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As much as the idea is nice I think it's just a political non-starter. Making this about "personal responsibility" is a pretty see-through cover. This is a stic

As much as the idea is nice I think it's just a political non-starter. Making this about "personal responsibility" is a pretty see-through cover. This is a stick and a stick wielded by "liberal elites who live in cities" against rural drivers and mega-commuters won't work in this environment. People will move to cities and use roads less if cities are affordable. If we can lower rent in the city, automobile usage will go down on its own. This is where the fight should be pointed I believe.

metaphorm 10y ago
well, implementation details matter. the premise of the article is to remove the "subsidies" (there language, I would have called them externalities that car owners benefit from) and move towards true-cost pricing for things related to automobiles. ok, that's a workable premise to start from. the true costs imposed by driving in urban environments are almost certainly much much much higher than those in rural environments. urban areas is where issues like air pollution, traffic congestion, bottlenecks on bridges and tunnels, scarcity of parking, and the need to share limited road space with pedestrians and cyclists are really big issues. in rural areas these are just not really major causes of concern. so my reading on it is that true-cost pricing of cars ought to make urban car use much more expensive, but only make rural car use a little more expensive. I think that's highly desirable, actually.
- Cerium 10y ago
  One way I've seen the infrastructure problem handled is to have all city residents who own cars to be required to purchase unlimited use pass for all city bridges and tunnels.
  - metaphorm 10y ago
    I would add to that all of the following: * annual fee for road maintenance * annual fee for traffic enforcement * no free parking anywhere except your own driveway. every street parking spot should be metered. * excise taxes on gasoline to control air pollution and C02 emissions
flukus 10y ago
How much are rural drivers subsidized compared to their city counterparts? Yes they have more road for fewer people, but a lot of the road is of much lower quality and it will suffer from less driving related deterioration.
- droopyEyelids 10y ago
  https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/14/the-growth-ponzi-scheme-part-2.html https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/14/the-growth-pon...
- rocqua 10y ago
  The argument isn't so much about rural driving, but suburban driving. Rural roads are probably fine. The often mentioned 'ponzi scheme' doesn't happen out there.
Johnny555 10y ago
Part of "lowering the rent" in the city involves preventing people from paying for cars whether they use them or not. That "free parking" in the street is not free, it comes at a real cost in real estate value and road maintenance. Likewise policies that require a certain amount of parking per unit or square foot also makes people pay for cars whether they use them or not. Making buses or trains share the road with cars instead of giving them dedicated lanes with signal pre-emption, also makes non-drivers pay for cars.
- closeparen 10y ago
  As a contrarian defender of driving in these threads, even I hate street parking. Street parking serves no one well. Finding a spot near where you're going is unlikely, searching for one brings traffic to a crawl, and getting into one creates significant and dangerous disruption to the roadway, particularly for the bike lane. People who rely on street parking are incentivized to oppose density in the places they park. Mandatory minimum parking requirements result in wasted space, or facilitates car ownership for people who don't care about/benefit from it at the expense of those who do. Street parking for cars should be eliminated in favor of loading zones and motorcycle/scooter/bicycle parking, which packs much more densely. (Bias towards electric ones if you care to). At the same time, garages (with street-facing storefronts) should be only the list of things you can build by-right. Drivers should booking garage spaces with dynamic, demand-based pricing from their phones before departing, and should know exactly where they're going to park before setting out.
  - davidw 10y ago
    > As a contrarian defender of driving in these threads I don't think anyone sane is suggesting that we should all stop driving from one day to the next, so there's no need to 'defend' driving. It's more about making driving one option among many, and eliminating some of the subsidies.
    - closeparen 10y ago
      Of course, no one is suggesting an overnight ban. I do see an alarming level of support for engineering a steadily increasing scarcity of parking, high tolls, and a deliberately under-provisioned road network in order to degrade the experience of driving until it sucks just a little worse than transit/cycling. I think we should address the reasons people live far from their destinations, rather than the mechanisms which let them lead reasonable lives while doing so. "It's too easy" isn't the reason. "The alternatives are too hard" is the reason.
maxsilver 10y ago
