8 ms·

Those are luxuries like a cell phone is a luxury. There does come a point where there's no acceptable alternative - a 1 hour bus line I know through the city of

by taurath 10y ago

Those are luxuries like a cell phone is a luxury. There does come a point where there's no acceptable alternative - a 1 hour bus line I know through the city of Seattle takes 10 minutes by car. Why should the city and property owners have to subsidize cars? They shouldn't, but they need some way for people to get to them and flow people through the city, or they will cease to exist.

plandis 10y ago
I don't even own a car in Seattle. It's clearly not a necessity as I, my fiancé, and several of our friends are all careless and do just fine. If anything its drivers that do stupid stuff like block bus lanes, don't know how to merge, etc... that are a bigger problem to public transit.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > It's clearly not a necessity as I, my fiancé, and several of our friends are all careless and do just fine. Please consider people living in other circumstances and with other responsibilities before making blanket statements for all based on the experience of yourself and your close social group. It's entirely possibly that you and your group do not encompass all the situations that may be found. For example, having a child makes not having a car extremely problematic. Being 30-60 minutes late to pick up you child is often unacceptable, and in many circumstances (such as childcare) may net you quite large fees if it happens often.
  - revelation 10y ago
    Yes, clearly it's a problem to not have a car when living a lifestyle designed entirely around a car. We get that, we can skip the 100 identical posts that have appeared and are yet to appear. The point is: what are you going to do about it? Because clearly city populations are growing and people are exceedingly unhappy with vastly subsidizing a shrinking minority that expects to drive door-to-door, or better yet, lives in a cheap suburb but expects city dwellers to sacrifice money and space for their daily commute. I think you will find in places that cater much less to cars people are very understanding if you miss a bus. Though likely they won't notice, because there are simply more buses and transit options around, so your delay won't be an hour. It seems getting rid of free parking, as suggested by the OP, is a good start, no?
    - closeparen 10y ago
      I expect city dwellers to recognize that their aesthetic distaste for car infrastructure doesn't come close to the very real impact on someone's life of tripling all their travel times. As long as we're humoring city dwellers being tired of things, we will never have housing construction (they've got ownership or rent control already, and they're tired of tall buildings). As long as we're humoring what they want to pay for, we'll never have decent transit (they can walk or bike, why should they pay taxes for your bus?). There are reasonable positions to be in which don't require parking downtown. Cheap housing in the center. Cheap housing near train stations and a quick ride in. Abundant parking at train stations and a quick ride in. Decouple cities from employment so that they really are luxuries and not crucial access to opportunity. Keep job growth in balance with walkable housing growth and don't allow development of suburbs. Any one of those is a great thing to strive for. Eliminating parking by itself just makes the city less livable.
      - drdeadringer 10y ago
        > As long as we're humoring what they want to pay for, we'll never have decent transit (they can walk or bike, why should they pay taxes for your bus?). Honest question: is there really "paying for transit" hate? The only "transit hate" I've seen ranges around various forms of "it sucks" e.g. "never a bus when I need one" punctuated by "5 of the same bus at the same time" and "always late". I'm happy to pay for transit, just as I am up for sidewalks and bike lanes. Also: how does one "decouple cities from employment"? And how does a surge of oasis-style job centers divorce an employee from needing a car to get there?
        closeparen 10y ago
        A basic car is practically free compared to basic housing. It's not necessary to divorce employees from needing cars, any more than it's necessary to divorce them from needing housing. It is necessary to divorce employees from trying to drive (mostly) the same routes at the same times, because there is no solution to car transportation at scale without traffic jams. The "solutions" (congestion pricing, less parking, etc) are to reduce the scale. It is necessary to divorce employees from competing with each other for such tiny slices of the city where the commute is reasonable, because paying an extra $2000/mo just for land value is such a soul-crushing waste of effort and resources. It is necessary to aggressively migrate the fleet of cars to electrics. Rush hour traffic in small town or city is still going 60mph, and living "downtown" isn't nearly so expensive because there's less competition, and little drastically wealthier competition. (Good look competing with tech workers for nicely located apartments in SF, or bankers for nicely located apartments in Manhattan, if you aren't one). See: SF opposition to tech shuttles, Muni expansion, Caltrain extension. I guess those aren't really about cost, but there's a common thread of "I don't like the noise" and "I don't like the kind of people that transportation brings in to my quiet neighborhood" and "we shouldn't be making it more attractive for gentrifiers to live here."
