Anecdotally, having moved to Western Europe, I get the sense that this is the major factor as well.
If I walk down the street and there is a group of workers excavating a road, there's a lot more of a relaxed attitude about fencing, walking underneath construction equipment, etc.
After all - use your common sense - don't fall into the hole. If you do, isn't it kind of your own fault? Nobody's going to sue anybody.
Additionally, it's not a big deal to close or severely impact a road due to construction - just shift around the fantastic public transit infrastructure, and everyone carries along. A bus only needs one lane in both directions. Another thing that would never fly in North America.
Both of these problems are deeply cultural. Lawsuits have become a form of welfare. Sure, you might not have government healthcare if you get hurt or sick, but maybe you can sue somebody and get paid for your suffering?
And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave.
The abusive relationship love-affair is the best explanation I've ever heard of cars in the USA.
Just like a an abusive relationship, the car love affair still produces some good things. It's not all dark and dreary.
"I hate that he comes home drunk and hits me, but he's so loving and apologetic the next morning."
"I hate that I get so stressed from my daily commute, but being able to drive to the countryside on the weekend is so nice."
You can be in a relationship without dealing with abuse, and you can get to work less stressfully and still have the freedom to explore the world.
That's what makes the relationship so sinister; it's Stockholm syndrome.
"How could I ever live without him, even though he hits me sometimes?"
"How could I ever live without driving everywhere, even though the country on the whole is getting more unhealthy, we continue to use up our limited resources, and the ability to walk around and individuals' quality of life is reduced?"
Of course you can live without those negatives. There are ways out. There is a better life possible.
Can we try to get through one thread on HN without frothing at the mouth about how much we hate cars? Message received, you happen to be in a situation where you don't need a car — I am genuinely happy for you, as well as envious. But it is not necessary or helpful for someone to bang on about it in every single thread that has anything to do with building stuff. It doesn't help anything, and it just annoys people who don't have your good fortune and feel like you're agitating to take away something they need.
If people don't bang on about it, nothing will ever change ... seriously, everyone will simply move on and build the next urban sprawl center, and the next shitty road, out to the next desolate subdivision because that's what's easy. No one wants to be agitated. Well, too bad, we _should_ be agitated. Those without the good fortune _should_ raise hell to the city planners, and attend city council meetings, and vote in local elections.
btw, I live in a place that definitely is an urban sprawl, and is in danger of getting worse as more and more people move here (Orlando, FL). So, I'm in the same place as it sounds like you are ... and I wish _more_ people would bang on
I suspect that part of the reason cities like San Francisco, New York, and Vancouver are so ludicrously expensive in North America are because there are far more people that hate cars than there are cities which are amenable to their preferences.
So, if a minority, then a very under-served one. Those cities are going to stay expensive unless the supply of walkable cities increases.
434,000 people ride Bart everyday in the Bay Area. But 270,000 cars still cross the Bay bridge every day and another 112,000 cross the golden gate. And obviously there's everyone driving up/down the peninsula.
I generally agree though, but to think that SF in particular is anti-car isn't exactly true. Much better than the rest of the country, but not as public transit friendly as it could/should be.
It's difficult to disentangle high priced housing from the availability of high paying jobs. Some of those people are in NYC or SF because that's the only way they're going to make $300k. I would hate every minute of living in either of those cities, but I still might do it for a few years for the cash.
>It turns out that Millennial behavior during the recession—living in the basement rather than driving to work, and biking and sharing rides elsewhere—did not reflect a preferred lifestyle so much as an accommodation to the longest recession and slowest recovery in modern U.S. history.
>By year-end 2016 road travel had hit an all-time high, north of 3.2 trillion vehicle-miles. Gasoline demand has followed apace, also hitting new highs. So much for peak driving.
shows clear bias by declaring an all time high and not accounting for population; vehicle miles per capita is still down when measured using fred (the same source as their data).
That's an interesting article. It didn't gel with my experience of people's motivations for buying cars in the UK, so I had a skim anyway, because what the fuck do I know about America (answer: I went there on holiday once), and ended up clicking on the link about how millenials prefer SUVs: http://fortune.com/2015/09/09/10-used-cars-millennials-buy/ and finding a list of the top 10 used cars that millenials buy.
Now look at that list of used cars.
No, seriously. Just look. Then come back here, because I want your upvote. Now here's s 3 of them to refresh your memory. 3 out of 10. That's 30%. Nearly a third.
These are not normal people cars. Practicality? Is that what millenials like? That's what the article claims! But judging by this list, all I can say is: my arse. The R32 has a fucking V6. In a hatchback. Are we mocking millenials here? Because if so, let me join the queue. If you want practical, you can find something better. Or are we mocking the article? Well, am I allowed to join two queues? Because count me in if so! These are not practical cars.
Or are we mocking the theory that millenials are buying cars. Well, let me join that queue as well, and frankly I don't care if that's not permitted. Because if the VW R32 is the 5th most popular car sold to millenials, and the 3rd is the Subaru WRX, and the 7th is the Nissan GT-R, then I'll bet that your average ordinary normal millenial is probably not, on average, buying a car. Because these are stupid cars that car people buy. They are not cars that average ordinary normal people go for.
Also: check carsalesbase.com! Total USA sales for WRX+STi were around 100,000 since 2010. The market for second hand examples is probably not very large. The Nissan GT-R? Never sold more than 2,000 per year. There's, like, less than 20,000 in the entire country. And that's the 7th most popular second hand car buy for millenials.
The explanation of course may just be that the snake people are buying a huge amount of Dodge Magna and Chrysler Pacificas. That would make sense - these two cars do indeed look relatively practical. Or maybe that they're buying a lot of new cars, since this is a table of used car purchases. And that would make sense too, since new cars, while a bit expensive, do probably have good fuel economy, good in-car functionality (iPod, Bluetooth, etc.), and don't require much in the way of upkeep.
But as evidence that millenials are buying a lot of SUVs, I do dare to claim that this is bullshit.
(And if you call me out on that, then I will downgrade that to merely saying that it does not follow from the evidence provided - which, in my opinion, is the same thing.)
