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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 --

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.
- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  30% is 100 million Americans. Also, a passport was not required to travel in North America (not sure if that is still the case). I traveled throughout Mexico and Canada before ever having a passport, for example.
  - kennend3 4y ago
    I take it you have not travelled in some time? This hasn't been the case since "9/11" when the rules were changed. you need a passport to travel between USA/CA (not sure about Mexico but i would assume it needs a passport too?).
    - bluedino 4y ago
      Some US states have an 'enhanced drivers license' which allows travel to Mexico/Canada via car or boat. However, you need a passport to fly into those countries.
    - jandrewrogers 4y ago
      I routinely travel internationally. I simply wasn't conflating what I do at the border with a requirement. I regularly crossed the northern and southern border without a passport in the 1990s.
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    Consider that America has around 45 million immigrants, most of whom probably haven't seen much of the world either. Assuming all those immigrants have no native-born children (an obviously terrible assumption), then we have 50 million passports for 250 million native-born Americans, a 20% rate. Compare that to germany's 90% rate.
    - ericmay 4y ago
      Sure... but compare the size and location of Germany with that of the United States. It's probably not all that sensible to compare rates here between countries, except perhaps European countries against one another.
jgwil2 4y ago
> I'd rather not learn a whole new language and leave my family and friends so far behind You could live in New York, Boston, DC, Chicago, or other dense cities with decent transit options without leaving the US entirely. It is certainly not impossible to live in the US without a car. EDIT: not really sure why this is downvoted. Just taking OP's statement that they would prefer not to uproot their whole life at face value. I have lived without a car in both the US and Europe, so I promise it can be done.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  I have lived in multiple major US cities without a car. In NYC it's feasible, but impossible to visit family or friends who live in car-centric places. In most other cities you feel like a distant second-or-third class citizen. Swimming upstream gets tiring after a while.
  - scelerat 4y ago
    > impossible to visit family or friends who live in car-centric places Traditional car rentals like Avis, Hertz, etc., as well as carshare services like Gig or Zipcar enable this if you don't already own a car. Many people I know in SF do this.
    - kuschku 4y ago
      I live in Germany. I'm 26. I don't have a driver's license, and neither do many of my friends. It's never been necessary. Between transit and cycling, it's possible to reach everywhere, easily. That's one of the issues with the US today.
  - TheBigSalad 4y ago
    The problem is that it's too hard to visit family and friends. The solution is to move to a different country where you don't know anyone or even speak the language?
    - dont__panic 4y ago
trgn 4y ago
Me too. Either my city calms traffic, or we're moving to a walkable city in Europe. Having young children makes the decision feel more urgent.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Yeah kids getting mowed down left and right in my city this summer. City has announced only more lanes and faster traffic. Grim shit.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
One of the hardest parts about buying a home, apart from all the stuff that isnt fun about buying a home, is finding somewhere that is walkable to... anything. I've rented my whole life and spent my entire adult life in cities. The idea of having to get in the car to get milk or something from the corner store, or have to drive to ANY restaurant, or not have some type of walking/running path within a few blocks of my house is foreign. Part of this is from living in a cities and in mixed zoning areas rather than neighborhoods but it just seems to odd that to get ANYWHERE one needs to drive. Even living in a city, but just a bit further away from a major area, you can run into this issue. Wife and I have looked at the Netherlands as well for similar reasons. Jobs/visas are the main concern. Family is the other big one.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  Any success filtering for walkability in the US when buying a home? As far as I can tell, "walkability" scores are borderline useless -- the small town I currently live in has extremely low "walkability," despite being able to walk or bike to everything I need, whereas the large city I just left has extremely high "walkability" -- despite the fact that walking around town was not pleasant due to high volumes of car traffic. Manually checking or restricting the search is not really a scalable option.
  - ghostpepper 4y ago
    What metric of walkability are you finding that is not reflective of reality? I've had at least some luck (in Canada) with https://www.walkscore.com/ https://www.walkscore.com/
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    I mean, you just can't have a walkability score for an entire large city. There's a lot of variation. You have to look at specific neighborhoods. This is especially true in north America where cities all went through a huge conglomeration effort in the second half of the 20th century and absorbed their suburbs.
    - 4y ago
Xeoncross 4y ago
Keep in mind that the US is only about 10% smaller than all of Europe combined. While I would love more walking/biking friendly cities, what about all the rural areas? It would take millions and millions of buses or train connections to get to all the places I drive and would still be more of a hassle than just driving there myself plus I couldn't pick the scenic routes. People in major cities have different needs than those in rural areas.
- denni9th 4y ago
  No one has said we should eliminate cars entirely. Cars make sense in rural areas, we should use them there. Cars don't make sense in cities, so we need alternatives.
- mtalantikite 4y ago
  I don't think anyone is advocating that rural America, or even most of exurban America, should be accessible by public transit. It's just that we literally only have one city in the entire United States that has a massive subway and bus system that operates 24 hours, which allows you to live without a car. It'd be great to have more cities as dense as NYC in this country.
  - deltarholamda 4y ago
    >It'd be great to have more cities as dense as NYC in this country. Yes, but remember that density is not without its problems as well. Socially of course, but also practically--density requires more competent urban management for things like sewer and water, which the US is famous for being awful at. In the not so distant past, even rural places had (limited) access to public transportation. My mother lived way out in the sticks, but there was a road nearby. The bus would stop for anybody standing on the side of the highway to take them into town or back. This was in the 1940s-50s.
    - ThatGeoGuy 4y ago
      This seems like scare-mongering, or FUD, in my humble opinion. The reason that sewage and water is so hard to get right in the United States is in part due to sprawl, as well as the lack of political will to actually maintain infrastructure once it is built. A bit of a deflection I'll admit but - look at the NY subway. It barely receives the funding to keep basic maintenance afloat. Compared to equivalently sized systems in Europe it fails because there's a massive political diaspora to overcome since culturally taking transit is "for the poors" (you know what that translates to) and we can't be giving them anything. Similar holds true for sewage and water (for water, look at Flint Michigan). Housing, transportation, zoning, etc. are all the same problem. The reasons we fail at them are all connected and without taking a holistic approach we likely will remain bad at it. Pointing to any one thing and claiming "well even if we do that we'll still suck at 99% of everything else" isn't really a helpful description of reality, it just means there's more work to do. I guess what I would really push back on in your argument is the point that higher density requires higher competence. At some meaningless level, sure, we have engineers that have to solve harder problems. But the reasons that the US is bad at a lot of urbanist policies isn't because we lack competency (you could just hire people from overseas) - it's because we've allowed ourselves to build a system that incentivizes that incompetency at multiple levels through restrictive zoning, endless veto privileges a la "community feedback" / NIMBYism, car culture and the social disdain for what is perceived as normal in other countries (trains, bikes), etc. This isn't a problem with the US geographically or its people, and the problems have solutions. I think if you talk to most people in cities they probably agree wholly or in part on a lot of fronts, even if there's still a prevailing "got mine" attitude depending on where you ask.
xhkkffbf 4y ago
