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The author is missing some crucial facts that a) not everyone lives in a big city with public transport, so they've no alternative; b) even if you live in a big

The author is missing some crucial facts that a) not everyone lives in a big city with public transport, so they've no alternative; b) even if you live in a big city, it's often much faster or more convenient to take a car; c) without a car you can't get to 99% places outside the city, so say goodbye to weekend road-trips. No, that's not absurd at all - that's the invaluable freedom of movement.

bluetomcat 11y ago
> without a car you can't get to 99% places outside the city People in big cities should realise that owning a car doesn't mean you have to use it daily. I have a very well-maintained mid 90's Japanese car that sits in a garage and is only taken out for trips during the weekends. Being able to afford a new car, I have saved an enormous amount of money compared to my peers.
kuschku 11y ago
> c) without a car you can't get to 99% places outside the city, so say goodbye to weekend road-trips. No, that's not absurd at all - that's the invaluable freedom of movement. Why? You can bike there. A lot of people do weekend trips with bike and tent here, even families. I know even a family that bikes every year up to Denmark and back for vacation (living near Hamburg), even when their kids were still little (you can buy carts to attach to a bike which can seat multiple kids + store bags) And if you take your bike in bus or train, you can get literally anywhere in Europe within of a day.
- base698 11y ago
  Really? You can bike 100 miles each way to do something active and not be too tired to do it? Also ropes, parachutes and other adventure activity equipment doesn't bike well.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    You don’t have to do it in one day ;) And otherwise, as I said, bike to bus stop or train station, should be < 10 miles, take bike on train, go wherever you want, bike to destination. Costs you like 10$ and you can get anywhere easily.
- soundwave106 11y ago
  In general, the urban infrastructure for biking in the cities and suburbs is horrible in the United States compared to Europe. In places like the Southern United States I would say it can even get dangerous. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/03/braving-the-deep-deadly-south-on-a-bicycle/284293/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/03/braving-... Some cities are getting much more "bike friendly", thankfully. The other issue is distance. The American West in particular is rather big and has large parts that are sparsely populated. If you bike from, say, San Francisco to Los Angeles, you are covering a much longer distance compared to biking from Hamburg to Copenhagen. There has been progress, in that it seems there's been more interest in long distance trails (usually "rail trails") of late. Beyond these trails, you'd have to bike on highways. Many highways are designed primarily for automobiles and are not terribly "bike friendly" at all.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    In the US, riding a bicycle on an interstate highway is completely illegal. Rail trails are great, but I've never seen any that were actually useful for practical purposes. They're usually in rural areas or other places where they're not going to actually help you travel between two points that you would want to travel between. They're fun because they usually have nice scenery (they're usually rural), there's no cars on or near them, they're almost nearly flat (they were built for trains, which can't go up and down hills easily), they let you see stuff that you can't see from the road, and they're usually long enough to make it worth doing. However, you still need a car, to transport yourself and your bike to the rail trail.... as I said, they're not practical, they're just a fun excursion. Another similar thing is tow paths: back in the 1800s they built tow paths along canals so that mules could pull barges. Now these paths are all used for hiking and cycling, and can stretch for very long distances, usually much longer than rail trails. Rail trails are frequently not that long, because they're not able to secure rights to the land for the trail for that much distance; either part of it is still used by the railroad, or the railroad is eliminated and the land sold off. Frequently landowners adjacent to the railroad oppose efforts to turn it into a trail and get the local government to prevent this because they don't want cyclists robbing them and vandalizing their property (yes, these are actually raised as valid concerns!).
