21 ms·

Spent the last 6 months in Seoul and the surrounding cities in Korea. Never needed a car. You can literally do everything without a car, everything is a short w

Spent the last 6 months in Seoul and the surrounding cities in Korea. Never needed a car. You can literally do everything without a car, everything is a short walk. I truly believe it makes a huge positive impact on happiness when you can just walk anywhere instead of having to drive. Also you'll notice that in Korea/Japan there are way more small businesses and things to do (eg. karaoke, cafes, etc) because people of this. In America there's relatively less to do because leaving the home is more of a hassle and less interesting, so people just stay in more. My least favorite thing about living in America is the dependence on cars (outside of a select few cities like NYC). Now that my parents in the suburbs sold their spare car, whenever I go back to visit, I'm stranded there during the weekdays because the nearest bus stop is like a 40 minute walk, and the nearest subway would be maybe a 90 minute walk. If I need to go anywhere, I'm dependent on Uber/Lyft. Even if I get access to a car, there's relatively much less to do as I mentioned above.

jdnenej 7y ago
In the same situation as you. Currently living with parents out in the suburbs. Plan to move later so I don't need or want a car but I'm basically stuck at home when not working. The only thing there is to do here is cycling which is relatively safe but you can't realistically get anywhere so I do it just for sport. The car culture is pretty bad in Australia as well.
- barbs 7y ago
  Do you live in Australia? I've lived in Sydney most of my life and I've found it fairly easy to get around with public transport. I'm currently living in Melbourne and it's even better, and has much better support for bikes.
  - dwd 7y ago
    I lived for a couple of years in the Melbourne CBD (off Lt Lonsdale) and never had a need for a car the whole time. Different story later living in Elwood and working in Port Melbourne, not having a car to commute along the Esplanade would have been a huge time sink.
  - keenmaster 7y ago
    The Bondi to Coogee beach walk is spectacular. I also like that there’s one street which cuts through the entirety of downtown Sydney (George Street).
  - jdnenej 7y ago
    The bus comes twice a day to my area and it lines up with school hours.
- sien 7y ago
  There are lots of places in Australia where you can ride to work. I've done it in Melbourne and Canberra. It just depends on how far you are from your job. Lots of people can cycle. Few really do though. Even in Canberra where the cycle paths are great it's ~10% of people who ride, perhaps even lower.
  - jdnenej 7y ago
    I'm about 20km away from work. I sometimes ride in but the road to the city is super unsafe.
- fdfsdfadsfxffff 7y ago
  As a European living in Australia (Melbourne, specifically), I'm horrified by the cycling infrastructure. It's such an afterthought most places, and you're usually not separated from fast-moving cars. Sometimes the cycle lane literally cuts across a car lane — super dangerous. I don't miss much about the Netherlands, but I definitely miss the cycling amenities. You're a first-class citizen on the road in a way that's hard to describe to cyclists here (especially the fervent ones).
  - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
    To be fair, good cycling infrastructure is not pervasive in the whole of Europe either. In the Netherlands it is, of course, as in most of northern Europe. But I'm from Spain and in many cities, cycling infrastructure is either almost nonexistent or an afterthough with many insecure spots, just as you describe for Melbourne. And cyclists are definitely second-class citizens. Things have improved a lot in the last ten years (from cycling in cities being almost unthinkable to Melbourne-like) so I hope this comment won't be true in another ten, but we still have a long way to go. Ability to walk to places and decent public transport is practically universal throughout Europe, though.
seer 7y ago
I wonder if part of the success of silicon valley can be attributed to this? In most other places you can spend your time doing interesting things all day long and never get bored. Whereas in SV you just start a business? How many people would not have began their software ventures if there was enough comedy clubs, pubs, theaters, community centers, beaches etc a short 10mins walk from home? Actually wondering?
- wpietri 7y ago
  It's a good question, but I think if that were true, we wouldn't see many startups in places like SF and NYC, and quite a lot of them in the middle of nowhere. For me, interactions with novel people, experiences, and ideas are a big feeder for my own ideas.
  - RyanAF7 7y ago
    Venture Capitalists aren't in the middle of nowhere.
    - dgellow 7y ago
      Something attracted the VCs in the first place though.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      This is an excellent point. People talk about the important network effects of SV, and that was definitely material before the Internet made distance less relevant. But however much information flows through copper wire, investment doesn't, because VCs expect people to come to them.