While I generally like the idea of city centers, I think that this kind of anti-car stuff comes off like wild-eyed propaganda. For instance, the title suggests that the places were built for cars alone, kind of like the garage where Jay Leno keeps his collection. No. The suburbs were built for people driving cars. Not just cars. People getting rides in cars, avoiding weather, sitting comfortably, transporting the handicapped and the infirm and the older folks. Car haters need to remember that most people love cars because they work in all kinds of weather and transport them to work or health care or entertainment etc. As for the bit about human connection, that's kind of silly. Life is what you make of it. For every lonely suburbanite trapped in a house with a two-car garage, I can show you a lonely city dweller who doesn't even know the name of the people in the apartment down the hall. I've lived in NYC and that is VERY common. I don't really like driving myself. I prefer to walk, or when the weather is good, to ride a bicycle. But I can easily understand why others want to buy a car. They're very useful and the car haters who deny this come across as fools or shills.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  I don't think car haters deny that cars can be useful, particularly in the environment we've constructed here in the USA. Hell, I own (half of) a car, because I want to visit family and friends who live a couple of hours away, and there's no train or even bus that could bring me to them. > The suburbs were built for people driving cars. Not just cars. People getting rides in cars, avoiding weather, sitting comfortably, transporting the handicapped and the infirm and the older folks. No, they were built for cars. Giant 4-lane 45 MPH stroads with no sidewalks that "connect" neighborhoods for cars, but isolate anyone without a car... those are built for cars. Driveways are built for people to get to cars, and some cul-de-sacs are built for children to play (but not teenagers to do anything interesting outside the yard -- they might get in trouble). A lot of us just want SOMEPLACE in the USA where we can live without a car. NYC is the only place I can think of that accomplishes that, but with median rent hitting 3-4k/mo, that's out of reach for all but the highest earners. There are some cities and towns where you can occasionally do things outside of a car if you're willing to pay a premium and deal with poor infrastructure, but it all feels very fringe -- as if you're doing something you shouldn't. Remember that wanting places without cars does not mean we want to ban cars, or stop people from using them in rural areas, or blow up the suburbs, or anything that wild. We just want to de-emphasize cars in dense environments so we can walk around!
incomingpain 4y ago
>I've seen so much anti-car, pro-walkability, pro-transit, pro-bikeability sentiment online recently. The usual political activist group has switched to this. The laptop class wants to ban cars. We could discuss if that's a good idea or not. Societal cost of transportation is insane. Imagine where you have a society number of amortized cars sitting in drive ways doing nothing. What a huge waste of society's wealth. What would be the cost difference if we simply had driverless vehicles that could pick you up, do whatever you need to do, and then move onto the next person. Sure there would be peak times and all this but for the most part you far better utilize transportation. The cost is immense. Car ownership is stupid. If only we had a legitimate driverless option. Free market would shift because of this alone. >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. No certainly not. The only proof is the political activists have shifted their intentions. perhaps we find out later? >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. Ive been considering this. https://organictransit.com/product/elf-2fr/ https://organictransit.com/product/elf-2fr/ Solar powered pedal assisted ebike that's enclosed so even in the winter you could zip around and get where you need to go. It's an ebike so hills arent a problem. In the summer you could take windows and doors off. If there's situations where there's too much snow? Ok I'll just not go, staying home. It's enclosed for rain. I dont need AC or heat. But $10,000 for something that'll get stolen? Looking at building my own from scratch as a winter project this year. I am estimating I could build something equivalent for probably $2000.
itsoktocry 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. I bet if this happened you'd be living in a downtown that's physically walkable, but there's no business left to walk to.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  This has been tried several times in cities and by and large it seems to be profitable for the businesses.
  - sleepdreamy 4y ago
    Source? Just curious
    - dont__panic 4y ago
      Many European cities have walkable downtown streets closed to cars with lots of successful businesses. Burlington, VT. Boulder, CO. Old Town Arvada, CO. All have very successful pedestrian-only streets in the USA with lots of healthy businesses.
      - itsoktocry 4y ago
        Yeah, tourist-centric destinations can do things like this. We do it where I live too, in the summer. Closing down a few streets is a world away from banning cars from downtown. How many people can actually live in an area like that?
        dont__panic 4y ago
        I'm confused about your question. If I can do everything I want in my city -- exercise, drink, eat, buy groceries, meet up with friends, etc. -- without a car, why wouldn't I be able to live there? I expect in this situation you'd be able to store your car in a secure garage on the edge of town if you want to own one. Or you could take public transit or bike to rent a car on the edge of town. Or you could take a train to wherever you want to go and use another method of transport once you get there. Is there some kind of deep intrinsic human need to sit in a car within 1000 feet of your home that I'm not understanding?
scottLobster 4y ago
So as a two car millennial American family that makes regular trips into our city center, we never use our cars going into the city. It's just stressful, streets are narrow, parking's expensive and car-jacking and vandalism are more likely. Just makes more sense to take the bus, cheaper too when you count the cost of parking. I also like having places to walk to from my house. That said, I like having my own house with my own land. That house and land is freedom to live how I want (within reason) without worrying if the neighbors will complain about my watching The Mandalorian at 1am. A car is freedom to go wherever I want whenever I want, and I use said freedoms on a regular basis. It's also carrying capacity, instead of making multiple inefficient trips to a local market multiple times a week I can get all my family's groceries in one trip once a week. Ditto for outdoor supplies, small furniture, Christmas Trees, etc. Never mind that WFH doesn't work for a lot of jobs, and not just low-paying ones. Many good jobs require a car to get to them. So I think there's a good middle ground here. Make city centers less car friendly and denser to discourage car use, improve walking infrastructure in the suburbs (more sidewalks/bike trails that actually go places). I'm all for a wide range of options, but cars are not a universal evil. The frog is not being boiled, this is what a lot of us see as a better life. Granted there are plenty of people doing it wrong, but that's always been true.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  Well said. I do something similar -- I live someplace with a bit more breathing room that's bike friendly and walk friendly for some basic things, and I never take my car into any city center. > Make city centers less car friendly and denser to discourage car use, improve walking infrastructure in the suburbs (more sidewalks/bike trails). To put it a bit more concretely: Remove street parking in cities. Expand sidewalks. Build more public transit and bike infrastructure. Create light rail with parking lots outside of cities so you can get in without a car. Let people use cars as before in rural middle-of-nowhere america, and mostly the same in the suburbs (lower speed limits and build more sidewalks and connecting paths, so you can walk between neighborhoods).
  - april_22 4y ago
    I love this concept made by dance a rental e-bike startup from berlin. They offer their bikes in all major cities in europe now. https://twitter.com/ericw/status/1554445703891533824 https://twitter.com/ericw/status/1554445703891533824
umvi 4y ago
I've lived in highly walkable, pro-transit areas. It does have benefits, don't get me wrong. The flip side of the coin is that those areas usually have high population density. That comes with a lot of its own cons - noise pollution, air pollution, annoying neighbors you can hear and smell through your walls, etc. To avoid these cons, a lot of Americans want their own house on their own property and doing that means moving to a lower population density area which means less walkability, less transit, more cars.
- kiba 4y ago
  Noise and air pollution are in part caused by cars. Meanwhile in the suburb, you have lawn mowers and leaf blowers, which I absolutely hate with a passion. I don't know about annoying neighbors and smells. That seems to be a design and engineering issue.
  - umvi 4y ago
    > I don't know about annoying neighbors and smells. If you live in a lower income area, get used to your condo/townhouse occasionally smelling like marijuana and/or tobacco whenever the neighbors decide to hotbox. Also get used to arguments and loud music late at night on weekends. > That seems to be a design and engineering issue. I'm sure you could build hermetically and acoustically sealed condos that keep out all unwanted noises and smells, but those sound like "rich people" condos that are not very economical.
    - blackoil 4y ago
