5 ms·

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 polic

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 4y 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?
- tenacious_tuna 4y ago
  I'm hopping on a plane in a minute, but I'll do my best to at least start an example :) The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such that we don't treat people as people unless they're shrouded in a big rolling box of metal. Of course it'll vary from person to person and family to family. I think urban environments offer children much more freedom than corresponding suburban environments, while being safer. There's much more mobility and access to things outside of the house, which I'd argue significantly enriches childhood experience and leads to more adaptable adults. As an adult, I'm overjoyed by the ease with which I can get to things around my city. I never have to deal with traffic, I can walk to three different grocery stores in under fifteen minutes. I have dozens of restaurants in similar distance, and I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home. I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads. I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers. (A co-worker of mine lives out in the suburbs of our city, which are denser than most, and takes the light rail into work; half an hour on the train, 5 minute walk from the station. If he took a car, we'd need parking for him and everyone else that had one, and roads for it [see again, induced demand in my post above], and I wouldn't be able to walk to work myself). A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads. Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn. As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from. We can invest in more public services since we're not committed endlessly to maintaining the cost-sink of asphalt plains. [1] Public transit is an amazing economic equalizer as well: In a suburban environment, you must have a reliable car to make it to work. If you're too poor (or just starting out) to afford a car, or if it's unreliable, that's going to severely curtail your available job pool. (There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences; my highschool girlfriend spent two hours on the bus, one way, to work, because her family only had one car, and her mother needed it for her job. That's four hours a day she can't use to cook, or study [she could try, but a bus is far from an ideal study environment], or sleep. If our town had better transit, or if our town wasn't so dense that it took two hours to travel from house to shopping district, it'd be a very different story.) This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society. I feel like putting these at the end really undercuts their significance, but we never seem to talk about these facts. Car accidents are the eighth-leading cause of death in the US [2]. Imagine the economic savings, and the amount of medical resources, we could free up by reducing that. Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Cars give you freedom... yes, they're a cost, they take up space, you have to build around them, but you can move wherever you want, whenever you want. I live in a country with relatively good public transport, relatively great one in the capital and few other large cities, with public bikes and biking lanes. Then 2020 came, and due to covid, no more public transport (for some time). Want to go to work? Too bad. Want to go to the larger (and cheaper) store... nope. Order food delivery from a large supermarket chain? Good luck, people don't want to go to crowded stores, and delivery slots are full 2 minutes after midnight. I know it's an extreme situation, but it made people rethink what they need for their independece, and cars came high on the list.
- tenacious_tuna 4y ago
  I would argue that the urban planning that enables the use of cars actually restricts your freedom; you can't go anywhere without your car, and god forbid if you want to go to the store across the stroad, you have to cross 5 lanes of traffic. You can't walk that--or if you do, you have to cross that, and another square mile of parking lot. Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US because we've made it impossible to be independent unless you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To me, that's the opposite of independence. Yes, COVID is an extreme situation--but I don't think it's reasonable to plan our daily lives around extreme situations. I see this when people buy their cars--Is it reasonable to buy a pickup truck if you're only going to tow or haul something once a year with it? Is the excess spend in car payment, insurance, gas usage, consumables, and safety hazard worth that convenience? Why not just rent the truck when you need it?
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    > I would argue that the urban planning that enables the use of cars actually restricts your freedom; you can't go anywhere without your car, and god forbid if you want to go to the store across the stroad, you have to cross 5 lanes of traffic. You can't walk that--or if you do, you have to cross that, and another square mile of parking lot. On the other hand, even in my urban environment, I can get to another neighborhood in less than half the time it would take me to get there by train or bus (especially if there is a transfer involved). It's also a lot more comfortable than waiting on a platform/bus stop exposed to the elements only to squeeze myself into a small box (that smells at once of urine, vomit, BO, and cigarette smoke) with dozens of strangers, some of whom are panhandling, blasting music, threatening other commuters, etc. Moreover, my wife and I share a car, and we spend quite a lot less on it (all in: maintenance, fuel, parking, insurance, etc) than we did on public transit + rideshare + car rentals even without amortizing the car payment over the useful lifetime of the car. And of course our time and comfort are also valuable to us. > Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US because we've made it impossible to be independent unless you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To me, that's the opposite of independence. This is a feature of the new world (not just the US), and it's a consequence of our post-car development. If Europe had the bulk of its development in the post-car era, it would've turned out the same way. Also, if you're getting around by public transit you need even bigger metal boxes and you need more of them and you have to wait for them and they are often late and you will be packed onto them like cattle and you're limited by where they go (hence the "independence" of the car).
throwaway894345 4y 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 this is mostly a straw man or nut picking. From what I can tell, there aren't many rural people arguing that rural transit policy should be imposed on urban areas, but rather the debate is about whether or not policies that arguably make sense in an urban environment should be imposed on the rest of the country. Notably, rural people have enough exposure to urban environments that they understand that urban environments differ from rural environments, but not so much the other way around: e.g., everyone watches the same entertainment media that is almost invariably set in urban environments and most people have traveled to an urban area for business or pleasure, but there's very little media set in a rural environment and "rural tourism" isn't exactly a popular pastime of urbanites. > 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. Sure, I actually agree with a lot of this. I would like to see American cities and suburbs become more walkable, and I'm sure the car industry lobbied for car-centric planning, jay-walking laws, etc. My criticism isn't that anti-car policies are unfounded or they don't make sense anywhere, but that the anti-car movement is generally ignorant (in a literal sense, not pejoratively) of the non-urban world. > 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? Yes, outside of urban areas we certainly can do this for the foreseeable future. Most of America isn't constrained by space. > I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss concerns like that out of hand. No one is dismissing these concerns out of hand--I'm only arguing that the policies that policies which assume a high degree of density don't make sense in areas where that assumption is incorrect. This seems almost tautological. > 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. Fully agree. I think we could have a lot more productive conversations if we started by reimagining collectively rather than asserting how others should live their lives (without demonstrating any understanding of their concerns).

