7 ms·

I think people are usually pretty happy with living in those areas. They like being able to drive and park at things easily. It’s just the kids who are less thr

• tolbish 6y ago
  I wonder if this has been studied by researchers. Is this a genuine preference or rather something akin to Stockholm syndrome? Something tells me the average American who moves to a mass-transit friendly city is happier than someone from a mass-transit city that moves to a car-centric city.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • throwaway201103 6y ago
    I think it's subjective, and maybe related to what you grew up with. I moved to Chicago in the 1990s, lived there for about 10 years. The mass-transit was very good, but I wasn't happy living there. Move to a smaller town with basically no useful public transit, but am vastly happier.
    • technothrasher 6y ago
      I'm a definite small town country person. I think even my town of 5300 people is getting too big for me these days, and I couldn't imagine being happy living in the city or even a bigger suburb. But if I had to live in a city, good public transit would be a must. I spent a week in Paris a few years ago getting around everywhere on the subway and enjoyed it immensely. On a later trip I spent one day driving in Paris and was ready to shoot myself.
      • mypalmike 6y ago
        Even the buses in Paris are pretty great. About halfway through my last visit, I switched almost entirely from subway to buses. They aren't necessarily the fastest way to get across town, but I found them clean and convenient, and just a great way to take everything in.
    • cambalache 6y ago
      But that is not a fair comparison. You need to compare moving from NY, Amsterdam,Berlin, Madrid, Shanghai, Singapore, big cities with good public transportation to any big America city https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZDZtBRTyeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZDZtBRTyeI
  • quantumwannabe 6y ago
    Something tells me the average American who moves from a mass-transit city to a car-centric city is happier than someone from a car-centric city that moves to a mass-transit city. People are allowed to like different lifestyles than you without being victims of Stockholm syndrome.
    • supertrope 6y ago
      The US government subsidizes houses in suburbs by guaranteeing mortgages and building toll free highways. Apartments are literally illegal to build in many areas (restrictive zoning). Property developers are mandated to include ample free parking. So in many places you are not allowed to have a different lifestyle than drive everywhere.
      • quantumwannabe 6y ago
        First off, you get all the same mortgage benefits with a condo or townhouse; those benefits are not just for single family houses [1]. The Seattle area has an urban growth boundary [2, see the red line] that effectively bans construction of new single family housing. The Seattle government also makes it impossible to get a project approved if it has "too many" parking spots and the the vast majority of the transit system is not paid for by its riders: Sound Transit, Seattle's train and express buses, has around 30-40% farebox recovery of operating costs, and capital costs are fully subsidized [3, Page 8]. King County Metro, the bus system, has a farebox recovery of around 25%, again with capital costs being fully subsidized [4, last graph]. User fees (tolls, car registration, gas taxes, etc.) pay a far larger percentage of roads than this: Washington collects 63.5% of road spending from user fees, which is a figure that includes both capital (new roads) and operational (maintenance on existing roads) costs [5]. So someone living in the Seattle area who wants to have a "different lifestyle" has to pay to subsidize the government's preferred lifestyle. Seattle isn't the only region with a strong bias towards transit (especially with new development), so generalizing across the entire country isn't helpful as different areas have very different urban planning cultures. [1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p530 https://www.irs.gov/publications/p530 [2] https://www.kingcounty.gov/property/permits/codes/growth/GMPC/~/media/property/permits/documents/GrowthManagement/CPP_ugb_gmpc_Map.ashx https://www.kingcounty.gov/property/permits/codes/growth/GMP... [3] https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2018-fare-revenue-report.pdf https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2... [4] https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/about/accountability-center/performance/financial/annual.aspx https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/about/acco... [5] https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/
  • majormajor 6y ago
    Even in cities with mass transit in the US, there's a substantial wealthy population that chooses car (or helicopter!) commutes (they might not be commuting daily, though, or driving themselves when they do) over transit ones, so with people for the means for either, it's definitely not a 100% preference for mass transit.
    • munk-a 6y ago
      It's weird though since in the US people actively fight against mass transit. Even if you're not personally riding on mass transit it's a public service that helps the local economy thrive - people just get silly minded and all the NIMBY arguments start coming out.
      • perryizgr8 6y ago
        > It's weird though since in the US people actively fight against mass transit. It's kind of understandable that people protest against having their money stolen and used to build things they don't like. Why do you think it's weird?
        • epistasis 6y ago
          No, it's completely illogical from every aspect. Even if the person is going to drive no matter what, and only wants to improve their own experience for least cost, the dollar for transit improves their road experience more than a dollar for more road infrastructure. And even those roads are mostly funded by general funds, not through gas taxes. Gas taxes and user fares fund roughly equivalent amounts of roads and public transit, respectively. And 80% of federal transportation money goes to roads. The only explanation that's possible is extremely short-sighted and self-defeating selfishness: seeing something that's not for them and instinctively opposing it, without thinking of the bigger picture. It's just childish.
        • Uberphallus 6y ago
          It's not weird, it's just extremely short sighted. It's exactly like socialized healthcare: somehow the US system manages to be more expensive than anywhere else in the world, ranks among developing nations, yet people will fight fang and teeth against "communism".
  • nradov 6y ago
    People have a genuine preference for good mass transit, and they also have a genuine preference for large private homes. Those two preferences are in direct conflict.