  - seer 7y ago
    Never been to SF (or US for that matter) so genuinely interested if this is a factor - from all the biographies I’ve read and looking from the sidelines it seems to me - novel people + capital + entrepreneurship + technical expertise (post apollo) + boredom are the key sauce for those kinds of things. And thats not about what SV is today. I was lead to believe the so named HBO show portrays it quite accurately. I was thinking more what it was in the 70s. Though to be honest living in the mediterranean I vastly prefer the walkable nature oriented laid back kind of places myself. Way more fun (and healthy) to live in. I was just wondering if that boredom thing was a factor
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
13of40 7y ago
I went fishing today and had to drive some very sketchy, not-on-google-maps dirt roads to get to the first spot I tried. What happens to that sort of thing once we're all living in walkable condos and depending on driverless Uber for exceptions?
- abdullahkhalids 7y ago
  You rent a car that you can drive yourself to wherever you want. Over the long term in a walkable city, that is definitely cheaper than owning a car.
  - gibolt 7y ago
    Or an autonomous vehicle picks you and your friends up and the experience doesn't just start at the time of arrival to the destination.
    - 13of40 7y ago
      Assuming it has that skill.
  - 13of40 7y ago
    Assuming you have that skill after years of having a computer drive you around.
    - H8crilA 7y ago
      It's not hard to learn how to drive. Otherwise not ~everybody would be able to do it. I don't think that self driving cars will replace all cars immediately. That makes little sense from CAPEX perspective, cars are fine for 5, 10, maybe 15 years. You'll not replace an okay car for the latest self driving vehicle, dumping the previous car to the junkyard. Rollout may take decades. And we still don't know when are they coming to the market, that may also take a very long time.
      - 7y ago
IloveHN84 7y ago
Don't let be fooled by the "tourist impression". Staying for some days isn't the same as living in a place, involving commuting to work, bringing children to school, etc Every city looks nice as a Tourist, but then it's hard if you live there and in the false zone of the city (=farest away)
- oefrha 7y ago
  Having moved from somewhere with working public transportation to the United States (and having lived here for close to a decade), I can assure you it’s not tourist impression.
  - codebolt 7y ago
    How many kids do you have? Any more than one and car becomes necessary in my experience.
    - namesbc 7y ago
      Imagine a world where instead of having to strap your screaming kids in to a car seat for an hour drive in traffic, you walked along a pedestrian street, your kids kicking a ball around, you visit a couple stores, see your kids off to their school, and then walk a couple more blocks to work. When school is over your kids walk safely back home by themselves because there aren't cars out there threatening their lives. This sounds way less stressful than your kids being dependent on you and your car for everything they need.
      - konart 7y ago
        I don't thing this is what codebolt was talking about. If you can one kid - there is no problem really. Walk him or her to school in the morning, ask grandmother to bring them back etc. When you have more than one - it is entrily possible they will end up going to different schools and after the school one of them had to go to the music shool and the other one to his hockey team or something etc etc. You simply can't do this without a car. I was the only child in the family so we never needed a car for this kind of scenario, plus we were living in a relatevely small city (450k), so public transport was more than enough for me, but this is not always the case. >and then walk a couple more blocks to work. yeah, now imaging you have two of them going to two different schools, each 40 minutes walking distance from home, different directions and your office in somewhere else too.
H8crilA 7y ago
It's the case not just in Korea and Japan but in most cities outside of America. It's one of American peculiarities, like checks or no public health care. China has a fantastic subway system in most big cities, for example. I once took a subway ride from the Shenzhen airport to the Hong Kong border, crossed the border, switched to another subway and arrived in downtown Hong Kong. That's around 65km (40 miles) by public subway!
- rpedela 7y ago
  There is public health care in US. Medicare for old people, Medicaid for poor people, and anyone without insurance can go to the ER. It may not be great, but it does exist.
  - noobermin 7y ago
    This seems like a pedantic point. The US AFAIK is the only healthcare system that is as dysfunctional as it is in the first world.
    - rpedela 7y ago
