29 ms·

Too many Americans live in places built for cars – not for human connection

381 points by smn1234 4y ago

smn1234 4y ago
the article calls out how “spontaneous encounters” are limited due to the urban planning and issues with American suburbia. Funny how just this morning, and throughout the return to office campaign, the key benefit for coming back to work has repeatedly been stated as the very same potential for “spontaneous encounters,” but with colleagues.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  This doesn’t help people who work at small companies. They still get screwed by car focused society without proper work socializing.
  - boring_twenties 4y ago
    Ha, so my friend recently accepted a "remote" job. Shortly after he started, they nixed that and started requiring everyone to come to the office most of the time. The best part is that no one from his team is in the office in his city. So now he has to commute 1.5h a day just to work remotely from the "office."
    - throwaway5959 4y ago
      He should just quit. That’s ridiculous.
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      Yeah…why is he working? Is he a programmer or in a less demand filled job where he can’t easily get another? Also. Are there other people from the company in the office who work in similar departments?
- teeray 4y ago
  “Spontaneous encounters” in a work context are just rebranded interruptions.
- Steltek 4y ago
  Absolutely. Friend or neighbor in a car? They get a wave because that's about all you can do because their window is rolled up and they're not going to stop anyway. Friend or neighbor walking or biking? Pleasant 30 minute conversation about how our summers are going while our kids play together.
twblalock 4y ago
Most Americans want it to be that way, and that’s why it is that way. Zoning laws didn’t push people into a car lifestyle. Americans created those zoning laws because they like the car lifestyle and want to perpetuate it. The same is true for suburban zoning in general. People have not been tricked into this: this is what they want.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  I too would like the car lifestyle ... from 1950. Sadly, we have created a monster. I suspect many Americans now don't even know what a community without cars would look like, that it could even work at all.
  - kodah 4y ago
    The average American likely doesn't want a life without cars. That seems to be an HN obsession seemingly (my perception) fueled by people who have lived and stayed in very dense urban areas. Creating larger spaces that aren't made for cars is great, but people will still need long-range individual transportation.
    - kiba 4y ago
      Last time I check, these 'dense' urban area aren't exactly great for anybody but cars.
      - kodah 4y ago
        Correct. The car situation is worse there, which is why I think their theories are so whacky when postulated as "get rid of cars" because it fails to be relevant beyond those areas.
      - dionidium 4y ago
        As a former resident of Manhattan, this is where I'm most resentful about car supremacy. I truly don't care that there exist car-centric suburbs. Anybody who lives there knows exactly what they're signing up for. What's insane to me is that we allow cars to dominate even our most urban spaces. When I would walk to work through Midtown, my senses were practically assaulted by automobiles. Honking, speeding, stereos blasting, engines revving, cars encroaching on the crosswalk, and on and on. It's an enormous quality of life issue and one of the things I hated most about living in NYC. "Cities are loud and dangerous. This is just life in the big city!" No, no, no, and no. Cars are loud and dangerous. This is a choice. It's not an unavoidable fact of life in cities. We choose to live this way.
ylhert 4y ago
The car has done so much damage to our world and most people are completely blind to it. Obesity, climate change, isolation/loneliness, excess deaths/injuries from collisions, out of control housing costs, can all be tied back in a major way to car centric society. And yet people will defend their car and the "convenience" of it like their life depends on it, and force it down the throats of everyone around them. Boggles the mind.
- zeristor 4y ago
  Maybe this is the great filter as to why we don't see any Extraterrestrial Civilisations, once they get to the 'car' they wither.
  - asdff 4y ago
    The modern human sits for 95% of the day. We evolved to forage out in the environment for resources, not to wake up just to sit at breakfast then sit in the car then sit at work then sit in the car then sit in front of the tv or computer then sleep. It's no wonder so many people have issues with maintaining a healthy weight when they literally aren't moving in a given day.
- datadata 4y ago
  How would you tie housing costs to cars?
  - warning26 4y ago
    Easy, supply and demand. Before cars, dense housing was the norm, but cars popularized spreading everything out as much as possible so you have room for wide roads and lots of parking. Less density -> less housing overall -> decreased supply -> increased prices
    - trombone5000 4y ago
      Less density doesn't imply less housing, especially when empty land is cheap, as it typically is in the USA. You just use more space. I hate cars, and I hate how expensive housing is, but as far as I can tell, housing is even more expensive in places (in the USA anyway) where cars are less necessary.
neves 4y ago
I took a lot of time to understand that American slums are parking lots with trailers.
- trgn 4y ago
  Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
user3939382 4y ago
Search YouTube for “stroad” (edit spelling) there’s a guy that’s very passionate about this topic with a lot of high quality videos on it.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  "Stroad" will get you what you want. The channels you are thinking of are probably either Not Just Bikes, Strong Towns, or Adam Something.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    Yep I was thinking of Not Just Bikes. He puts a lot of effort into those videos.
hi41 4y ago
Our homes are also designed in way that causes alienation from family members. Many rooms have TV and the seating is arranged in such a way that we can compulsively watch to dull our anxiety instead of having meaningful conversations with wife and kids. This is the default and without everyone’s okay in the family it’s hard to change this.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  >Our homes are also designed in way that causes alienation from family members. Have you been in a house from the 1800s or early 1900s? Walls and doors everywhere. Hell, there's a good chance the kitchen sink isn't even in the kitchen. People are much more readily in each others company (for better or worse) in newer houses with their big open spaces. >Many rooms have TV and the seating is arranged in such a way that we can compulsively watch to dull our anxiety instead of having meaningful conversations with wife and kids. Back in the "good old days" the kids would be doing some sort of labor (chores or otherwise) as their age and ability allowed and husband and wife would have spent more of their time doing the stuff needed to run the household. We spend far more time interacting with each other these days as a result of the sheer abundance of leisure time. Having daily leisure time with your SO, even if it's also screen time, is basically unheard of by 1920s standards of living.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  The seating arrangement in a house is entirely up to you. Hard to believe, but there's not even a hard government-mandated requirement on where your TV is positioned or fee if you forego it. At any rate, most homes have far more flexibility in seating arrangements and remodeling possibilities than your average apartment does. They also tend to have more outdoor seating and arrangements that make it easier for social activities. The garage, too, if properly arranged as a workshop or craft center, can also be a great way to encourage social activity. One can even add a basketball hoop in the driveway, or cornhole in the back yard for additional possibilities.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
dont__panic 4y ago
I've seen so much anti-car, pro-walkability, pro-transit, pro-bikeability sentiment online recently. I really hope this is proof of the younger generations -- Millenials, Zoomers, and younger folks even -- waking up to the idea that the USA in particular has become a toxic environment thanks to cars. WFH was a big wakeup call, I think -- once you step away from the commute for a year or two, trying to sit in traffic again seems insane. I guess it's a successful "unboiling of the frog," where we realized that car infratructure has been turned up for the last century to unbearable levels. I hate cars. I don't want to use them on a daily basis. I'm cheap, and I don't want to own one, or maintain one. I try to do everything I can by biking or walking, or transit if those aren't feasible. It is nearly impossible in 95% of the USA. Selfishly, I really want the USA to bring city centers back to livable levels by banning most cars and redesigning them for humans. Otherwise I'm absolutely going to end up moving to Europe eventually -- likely the Netherlands -- because driving a car is just so unpleasant for me. I'd rather not learn a whole new language and leave my family and friends so far behind, but especially since covid I've come to realize that driving makes me miserable, and I need other ways to get from my home into the world.
- justinator 4y ago
  > I've seen so much anti-car, pro-walkability, pro-transit, pro-bikeability sentiment online recently. Bikes bring me joy. I guess label that however you'd like!
- aprdm 4y ago
  Yeah that's why I love living in Vancouver. You never need a car if you live remotely close to downtown... if you live downtown-ish you basically just walk everywhere or bike. It's so great. Back in my country I was all the time in car traffic...
- Invictus0 4y ago
  I honestly think that most Americans have not traveled enough to realize there is a better way. Only 30% of Americans even have a passport.
  - 4y ago