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - curun1r 10y ago
    That being unacceptable is based on conditions where owning a car is subsidized by free parking. Remove those subsidies and there would now be a market for more flexible childcare. Your argument amounts to a tautology. A car is necessary under current driving conditions is not the same thing as a car being necessary under any driving conditions. There are many places around the world where most people don't own cars. They still manage to figure out how to raise children, often while being substantially poorer than we are in the states. I'm confident that if we create the right environment that discourages car ownership, we'll figure it out here too.
    - kbenson 10y ago
      > Your argument amounts to a tautology. Only when you make up some argument for me... > A car is necessary under current driving conditions is not the same thing as a car being necessary under any driving conditions. That wasn't my argument at all. I was simple stating that when making an argument using personal experience as the basis for what is and isn't "necessary" is likely to leave out a lot of people with valid concerns. My example wasn't to push an agenda for or against cards, but to show how some people may come to an entirely different conclusion about what is and isn't necessary, currently.
    - lovemenot 10y ago
      Quite so. My wife and I have raised three children into their teens without ever having owned a car. This was not problematic, precisely because we live in Tokyo, a city mentioned in the article as having enlightened policies on parking and public transport.
      - candiodari 10y ago
        So everyone can do this ? What is your average expenses per month, you know, basic stuff. Apartment (rent/mortgage), transport, non-restaurant food, etc. And how does that compare to average income around you ? This is the argument everyone in SF makes. "Just move into the city. Use an (electrical) bike. Yes there's the homeless but you learn to steer around them quickly". And then you look at the rent, and the average income. Needless to say, this is not a reasonable suggestion.
  - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    Yes, because clearly having children was impossible until we developed the motor car.
- dba7dba 10y ago
  I gather you don't have kids then? With young kids in family you will almost certainly need cars.
  - nsxwolf 10y ago
    We need to convince people to stop having kids, too. Then we can have our public transportation utopia.
    - 35bge57dtjku 10y ago
      We need to convince people to stop wanting to go anywhere, then we can save on the costs of that, too.
  - yellow_postit 10y ago
    People living with children in London tend to do just fine as long as we are trading anectdotes.
zifnab06 10y ago
My commute to my office is 90 minutes by bus on a good day. It's 15 minutes driving outside of rush hour. If you need to go downtown, Seattle buses are great. Anything else (especially east/West corridors to the north) is a huge joke.
- drdeadringer 10y ago
  > It's 15 minutes driving outside of rush hour. Is it 90 minutes inside of rush hour?
  - sogen 10y ago
    I think he meant to say "on a good day"
    - dmoy 10y ago
      Unless he drives through Mercer and then maybe it is 90 minutes in rush hour lol. Takes my wife that long on occasion to get home from downtown Seattle because of the Amazon Mercer traffic
      - grogenaut 10y ago
        worst case from south bellevue via 90/merce to belltown takes me 55 minutes in rush hour. Well a month ago when that wreck was on i-5 I took 405 south to i5 north to belltown and that took 1:30, eg 90 minutes. If I go in my preferred slot it's 45 minutes max, usually 33 minutes. If I go 10am, 6:45 pm, it's 22 and 20 minutes. Fastest I've ever made it is 19 minutes and that was doing well over the speed limit the whole time on a motorcycle.
        dmoy 10y ago
        Heading to East side is better, yea. And actually, if you are already on Mercer it's not as bad. Getting across from Westlake ish means the bus routinely goes slower than walking speed. Can walk to Fremont faster...
uzoodoo 10y ago
If driving a car is so effective for everyone, no one is going to petition to add a new bus route, and there will never be an acceptable alternative.
Buge 10y ago
>Why should the city and property owners have to subsidize cars? They shouldn't, but they need some way for people to get to them and flow people through the city, or they will cease to exist. So cities should remove all parking minimum laws, and let apartments and businesses decide how much parking to build. That's exactly what the article is saying.