fulafel 11y ago
Renting a car works well for weekend road-trips. In small cities it's often feasible to live within walking/biking distance from town center even if the public transport is poorer than big cities.
- exhilaration 11y ago
  My friends in NYC just book a Zipcar when they need to travel to New Jersey or Long Island. That seems to be a perfect solution (if you've got the money) for people in big cities.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
alistairSH 11y ago
a. That's part of the problem - we have a lot of inefficient suburban sprawl. I don't thnk anybody would claim a farmer or other rural resident should be car-free. b. That's a failure of us, as a society, to provide reasonable public transit and walkable town centers. c. This doesn't require owning a car. Rental cars are readily available. ZipCar and other car sharing services are available in larger cities. For whatever reason, the US has simply decided it prefers the waste of automotive transportation. I'm sure there are many factors... cheap fuel, plenty of land, racism and other social factors, etc.
- pkorzeniewski 11y ago
  a. Part of the problem is that people want to live outside city? Should we force people to live in cities or what? b. It's not a failure of society, it's just the nature of public transport - you simply can't provide direct connections from anywhere to anywhere, you'll always have to walk from/to stations and change lines. The city I live in, although in Europe, is very well communicated, but I work in such place that I can't get there directly from where I live and the whole trip using public transport takes me an hour one way, while with car it's 15 minutes. Now tell me that I should use public transport and waste 40 hours in buses each month. c. Renting a car doesn't resolve any of the issues mentioned in the article - you still drive a car, just not yours.
  - alistairSH 11y ago
    a. Force? No, of course not. But suburban sprawl is not a sustainable development pattern. We should be incentivizing denser development, support by quality public transit. b. You can't link everything, but in many parts of the US, we haven't even tried. Take DC - we have a basic metro downtown, but precious little rail access from the suburbs. There is no light rail across Fairfax or Montgomery Counties. The subway that exists is falling apart because local governments refuse to provide appropriate funding. c. It means you aren't driving during the week, only when you actually need to get out of the city. If enough people car-share, there are fewer cars being produced (building cars is resource-intensive).
imgabe 11y ago
Cars can be rented for weekend trips. It depends on the math of your specific situation, but if you have to pay for parking you'd probably come out ahead just renting a car for a couple days the ~12 times a year or so that you need to drive out of town.
tajen 11y ago
Sustainability requires rearchitecturing your city and your leisure time, and it's gonna be so costly and long that you'll never be able to afford it. From Europe, it looks like the US cities belong to the past, to the era where you could innocuously pick petrol from your colonies and damage the globe. It's not meant to be insulting (because Europe has its own responsibilities) but to put words on what we're doing to the Earth. Your right to have week-end trips is the right to massively murder people to obtain/keep using petrol.
frabbit 11y ago
Man, I wish people would not take weekend road trips to "nice wild places". It turns said places into noisy, overcrowded hellholes, destroying the very thing that supposedly is worth travelling to.