      While traveling outside the US, I have found many people think Americans are cold and heartless and just let people die. It is an understandable conclusion the way people talk about the US system in the media and internet, but it also isn't true. The US has dysfunctional, public healthcare but it isn't so dysfunctional that you just die if you fall or get an ear infection without insurance. So saying the US has "no public health care" is not only incorrect but it is also overly dramatic.
      - louwrentius 7y ago
        But you are fucked with a huge bill that would cripple your life in a way that you might as well be dead.
        Broken_Hippo 7y ago
vnorilo 7y ago
This European spent a couple of carless months in Pittsburgh and found the public transit pretty decent. Only ride-hailed a handful of times. I do realize that Pittsburgh is probably not a median US city, but serves to remind us in the old world that there's a huge variety of different sorts of places in the US.
- noobermin 7y ago
  It isn't. It's also an older city and it depends on where in a city you are. Try living this way in a suburb of LA, your quality of life without a car will be greatly reduced.
pencillr 7y ago
When I moved to the USA for a few months from Europe, I was surprised by the fact that you simply can't walk to places. There are so huge spaces between things except for maybe city centers. (I was mostly in CA and FL)
- eb0la 7y ago
  I've been in Houston this year and it shocked me how difficult is to move there without a car. I was saved by Uber and Lyft many times just because both my hotel and the office were really far away from public transport.
  - jcranberry 7y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if Houston is the worst city in the nation when it comes to "walkability". It's so spread out.
- vladojsem 7y ago
  Yes, this is very true. That is how European cities from US cities. In Europe cities are built for pedestrians, in US for cars. All these US suburbs areas with one-store buildings are making transportation ineffective because the US city is often more spread. However, there are some positive things happening, like walkability studies in US cities. Hopefully, that will help in the near future.
lostjohnny 7y ago
Never needed a car in the past four years in Milan and the year before in Bologna, Italy, and when it happened I could rely on car-sharing services or very cheap rentals. But I'm originally from Rome, where I spent most of my life, and without a car in Rome you're pretty much f*ed.
lanevorockz 7y ago
You are ignoring the number one problem. Population Density, dense areas need public transport less dense areas require custom transport. You argument here is against small towns and in favour or ultra dense cities. Public transport is just a mean to complain.
- goodcanadian 7y ago
  I absolutely hate this argument. In Europe, you take the train and there is literal farm land in between stations. While there are lots of small towns and villages close together in a way that you don't necessarily see in North America, the average density is considerably less than Los Angeles, for example. There is no good reason LA couldn't be crisscrossed by trains instead of by freeways.
  - vinay427 7y ago
    This doesn't even seem to follow, in my experience, and their argument definitely makes sense to me as someone that's lived in an urban European city, an urban American city, and some American suburbs and traveled around all of these places extensively. Why do trains work well in many European countries? When there's farmland between stations (or even between some bus stops in the city where I currently live), it means that because you normally want to go somewhere that's not farmland, you're very likely to want to go somewhere near a station. The density around specific points (train stations, bus/tram plazas, etc.) is particularly high which makes the last-mile or last-kilometer problem largely a non-issue. If you build this in the LA metro area, it might serve the people who live very close to stations well, but everyone else who lives somewhere in the middle between two stations (which would be a higher percentage than people living in European farmland) would need to find a way to get home from the station.
    - vladojsem 7y ago
      I agree with you. In the case of LA metro area, it is just too spread city = badly designed. If you imagine even fast public transport, to get from one side of LA to the other side, it would still require a lot of stops in the low population density areas. Let's say every stop would cost you 5 minutes which means that even a car could be faster than public transport.
ekianjo 7y ago
> You can literally do everything without a car, everything is a short walk when you are young and single. By the time you have kids this changes everything.
- jefftk 7y ago