spamizbad 4y ago
I always thought it was strange when people would say "The automobile represent freedom". I grew up in a "streetcar suburb" and later moved to a big city. So for me, cars were always viewed as an expensive annoyance you might need depending on your life circumstances, but certainly not something you'd go out of your way to buy unless you needed it. But as I got older and lived briefly in a suburb of Houston TX it finally clicked: the way so many subdivisions are planned you are quite literally trapped inside your subdivision unless you have a vehicle. Need to buy groceries? Get to school? Go hang out with friends? You need a car. You aren't heading anywhere interesting without one. So I get why people have a romanic idea of the automobile, but that romance is a side-effect of poor urban planning.
- deleted 4y ago
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- lambdasquirrel 4y ago
  I think the original idea behind the suburb is that you don't have to interact with anyone you don't want to interact with. A much nicer way of saying that is they are more efficient. Or at least that was the original intention. The layout of the subdivision is that maximizes the lawn space you get, for the amount of routing (e.g. traffic intersections) to whatever your destination was. And since driving is nominally the fastest way to get somewhere, the suburbs were how you were going to do it. It's like someone decided on the efficiency goal, and looked at what was the fastest means of transport, and derived from there. Maybe you could say there might've been some redlining too – just put the folks you don't want to interact with in that subdivision over there –, but in all, the problem is that it ultimately becomes: only efficient at one thing, and that's getting to work and back home. And it got terrible even just for that because cars as a means of transport doesn't scale well with population. Then public transit becomes a hack to try to make it work. In the Bay Area and DC, you have highly efficient transit systems that are good for getting to downtown, and pretty much terrible at most other things. In both places, you still need cars for the last mile, when you're leaving "downtown." In the Bay Area, only the Mission District is truly walkable, of all the non-downtown neighborhoods it connects. So now there's car sharing at most of the BART stations. But at least we have them. Not sure if there are any for the Caltrain.
oldnetguy 4y ago
I lived in New York City my entire life and I am now wanting a house. I am tired of living in an apartment building. This idea that people live together communally within buildings or neighborhoods is very overrated. I have lived in multiple apartments and never has there been a real community there. The building has one holiday party and out of 144 apartments maybe 15 people show up. The posts on the chat board that the building now provides is more about neighbors complaining about each other. I know people who live in houses and they have more communal respect then the people who I have lived with within the various buildings I have lived. I understand why people have houses, I just cannot afford one right now.
- tmh88j 4y ago
  > I lived in New York City my entire life and I am now wanting a house. I am tired of living in an apartment building. This idea that people live together communally within buildings or neighborhoods is very overrated. I feel the same way. I grew up in an urban environment, moved to rural areas, now back in an urban environment. I can't wait to get out of here. Too many people, too much noise and too much energy spent looking over your shoulder. I don't understand the desire to be around people just for the sake of it. I'd rather live on the quiet "un-walkable" outskirts or suburbs of a city and occasionally go in if I need to. More than anything I hate the lack of privacy that comes with city life.
  - trgn 4y ago
    > too much noise and too much energy spent looking over your shoulder. That's the bane of american cities. They're noisy, and sociopathy is tolerated by the authorities. Living abroad has shown me cities, significantly more dense than the US, that are neither noisy or unsafe. Walkable cities can be quiet, almost eerily so. America needs more urban environments like that.
    - tmh88j 4y ago
      > Living abroad has shown me cities, significantly more dense than the US, that are neither noisy or unsafe Just because you can find quiet isolated pockets in any given city doesn't mean the rest of it is like that. All cities are loud and require being very aware of your surroundings, some more than others. I've spent months traveling through many European cities and been victim of crime and saw a lot of crime. As for being quiet, that's ridiculous. There are still tons of cars and constant construction even in the most walkable cities. Even in Venice where there are no cars it's pretty loud until you wander off into some back walkways.
legitster 4y ago
I love dense urban areas, but I'm not sure I buy the human connection angle. I've never felt so alone when living in cities. Something about constantly being surrounded by people makes you less likely to want to get to know them. Now that I live a bit more rural, I've found myself much more likely to get to know people. It helps that things aren't always busy or packed, and I can linger a bit more and have more pleasant conversations. YMMV.
- troon-lover 4y ago
- insickness 4y ago
  My experience has been the same. In urban areas, people seem to me to be less friendly than in suburban areas, maybe out of a sense of maintaining their own space. If you become acquainted with a neighbor who turns out to be annoying or clingy, there's very little refuge.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Most car-centric suburban sprawls encourage social isolation. Dense urban areas - it really depends. YMMV indeed.
- robbyking 4y ago
  It's interesting, I had the opposite experience. When I lived in SF in my 20's, I knew all of my neighbors: some I'd party with, some I'd walk my dogs with, and later, when I was older, we had a nanny share with the family who lived next door. I knew the brothers that ran the corner store and I knew the family that ran the coffee shop next door. When I lived in smaller town, I didn't know any of my neighbors. People walked from their side door to their cars and would only say hello if they happened to make eye contact. My wife and I prioritized walkabilty and bikability when we chose our house, but even then it was a struggle. There are exceptions, but now that I'm back in a city I once again know all of my neighbors. I regularly have lunch with another dev who works from home down the street, and we hang out with the family across the street a few times a week. Our neighborhood isn't the "NYC in the 70's" image of an urban area that some people from small towns think of when they think of big cities, it's cute tree lined block with 2k sqft houses.
1970-01-01 4y ago
It isn't as simple as building things closer and removing the lawn. The author completely forgot about rain, snow, and ice. Very few Americans will put up with freezing weather, perhaps marching through miles of it, putting in 9 hours at the factory, and marching back home again.
mancerayder 4y ago
High density is for young people. I've lived in ultra high density for decades and it's starting to really hurt. I sleep poorly due to noise (mostly from neighbors) and it's not fun to go for a walk anymore. I'm looking for a rural place to purchase a home because sorry, I just don't want to tolerate people's selfishness anymore. Density should come with more rules, both laws that are enforced as well as cultural rules, and in American cities it seems chaos and lawlessness are embraced as tolerance and compassion. I've lived in a city for a while. I'm through. People are rude, loud and even dangerous: putting aside criminality which is being essentially decriminalized (we've removed bail for all but attempted murder in my city, and prosecutors are progressive and are systematically reducing charges on violent crimes so they are misdemeanors, because they're trying to reduce incarceration), cars and e bikes have become dangerous to pedestrians. You're literally never relaxed walking outside on a sidewalk now. Is that the vision?
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  There is a middle point between city center and car-dependent sprawl. We’ve just mostly outlawed building any new places in this in-between style, so the only ones remaining are those that have been this way for well over a century. See “streetcar suburbs”: https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0 https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0
- steve-benjamins 4y ago
  What city is this?
  - robbyking 4y ago
    Strawman City
    - DawnQFunk3 4y ago
    - ryanklee 4y ago
      I've lived in: - Chicago - Baltimore - St Paul, MN - Minneapolis, MN - Cincinnati, OH They all feel exactly the same with regard to the complaints in the post you are replying to. When I was younger, cities were excellent and I would never have imagined wanting to live outside an urban center. Now I am older and have kids and have massively different priorities than I used to; I wouldn't live in any city in any country anywhere. If it's not a suburb, count me out. I value my space, my yard, and my control over my ambient environment. I value my multiple cars that can get me to where I want to go when I want to get there. It's nice and quiet and people are fewer and more predictable. Yes, there are tradeoffs -- the culture sucks, but I can leave my house and go elsewhere for culture. I don't need it right outside my house. It makes my life harder to manage.
coding123 4y ago
- trgn 4y ago
  Maybe not starting from scratch, what is happening in reality is that the car-light movement is growing, and cities are calming traffic. I think this effort will continue, because quality of life in these places is just objectively better. I was in Boston recently, and the experience is so much better than 10-15 years ago, just because many core neighborhoods are calming traffic. Many other cities are taking similar measures. imho it's not nearly going fast enough (e.g. I'd like my kids to be independently mobile), but nonetheless, it's happening.