> If we can lower rent in the city, automobile usage will go down on its own. This is where the fight should be pointed I believe. This needs to be repeated, at least 1,000 more times, because it is the real issue we're facing and everyone is ignoring. You can't expect people to live lifestyles like they're in big cities, when we don't let any of these people live in big cities. Until that happens, these "punish driver" attempts are nothing more than punishing poor/middle class people simply for being poor/middle class. They already can't afford to live in cities. Taxing them again just makes them even less able to afford cities.
- philwelch 10y ago
  Small towns used to be walkable, too. It's not like everyone lived in big cities before the automobile was invented.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    Sure, and maybe promoting walkability in small towns is the right path. This doesn't solve the problem that the low- and mid-level staff of downtown offices in major metros benefits immensely from the ability to drive to work (or to within a few transit stops of work) and would suffer immensely if that option were taken away.
    - osdiab 10y ago
      Most small American towns may have small population, but enormous land mass. There's a video somewhere about how old towns had to be small in area in part because people didn't have things like cars to get around, so although population was low density kept up. Those are the kind of towns we should be encouraging these days. As for driving to work, I do think that transit into work would be a perfectly good (and personally preferable) alternative; Id rather sparse communities have decent car infrastructure and storage at transit connections to dense cities, which don't have as much space to build car storage and road capacity and suffer from far greater utilization since they catch the traffic from all suburbs instead of a subsection of them. It's just a more scalable design.
fovc 10y ago
I've asked this before on similar articles, but I just can't wrap my head around why suburbs are intrinsically cheaper than cities. My gut still thinks that density should be cheaper One reasonable argument I've seen is that once you factor in car+gas, the difference narrows. There's also an element of the suburban "ponzi" scheme.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > One reasonable argument I've seen is that once you factor in car+gas, the difference narrows. There's also an element of the suburban "ponzi" scheme. There are very few cities in the US in which owning a car is optional. Only one (New York City) has an outright majority of people who don't own a car. The next two, D.C and Boston, are the only others that have more than a third of households without a car[0]. The reason is that most cities just don't have the infrastructure necessary to facilitate car non-ownership. It's not that everyone wants to own a car; it's that you have to own a car anyway, at least some of the time, and once you already own a car, the impetus to live in higher-density, more expensive areas drops dramatically. [0] You can inflate those numbers a bit by counting Jersey City and Newark as separate cities from the New York City metro area, but no matter how you slice and dice it, it doesn't change the numbers much.
  - innocentoldguy 10y ago
    Tokyo is the only city I've ever lived in where I didn't have to own a car, so I didn't. Everywhere else I've lived, I have had to own a car to get to work. Even in New York, I had to own a car to get to work. I hate everything about driving—other drivers, cops, accidents, detours, traffic, etc. I would never own a car if I could get away with it. Unfortunately, I've only been able to do that for about three years of my life.
    - chimeracoder 10y ago
      > Even in New York, I had to own a car to get to work. I'm assuming you lived in the outer boroughs? In Manhattan, it's painful to own a car unless you're really wealthy.
guelo 10y ago
Tangential but I don't get why I'm an elite and you're not. It's just name calling to make people hate "the others". It has been very effective.
- JimmyAustin 10y ago
  I don't think he thinks that you are an elite, he thinks that there is a portion of the population, leaning towards rural and right wing, that believes in a liberal elite.
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
  I'm blue in a state that is as red as it comes and you're right, it is name calling and it is effective. At the same time if I gave this article to the people in my life what are they supposed to think? The article shows a crucial lack of understanding of their life. It's "liberal elite" because it's so incredibly out of touch with a large swath of America. There are other ways to fix this car problem, see the rent lowering argument.
nnq 10y ago
