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I don't have a car and absolutely hate the car-centric culture of American cities (I live in SF). That being said, this article is completely wrong and draws t

I don't have a car and absolutely hate the car-centric culture of American cities (I live in SF). That being said, this article is completely wrong and draws the wrong conclusions. People were anti-car early on because most people didn't have cars. Later, people stopped being anti-car because most people had cars. The article would have you believe that at no point in time did the majority of people want car-centric city streets and that it was forced on them by a small minority of people interested in selling cars. That simply isn't the case. Vocal opposition to cars faded away as more people owned them. It's important to understand the status quo correctly if we ever want to change things. The sad reality is that most people want cars, even in dense cities. As I look out my apartment window on a Sunday morning, with pleasant weather and a walkable green neighborhood, I still count far more cars going by than people on foot or bicycle. Hopefully that would change if we made it easier and safer for people to walk, but it's not productive to pretend most people secretly hate cars.

hnhg 4y ago
You're looking at on car usage after all the rules were changed, and all those drivers know no better, or worse, have no choice. But imagine a city designed for no car usage! How would all those car driver vote then? SF has terrible public transport by international standards. You have to rebalance your baseline, I'm afraid.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  Right, I would strongly prefer a city designed for less/no car usage. My complaint is that this article misrepresents history and misrepresents the current situation. Public transit 100 years ago was worse for everyone than car ownership today. Living in a car centric city with a car is an overwhelmingly better lifestyle than riding public transit in the 1910s. At the time that cars became popular, they were a huge improvement in quality of life for the vast majority of people. Today we have technology to build better transit that is an improvement on car ownership for most people, but we're not building it. I'd like the narrative to be "we can do better", not "we used to do better but secret evil forces hurt us".
- dionidium 4y ago
  Something like 22% of Mahattanites and almost half of all Brooklynites live in a household with a car. Sometimes people will say something like, "see, this proves that people don't want a car when they don't need one." But this seems exactly backwards to me. Given the truly staggering cost and difficulty of car ownership in New York, what this says to me is that people really like owning cars, even in places where they aren't necessary. Even in those places, basically everybody who feels rich enough to own one still buys one. Those are very high rates of car ownership in those places, given the costs and availability of good alternatives. The lesson here is that you can create environments with enough constraints on ownership where people will mostly choose not to own a car (if they aren't simply priced out), but what you cannot do is create a place where most people don't want one. Even in NYC, a car is an incredibly useful tool. People aren't stupid. They know that. So they like owning them.
  - seadan83 4y ago
    Are you assuming that 78% of non-car owners living in New York want a car? Given they don't have one, there is oodles of financing available, wouldn't it be more logical to conclude that the majority not only do not own cars, but do not want them? Perhaps that 22%, a good chunk of them might hate their cars but for whatever reason keep them (travel outside of the city for work, perhaps previously owned and the economics are better to keep them, etc..) I think one could draw an opposite conclusion from those same numbers.
    - dionidium 4y ago
      > Are you assuming that 78% of non-car owners living in New York want a car? The rate of people who are in principle uninterested or even opposed to car ownership is surely higher in NYC than anywhere else in the country, since there's both a selection effect (people who fit that description move there) and an experiential effect (people who grow up there may not be interested in something they have little exposure to). What I believe but cannot prove is that the number is nowhere near 78%. I think that defies belief. I sincerely doubt there are more people who think, "the subway is so good there's no possible need for a car" than there are people who simply can't afford the additional costs or are unwilling to endure the unique inconvenience of car ownership in the city.
Arainach 4y ago
People got cars in large part because new development was done in car-specific ways rather than dense ways that support alternatives. I recommend Robert Caro's The Power Broker, which goes into how new development was shaped by roads without planning for rail or mass transit, and how even as this was being built in the 1950s people understood induced demand and how roads couldn't scale and advocated for the inclusion of planning for mass transit but were overruled. This led to sparse suburban development that required cars, but didn't have to be the case. Once it was in place it was prohibitively expensive (and in many cases impossible) to change.
jacquesm 4y ago