  We live outside of Boston with two kids, now 3y and 5y. We're about 10min from the subway, and we've never had a car. We do a lot of walking with our kids, and when they were younger we used the stroller more. I'm as happy with this as I was before kids.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    The difference is that most people can't afford to live just a few minutes away from the subway. City centers are very expensive. You can't expect people to live with the same standards if they have to walk for 1 hour to get to the nearest public transport.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      My parent post is saying that even in situations where walking is very practical it stops working after you have kids, and I strongly disagree there. As for the question of how generalizable this is, the US situation is much worse than other cities around the world. Boston has very good public transit for the US, but it's still pretty minimal globally, and we could build out transit far better. It's also only expensive to live near transit, or generally to live in cities, because we've massively restricted housing construction. Allow people to construct tall dense buildings, use the tax money to build out transit, and for the price of an apartment in the cheapest part of Boston today you can have something better that's a short walk from a transit stop that will get you all over the city faster than the T does today.
- JDiculous 7y ago
  That's the thing though - where I'm living right now in Korea you can! I'm not exaggerating when I say that everything is walking distance here - school, hospital, grocery store, kids entertainment places, food, etc. There are multiple playgrounds literally outside my building. And I don't live in some city center, it's a residential area.
namelosw 7y ago
I live in Beijing and I spend 20 mins riding share bike to work every day. I don't drive because I don't find it useful. I have a driving license but almost never used it, there are many, many people also having a license without driving cars. Almost colleagues owning cars don't drive on workdays because the metro is good (crowed by less crowded than driving and parking). It's not just one city like NYC, at least all moderate to major cities in China are friendly if you don't have a car. I've been to SF and the silicon valley, and I'm pretty annoyed I almost cannot go anywhere without driving. The difference might be related to how do people build the city, in order to make one way to suck less than another. In Beijing, it seems to be not driving suck less than driving.
faceplanted 7y ago
Do think of the other perspective though, all those local places for going out are so popular partly because housing is so small and expensive that staying home for the evening just isn't that attractive a proposition
- JDiculous 7y ago
  True. But I never really enjoyed staying home for the evening in my big house in the suburbs either.
bluGill 7y ago
People stay home in the US because they have a house with plenty of things to do at home. Why go to a karaoke bar when you have a piano in your house? Why go to a cafe when you have a nice kitchen to cook your own meal? Why do A when you have B? The large houses people have in the US enables and enforces a lifestyle very different from what you get in other cities. This is just a fact - you are allowed to hate it or like it. I don't want to have a karaoke bar nearby - it might be fun (I've never been to one), but at home I have my wood saws, music, computers, food, thread. Those are just the things I've used this week at home (note that it is Tuesday as I write this: the week is only three days old) to entertain myself.
- dumb_troll 7y ago
  It's not about stuff, it's about having other people. Some ( apparently a whole lot more than I thought) people find the lack of social interaction in American towns and cities depressing and alienating. Moreover you may have a lot things to keep you entertained in your home, but I doubt that yours is reflective of the average American home. Most people (I'm guessing now) probably just watch T.V and argue online...
- dasloop 7y ago
  Probably cultural. I have, as many spaniards, many things to do at home but I prefer public spaces (restaurants, bars, museums, concerts...). As Mazoni says in one of his songs: "Quan sortim a la nit no entrem mai en un local amb poca gent i no ho entenc perquè després només parlem entre nosaltres" What translates to something like: "When we go out at night we never enter a place with few people And I do not understand it because after all we talk only among us"
- JDiculous 7y ago
  For sure it's a tradeoff - more space + privacy/isolation vs. less space + more people and things to do outside your home. Houses in America are way bigger than the rest of the world because everything is so spread out. I prefer living in an apartment in a nice city vs. living in a big house in the suburbs. But it's totally fine to feel the opposite. The problem is that in the U.S., the only real city of any scale that's truly carless that I've ever seen is NYC. It's fun for a year or two, but it's too "city" in all the negative ways and very expensive so not a place I'd want to live in long-term (unless I stumbled onto enough millions to buy a brownstown in Brooklyn Heights or something).
agumonkey 7y ago
As much as I agree. It will feel weird to leave (if it happens) the car centric world.. But it's probably an improvement in most dimensions anyways.