danans 4y ago
For most of human history, we have lived in settlements where we slept a stones toss (not even a throw) from our neighbors, for security and also because traveling a long distance for daily activities took to much physical energy. This was true whether the settlement was as city, town, or village. The discovery of petroleum and the invention and popularizing of cars enabled people to build and live an imitation of the aristocratic lifestyle. Ironically, the aristocrats in their hilltop palaces and castles weren't nearly as isolated since they would always have a cadre of personal attendants to serve them. Quite reasonably, nobody wants to go back to the poverty and hardships of village and tenement life, of course. But people quite reasonably have identified what was lost in the shift away from that spatial arrangement.
mtalantikite 4y ago
Every time I'm on the west side of LA I think about how we could have built a gorgeous, walkable city like you see all over the Mediterranean, but instead we got LA. Of course there's a little glimpse of it in that part of LA, but you still just can't easily live in LA without a car.
- asdff 4y ago
  It's pretty easy to be car light though. Every artery has at least one bus line. A bike going 12mph is faster than traffic on surface streets in my experience when you account for filtering to the front of the intersections at lights (I take the lane otherwise); I regularly beat cars I see on my commute or errand runs. Plus there are grocery stores and restaurants in every neighborhood. You can probably get all your basics within 2 miles of your place. 300 days of sun means you can do this all year, and if you are in the valley where its pretty hot, you can just buy an ebike and not pedal too hard and wear white. Lack of humidity means you cool off as soon as the bike starts moving or you are in any shadows. Santa Monica is a good model for how the rest of the west side will look after the city finally implements the bike lane plan they created in 2010, and imo that is one of the most bikeable cities in the country.
massysett 4y ago
I always snicker at these "built for cars" screeds, as though the "cars" are empty self-serving machines that are fulfilling their own needs. Every car has at least one person in it. That person is going shopping, going to work, socializing, etc., or servicing the needs of others - my plumber's van is essential so that he can fix my plumbing. So no, places are not "built for cars" - they are built to satisfy human needs, and it turns out that cars are an excellent way to do that.
- deleted 4y ago
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- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Just because it's a person doing necessary things doesn't make the structures themselves noble. If you stand before it and actually look, the scale of a single suburban four-lane intersection is just mind-boggling. The resources put into just one of these in terms of time, money, human effort, skill and ingenuity inspires awe but also disgust. People would shop and socialize without this. Is there really nothing better, more effective for these goals, we could have found to spend such tremendous skill and wealth on? I am ashamed of us if this is the best we can come up with.
- welshwelsh 4y ago
  Most cars have only one person in it, despite taking up as much space as 10 people. Most cars are parked for most of the day, which is a complete waste of space. Stores need huge parking lots, which are usually mostly empty, to accommodate the busiest times. Cars are a horrible way of fulfilling human needs. Going shopping? The corner store next to your apartment should have everything you need for daily life. Work? It's 2022, most people can work from home. Socializing? If it involves alcohol, you better not be driving. A plumber's van is the only valid use case for a car you listed. City streets should be restricted to commercial vehicles and public transportation only.
  - yeeyeeyee 4y ago
    Ok, get a motorcycle then.
m1117 4y ago
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chrisco255 4y ago
I love the car and car culture. I've road tripped across the U.S. and live in an RV. I will never go back to living in an apartment. There's no human connection there. I spent years living in apartments and maybe met one or two people, with no meaningful connections ever developed. Cars are great for road tripping, and America is highly optimized for it. You can, with the same vehicle, without unpacking once, travel from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific ocean in a matter of days. You can visit the mountains, beaches, camp in hundreds of national and state parks (for cheap or free). In Florida, some of my fondest memories was jumping into two cars with my teenage friends and riding out the one hour drive to Daytona, where we'd drive our car literally on the beach and then plop down right next to it, sneaking sips of Natural Light that we illegally smuggled there between sessions of football and boogey boarding. Then we'd get back in the car and be back before curfew. All of our vacations were to the Smokey Mountains, a mere 9 hour drive from central Florida. Dad would drive overnight in our minivan while us kids slept in the back seats. We'd pull up to a cabin first thing in the morning and excitedly rush to our claim our beds for the few days we'd be staying there. Despite sleeping a little rough in the car, we were more than energized by the newness of the locale and the existence of elevation we were quite unfamiliar with back home on the relatively flat peninsula, and we'd proceed to hike the woods around the cabin to survey the land. Plenty of human and natural connection is to be had with your own vehicle in America. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
- Steltek 4y ago
  Your positive examples all have one thing in common: they're not happening in cities. Just because a car makes sense in the countryside or beach does not mean it makes sense inside of a city. A problem with our approach to urban planning is that we get large, sterile apartment buildings or detached single family homes but absolutely nothing in between. If that missing middle was allowed by right, you'd find what I enjoy right now: both human connections and a car-lite lifestyle.
  - hardnose 4y ago
    >they're not happening in cities. Neither is people willingly moving there. Dense urban living might appeal to young people but once you build a family and priorities change to peace & quiet, safety, good schools, and stable property values, dense urban living loses most of its appeal.
lr4444lr 4y ago
Author compares post college life to his residential campus and concludes that walkability promotes human connection? That's... ...an opinion, to put it charitably. Cities have been known for fostering alienation and dehumanization long before the invention of the automobile. People who move out to my car-necessitating suburb routinely cite the enhanced feeling of community by having a small town feel centered around the school district, local businesses, churches, and responsive civic organizations that make a difference. I think the author needs to get out of his bubble.
jmyeet 4y ago
The USA is really hostile to anyone who doesn’t want to have a car or perhaps more importantly can’t have a car. Who can’t have a car? People with certain disabilities for one. Not a car-centric life has its origins in keeping poor people out and redlining. Now neighborhoods might not be legally segregated (sunset towns still exist however) but if those houses are so expensive that poor people can’t afford them then it amounts to de facto segregation. You will hear counterarguments like “how can a highway be racist?” but when you look at what neighborhoods were destroyed to make room for that highway and the net effects of intergenerational wealth creation it turns out a highway can be racist. Even something like turning right on red is so hostile to cyclists and pedestrians. This was originally introduced in the OPEC oil crisis to reduce car idling but despite clear evidence that it increases danger to cyclist and pedestrians it’s still here. Why? Driver convenience trumps everything. When it comes to walkability most Americans still want their cars and will nearly always choose more space over walkability. Even when they do want walkability what they talk mean is they still want their large house on an acre lot that happens to be walkable and that just doesn’t scale. I also believe that America’s car worship contributes to the profound selfishness and lack of empathy of most Americans. It’s a bubble that allows you not to have to deal with other people.
kindatrue 4y ago
Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, flyers like this appear against anyone that challenges the hegemony of cars: https://twitter.com/RobMooreLG/status/1562508014464012288 https://twitter.com/RobMooreLG/status/1562508014464012288
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mekoka 4y ago
It's not even that they're built for cars. They're simply just not built for humans to walk around. If you've ever been in a situation where you're visiting a friend in an unfamiliar neighborhood and the map is telling you that your destination is physically just "right behind this house", a mere 50m away, but the front street you're currently in is a long crescent without cross access to the back street where you're trying to get to, you've experienced the frustration of modern planning with no afterthought for human access. I'm no expert, but I've done my fair share of traveling. One thing that's always been very noticeable to me is the strong correlation between highly cohesive communities and the many seemingly disorderly pedestrian paths crisscrossing their neighborhoods.
- DanTheManPR 4y ago