> because most people had cars. That's mostly an American/European thing though, world wide there are only about 1.5 billion cars, 275 million of these in the United States, another 250 million in Europe. Together those account for ~ 1/3 of the cars but only for about 12% of the world population.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  For sure, and some economies were "lucky" enough to wait until the late 20th century to develop. The public transit systems in Singapore, Hong Kong, the entire Pearl River Delta, etc are all IMO far better ways to get around than driving a car in most US cities.
  - 88913527 4y ago
    Lucky might be subjective. Standard of living in the suburbs of American might be deemed superior to living in an efficiency apartment in Hong Kong, but that's much less an option for people who live in areas that developed later on, as these areas leaned into true urban levels of density since it's infrastructurally far cheaper per capita. Given the choice, many would prefer to not live in New York levels of density.
    - mgraczyk 4y ago
      For sure, and I want people to have that choice! But I also want the amount paid by people living in the suburbs to more accurately reflect the cost, and I want people who prefer living in denser urban environments to be able to improve their surroundings by removing cars.
TulliusCicero 4y ago
> As I look out my apartment window on a Sunday morning, with pleasant weather and a walkable green neighborhood, I still count far more cars going by than people on foot or bicycle. And how much dedicated infrastructure is there, in terms of space and money, for walking vs biking vs driving? People always ignore this, that driving even in "walkable" neighborhoods generally still has ENORMOUSLY more money and more land dedicated to it. If you look at how much space the road takes up, vs sidewalks and protected bike lanes, and how much money those things cost to build -- it's not even close. That, plus in the US there's usually a lack of mixed use zoning, so there's hardly anywhere to walk to (though I don't know whether this is the case for your neighborhood in particular).
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  At the intersection I'm looking at, it's around 2/3 for cars, 1/3 for peds, 0 dedicated for biking. However, SF is actually pretty good about this. There are two "slow streets" within 1 block of me that are mostly car-free. There are also 2 streets within 3 blocks of me that have dedicated bike lanes with raised barriers.
  - TulliusCicero 4y ago
    Sounds like what I'd expect in SF, as someone from the bay area. Much better than average for the US, but still a long ways to go.
  - sagarm 4y ago
    It's not just land. Walking paths cost far less than and require less maintenance and drainage than smooth impermeable asphalt roads with curbs. "Intersections" for pedestrians are simply paths, with no signage or expensive signals required. Drivers rushing about at 20-30mph pose a danger to people on foot, on bikes, on scooters, in strollers, etc.
  - scoofy 4y ago
    Slow Streets (also called open streets), and really a half measure as it stands. To make them fully low-car, they need to be one-way for cars, alternating directions, so that there is no reason to be on the street if it's not your final destination. It would also be helpful if the intersections were genuine roundabouts. I live in SF too, but calling our infrastructure "good" is really setting a low bar. We want about 10%-15% of the streets primarily serving bicycles, with pedestrians getting another 10% of roadways. That should be the goal.
cscurmudgeon 4y ago
> The sad reality is that most people want cars The sad reality is that most people NEED cars Only the rich can afford to not need cars. Now back to your regularly scheduled car hate.
- ska 4y ago
  > The sad reality is that most people NEED cars That was a choice, though. We (especially in North America) have decided collectively to build infrastructure in such a way that most people will have strong reasons to use cars, as a result most people want cars. We did not have to do that, or at least there was no compelling reason to do it to the degree that we have.
  - seadan83 4y ago
    Well, there was a compelling reason. Massive funds from an auto and oil industry lobby rooted in excuses such as the american car tourist dream and a life in a segregated suburb. Where we arrived is IMO almost wholly corrupt, perhaps one of the biggest astro-turfing campaigns ever seen.
    - ska 4y ago
      That (roughly, with different emphasis) is a the choice I'm talking about. It was not based purely on rational planning, and it was a choice. That in turn made it compelling for individuals, often, but that's not the same thing.
- asdff 4y ago
  It depends on the city honestly. In LA county, cars save you time but you can get everywhere, eventually, on a bus. Again, the key word is eventually, so bring a book and it will be like teleporting. Ridership reflects this. If you can afford to buy convenience you do so. 70% of LA metro riders are very low income, median income for riders on the system is $19,000. In other words most riders can't even entertain the idea of affording a car. Even a 20 year old beater car in CA might be a few hundred alone just to register a year, whereas low income people can ride metro for free. https://www.nlc.org/article/2021/05/14/expanding-l-a-metros-fare-free-transit-for-kids-and-families/ https://www.nlc.org/article/2021/05/14/expanding-l-a-metros-...
welshwelsh 4y ago