(One of the other links - http://www.autonews.com/article/20170227/RETAIL/302279963/th... - has a section entitled "Need, not want", which fits better with what seems to me to be the general trend. And over time this will probably result in greater sales for SUVs and family-friendly cars and the like, I suppose, for obvious reasons. But I still suspect there's something of a change here, and that people will be purchasing what 15-20 years ago might have been an aspirational-type vehicle with a minivan-/estate-type mindset. Which, of course, just as how you today think nothing of having the equivalent of a 1980s Cray supercomputer in your pocket, running off battery power, is evidence of progress.)
That list is misleading. Yes "young people buy stupid stuff" but the list is describing "cars with highest RATES of millennial buyers" not "most popular cars millennials buy". If I sold 10 used Deloreans and millennials bought 5, it would be at the top of this list.
That list of cars isn't the list of most popular millennial cars, it's the list of cars that no one except young people will buy. You're right, the GT-R, R32, WRX, IS-F, and Magnum aren't a "normal person cars", they're mostly cheap high performance cars. The other half of the list is cheap, ugly SUVs. That list is a list of unpopular cars that for various reasons sells slightly better to younger people.
OK, yes, that's a worthwhile clarification, thanks. I did realise this, at least at first, but it looks like I warmed to my theme too much, and then promptly forgot, only to remember again towards the end ;)
If you have some good ideas about how to solve the problem of transportation in America, absolutely go talk to the relevant authorities. Heck, you might even start a startup around it, because this is a problem that many cities have poured money into with little success.
What is not useful is going into vaguely related threads on Hacker News and posting extended analogies between cars and abusive boyfriends.
Seriously, look at this entire sprawling "I like cars"/"I don't like cars" subthread that has derailed discussion of the actual article and tell me: Has it brought America one iota closer to a solution?
Many people don't just "happen" to be in a situation where they don't need a car, they actively put themselves in that situation by making many lifestyle choices.
I changed jobs (twice) to move closer to home. I used to have a job with a 45 - 60 minute car commute (the train was over 2 hours due to the need to make 2 connections), then took a job that was only about 10 miles away (just under an hour by bike, 12 - 30 minutes by car depending on traffic). I took a bit of a pay cut for that job, but it was worth it for saving about an hour/day commuting.
Then I moved to a job that was 2 miles away (10 minutes by bike or by car). My job also happens to be close to shops, restaurants, etc -- everything I need for daily living. And I get around 1.5 hours/day of my life back compared to when I had the original, longer commute.
But I didn't just "happen" to end up living where I don't need a car, I actively sought it out.
Many people say that they don't have the option to change jobs, yet when they get laid off or the factory where they work shuts down, they find a way to survive even if they have to make sacrifices to do so.
There has to be a name for this-- Godwin's corollary , or something.
FWIW, people living in poor rural areas, the rust belt, Reservations, etc. are surviving, true, but doing so in conditions that aren't quite first-world.
You mean the kind of people that can't afford a car, yet are stuck in decaying suburbia that can't afford to keep up infrastructure and where it's hard to provide social services to a far-flung population?
People for whom the American dream of a car for everyone has left them stuck in one place when they can't afford that car. People that need an expensive car because it's the only way to get to their far-flung job, or get groceries, or go a doctor's appointment? Where even if there's a bus, it only runs a few times a day and may require long transfers to go across town.
You know that this is a post about _infrastructure_, right? How does it not occur to you that talking about the culture around cars (and its effect on politics/policy) might perhaps be relevant?
Everyone on the planet could weep in unison about the continued existence of cars and it wouldn't improve a thing. If this is a problem you sincerely want to solve, create real-world solutions, not angry Internet rants.
How do we convince home owners in Cupertino, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Atherton, etc that BART down the peninsula won't "bring inner city crime" to their perfect neighborhood? We've already lost that battle; Berryessa BART opens in the next year or so and it runs down east bay, so SJ <-> SF will still be faster driving except during rush hours. Caltrain is an option but neither run 24.7 either. Coming from a rust belt state with a private bus service that frequently didn't show up at all, I understand that we're in a much better public transit situation than the majority of America, which is really sad, but I place a lot of the blame on NIMBYs, mortgage interest tax deduction (a form of welfare that almost no one receiving it argues against), and how home ownership here basically makes or breaks you (if you rent and don't benefit from the credit rating (renting doesn't count toward your credit history or score)): https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrenceyun/2015/10/14/how-do-h...
I cock an eyebrow at the car haters too, especially these days.
We're on the cusp of autonomous self-driving cars! A transport revolution, lives saved, traffic optimized, pollution reduced, etc, etc. Why all the drip-drip-drip poison words about cars?
Does GP and our numerous sibling commenters have a case of the premature sour grapes? Are they wrong even after all the pot banging?
Consider cars today: polluting, wasteful in time/money/energy/lives, loud, dangerous killers ... transformed into cars tomorrow: a nimble, safe, convenient, "zero-carbon" (battery-powered), direct and fast conveyance! The old arguments evaporate in a cloud of red smoke!
We who are so blessed to own (or hire) cars can all feel GREAT about avoiding the urban density, travel villages, inconvenient bus routes, foul smelling light rail cars with their stabby/gropey fellow passengers, etc! Soon, we'll travel in comfort, productive and safe in our cars, as we merrily scoot from our far-flung, clean, beautiful, sprawling suburbs to our glittering commute destinations on the other side of the map forever! Smiles everywhere you look!
The above is all just theory. I mean, who knows what is really behind peoples' complaints these days.
The old arguments evaporate in a cloud of red smoke
Only if you exclude traffic congestion as a problem. Self-driving cars can help with some optimization (i.e. closer following distance on freeways, less traffic disruption due to erratic drivers), but they aren't going solve the overriding problem of too much traffic in the city.
San Francisco is already experiencing extra congestion from the precursor to self-driving cars, car sharing [1]
And wide-spread use of self driving cars may make congestion even worse. Instead of the office worker driving to work and parking in the garage all day long, his car will drop him off,
then will go drive around and look for someone else to pick up (or will seek cheap parking outside of the city center),
so that's an extra car on the road.
And anyone that's tried to drive past a school in the morning or afternoon knows that traffic is going to be a nightmare during commute hours when every office building is surrounded by cars that are dropping off/picking up the 1000+ workers in each building.