bluetomcat 11y ago

> without a car you can't get to 99% places outside the city People in big cities should realise that owning a car doesn't mean you have to use it daily. I have a very well-maintained mid 90's Japanese car that sits in a garage and is only taken out for trips during the weekends. Being able to afford a new car, I have saved an enormous amount of money compared to my peers.

kuschku 11y ago

> c) without a car you can't get to 99% places outside the city, so say goodbye to weekend road-trips. No, that's not absurd at all - that's the invaluable freedom of movement. Why? You can bike there. A lot of people do weekend trips with bike and tent here, even families. I know even a family that bikes every year up to Denmark and back for vacation (living near Hamburg), even when their kids were still little (you can buy carts to attach to a bike which can seat multiple kids + store bags) And if you take your bike in bus or train, you can get literally anywhere in Europe within of a day.

base698 11y ago
Really? You can bike 100 miles each way to do something active and not be too tired to do it? Also ropes, parachutes and other adventure activity equipment doesn't bike well.
- kuschku 11y ago
  You don’t have to do it in one day ;) And otherwise, as I said, bike to bus stop or train station, should be < 10 miles, take bike on train, go wherever you want, bike to destination. Costs you like 10$ and you can get anywhere easily.
soundwave106 11y ago
In general, the urban infrastructure for biking in the cities and suburbs is horrible in the United States compared to Europe. In places like the Southern United States I would say it can even get dangerous. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/03/braving-the-deep-deadly-south-on-a-bicycle/284293/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/03/braving-... Some cities are getting much more "bike friendly", thankfully. The other issue is distance. The American West in particular is rather big and has large parts that are sparsely populated. If you bike from, say, San Francisco to Los Angeles, you are covering a much longer distance compared to biking from Hamburg to Copenhagen. There has been progress, in that it seems there's been more interest in long distance trails (usually "rail trails") of late. Beyond these trails, you'd have to bike on highways. Many highways are designed primarily for automobiles and are not terribly "bike friendly" at all.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  In the US, riding a bicycle on an interstate highway is completely illegal. Rail trails are great, but I've never seen any that were actually useful for practical purposes. They're usually in rural areas or other places where they're not going to actually help you travel between two points that you would want to travel between. They're fun because they usually have nice scenery (they're usually rural), there's no cars on or near them, they're almost nearly flat (they were built for trains, which can't go up and down hills easily), they let you see stuff that you can't see from the road, and they're usually long enough to make it worth doing. However, you still need a car, to transport yourself and your bike to the rail trail.... as I said, they're not practical, they're just a fun excursion. Another similar thing is tow paths: back in the 1800s they built tow paths along canals so that mules could pull barges. Now these paths are all used for hiking and cycling, and can stretch for very long distances, usually much longer than rail trails. Rail trails are frequently not that long, because they're not able to secure rights to the land for the trail for that much distance; either part of it is still used by the railroad, or the railroad is eliminated and the land sold off. Frequently landowners adjacent to the railroad oppose efforts to turn it into a trail and get the local government to prevent this because they don't want cyclists robbing them and vandalizing their property (yes, these are actually raised as valid concerns!).

fulafel 11y ago

Renting a car works well for weekend road-trips. In small cities it's often feasible to live within walking/biking distance from town center even if the public transport is poorer than big cities.

exhilaration 11y ago
My friends in NYC just book a Zipcar when they need to travel to New Jersey or Long Island. That seems to be a perfect solution (if you've got the money) for people in big cities.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

alistairSH 11y ago

a. That's part of the problem - we have a lot of inefficient suburban sprawl. I don't thnk anybody would claim a farmer or other rural resident should be car-free. b. That's a failure of us, as a society, to provide reasonable public transit and walkable town centers. c. This doesn't require owning a car. Rental cars are readily available. ZipCar and other car sharing services are available in larger cities. For whatever reason, the US has simply decided it prefers the waste of automotive transportation. I'm sure there are many factors... cheap fuel, plenty of land, racism and other social factors, etc.

pkorzeniewski 11y ago
a. Part of the problem is that people want to live outside city? Should we force people to live in cities or what? b. It's not a failure of society, it's just the nature of public transport - you simply can't provide direct connections from anywhere to anywhere, you'll always have to walk from/to stations and change lines. The city I live in, although in Europe, is very well communicated, but I work in such place that I can't get there directly from where I live and the whole trip using public transport takes me an hour one way, while with car it's 15 minutes. Now tell me that I should use public transport and waste 40 hours in buses each month. c. Renting a car doesn't resolve any of the issues mentioned in the article - you still drive a car, just not yours.
- alistairSH 11y ago
  a. Force? No, of course not. But suburban sprawl is not a sustainable development pattern. We should be incentivizing denser development, support by quality public transit. b. You can't link everything, but in many parts of the US, we haven't even tried. Take DC - we have a basic metro downtown, but precious little rail access from the suburbs. There is no light rail across Fairfax or Montgomery Counties. The subway that exists is falling apart because local governments refuse to provide appropriate funding. c. It means you aren't driving during the week, only when you actually need to get out of the city. If enough people car-share, there are fewer cars being produced (building cars is resource-intensive).

imgabe 11y ago

Cars can be rented for weekend trips. It depends on the math of your specific situation, but if you have to pay for parking you'd probably come out ahead just renting a car for a couple days the ~12 times a year or so that you need to drive out of town.

tajen 11y ago

Sustainability requires rearchitecturing your city and your leisure time, and it's gonna be so costly and long that you'll never be able to afford it. From Europe, it looks like the US cities belong to the past, to the era where you could innocuously pick petrol from your colonies and damage the globe. It's not meant to be insulting (because Europe has its own responsibilities) but to put words on what we're doing to the Earth. Your right to have week-end trips is the right to massively murder people to obtain/keep using petrol.

frabbit 11y ago

Man, I wish people would not take weekend road trips to "nice wild places". It turns said places into noisy, overcrowded hellholes, destroying the very thing that supposedly is worth travelling to.