>it's not productive to pretend most people secretly hate cars Actually, I think that's exactly what we should do. Most people don't have a strong opinion on cars. They originally bought cars due to marketing. If we talk about how great cars are, most people will agree. If we talk about how terrible cars are, most people will agree. Don't worry about what people think. Just keep talking about the benefits of walkable carefree cities, and that will become the new popular opinion.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  > Just keep talking about the benefits of walkable carefree cities If you don't worry about what people think, you're never going to understand and address the actual reasons people buy cars. When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable! They are making choices informed based on their own life experiences that it would be smart to understand and emphasize with, if you want to drive meaningful change.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    > When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable! This is because we plan for the only possible route by car. We prioritize making car access fast in every single aspect of planning, and never once even consider public transit during the planning process, and hope that underfunded transit systems can somehow work around the cars. A far better system would be to have children be able to walk to school rather than hop in a vehicle. Or school buses, which used to be common in the US to get around the car dependency.
  - jeltz 4y ago
    Where I live almost everyone walks their kids to school. Many people having to drive their kids to school or use public transport is a sign of bad urban planning.
  - jackvalentine 4y ago
    > When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable! I saw a case recently where a woman crashed her car outside her child’s school in London, injuring some children. All very sad and especially compounded by the school only accepting enrolments within 1km of the school due to demand. 1km! And she still drove to pick up the kids!
88913527 4y ago
> The sad reality is that most people want cars Why is it sad? I can go the mountains, the beach, work all in under 30 minutes. The user experience is great (minus traffic, but that is orthogonal to the vehicle itself, or compared to alternatives like mass transit that don't go to all of these places in comparable amounts of time or even have service to all these areas). The only viable successor that meets our standard of living will be something like autonomous rideshare, and since that's always 5 years away, and we enjoy the standard of living we have, nothing will change. It is that simple. The point of human progress is to raise our standard of living over time, and convincing people to roll back to inferior alternatives is a fool's errand. The successor to cars needs a similar to superior convenience factor.
- acdha 4y ago
  > I can go the mountains, the beach, work all in under 30 minutes. The user experience is great (minus traffic, but that is orthogonal to the vehicle itself). That last part is the logical flaw: you’re acting like traffic is some random coincidence when it’s actually inherent to the design. Cars are inherently inefficient because you’re using over a hundred square feet of space and 2-3 tons of metal to move on average 1-2 people but because they’re familiar people who drive a lot tend to make excuses or simply not recognize those drawbacks - it’s always someone else making traffic, adding another lane will fix it even though that’s never been true anywhere in the world, it’s “under 30 minutes” because they’re thinking the best-case travel times from where they parked to the general vicinity of where they’re going rather than realistic door to door times including traffic, parking, etc. Similarly, it’s not rolling back the standard of living to acknowledge that this lifestyle is expensive ($11+k USD/driver/year), unhealthy, and soaks up a lot of time. Yes, it’s nice to get in and go and that even works okay in a rural setting but in practice an awful lot of people are spending large fractions of their non-work time sitting in traffic and paying a large quantity of money to do so, all of which lowers the standard of living even before you consider the annual death and life-altering injury rates, effects of pollution (not just fuel but also tire and brake particulates), and the social cost of reserving so much public space for vehicle motion and storage.
  - candiodari 4y ago
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
America has Stockholm Syndrome but for car-based infrastructure. It's obvious to outsiders and even to Americans who live abroad.
opportune 4y ago
I am also a car-hater in SF and live here specifically because it's one of the 4-5 cities in the US where you can not own a car without it being an immense inconvenience/making yourself into a pariah. Most people want cars sure, but not the drawbacks. Many people would like to listen to loud music or practice target shooting outside their home, but if everybody did that it'd make for really shitty city living. I think a lot of people in the US simply don't realize or consciously acknowledge how inconvenient car-centrism is, so they only think of the personal convenience their car gives them, rather than how inconvenient things become when everybody uses cars (ie the conveniences cars afford are in many cases only because we've developed around cars). Most people probably hate not being able to walk a few hundred feet to the store to get some milk, or don't realize how nice it would be (because in a lot of the US it's such a bizarrely foreign concept) to have that as an option. They probably hate that the only way to get to work is to commute during rush hour with tons of traffic, or that their friend in the same urban area is actually 80 miles away, or that everything is covered in asphalt and the air sucks.