Not to mention that your "zero-carbon" (battery-powered)" cars don't exist, even if powered by solar cells (that were created by non-carbon fuel sources), the processes that go into mining materials and manufacturing a car still emit tons of CO2 and we are a long way away from making all manufacturing carbon neutral.
Single occpancy cars are just not very efficient at moving people. A single train can carry 2000+ passengers and deliver them every few minutes. In comparison, car freeway lane carries around 1000 cars/hour.
Yeah, the misconception around solar vehicles is hilarious. I met someone who was otherwise intelligent who thought that they had previously been in a Prius with a solar panel on the roof that powered the car. The option they referred to was only able to help power the hvac in the Prius. They seemingly had no concept of how many watts it takes to drive a car down the freeway versus how many watts a solar panel of that size might put out. http://electrek.co/2016/06/20/toyota-prius-plug-prime-solar-... looks like the new non-US Prius prime might have a solar roof option that could be capable of providing up to 10% of the energy required to drive it. Since this is marketing material, I would be surprised if that's not under ideal conditions. The panels on that roof look to be a few hundred watts max, during the best period of a clear day at the ideal angle.
> "I hate that I get so stressed from my daily commute, but being able to drive to the countryside on the weekend is so nice."
I have truly never understood this line of thinking. These two are not tied together.
I grew up in a car-centric city, but moved away in my teens. I've never personally owned a car and haven't had one in the household since I was 17. I hear this supposed "upside" of cars from my friends who are still stuck in LA, and what no one has ever been able to answer is:
What prevents you from renting a car when you want to drive out to the countryside? I drive out somewhere beautiful on a sunny weekend probably 3x as much as any of my friends who own cars, and I'm still paying less for total transportation than they do (let alone the occasional hassle that owning a car exposes you to). The only actual negative I can think of is the mental friction of having to pay each time, and this is just an irrational speedbump that really isn't that difficult to surmount.
I grew up in a country with dense urban centers, where most people rely on public transit to get around even if they do have a car, because of traffic. On top of that, when I was growing up, car was very much a luxury there - most families had none, and the lucky ones had one.
I live in US now, in an area that is the edge of suburban sprawl, and I can tell you this: owning a car is very liberating on an emotional level. You can go wherever you want, when you want it, without making plans around it or having to share your space with strangers. For the first couple of years, I would go driving entirely on a whim. On a few occasions, my weekends became spontaneous multi-day road trips. It was very enjoyable, and I still rather enjoy driving in general.
I wouldn't switch back.
Yes, I know, cars come with a lot of externalities. That's not my point, though. I just wanted to show that not everyone is in a "love/hate relationship" with cars. Some of us actually do find it all genuinely enjoyable to the point where any associated inconveniences are minor, while the benefits are major. So when your solution involves taking those benefits away, don't be surprised if you get pushback.
Most of all, if you go around telling people that they don't really derive any benefit from their cars, and if only they could surrender their preconceived notions and listen to the voice of reason, it would be better for them in all or most respects - don't be surprised if your argument is dismissed out of hand.
It may well be that we need to give up cars for some important reason. But you'll have to convince me that the reason is important enough on its own merits - not because I don't have anything to lose. I know better.
> What prevents you from renting a car when you want to drive out to the countryside?
Nothing, but it is a barrier. When you own a car, you just get in, make sure you've got gas, and go. When you don't, you need to go out and find a rental place, get there, find a car you want/like, etc.
It's a small barrier, and mostly psychological, but it's there and it affects decisions.
There are a bunch of other small inconveniences too.
I own a car but I've considered renting cars for trips multiple times (you don't have to care as much about a rental car, you don't mind if other people are driving it, it's normal to split rental car expenses but weird to split, say, the depreciation on your car) etc. But it's often a hassle.
Most rental car centers in the city do not open before say 9 am (the best I have seen is 8 am) and close by 5-6 pm. After you do all the paper work and blah blah it's typically 9-10 am before you can leave for your trip. This is just not practical for a lot of weekend trips. The other option is to rent it on Friday (which means you pay for a day more), but since they close by 5 pm you need to rent it on Friday morning at 9 am which means you have to now plan it along with your work day.
The other option is to rent from the airport where the centers are generally open 24/7 but charge more and the airport is far so now you have to take that into account.
The other problem is when you rent for a long trip and have to pay per day when you know you'll actually be driving only on a few of those days.
Yup. I cycle a lot, and when I first moved to USA I tried to live the car rental only lifestyle in the Bay Area. In someways this was easier than I expected:
* Most US car rental price comparison sites let you book a car months in advance to lock in the price, but you don't pay till pick up. There's almost never a penalty for booking and not picking up, so I used to just block book the weekends months in advance, whether I needed the car or not.
* I just used the big rental firms - at the time services like ZipCar were priced to heavily incentivise you to only drive between ZipCar areas and drop off, e.g. use a different car for the outbound journey and the return one. Using them for all-day tripping often ended up being significantly more expensive than a traditional rental. I've no idea if this has improved. Car sharing services appeared to really rely on both your start and end destinations being in their 'coverage' areas though.
* Once I got to know staff at my local rental place, I started getting 'free' upgrades a lot.
However, after four or five months I ended up buying a modest low mileage 3 year old Honda. The cost of running isn't actually all that much more, and now I don't have to factor in travel time to rental place, having to refill the rental before return, clock-watching etc. This is entirely selfish of me of course, but very much caused by the small 'barrier' you mention.
I've generally optimized for convenience: it's easy for me to ignore the expense when I consider my overall transportation + rent budget (the two aren't really fully extricable).
It's a pretty serious psychological barrier. When you already own a car, the maintenance and finance costs are already sunk costs, so the marginal cost of doing a weekend trip is quite low -- pretty much just the cost of gas. When you don't own a car, now you have to throw in the cost of the rental too, which can easily make a $20 trip turn into a $120 trip or more (it costs $100 per day to rent a car near me, so an weekend camping trip jumps up to $220). Even if the total cost with the occasional rental is less, the marginal costs are structured in a completely different way, which ends up negatively incentivizing it.