jdnenej 7y ago

In the same situation as you. Currently living with parents out in the suburbs. Plan to move later so I don't need or want a car but I'm basically stuck at home when not working. The only thing there is to do here is cycling which is relatively safe but you can't realistically get anywhere so I do it just for sport. The car culture is pretty bad in Australia as well.

barbs 7y ago
Do you live in Australia? I've lived in Sydney most of my life and I've found it fairly easy to get around with public transport. I'm currently living in Melbourne and it's even better, and has much better support for bikes.
- dwd 7y ago
  I lived for a couple of years in the Melbourne CBD (off Lt Lonsdale) and never had a need for a car the whole time. Different story later living in Elwood and working in Port Melbourne, not having a car to commute along the Esplanade would have been a huge time sink.
- keenmaster 7y ago
  The Bondi to Coogee beach walk is spectacular. I also like that there’s one street which cuts through the entirety of downtown Sydney (George Street).
- jdnenej 7y ago
  The bus comes twice a day to my area and it lines up with school hours.
sien 7y ago
There are lots of places in Australia where you can ride to work. I've done it in Melbourne and Canberra. It just depends on how far you are from your job. Lots of people can cycle. Few really do though. Even in Canberra where the cycle paths are great it's ~10% of people who ride, perhaps even lower.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  I'm about 20km away from work. I sometimes ride in but the road to the city is super unsafe.
fdfsdfadsfxffff 7y ago
As a European living in Australia (Melbourne, specifically), I'm horrified by the cycling infrastructure. It's such an afterthought most places, and you're usually not separated from fast-moving cars. Sometimes the cycle lane literally cuts across a car lane — super dangerous. I don't miss much about the Netherlands, but I definitely miss the cycling amenities. You're a first-class citizen on the road in a way that's hard to describe to cyclists here (especially the fervent ones).
- Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
  To be fair, good cycling infrastructure is not pervasive in the whole of Europe either. In the Netherlands it is, of course, as in most of northern Europe. But I'm from Spain and in many cities, cycling infrastructure is either almost nonexistent or an afterthough with many insecure spots, just as you describe for Melbourne. And cyclists are definitely second-class citizens. Things have improved a lot in the last ten years (from cycling in cities being almost unthinkable to Melbourne-like) so I hope this comment won't be true in another ten, but we still have a long way to go. Ability to walk to places and decent public transport is practically universal throughout Europe, though.

seer 7y ago

I wonder if part of the success of silicon valley can be attributed to this? In most other places you can spend your time doing interesting things all day long and never get bored. Whereas in SV you just start a business? How many people would not have began their software ventures if there was enough comedy clubs, pubs, theaters, community centers, beaches etc a short 10mins walk from home? Actually wondering?

wpietri 7y ago
It's a good question, but I think if that were true, we wouldn't see many startups in places like SF and NYC, and quite a lot of them in the middle of nowhere. For me, interactions with novel people, experiences, and ideas are a big feeder for my own ideas.
- RyanAF7 7y ago
  Venture Capitalists aren't in the middle of nowhere.
  - dgellow 7y ago
    Something attracted the VCs in the first place though.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    This is an excellent point. People talk about the important network effects of SV, and that was definitely material before the Internet made distance less relevant. But however much information flows through copper wire, investment doesn't, because VCs expect people to come to them.
- seer 7y ago
  Never been to SF (or US for that matter) so genuinely interested if this is a factor - from all the biographies I’ve read and looking from the sidelines it seems to me - novel people + capital + entrepreneurship + technical expertise (post apollo) + boredom are the key sauce for those kinds of things. And thats not about what SV is today. I was lead to believe the so named HBO show portrays it quite accurately. I was thinking more what it was in the 70s. Though to be honest living in the mediterranean I vastly prefer the walkable nature oriented laid back kind of places myself. Way more fun (and healthy) to live in. I was just wondering if that boredom thing was a factor