      The cost of decent insulation is a low percentage of overall cost. Also don't know if low income family can afford a nice/safe house in suburb, multiple cars etc.
    - dont__panic 4y ago
      Sounds like issues that an HOA (if you're into that) or the police/311 ought to address in a city. I assume that's why these services exist -- to resolve conflicts between people who live in dense environments where there is no option but to resolve the conflict. If those issues go unresolved, that's a dereliction of city government and apartment administration duty.
pier25 4y ago
r/fuckcars has seen a lot of growth in the past year or so: https://subredditstats.com/r/fuckcars https://subredditstats.com/r/fuckcars https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/
- falcolas 4y ago
  That subreddit occasionally hit the front page, and lemme tell you, it's full of really fun and nice people who are able to take a nuanced and complex subject and handle it with care. /s
jimmaswell 4y ago
I work from home. I'd still rather drive most of the time than rely on transit and live anywhere more dense. E-biking is nice and I do it for exercise often, but I wouldn't want to do it in the snow or rain, even with perfect separate bike lanes, no matter how much Netherlanders insist it's no big deal. My car has a comfortable seat, good sound system, a lot of my stuff in it, climate control, and no drug addicts accosting me for money inside it. I'll be glad to see bike infrastructure and more rail lines built out but I would never want to live somewhere without a car.
- badpun 4y ago
  > I work from home. I'd still rather drive most of the time than rely on transit and live anywhere more dense. E-biking is nice and I do it for exercise often, but I wouldn't want to do it in the snow or rain, even with perfect separate bike lanes, no matter how much Netherlanders insist it's no big deal. Yep. Not to mention, biking excludes a lot of people and is pretty ableist to be honest. I for one get sick very easily and having to bike during snow/rain seasons would mean I'm having a permanent low-mid grade cold.
  - dont__panic 4y ago
    Recumbent bikes, e-bikes, and other alternatives (https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/who-else-benefits-from-the-dutch-cycling-infrastructure/ https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/who-else-benef...) make "bike infrastructure" accessible to pretty much anyone. Considering the fact that it's impossible to live in the USA outside of a nursing home if you lose your ability to drive due to old age... I'm not sure accessibility is a great argument for car-centric infrastructure.
    - jimmaswell 4y ago
      What percentage of people who are too old and disabled to drive a car are fit to ride a bike instead?
      - 4y ago
throw8383833jj 4y ago
Absolutely. It seems strange to lock yourself into a metal box for 2 hours every day as you move back and forth between the same two destinations 220 times per year, not getting anywhere in the process. I also hope this has been a wake up call for most people. Furthermore, driving is a lot more expensive than people realize, somewhere on the order of nearly 15% of people's expenses! or more! it's not just gas, but maintenance, parking, insurance, registration, smog, and that doesn't even count all the externalized costs.
badpun 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. Otherwise I'm absolutely going to end up moving to Europe eventually -- likely the Netherlands There isn't a single US city which meets your criteria?
- dont__panic 4y ago
  Nope. And I've tried. US cities are so dominated by cars that other modes of transportation are an afterthought. If you've ever tried to bike on an icy bike lane (when the car surface was cleared days ago), been honked at by aggressive drivers on residential streets for daring to walk or bike, been yelled at by a driver parked in a bike lane, or been stressed out by a street corner that becomes completely blind to traffic due to a huge parked car... that's what I'm talking about.
- aikinai 4y ago
  I'm not the grandparent, but I've looked a lot and I don't think there is a single city. New York is the only place you can reasonably live car free without feeling like you're handicapping yourself to make a statement, but it's also very specific type of city that comes with a lot of other baggage (e.g. expensive, overly dense and urban, arguably not where you want to raise kids, etc). There are plenty of cities where you can live parts of this life, for example when you're young. But when it's time for a family there's basically nowhere in the US you can avoid the house-and-two-cars typical American lifestyle (except New York City with lots of money).
- iratewizard 4y ago
  Cities in the US with strong public transit have only ended up building moving toilets for the homeless. There are a number of bigger issues that come first before billions more in public funding goes into larger wheeled toilets.
  - vangelis 4y ago
    I really want to like public transit!
bmismyname 4y ago
I hope it's a trend, but I think it's more likely that the government will do everything it can to do what's most profitable for the biggest lobbyists. Cars create a huge amount of pointless fake economic activity and bullshit jobs that will never go away.
- criddell 4y ago
  I think a lot of anti-car people underestimate how much people like their cars. People spend way more on their car than they need to. It's another thing they can customize and personalize. I'm in central Texas and cars are somewhat necessary because of weather. Not enough businesses have employee showers, so biking or walking is often not a realistic option. I also think if real self-driving cars are developed, it's going to fuel sprawl like nothing before. We will look back on cities of today and think they were decently dense. These days, I'm pretty much in the pro-car camp. In my 20's I didn't like them and chose to live in pretty small places as close to the heart of the city as I could and I got by with a bicycle and small motorcycle. Then I had kids and we moved to the 'burbs for all the usual reasons. Now that my kids are at college I think my wife and I would like to move further out of the city where we can have a smallish house with enough land for things like a big workshop, greenhouse, gym, sauna, etc... When we get old enough that we aren't as engaged with our hobbies, maybe we would head back into the city for the closing chapter of our lives. I don't think that type of arc is all that unusual. People want different things in different parts of their life.
  - barnabee 4y ago
    I’m anti-car and I love my car! I drive no more than once or twice a month, to get to the coast or the mountains (or all of Europe via ferry/tunnel) or to move heavy stuff around. It didn’t cost me much but it’s reasonably fast and a joy to drive on country roads. I can’t think of anything worse than having to drive every or even most days, to work or the shops or to see friends. I walk almost everywhere, cycle most of the rest, take public transport if it’s really raining or really far (or I am late) and take the occasional Uber when none of those is an option and I still don’t want to drive. So I don’t think there should be no cars, just [almost] no cars in the middle of most cities and towns, and no need for anyone, anywhere to own one to have a reasonable life.
aikinai 4y ago
This is exactly why I live outside the US in a country with walkable urban communities suitable for families, even though there are far fewer career opportunities and much lower compensation. I keep thinking about going to the US for the career boost and doubled pay, but just can't stomach the thought of driving everywhere to do anything, especially with kids.
anovikov 4y ago
I can relate to this! I lived parts of my life in car-only and walkable places. I so prefer walkability! But, it has downsides. Walkability, in a rich country, means insane real estate prices (in a poor country people don't have enough disposable income after food, clothing etc to create an auction effect). In a poor country on the other hand, it means crime. In rich country even poor people have cars so crime is more equally distributed, but in poor countries, living in a place where jobs and shipping is unreachable on foot, you are also shielded from almost all crime, but in a poor country all walkable places are dangerous. In other words, walkable places are only good if you are rich and live in a rich country.
- spiffage 4y ago
  Walkability in rich countries is expensive precisely because lots of people want walkability, and that want is underserved. It's signal that we should allow more of it to happen!
  - anovikov 4y ago
    Walkability is expensive because density. Walkability = density. And density means that real estate is small and there is a competition to get it. A walkable place just can't be big to stay walkable, and it has to include a lot of things to still be liveable. A suburbia can cover entire continent easily and stay cheap because land, on the scale needed for private houses, is almost free. It just doesn't work this way with liveable cities that have to be small, and quickly lose attractiveness as you move away from the very core which is normally only a few hundred meters in radius. European cities look nice for a tourist but people living in "nice" parts of them are living there either because their ancestors bought their apartments pre-WWI, or because of one-off luck, or because they are rich. Vast majority still lives in the outskirts that look a lot more like Soviet Union than "Europe" the way Americans see it.
pkulak 4y ago