Hell, I live in Manhattan and I now don't do a lot of things I used to do when I lived out in the suburbs and had a car, for precisely this reason. Instead I do a lot more things on my bicycle, including long weekend trips -- it's basically become to me what my car used to be to me when I lived in the suburbs. Except using it actually improves my health.
Right, this is the mental speedbump I referred to. I just get tired of people pretending that you're precluded from easily driving out away from cities, instead of the much-lesser inconvenience of "having to get used to the minuscule additional mental barrier". In my own personal experience it took me about three trips before this latter issue vanished.
The difference between the magnitude of the two ways of stating this "downside" are vast, and I hear people conflate them constantly.
In Canada, renting a car when you're under 25 years old is pretty annoying. It's usually an extra $25 a day and that's what turned me off to renting. Some rental companies won't even let you get a car if you're under 25. It's actually a function of age, so I'm currently 24 and in theory, it should be cheaper now.. so let's do some blanket math to entertain your idea.
- I drive my car only on weekends, so Friday - Sunday
- It tends to break down every 3 months, at around $1000 a repair each time(BMWs have expensive repairs.) That's $4000 a year
- Insurance is about $1750 for a year
- Looking at rates at www.enterprise.com for my city, it's about $100 CAD for a rental car for 3 days (pick up at 7:00AM Friday and drop off at 4:00PM on Sunday.)
- $100 CAD * 4 is about $400 a month for a rental
- $4000 (repairs) + $1750 (insurance) + $120 (stickers) is about $489 for owning
It looks like using rental cars on weekends is not a great investment still and that makes me sad. I only save $89 a month and have to deal with picking up and dropping off the car and also not using it through the week. $1068 in yearly savings is not worth it!
Note: Gas is not included because I have to pay for gas for both cars, I guess it might be a little cheaper for the rental cars since they tend to be gas efficient, but I still don't think it's huge savings.
> It tends to break down every 3 months, at around $1000 a repair each time
That's really not good. Even BMW's are not that expensive to maintain, something is really wrong with your vehicle. Unless it's a classic and you're using it as a daily driver.
An easy way to improve your situation is to sell the BMW and get a more practical and reliable vehicle. Granted, that works more in favor against the rental car.
I also don't think it's a given that you'd need a rental car every single weekend. If you need a car every single weekend then owning one yourself clearly makes the most sense. It's when you only need the car occasionally that it would make more sense.
The only actual negative I can think of is the mental friction of having to pay each time
Don't underestimate this. People will pay a large premium for unlimited internet, for example, just to relieve themselves of the mental burden of maybe, possibly, once a year going over and getting hit with $5 or $10 in overage fees. Companies know this. They exploit the hell out of it!
Meh, public transport also sucks. I have a daily commute a bit over an hour each way on a tram. I'm near the end of my line, so I'm 'lucky' enough to get a seat for that time. I'm not the one who gets squished in during peak hour, or has to watch overfull trams just pass by. If they're not overdue, that is (a famous problem with public transport). I'm also lucky in that where I live and work are on the same line. I do, however, have to walk a moderate distance at both ends - it's not end-to-end transport - and I'm limited to having a small amount of things I can personally carry; no carting much extra stuff to work to do things afterwards for me. I'm also tall, which means that public transport vehicles aren't built for me (seats too small, hit my head on things if I'm standing, etc) and there's nothing I can do about it. Then if it's raining, not all stops have shelters for the proles, and the floors can get slippery. Or perhaps its winter, and that press of people on the vehicle is a haven for colds and viruses to spread.
Public transport is a good thing overall, but I do get tired of people talking about it like it's heaven 'if only it were more available'.
> And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave.
It's pretty much impossible to leave this relationship unless you live in one of the larger US cities. If you live in a suburb, rural area, or city that's not in the top 10-15 in terms of size there's literally no other option that exists or that could easily exist.
This is an extremely simplistic view of the situation. In reality, many of the largest cities are almost entirely unusable without a car while many small cities (in the extreme case, most college towns) have excellent walkability and public transit because of their dense layout. I have personally experienced these. This is not a problem of urbanization to large cities, but of overall urban design.
You assume those that live in small cities work there as well. A large number of people living rural areas or small cities drive to big cities to work. There are very few "small" cities on the coasts (<10,000 people) so perhaps that is what you are referring to by small cities for which this works.
> If a large number of people all have to go in the same direction at a similar time, isn't that what public transit is for?
Yes, and in a sane nation, this would mean that people could live in small cities, take transit to work, then take transit back. But there are many, many places where this is not the case.
I lived on the outskirts of Dallas; it took ages for the rail system to approach usefulness, and individual cities along the route could opt out of having stations (and therefore, opt out of paying for them.)
They're all going to the same place, but all coming from different areas. Arranging for them to get to a common point to even board the public transportation you're offering would require them to take a car, since density makes and sheer time makes it prohibitively expensive. If buses did stop in convenient locations for the widely dispersed people in small towns, it'd take hours before they'd even approach their destination after having spent half the day just picking up people from all over.
The only way to fix the problem is to encourage people to move out of the suburbs and small towns and live in denser regions.
I don't even understand the need of physically being at the same place, for information workers at least (until remote surgery and hairdressing catch up). Working remotely is good for the environment!
I like cars, but I'd never want to use one for commuting. Random places at indiscriminate times — this is what cars are for indeed.
I am a consultant in a small team of professionals, right. However, for me, "learning on the job" comes mostly from solving problems, not talking to people. Which is why I steered to consultant / R&D positions. And I had no problems in acquiring said knowledge (in trading systems) on my own.
For me, the need for commuting is such a great nuisance that I worked the hardest I can to get rid of it.
I agree that it might be a transitional phase, or something necessary to acquire the skills needed, but it needs to be rid of at the first sight of an opportunity.
While the normality of office work is responsible for a lot of oppressive commutes, it doesn't follow that commutes must necessarily be long or that this in itself negates the benefit of working in the office.
For what it's worth, I have zero tolerance for long commutes, and always lived close to my jobs. It took considerable expense, and relied on life situation flexibility I no longer have, but my patience for driving is maybe ten minutes.
>> If a large number of people all have to go in the same direction at a similar time, isn't that what public transit is for?