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

13of40 7y ago

I went fishing today and had to drive some very sketchy, not-on-google-maps dirt roads to get to the first spot I tried. What happens to that sort of thing once we're all living in walkable condos and depending on driverless Uber for exceptions?

abdullahkhalids 7y ago
You rent a car that you can drive yourself to wherever you want. Over the long term in a walkable city, that is definitely cheaper than owning a car.
- gibolt 7y ago
  Or an autonomous vehicle picks you and your friends up and the experience doesn't just start at the time of arrival to the destination.
  - 13of40 7y ago
    Assuming it has that skill.
- 13of40 7y ago
  Assuming you have that skill after years of having a computer drive you around.
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    It's not hard to learn how to drive. Otherwise not ~everybody would be able to do it. I don't think that self driving cars will replace all cars immediately. That makes little sense from CAPEX perspective, cars are fine for 5, 10, maybe 15 years. You'll not replace an okay car for the latest self driving vehicle, dumping the previous car to the junkyard. Rollout may take decades. And we still don't know when are they coming to the market, that may also take a very long time.
    - 7y ago

IloveHN84 7y ago

Don't let be fooled by the "tourist impression". Staying for some days isn't the same as living in a place, involving commuting to work, bringing children to school, etc Every city looks nice as a Tourist, but then it's hard if you live there and in the false zone of the city (=farest away)

oefrha 7y ago
Having moved from somewhere with working public transportation to the United States (and having lived here for close to a decade), I can assure you it’s not tourist impression.
- codebolt 7y ago
  How many kids do you have? Any more than one and car becomes necessary in my experience.
  - namesbc 7y ago
    Imagine a world where instead of having to strap your screaming kids in to a car seat for an hour drive in traffic, you walked along a pedestrian street, your kids kicking a ball around, you visit a couple stores, see your kids off to their school, and then walk a couple more blocks to work. When school is over your kids walk safely back home by themselves because there aren't cars out there threatening their lives. This sounds way less stressful than your kids being dependent on you and your car for everything they need.
    - konart 7y ago
      I don't thing this is what codebolt was talking about. If you can one kid - there is no problem really. Walk him or her to school in the morning, ask grandmother to bring them back etc. When you have more than one - it is entrily possible they will end up going to different schools and after the school one of them had to go to the music shool and the other one to his hockey team or something etc etc. You simply can't do this without a car. I was the only child in the family so we never needed a car for this kind of scenario, plus we were living in a relatevely small city (450k), so public transport was more than enough for me, but this is not always the case. >and then walk a couple more blocks to work. yeah, now imaging you have two of them going to two different schools, each 40 minutes walking distance from home, different directions and your office in somewhere else too.

H8crilA 7y ago

It's the case not just in Korea and Japan but in most cities outside of America. It's one of American peculiarities, like checks or no public health care. China has a fantastic subway system in most big cities, for example. I once took a subway ride from the Shenzhen airport to the Hong Kong border, crossed the border, switched to another subway and arrived in downtown Hong Kong. That's around 65km (40 miles) by public subway!

