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How many people want to live in dense cities without any means of escape? It sounds miserable to me. But I live in a really small city (< 250k) and drive mayb
by nightski 6y ago
How many people want to live in dense cities without any means of escape? It sounds miserable to me.
But I live in a really small city (< 250k) and drive maybe 3-5k miles a year (mostly to our cabin in a neighboring state) and bike a LOT. It's kind of ironic I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it.
- TheTrotters 6y agoWhat do you mean “no means of escape?” There are trains, buses, taxis, bikes, rental cars etc. To me owning a car seems much more miserable!
- FpUser 6y ago>"To me owning a car seems much more miserable!" Well you are free not to own it. Nobody's forcing you. Actually my main mean of transportation in Toronto is bicycle myself (well I work from home for the last 20 years anyways). I also own car (van actually) and it gives me great and hassle free degree of freedom. If I am in a mood and I often am I can jump in and in few hours be in complete wilderness swimming in some godforsaken lake. Or if I need to grab some heavy stuff and bring it somewhere which happens rather often. And I do not need to arrange / wait for anything. Just get in and go. So no. Screw that dense car free living. To each their own.
- adrianN 6y agoCar centric infrastructure forces people to own cars.
- FpUser 6y ago>"Car centric infrastructure forces people to own cars." Where? I live in Toronto and I certainly do not feel that I am forced to have a car.
- FpUser 6y agoAnd because I do not feel forced it deserves downvote. Fucking thought police.
- yodelshady 6y agoToronto where the previous mayor removed bike lanes, was caught reading a book whilst driving, and called cyclists "a pain in the ass"? That Toronto? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17914504 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17914504 Yeah, that sounds a welcoming place.
- FpUser 6y agoI do not give a shit what our previous world famous lunatic said. I just state my personal experience and I ride my bike everywhere nearly every day.
- adrianN 6y agoEverywhere where daily amenities are too spread out and the streets are too dangerous for children and old people to cycle on them. That's most of the developed world outside of some very large cities.
- libraryatnight 6y agoAnd I don't know a ton of people that "buy" cars they can afford, they buy car payments they can afford. I just can't help but feel that breaking that cycle would be a societal good ( for people, sorry automakers).
- FpUser 6y agoAnd I buy used vans. Whet you know might not reflect generic situation.
- donjoe 6y agoHow can it be 'complete wilderness' if reachable by car? Isn't there some sort of infrastructure necessary in order to reach it by car which ultimately destroys nature?
- FpUser 6y agoGravel / dirt road and then take canoe to some secluded spot. No one is around which to me is enough to call it "complete wilderness", does not need to be Ellesmere Island. No visible "destruction of nature" either.
- cycomanic 6y agoYes and you can say that a helicopter would offer you even more freedom, but does that mean we should build our cities so that everyone has there own helipad? Ironically it probably would take up less space than the infrastructure build for cars. But this is the point made by the OP, essentially for the convenience to jump into your car a couple of times a year and drive to the wilderness without having to walk or take a means of public transport, you require cities to be build around those cars. The issue is you don't directly see the cost associated with it, because you're used to it. The thing is, if you actually had to pay for that convenience (because if we would not have to build the car infrastructure cities could be much cheaper) directly there clearly would be a point where you would say it is not worth it.
- SirZimzim 6y agoYes, too many people can't bear making anything they sense to be a sacrifice on their part. The solution is definitely to shift the car ownership economic burden more towards car owners instead of everyone. Giant empty parking lots and huge roads are an insane cost with a terrible maintenance story. I like to think of it as moving away from a datacenter to cloud based solutions. You don't need to buy all that capacity ahead of time anymore just for those short bursts.
- FpUser 6y ago>"Yes, too many people can't bear making anything they sense to be a sacrifice on their part." Sorry but I do not live to make sacrifices for the "benefit of everyone". I already left one country because of that. It was called USSR. And the first thing I did as soon as I could - got myself a car and traveled all over the places on my own. My small software development company does not use cloud either. Self host and rented dedicated servers. Orders of magnitude cheaper that that cloud. I prefer to feed myself rather then keep filling pockets of FAANG and the likes.
- cycomanic 6y agoBut you are expecting everyone to make sacrifices for your benefit, because non-car drivers are significantly subsidising car drivers. Lets make car cost exactly what they should be then, things like lets make real-estate used for roads in cities go into rental costs for those roads (via taxes, road tolls etc.), lets price the environmental costs appropriately, including the health cost from noise etc. If you still want to pay for your car then, go ahead, but don't expect others to subsidise your living.
- supert56 6y agoCars offer a level of freedom far beyond that of public transport. That doesn’t mean they are the best vehicle to offer that freedom and electric vehicles will definitely be an improvement over ICE vehicles but in my experience as soon as you’re outside of major metropolitan cities public transport options fall apart and are often incredibly inconvenient compared to owning a car. Maybe the solution would be to build better public transport systems outside of major cities but to do that requires funding and local governments (in the UK at least) seem to be chronically underfunded so I doubt that it will become a reality anytime soon.
- Leherenn 6y agoIn my experience, currently public transport works really well for high density routes, but no one has managed to solve the low density route issue. Take a bus going towards a leaf node at 10 pm on a week day, and you're often the only one in a huge bus with the driver (that's of course if you're in a place where such a bus exists). Environmentally and economically, that's dreadful, worse than a car. I don't think public transports running at 5% capacity is the solution. The solution might be full self-driving cars, but we're far from it yet.