- grogenaut 4y ago
  I live in the burbs, I also live .25 miles from the grocery. When it's just me and my spouse I'm happy to walk it, we do that on our daily walk anyway. When it's me, my SO, my son, and his SO which it has been all of the pandemic and after... it's too much to carry. Way Way too much for my SO to carry who likes to do the shopping. Car gets it done easily. I lived about 3 blocks from a grocery in a downtown core for 10 years and rarely drove and walked it then. It was actually more of a hassle. My mom lived about 5 miles away. She'd pick me up on Sundays and we'd go shop. She'd cook dinner then drop me off at my apartment in that downtown core. This was a lot better. Basically the car was great for the stuff you buy a bit more of and walking is great to pick up the stuff you want for this meal. Then again there were 5 restaurants on my walk from work to home so I just ate out all the time. Most places are also not SF weather wise. This was in downtown St. Louis. It would be 85-90 the warm part of the year and sub 40 the rest of the year. Walking with heavy grocery bags in that weather or in winter requires changing clothes. Or pop in the car and get more moved and no sweat (literally). You go 5 blocks with a granny grocery cart in 95 weather and you'll need a shower when you get home.
anothernewdude 4y ago
Except the reason streets became car-centric was due to lobbying from car companies to remove streetcars. Once streetcars were gone, people had to own cars.
8note 4y ago
I dunno about your interpretation. When did jaywalking become a thing? When did people get kicked off the road so cars to use them, before or after everyone had cars?
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  It became a thing in different places at different times. I'm curious to learn more about the history actually, because all the sources I can find are specifically oriented around political action and do not present any factual history. From what I could find about California, jaywalking is not illegal on most streets, but happens to be illegal when crossing most streets in densely populated areas. Specifically, you are not allowed to cross streets that have crosswalks at both ends unless you do it at the crosswalk. The current laws are from 1959 and seem to have been passed specifically to reduce pedestrian fatalities. These laws seems pretty successful at accomplishing that goal, and recent attempts to remove jaywalking laws over racial equality concerns have been blocked in the interest of public safety (rightly, in my opinion). To answer you question, in CA at least, it appears that pedestrians were kicked off after everyone had cars. Streets are unsafe for pedestrians, but it's because people drive on them, not the other way around.
brailsafe 4y ago
I contest that people do secretly hate cars, but they don't hate their own car. Put two identical patios adjacent to each other on the same street, and I'd bet that the one furthest away from cars would attract people first if you sufficiently isolate the variable. Suburbs are basically a symptom of their own car-dependent design. Even they don't want to be near them! But it's fine for an individual if they're driving somewhere else.
kingludite 4y ago
Children and animals don't drive cars. If we forget for a moment that they are not at all important and assumed a level playing field the child would need to give up playing outside so that mostly unfit people only have to walk the bare minimum distance to maximize commerce. Animals would have to accept thick lines of asphalt that one may not walk on with death by car as the chosen punishment. Then surely it is a deal that is good for everyone? Not that I have any proposals. It's just funny in a dark and morbid way. The ME ME ME context has more comedy in it. Those roads one looks at as "things for me!" but to a much greater extend they are things for others. Others will come blast their fumes and noise into your neighborhood. Murder your cat, your dog and your kids. But also a parade of suits who got it in their head to serve and enforce a rule set created for you to obey. What is the tax man to do if he cant extremely conveniently get to your house? Is your lawn mowed to spec? That your kids are fine doesn't mean they are yours to keep and neither is your home. Roads are the great enabler for more and more rules and regulations by designs you only have influence on in theory. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live at the top of some hard to climb mountain surrounded by forest swamps and/or oceans. Surely you could still contribute to society? That your pull requests come in a bit less frequently hardly makes you unproductive. the MPAA might not care if you are brewing your own liquor and the building inspector might not care you are growing opium, mescaline cacti, shrooms and like licking the psychedelic toads. But all combined they make a formidable army fit to examine every inch of your life. Are those real nikes, is that a stolen rolex? Do you wear a helmet riding that bicycle? The mailman - the bringer of bad news, over the road. And in the end your road is perfect for tanks and marching armies coming to murder you.