> People will move to cities Why tf would you want this? As an European, what I loved about US was that people don't like being all crammed up in small, old and disgusting cities, and they are OK with long commutes as the price for their "house with lawn"... Population dispersal should be encouraged! It dramatically increases quality of life, and if you take a look at google maps you'll see that the Earth is full of unused space. Yeah, energy and climate change and all that are serious problems... but let's solve so that having solved them we can enjoy un-crammed living... Ideal world imho would one where cities and towns simply don't exist: it's individual homes or small-group-homes sprinkled around the planet, with "leisure centers" and "shopping centers" and "health centers" sprinkled uniformly between them, and large chunks of forest here + agricultural land here in-between them. It may sound extremely inefficient, but we have the technolgy to make it work now, so let's do it. Find something else to optimize, like making agriculture vertical instead, and let people live in the wide open spaces they enjoy! Why TF do we insist creating and optimizing these Urban Hells and then complain that anxiety and depression are eating us alive?!
- adrianN 10y ago
  That's all fine and dandy as long as you don't have a butt-in-chair job. I live in a city because I don't want to spend 20% of my waking life stuck in traffic. Once we figured all the post-scarcity stuff out, we might live like the Solarians, but for now it's just not practical.
  - pif 10y ago
    > I live in a city because I don't want to spend 20% of my waking life stuck in traffic. That's an effect of too many businesses being concentrated in city centre, too. Disperse jobs as well as people, and life will be better.
    - lazaroclapp 10y ago
      Businesses are concentrated in city centers because that's where the people (i.e. potential employees) are. Even better, there is a robust market for both employees and employers, meaning people are not stuck in an area where only one company exists and everyone living in a 20 miles radius is not either a coworker or someone working a service industry job that gets half of its revenue from people working at your one available office employer. I don't think it would do much for ones quality of life to have to move every time one changes jobs.
revelation 10y ago
The problem in cities isn't people living in the city driving cars; they already don't, ownership per family is already less than 50% in e.g. NYC. The problem are antisocial people who want the big garden in the suburb and drive their car into the city for their commute by day, pushing the massive costs for their lifestyle on the people actually living in the city.
- xtreme 10y ago
  > antisocial people who want the big garden in the suburb This is pretty ignorant. Not wanting to live in cramped apartments does not make someone an anti-social. There are plenty of shut-ins living in cities.
  - 7952 10y ago
    I think the parent meant anti-social as in causing a nuisance, rather than not sociable.
robynsmith 10y ago
Agree++ >People will move to cities and use roads less if cities are affordable. If we can lower rent in the city, automobile usage will go down on its own. This is where the fight should be pointed I believe. This. So much. Affordable housing and reasonable transit that makes the entire city and neighboring suburbs accessible will reduce car usage. I work in Toronto and commute from a nearby suburb. Rent and real estate costs in the city are ridiculous, but I'm planning on making the move anyway. I would love to live car-free, but the reality is a failure of transit. Transit sucks: 1) Transit in suburbia sucks. A lot of routes are every 30 or 60 minutes. 2) Transit between the suburbs and the city sucks. The systems are not aligned well and when you have layers of busses and trains that only come every 30-60 minutes, it just adds a lot of unnecessary waiting time to your commute. This causes a lot of people to drive and park at the GO station so they can take a train into the city. 3) Transit in Toronto is great if you happen to live and work on a Subway line. If not, good luck - you'll likely add 20-60 minutes to your transit commute. A car makes the rest of the city easily accessible. So dealing with 2-3 different transit systems makes a commute unreasonable. If you're commuting from a nearby suburb, it can take 2+ hours to get to work. My partner works in another suburb, and to transit there would take about 2.5-3 hours each direction. It's just not practical. We've reached a compromise: We have a single car, and we car-pool to a reasonable spot and I take the train into the city. I'm lucky in that my place of work is near a subway stop, so my entire commute in this way is about 75-90 minutes each-way. I often work on the train on my way to work. I'm planning on moving to the city, but we will never be able to be car-free with the state of transit the way it is. My partner will have to drive from Toronto to her work. Without traffic, probably 25 minutes. With traffic, closer to an hour. But that beats the 2.5-3 hours (each way) that it would take to commute via transit.
- dashundchen 10y ago
  Toronto seems to be a city that never got around to planning a transportation system for it's massive growth. Every time I visit I'm surprised by how much further the skyscrapers creep down the QEW towards Hamilton. Even the suburban hubs like Mississauga have bigger downtowns than many North American cities. But the transit system seems to be built for a Toronto half the size. In between the hubs of density are miles of big box plazas, McMansions and 10 lane roads with neverending traffic jams. Downtown exploded while the subways and Gardiner choked. In the race to develop it seems no one was looking at the big picture of how all this growth was going to interact. I've heard of the regional transport plan, The Big Move - curious to see how this affects the GTA in the next decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Move https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Move