I'm pretty lucky for an average American, all things considered, and live in an area with a grocery store 15 minutes away by foot, and most everything else under 30 minutes by bike. Public transit isn't amazing, but there's 60 miles of light rail and a decent bus network. My family of 4 still needs (wants?) one car, but we only put about 8000 miles a year on it. All that said, I feel a bit trapped here. I've yet to find somewhere else in the United States I'd like to move to if I had to move. Manhattan would be fun, but whoa boy...
- ChillyWater 4y ago
  Not a single good place in the entire United States to move to? Miami, Savanna, Boston, NYC, Austin, Vermont, Minneapolis, Duluth, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Nashville, Colorado, Scottsdale, Vegas, Tahoe, San Diego, Seattle ... It seems like there are a lot of different climates and feels to choose from ...
FigurativeVoid 4y ago
This was my experience to a tee. I had been commuting about 80 minutes a day for work. Then we had the pandemic. I have been at a fully distributed company, and I love it. You would have to pay me an extraordinary amount to give up the quality of life I have working from home.
silent_cal 4y ago
Agree 100%
TaupeRanger 4y ago
Maybe I'm just not exposed to these ideas because I live in the Midwest, but this entire post sounds like some weird borderline clinical phobia of cars and driving that just doesn't jive at all with my experience, except perhaps a hatred of long car commutes. I can't imagine ever hating cars so much that I'd want to move to a new country...
- dont__panic 4y ago
  Where do you live in the Midwest? If you don't live in a dense city environment, and you don't walk or bike much, it makes sense that you would struggle to understand the problems with cars linked to that lifestyle.
  - TaupeRanger 4y ago
    If I lived in a dense city, I wouldn't drive cars except on longer trips and would have no reason to rant about other people using them in normal, legitimate ways.
- ryan_lane 4y ago
  Have you been exposed much to the alternative to car commuting? I used to live in New Orleans, and commuted 45 minutes each direction by car, usually without traffic. I moved to San Francisco and commuted 40 minutes by bus, each direction. The difference in experience of these two commutes is something you truly need to experience for yourself. On public transportation, you don't have to be engaged with the road. You can read. You can text with people on your phone. You can watch a TV show. You can get caught up on emails, or slack messages you need to handle. Commuting in general sucks, but not having to have your mind fully engaged on a specific (and frankly boring) task the entire time is an amazingly freeing experience. Now I live in Tokyo and mostly work from home. The commuting experience here (for most routes) is even better. It's fast, comfortable, highly accessible and extremely quiet. I'm eventually moving back to the experience, but to be honest I'm a bit worried about my reverse culture shock when I have to downgrade my transportation experience. I absolutely hate driving everywhere when I go back to visit my family. It's dangerous. It's expensive. I have to figure out where to park, worry about damage to the car, stay sober, and not be sleepy. Driving is in most ways a worse experience than using public transportation.
sokoloff 4y ago
Life is very short. If living in a walkable city is a major goal of yours, just move to one now rather than waiting and hoping your not-walkable city will transform itself. First of all, it probably won’t. But more importantly, even if it does, 20% or more of your remaining healthy lifespan will elapse while it’s happening. Don’t wait. Carpe deambulatio.
- ejb999 4y ago
  >>Life is very short. If living in a walkable city is a major goal of yours, just move to one now rather than waiting and hoping your not-walkable city will transform itself. I agree, and not really sure why there are so many posts on this topic on HN - there are plenty of places to move and live if you want to be someplace where you can walk to or bike to. There are also plenty of places where you can move to, buy a bit of land with a SFH and enjoy that lifestyle if that is what you prefer. Why do some people have such a strong need to tell other people how they should live? or expect them to change to suit someone else's idea of what is 'better'.
  - dont__panic 4y ago
    Immigration is difficult, expensive, and isolates you from your family and friends. I don't think it's surprising that people born in the USA are frustrated that they must immigrate to life the lifestyle they want. You might say that the people who want to drive cars everywhere are telling the walkability folks how to live. I just want to live in a walkable and bikeable place where I'm safe from aggressive car drivers within a few hours of friends and family. That place sadly does not exist. Would it be so wild to make a few neighborhoods in the US a bit more human-centric and a bit less car-centric? It doesn't have to change everything. Just a small number of cities and towns.
  - closeparen 4y ago
    There really aren’t “plenty” - slots to live in places like this come up rarely and are fiercely competitive. If you’re not making FAANG money you have no real chance of owning one. And the reason it’s this way is suburban preferences have so dominated government for so long that it is either a historical oddity or an extreme swimming-upstream exception when a walkable neighborhood exists.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
The Netherlands is pretty rough without a car. Public transport is pretty bad compared to other European places. I'm dutch but live in Barcelona now which is a lot better. In the Netherlands everything is privatized so each line has to run a profit whereas here they view it as an investment into making the city liveable. So even people in the cities own a car to get around and the results are massive traffic jams. Same with health care, there's an excellent public system here which is free (paid by tax) but in the Netherlands you pay a private company a lot and there's penalties if you use it. If you live in a big city in the Netherlands and don't need to leave it much you'll be ok work public transport but there's a huge housing crisis there too so city apartments come at a huge premium. FWIW I love not needing a car and I hope I'll never need to own one again or even drive one. I've always found it so stressful.
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  In Barcelona you can go to many places without a car, but has awful traffic everywhere (and they drive really fast on the big streets). Plus, the police kicks you out of the street at night. I don't think it's a nice place to live.
- cr1895 4y ago
  >The Netherlands is pretty rough without a car. Hard disagree. It depends on too many factors to make a universal statement like this.
irrational 4y ago
I never even had to sit in traffic. I can bike to work through a very nice meadow and forest in about 15 minutes. But after working from home for 2 years, doing even that nice of a commute seems like hell. Never again.
babycake 4y ago
I've always wanted to bike, and the city finally said yes, let's make the city bike-friendly. And then they go ahead and just paint a white bike lane right next to the car lane. Yea, even when politicians listen to their constituents, they just half ass the effort. I'm not risking my life to ride in that bike lane, so I still use a car.
- randcraw 4y ago
  Yeah, I live about 15 miles outside Philly and don't know anywhere nearby safe enough to ride. Local drivers think nothing of missing you by only a foot or two, often at a speed difference of over 20 MPH. Even offroad spaces set aside for bike routes often cross busy highways without proper signage, putting riders and pedestrians in the crosshairs of fast turning vehicles that are surprised to find anyone on the road who's not motorized. With the rise of big big SUVs and even bigger trucks, those who are not likewise encased in a large metal cage are just too easy to miss. Or hit.
- 29083011397778 4y ago
  From what I recall growing up, Vancouver's bike lanes were not well-recieved (by what I imagine was a slight minority) when they started taking lanes from traffic. "They're always empty", "They're unsafe", "What about the cars and increased wait" were some of the complaints I remember. Over time, they've gotten dramatically better, and public opinion is shifting as they improve. Bike lanes become more common, so they grant access to more areas instead of getting you 90% of the way there, so they can be used, and people can take advantage of them, and see (or know someone), that uses them. It all ends up being a positive feedback cycle for bicycles. They may not be popular in your city, but if they can keep the political motivation up for a few election cycles, it can work :)
stjohnswarts 4y ago
You should move to the netherlands then. Not everyone needs to live in a dense concrete jungle. You should -choose- that, though. I understand why you hate cars, so move to the urban center and figure out a way but you don't have a right to force that on me.
chung8123 4y ago
I guess I am the opposite. It wasn't hard for me to find walkable places in the cities I have lived it because I planned my living around not having to drive much. There are still things I have to drive to like seeing my parents and family but everyday things like groceries, bars, food, haircut, etc were easy for me to do walking it all the cities I have lived. Also I lived in the suburbs of those cities so it isn't an urban core thing. For me as long as I prioritized walking my locations have been walking friendly.