Public transit only works when people live in high density areas. It makes no sense to have a transit stop where very few people live in walking distance of it. People with cars don't really want to drive to the bus stop and then catch a ride downtown, though some do. But most companies are spread out just as much as peoples homes, so business isn't even high enough density to warrant public transit in most cases.
Japanese zoning restrictions also contribute heavily here. It's not just that higher-density residences are available, it's that you can put them nearly anywhere. According to http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html, not only are there vastly fewer zones (12, nationally), Japanese zoning laws specify only the "maximum use", instead of exclusive uses. So anything zoned for commercial use, for example, could also have neighborhood stores and residential.
Yeah, there are some even more extreme cases of office parks where it's illegal to walk on the roadside, illegal to walk near the road, illegal to walk on the road, illegal to walk on the surrounding property. Basically places where it's illegal not to be on at least a bicycle, and more likely in a car.
One thing I miss about my college days is the commute. I lived about 300 feet from the math department. Sometimes I would refuel my car about as often as I would change its oil. (I still needed a car as I lived an hour from 'the city'.)
That's a self-inflicted problem though. Nobody put a gun to America's head and forced us to make our cities sprawl out. We collectively decided to do it that way because we thought it was better.
And for a few things it IS better. But there are a whole lotta costs, too, with the top 3 being being actual financial cost, grinding on the faces of the poor, and making us fat.
It was done for a very rational reason: making country more immune to a nuclear attack, especially the retaliation to its own nuclear attack (i.e. a nuclear attack that is coming in convenient time of day and week because you chose the time). It works perfectly to that purpose: it is whole lot better to keep all relevant population in separate houses with basements, with little combustible material around, than in multimillion cities with no way out of them.
If U.S. launched its missiles while all these people just came home from jobs say at 11pm ET/8pm PT, and people in the Soviet Union were on the way or at their factory jobs during Moscow morning on Siberia mid-day, it would be a slaughter for the Soviet Union and an easy win for the U.S.
"... While it is true that various factors contributed to phenomenal growth of the suburbs between 1945 and 1960, historians have thus far paid little attention to policymakers' fears of atomic attack as a significant factor in population dispersal. ..."
The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defence K. Tobin, Pages 1-32 | Published online: 06 Sep 2010
I work in tech/finance. I am old enough to remember that, after the 9/11 attack in 2001, banks were required to set up their datacenter/DR sites at least 50 miles away from their main offices to avoid a complete wipe-out in case of nuke attack.
Moscow is also tremendously dense. It's sprawled out because it has so many people in it, but the vast majority of those people are packed into apartment buildings. The same goes for all other major urban centers. A typical Russian (or rather, ex-Soviet) cityscape looks like this, and can go for miles:
Now imagine an airburst nuclear explosion over this, just low enough to maximize the blast wave.
There's a reason why Soviets heavily invested into protecting the populace from such attacks - the entire Moscow Metro system doubles as a nuclear bomb shelter, complete with blast doors.
Federal Highways in the US are designed to increase national security. The best example is certain bridges are in certain places so that their destruction would cut off the easy path for mobilized enemy armor. They're designed to be easily blown up on purpose.
You got any credible sources on that? It sounds like one of those urban legends that people like to repeat. The Eisenhower interstate system was built in a post-nuclear world, and in a post-nuclear world it's hard to imagine there ever being a mainland invasion of the United States. The bombs would be flying before that, and there wouldn't be anything left worth invading (on any side in the conflict). Being able to utterly destroy the other nation and its military forces within minutes by launching thousands of ICBMs is a much more credible plan of war than blowing up some random bridges on your own turf, and indeed that is the logical course of action that we did go down.
I don't know about the bridges specifically, but that the interstate system had an explicit national security purpose is not just well-documented, it's literally right there in the name of the law that created it: National Interstate and Defense Highways Act.
My issue with the bridge thing is that it's easy enough to blow up bridges, especially as you're retreating from the territory they're in, regardless of their location or construction. It could cost billions of extra construction dollars to unnecessarily site a bridge in anything but its obvious ideal location (e.g. the shortest possible span).
My understanding was that it was created to mobilize the military and transport resources across the continent, not to make it easy to cut off enemy routes.
Now this is a lot more true, and the military value of having good transportation within the boundaries of your own land has been known since at least Roman times, and likely much farther back.
It doesn't explain the bridge blowing up thing, however.
I had never considered this and something else about it makes perfect sense to me.
It also explains the "white flight" of the time. What we now call the "inner city" was allowed to remain black and brown with the expectation that the country would be alright if they were incinerated while the more -valuable- people had been relocated to the suburbs.
The Soviets would be able to get their retaliatory body count while eliminating people that the US didn't really value in the first place.
There was a serious attempt to do that in the 1950s, although it didn't have great impact. It is, however, why IBM corporate headquarters moved from Manhattan to Armonk, NY.
'easy win' = the people in the area die more slowly rather than in the initial blast? Apart from the now-radioactive work centers (that are the wealth of your country), take out your city centers and industry, and you also take out your transportation network. Hello, famine.
It's probably not even a decision so much as a probable consequence of having a much smaller population and opening of new frontiers to settle over the course of the country's history, ending up today with about half the population spread across about the same total area, and not uniformly. What has been our decision is to respect individual and local preferences (NIMBYism) and to ignore certain infrastructure improvements.
Given that sprawl is not a new phenomenon but obesity is I don't see how you can claim this is responsible for making us fat.
Sprawl IS a new phenomenon, though. We didn't see the kind of suburban sprawl that we see today until after WW2, when cars became THE way to get around. It became more and more dominant and entrenched as the interstate highway system developed.
Remember, we're talking about relative density within a metro area, not how close each metro area is to the others. If you look at cities that were more or less fully developed prior to WW2, like Boston, you find that they're more compact, as opposed to, say, LA or Phoenix.
That said, I don't think it's the only thing making us fat. But I do think it's one contributing factor.
True, but even in Boston they can't get public transportation and infrastructure right. Boston is almost certainly one of the most vibrant economic hubs in America and one of the most compact cities, but the subway absolutely sucks, is completely outdated, and can't adequately service proximal cities like Somerville. The city is also desperately in need of further tunneling and infrastructure expansion to service the Cambridge / Somerville area as well as the Sea Port but I can't see that ever happening. It's taken us over five years to fix a single small bridge with two lanes in each direction...