LordKano 10y ago
Making this about "personal responsibility" is a pretty see-through cover. Especially when there's no similar talk about how we subsidize mass transit. If we can lower rent in the city, automobile usage will go down on its own. This will lead to the day when the author complains about how the mortgage interest tax deduction is unfair because people in the city who rent don't get it and needs to be eliminated.
- naravara 10y ago
  >This will lead to the day when the author complains about how the mortgage interest tax deduction is unfair because people in the city who rent don't get it and needs to be eliminated. Um. .. yes. Not necessarily because 'unfair' but because it confers no real societal benefit. If you want to lower people's taxes, just lower their fucking taxes. Quit trying to skew market forces to make sure only certain types of people get favorable tax treatment. There are tax credits and deductions that make sense because they promote socially beneficial behavior like getting an education or raising kids. But nobody cares whether your rent or own.
  - LordKano 10y ago
    Your assertions are definitely debatable. There are at least two social benefits to home ownership. First is wealth accumulation. According to GAAP, land does not depreciate. It can go up or down in value due to market forces but it does not depreciate. When people have real, tangible wealth, they are less likely to be dependent upon the social safety net as they go through life. That benefits society. Homes can also be used as an instrument of generational wealth transfer. Second, owners tend to take better care of properties than tenants. A community where most or all of the inhabitants own their residences is more desirable than one where everyone rents. If you have no objection to child and educational tax credits, you don't have an issue with skewing market forces. You just want to be the one to decide who gets the benefit of that skewing.
    - naravara 10y ago
      >First is wealth accumulation. According to GAAP, land does not depreciate. It can go up or down in value due to market forces but it does not depreciate. When people have real, tangible wealth, they are less likely to be dependent upon the social safety net as they go through life. That benefits society. Homes can also be used as an instrument of generational wealth transfer. First of all, there is a slight of hand here. I said housing and you just said land. Housing does depreciate. Especially shitty, pre-fab housing. Secondly, land that isn't used for farming is not a productive asset. There is no societal benefit to encouraging people to sink their savings/investment into non-productive assets. If that savings wasn't being poured into housing, it would have been put into an index fund or other asset class that does more than generate paper-profits via speculation. Home-ownership only functions as an investment vehicle in a political environment that prioritizes raising real-estate costs. Functionally all this does is transfers wealth from people who earn incomes to people who own assets. >Second, owners tend to take better care of properties than tenants. A community where most or all of the inhabitants own their residences is more desirable than one where everyone rents. Not really. Once you control for length of residence it's mostly a wash. Long-term tenants aren't any worse than owners. In some cases they can be better because they're not the ones footing the bill for essential repair work. It comes out of their rent and is handled by a property manager who is legally liable for maintaining the property. >You just want to be the one to decide who gets the benefit of that skewing. This is literally the role of government. When governed well, society gets the benefit of that skewing by accounting for the externalities that aren't accounted for by the market forces. When governed badly you make problems worse.
cptskippy 10y ago
> This is a stick and a stick wielded by "liberal elites who live in cities" against rural drivers and mega-commuters won't work in this environment. I'm getting pretty sick of the self absorbed us vs them mentality. Take a step back and put on a wider lens. If this were some liberal elite who hates you and your life style then why the hell would they want you to come live with them? If you're living in a rural setting and you're not commuting to the city daily, this isn't about you. > People will move to cities and use roads less if cities are affordable. You're completely failing to understand and generalizing everyone with that sentiment. There are a multitude of factors that people consider when they choose where they live. Everything from schools, family, friends, to things like personal preference and social anxiety. Name calling and failure to understand the problem are lazy short cuts and not simple practical solutions.

