was never freedom to me.

Whether it be NYC or where I live now, getting on a bus or train is freedom to me. It's freedom to know that this cost of modern living is off my budget and that when it comes down to it now, I really don't have to drive to get around.

I will say though that this is all really dependent on where you live. It would get stifling if you lived in suburbia or rural areas and can't travel anywhere. My parents had a vacation place in a rural area outside the city. I'd go stir crazy if I couldn't drive to town (I sort of did when we vacationed at the place, when I was much younger.)

The whole point is that this is really contextual. In the end, given cost of living and having to add budget items, I'd prefer things to be simpler. No insurance payments, no car payments, no fuel payments is a breath of fresh air to me.

I think we can safely disregard your negative Manhattan car owning experience when deciding on whether to own a car. Anyone who bothers to keep a car while living there is automatically deemed insane.

I was insane :)

I just bought a car because I took a job in Greenwich, CT that is only accessible by car. For years I prided myself on not owning a car. I don't like that I have to have a car to get to work, but now that I do I'm making the best of it. I love that my office in Greenwich has a door that closes and a window that opens.

I pay for monthly garage parking. Right now I pay $150 a month in Battery Park City for nights and weekend parking. I will probably end up paying $400 a month in Hell's Kitchen. The thought of driving around looking for a parking space seems like an incredible waste of time.

To be honest, I don't use the car that much to go out of town. Probably every other weekend, I definitely don't run errands with it.

> Ask any recently-turned 16-year-old what it's like actually being able to go places. ...

That's a sentiment born of the suburban age. Cars are freedom from suburban isolation. In places where you can get around using your own two feet, cars offer only a marginal sort of liberation, and one that's bound up with all sorts of dangers and obligations.

Cars are the sine qua non of suburbia. The problem is that they are also the non cum qua of cities—cars destroy cities.

Your first paragraph strikes me as disingenuous. Curious, where do you live and how much driving do you do? For most people I know and have grown up around, cars indisputably are freedom. The bureaucratic and law enforcement pieces are such minor nuisances, I don't know anyone that ever complains about them. The true frustrations of car ownership, that crop up on a daily basis, are traffic and parking (and, less frequently, maintenance).

With a car, I can easily drive out of my city and into a spot of wilderness of my choosing, whenever I want. It is freedom in the sense it greatly increases the number of places you can feasibly travel to and the the control you have over how and when you travel there.

Regarding the manufactured human-scale areas, that is the New Urbanism the author mentions. It's a positive trend but the problem is that the city as a whole is still automobile-scale, just peppered with tiny oases, which seems a kind of inelegant shoehorned solution. That you describe them as "manufactured" speaks to that, I think.

>For most people I know and have grown up around, cars indisputably are freedom. The bureaucratic and law enforcement pieces are such minor nuisances, I don't know anyone that ever complains about them.

This says a lot about the people you know, but very little about the subject.

edit: For most people I know and have grown up around, cars are seen as a burden. I was born in a major city, am pushing 40, have lived in a dozen cities, and currently live in the major city I was born in. I have never bothered to get a drivers' license, and have multiple friends and family my age who have just gotten their first car within the past five years, or have given up their cars after moving back into the city from smaller and/or more depressed and/or more conservative towns. I've been dabbling in motorscooters for the past 5 years.

If we're going to be talking about ourselves.

Well that is why I asked about his driving situation, to better understand where he was coming from. And my anecdote was clearly presented as such, I never said it should be true for everyone.

I did suspect that he lived in a major city with ample public transportation. Obviously the advantages of owning a car in that situation are greatly diminished. The primary reason that NYC is at the top of my list of places to move is that I could get rid of my car there. When I'm there I actually get the same feeling of freedom and empowerment that a car affords me in other places.

I was taking it as some sort of justification for calling his first paragraph "disingenuous"; I was trying to understand how a description of the people that you grew up with could make his argument appear insincere or deceptive.

I think he was using "freedom" with the definition of Liberty with a capital L . Or Freedom with a capital F. Both used by Libertarians, where the interaction with the state, police etc is opposed.

"Freedom" with a car is more commonly used to refer to the feeling of liberation. You are both correct.

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