When I read about proposed public transit projects in Boston that were never built, most of them had actually been _court mandated_ by the Big Dig mitigation lawsuits, but they still didn't get completed. Very mysterious.
To be fair about the 'single small bridge', it seems like smaller projects suffer proportionately larger delays due to being considered low priority, ridiculously lax work scheduling, etc. Although the financial scales are completely different, it takes my city (Toronto) approximately the same time to build a subway extension as to renovate the bike trail that runs near my house.
This single small bridge, the Longfellow Bridge, is a crucial artery connecting Boston with its surrounding cities and towns across the river. I should have emphasized in my initial comment that it is a high priority project.
The patterns of the LA basins development was set by the Pacific Electric Railway, in the 20's and 30's - the freeways if you look almost all parallel former PE lines.
Don't have an authoritative answer for you, but I thought this chart was pretty great; it shows the profit/loss for the local government (so, taxes vs spending) for different neighborhoods for a city in Lousiana: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
Most of Europe doesn't live in what Americans would call suburbs, but villages. They're dense where people live and have train and bus service conveniently, because in postwar Europe there were a lot fewer cars. They also zone such that there's a dense living area surrounded by farmland - when that farmland becomes all housing thenyoull have American style suburbs, but few in Europe want that because it's harder to get where you want to go.
Even in San Francisco, widely known for its public transit system, not having a car some of the time sucks. It's much more convenient to get around by car. That's why Uber and Zipcar are ultra popular here.
Is San Fran really known for its public transport system?
New York, sure. Everyone's heard of their subway.
The first time I'd ever heard of BART was when I visited briefly, and in doing so I learnt 2 things:
1) BART is pretty bad: noisy and a small network
2) Talking to people during my short stay made it pretty clear San-Fran and the bay area was considered 99% car territory, and traffic/congestion/commuting around SF was a significant problem commensurate with that fact.
Edit: understand this is a genuine question asked as a foreigner who has only formed an impression from short visits.
Those rural towns only exist because they are subsidized by everyone else through taxes. Close the loss-making post offices and roads servicing those towns and everyone would be forced to move. Problem solved.
I have two sons. At the time that we chose to go carless, we were living in an apartment complex with endless speed bumps. Driving over the speed bumps into and out of the complex daily was about 3 minutes of torture that we were completely thrilled to give up.
Humorously, we have had occasion to put me on a bus for some reason while they walked to the destination in question. I would get ahead of them, then the bus would get stuck in traffic and they would get ahead of me. We all arrived at the spot in question within a couple of minutes of each other.
Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe. Short local trips don't see as much gain in speed as Americans seem to imagine. I think this belief persists in part because so many people just don't walk anywhere at all. They drive everywhere, even if they are only going 1/4 mile or something silly like that.
Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe.
I'm going to have to disagree on this one.
I can drive to my local Wal-Mart in about 5 minutes. It would take me 30 minutes to walk there. I can drive there. Do my shopping, wait in line, pay, cart my stuff back out to my vehicle and drive home in less than the amount of time it would take to walk there.
I've lived in multiple cities of different size where I had multiple grocery stores within 5 minutes walking. In dense-for-US SF where I need to drive for 10 minutes to get to the closest Safeway.
> Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe.
The average speed limit on municipal roads in Ontario is 50 km/h, which means that anywhere within 5km will take 6 minutes and, within 10km, 12 minutes.
Running 5km takes me 18 minutes, and running 10km takes me closer to 40 minutes. Humans walk at about 5km/h, which means that 5km would take about 1 hour, and 10km would be 2 hours or more, since exhaustion starts to factor in.
Car travel is unimaginably faster than walking. I don't know anybody who wants to spend 2 hours on a round-trip to a grocery store 5km away when they could do it in 10 minutes in a car.
You're not wrong, and even though I dislike cars, I can't help but feel like you're arguing against someone living in an alternate reality. Unless you live in a dense urban core there's no possible way that walking saves more time than driving. The main reasons I don't have a car is that it's very freeing not to have to worry about owning one (from a theft/maintenance/risk perspective), and also because I'm now living in Manhattan, where owning a car is a huge additional hassle above just parking it in the suburbs where I used to live. I'd either have to pony up for an expensive garage or go fight to find free public parking multiple times every week, all just so I can drive in traffic that's horrendous during the entire day. No thank you.
If I had the choice to go live in Manhattan and not have a car vs. live somewhere else and be obligated to own a car I would choose Manhattan in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I can't do that (and even if I could, most people cannot).
I'm curious as to why you truly can't do it. Obviously not everyone can, but most individual cases likely can. It's more that you choose not to, which is still perfectly valid.
If there are fewer places to live than people who need to live there, then having a place for everyone is impossible. In a shortage, all housing is luxury housing.
You are not doing speed limit on average in most cities. You slow down for turns, you wait for red light, you wait for other cars, you are parking. Most importantly, shortcuts available to pedestrians are not available to cars that have to take longer route.
I do groceries by walk and it never took 2 hours. The store is not 5km away pretty much from anywhere. You have to be out of city or in the middle of night for it to be that far. Unless there is some kind of law to prevent it, stores with what you need daily pop up around cities everywhere.
In any case, 5km is still nothing on bicycle which I might take for that distance. Just to kill two birds with one stone and get a bit of exercise.
* Slowdowns, sure, but many drivers also exceed the limit, and the walking:driving ratio is still massively lopsided.
* Pedestrians are not immune to red lights.
* While there are certainly pedestrian shortcuts that are faster than driving, this is definitely not the case for most combinations of start and end points. Far more often, while the pedestrian might gain distance, the car is still literally 10x faster.
* In fact, unless you live in an extremely dense city, it's highly unlikely that there will be a grocery shop, book store, electronics retailer, Italian restaurant, furniture store, etc. less than 5km from your house. Plus all of the people who you might want to visit, your school, place of work, and so on.
* A bike is not walking. Most bikes are for one person, so if you're in a group they're not much use.
* Carrying purchases home is a pain. I should know, I did this for two years.
>* A bike is not walking. Most bikes are for one person, so if you're in a group they're not much use.