metaphorm 10y ago

well, implementation details matter. the premise of the article is to remove the "subsidies" (there language, I would have called them externalities that car owners benefit from) and move towards true-cost pricing for things related to automobiles. ok, that's a workable premise to start from. the true costs imposed by driving in urban environments are almost certainly much much much higher than those in rural environments. urban areas is where issues like air pollution, traffic congestion, bottlenecks on bridges and tunnels, scarcity of parking, and the need to share limited road space with pedestrians and cyclists are really big issues. in rural areas these are just not really major causes of concern. so my reading on it is that true-cost pricing of cars ought to make urban car use much more expensive, but only make rural car use a little more expensive. I think that's highly desirable, actually.

Cerium 10y ago
One way I've seen the infrastructure problem handled is to have all city residents who own cars to be required to purchase unlimited use pass for all city bridges and tunnels.
- metaphorm 10y ago
  I would add to that all of the following: * annual fee for road maintenance * annual fee for traffic enforcement * no free parking anywhere except your own driveway. every street parking spot should be metered. * excise taxes on gasoline to control air pollution and C02 emissions

flukus 10y ago

How much are rural drivers subsidized compared to their city counterparts? Yes they have more road for fewer people, but a lot of the road is of much lower quality and it will suffer from less driving related deterioration.

droopyEyelids 10y ago
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/14/the-growth-ponzi-scheme-part-2.html https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/14/the-growth-pon...
rocqua 10y ago
The argument isn't so much about rural driving, but suburban driving. Rural roads are probably fine. The often mentioned 'ponzi scheme' doesn't happen out there.

Johnny555 10y ago

Part of "lowering the rent" in the city involves preventing people from paying for cars whether they use them or not. That "free parking" in the street is not free, it comes at a real cost in real estate value and road maintenance. Likewise policies that require a certain amount of parking per unit or square foot also makes people pay for cars whether they use them or not. Making buses or trains share the road with cars instead of giving them dedicated lanes with signal pre-emption, also makes non-drivers pay for cars.

closeparen 10y ago
As a contrarian defender of driving in these threads, even I hate street parking. Street parking serves no one well. Finding a spot near where you're going is unlikely, searching for one brings traffic to a crawl, and getting into one creates significant and dangerous disruption to the roadway, particularly for the bike lane. People who rely on street parking are incentivized to oppose density in the places they park. Mandatory minimum parking requirements result in wasted space, or facilitates car ownership for people who don't care about/benefit from it at the expense of those who do. Street parking for cars should be eliminated in favor of loading zones and motorcycle/scooter/bicycle parking, which packs much more densely. (Bias towards electric ones if you care to). At the same time, garages (with street-facing storefronts) should be only the list of things you can build by-right. Drivers should booking garage spaces with dynamic, demand-based pricing from their phones before departing, and should know exactly where they're going to park before setting out.
- davidw 10y ago
  > As a contrarian defender of driving in these threads I don't think anyone sane is suggesting that we should all stop driving from one day to the next, so there's no need to 'defend' driving. It's more about making driving one option among many, and eliminating some of the subsidies.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    Of course, no one is suggesting an overnight ban. I do see an alarming level of support for engineering a steadily increasing scarcity of parking, high tolls, and a deliberately under-provisioned road network in order to degrade the experience of driving until it sucks just a little worse than transit/cycling. I think we should address the reasons people live far from their destinations, rather than the mechanisms which let them lead reasonable lives while doing so. "It's too easy" isn't the reason. "The alternatives are too hard" is the reason.