rootusrootus 4y 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?

tenacious_tuna 4y ago
I'm hopping on a plane in a minute, but I'll do my best to at least start an example :) The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such that we don't treat people as people unless they're shrouded in a big rolling box of metal. Of course it'll vary from person to person and family to family. I think urban environments offer children much more freedom than corresponding suburban environments, while being safer. There's much more mobility and access to things outside of the house, which I'd argue significantly enriches childhood experience and leads to more adaptable adults. As an adult, I'm overjoyed by the ease with which I can get to things around my city. I never have to deal with traffic, I can walk to three different grocery stores in under fifteen minutes. I have dozens of restaurants in similar distance, and I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home. I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads. I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers. (A co-worker of mine lives out in the suburbs of our city, which are denser than most, and takes the light rail into work; half an hour on the train, 5 minute walk from the station. If he took a car, we'd need parking for him and everyone else that had one, and roads for it [see again, induced demand in my post above], and I wouldn't be able to walk to work myself). A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads. Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn. As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from. We can invest in more public services since we're not committed endlessly to maintaining the cost-sink of asphalt plains. [1] Public transit is an amazing economic equalizer as well: In a suburban environment, you must have a reliable car to make it to work. If you're too poor (or just starting out) to afford a car, or if it's unreliable, that's going to severely curtail your available job pool. (There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences; my highschool girlfriend spent two hours on the bus, one way, to work, because her family only had one car, and her mother needed it for her job. That's four hours a day she can't use to cook, or study [she could try, but a bus is far from an ideal study environment], or sleep. If our town had better transit, or if our town wasn't so dense that it took two hours to travel from house to shopping district, it'd be a very different story.) This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society. I feel like putting these at the end really undercuts their significance, but we never seem to talk about these facts. Car accidents are the eighth-leading cause of death in the US [2]. Imagine the economic savings, and the amount of medical resources, we could free up by reducing that. Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