rpedela 7y ago
There is public health care in US. Medicare for old people, Medicaid for poor people, and anyone without insurance can go to the ER. It may not be great, but it does exist.
- noobermin 7y ago
  This seems like a pedantic point. The US AFAIK is the only healthcare system that is as dysfunctional as it is in the first world.
  - rpedela 7y ago
    While traveling outside the US, I have found many people think Americans are cold and heartless and just let people die. It is an understandable conclusion the way people talk about the US system in the media and internet, but it also isn't true. The US has dysfunctional, public healthcare but it isn't so dysfunctional that you just die if you fall or get an ear infection without insurance. So saying the US has "no public health care" is not only incorrect but it is also overly dramatic.
    - louwrentius 7y ago
      But you are fucked with a huge bill that would cripple your life in a way that you might as well be dead.
      - Broken_Hippo 7y ago

vnorilo 7y ago

This European spent a couple of carless months in Pittsburgh and found the public transit pretty decent. Only ride-hailed a handful of times. I do realize that Pittsburgh is probably not a median US city, but serves to remind us in the old world that there's a huge variety of different sorts of places in the US.

noobermin 7y ago
It isn't. It's also an older city and it depends on where in a city you are. Try living this way in a suburb of LA, your quality of life without a car will be greatly reduced.

pencillr 7y ago

When I moved to the USA for a few months from Europe, I was surprised by the fact that you simply can't walk to places. There are so huge spaces between things except for maybe city centers. (I was mostly in CA and FL)

eb0la 7y ago
I've been in Houston this year and it shocked me how difficult is to move there without a car. I was saved by Uber and Lyft many times just because both my hotel and the office were really far away from public transport.
- jcranberry 7y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if Houston is the worst city in the nation when it comes to "walkability". It's so spread out.
vladojsem 7y ago
Yes, this is very true. That is how European cities from US cities. In Europe cities are built for pedestrians, in US for cars. All these US suburbs areas with one-store buildings are making transportation ineffective because the US city is often more spread. However, there are some positive things happening, like walkability studies in US cities. Hopefully, that will help in the near future.

lostjohnny 7y ago

Never needed a car in the past four years in Milan and the year before in Bologna, Italy, and when it happened I could rely on car-sharing services or very cheap rentals. But I'm originally from Rome, where I spent most of my life, and without a car in Rome you're pretty much f*ed.

lanevorockz 7y ago

You are ignoring the number one problem. Population Density, dense areas need public transport less dense areas require custom transport. You argument here is against small towns and in favour or ultra dense cities. Public transport is just a mean to complain.

goodcanadian 7y ago
I absolutely hate this argument. In Europe, you take the train and there is literal farm land in between stations. While there are lots of small towns and villages close together in a way that you don't necessarily see in North America, the average density is considerably less than Los Angeles, for example. There is no good reason LA couldn't be crisscrossed by trains instead of by freeways.
- vinay427 7y ago
  This doesn't even seem to follow, in my experience, and their argument definitely makes sense to me as someone that's lived in an urban European city, an urban American city, and some American suburbs and traveled around all of these places extensively. Why do trains work well in many European countries? When there's farmland between stations (or even between some bus stops in the city where I currently live), it means that because you normally want to go somewhere that's not farmland, you're very likely to want to go somewhere near a station. The density around specific points (train stations, bus/tram plazas, etc.) is particularly high which makes the last-mile or last-kilometer problem largely a non-issue. If you build this in the LA metro area, it might serve the people who live very close to stations well, but everyone else who lives somewhere in the middle between two stations (which would be a higher percentage than people living in European farmland) would need to find a way to get home from the station.
  - vladojsem 7y ago
    I agree with you. In the case of LA metro area, it is just too spread city = badly designed. If you imagine even fast public transport, to get from one side of LA to the other side, it would still require a lot of stops in the low population density areas. Let's say every stop would cost you 5 minutes which means that even a car could be faster than public transport.

ekianjo 7y ago

> You can literally do everything without a car, everything is a short walk when you are young and single. By the time you have kids this changes everything.