maxsilver 10y ago

> If we can lower rent in the city, automobile usage will go down on its own. This is where the fight should be pointed I believe. This needs to be repeated, at least 1,000 more times, because it is the real issue we're facing and everyone is ignoring. You can't expect people to live lifestyles like they're in big cities, when we don't let any of these people live in big cities. Until that happens, these "punish driver" attempts are nothing more than punishing poor/middle class people simply for being poor/middle class. They already can't afford to live in cities. Taxing them again just makes them even less able to afford cities.

philwelch 10y ago
Small towns used to be walkable, too. It's not like everyone lived in big cities before the automobile was invented.
- closeparen 10y ago
  Sure, and maybe promoting walkability in small towns is the right path. This doesn't solve the problem that the low- and mid-level staff of downtown offices in major metros benefits immensely from the ability to drive to work (or to within a few transit stops of work) and would suffer immensely if that option were taken away.
  - osdiab 10y ago
    Most small American towns may have small population, but enormous land mass. There's a video somewhere about how old towns had to be small in area in part because people didn't have things like cars to get around, so although population was low density kept up. Those are the kind of towns we should be encouraging these days. As for driving to work, I do think that transit into work would be a perfectly good (and personally preferable) alternative; Id rather sparse communities have decent car infrastructure and storage at transit connections to dense cities, which don't have as much space to build car storage and road capacity and suffer from far greater utilization since they catch the traffic from all suburbs instead of a subsection of them. It's just a more scalable design.

fovc 10y ago

I've asked this before on similar articles, but I just can't wrap my head around why suburbs are intrinsically cheaper than cities. My gut still thinks that density should be cheaper One reasonable argument I've seen is that once you factor in car+gas, the difference narrows. There's also an element of the suburban "ponzi" scheme.

chimeracoder 10y ago
> One reasonable argument I've seen is that once you factor in car+gas, the difference narrows. There's also an element of the suburban "ponzi" scheme. There are very few cities in the US in which owning a car is optional. Only one (New York City) has an outright majority of people who don't own a car. The next two, D.C and Boston, are the only others that have more than a third of households without a car[0]. The reason is that most cities just don't have the infrastructure necessary to facilitate car non-ownership. It's not that everyone wants to own a car; it's that you have to own a car anyway, at least some of the time, and once you already own a car, the impetus to live in higher-density, more expensive areas drops dramatically. [0] You can inflate those numbers a bit by counting Jersey City and Newark as separate cities from the New York City metro area, but no matter how you slice and dice it, it doesn't change the numbers much.
- innocentoldguy 10y ago
  Tokyo is the only city I've ever lived in where I didn't have to own a car, so I didn't. Everywhere else I've lived, I have had to own a car to get to work. Even in New York, I had to own a car to get to work. I hate everything about driving—other drivers, cops, accidents, detours, traffic, etc. I would never own a car if I could get away with it. Unfortunately, I've only been able to do that for about three years of my life.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > Even in New York, I had to own a car to get to work. I'm assuming you lived in the outer boroughs? In Manhattan, it's painful to own a car unless you're really wealthy.

guelo 10y ago

Tangential but I don't get why I'm an elite and you're not. It's just name calling to make people hate "the others". It has been very effective.

JimmyAustin 10y ago
I don't think he thinks that you are an elite, he thinks that there is a portion of the population, leaning towards rural and right wing, that believes in a liberal elite.
frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
I'm blue in a state that is as red as it comes and you're right, it is name calling and it is effective. At the same time if I gave this article to the people in my life what are they supposed to think? The article shows a crucial lack of understanding of their life. It's "liberal elite" because it's so incredibly out of touch with a large swath of America. There are other ways to fix this car problem, see the rent lowering argument.

nnq 10y ago

> People will move to cities Why tf would you want this? As an European, what I loved about US was that people don't like being all crammed up in small, old and disgusting cities, and they are OK with long commutes as the price for their "house with lawn"... Population dispersal should be encouraged! It dramatically increases quality of life, and if you take a look at google maps you'll see that the Earth is full of unused space. Yeah, energy and climate change and all that are serious problems... but let's solve so that having solved them we can enjoy un-crammed living... Ideal world imho would one where cities and towns simply don't exist: it's individual homes or small-group-homes sprinkled around the planet, with "leisure centers" and "shopping centers" and "health centers" sprinkled uniformly between them, and large chunks of forest here + agricultural land here in-between them. It may sound extremely inefficient, but we have the technolgy to make it work now, so let's do it. Find something else to optimize, like making agriculture vertical instead, and let people live in the wide open spaces they enjoy! Why TF do we insist creating and optimizing these Urban Hells and then complain that anxiety and depression are eating us alive?!