- supert56 6y agoHa, I totally agree with this. I have seen so many of those big empty buses with just 1 or 2 people in them. Perhaps self-driving cars and autonomous vehicles will be the solution to this.
- digital-cygnet 6y agoI'm not sure I fully follow "I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it", but I think there are two potential points of disagreement: 1) Living in dense cities is not for everybody, but given that large and (at least pre-covid) growing majority of people in the developed world do choose to live in cities, I think it's safe to say that there is a very sizable demand. For an example of the benefits of density, see [0]. 2) I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a "means of escape", but getting rid of cars of course necessitates replacing them with other modalities. If you want to go skiing does it matter to you whether you take a train or a car? Or, for further afield trips, take a train to a car rental far from the city center? (If you mean escape in a literal sense, like "evacuate in the face of a disaster", then cars are clearly not fit for purpose -- if roads can barely handle rush hour traffic, mass evacuation is a recipe for gridlock) [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-01/how-density-and-innovation-are-linked-in-cities https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-01/how-densi...
- blix 6y agoThe pre-covid world is kinda over. Density has very clear downsides that have never been more apparent. I don't know how often you do the train + car rental thing, but the friction is much, much higher than driving (especially if you have any sort of gear like you would for skiing). Not everyone wants to be so contricted both in freedom of movement and in living space.
- piva00 6y agoThe friction of owning a car is much, much higher than having to care a few times a year on how to carry your skis or sporting gear on a train and renting a car afterwards. Personal anecdote: I was born, grew up and lived up to my mid-20s in São Paulo, Brazil. It's a city where a car is a basic necessity, much like in the US, public transportation sucks and is spotty, never on time. I owned cars, I loved the frictionless way to get out, getting the elevator out of my apartment, down to the underground garage, turning my car on and driving away, easy. But that car sat idle 98% of the time, I paid road taxes, maintenance, parking spot, etc. for the convenience of having a car ready to go at an instant time. Nowadays I live in Sweden, I never need a car apart from moving houses or carrying some large furniture. A few times for a road trip here and there, I can just rent a car when needed and I come out on top of expenses still, the peace of mind of not having to take care of a car is another huge bonus. The pre-COVID world will still exist, cities are a necessity if you want to have good public services, without higher density a city has no way to fund high quality public services. I would like to know what clear downsides, apart from disease spread, has COVID showed from living in high density cities? And I mean cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, and so on.
- yourmom2 6y ago> t's kind of ironic I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it. it's not ironic, this statement makes no sense.
- megablast 6y agoI’ve never owned a car. But somehow I’ve traveled all over my country and the world. And Australia isn’t small. It’s crazy, I know.
- RestlessMind 6y agoDid you rent one? Are you young and healthy enough to walk/bike everyone? If yes, then your assumption about the world is indeed crazy since not everyone would have the same abilities as you.
- patrickyeon 6y agoIt sounds like you bike for most of your transportation in your city? That's what "anti-car" people (speaking as one myself) want: to emphasize infrastructure that enables and encourages that. The "anti-car" thing isn't "ban cars entirely in all cases", just "stop assuming everything needs to be car-first at the expense of every other modality".
- nightski 6y agoYea my point is that if you want to be less car centric, maybe try moving out of the big city. It's ironically easier to obtain that lifestyle in a small city in America than the "walkable urban utopias" everyone seems to desire on HN.
- ido 6y agoMostly only out of American big cities (at least in the developed world), the point is to fix that. A lot of big cities in Europe and East Asia do fine without being car-centric.
- RestlessMind 6y agoA lot of places depend on cars / 2-wheelers beyond American big cities. Based on my first hand experience - big cities in India and Brazil.
- ido 6y agoYou're right, in my zeal I overstated a bit. But among the richest/most developed nations there are the US & a few similar countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) where a lot of people drive cars and on the other hand western europe and the reach east asian countries (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore) where mass transit (and in Europe sometimes also bicycles) is the main form of transportation in the large cities.
- raffraffraff 6y agoSuper obvious response, but it depends on the city. Smaller denser European cities that were not designed, but evolved over hundreds of years from earlier settlements, don't handle car traffic very well and are better suited to walking and cycling (or battery operated scooters). But even larger cities over here work well for walking and cycling because you tend to find lots of bars, restaurants, convenience stores and shopping malls all over them. In my home town, you can't walk a mile without passing a dozen bars, a dozen restaurants and two decent grocery stores. But it's not just down to city size. Take a city like Provo in Utah. It's not large by any standard, but it's completely designed for cars. It has awful public transport, a grid 'motorway' system cris-crossing it, everything-as-a-drive-thru, lots of unused space, lots of parking lots... If you try walking around it, you'll just spend hours walking past nothing in particular to get to nowhere special.
- porb121 6y ago> How many people want to live in dense cities without any means of escape? It sounds miserable to me. Some 30m people in Tokyo seem to be doing fine.
- torgian 6y agoDoesn’t mean they actually want to be there though.
- porknubbins 6y agoThe no means of escape from NYC was what I could never handle (so got a bike, motorcycle, car and eventually just moved out) but there are many people who grew up in big cities for whom the endless concrete blocks is just the normal environment, though I think its kind of sad.
- ido 6y agoI live in Berlin with 2 little kids and have no car. We bike and take transit (including long-range trains when going out of the city). There's plenty opportunity to escape (corona lockdowns notwithstanding).
- yodelshady 6y agoI would definitely agree with you about the merits of smaller cities, but half the value of density is that "escape" is easier. Driving for a solid hour through nothing but housing estates is not my idea of freedom. It does depend on your idea of "escape" though. Good trains to beauty spots make a world of difference.