My favourite part of visiting Amsterdam was the excessive bike usage. Pretty much everyone has 1 or more of them, you just ride together in a group or catch a tram, even out of the city everyone would either catch a train or simply ride on the side of the highway between villages.
> Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe.
I actually got to test this. My office was about 8km from my house. If I was to leave around my usual time, it would take me about 55-65 mins minimum to reach home.
One day I hadn't taken my car and couldn't find a cab. So I said screw it and decided to walk home.
Reached home in flat 71 minutes. Would have been faster had I taken detours that cut the distance by a kilometer or so.
But you're also not working at a Starbucks or a Chipotle. This is what your parent was talking about: a lot of the jobs in our economy require physically being where your customers are.
I am aware that many jobs require physically being there. That is not at all what the reply to me said.
I am a writer. I am quite poor. In fact, I am currently homeless. I have been bitching via blog here recently about my frustrations with the widespread attitudes that writers don't deserve to be paid dirt, never mind that people online expect good quality writing to be readily available on the internet. Somehow, that high quality writing should magically appear without paying anyone for it in any way.
I don't make much money. I wish I had a better income.
I am really glad I can make money online at all, but, no, I am not part of some privileged elite with money, power, mobility, etc. I do have mobility. I do cherish it and it enormously enhances my life.
But life is a great deal more complicated than those who have ALL the bennies and those who are nothing but crapped on in every way imaginable. This isn't even a case of shades of grey. Life is incredibly Technicolor and varied.
I think it is completely legitimate to give some push back against the enormous amount of assumption in both that reply and yours.
I would like to see us come up with better solutions than we currently have. That will not happen if we blithely tolerate what amounts to classist assumptions dominating any and every supposed intelligent discussion.
I think you're reading too much into our comments. From your parent comment:
> most service industry workers
Those are folks that predominantly need to be physically present. We weren't assuming anything about your membership in a privileged elite, just pointing out that lots of people still need to transport themselves to work.
Good luck with your writing! I agree that we need better business models to reward it.
I know exactly where you got it. But you referred to the comment as "your" parent comment. Perhaps you meant something different by that from what that sounds like to me.
I know there are a lot of options for basic online work that isn't developer based, but I'm not sure what is available that truly pays a decent living wage.
I'm a writer. I do freelance writing for an online service, I sometimes edit resumes and I blog.
I can make better than minimum wage in fits and spurts, but I currently don't have much earned income. A large part of this is rooted in my medical situation. The details probably aren't really of interest to you.
Exactly. Folks who prefer public transit have been forced to live in car culture by folks who fund roads at the expense of pretty much every other form of transportation. In many cases very unethically so.
Due to the societal and environmental effects, I think it's pretty clear roads should be in no way subsidized like they currently are. If the "suburbs" had to carry their full economic costs, they would be unaffordable.
There have been several great articles that have floated to the top of HN in recent years about how practically no city in the US can afford to maintain its own road networks because of the extreme subsidies in the past.
It is a combination of population density being artificially lowered through cheap road subsidies, constant pressure to eliminate taxes, and gutting alternative transport meaning roads need to satiate all human mobility and thus need huge capacity.
Mass transit is so heavily subsidized that if had to carry it's full economic costs, it would be unaffordable.
The light rail lines in my state (MN) don't even make enough from fares to cover their day-to-day operating costs, much less maintenance, and of course tax payers were 100% on the hook for initial construction - with a large chunk of the money coming from automobile taxes.
So yes, I would be fine with the costs of roads coming more directly from the people using them, but then we are going to do the same with transit. Deal?
Agreed. America's forced dominance of the automobile is pretty grossly unethical. Freedom means the ability to make meaningful choices, and if biking is incredibly dangerous, transit is slow and infrequent, and nothing is within walking distance, then those are hardly meaningful options, are they?
Building to support multiple modes of transportation is the freedom-loving thing to do. Want to walk? Go for it! Transit? Sure! Biking? Why not? Driving? Works for me!
"Freedom" doesn't mean living wherever you want and having every option available to you. It means choosing to live in places that offer the amenities you desire.
Want walkable, bikeable, mass transit, etc? Live downtown. Want bigger homes, yards, quite, etc? Live in the suburbs.
> "Freedom" doesn't mean living wherever you want and having every option available to you.
Obviously there's a limit to how reasonable multimodal transportation is. Nobody's expecting decent transit among rural farmland. But we could do better than we're doing now -- MUCH better.
> Want bigger homes, yards, quite, etc? Live in the suburbs.
The biggest problem with this is that in the US you usually have to choose between one of two extremes which dovetail with your examples. You're either in a big ugly apartment block downtown (or in a downtown-ish area) or you're in a super low density suburb where Cars Are Law.
Plenty of countries manage to have more of a gradient, where you can have, say, suburbs of middling density, where driving is easy, but so is walking, biking, and taking the train to the city. I live in Munich at the moment and the suburbs nearby fit this mold perfectly, but in the US such towns are extremely rare.
There are still plenty of cars in Munich proper, for that matter. There are just lots of other options too.
* Also in most American cities even the downtown still isn't very walkable, definitely isn't bikable, and has crappy transit. There really are only a handful of cities in the US where these things all work reasonably well.
Biking is not "incredibly dangerous". It plenty safe. It is healthy. It however sometimes slows down cars and some drivers are then motivated to frame biking as dangerous activity to stop it.
But really really really, biking is not incredibly dangerous.
I've bike commuted to work. In a very bike friendly area.
Everyone I know has been in an accident of some sort. Hit & runs, side swipes, doored, pushed (deliberately), etc.
After better infrastructure, the most effective way to improve safety is to have more cyclists. I think we're in a rough transition period, but things are definitely getting better.
One of my bike buddies thinks things will really change once moms start cycling en masse. That'd change the perception from gonzo bike dudes to totally uncool in a heartbeat, evoking much less hostility.
I live in the Netherlands (16 million people, 23 million bikes). I went to San Fransisco a few months ago, one of the most bike-friendly US cities from what I've heard. Riding a bike there made me want to make sure my will was updated.
I have several coworkers that have stopped biking to work here in sunny, liberal SF because of near-death experiences commuting on a bike.
These are both avid riders with professional-grade equipment taking a short Mission-FiDi route.