  One of the major frustrations I have with my current town is the "last tenth of a mile" that is often disconnected from any sidewalks, or is blocked off with no path through. We're a dense inner ring suburb with a decent selection of stores within 1/4 mile of tens of thousands of people. But for me to walk to the grocery store or dollar store, There are a couple of short sections of the walk where the sidewalk simply ends and I have to walk in the street. Also, a lot of commercial areas will be completely fenced off in the rear, so pedestrians in the residential area behind them have to take a long circuitous path to visit them. There sometimes seems to be no thought given to how pedestrians would access some areas.
adamsmith143 4y ago
>Selfishly, I really want the USA to bring city centers back to livable levels by banning most cars and redesigning them for humans. Sadly though this doesn't help the millions of people who also aren't within walking distance of said city centers. We'd need to rebuild our public transport as well which is also desperately needed.
dividefuel 4y ago
I certainly agree that the US planned too much around cars and not enough around walking/transit/cycling. I am however often skeptical of the comparisons to university life. While walkability absolutely does help foster connection, I don't think you can attribute all of the differences just to that. There are other major differences between life in university and life outside that also make a big difference in fostering connection: - Only 5,000-50,000 people in universities, compared to millions in cities. You're more likely to live near friends and more likely to run into them. - The vast majority of people in university are in the same narrow age group - Most people in university have more free time than those who work full time
- yeeyeeyee 4y ago
  The biggest apple/orange problem with OPs comparison is that in a university, there is a competitive admission process. Universities are planned, elite communities. You can't do that in a city. "Oh sorry NYC is now for people with 1400+ SAT only, sorry buddy, you're gonna have to go to Detroit." I guess you can price people out, but that does not really have the same effect as the psychometric screening that universities do.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
It's not that they were build for cars, it's that they were built for consumption. The car is just one of the key things the paradigm requires. Got a yard? Now you have to mow it. Add shrubs? Gotta trim those. Got more living space? Now you have to fill it with more stuff. Wanna buy a lawn mower and stuff, then get a car. It's why we're no longer citizens. We're merely consumers, and apparently more than happy to live up to the insulting title. Neighbors could and would connect, if they weren't so busy running like a rat in the endless wheel of consumption.
fwsgonzo 4y ago
I live in a small remote town on an island, and I could not be happier. Silent, big houses, everything I need in shops and restaurants, and incredible scenery every day. I used to live in the big city when I was studying, and it was horrible. I used to have a window open just to get some air into the horrible apartment I lived in, and the windowsill would have a layer of asphalt dust. The big city has a few things that you can't get elsewhere, but you can always just travel there when you need to/want to.
- hnuser847 4y ago
  Do you mind revealing what island you live on, or at least the general region? I've always fantasized about living in a small town on an island.
  - fwsgonzo 4y ago
    Yes, sure. It's not a secret place or anything :) https://visithelgeland.com/no/places/sandnessjoen/ https://visithelgeland.com/no/places/sandnessjoen/ It's kinda cold and dark in the winter. Otherwise it's pretty nice!
yeeyeeyee 4y ago
I love my car and I love driving to work every day. Cars enable privacy, freedom from bias and judgement, and a place to think. Also freedom from getting murdered on the Caltrain. "Loneliness is dangerous" is easy to say when you're on top of the social hierarchy with a job at Vox. Also, what a misleading lie of "a majority prefer to live in cities, suburbs, towns"; the survey "cited" gave 6 options, and 31% chose rural areas, and the "majority" comes from the other 5. I find it more surprising that 30% of Americans actually prefer to live in the woods.
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  Yeah, it's frustrating to always see "people should use public transit" in opinion pieces every week without ever making efforts to discover why people aren't - for me, like yourself, it's safety. California public transport feels entirely unpoliced to me. I live next to a transit station in southern california, which goes to places I often want to visit, but I don't ever ride it because I read news about people getting attacked on it. Which of course happens when there isn't even the bare minimum of fare verification/enforcement at the stations. I spent a few years living in India, where most major cities require you to go through a metal detector/bags though X-ray to board. Plus decent security coverage at the stations. Yeah, it takes a lot of human resources to do all that, but really gives the population confidence they can safely take the metro to work and back.
mr_tristan 4y ago
I see these articles focusing on cars and density, and don't seem dive into details of policy decisions. This year I moved to a city (Spokane, WA) with an abundance of parks and a few smaller commercial businesses within the middle of residential areas, and the amount of interactions I have with neighbors has exploded. Just yesterday, I'm in front of my house breaking down cardboard for recycling, and met someone new just walking over to a nearby park with their dog. This never happened to me in the last 3-4 cities I lived in. My sense is that policies like parking minimums, restrictions on small commercial businesses in residential areas, access to parks, might actually have a bigger impact than simply trying to have lots of people living on top of each other. Not that density is bad, or necessarily good, I just don't see it as particularly significant to improving social interaction. Simply stacking people together isn't going to fix this problem.
jeffreyrogers 4y ago
Too reductive. If you go to places like Weber County, Utah there's lots of human connection and it's also built for cars. There are lots of things causing people to feel lonely in the modern world and cars are only a part of it. And if you live in certain parts of the country the car is a great tool for feeling more human connection (by getting you to a church or other place with people similar to you for example).
Consultant32452 4y ago
I've never felt less human connection than when I've been in dense cities.
- alamortsubite 4y ago
  Try being a pedestrian on a stroad in suburbia and see how that compares.
  - Consultant32452 4y ago
    When I walk around in suburbia it's full of my neighbors also walking around. We make small talk, catch up about the kids, etc. It's quite enjoyable.
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
I like driving, and I don't want it to be taken away from me. I don't want my whole city and society to be re-engineered because of "climate" concerns.
greyhair 4y ago
When my wife and I bought were looking for a home in 1993, our #1 requirement was that it was a walkable urban environment with a minimum of restaurants, bars, and parks, and preferably, other entertainment as well. We narrowed it down to four towns in the area near both our jobs, and settled in a town of about 12,000 that is 2 square miles in area. Our neighborhood of single family homes is mostly 50ft x 90ft lots. There are several apartment complexes in town, and also several high rise apartment buildings. We had a few bars and restaurants when we bought the house, there are more now, plus a very good performing arts theater, a movie theater, and several good parks. It really hit all the points. The added kicker is that we have a light rail stop in town that can deliver us to Manhattan in 85 minutes. In spite of that, we know a lot of people that question why we didn't take that same amount of money and buy a much larger house on a full acre out in the suburbs. They really just don't get it.
anonu 4y ago
Blaming no friends on the car seems misplaced. NYC can also be a very lonely city, for example, and most people don't own a car there.
wikitopian 4y ago
The SFH + Cars lifestyle results in a higher TFR than the efficiency pods and pogo sticks lifestyle everybody's promoting lately. How would you even fit an infant seat on a pogo stick?
deleted 4y ago
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giantg2 4y ago
Wow, is this article seriously going to ignore free time and responsibility? Of course it was easy to make friends in college, because you had a light schedule that allowed leisure time and to actually do something with spontaneous events. It seems the author also ignores the recent research that shows that shared context is a huge contributor to building friendships, which college provides. And of course if you worked and went to school, you had very little time to build meaningful friendships. Once you have a house, you have home maintenence. Once you have a job, you have as much or more work than in college. Your coworkers are likely to have families... not so much in college. Those coworkers and their family schedules are not going to be as similar as two college students. Even removing commutes entirely, doesn't provide much additional leisure time to build friendships if you have a house, family, etc to be responsible for.
SKILNER 4y ago
"It's so crowded no one goes there any more." Attributed to old baseball player, Yogi Berra. I.e., Too many Americans living where they choose to live.
ryanj20021 4y ago
Check out what we’re doing at Culdesac. We build cities for people, not cars. We’re building a 1000 resident car free neighborhood in Tempe, AZ. It is under construction now. Over 25 buildings are vertical and the first residents move in later this year.
- quantumwannabe 4y ago
  No, you're building an off-campus college dorm for ASU. Calling that development a city is a joke. You have fewer amenities within walking distance than the apartments closer to the campus, which have parking.
- pwpw 4y ago
  I was interested in the concept and applied for a position on the team but was rejected without a phone screen. Thought my enthusiasm would at least warrant a preliminary discussion.
SKILNER 4y ago
Headline: Too many Americans living where they choose to live.