Cars give you freedom... yes, they're a cost, they take up space, you have to build around them, but you can move wherever you want, whenever you want. I live in a country with relatively good public transport, relatively great one in the capital and few other large cities, with public bikes and biking lanes. Then 2020 came, and due to covid, no more public transport (for some time). Want to go to work? Too bad. Want to go to the larger (and cheaper) store... nope. Order food delivery from a large supermarket chain? Good luck, people don't want to go to crowded stores, and delivery slots are full 2 minutes after midnight. I know it's an extreme situation, but it made people rethink what they need for their independece, and cars came high on the list.

tenacious_tuna 4y ago
I would argue that the urban planning that enables the use of cars actually restricts your freedom; you can't go anywhere without your car, and god forbid if you want to go to the store across the stroad, you have to cross 5 lanes of traffic. You can't walk that--or if you do, you have to cross that, and another square mile of parking lot. Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US because we've made it impossible to be independent unless you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To me, that's the opposite of independence. Yes, COVID is an extreme situation--but I don't think it's reasonable to plan our daily lives around extreme situations. I see this when people buy their cars--Is it reasonable to buy a pickup truck if you're only going to tow or haul something once a year with it? Is the excess spend in car payment, insurance, gas usage, consumables, and safety hazard worth that convenience? Why not just rent the truck when you need it?
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  > I would argue that the urban planning that enables the use of cars actually restricts your freedom; you can't go anywhere without your car, and god forbid if you want to go to the store across the stroad, you have to cross 5 lanes of traffic. You can't walk that--or if you do, you have to cross that, and another square mile of parking lot. On the other hand, even in my urban environment, I can get to another neighborhood in less than half the time it would take me to get there by train or bus (especially if there is a transfer involved). It's also a lot more comfortable than waiting on a platform/bus stop exposed to the elements only to squeeze myself into a small box (that smells at once of urine, vomit, BO, and cigarette smoke) with dozens of strangers, some of whom are panhandling, blasting music, threatening other commuters, etc. Moreover, my wife and I share a car, and we spend quite a lot less on it (all in: maintenance, fuel, parking, insurance, etc) than we did on public transit + rideshare + car rentals even without amortizing the car payment over the useful lifetime of the car. And of course our time and comfort are also valuable to us. > Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US because we've made it impossible to be independent unless you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To me, that's the opposite of independence. This is a feature of the new world (not just the US), and it's a consequence of our post-car development. If Europe had the bulk of its development in the post-car era, it would've turned out the same way. Also, if you're getting around by public transit you need even bigger metal boxes and you need more of them and you have to wait for them and they are often late and you will be packed onto them like cattle and you're limited by where they go (hence the "independence" of the car).

throwaway894345 4y 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 this is mostly a straw man or nut picking. From what I can tell, there aren't many rural people arguing that rural transit policy should be imposed on urban areas, but rather the debate is about whether or not policies that arguably make sense in an urban environment should be imposed on the rest of the country. Notably, rural people have enough exposure to urban environments that they understand that urban environments differ from rural environments, but not so much the other way around: e.g., everyone watches the same entertainment media that is almost invariably set in urban environments and most people have traveled to an urban area for business or pleasure, but there's very little media set in a rural environment and "rural tourism" isn't exactly a popular pastime of urbanites. > 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. Sure, I actually agree with a lot of this. I would like to see American cities and suburbs become more walkable, and I'm sure the car industry lobbied for car-centric planning, jay-walking laws, etc. My criticism isn't that anti-car policies are unfounded or they don't make sense anywhere, but that the anti-car movement is generally ignorant (in a literal sense, not pejoratively) of the non-urban world. > 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? Yes, outside of urban areas we certainly can do this for the foreseeable future. Most of America isn't constrained by space. > I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss concerns like that out of hand. No one is dismissing these concerns out of hand--I'm only arguing that the policies that policies which assume a high degree of density don't make sense in areas where that assumption is incorrect. This seems almost tautological. > 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. Fully agree. I think we could have a lot more productive conversations if we started by reimagining collectively rather than asserting how others should live their lives (without demonstrating any understanding of their concerns).