hnhg 4y ago

You're looking at on car usage after all the rules were changed, and all those drivers know no better, or worse, have no choice. But imagine a city designed for no car usage! How would all those car driver vote then? SF has terrible public transport by international standards. You have to rebalance your baseline, I'm afraid.

mgraczyk 4y ago
Right, I would strongly prefer a city designed for less/no car usage. My complaint is that this article misrepresents history and misrepresents the current situation. Public transit 100 years ago was worse for everyone than car ownership today. Living in a car centric city with a car is an overwhelmingly better lifestyle than riding public transit in the 1910s. At the time that cars became popular, they were a huge improvement in quality of life for the vast majority of people. Today we have technology to build better transit that is an improvement on car ownership for most people, but we're not building it. I'd like the narrative to be "we can do better", not "we used to do better but secret evil forces hurt us".
dionidium 4y ago
Something like 22% of Mahattanites and almost half of all Brooklynites live in a household with a car. Sometimes people will say something like, "see, this proves that people don't want a car when they don't need one." But this seems exactly backwards to me. Given the truly staggering cost and difficulty of car ownership in New York, what this says to me is that people really like owning cars, even in places where they aren't necessary. Even in those places, basically everybody who feels rich enough to own one still buys one. Those are very high rates of car ownership in those places, given the costs and availability of good alternatives. The lesson here is that you can create environments with enough constraints on ownership where people will mostly choose not to own a car (if they aren't simply priced out), but what you cannot do is create a place where most people don't want one. Even in NYC, a car is an incredibly useful tool. People aren't stupid. They know that. So they like owning them.
- seadan83 4y ago
  Are you assuming that 78% of non-car owners living in New York want a car? Given they don't have one, there is oodles of financing available, wouldn't it be more logical to conclude that the majority not only do not own cars, but do not want them? Perhaps that 22%, a good chunk of them might hate their cars but for whatever reason keep them (travel outside of the city for work, perhaps previously owned and the economics are better to keep them, etc..) I think one could draw an opposite conclusion from those same numbers.
  - dionidium 4y ago
    > Are you assuming that 78% of non-car owners living in New York want a car? The rate of people who are in principle uninterested or even opposed to car ownership is surely higher in NYC than anywhere else in the country, since there's both a selection effect (people who fit that description move there) and an experiential effect (people who grow up there may not be interested in something they have little exposure to). What I believe but cannot prove is that the number is nowhere near 78%. I think that defies belief. I sincerely doubt there are more people who think, "the subway is so good there's no possible need for a car" than there are people who simply can't afford the additional costs or are unwilling to endure the unique inconvenience of car ownership in the city.

Arainach 4y ago

People got cars in large part because new development was done in car-specific ways rather than dense ways that support alternatives. I recommend Robert Caro's The Power Broker, which goes into how new development was shaped by roads without planning for rail or mass transit, and how even as this was being built in the 1950s people understood induced demand and how roads couldn't scale and advocated for the inclusion of planning for mass transit but were overruled. This led to sparse suburban development that required cars, but didn't have to be the case. Once it was in place it was prohibitively expensive (and in many cases impossible) to change.

jacquesm 4y ago

> because most people had cars. That's mostly an American/European thing though, world wide there are only about 1.5 billion cars, 275 million of these in the United States, another 250 million in Europe. Together those account for ~ 1/3 of the cars but only for about 12% of the world population.

mgraczyk 4y ago
For sure, and some economies were "lucky" enough to wait until the late 20th century to develop. The public transit systems in Singapore, Hong Kong, the entire Pearl River Delta, etc are all IMO far better ways to get around than driving a car in most US cities.
- 88913527 4y ago
  Lucky might be subjective. Standard of living in the suburbs of American might be deemed superior to living in an efficiency apartment in Hong Kong, but that's much less an option for people who live in areas that developed later on, as these areas leaned into true urban levels of density since it's infrastructurally far cheaper per capita. Given the choice, many would prefer to not live in New York levels of density.
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    For sure, and I want people to have that choice! But I also want the amount paid by people living in the suburbs to more accurately reflect the cost, and I want people who prefer living in denser urban environments to be able to improve their surroundings by removing cars.

