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But don't you think that living in a place that requires you to commute for so long is a situation you would not be in to begin with if cars were not an option?
by carlob 7y ago
But don't you think that living in a place that requires you to commute for so long is a situation you would not be in to begin with if cars were not an option? And I don't mean it just as a personal choice but as a urban planning strategy.
It seems to me a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
- austinjp 7y agoBingo. It would certainly be wrenching for GP to move from their current life to somewhere less car-centric. But the issue (predominantly in the US, apparently) seems to be that a car-free life simply isn't on the menu when people are making the lifestyle decisions around settling down. Or maybe HN is poorly populated by the people who choose a car-free life.
- falcolas 7y agoThe difference in living costs of having your home close to work is often ignored. It’s frequently cheaper to pay for the car, gas, and maintenance than it is to live that 40km closer. Not to mention, there are other things, such as green spaces, good schools, and work for spouses, which make living “closer to work” impractical.
- kungtotte 7y agoTo buy an equivalent home within biking/walking distance of my job we would have had to pay literally double of what we did. The difference equates to ten times the average yearly salary here. That's the difference. You get a whole lot of miles (and cars) for that price...
- slfnflctd 7y agoI think you nailed the most fundamental economic forces at work here. The total costs of operating a household - including opportunity costs - will keep pushing people into situations where a long commute is unavoidable. The only way to green that up in the long run (besides carpooling), I suppose, is doing something crazy like making cars accessible to everyone that run on sunlight and last a million miles.
- kungtotte 7y agoI'm a strong proponent of decentralised planning of society and subsidised costs of local infrastructure to facilitate car free lifestyles. Part of the current mess is almost certainly due to the low cost of transportation and society pushing the cost onto future generations, but people literally can't live car free in some areas of the world right now and you need to pony up the dough to fix infrastructure etc. first before people can give up their cars. Otherwise you exacerbate an ongoing socioeconomic divide between the rich and the poor. Hence, people overestimate how easy it is for others to live car free.