4 ms·

Cars are not super cheap, and in fact are very expensive when you start to account for public costs and externalities. Especially in regards parking, building c

Cars are not super cheap, and in fact are very expensive when you start to account for public costs and externalities. Especially in regards parking, building car infrastructure is expensive and space inefficient, and nowhere near the amount built today would be built without laws mandating it. Moreover, highways really aren't cheap either, and Houston is suffering under the financial weight of them. Obviously since sprawl exists now it's hard to get rid of it; a city would be hard-pressed to go to the suburbs and tell them that they won't receive services anymore. However, as Detroit has shown, sprawl is definitely a liability if the city ever has any sort of period of decline. That certainly hasn't stopped Houston (and many other American cities) from acting as if that could never happen, and I suspect that the next 50 years will reveal the weaknesses of the model. I hope to be proven wrong, but that would require climate change to magically disappear and resources of all kinds to stay abundant, which seems unlikely.

bluGill 4y ago
Cars are super cheap compared to jet airplanes or helicopters. Yes they are a large part of our economy (I once read 60%, but I have no idea how to look that up), and of the average person's budget, but they are still cheap. Walking barefoot is a lot cheaper than cars (and not as stupid as it sounds - your feet are made to walk barefoot), but it is so much slower nobody considers it reasonable anymore.
- gfaster 4y ago
  I think you're thinking of automotive manufacturing, which was a super important part of the economy at one point. Cars (and by extension the policies that enable car dependence), have an extremely high externalities. They require vast amounts of public spending, lower land productivity, make areas more flood prone, damage the health of those living near car infrastructure, contribute to climate change, are traffic, drive suburban sprawl, and kill more Americans than guns do (crashes alone are just 0.3/100k fewer). The reason 'nobody considers it reasonable anymore' to walk are those policies that build for cars. In places with less car-oriented policies, people walk places. It has nothing to do with maximizing the speed of the vehicle you're using.

bluGill 4y ago

Cars are super cheap compared to jet airplanes or helicopters. Yes they are a large part of our economy (I once read 60%, but I have no idea how to look that up), and of the average person's budget, but they are still cheap. Walking barefoot is a lot cheaper than cars (and not as stupid as it sounds - your feet are made to walk barefoot), but it is so much slower nobody considers it reasonable anymore.

gfaster 4y ago
I think you're thinking of automotive manufacturing, which was a super important part of the economy at one point. Cars (and by extension the policies that enable car dependence), have an extremely high externalities. They require vast amounts of public spending, lower land productivity, make areas more flood prone, damage the health of those living near car infrastructure, contribute to climate change, are traffic, drive suburban sprawl, and kill more Americans than guns do (crashes alone are just 0.3/100k fewer). The reason 'nobody considers it reasonable anymore' to walk are those policies that build for cars. In places with less car-oriented policies, people walk places. It has nothing to do with maximizing the speed of the vehicle you're using.