adrianN 10y ago
That's all fine and dandy as long as you don't have a butt-in-chair job. I live in a city because I don't want to spend 20% of my waking life stuck in traffic. Once we figured all the post-scarcity stuff out, we might live like the Solarians, but for now it's just not practical.
- pif 10y ago
  > I live in a city because I don't want to spend 20% of my waking life stuck in traffic. That's an effect of too many businesses being concentrated in city centre, too. Disperse jobs as well as people, and life will be better.
  - lazaroclapp 10y ago
    Businesses are concentrated in city centers because that's where the people (i.e. potential employees) are. Even better, there is a robust market for both employees and employers, meaning people are not stuck in an area where only one company exists and everyone living in a 20 miles radius is not either a coworker or someone working a service industry job that gets half of its revenue from people working at your one available office employer. I don't think it would do much for ones quality of life to have to move every time one changes jobs.

revelation 10y ago

The problem in cities isn't people living in the city driving cars; they already don't, ownership per family is already less than 50% in e.g. NYC. The problem are antisocial people who want the big garden in the suburb and drive their car into the city for their commute by day, pushing the massive costs for their lifestyle on the people actually living in the city.

xtreme 10y ago
> antisocial people who want the big garden in the suburb This is pretty ignorant. Not wanting to live in cramped apartments does not make someone an anti-social. There are plenty of shut-ins living in cities.
- 7952 10y ago
  I think the parent meant anti-social as in causing a nuisance, rather than not sociable.

robynsmith 10y ago

Agree++ >People will move to cities and use roads less if cities are affordable. If we can lower rent in the city, automobile usage will go down on its own. This is where the fight should be pointed I believe. This. So much. Affordable housing and reasonable transit that makes the entire city and neighboring suburbs accessible will reduce car usage. I work in Toronto and commute from a nearby suburb. Rent and real estate costs in the city are ridiculous, but I'm planning on making the move anyway. I would love to live car-free, but the reality is a failure of transit. Transit sucks: 1) Transit in suburbia sucks. A lot of routes are every 30 or 60 minutes. 2) Transit between the suburbs and the city sucks. The systems are not aligned well and when you have layers of busses and trains that only come every 30-60 minutes, it just adds a lot of unnecessary waiting time to your commute. This causes a lot of people to drive and park at the GO station so they can take a train into the city. 3) Transit in Toronto is great if you happen to live and work on a Subway line. If not, good luck - you'll likely add 20-60 minutes to your transit commute. A car makes the rest of the city easily accessible. So dealing with 2-3 different transit systems makes a commute unreasonable. If you're commuting from a nearby suburb, it can take 2+ hours to get to work. My partner works in another suburb, and to transit there would take about 2.5-3 hours each direction. It's just not practical. We've reached a compromise: We have a single car, and we car-pool to a reasonable spot and I take the train into the city. I'm lucky in that my place of work is near a subway stop, so my entire commute in this way is about 75-90 minutes each-way. I often work on the train on my way to work. I'm planning on moving to the city, but we will never be able to be car-free with the state of transit the way it is. My partner will have to drive from Toronto to her work. Without traffic, probably 25 minutes. With traffic, closer to an hour. But that beats the 2.5-3 hours (each way) that it would take to commute via transit.