381 points by smn1234 4y ago

the article calls out how “spontaneous encounters” are limited due to the urban planning and issues with American suburbia. Funny how just this morning, and throughout the return to office campaign, the key benefit for coming back to work has repeatedly been stated as the very same potential for “spontaneous encounters,” but with colleagues.

skinnymuch 4y ago
This doesn’t help people who work at small companies. They still get screwed by car focused society without proper work socializing.
- boring_twenties 4y ago
  Ha, so my friend recently accepted a "remote" job. Shortly after he started, they nixed that and started requiring everyone to come to the office most of the time. The best part is that no one from his team is in the office in his city. So now he has to commute 1.5h a day just to work remotely from the "office."
  - throwaway5959 4y ago
    He should just quit. That’s ridiculous.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    Yeah…why is he working? Is he a programmer or in a less demand filled job where he can’t easily get another? Also. Are there other people from the company in the office who work in similar departments?
teeray 4y ago
“Spontaneous encounters” in a work context are just rebranded interruptions.
Steltek 4y ago
Absolutely. Friend or neighbor in a car? They get a wave because that's about all you can do because their window is rolled up and they're not going to stop anyway. Friend or neighbor walking or biking? Pleasant 30 minute conversation about how our summers are going while our kids play together.

twblalock 4y ago

Most Americans want it to be that way, and that’s why it is that way. Zoning laws didn’t push people into a car lifestyle. Americans created those zoning laws because they like the car lifestyle and want to perpetuate it. The same is true for suburban zoning in general. People have not been tricked into this: this is what they want.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
I too would like the car lifestyle ... from 1950. Sadly, we have created a monster. I suspect many Americans now don't even know what a community without cars would look like, that it could even work at all.
- kodah 4y ago
  The average American likely doesn't want a life without cars. That seems to be an HN obsession seemingly (my perception) fueled by people who have lived and stayed in very dense urban areas. Creating larger spaces that aren't made for cars is great, but people will still need long-range individual transportation.
  - kiba 4y ago
    Last time I check, these 'dense' urban area aren't exactly great for anybody but cars.
    - kodah 4y ago
      Correct. The car situation is worse there, which is why I think their theories are so whacky when postulated as "get rid of cars" because it fails to be relevant beyond those areas.
    - dionidium 4y ago
      As a former resident of Manhattan, this is where I'm most resentful about car supremacy. I truly don't care that there exist car-centric suburbs. Anybody who lives there knows exactly what they're signing up for. What's insane to me is that we allow cars to dominate even our most urban spaces. When I would walk to work through Midtown, my senses were practically assaulted by automobiles. Honking, speeding, stereos blasting, engines revving, cars encroaching on the crosswalk, and on and on. It's an enormous quality of life issue and one of the things I hated most about living in NYC. "Cities are loud and dangerous. This is just life in the big city!" No, no, no, and no. Cars are loud and dangerous. This is a choice. It's not an unavoidable fact of life in cities. We choose to live this way.

ylhert 4y ago

The car has done so much damage to our world and most people are completely blind to it. Obesity, climate change, isolation/loneliness, excess deaths/injuries from collisions, out of control housing costs, can all be tied back in a major way to car centric society. And yet people will defend their car and the "convenience" of it like their life depends on it, and force it down the throats of everyone around them. Boggles the mind.

zeristor 4y ago
Maybe this is the great filter as to why we don't see any Extraterrestrial Civilisations, once they get to the 'car' they wither.
- asdff 4y ago
  The modern human sits for 95% of the day. We evolved to forage out in the environment for resources, not to wake up just to sit at breakfast then sit in the car then sit at work then sit in the car then sit in front of the tv or computer then sleep. It's no wonder so many people have issues with maintaining a healthy weight when they literally aren't moving in a given day.
datadata 4y ago
How would you tie housing costs to cars?
- warning26 4y ago
  Easy, supply and demand. Before cars, dense housing was the norm, but cars popularized spreading everything out as much as possible so you have room for wide roads and lots of parking. Less density -> less housing overall -> decreased supply -> increased prices
  - trombone5000 4y ago
    Less density doesn't imply less housing, especially when empty land is cheap, as it typically is in the USA. You just use more space. I hate cars, and I hate how expensive housing is, but as far as I can tell, housing is even more expensive in places (in the USA anyway) where cars are less necessary.

neves 4y ago

I took a lot of time to understand that American slums are parking lots with trailers.

trgn 4y ago
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

user3939382 4y ago

Search YouTube for “stroad” (edit spelling) there’s a guy that’s very passionate about this topic with a lot of high quality videos on it.

kmeisthax 4y ago
"Stroad" will get you what you want. The channels you are thinking of are probably either Not Just Bikes, Strong Towns, or Adam Something.
- user3939382 4y ago
  Yep I was thinking of Not Just Bikes. He puts a lot of effort into those videos.

hi41 4y ago

Our homes are also designed in way that causes alienation from family members. Many rooms have TV and the seating is arranged in such a way that we can compulsively watch to dull our anxiety instead of having meaningful conversations with wife and kids. This is the default and without everyone’s okay in the family it’s hard to change this.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
>Our homes are also designed in way that causes alienation from family members. Have you been in a house from the 1800s or early 1900s? Walls and doors everywhere. Hell, there's a good chance the kitchen sink isn't even in the kitchen. People are much more readily in each others company (for better or worse) in newer houses with their big open spaces. >Many rooms have TV and the seating is arranged in such a way that we can compulsively watch to dull our anxiety instead of having meaningful conversations with wife and kids. Back in the "good old days" the kids would be doing some sort of labor (chores or otherwise) as their age and ability allowed and husband and wife would have spent more of their time doing the stuff needed to run the household. We spend far more time interacting with each other these days as a result of the sheer abundance of leisure time. Having daily leisure time with your SO, even if it's also screen time, is basically unheard of by 1920s standards of living.
chrisco255 4y ago
The seating arrangement in a house is entirely up to you. Hard to believe, but there's not even a hard government-mandated requirement on where your TV is positioned or fee if you forego it. At any rate, most homes have far more flexibility in seating arrangements and remodeling possibilities than your average apartment does. They also tend to have more outdoor seating and arrangements that make it easier for social activities. The garage, too, if properly arranged as a workshop or craft center, can also be a great way to encourage social activity. One can even add a basketball hoop in the driveway, or cornhole in the back yard for additional possibilities.
- bowsamic 4y ago

dont__panic 4y ago

I've seen so much anti-car, pro-walkability, pro-transit, pro-bikeability sentiment online recently. I really hope this is proof of the younger generations -- Millenials, Zoomers, and younger folks even -- waking up to the idea that the USA in particular has become a toxic environment thanks to cars. WFH was a big wakeup call, I think -- once you step away from the commute for a year or two, trying to sit in traffic again seems insane. I guess it's a successful "unboiling of the frog," where we realized that car infratructure has been turned up for the last century to unbearable levels. I hate cars. I don't want to use them on a daily basis. I'm cheap, and I don't want to own one, or maintain one. I try to do everything I can by biking or walking, or transit if those aren't feasible. It is nearly impossible in 95% of the USA. Selfishly, I really want the USA to bring city centers back to livable levels by banning most cars and redesigning them for humans. Otherwise I'm absolutely going to end up moving to Europe eventually -- likely the Netherlands -- because driving a car is just so unpleasant for me. I'd rather not learn a whole new language and leave my family and friends so far behind, but especially since covid I've come to realize that driving makes me miserable, and I need other ways to get from my home into the world.