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.

jandrewrogers 4y ago
30% is 100 million Americans. Also, a passport was not required to travel in North America (not sure if that is still the case). I traveled throughout Mexico and Canada before ever having a passport, for example.
- kennend3 4y ago
  I take it you have not travelled in some time? This hasn't been the case since "9/11" when the rules were changed. you need a passport to travel between USA/CA (not sure about Mexico but i would assume it needs a passport too?).
  - bluedino 4y ago
    Some US states have an 'enhanced drivers license' which allows travel to Mexico/Canada via car or boat. However, you need a passport to fly into those countries.
  - jandrewrogers 4y ago
    I routinely travel internationally. I simply wasn't conflating what I do at the border with a requirement. I regularly crossed the northern and southern border without a passport in the 1990s.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  Consider that America has around 45 million immigrants, most of whom probably haven't seen much of the world either. Assuming all those immigrants have no native-born children (an obviously terrible assumption), then we have 50 million passports for 250 million native-born Americans, a 20% rate. Compare that to germany's 90% rate.
  - ericmay 4y ago
    Sure... but compare the size and location of Germany with that of the United States. It's probably not all that sensible to compare rates here between countries, except perhaps European countries against one another.

jgwil2 4y ago

> I'd rather not learn a whole new language and leave my family and friends so far behind You could live in New York, Boston, DC, Chicago, or other dense cities with decent transit options without leaving the US entirely. It is certainly not impossible to live in the US without a car. EDIT: not really sure why this is downvoted. Just taking OP's statement that they would prefer not to uproot their whole life at face value. I have lived without a car in both the US and Europe, so I promise it can be done.

dont__panic 4y ago
I have lived in multiple major US cities without a car. In NYC it's feasible, but impossible to visit family or friends who live in car-centric places. In most other cities you feel like a distant second-or-third class citizen. Swimming upstream gets tiring after a while.
- scelerat 4y ago
  > impossible to visit family or friends who live in car-centric places Traditional car rentals like Avis, Hertz, etc., as well as carshare services like Gig or Zipcar enable this if you don't already own a car. Many people I know in SF do this.
  - kuschku 4y ago
    I live in Germany. I'm 26. I don't have a driver's license, and neither do many of my friends. It's never been necessary. Between transit and cycling, it's possible to reach everywhere, easily. That's one of the issues with the US today.
- TheBigSalad 4y ago
  The problem is that it's too hard to visit family and friends. The solution is to move to a different country where you don't know anyone or even speak the language?
  - dont__panic 4y ago

trgn 4y ago

Me too. Either my city calms traffic, or we're moving to a walkable city in Europe. Having young children makes the decision feel more urgent.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
Yeah kids getting mowed down left and right in my city this summer. City has announced only more lanes and faster traffic. Grim shit.

AlwaysRock 4y ago

One of the hardest parts about buying a home, apart from all the stuff that isnt fun about buying a home, is finding somewhere that is walkable to... anything. I've rented my whole life and spent my entire adult life in cities. The idea of having to get in the car to get milk or something from the corner store, or have to drive to ANY restaurant, or not have some type of walking/running path within a few blocks of my house is foreign. Part of this is from living in a cities and in mixed zoning areas rather than neighborhoods but it just seems to odd that to get ANYWHERE one needs to drive. Even living in a city, but just a bit further away from a major area, you can run into this issue. Wife and I have looked at the Netherlands as well for similar reasons. Jobs/visas are the main concern. Family is the other big one.

dont__panic 4y ago
Any success filtering for walkability in the US when buying a home? As far as I can tell, "walkability" scores are borderline useless -- the small town I currently live in has extremely low "walkability," despite being able to walk or bike to everything I need, whereas the large city I just left has extremely high "walkability" -- despite the fact that walking around town was not pleasant due to high volumes of car traffic. Manually checking or restricting the search is not really a scalable option.
- ghostpepper 4y ago
  What metric of walkability are you finding that is not reflective of reality? I've had at least some luck (in Canada) with https://www.walkscore.com/ https://www.walkscore.com/
- stormbrew 4y ago
  I mean, you just can't have a walkability score for an entire large city. There's a lot of variation. You have to look at specific neighborhoods. This is especially true in north America where cities all went through a huge conglomeration effort in the second half of the 20th century and absorbed their suburbs.
  - 4y ago

Xeoncross 4y ago

Keep in mind that the US is only about 10% smaller than all of Europe combined. While I would love more walking/biking friendly cities, what about all the rural areas? It would take millions and millions of buses or train connections to get to all the places I drive and would still be more of a hassle than just driving there myself plus I couldn't pick the scenic routes. People in major cities have different needs than those in rural areas.

denni9th 4y ago
No one has said we should eliminate cars entirely. Cars make sense in rural areas, we should use them there. Cars don't make sense in cities, so we need alternatives.
mtalantikite 4y ago
I don't think anyone is advocating that rural America, or even most of exurban America, should be accessible by public transit. It's just that we literally only have one city in the entire United States that has a massive subway and bus system that operates 24 hours, which allows you to live without a car. It'd be great to have more cities as dense as NYC in this country.
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  >It'd be great to have more cities as dense as NYC in this country. Yes, but remember that density is not without its problems as well. Socially of course, but also practically--density requires more competent urban management for things like sewer and water, which the US is famous for being awful at. In the not so distant past, even rural places had (limited) access to public transportation. My mother lived way out in the sticks, but there was a road nearby. The bus would stop for anybody standing on the side of the highway to take them into town or back. This was in the 1940s-50s.
  - ThatGeoGuy 4y ago
    This seems like scare-mongering, or FUD, in my humble opinion. The reason that sewage and water is so hard to get right in the United States is in part due to sprawl, as well as the lack of political will to actually maintain infrastructure once it is built. A bit of a deflection I'll admit but - look at the NY subway. It barely receives the funding to keep basic maintenance afloat. Compared to equivalently sized systems in Europe it fails because there's a massive political diaspora to overcome since culturally taking transit is "for the poors" (you know what that translates to) and we can't be giving them anything. Similar holds true for sewage and water (for water, look at Flint Michigan). Housing, transportation, zoning, etc. are all the same problem. The reasons we fail at them are all connected and without taking a holistic approach we likely will remain bad at it. Pointing to any one thing and claiming "well even if we do that we'll still suck at 99% of everything else" isn't really a helpful description of reality, it just means there's more work to do. I guess what I would really push back on in your argument is the point that higher density requires higher competence. At some meaningless level, sure, we have engineers that have to solve harder problems. But the reasons that the US is bad at a lot of urbanist policies isn't because we lack competency (you could just hire people from overseas) - it's because we've allowed ourselves to build a system that incentivizes that incompetency at multiple levels through restrictive zoning, endless veto privileges a la "community feedback" / NIMBYism, car culture and the social disdain for what is perceived as normal in other countries (trains, bikes), etc. This isn't a problem with the US geographically or its people, and the problems have solutions. I think if you talk to most people in cities they probably agree wholly or in part on a lot of fronts, even if there's still a prevailing "got mine" attitude depending on where you ask.

xhkkffbf 4y ago

While I generally like the idea of city centers, I think that this kind of anti-car stuff comes off like wild-eyed propaganda. For instance, the title suggests that the places were built for cars alone, kind of like the garage where Jay Leno keeps his collection. No. The suburbs were built for people driving cars. Not just cars. People getting rides in cars, avoiding weather, sitting comfortably, transporting the handicapped and the infirm and the older folks. Car haters need to remember that most people love cars because they work in all kinds of weather and transport them to work or health care or entertainment etc. As for the bit about human connection, that's kind of silly. Life is what you make of it. For every lonely suburbanite trapped in a house with a two-car garage, I can show you a lonely city dweller who doesn't even know the name of the people in the apartment down the hall. I've lived in NYC and that is VERY common. I don't really like driving myself. I prefer to walk, or when the weather is good, to ride a bicycle. But I can easily understand why others want to buy a car. They're very useful and the car haters who deny this come across as fools or shills.