TulliusCicero 4y ago

> As I look out my apartment window on a Sunday morning, with pleasant weather and a walkable green neighborhood, I still count far more cars going by than people on foot or bicycle. And how much dedicated infrastructure is there, in terms of space and money, for walking vs biking vs driving? People always ignore this, that driving even in "walkable" neighborhoods generally still has ENORMOUSLY more money and more land dedicated to it. If you look at how much space the road takes up, vs sidewalks and protected bike lanes, and how much money those things cost to build -- it's not even close. That, plus in the US there's usually a lack of mixed use zoning, so there's hardly anywhere to walk to (though I don't know whether this is the case for your neighborhood in particular).

mgraczyk 4y ago
At the intersection I'm looking at, it's around 2/3 for cars, 1/3 for peds, 0 dedicated for biking. However, SF is actually pretty good about this. There are two "slow streets" within 1 block of me that are mostly car-free. There are also 2 streets within 3 blocks of me that have dedicated bike lanes with raised barriers.
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  Sounds like what I'd expect in SF, as someone from the bay area. Much better than average for the US, but still a long ways to go.
- sagarm 4y ago
  It's not just land. Walking paths cost far less than and require less maintenance and drainage than smooth impermeable asphalt roads with curbs. "Intersections" for pedestrians are simply paths, with no signage or expensive signals required. Drivers rushing about at 20-30mph pose a danger to people on foot, on bikes, on scooters, in strollers, etc.
- scoofy 4y ago
  Slow Streets (also called open streets), and really a half measure as it stands. To make them fully low-car, they need to be one-way for cars, alternating directions, so that there is no reason to be on the street if it's not your final destination. It would also be helpful if the intersections were genuine roundabouts. I live in SF too, but calling our infrastructure "good" is really setting a low bar. We want about 10%-15% of the streets primarily serving bicycles, with pedestrians getting another 10% of roadways. That should be the goal.

cscurmudgeon 4y ago

> The sad reality is that most people want cars The sad reality is that most people NEED cars Only the rich can afford to not need cars. Now back to your regularly scheduled car hate.

ska 4y ago
> The sad reality is that most people NEED cars That was a choice, though. We (especially in North America) have decided collectively to build infrastructure in such a way that most people will have strong reasons to use cars, as a result most people want cars. We did not have to do that, or at least there was no compelling reason to do it to the degree that we have.
- seadan83 4y ago
  Well, there was a compelling reason. Massive funds from an auto and oil industry lobby rooted in excuses such as the american car tourist dream and a life in a segregated suburb. Where we arrived is IMO almost wholly corrupt, perhaps one of the biggest astro-turfing campaigns ever seen.
  - ska 4y ago
    That (roughly, with different emphasis) is a the choice I'm talking about. It was not based purely on rational planning, and it was a choice. That in turn made it compelling for individuals, often, but that's not the same thing.
asdff 4y ago
It depends on the city honestly. In LA county, cars save you time but you can get everywhere, eventually, on a bus. Again, the key word is eventually, so bring a book and it will be like teleporting. Ridership reflects this. If you can afford to buy convenience you do so. 70% of LA metro riders are very low income, median income for riders on the system is $19,000. In other words most riders can't even entertain the idea of affording a car. Even a 20 year old beater car in CA might be a few hundred alone just to register a year, whereas low income people can ride metro for free. https://www.nlc.org/article/2021/05/14/expanding-l-a-metros-fare-free-transit-for-kids-and-families/ https://www.nlc.org/article/2021/05/14/expanding-l-a-metros-...

welshwelsh 4y ago

>it's not productive to pretend most people secretly hate cars Actually, I think that's exactly what we should do. Most people don't have a strong opinion on cars. They originally bought cars due to marketing. If we talk about how great cars are, most people will agree. If we talk about how terrible cars are, most people will agree. Don't worry about what people think. Just keep talking about the benefits of walkable carefree cities, and that will become the new popular opinion.