justinator 4y ago
> I've seen so much anti-car, pro-walkability, pro-transit, pro-bikeability sentiment online recently. Bikes bring me joy. I guess label that however you'd like!
aprdm 4y ago
Yeah that's why I love living in Vancouver. You never need a car if you live remotely close to downtown... if you live downtown-ish you basically just walk everywhere or bike. It's so great. Back in my country I was all the time in car traffic...
Invictus0 4y ago
I honestly think that most Americans have not traveled enough to realize there is a better way. Only 30% of Americans even have a passport.
- 4y ago

spamizbad 4y ago

I always thought it was strange when people would say "The automobile represent freedom". I grew up in a "streetcar suburb" and later moved to a big city. So for me, cars were always viewed as an expensive annoyance you might need depending on your life circumstances, but certainly not something you'd go out of your way to buy unless you needed it. But as I got older and lived briefly in a suburb of Houston TX it finally clicked: the way so many subdivisions are planned you are quite literally trapped inside your subdivision unless you have a vehicle. Need to buy groceries? Get to school? Go hang out with friends? You need a car. You aren't heading anywhere interesting without one. So I get why people have a romanic idea of the automobile, but that romance is a side-effect of poor urban planning.

deleted 4y ago
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lambdasquirrel 4y ago
I think the original idea behind the suburb is that you don't have to interact with anyone you don't want to interact with. A much nicer way of saying that is they are more efficient. Or at least that was the original intention. The layout of the subdivision is that maximizes the lawn space you get, for the amount of routing (e.g. traffic intersections) to whatever your destination was. And since driving is nominally the fastest way to get somewhere, the suburbs were how you were going to do it. It's like someone decided on the efficiency goal, and looked at what was the fastest means of transport, and derived from there. Maybe you could say there might've been some redlining too – just put the folks you don't want to interact with in that subdivision over there –, but in all, the problem is that it ultimately becomes: only efficient at one thing, and that's getting to work and back home. And it got terrible even just for that because cars as a means of transport doesn't scale well with population. Then public transit becomes a hack to try to make it work. In the Bay Area and DC, you have highly efficient transit systems that are good for getting to downtown, and pretty much terrible at most other things. In both places, you still need cars for the last mile, when you're leaving "downtown." In the Bay Area, only the Mission District is truly walkable, of all the non-downtown neighborhoods it connects. So now there's car sharing at most of the BART stations. But at least we have them. Not sure if there are any for the Caltrain.

oldnetguy 4y ago

I lived in New York City my entire life and I am now wanting a house. I am tired of living in an apartment building. This idea that people live together communally within buildings or neighborhoods is very overrated. I have lived in multiple apartments and never has there been a real community there. The building has one holiday party and out of 144 apartments maybe 15 people show up. The posts on the chat board that the building now provides is more about neighbors complaining about each other. I know people who live in houses and they have more communal respect then the people who I have lived with within the various buildings I have lived. I understand why people have houses, I just cannot afford one right now.

tmh88j 4y ago
> I lived in New York City my entire life and I am now wanting a house. I am tired of living in an apartment building. This idea that people live together communally within buildings or neighborhoods is very overrated. I feel the same way. I grew up in an urban environment, moved to rural areas, now back in an urban environment. I can't wait to get out of here. Too many people, too much noise and too much energy spent looking over your shoulder. I don't understand the desire to be around people just for the sake of it. I'd rather live on the quiet "un-walkable" outskirts or suburbs of a city and occasionally go in if I need to. More than anything I hate the lack of privacy that comes with city life.
- trgn 4y ago
  > too much noise and too much energy spent looking over your shoulder. That's the bane of american cities. They're noisy, and sociopathy is tolerated by the authorities. Living abroad has shown me cities, significantly more dense than the US, that are neither noisy or unsafe. Walkable cities can be quiet, almost eerily so. America needs more urban environments like that.
  - tmh88j 4y ago
    > Living abroad has shown me cities, significantly more dense than the US, that are neither noisy or unsafe Just because you can find quiet isolated pockets in any given city doesn't mean the rest of it is like that. All cities are loud and require being very aware of your surroundings, some more than others. I've spent months traveling through many European cities and been victim of crime and saw a lot of crime. As for being quiet, that's ridiculous. There are still tons of cars and constant construction even in the most walkable cities. Even in Venice where there are no cars it's pretty loud until you wander off into some back walkways.

legitster 4y ago

I love dense urban areas, but I'm not sure I buy the human connection angle. I've never felt so alone when living in cities. Something about constantly being surrounded by people makes you less likely to want to get to know them. Now that I live a bit more rural, I've found myself much more likely to get to know people. It helps that things aren't always busy or packed, and I can linger a bit more and have more pleasant conversations. YMMV.

troon-lover 4y ago
insickness 4y ago
My experience has been the same. In urban areas, people seem to me to be less friendly than in suburban areas, maybe out of a sense of maintaining their own space. If you become acquainted with a neighbor who turns out to be annoying or clingy, there's very little refuge.
goodpoint 4y ago
Most car-centric suburban sprawls encourage social isolation. Dense urban areas - it really depends. YMMV indeed.
robbyking 4y ago
It's interesting, I had the opposite experience. When I lived in SF in my 20's, I knew all of my neighbors: some I'd party with, some I'd walk my dogs with, and later, when I was older, we had a nanny share with the family who lived next door. I knew the brothers that ran the corner store and I knew the family that ran the coffee shop next door. When I lived in smaller town, I didn't know any of my neighbors. People walked from their side door to their cars and would only say hello if they happened to make eye contact. My wife and I prioritized walkabilty and bikability when we chose our house, but even then it was a struggle. There are exceptions, but now that I'm back in a city I once again know all of my neighbors. I regularly have lunch with another dev who works from home down the street, and we hang out with the family across the street a few times a week. Our neighborhood isn't the "NYC in the 70's" image of an urban area that some people from small towns think of when they think of big cities, it's cute tree lined block with 2k sqft houses.

1970-01-01 4y ago

It isn't as simple as building things closer and removing the lawn. The author completely forgot about rain, snow, and ice. Very few Americans will put up with freezing weather, perhaps marching through miles of it, putting in 9 hours at the factory, and marching back home again.

mancerayder 4y ago

High density is for young people. I've lived in ultra high density for decades and it's starting to really hurt. I sleep poorly due to noise (mostly from neighbors) and it's not fun to go for a walk anymore. I'm looking for a rural place to purchase a home because sorry, I just don't want to tolerate people's selfishness anymore. Density should come with more rules, both laws that are enforced as well as cultural rules, and in American cities it seems chaos and lawlessness are embraced as tolerance and compassion. I've lived in a city for a while. I'm through. People are rude, loud and even dangerous: putting aside criminality which is being essentially decriminalized (we've removed bail for all but attempted murder in my city, and prosecutors are progressive and are systematically reducing charges on violent crimes so they are misdemeanors, because they're trying to reduce incarceration), cars and e bikes have become dangerous to pedestrians. You're literally never relaxed walking outside on a sidewalk now. Is that the vision?

ryukafalz 4y ago
There is a middle point between city center and car-dependent sprawl. We’ve just mostly outlawed building any new places in this in-between style, so the only ones remaining are those that have been this way for well over a century. See “streetcar suburbs”: https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0 https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0
steve-benjamins 4y ago
What city is this?
- robbyking 4y ago
  Strawman City
  - DawnQFunk3 4y ago
  - ryanklee 4y ago
    I've lived in: - Chicago - Baltimore - St Paul, MN - Minneapolis, MN - Cincinnati, OH They all feel exactly the same with regard to the complaints in the post you are replying to. When I was younger, cities were excellent and I would never have imagined wanting to live outside an urban center. Now I am older and have kids and have massively different priorities than I used to; I wouldn't live in any city in any country anywhere. If it's not a suburb, count me out. I value my space, my yard, and my control over my ambient environment. I value my multiple cars that can get me to where I want to go when I want to get there. It's nice and quiet and people are fewer and more predictable. Yes, there are tradeoffs -- the culture sucks, but I can leave my house and go elsewhere for culture. I don't need it right outside my house. It makes my life harder to manage.

coding123 4y ago

trgn 4y ago
Maybe not starting from scratch, what is happening in reality is that the car-light movement is growing, and cities are calming traffic. I think this effort will continue, because quality of life in these places is just objectively better. I was in Boston recently, and the experience is so much better than 10-15 years ago, just because many core neighborhoods are calming traffic. Many other cities are taking similar measures. imho it's not nearly going fast enough (e.g. I'd like my kids to be independently mobile), but nonetheless, it's happening.