jefftk 7y ago
We live outside of Boston with two kids, now 3y and 5y. We're about 10min from the subway, and we've never had a car. We do a lot of walking with our kids, and when they were younger we used the stroller more. I'm as happy with this as I was before kids.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  The difference is that most people can't afford to live just a few minutes away from the subway. City centers are very expensive. You can't expect people to live with the same standards if they have to walk for 1 hour to get to the nearest public transport.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    My parent post is saying that even in situations where walking is very practical it stops working after you have kids, and I strongly disagree there. As for the question of how generalizable this is, the US situation is much worse than other cities around the world. Boston has very good public transit for the US, but it's still pretty minimal globally, and we could build out transit far better. It's also only expensive to live near transit, or generally to live in cities, because we've massively restricted housing construction. Allow people to construct tall dense buildings, use the tax money to build out transit, and for the price of an apartment in the cheapest part of Boston today you can have something better that's a short walk from a transit stop that will get you all over the city faster than the T does today.
JDiculous 7y ago
That's the thing though - where I'm living right now in Korea you can! I'm not exaggerating when I say that everything is walking distance here - school, hospital, grocery store, kids entertainment places, food, etc. There are multiple playgrounds literally outside my building. And I don't live in some city center, it's a residential area.

namelosw 7y ago

I live in Beijing and I spend 20 mins riding share bike to work every day. I don't drive because I don't find it useful. I have a driving license but almost never used it, there are many, many people also having a license without driving cars. Almost colleagues owning cars don't drive on workdays because the metro is good (crowed by less crowded than driving and parking). It's not just one city like NYC, at least all moderate to major cities in China are friendly if you don't have a car. I've been to SF and the silicon valley, and I'm pretty annoyed I almost cannot go anywhere without driving. The difference might be related to how do people build the city, in order to make one way to suck less than another. In Beijing, it seems to be not driving suck less than driving.

faceplanted 7y ago

Do think of the other perspective though, all those local places for going out are so popular partly because housing is so small and expensive that staying home for the evening just isn't that attractive a proposition

JDiculous 7y ago
True. But I never really enjoyed staying home for the evening in my big house in the suburbs either.

bluGill 7y ago

People stay home in the US because they have a house with plenty of things to do at home. Why go to a karaoke bar when you have a piano in your house? Why go to a cafe when you have a nice kitchen to cook your own meal? Why do A when you have B? The large houses people have in the US enables and enforces a lifestyle very different from what you get in other cities. This is just a fact - you are allowed to hate it or like it. I don't want to have a karaoke bar nearby - it might be fun (I've never been to one), but at home I have my wood saws, music, computers, food, thread. Those are just the things I've used this week at home (note that it is Tuesday as I write this: the week is only three days old) to entertain myself.

dumb_troll 7y ago
It's not about stuff, it's about having other people. Some ( apparently a whole lot more than I thought) people find the lack of social interaction in American towns and cities depressing and alienating. Moreover you may have a lot things to keep you entertained in your home, but I doubt that yours is reflective of the average American home. Most people (I'm guessing now) probably just watch T.V and argue online...
dasloop 7y ago
Probably cultural. I have, as many spaniards, many things to do at home but I prefer public spaces (restaurants, bars, museums, concerts...). As Mazoni says in one of his songs: "Quan sortim a la nit no entrem mai en un local amb poca gent i no ho entenc perquè després només parlem entre nosaltres" What translates to something like: "When we go out at night we never enter a place with few people And I do not understand it because after all we talk only among us"
JDiculous 7y ago
For sure it's a tradeoff - more space + privacy/isolation vs. less space + more people and things to do outside your home. Houses in America are way bigger than the rest of the world because everything is so spread out. I prefer living in an apartment in a nice city vs. living in a big house in the suburbs. But it's totally fine to feel the opposite. The problem is that in the U.S., the only real city of any scale that's truly carless that I've ever seen is NYC. It's fun for a year or two, but it's too "city" in all the negative ways and very expensive so not a place I'd want to live in long-term (unless I stumbled onto enough millions to buy a brownstown in Brooklyn Heights or something).

agumonkey 7y ago

As much as I agree. It will feel weird to leave (if it happens) the car centric world.. But it's probably an improvement in most dimensions anyways.