- taurath 10y ago
  If everyone did that, the value of their property would go down unless the city picked up the tab for alternate transport. Either way the city pays
  - Buge 10y ago
    Why would the value of their property go down? Apple's new headquarters has 318k ft^2 of office space and 325k ft^2 of legally required parking spaces. If Apple could flexibly choose what they wanted to do with their land, they could use their land in more useful ways, making it more valuable to them.
    - taurath 10y ago
      If people can't get there, or park there, then its less valuable to them. There's freeway capacity and bus routes to think about, and I'm 100% sure that they planned their campus alongside city planners in cupertino and santa clara county. That area of Wolfe Rd. would be totally overrun if there wasn't enough parking not only for current employees but future ones as well.
      - tetrep 10y ago
        > If people can't get there, or park there, then its less valuable to them. So the natural response to that is to force businesses to have greater value? Is this not exactly what market forces would do naturally? A business with insufficient parking would have less value than one with, and would therefore compete less effectively.
      - 10y ago
curun1r 10y ago
I think the article's authors would say that you have it backwards. You can't have acceptable alternatives while cities are forcing businesses and developers to subsidize car driving. How can the alternatives compete when the market is subsidizing their competition? What this article is positing is that the conditions you describe are emergent, not determining. Change the policies and the conditions will adjust after a brief, albeit painful period.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jhayward 10y ago
  > Change the policies and the conditions will adjust after a brief, albeit painful period. This is an unproven assertion, which in my view is most likely political dogma rather than analysis. Take a look at parking and alternative transportation in Philadelphia, for instance. It's nothing but pain for everyone and has been for at least 30 years. City zoning codes requiring off-street parking on a per-dwelling or per-sq foot basis at least has the aspect of not letting the situation deteriorate into unlivable squalor, with no good alternatives. It may be that this pushes the problem to the transportation network, true, but that's a different problem to solve. If you want to take away, or let developer profit-driven markets take away a major quality of life issue then you'd better provide a better, cheaper, more individually useful alternative first.
Sharlin 10y ago
Cellphones don't have the sort of negative externalities that cars do, and there are no statutes that actively make externalities worse, either.
monk_e_boy 10y ago
Agreed. If you live outside of a city with no public transport ... what options do you have? No one is going to cycle 40 miles to work every day.
- convolvatron 10y ago
  maybe it really doesn't make sense to travel 80 miles a day to get to work? just saying, at some point it becomes a poor societal and personal tradeoff. where do you think the line is? to some extend the 80 mile commute is being subsidized (roads, artificially lower gas prices, cost of congestion, pollution, sufficient space for parking at dense destinations, etc) I'm not saying there aren't tradeoffs, but you can't really assert that as a group we just have to accommodate 80 mile daily commutes for everyone and solve backwards from that.
  - monk_e_boy 10y ago
    For me it comes down to my house - I can't sell it as it is worth less than when I purchased it. This is the case for a lot of people since the housing crash. Also, jobs come and go. Sometimes I'm working close to home, sometimes 40 miles East, sometimes 50 miles north. I guess this is the same for most people. Why move when you're just going to get laid off in a years time?
    - convolvatron 10y ago
      i'm not criticizing your personal choices. i'm old and i can't afford to buy so i really screwed up. but as a matter of policy I'm not sure we should be encouraging exurb development by trying to twist transit around that. more broadly i think the US (whatever combination of govt and industry) has failed to provide well for the guy with a job that wants to invest in property and possibly to raise a family. even with two incomes. as you say, the promise of job stability is looking increasingly illusory the job market putting you in a position where you are killing time in traffic for 2+ hours a day is a pretty clear sign of that failure
aidenn0 10y ago
But we don't provide free cell phones to everyone.
- dsfyu404ed 10y ago
  We don't provide free cars to anyone.
  - grogenaut 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure I pay for the bus as well both with taxes and fares.
  - TheCoelacanth 10y ago
    But we do provide free parking.
thatfrenchguy 10y ago
You should try living in a real city like London or Paris, where being a car owner sucks and that's really good.