dont__panic 4y ago
I don't think car haters deny that cars can be useful, particularly in the environment we've constructed here in the USA. Hell, I own (half of) a car, because I want to visit family and friends who live a couple of hours away, and there's no train or even bus that could bring me to them. > The suburbs were built for people driving cars. Not just cars. People getting rides in cars, avoiding weather, sitting comfortably, transporting the handicapped and the infirm and the older folks. No, they were built for cars. Giant 4-lane 45 MPH stroads with no sidewalks that "connect" neighborhoods for cars, but isolate anyone without a car... those are built for cars. Driveways are built for people to get to cars, and some cul-de-sacs are built for children to play (but not teenagers to do anything interesting outside the yard -- they might get in trouble). A lot of us just want SOMEPLACE in the USA where we can live without a car. NYC is the only place I can think of that accomplishes that, but with median rent hitting 3-4k/mo, that's out of reach for all but the highest earners. There are some cities and towns where you can occasionally do things outside of a car if you're willing to pay a premium and deal with poor infrastructure, but it all feels very fringe -- as if you're doing something you shouldn't. Remember that wanting places without cars does not mean we want to ban cars, or stop people from using them in rural areas, or blow up the suburbs, or anything that wild. We just want to de-emphasize cars in dense environments so we can walk around!

incomingpain 4y ago

>I've seen so much anti-car, pro-walkability, pro-transit, pro-bikeability sentiment online recently. The usual political activist group has switched to this. The laptop class wants to ban cars. We could discuss if that's a good idea or not. Societal cost of transportation is insane. Imagine where you have a society number of amortized cars sitting in drive ways doing nothing. What a huge waste of society's wealth. What would be the cost difference if we simply had driverless vehicles that could pick you up, do whatever you need to do, and then move onto the next person. Sure there would be peak times and all this but for the most part you far better utilize transportation. The cost is immense. Car ownership is stupid. If only we had a legitimate driverless option. Free market would shift because of this alone. >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. No certainly not. The only proof is the political activists have shifted their intentions. perhaps we find out later? >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. Ive been considering this. https://organictransit.com/product/elf-2fr/ https://organictransit.com/product/elf-2fr/ Solar powered pedal assisted ebike that's enclosed so even in the winter you could zip around and get where you need to go. It's an ebike so hills arent a problem. In the summer you could take windows and doors off. If there's situations where there's too much snow? Ok I'll just not go, staying home. It's enclosed for rain. I dont need AC or heat. But $10,000 for something that'll get stolen? Looking at building my own from scratch as a winter project this year. I am estimating I could build something equivalent for probably $2000.

itsoktocry 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. I bet if this happened you'd be living in a downtown that's physically walkable, but there's no business left to walk to.

ryukafalz 4y ago
This has been tried several times in cities and by and large it seems to be profitable for the businesses.
- sleepdreamy 4y ago
  Source? Just curious
  - dont__panic 4y ago
    Many European cities have walkable downtown streets closed to cars with lots of successful businesses. Burlington, VT. Boulder, CO. Old Town Arvada, CO. All have very successful pedestrian-only streets in the USA with lots of healthy businesses.
    - itsoktocry 4y ago
      Yeah, tourist-centric destinations can do things like this. We do it where I live too, in the summer. Closing down a few streets is a world away from banning cars from downtown. How many people can actually live in an area like that?
      - dont__panic 4y ago
        I'm confused about your question. If I can do everything I want in my city -- exercise, drink, eat, buy groceries, meet up with friends, etc. -- without a car, why wouldn't I be able to live there? I expect in this situation you'd be able to store your car in a secure garage on the edge of town if you want to own one. Or you could take public transit or bike to rent a car on the edge of town. Or you could take a train to wherever you want to go and use another method of transport once you get there. Is there some kind of deep intrinsic human need to sit in a car within 1000 feet of your home that I'm not understanding?

scottLobster 4y ago

So as a two car millennial American family that makes regular trips into our city center, we never use our cars going into the city. It's just stressful, streets are narrow, parking's expensive and car-jacking and vandalism are more likely. Just makes more sense to take the bus, cheaper too when you count the cost of parking. I also like having places to walk to from my house. That said, I like having my own house with my own land. That house and land is freedom to live how I want (within reason) without worrying if the neighbors will complain about my watching The Mandalorian at 1am. A car is freedom to go wherever I want whenever I want, and I use said freedoms on a regular basis. It's also carrying capacity, instead of making multiple inefficient trips to a local market multiple times a week I can get all my family's groceries in one trip once a week. Ditto for outdoor supplies, small furniture, Christmas Trees, etc. Never mind that WFH doesn't work for a lot of jobs, and not just low-paying ones. Many good jobs require a car to get to them. So I think there's a good middle ground here. Make city centers less car friendly and denser to discourage car use, improve walking infrastructure in the suburbs (more sidewalks/bike trails that actually go places). I'm all for a wide range of options, but cars are not a universal evil. The frog is not being boiled, this is what a lot of us see as a better life. Granted there are plenty of people doing it wrong, but that's always been true.

dont__panic 4y ago
Well said. I do something similar -- I live someplace with a bit more breathing room that's bike friendly and walk friendly for some basic things, and I never take my car into any city center. > Make city centers less car friendly and denser to discourage car use, improve walking infrastructure in the suburbs (more sidewalks/bike trails). To put it a bit more concretely: Remove street parking in cities. Expand sidewalks. Build more public transit and bike infrastructure. Create light rail with parking lots outside of cities so you can get in without a car. Let people use cars as before in rural middle-of-nowhere america, and mostly the same in the suburbs (lower speed limits and build more sidewalks and connecting paths, so you can walk between neighborhoods).
- april_22 4y ago
  I love this concept made by dance a rental e-bike startup from berlin. They offer their bikes in all major cities in europe now. https://twitter.com/ericw/status/1554445703891533824 https://twitter.com/ericw/status/1554445703891533824

umvi 4y ago

I've lived in highly walkable, pro-transit areas. It does have benefits, don't get me wrong. The flip side of the coin is that those areas usually have high population density. That comes with a lot of its own cons - noise pollution, air pollution, annoying neighbors you can hear and smell through your walls, etc. To avoid these cons, a lot of Americans want their own house on their own property and doing that means moving to a lower population density area which means less walkability, less transit, more cars.

kiba 4y ago
Noise and air pollution are in part caused by cars. Meanwhile in the suburb, you have lawn mowers and leaf blowers, which I absolutely hate with a passion. I don't know about annoying neighbors and smells. That seems to be a design and engineering issue.
- umvi 4y ago
  > I don't know about annoying neighbors and smells. If you live in a lower income area, get used to your condo/townhouse occasionally smelling like marijuana and/or tobacco whenever the neighbors decide to hotbox. Also get used to arguments and loud music late at night on weekends. > That seems to be a design and engineering issue. I'm sure you could build hermetically and acoustically sealed condos that keep out all unwanted noises and smells, but those sound like "rich people" condos that are not very economical.
  - blackoil 4y ago
    The cost of decent insulation is a low percentage of overall cost. Also don't know if low income family can afford a nice/safe house in suburb, multiple cars etc.
  - dont__panic 4y ago
    Sounds like issues that an HOA (if you're into that) or the police/311 ought to address in a city. I assume that's why these services exist -- to resolve conflicts between people who live in dense environments where there is no option but to resolve the conflict. If those issues go unresolved, that's a dereliction of city government and apartment administration duty.