bpodgursky 4y ago
> Just keep talking about the benefits of walkable carefree cities If you don't worry about what people think, you're never going to understand and address the actual reasons people buy cars. When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable! They are making choices informed based on their own life experiences that it would be smart to understand and emphasize with, if you want to drive meaningful change.
- epistasis 4y ago
  > When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable! This is because we plan for the only possible route by car. We prioritize making car access fast in every single aspect of planning, and never once even consider public transit during the planning process, and hope that underfunded transit systems can somehow work around the cars. A far better system would be to have children be able to walk to school rather than hop in a vehicle. Or school buses, which used to be common in the US to get around the car dependency.
- jeltz 4y ago
  Where I live almost everyone walks their kids to school. Many people having to drive their kids to school or use public transport is a sign of bad urban planning.
- jackvalentine 4y ago
  > When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable! I saw a case recently where a woman crashed her car outside her child’s school in London, injuring some children. All very sad and especially compounded by the school only accepting enrolments within 1km of the school due to demand. 1km! And she still drove to pick up the kids!

88913527 4y ago

> The sad reality is that most people want cars Why is it sad? I can go the mountains, the beach, work all in under 30 minutes. The user experience is great (minus traffic, but that is orthogonal to the vehicle itself, or compared to alternatives like mass transit that don't go to all of these places in comparable amounts of time or even have service to all these areas). The only viable successor that meets our standard of living will be something like autonomous rideshare, and since that's always 5 years away, and we enjoy the standard of living we have, nothing will change. It is that simple. The point of human progress is to raise our standard of living over time, and convincing people to roll back to inferior alternatives is a fool's errand. The successor to cars needs a similar to superior convenience factor.

acdha 4y ago
> I can go the mountains, the beach, work all in under 30 minutes. The user experience is great (minus traffic, but that is orthogonal to the vehicle itself). That last part is the logical flaw: you’re acting like traffic is some random coincidence when it’s actually inherent to the design. Cars are inherently inefficient because you’re using over a hundred square feet of space and 2-3 tons of metal to move on average 1-2 people but because they’re familiar people who drive a lot tend to make excuses or simply not recognize those drawbacks - it’s always someone else making traffic, adding another lane will fix it even though that’s never been true anywhere in the world, it’s “under 30 minutes” because they’re thinking the best-case travel times from where they parked to the general vicinity of where they’re going rather than realistic door to door times including traffic, parking, etc. Similarly, it’s not rolling back the standard of living to acknowledge that this lifestyle is expensive ($11+k USD/driver/year), unhealthy, and soaks up a lot of time. Yes, it’s nice to get in and go and that even works okay in a rural setting but in practice an awful lot of people are spending large fractions of their non-work time sitting in traffic and paying a large quantity of money to do so, all of which lowers the standard of living even before you consider the annual death and life-altering injury rates, effects of pollution (not just fuel but also tire and brake particulates), and the social cost of reserving so much public space for vehicle motion and storage.
- candiodari 4y ago

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

America has Stockholm Syndrome but for car-based infrastructure. It's obvious to outsiders and even to Americans who live abroad.

opportune 4y ago

I am also a car-hater in SF and live here specifically because it's one of the 4-5 cities in the US where you can not own a car without it being an immense inconvenience/making yourself into a pariah. Most people want cars sure, but not the drawbacks. Many people would like to listen to loud music or practice target shooting outside their home, but if everybody did that it'd make for really shitty city living. I think a lot of people in the US simply don't realize or consciously acknowledge how inconvenient car-centrism is, so they only think of the personal convenience their car gives them, rather than how inconvenient things become when everybody uses cars (ie the conveniences cars afford are in many cases only because we've developed around cars). Most people probably hate not being able to walk a few hundred feet to the store to get some milk, or don't realize how nice it would be (because in a lot of the US it's such a bizarrely foreign concept) to have that as an option. They probably hate that the only way to get to work is to commute during rush hour with tons of traffic, or that their friend in the same urban area is actually 80 miles away, or that everything is covered in asphalt and the air sucks.