by taurath 10y ago

plandis 10y ago

I don't even own a car in Seattle. It's clearly not a necessity as I, my fiancé, and several of our friends are all careless and do just fine. If anything its drivers that do stupid stuff like block bus lanes, don't know how to merge, etc... that are a bigger problem to public transit.

kbenson 10y ago
> It's clearly not a necessity as I, my fiancé, and several of our friends are all careless and do just fine. Please consider people living in other circumstances and with other responsibilities before making blanket statements for all based on the experience of yourself and your close social group. It's entirely possibly that you and your group do not encompass all the situations that may be found. For example, having a child makes not having a car extremely problematic. Being 30-60 minutes late to pick up you child is often unacceptable, and in many circumstances (such as childcare) may net you quite large fees if it happens often.
- revelation 10y ago
  Yes, clearly it's a problem to not have a car when living a lifestyle designed entirely around a car. We get that, we can skip the 100 identical posts that have appeared and are yet to appear. The point is: what are you going to do about it? Because clearly city populations are growing and people are exceedingly unhappy with vastly subsidizing a shrinking minority that expects to drive door-to-door, or better yet, lives in a cheap suburb but expects city dwellers to sacrifice money and space for their daily commute. I think you will find in places that cater much less to cars people are very understanding if you miss a bus. Though likely they won't notice, because there are simply more buses and transit options around, so your delay won't be an hour. It seems getting rid of free parking, as suggested by the OP, is a good start, no?
  - closeparen 10y ago
    I expect city dwellers to recognize that their aesthetic distaste for car infrastructure doesn't come close to the very real impact on someone's life of tripling all their travel times. As long as we're humoring city dwellers being tired of things, we will never have housing construction (they've got ownership or rent control already, and they're tired of tall buildings). As long as we're humoring what they want to pay for, we'll never have decent transit (they can walk or bike, why should they pay taxes for your bus?). There are reasonable positions to be in which don't require parking downtown. Cheap housing in the center. Cheap housing near train stations and a quick ride in. Abundant parking at train stations and a quick ride in. Decouple cities from employment so that they really are luxuries and not crucial access to opportunity. Keep job growth in balance with walkable housing growth and don't allow development of suburbs. Any one of those is a great thing to strive for. Eliminating parking by itself just makes the city less livable.
    - drdeadringer 10y ago
      > As long as we're humoring what they want to pay for, we'll never have decent transit (they can walk or bike, why should they pay taxes for your bus?). Honest question: is there really "paying for transit" hate? The only "transit hate" I've seen ranges around various forms of "it sucks" e.g. "never a bus when I need one" punctuated by "5 of the same bus at the same time" and "always late". I'm happy to pay for transit, just as I am up for sidewalks and bike lanes. Also: how does one "decouple cities from employment"? And how does a surge of oasis-style job centers divorce an employee from needing a car to get there?
      - closeparen 10y ago
        A basic car is practically free compared to basic housing. It's not necessary to divorce employees from needing cars, any more than it's necessary to divorce them from needing housing. It is necessary to divorce employees from trying to drive (mostly) the same routes at the same times, because there is no solution to car transportation at scale without traffic jams. The "solutions" (congestion pricing, less parking, etc) are to reduce the scale. It is necessary to divorce employees from competing with each other for such tiny slices of the city where the commute is reasonable, because paying an extra $2000/mo just for land value is such a soul-crushing waste of effort and resources. It is necessary to aggressively migrate the fleet of cars to electrics. Rush hour traffic in small town or city is still going 60mph, and living "downtown" isn't nearly so expensive because there's less competition, and little drastically wealthier competition. (Good look competing with tech workers for nicely located apartments in SF, or bankers for nicely located apartments in Manhattan, if you aren't one). See: SF opposition to tech shuttles, Muni expansion, Caltrain extension. I guess those aren't really about cost, but there's a common thread of "I don't like the noise" and "I don't like the kind of people that transportation brings in to my quiet neighborhood" and "we shouldn't be making it more attractive for gentrifiers to live here."
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- curun1r 10y ago
  That being unacceptable is based on conditions where owning a car is subsidized by free parking. Remove those subsidies and there would now be a market for more flexible childcare. Your argument amounts to a tautology. A car is necessary under current driving conditions is not the same thing as a car being necessary under any driving conditions. There are many places around the world where most people don't own cars. They still manage to figure out how to raise children, often while being substantially poorer than we are in the states. I'm confident that if we create the right environment that discourages car ownership, we'll figure it out here too.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    > Your argument amounts to a tautology. Only when you make up some argument for me... > A car is necessary under current driving conditions is not the same thing as a car being necessary under any driving conditions. That wasn't my argument at all. I was simple stating that when making an argument using personal experience as the basis for what is and isn't "necessary" is likely to leave out a lot of people with valid concerns. My example wasn't to push an agenda for or against cards, but to show how some people may come to an entirely different conclusion about what is and isn't necessary, currently.
  - lovemenot 10y ago
    Quite so. My wife and I have raised three children into their teens without ever having owned a car. This was not problematic, precisely because we live in Tokyo, a city mentioned in the article as having enlightened policies on parking and public transport.
    - candiodari 10y ago
      So everyone can do this ? What is your average expenses per month, you know, basic stuff. Apartment (rent/mortgage), transport, non-restaurant food, etc. And how does that compare to average income around you ? This is the argument everyone in SF makes. "Just move into the city. Use an (electrical) bike. Yes there's the homeless but you learn to steer around them quickly". And then you look at the rent, and the average income. Needless to say, this is not a reasonable suggestion.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  Yes, because clearly having children was impossible until we developed the motor car.
dba7dba 10y ago
I gather you don't have kids then? With young kids in family you will almost certainly need cars.
- nsxwolf 10y ago
  We need to convince people to stop having kids, too. Then we can have our public transportation utopia.
  - 35bge57dtjku 10y ago
    We need to convince people to stop wanting to go anywhere, then we can save on the costs of that, too.
- yellow_postit 10y ago
  People living with children in London tend to do just fine as long as we are trading anectdotes.