    • zten 6y ago
      This is kind of what I was trying to get at. People have made a choice, because they were forced to make one, and they chose detached suburban living. It has good and bad points, for sure.
  • zten 6y ago
    Huh, I came back and found my comment to be more polarizing than expected... I am unsure where the preference lies. I don't always think there's a preference, but you can get forced into it by other economic factors. Young people move into a city, getting adapted a mass transit lifestyle, but they move to a more car-centric area when they inevitably get priced out of car-free living downtown or on a popular rail/bus line because they want to start a family. Personally I don't really want to give up being able to walk outside and down the street to go to restaurants and shop or connect to transit easily, but it would be short-sighted to say that everyone has the same preferences as me. There's benefits to living in a detached house with a yard. The price is usually being tethered to a car in the US. If you pick a low density area you're probably not going to have an oppressive commute and running errands will be easy (if predictably lengthy, but knowing it'll always be a 20 minute drive and not 20-60 minutes based on traffic is valuable) because there's large roads and every business was mandated to build a large parking lot. The problem comes when inevitably other people make the same decision and development happens and more people move in. A Californian pattern of development (and in the many areas of the country that have since copied this pattern) is incredibly hostile to good public transit, but due to the geometry of cars, you inevitably have to do _something_... it's just probably going to suck and get underused. So, an alternative strategy emerges: fight tooth and nail against growth.
    • Can_Not 6y ago
      > I came back and found my comment to be more polarizing than expected... You basically said "people who disagree are mostly children".
      • zten 6y ago
        Whoops. Wasn't actually trying to say that. But thanks for the explanation.
  • trianglem 6y ago
    Sharing things sucks. I’ve lived in both situations and much prefer rural-20-minutes-from-a-city to living in a city.
• rpedela 6y ago
  I grew up in Cincinnati. You are correct, however traffic is bad enough now that a subway or light rail would make a big difference. Unfortunately it is unlikely the voters would approve a tax increase to support that.
  • mywittyname 6y ago
    It's not that people wouldn't approve a tax increase to support it. The issue is that every politician in the state would attack a light rail project for the city. The city managed to complete a street car after ten years, but it faced opposition from the mayor, the governor, and federal congressman. The congressman in question even pushed a law that would prohibit any federal funding from going to the operation of the project. How fucked up is that? A congressman who prevents federal funding from flowing into their district.
    • minot 6y ago
      Car dealership campaign contributions?
    • bernawil 6y ago
      But is it fair to compare light rail with subways? Seems to me light rail is the worst of all worlds: Slow, low carrying capacity, subject to the same traffic as cars and probably expensive.
      • mywittyname 6y ago
        On a technical level: no. On a political level: yes. The political opposition to the project had nothing to do with preferring a technically superior form of public transportation. Instead, it was opposition to public transportation in general.
        • bernawil 6y ago
          That sounds fair, but another pov: I'm pretty much in favor of subways but I'd be opposed to any light rail project in a heartbeat.
• rektide 6y ago
  > I think people are usually pretty happy with living in those areas. They like being able to drive and park at things easily. yeah people probably are pretty happy with their situation. it probably works pretty well for them. they probably respond extremely negatively to any other possibilities. they'd tell you they wouldn't want to use public transit or bikes or whatever else. they couldn't imagine how inconvenient that would be. that sounds terrible to them. but like, people across broad parts of Europe don't think of biking as inconvenient. people with good public transit don't think of it as inconvenient. i far prefer getting on the bus to taking my car, negotiating traffic & parking. at my last job, it took a couple months of trying it, but eventually i started to far prefer a bike commute to the bus, even though it was pretty long & hilly. so much of our preferences is comfortability with the known, familiarity. the expressed preference of society, often, it turns out, matter for very little, reflect primarily bias, not intelligence or wisdom or what makes us (individually or collectively) happiest. and all too often these things we imagine serve us, they hold back society. they feed our id, they feed our ego, and the deny a greater super-ego, a better way, that we could better enjoy.
  • rootusrootus 6y ago
    > so much of our preferences is comfortability with the known, familiarity Well that, and weather. Only die-hards like to bike in the Pacific Northwest winter. Frigid, wet, windy. I'd rather bike in snow.
• scythe 6y ago
  The problem is that the huge suburban "exclusion zone" around cities means that central parts of the metro are very far from open green space. Compare e.g. the development pattern around Cologne-Essen: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cologne,+Germany/@51.201637,6.7986817,9.71z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x47bf259169ab2fe5:0x42760fc4a2a77f0!8m2!3d50.937531!4d6.9602786 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cologne,+Germany/@51.20163... to Houston: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houston,+TX/@29.759369,-95.5165806,11.01z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x8640b8b4488d8501:0xca0d02def365053b!8m2!3d29.7604267!4d-95.3698028 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houston,+TX/@29.759369,-95... In the one case you are never more than five miles from green space, in the other you may be 20+ in the middle. It's a tragedy of the commons -- no one driveway thinks it caused the flood (literally, in some cases!). Even Paris is more compact than Houston despite having 2x the population! This can affect air quality, urban heat islands, mental health, etc.
  • zten 6y ago
    Yeah, I understand it's not a good pattern of development for huge metro areas. But someone managed to get the laws on the books to basically require the US to develop in this way, and people aren't fighting _too_ hard to change it. It's not hard to imagine, then, that there might be some competitive advantages to a car-centric lifestyle for individuals to live in that situation even if it's worse for the collective.