grogenaut 4y ago
I live in the burbs, I also live .25 miles from the grocery. When it's just me and my spouse I'm happy to walk it, we do that on our daily walk anyway. When it's me, my SO, my son, and his SO which it has been all of the pandemic and after... it's too much to carry. Way Way too much for my SO to carry who likes to do the shopping. Car gets it done easily. I lived about 3 blocks from a grocery in a downtown core for 10 years and rarely drove and walked it then. It was actually more of a hassle. My mom lived about 5 miles away. She'd pick me up on Sundays and we'd go shop. She'd cook dinner then drop me off at my apartment in that downtown core. This was a lot better. Basically the car was great for the stuff you buy a bit more of and walking is great to pick up the stuff you want for this meal. Then again there were 5 restaurants on my walk from work to home so I just ate out all the time. Most places are also not SF weather wise. This was in downtown St. Louis. It would be 85-90 the warm part of the year and sub 40 the rest of the year. Walking with heavy grocery bags in that weather or in winter requires changing clothes. Or pop in the car and get more moved and no sweat (literally). You go 5 blocks with a granny grocery cart in 95 weather and you'll need a shower when you get home.

anothernewdude 4y ago

Except the reason streets became car-centric was due to lobbying from car companies to remove streetcars. Once streetcars were gone, people had to own cars.

8note 4y ago

I dunno about your interpretation. When did jaywalking become a thing? When did people get kicked off the road so cars to use them, before or after everyone had cars?

mgraczyk 4y ago
It became a thing in different places at different times. I'm curious to learn more about the history actually, because all the sources I can find are specifically oriented around political action and do not present any factual history. From what I could find about California, jaywalking is not illegal on most streets, but happens to be illegal when crossing most streets in densely populated areas. Specifically, you are not allowed to cross streets that have crosswalks at both ends unless you do it at the crosswalk. The current laws are from 1959 and seem to have been passed specifically to reduce pedestrian fatalities. These laws seems pretty successful at accomplishing that goal, and recent attempts to remove jaywalking laws over racial equality concerns have been blocked in the interest of public safety (rightly, in my opinion). To answer you question, in CA at least, it appears that pedestrians were kicked off after everyone had cars. Streets are unsafe for pedestrians, but it's because people drive on them, not the other way around.

brailsafe 4y ago

I contest that people do secretly hate cars, but they don't hate their own car. Put two identical patios adjacent to each other on the same street, and I'd bet that the one furthest away from cars would attract people first if you sufficiently isolate the variable. Suburbs are basically a symptom of their own car-dependent design. Even they don't want to be near them! But it's fine for an individual if they're driving somewhere else.

kingludite 4y ago

Children and animals don't drive cars. If we forget for a moment that they are not at all important and assumed a level playing field the child would need to give up playing outside so that mostly unfit people only have to walk the bare minimum distance to maximize commerce. Animals would have to accept thick lines of asphalt that one may not walk on with death by car as the chosen punishment. Then surely it is a deal that is good for everyone? Not that I have any proposals. It's just funny in a dark and morbid way. The ME ME ME context has more comedy in it. Those roads one looks at as "things for me!" but to a much greater extend they are things for others. Others will come blast their fumes and noise into your neighborhood. Murder your cat, your dog and your kids. But also a parade of suits who got it in their head to serve and enforce a rule set created for you to obey. What is the tax man to do if he cant extremely conveniently get to your house? Is your lawn mowed to spec? That your kids are fine doesn't mean they are yours to keep and neither is your home. Roads are the great enabler for more and more rules and regulations by designs you only have influence on in theory. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live at the top of some hard to climb mountain surrounded by forest swamps and/or oceans. Surely you could still contribute to society? That your pull requests come in a bit less frequently hardly makes you unproductive. the MPAA might not care if you are brewing your own liquor and the building inspector might not care you are growing opium, mescaline cacti, shrooms and like licking the psychedelic toads. But all combined they make a formidable army fit to examine every inch of your life. Are those real nikes, is that a stolen rolex? Do you wear a helmet riding that bicycle? The mailman - the bringer of bad news, over the road. And in the end your road is perfect for tanks and marching armies coming to murder you.