zifnab06 10y ago

My commute to my office is 90 minutes by bus on a good day. It's 15 minutes driving outside of rush hour. If you need to go downtown, Seattle buses are great. Anything else (especially east/West corridors to the north) is a huge joke.

drdeadringer 10y ago
> It's 15 minutes driving outside of rush hour. Is it 90 minutes inside of rush hour?
- sogen 10y ago
  I think he meant to say "on a good day"
  - dmoy 10y ago
    Unless he drives through Mercer and then maybe it is 90 minutes in rush hour lol. Takes my wife that long on occasion to get home from downtown Seattle because of the Amazon Mercer traffic
    - grogenaut 10y ago
      worst case from south bellevue via 90/merce to belltown takes me 55 minutes in rush hour. Well a month ago when that wreck was on i-5 I took 405 south to i5 north to belltown and that took 1:30, eg 90 minutes. If I go in my preferred slot it's 45 minutes max, usually 33 minutes. If I go 10am, 6:45 pm, it's 22 and 20 minutes. Fastest I've ever made it is 19 minutes and that was doing well over the speed limit the whole time on a motorcycle.
      - dmoy 10y ago
        Heading to East side is better, yea. And actually, if you are already on Mercer it's not as bad. Getting across from Westlake ish means the bus routinely goes slower than walking speed. Can walk to Fremont faster...

uzoodoo 10y ago

If driving a car is so effective for everyone, no one is going to petition to add a new bus route, and there will never be an acceptable alternative.