pier25 4y ago

r/fuckcars has seen a lot of growth in the past year or so: https://subredditstats.com/r/fuckcars https://subredditstats.com/r/fuckcars https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/

falcolas 4y ago
That subreddit occasionally hit the front page, and lemme tell you, it's full of really fun and nice people who are able to take a nuanced and complex subject and handle it with care. /s

jimmaswell 4y ago

I work from home. I'd still rather drive most of the time than rely on transit and live anywhere more dense. E-biking is nice and I do it for exercise often, but I wouldn't want to do it in the snow or rain, even with perfect separate bike lanes, no matter how much Netherlanders insist it's no big deal. My car has a comfortable seat, good sound system, a lot of my stuff in it, climate control, and no drug addicts accosting me for money inside it. I'll be glad to see bike infrastructure and more rail lines built out but I would never want to live somewhere without a car.

badpun 4y ago
> I work from home. I'd still rather drive most of the time than rely on transit and live anywhere more dense. E-biking is nice and I do it for exercise often, but I wouldn't want to do it in the snow or rain, even with perfect separate bike lanes, no matter how much Netherlanders insist it's no big deal. Yep. Not to mention, biking excludes a lot of people and is pretty ableist to be honest. I for one get sick very easily and having to bike during snow/rain seasons would mean I'm having a permanent low-mid grade cold.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  Recumbent bikes, e-bikes, and other alternatives (https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/who-else-benefits-from-the-dutch-cycling-infrastructure/ https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/who-else-benef...) make "bike infrastructure" accessible to pretty much anyone. Considering the fact that it's impossible to live in the USA outside of a nursing home if you lose your ability to drive due to old age... I'm not sure accessibility is a great argument for car-centric infrastructure.
  - jimmaswell 4y ago
    What percentage of people who are too old and disabled to drive a car are fit to ride a bike instead?
    - 4y ago

throw8383833jj 4y ago

Absolutely. It seems strange to lock yourself into a metal box for 2 hours every day as you move back and forth between the same two destinations 220 times per year, not getting anywhere in the process. I also hope this has been a wake up call for most people. Furthermore, driving is a lot more expensive than people realize, somewhere on the order of nearly 15% of people's expenses! or more! it's not just gas, but maintenance, parking, insurance, registration, smog, and that doesn't even count all the externalized costs.

badpun 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. Otherwise I'm absolutely going to end up moving to Europe eventually -- likely the Netherlands There isn't a single US city which meets your criteria?

dont__panic 4y ago
Nope. And I've tried. US cities are so dominated by cars that other modes of transportation are an afterthought. If you've ever tried to bike on an icy bike lane (when the car surface was cleared days ago), been honked at by aggressive drivers on residential streets for daring to walk or bike, been yelled at by a driver parked in a bike lane, or been stressed out by a street corner that becomes completely blind to traffic due to a huge parked car... that's what I'm talking about.
aikinai 4y ago
I'm not the grandparent, but I've looked a lot and I don't think there is a single city. New York is the only place you can reasonably live car free without feeling like you're handicapping yourself to make a statement, but it's also very specific type of city that comes with a lot of other baggage (e.g. expensive, overly dense and urban, arguably not where you want to raise kids, etc). There are plenty of cities where you can live parts of this life, for example when you're young. But when it's time for a family there's basically nowhere in the US you can avoid the house-and-two-cars typical American lifestyle (except New York City with lots of money).
iratewizard 4y ago
Cities in the US with strong public transit have only ended up building moving toilets for the homeless. There are a number of bigger issues that come first before billions more in public funding goes into larger wheeled toilets.
- vangelis 4y ago
  I really want to like public transit!

bmismyname 4y ago

I hope it's a trend, but I think it's more likely that the government will do everything it can to do what's most profitable for the biggest lobbyists. Cars create a huge amount of pointless fake economic activity and bullshit jobs that will never go away.

criddell 4y ago
I think a lot of anti-car people underestimate how much people like their cars. People spend way more on their car than they need to. It's another thing they can customize and personalize. I'm in central Texas and cars are somewhat necessary because of weather. Not enough businesses have employee showers, so biking or walking is often not a realistic option. I also think if real self-driving cars are developed, it's going to fuel sprawl like nothing before. We will look back on cities of today and think they were decently dense. These days, I'm pretty much in the pro-car camp. In my 20's I didn't like them and chose to live in pretty small places as close to the heart of the city as I could and I got by with a bicycle and small motorcycle. Then I had kids and we moved to the 'burbs for all the usual reasons. Now that my kids are at college I think my wife and I would like to move further out of the city where we can have a smallish house with enough land for things like a big workshop, greenhouse, gym, sauna, etc... When we get old enough that we aren't as engaged with our hobbies, maybe we would head back into the city for the closing chapter of our lives. I don't think that type of arc is all that unusual. People want different things in different parts of their life.
- barnabee 4y ago
  I’m anti-car and I love my car! I drive no more than once or twice a month, to get to the coast or the mountains (or all of Europe via ferry/tunnel) or to move heavy stuff around. It didn’t cost me much but it’s reasonably fast and a joy to drive on country roads. I can’t think of anything worse than having to drive every or even most days, to work or the shops or to see friends. I walk almost everywhere, cycle most of the rest, take public transport if it’s really raining or really far (or I am late) and take the occasional Uber when none of those is an option and I still don’t want to drive. So I don’t think there should be no cars, just [almost] no cars in the middle of most cities and towns, and no need for anyone, anywhere to own one to have a reasonable life.

aikinai 4y ago

This is exactly why I live outside the US in a country with walkable urban communities suitable for families, even though there are far fewer career opportunities and much lower compensation. I keep thinking about going to the US for the career boost and doubled pay, but just can't stomach the thought of driving everywhere to do anything, especially with kids.

anovikov 4y ago

I can relate to this! I lived parts of my life in car-only and walkable places. I so prefer walkability! But, it has downsides. Walkability, in a rich country, means insane real estate prices (in a poor country people don't have enough disposable income after food, clothing etc to create an auction effect). In a poor country on the other hand, it means crime. In rich country even poor people have cars so crime is more equally distributed, but in poor countries, living in a place where jobs and shipping is unreachable on foot, you are also shielded from almost all crime, but in a poor country all walkable places are dangerous. In other words, walkable places are only good if you are rich and live in a rich country.

spiffage 4y ago
Walkability in rich countries is expensive precisely because lots of people want walkability, and that want is underserved. It's signal that we should allow more of it to happen!
- anovikov 4y ago
  Walkability is expensive because density. Walkability = density. And density means that real estate is small and there is a competition to get it. A walkable place just can't be big to stay walkable, and it has to include a lot of things to still be liveable. A suburbia can cover entire continent easily and stay cheap because land, on the scale needed for private houses, is almost free. It just doesn't work this way with liveable cities that have to be small, and quickly lose attractiveness as you move away from the very core which is normally only a few hundred meters in radius. European cities look nice for a tourist but people living in "nice" parts of them are living there either because their ancestors bought their apartments pre-WWI, or because of one-off luck, or because they are rich. Vast majority still lives in the outskirts that look a lot more like Soviet Union than "Europe" the way Americans see it.

pkulak 4y ago

I'm pretty lucky for an average American, all things considered, and live in an area with a grocery store 15 minutes away by foot, and most everything else under 30 minutes by bike. Public transit isn't amazing, but there's 60 miles of light rail and a decent bus network. My family of 4 still needs (wants?) one car, but we only put about 8000 miles a year on it. All that said, I feel a bit trapped here. I've yet to find somewhere else in the United States I'd like to move to if I had to move. Manhattan would be fun, but whoa boy...

ChillyWater 4y ago
Not a single good place in the entire United States to move to? Miami, Savanna, Boston, NYC, Austin, Vermont, Minneapolis, Duluth, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Nashville, Colorado, Scottsdale, Vegas, Tahoe, San Diego, Seattle ... It seems like there are a lot of different climates and feels to choose from ...

FigurativeVoid 4y ago

This was my experience to a tee. I had been commuting about 80 minutes a day for work. Then we had the pandemic. I have been at a fully distributed company, and I love it. You would have to pay me an extraordinary amount to give up the quality of life I have working from home.

silent_cal 4y ago

Agree 100%

TaupeRanger 4y ago

Maybe I'm just not exposed to these ideas because I live in the Midwest, but this entire post sounds like some weird borderline clinical phobia of cars and driving that just doesn't jive at all with my experience, except perhaps a hatred of long car commutes. I can't imagine ever hating cars so much that I'd want to move to a new country...

dont__panic 4y ago
Where do you live in the Midwest? If you don't live in a dense city environment, and you don't walk or bike much, it makes sense that you would struggle to understand the problems with cars linked to that lifestyle.
- TaupeRanger 4y ago
  If I lived in a dense city, I wouldn't drive cars except on longer trips and would have no reason to rant about other people using them in normal, legitimate ways.
ryan_lane 4y ago
Have you been exposed much to the alternative to car commuting? I used to live in New Orleans, and commuted 45 minutes each direction by car, usually without traffic. I moved to San Francisco and commuted 40 minutes by bus, each direction. The difference in experience of these two commutes is something you truly need to experience for yourself. On public transportation, you don't have to be engaged with the road. You can read. You can text with people on your phone. You can watch a TV show. You can get caught up on emails, or slack messages you need to handle. Commuting in general sucks, but not having to have your mind fully engaged on a specific (and frankly boring) task the entire time is an amazingly freeing experience. Now I live in Tokyo and mostly work from home. The commuting experience here (for most routes) is even better. It's fast, comfortable, highly accessible and extremely quiet. I'm eventually moving back to the experience, but to be honest I'm a bit worried about my reverse culture shock when I have to downgrade my transportation experience. I absolutely hate driving everywhere when I go back to visit my family. It's dangerous. It's expensive. I have to figure out where to park, worry about damage to the car, stay sober, and not be sleepy. Driving is in most ways a worse experience than using public transportation.

sokoloff 4y ago

Life is very short. If living in a walkable city is a major goal of yours, just move to one now rather than waiting and hoping your not-walkable city will transform itself. First of all, it probably won’t. But more importantly, even if it does, 20% or more of your remaining healthy lifespan will elapse while it’s happening. Don’t wait. Carpe deambulatio.

ejb999 4y ago
>>Life is very short. If living in a walkable city is a major goal of yours, just move to one now rather than waiting and hoping your not-walkable city will transform itself. I agree, and not really sure why there are so many posts on this topic on HN - there are plenty of places to move and live if you want to be someplace where you can walk to or bike to. There are also plenty of places where you can move to, buy a bit of land with a SFH and enjoy that lifestyle if that is what you prefer. Why do some people have such a strong need to tell other people how they should live? or expect them to change to suit someone else's idea of what is 'better'.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  Immigration is difficult, expensive, and isolates you from your family and friends. I don't think it's surprising that people born in the USA are frustrated that they must immigrate to life the lifestyle they want. You might say that the people who want to drive cars everywhere are telling the walkability folks how to live. I just want to live in a walkable and bikeable place where I'm safe from aggressive car drivers within a few hours of friends and family. That place sadly does not exist. Would it be so wild to make a few neighborhoods in the US a bit more human-centric and a bit less car-centric? It doesn't have to change everything. Just a small number of cities and towns.
- closeparen 4y ago
  There really aren’t “plenty” - slots to live in places like this come up rarely and are fiercely competitive. If you’re not making FAANG money you have no real chance of owning one. And the reason it’s this way is suburban preferences have so dominated government for so long that it is either a historical oddity or an extreme swimming-upstream exception when a walkable neighborhood exists.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

The Netherlands is pretty rough without a car. Public transport is pretty bad compared to other European places. I'm dutch but live in Barcelona now which is a lot better. In the Netherlands everything is privatized so each line has to run a profit whereas here they view it as an investment into making the city liveable. So even people in the cities own a car to get around and the results are massive traffic jams. Same with health care, there's an excellent public system here which is free (paid by tax) but in the Netherlands you pay a private company a lot and there's penalties if you use it. If you live in a big city in the Netherlands and don't need to leave it much you'll be ok work public transport but there's a huge housing crisis there too so city apartments come at a huge premium. FWIW I love not needing a car and I hope I'll never need to own one again or even drive one. I've always found it so stressful.

TremendousJudge 4y ago
In Barcelona you can go to many places without a car, but has awful traffic everywhere (and they drive really fast on the big streets). Plus, the police kicks you out of the street at night. I don't think it's a nice place to live.
cr1895 4y ago
>The Netherlands is pretty rough without a car. Hard disagree. It depends on too many factors to make a universal statement like this.

irrational 4y ago

I never even had to sit in traffic. I can bike to work through a very nice meadow and forest in about 15 minutes. But after working from home for 2 years, doing even that nice of a commute seems like hell. Never again.

babycake 4y ago

I've always wanted to bike, and the city finally said yes, let's make the city bike-friendly. And then they go ahead and just paint a white bike lane right next to the car lane. Yea, even when politicians listen to their constituents, they just half ass the effort. I'm not risking my life to ride in that bike lane, so I still use a car.

randcraw 4y ago
Yeah, I live about 15 miles outside Philly and don't know anywhere nearby safe enough to ride. Local drivers think nothing of missing you by only a foot or two, often at a speed difference of over 20 MPH. Even offroad spaces set aside for bike routes often cross busy highways without proper signage, putting riders and pedestrians in the crosshairs of fast turning vehicles that are surprised to find anyone on the road who's not motorized. With the rise of big big SUVs and even bigger trucks, those who are not likewise encased in a large metal cage are just too easy to miss. Or hit.
29083011397778 4y ago
From what I recall growing up, Vancouver's bike lanes were not well-recieved (by what I imagine was a slight minority) when they started taking lanes from traffic. "They're always empty", "They're unsafe", "What about the cars and increased wait" were some of the complaints I remember. Over time, they've gotten dramatically better, and public opinion is shifting as they improve. Bike lanes become more common, so they grant access to more areas instead of getting you 90% of the way there, so they can be used, and people can take advantage of them, and see (or know someone), that uses them. It all ends up being a positive feedback cycle for bicycles. They may not be popular in your city, but if they can keep the political motivation up for a few election cycles, it can work :)

stjohnswarts 4y ago

You should move to the netherlands then. Not everyone needs to live in a dense concrete jungle. You should -choose- that, though. I understand why you hate cars, so move to the urban center and figure out a way but you don't have a right to force that on me.

chung8123 4y ago

I guess I am the opposite. It wasn't hard for me to find walkable places in the cities I have lived it because I planned my living around not having to drive much. There are still things I have to drive to like seeing my parents and family but everyday things like groceries, bars, food, haircut, etc were easy for me to do walking it all the cities I have lived. Also I lived in the suburbs of those cities so it isn't an urban core thing. For me as long as I prioritized walking my locations have been walking friendly.