dashundchen 10y ago
Toronto seems to be a city that never got around to planning a transportation system for it's massive growth. Every time I visit I'm surprised by how much further the skyscrapers creep down the QEW towards Hamilton. Even the suburban hubs like Mississauga have bigger downtowns than many North American cities. But the transit system seems to be built for a Toronto half the size. In between the hubs of density are miles of big box plazas, McMansions and 10 lane roads with neverending traffic jams. Downtown exploded while the subways and Gardiner choked. In the race to develop it seems no one was looking at the big picture of how all this growth was going to interact. I've heard of the regional transport plan, The Big Move - curious to see how this affects the GTA in the next decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Move https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Move

LordKano 10y ago

Making this about "personal responsibility" is a pretty see-through cover. Especially when there's no similar talk about how we subsidize mass transit. If we can lower rent in the city, automobile usage will go down on its own. This will lead to the day when the author complains about how the mortgage interest tax deduction is unfair because people in the city who rent don't get it and needs to be eliminated.

naravara 10y ago
>This will lead to the day when the author complains about how the mortgage interest tax deduction is unfair because people in the city who rent don't get it and needs to be eliminated. Um. .. yes. Not necessarily because 'unfair' but because it confers no real societal benefit. If you want to lower people's taxes, just lower their fucking taxes. Quit trying to skew market forces to make sure only certain types of people get favorable tax treatment. There are tax credits and deductions that make sense because they promote socially beneficial behavior like getting an education or raising kids. But nobody cares whether your rent or own.
- LordKano 10y ago
  Your assertions are definitely debatable. There are at least two social benefits to home ownership. First is wealth accumulation. According to GAAP, land does not depreciate. It can go up or down in value due to market forces but it does not depreciate. When people have real, tangible wealth, they are less likely to be dependent upon the social safety net as they go through life. That benefits society. Homes can also be used as an instrument of generational wealth transfer. Second, owners tend to take better care of properties than tenants. A community where most or all of the inhabitants own their residences is more desirable than one where everyone rents. If you have no objection to child and educational tax credits, you don't have an issue with skewing market forces. You just want to be the one to decide who gets the benefit of that skewing.
  - naravara 10y ago
    >First is wealth accumulation. According to GAAP, land does not depreciate. It can go up or down in value due to market forces but it does not depreciate. When people have real, tangible wealth, they are less likely to be dependent upon the social safety net as they go through life. That benefits society. Homes can also be used as an instrument of generational wealth transfer. First of all, there is a slight of hand here. I said housing and you just said land. Housing does depreciate. Especially shitty, pre-fab housing. Secondly, land that isn't used for farming is not a productive asset. There is no societal benefit to encouraging people to sink their savings/investment into non-productive assets. If that savings wasn't being poured into housing, it would have been put into an index fund or other asset class that does more than generate paper-profits via speculation. Home-ownership only functions as an investment vehicle in a political environment that prioritizes raising real-estate costs. Functionally all this does is transfers wealth from people who earn incomes to people who own assets. >Second, owners tend to take better care of properties than tenants. A community where most or all of the inhabitants own their residences is more desirable than one where everyone rents. Not really. Once you control for length of residence it's mostly a wash. Long-term tenants aren't any worse than owners. In some cases they can be better because they're not the ones footing the bill for essential repair work. It comes out of their rent and is handled by a property manager who is legally liable for maintaining the property. >You just want to be the one to decide who gets the benefit of that skewing. This is literally the role of government. When governed well, society gets the benefit of that skewing by accounting for the externalities that aren't accounted for by the market forces. When governed badly you make problems worse.

cptskippy 10y ago

> This is a stick and a stick wielded by "liberal elites who live in cities" against rural drivers and mega-commuters won't work in this environment. I'm getting pretty sick of the self absorbed us vs them mentality. Take a step back and put on a wider lens. If this were some liberal elite who hates you and your life style then why the hell would they want you to come live with them? If you're living in a rural setting and you're not commuting to the city daily, this isn't about you. > People will move to cities and use roads less if cities are affordable. You're completely failing to understand and generalizing everyone with that sentiment. There are a multitude of factors that people consider when they choose where they live. Everything from schools, family, friends, to things like personal preference and social anxiety. Name calling and failure to understand the problem are lazy short cuts and not simple practical solutions.