Buge 10y ago

>Why should the city and property owners have to subsidize cars? They shouldn't, but they need some way for people to get to them and flow people through the city, or they will cease to exist. So cities should remove all parking minimum laws, and let apartments and businesses decide how much parking to build. That's exactly what the article is saying.

taurath 10y ago
If everyone did that, the value of their property would go down unless the city picked up the tab for alternate transport. Either way the city pays
- Buge 10y ago
  Why would the value of their property go down? Apple's new headquarters has 318k ft^2 of office space and 325k ft^2 of legally required parking spaces. If Apple could flexibly choose what they wanted to do with their land, they could use their land in more useful ways, making it more valuable to them.
  - taurath 10y ago
    If people can't get there, or park there, then its less valuable to them. There's freeway capacity and bus routes to think about, and I'm 100% sure that they planned their campus alongside city planners in cupertino and santa clara county. That area of Wolfe Rd. would be totally overrun if there wasn't enough parking not only for current employees but future ones as well.
    - tetrep 10y ago
      > If people can't get there, or park there, then its less valuable to them. So the natural response to that is to force businesses to have greater value? Is this not exactly what market forces would do naturally? A business with insufficient parking would have less value than one with, and would therefore compete less effectively.
    - 10y ago

curun1r 10y ago

I think the article's authors would say that you have it backwards. You can't have acceptable alternatives while cities are forcing businesses and developers to subsidize car driving. How can the alternatives compete when the market is subsidizing their competition? What this article is positing is that the conditions you describe are emergent, not determining. Change the policies and the conditions will adjust after a brief, albeit painful period.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jhayward 10y ago
> Change the policies and the conditions will adjust after a brief, albeit painful period. This is an unproven assertion, which in my view is most likely political dogma rather than analysis. Take a look at parking and alternative transportation in Philadelphia, for instance. It's nothing but pain for everyone and has been for at least 30 years. City zoning codes requiring off-street parking on a per-dwelling or per-sq foot basis at least has the aspect of not letting the situation deteriorate into unlivable squalor, with no good alternatives. It may be that this pushes the problem to the transportation network, true, but that's a different problem to solve. If you want to take away, or let developer profit-driven markets take away a major quality of life issue then you'd better provide a better, cheaper, more individually useful alternative first.

Sharlin 10y ago

Cellphones don't have the sort of negative externalities that cars do, and there are no statutes that actively make externalities worse, either.

monk_e_boy 10y ago

Agreed. If you live outside of a city with no public transport ... what options do you have? No one is going to cycle 40 miles to work every day.

convolvatron 10y ago
maybe it really doesn't make sense to travel 80 miles a day to get to work? just saying, at some point it becomes a poor societal and personal tradeoff. where do you think the line is? to some extend the 80 mile commute is being subsidized (roads, artificially lower gas prices, cost of congestion, pollution, sufficient space for parking at dense destinations, etc) I'm not saying there aren't tradeoffs, but you can't really assert that as a group we just have to accommodate 80 mile daily commutes for everyone and solve backwards from that.
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  For me it comes down to my house - I can't sell it as it is worth less than when I purchased it. This is the case for a lot of people since the housing crash. Also, jobs come and go. Sometimes I'm working close to home, sometimes 40 miles East, sometimes 50 miles north. I guess this is the same for most people. Why move when you're just going to get laid off in a years time?
  - convolvatron 10y ago
    i'm not criticizing your personal choices. i'm old and i can't afford to buy so i really screwed up. but as a matter of policy I'm not sure we should be encouraging exurb development by trying to twist transit around that. more broadly i think the US (whatever combination of govt and industry) has failed to provide well for the guy with a job that wants to invest in property and possibly to raise a family. even with two incomes. as you say, the promise of job stability is looking increasingly illusory the job market putting you in a position where you are killing time in traffic for 2+ hours a day is a pretty clear sign of that failure

aidenn0 10y ago

But we don't provide free cell phones to everyone.

dsfyu404ed 10y ago
We don't provide free cars to anyone.
- grogenaut 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure I pay for the bus as well both with taxes and fares.
- TheCoelacanth 10y ago
  But we do provide free parking.

thatfrenchguy 10y ago

You should try living in a real city like London or Paris, where being a car owner sucks and that's really good.