Regardless of its "project zero" marketing, SFMTA has bikes last on its priority list. It has to be pushed by guerrilla infrastructure groups to do anything meaningful.
In some areas, it is quite dangerous due to a lack of bike infrastructure and the driving habits of locals. My ex husband sometimes commuted to work by bike and often bitched about this.
I live in an area with good roads, good cars. We get a bike fatality a few times a year. At dusk I find even the well-lit bikes a little hard to discern. We also have some bad drivers. In the most recent fatality the lead rider of a bunch riding on a road was decapitated.
I used to ride bikes all the time as a kid but I would not make a habit of riding on our roads. It's too much of a gamble.
In many areas, just removing outright hostile barriers to pedestrians would vastly improve walkability in the US while possibly going entirely unnoticed by drivers. I once walked to a shopping center with a fence partway around the property that forced me to go far out of my way to go in using the car entrance. A small gap in the fence next to the cross walk would have done wonders for me and most drivers would not have noticed the difference.
I don't see where you get the idea that I am doing anything or have any goal to force anyone to do anything. That seems like a huge and unwarranted leap of logic.
I don't see how that in any way suggests what you are saying. There are a lot of people who currently feel forced into long commutes who hate them. There are a lot of people who are trapped in the situation of they need a car to get to work, they need a job to afford a car because a car is often the second biggest household expense after housing itself.
I am talking about opening up options, not putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to give up their car. We currently have many people who feel they have a gun to their head in terms of being forced into needing a car they don't want. Where is your sympathy for their right to choose?
They have right to choose to limit their standard of living, as you have done, and move to an urban core and be completely dependent on transit for transportation.
Only one of us wants to "change this substantially."
Many people are genuinely trapped. Just because I have been able to pull this off does not mean other people are simply free to choose.
Urban cores are often insanely expensive and not necessarily where someone wants to live just because they don't want a car. I am wholly unimpressed with your hypocritical comments here that boil down to "Don't tread on ME or interfere with my right to own a car and drive all over the place while the world bends over backwards to make that convenient, but your lifestyle preferences? Oh, fuck you."
They have right to choose to limit their standard of living, as you have done, and move to an urban core and be completely dependent on transit for transportation.
This is dismissive, insulting of my preference to live without a car and rather hostile. If you were intending to say that you support my right to choose, you failed to communicate that. It came across as contemptuous and is in no way sympathetic to the fact that walkable neighborhoods and public transit are not hostile to drivers the way the current car centric American landscape is hostile to pedestrians.
Only a minority of the country lives without children where a car is necessary. And who's rich enough to live in an urban centre with 2 children? More importantly who would!
I wish. Then I wouldn't get woken up by little brats every Saturday morning. I live in one of the densest, most expensive neighborhood in the US outside of SF, and there's still a bazillion little kids and screaming babies all over the place living in lofts with no green area in sight, and even though the nearby schools are terrible.
People can't really though, because of zoning and government planning. Like even if you wanted to make an area more walkable by inviting, say, a corner grocery store to set up shop in your neighborhood, usually you can't, because of single-use zoning.
And before you say, "well then just move to the city center!" perhaps you should consider that we're talking about a very common urban form across the world that is strikingly uncommon in the US due to government forces? Not exactly "people making their lifestyle preferences", more like "government imposing lifestyle preferences", and it's mostly just due to cultural momentum at this point.
>They have right to choose to limit their standard of living, as you have done, and move to an urban core and be completely dependent on transit for transportation.
As opposed to being completely dependent on public roads for transportation? Or out away from the "urban core" do you just get around on four-wheelers and snowmobiles? If so, maybe we can stop spending so much of our taxes building roads out to wherever you want to live.
Is your argument against "forcing others to live how you see fit" as in your original comment, or against change from the status quo as in these follow on comments? These are not the same thing.
They don't have that freedom now because of zoning that restricts the development of urban-core-like development and because of subsidies that favor sparsely populated suburbs over the urban core.
I used to walk to the grocery store in Germany six days a week with a toddler and an infant and a backpack for my groceries. I was in American military housing.
After I moved to Kansas, I ran into a soldier I did not remember, but he clearly remembered me. The soldiers who knew what it was like to carry a 60 pound ruck sack had all kinds of respect for me.
It can be done. Not by everyone and I am not saying you are required to live that way. But giving other people options doesn't preclude you from driving everywhere. And that's the entire fucking point here.
Feel free to drive. But I like walking. I liked walking even when I was carrying groceries home in a backpack with an infant strapped to my chest and a toddler sitting on my shoulders.
Preferring to walk in no way makes me some undeveloped savage. Maybe you haven't noticed, but I am online. I spend a lot of time online. I make my earned income online.
For the last time: My desire to see more walkable environments and better public transit in the U.S. in no way bars people from driving. Busses use the same roads that cars use. This is in no way whatsoever a situation where we must choose one or the other.
well by choosing to drive yourself to work every day in a wasteful petroleum burning vehicle you are forcing the rest of us to live with your pollution
The lead batteries make them less "clean" than many people imagine. Lead is a hazardous waste, batteries do not last forever and car batteries are quite large.
I know you couldn't resist injecting an anti-car barb in there but it makes no sense - the problem in the US isn't our "abusive relationship" with cars, it's insufficient infrastructure. Your magical public-transportation future will be ever bit as bad or worse than cars today if the government similarly underfunds it. Which they will.
As a counter-example, Japan is one of the best in the world at infrastructure while at the same time being incredibly thorough about safety and external impacts. They can do a complete overhaul of the busiest train station in the world with zero downtime and solid walls around all construction.
If I walk down the street and there is a group of workers excavating a road, there's a lot more of a relaxed attitude about fencing, walking underneath construction equipment, etc.
After all - use your common sense - don't fall into the hole. If you do, isn't it kind of your own fault? Nobody's going to sue anybody.
Additionally, it's not a big deal to close or severely impact a road due to construction - just shift around the fantastic public transit infrastructure, and everyone carries along. A bus only needs one lane in both directions. Another thing that would never fly in North America.
Both of these problems are deeply cultural. Lawsuits have become a form of welfare. Sure, you might not have government healthcare if you get hurt or sick, but maybe you can sue somebody and get paid for your suffering?
And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave.