8 ms·

My favorite are the threads about how we need to get rid of cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling. :)

by throwaway894345 5y ago

jiveturkey42 5y ago
A sure-fire indicator that someone exists in a purely urban mental-model of reality
- krzyk 5y ago
  The alernative view is also freqently purely US-centric suburban/rural one. In many densely populated countries, rural areas have quite good public transport.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Yeah, but the US isn't one of those densely populated countries.
leokennis 5y ago
Two counter points. - Where I live (The Netherlands) you don’t have to live in a city to have good PT. There are places that you cannot reach by train or bus but they are few. - While sometimes a car is necessary, the cars many people prefer (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary.
- User23 5y ago
  It always amuses me when Europeans are confused by the lack of good public transit in much of the USA. Come visit here and use our public transit and you'll see why we like cars.
- wincy 5y ago
  The United States is 200x larger in size (excluding Alaska) but has only 20x as many people as the Netherlands.
  - ajross 5y ago
    The urban cores of New York and Boston are denser than any city in Europe! I mean, yes, it's true that the "empty" spaces are much bigger in the Americas. But you don't need a personal automobile to reach places you go only occasionally, and often for leisure. There's absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is impossible here. It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads for private vehicles is very much a policy decision. [1] Actually it is what we chose, up until the 1950's, when we chose to build in different ways.
    - xboxnolifes 5y ago
      > The urban cores of New York and Boston are denser than any city in Europe! And unaffordable to the vast majority. I'd love to have plenty of walkable city options in the US, but they aren't going to appear overnight by banning cars when you need them to get around places over half of the people in the US live in.
    - animal_spirits 5y ago
      People also forget that Europe has had continuous non-nomadic people living in most places for thousands of years already, while the US has only had that for a few hundred years. Many things that have already been figured out in Europe for centuries (roads, dams, levies) are still in progress developments in the US
    - goatlover 5y ago
      The US has tons of smaller cities and towns. New York and Massachusetts included. There might be trains going into Boston and NY, but you still need to get around the smaller population centers if you live or visit there. The Northeast has a big mix of highly urban areas and countryside.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      The whole point of the thread is that there's a lot of variance in density within the US, and we shouldn't regulate the rural midwest like we regulate NYC. > It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads for private vehicles is very much a policy decision. It's an amalgamation of a hundred years of policy decisions and private investment based around those decisions, and it would take as long to reverse it even if there was political appetite for it. And there's not much appetite for it because most people prefer the convenience and comfort of cars. To that end: > There's absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is impossible here. It's not a matter of whether that lifestyle is possible, but whether it's desirable. Most Americans find the convenience and comfort of cars to be preferable to public transit.
- hunterb123 5y ago
  > (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary. As someone with a truck constantly having to lend it for friends to use, I disagree. Not sure exactly what you meant by insanely oversized, but a lift kit and tires aren't abnormal, they have use for off-roading / mudding which is fairly popular. It's both a style preference and lifestyle preference. Good luck using a car if you have a lot of outdoor hobbies or work. Kind of strange to tell a whole population what is or isn't necessary in their life, especially without knowing their reasonings.
  - leokennis 5y ago
    What I mean is this: https://i.imgur.com/7huPvde.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7huPvde.jpg What does the insanely large truck have that enables you to off road and explore your hobbies, that the smaller one does not?
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      Lol I assume you don't pull anything or do any sort of off roading, do you? The smaller truck will get stuck. I guess you could try to winch yourself out every time it does. But at that point use the bigger truck to pull a side by side and off road with that.
  - ajross 5y ago
    Isn't the fact that your friends don't need a truck because they can borrow one occasionally evidence against your point? I mean, yes, it's true that it would be nicer if they'd rent one instead of impose on you. But clearly they don't "need" trucks of their own, because they have access to shared resources. This is the kind of absolutist argument that these threads always fall into. You hear someone say "not everyone needs a truck!" or "there are too many trucks!", and hear "You, personally, should not own a truck". No, clearly trucks are useful vehicles and need to exist for people to use. But we also build and deploy way too many of them. Those facts can be true at the same time.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
- honkdaddy 5y ago
  The 'insanely oversized "trucks"' are necessary for reasons probably not evident if you grew up in a country like NT. I'm from a small town in rural Ontario, Canada where most people drive a 4WD vehicle largely because they'd never get out of their snow-filled driveway in a tiny European style car. Lots of country roads are literally impassable without a large machine; having a truck of some kind is more or less a necessity for plenty of rural folks.
  - triceratops 5y ago
    What explains the abundance of trucks that I see here in suburbia? Or in places like the Bay Area, where there's never, ever any snow.
    - honkdaddy 5y ago
      I'm not sure, I've never lived in the Bay Area.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      Outdoor activities? Labor jobs? I don't think you can judge without knowing their lifestyle. Even then, who is to say who can get what? I don't see why trucks are one of things people can't buy just because they prefer it. I'm sure everyone owns something that another person would consider frivolous.
      - triceratops 5y ago
        > I don't see why trucks are one of things people can't buy just because they prefer it. I was responding to GP who said trucks are necessary in rural areas with snow and rough roads. Obviously people can buy what they want, and other people can judge them for their choices as they want. > I'm sure everyone owns something that another person would consider frivolous. Definitely. I'm sure there are people who judge my purchases - I wish them well. But most frivolous purchases don't kill pedestrians at alarming rates, or guzzle absurd amounts of gas pointlessly. Pickup trucks are the pit bulls of car ownership.
  - 5y ago
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  As others have pointed out, the US is much less dense than the Netherlands and also the bulk of our development happened in a post-car context--the US literally evolved around the car, and consequently doing away with cars is a much less realistic proposition for the US than it is for the Netherlands. To that point, most of our streets, roads, and parking spaces are much wider than yours, and can accommodate larger vehicles. As others have noted, we have more people in remote areas, and while Netherlands is obviously an agricultural superpower, your farms are smaller than ours (larger farms require larger equipment).
typest 5y ago
As someone who is strongly wants to "get rid of cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling" -- no one is talking about doing this in rural areas. Should we decrease reliance on cars in cities and focus more on alternative forms of transport? Yes. Will this work in rural areas? No, of course not.
- llanowarelves 5y ago
  People who live in cities tend to look down on people who don't and wouldn't really care about what happens there, despite the fact that they rely on them for food. For example, think about how many times you've seen people say they don't care about gas prices because they don't have a car: they take public transportation (which uses gas..) or walk. The supply chain consists of things magically appearing in bodegas for their consumption, and that's why their pejoratively-named "flyover country" is and does nothing, they think.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Will it work in suburbs and medium-sized cities, particularly in the US? There's around 280 US cities between 100,000 and 500,000 people.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > no one is talking about doing this in rural areas. Perhaps that's true in your experience, but I hear this fairly regularly including various subreddits, Twitter, and I've heard it here on HN as well (it's been a while, I don't care to dig through my comment history for links to the specific threads). Specifically, the argument takes one of two forms: either we should extend public transit and cycling infrastructure everywhere (including rural areas) or that we should implement policies that expressly accelerate urbanization and penalize rural life (or a combination).
tenacious_tuna 5y ago
Similarly, a sure-fire way to tell someone hasn't lived in a place where you haven't needed a car for every aspect of life is when they criticize anti-car policy without engaging with the deeper reasons behind it :) I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do with the popularization of human-centric design movements that question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of transportation that American cities have operated from since about the 1950s. An easy example is the idea of "induced demand" [1] that shows even from a pure engineering perspective that the cost-benefit math for cars has long been unfairly weighted towards cars by outside forces. We're seeing a lot of pressure around housing and energy and social policy in general which in turn is making us question decisions we've made, culturally, in history, like can we really sustain the building of less dense housing for our growing population? Does it make sense to give every family 0.75 acres of grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage, when those things are only used some of the time? Might there be better ways to approach the utilization of that space as a population? I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss concerns like that out of hand. Can the US ever totally get rid of cars? No, not for a hundred years at least. Having a good 80 years of city planning being focused around every adult having their own vehicle is of course going to e difficult to move away from, and there are certain lifestyles (rural living, farming, regions where building trains is more impractical) that it'll just never be a great idea... but I still think it's worth interrogating these assumptions we've carried to see if there's a better way we could be living life. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_transportation_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_trans...
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > Does it make sense to give every family 0.75 acres of grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage A standard suburban house doesn't sit on 0.75 acres. 0.2 is typical. Though you're probably low on the driveway and garage :). I'd like to see a better argument for why we shouldn't live this way. There are relatively large metros (e.g. Portland) that are predominantly suburban single family homes, and so far it seems to work fine. Sure, we could compress Portland into a 10 mile by 10 mile square, but why? Would it actually make our lives better? By what metric?

My favorite are the threads about how we need to get rid of cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling. :)

jiveturkey42 5y ago

A sure-fire indicator that someone exists in a purely urban mental-model of reality

krzyk 5y ago
The alernative view is also freqently purely US-centric suburban/rural one. In many densely populated countries, rural areas have quite good public transport.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Yeah, but the US isn't one of those densely populated countries.

leokennis 5y ago

Two counter points. - Where I live (The Netherlands) you don’t have to live in a city to have good PT. There are places that you cannot reach by train or bus but they are few. - While sometimes a car is necessary, the cars many people prefer (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary.

User23 5y ago
It always amuses me when Europeans are confused by the lack of good public transit in much of the USA. Come visit here and use our public transit and you'll see why we like cars.
wincy 5y ago
The United States is 200x larger in size (excluding Alaska) but has only 20x as many people as the Netherlands.
- ajross 5y ago
  The urban cores of New York and Boston are denser than any city in Europe! I mean, yes, it's true that the "empty" spaces are much bigger in the Americas. But you don't need a personal automobile to reach places you go only occasionally, and often for leisure. There's absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is impossible here. It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads for private vehicles is very much a policy decision. [1] Actually it is what we chose, up until the 1950's, when we chose to build in different ways.
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    > The urban cores of New York and Boston are denser than any city in Europe! And unaffordable to the vast majority. I'd love to have plenty of walkable city options in the US, but they aren't going to appear overnight by banning cars when you need them to get around places over half of the people in the US live in.
  - animal_spirits 5y ago
    People also forget that Europe has had continuous non-nomadic people living in most places for thousands of years already, while the US has only had that for a few hundred years. Many things that have already been figured out in Europe for centuries (roads, dams, levies) are still in progress developments in the US
  - goatlover 5y ago
    The US has tons of smaller cities and towns. New York and Massachusetts included. There might be trains going into Boston and NY, but you still need to get around the smaller population centers if you live or visit there. The Northeast has a big mix of highly urban areas and countryside.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    The whole point of the thread is that there's a lot of variance in density within the US, and we shouldn't regulate the rural midwest like we regulate NYC. > It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads for private vehicles is very much a policy decision. It's an amalgamation of a hundred years of policy decisions and private investment based around those decisions, and it would take as long to reverse it even if there was political appetite for it. And there's not much appetite for it because most people prefer the convenience and comfort of cars. To that end: > There's absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is impossible here. It's not a matter of whether that lifestyle is possible, but whether it's desirable. Most Americans find the convenience and comfort of cars to be preferable to public transit.
hunterb123 5y ago
> (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary. As someone with a truck constantly having to lend it for friends to use, I disagree. Not sure exactly what you meant by insanely oversized, but a lift kit and tires aren't abnormal, they have use for off-roading / mudding which is fairly popular. It's both a style preference and lifestyle preference. Good luck using a car if you have a lot of outdoor hobbies or work. Kind of strange to tell a whole population what is or isn't necessary in their life, especially without knowing their reasonings.
- leokennis 5y ago
  What I mean is this: https://i.imgur.com/7huPvde.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7huPvde.jpg What does the insanely large truck have that enables you to off road and explore your hobbies, that the smaller one does not?
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    Lol I assume you don't pull anything or do any sort of off roading, do you? The smaller truck will get stuck. I guess you could try to winch yourself out every time it does. But at that point use the bigger truck to pull a side by side and off road with that.
- ajross 5y ago
  Isn't the fact that your friends don't need a truck because they can borrow one occasionally evidence against your point? I mean, yes, it's true that it would be nicer if they'd rent one instead of impose on you. But clearly they don't "need" trucks of their own, because they have access to shared resources. This is the kind of absolutist argument that these threads always fall into. You hear someone say "not everyone needs a truck!" or "there are too many trucks!", and hear "You, personally, should not own a truck". No, clearly trucks are useful vehicles and need to exist for people to use. But we also build and deploy way too many of them. Those facts can be true at the same time.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
honkdaddy 5y ago
The 'insanely oversized "trucks"' are necessary for reasons probably not evident if you grew up in a country like NT. I'm from a small town in rural Ontario, Canada where most people drive a 4WD vehicle largely because they'd never get out of their snow-filled driveway in a tiny European style car. Lots of country roads are literally impassable without a large machine; having a truck of some kind is more or less a necessity for plenty of rural folks.
- triceratops 5y ago
  What explains the abundance of trucks that I see here in suburbia? Or in places like the Bay Area, where there's never, ever any snow.
  - honkdaddy 5y ago
    I'm not sure, I've never lived in the Bay Area.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    Outdoor activities? Labor jobs? I don't think you can judge without knowing their lifestyle. Even then, who is to say who can get what? I don't see why trucks are one of things people can't buy just because they prefer it. I'm sure everyone owns something that another person would consider frivolous.
    - triceratops 5y ago
      > I don't see why trucks are one of things people can't buy just because they prefer it. I was responding to GP who said trucks are necessary in rural areas with snow and rough roads. Obviously people can buy what they want, and other people can judge them for their choices as they want. > I'm sure everyone owns something that another person would consider frivolous. Definitely. I'm sure there are people who judge my purchases - I wish them well. But most frivolous purchases don't kill pedestrians at alarming rates, or guzzle absurd amounts of gas pointlessly. Pickup trucks are the pit bulls of car ownership.
- 5y ago
throwaway894345 5y ago
As others have pointed out, the US is much less dense than the Netherlands and also the bulk of our development happened in a post-car context--the US literally evolved around the car, and consequently doing away with cars is a much less realistic proposition for the US than it is for the Netherlands. To that point, most of our streets, roads, and parking spaces are much wider than yours, and can accommodate larger vehicles. As others have noted, we have more people in remote areas, and while Netherlands is obviously an agricultural superpower, your farms are smaller than ours (larger farms require larger equipment).

typest 5y ago

As someone who is strongly wants to "get rid of cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling" -- no one is talking about doing this in rural areas. Should we decrease reliance on cars in cities and focus more on alternative forms of transport? Yes. Will this work in rural areas? No, of course not.

llanowarelves 5y ago
People who live in cities tend to look down on people who don't and wouldn't really care about what happens there, despite the fact that they rely on them for food. For example, think about how many times you've seen people say they don't care about gas prices because they don't have a car: they take public transportation (which uses gas..) or walk. The supply chain consists of things magically appearing in bodegas for their consumption, and that's why their pejoratively-named "flyover country" is and does nothing, they think.
goatlover 5y ago
Will it work in suburbs and medium-sized cities, particularly in the US? There's around 280 US cities between 100,000 and 500,000 people.
throwaway894345 5y ago
> no one is talking about doing this in rural areas. Perhaps that's true in your experience, but I hear this fairly regularly including various subreddits, Twitter, and I've heard it here on HN as well (it's been a while, I don't care to dig through my comment history for links to the specific threads). Specifically, the argument takes one of two forms: either we should extend public transit and cycling infrastructure everywhere (including rural areas) or that we should implement policies that expressly accelerate urbanization and penalize rural life (or a combination).

tenacious_tuna 5y ago

Similarly, a sure-fire way to tell someone hasn't lived in a place where you haven't needed a car for every aspect of life is when they criticize anti-car policy without engaging with the deeper reasons behind it :) I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do with the popularization of human-centric design movements that question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of transportation that American cities have operated from since about the 1950s. An easy example is the idea of "induced demand" [1] that shows even from a pure engineering perspective that the cost-benefit math for cars has long been unfairly weighted towards cars by outside forces. We're seeing a lot of pressure around housing and energy and social policy in general which in turn is making us question decisions we've made, culturally, in history, like can we really sustain the building of less dense housing for our growing population? Does it make sense to give every family 0.75 acres of grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage, when those things are only used some of the time? Might there be better ways to approach the utilization of that space as a population? I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss concerns like that out of hand. Can the US ever totally get rid of cars? No, not for a hundred years at least. Having a good 80 years of city planning being focused around every adult having their own vehicle is of course going to e difficult to move away from, and there are certain lifestyles (rural living, farming, regions where building trains is more impractical) that it'll just never be a great idea... but I still think it's worth interrogating these assumptions we've carried to see if there's a better way we could be living life. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_transportation_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_trans...

rootusrootus 5y ago
> Does it make sense to give every family 0.75 acres of grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage A standard suburban house doesn't sit on 0.75 acres. 0.2 is typical. Though you're probably low on the driveway and garage :). I'd like to see a better argument for why we shouldn't live this way. There are relatively large metros (e.g. Portland) that are predominantly suburban single family homes, and so far it seems to work fine. Sure, we could compress Portland into a 10 mile by 10 mile square, but why? Would it actually make our lives better? By what metric?