danans 4y ago

For most of human history, we have lived in settlements where we slept a stones toss (not even a throw) from our neighbors, for security and also because traveling a long distance for daily activities took to much physical energy. This was true whether the settlement was as city, town, or village. The discovery of petroleum and the invention and popularizing of cars enabled people to build and live an imitation of the aristocratic lifestyle. Ironically, the aristocrats in their hilltop palaces and castles weren't nearly as isolated since they would always have a cadre of personal attendants to serve them. Quite reasonably, nobody wants to go back to the poverty and hardships of village and tenement life, of course. But people quite reasonably have identified what was lost in the shift away from that spatial arrangement.

mtalantikite 4y ago

Every time I'm on the west side of LA I think about how we could have built a gorgeous, walkable city like you see all over the Mediterranean, but instead we got LA. Of course there's a little glimpse of it in that part of LA, but you still just can't easily live in LA without a car.

asdff 4y ago
It's pretty easy to be car light though. Every artery has at least one bus line. A bike going 12mph is faster than traffic on surface streets in my experience when you account for filtering to the front of the intersections at lights (I take the lane otherwise); I regularly beat cars I see on my commute or errand runs. Plus there are grocery stores and restaurants in every neighborhood. You can probably get all your basics within 2 miles of your place. 300 days of sun means you can do this all year, and if you are in the valley where its pretty hot, you can just buy an ebike and not pedal too hard and wear white. Lack of humidity means you cool off as soon as the bike starts moving or you are in any shadows. Santa Monica is a good model for how the rest of the west side will look after the city finally implements the bike lane plan they created in 2010, and imo that is one of the most bikeable cities in the country.

massysett 4y ago

I always snicker at these "built for cars" screeds, as though the "cars" are empty self-serving machines that are fulfilling their own needs. Every car has at least one person in it. That person is going shopping, going to work, socializing, etc., or servicing the needs of others - my plumber's van is essential so that he can fix my plumbing. So no, places are not "built for cars" - they are built to satisfy human needs, and it turns out that cars are an excellent way to do that.

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giraffe_lady 4y ago
Just because it's a person doing necessary things doesn't make the structures themselves noble. If you stand before it and actually look, the scale of a single suburban four-lane intersection is just mind-boggling. The resources put into just one of these in terms of time, money, human effort, skill and ingenuity inspires awe but also disgust. People would shop and socialize without this. Is there really nothing better, more effective for these goals, we could have found to spend such tremendous skill and wealth on? I am ashamed of us if this is the best we can come up with.
welshwelsh 4y ago
Most cars have only one person in it, despite taking up as much space as 10 people. Most cars are parked for most of the day, which is a complete waste of space. Stores need huge parking lots, which are usually mostly empty, to accommodate the busiest times. Cars are a horrible way of fulfilling human needs. Going shopping? The corner store next to your apartment should have everything you need for daily life. Work? It's 2022, most people can work from home. Socializing? If it involves alcohol, you better not be driving. A plumber's van is the only valid use case for a car you listed. City streets should be restricted to commercial vehicles and public transportation only.
- yeeyeeyee 4y ago
  Ok, get a motorcycle then.

m1117 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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chrisco255 4y ago

I love the car and car culture. I've road tripped across the U.S. and live in an RV. I will never go back to living in an apartment. There's no human connection there. I spent years living in apartments and maybe met one or two people, with no meaningful connections ever developed. Cars are great for road tripping, and America is highly optimized for it. You can, with the same vehicle, without unpacking once, travel from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific ocean in a matter of days. You can visit the mountains, beaches, camp in hundreds of national and state parks (for cheap or free). In Florida, some of my fondest memories was jumping into two cars with my teenage friends and riding out the one hour drive to Daytona, where we'd drive our car literally on the beach and then plop down right next to it, sneaking sips of Natural Light that we illegally smuggled there between sessions of football and boogey boarding. Then we'd get back in the car and be back before curfew. All of our vacations were to the Smokey Mountains, a mere 9 hour drive from central Florida. Dad would drive overnight in our minivan while us kids slept in the back seats. We'd pull up to a cabin first thing in the morning and excitedly rush to our claim our beds for the few days we'd be staying there. Despite sleeping a little rough in the car, we were more than energized by the newness of the locale and the existence of elevation we were quite unfamiliar with back home on the relatively flat peninsula, and we'd proceed to hike the woods around the cabin to survey the land. Plenty of human and natural connection is to be had with your own vehicle in America. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Steltek 4y ago
Your positive examples all have one thing in common: they're not happening in cities. Just because a car makes sense in the countryside or beach does not mean it makes sense inside of a city. A problem with our approach to urban planning is that we get large, sterile apartment buildings or detached single family homes but absolutely nothing in between. If that missing middle was allowed by right, you'd find what I enjoy right now: both human connections and a car-lite lifestyle.
- hardnose 4y ago
  >they're not happening in cities. Neither is people willingly moving there. Dense urban living might appeal to young people but once you build a family and priorities change to peace & quiet, safety, good schools, and stable property values, dense urban living loses most of its appeal.

lr4444lr 4y ago

Author compares post college life to his residential campus and concludes that walkability promotes human connection? That's... ...an opinion, to put it charitably. Cities have been known for fostering alienation and dehumanization long before the invention of the automobile. People who move out to my car-necessitating suburb routinely cite the enhanced feeling of community by having a small town feel centered around the school district, local businesses, churches, and responsive civic organizations that make a difference. I think the author needs to get out of his bubble.

jmyeet 4y ago

The USA is really hostile to anyone who doesn’t want to have a car or perhaps more importantly can’t have a car. Who can’t have a car? People with certain disabilities for one. Not a car-centric life has its origins in keeping poor people out and redlining. Now neighborhoods might not be legally segregated (sunset towns still exist however) but if those houses are so expensive that poor people can’t afford them then it amounts to de facto segregation. You will hear counterarguments like “how can a highway be racist?” but when you look at what neighborhoods were destroyed to make room for that highway and the net effects of intergenerational wealth creation it turns out a highway can be racist. Even something like turning right on red is so hostile to cyclists and pedestrians. This was originally introduced in the OPEC oil crisis to reduce car idling but despite clear evidence that it increases danger to cyclist and pedestrians it’s still here. Why? Driver convenience trumps everything. When it comes to walkability most Americans still want their cars and will nearly always choose more space over walkability. Even when they do want walkability what they talk mean is they still want their large house on an acre lot that happens to be walkable and that just doesn’t scale. I also believe that America’s car worship contributes to the profound selfishness and lack of empathy of most Americans. It’s a bubble that allows you not to have to deal with other people.

kindatrue 4y ago

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, flyers like this appear against anyone that challenges the hegemony of cars: https://twitter.com/RobMooreLG/status/1562508014464012288 https://twitter.com/RobMooreLG/status/1562508014464012288

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mekoka 4y ago

It's not even that they're built for cars. They're simply just not built for humans to walk around. If you've ever been in a situation where you're visiting a friend in an unfamiliar neighborhood and the map is telling you that your destination is physically just "right behind this house", a mere 50m away, but the front street you're currently in is a long crescent without cross access to the back street where you're trying to get to, you've experienced the frustration of modern planning with no afterthought for human access. I'm no expert, but I've done my fair share of traveling. One thing that's always been very noticeable to me is the strong correlation between highly cohesive communities and the many seemingly disorderly pedestrian paths crisscrossing their neighborhoods.

DanTheManPR 4y ago
One of the major frustrations I have with my current town is the "last tenth of a mile" that is often disconnected from any sidewalks, or is blocked off with no path through. We're a dense inner ring suburb with a decent selection of stores within 1/4 mile of tens of thousands of people. But for me to walk to the grocery store or dollar store, There are a couple of short sections of the walk where the sidewalk simply ends and I have to walk in the street. Also, a lot of commercial areas will be completely fenced off in the rear, so pedestrians in the residential area behind them have to take a long circuitous path to visit them. There sometimes seems to be no thought given to how pedestrians would access some areas.

adamsmith143 4y ago

>Selfishly, I really want the USA to bring city centers back to livable levels by banning most cars and redesigning them for humans. Sadly though this doesn't help the millions of people who also aren't within walking distance of said city centers. We'd need to rebuild our public transport as well which is also desperately needed.

dividefuel 4y ago

I certainly agree that the US planned too much around cars and not enough around walking/transit/cycling. I am however often skeptical of the comparisons to university life. While walkability absolutely does help foster connection, I don't think you can attribute all of the differences just to that. There are other major differences between life in university and life outside that also make a big difference in fostering connection: - Only 5,000-50,000 people in universities, compared to millions in cities. You're more likely to live near friends and more likely to run into them. - The vast majority of people in university are in the same narrow age group - Most people in university have more free time than those who work full time

yeeyeeyee 4y ago
The biggest apple/orange problem with OPs comparison is that in a university, there is a competitive admission process. Universities are planned, elite communities. You can't do that in a city. "Oh sorry NYC is now for people with 1400+ SAT only, sorry buddy, you're gonna have to go to Detroit." I guess you can price people out, but that does not really have the same effect as the psychometric screening that universities do.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

It's not that they were build for cars, it's that they were built for consumption. The car is just one of the key things the paradigm requires. Got a yard? Now you have to mow it. Add shrubs? Gotta trim those. Got more living space? Now you have to fill it with more stuff. Wanna buy a lawn mower and stuff, then get a car. It's why we're no longer citizens. We're merely consumers, and apparently more than happy to live up to the insulting title. Neighbors could and would connect, if they weren't so busy running like a rat in the endless wheel of consumption.

fwsgonzo 4y ago

I live in a small remote town on an island, and I could not be happier. Silent, big houses, everything I need in shops and restaurants, and incredible scenery every day. I used to live in the big city when I was studying, and it was horrible. I used to have a window open just to get some air into the horrible apartment I lived in, and the windowsill would have a layer of asphalt dust. The big city has a few things that you can't get elsewhere, but you can always just travel there when you need to/want to.

hnuser847 4y ago
Do you mind revealing what island you live on, or at least the general region? I've always fantasized about living in a small town on an island.
- fwsgonzo 4y ago
  Yes, sure. It's not a secret place or anything :) https://visithelgeland.com/no/places/sandnessjoen/ https://visithelgeland.com/no/places/sandnessjoen/ It's kinda cold and dark in the winter. Otherwise it's pretty nice!

yeeyeeyee 4y ago

I love my car and I love driving to work every day. Cars enable privacy, freedom from bias and judgement, and a place to think. Also freedom from getting murdered on the Caltrain. "Loneliness is dangerous" is easy to say when you're on top of the social hierarchy with a job at Vox. Also, what a misleading lie of "a majority prefer to live in cities, suburbs, towns"; the survey "cited" gave 6 options, and 31% chose rural areas, and the "majority" comes from the other 5. I find it more surprising that 30% of Americans actually prefer to live in the woods.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago
Yeah, it's frustrating to always see "people should use public transit" in opinion pieces every week without ever making efforts to discover why people aren't - for me, like yourself, it's safety. California public transport feels entirely unpoliced to me. I live next to a transit station in southern california, which goes to places I often want to visit, but I don't ever ride it because I read news about people getting attacked on it. Which of course happens when there isn't even the bare minimum of fare verification/enforcement at the stations. I spent a few years living in India, where most major cities require you to go through a metal detector/bags though X-ray to board. Plus decent security coverage at the stations. Yeah, it takes a lot of human resources to do all that, but really gives the population confidence they can safely take the metro to work and back.

mr_tristan 4y ago

I see these articles focusing on cars and density, and don't seem dive into details of policy decisions. This year I moved to a city (Spokane, WA) with an abundance of parks and a few smaller commercial businesses within the middle of residential areas, and the amount of interactions I have with neighbors has exploded. Just yesterday, I'm in front of my house breaking down cardboard for recycling, and met someone new just walking over to a nearby park with their dog. This never happened to me in the last 3-4 cities I lived in. My sense is that policies like parking minimums, restrictions on small commercial businesses in residential areas, access to parks, might actually have a bigger impact than simply trying to have lots of people living on top of each other. Not that density is bad, or necessarily good, I just don't see it as particularly significant to improving social interaction. Simply stacking people together isn't going to fix this problem.

jeffreyrogers 4y ago

Too reductive. If you go to places like Weber County, Utah there's lots of human connection and it's also built for cars. There are lots of things causing people to feel lonely in the modern world and cars are only a part of it. And if you live in certain parts of the country the car is a great tool for feeling more human connection (by getting you to a church or other place with people similar to you for example).

Consultant32452 4y ago

I've never felt less human connection than when I've been in dense cities.

alamortsubite 4y ago
Try being a pedestrian on a stroad in suburbia and see how that compares.
- Consultant32452 4y ago
  When I walk around in suburbia it's full of my neighbors also walking around. We make small talk, catch up about the kids, etc. It's quite enjoyable.

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

I like driving, and I don't want it to be taken away from me. I don't want my whole city and society to be re-engineered because of "climate" concerns.

greyhair 4y ago

When my wife and I bought were looking for a home in 1993, our #1 requirement was that it was a walkable urban environment with a minimum of restaurants, bars, and parks, and preferably, other entertainment as well. We narrowed it down to four towns in the area near both our jobs, and settled in a town of about 12,000 that is 2 square miles in area. Our neighborhood of single family homes is mostly 50ft x 90ft lots. There are several apartment complexes in town, and also several high rise apartment buildings. We had a few bars and restaurants when we bought the house, there are more now, plus a very good performing arts theater, a movie theater, and several good parks. It really hit all the points. The added kicker is that we have a light rail stop in town that can deliver us to Manhattan in 85 minutes. In spite of that, we know a lot of people that question why we didn't take that same amount of money and buy a much larger house on a full acre out in the suburbs. They really just don't get it.

anonu 4y ago

Blaming no friends on the car seems misplaced. NYC can also be a very lonely city, for example, and most people don't own a car there.

wikitopian 4y ago

The SFH + Cars lifestyle results in a higher TFR than the efficiency pods and pogo sticks lifestyle everybody's promoting lately. How would you even fit an infant seat on a pogo stick?

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giantg2 4y ago

Wow, is this article seriously going to ignore free time and responsibility? Of course it was easy to make friends in college, because you had a light schedule that allowed leisure time and to actually do something with spontaneous events. It seems the author also ignores the recent research that shows that shared context is a huge contributor to building friendships, which college provides. And of course if you worked and went to school, you had very little time to build meaningful friendships. Once you have a house, you have home maintenence. Once you have a job, you have as much or more work than in college. Your coworkers are likely to have families... not so much in college. Those coworkers and their family schedules are not going to be as similar as two college students. Even removing commutes entirely, doesn't provide much additional leisure time to build friendships if you have a house, family, etc to be responsible for.

SKILNER 4y ago

"It's so crowded no one goes there any more." Attributed to old baseball player, Yogi Berra. I.e., Too many Americans living where they choose to live.

ryanj20021 4y ago

Check out what we’re doing at Culdesac. We build cities for people, not cars. We’re building a 1000 resident car free neighborhood in Tempe, AZ. It is under construction now. Over 25 buildings are vertical and the first residents move in later this year.

quantumwannabe 4y ago
No, you're building an off-campus college dorm for ASU. Calling that development a city is a joke. You have fewer amenities within walking distance than the apartments closer to the campus, which have parking.
pwpw 4y ago
I was interested in the concept and applied for a position on the team but was rejected without a phone screen. Thought my enthusiasm would at least warrant a preliminary discussion.

SKILNER 4y ago

Headline: Too many Americans living where they choose to live.