43 ms·

How to quit cars

• aziaziazi 3y ago
  > The fact that it takes six hours to get from Baltimore to Boston, when a faster train can cover the longer distance between Paris and Marseille in four, does not move us to protest the obvious failure of ambition. Paris > Marseille by train is 3:08, not 4:00. Nice writup, thanks for sharing.
  • VBprogrammer 3y ago
    We quite often take the car to my parents home near Glasgow from our home on the outskirts of London. The train from London to Glasgow is about 4.5h if it runs to time (that's a pretty big if on the UKs rail network). The drive is about 8 hours including some reasonable stops, often we split it overnight with a stop midway. The problem is we don't live near Euston station, it would take about 1.5 hours to get to Waterloo then maybe 30 minutes to get across London on the underground. With two small children and the stuff they require for a week it would be excruciating. When we get to the other end we wouldn't have a car to visit the family members were traveling to see and realistically would have to rent a car. I've done the journey by train more times than I can count, both when I was single and before we had kids. I would be happy to do it again but the cost is easily 5x what it would be to just drive and is far less flexible.
    • karmelapple 3y ago
      > I would be happy to do it again but the cost is easily 5x what it would be to just drive and is far less flexible. To me this is a huge part of the problem. I've wanted to take the train many times in the US, but it also is wildly expensive here. Much faster and cheaper to take a plane in most cases. I'd think the way to solve this is to tax driving a car appropriately, whether through parking or other methods, to encourage and subsidize train travel. If the cost comes down, I'm guessing many more people would do it.
  • melling 3y ago
    3 hours to go 400 miles in France vs 6 hours in the US? The United States sat out the HSR revolution. China built 26,000 miles in the past 20 years. The US has essentially nothing. Personally, I think the creation of China’s subway system is even more impressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems#:~:text=The%20Shanghai%20Metro%20is%20the,China%2C%20with%2047%20in%20operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems#:~:text=....
    • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      My wife's small hometown (small meaning ~1 million people) in China was served by an HSR station, so we would often take an 8 hour ride on the HSR (on the Beijing - Guangzhou route) to get there. But an airport opened up recently (a decade after the HSR station opened), I think next time we will just take the plane instead given that it is still a very long train ride from Beijing. I think in the USA, pre-existing airports have reduced demand for HSR. The US has airports in almost every city with more than 500k people, while that is definitely not true in China (even still).
      • bluGill 3y ago
        An 8 hour train ride is outside of what is acceptable for normal train use. Up to about 5 hours on the train most people will prefer the train to flying. For short and medium distance trips trains have several advantages. The train is probably closer to your house and where you are going (air ports are way out on the edge of town in most cases, while train stations are closer to the center). You don't have the long wait for security for the train. You get more legroom on the train. For longer trips an airplane is worth those disadvantages, but not for shorter trips.
        • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
          Yes, but without an airport in my wife's hometown, 8 hours by HSR is better than flying from Beijing to Changsha or Guangzhou and transferring to HSR. Chinese HSR stations can be as inconveniently located as airports, so that isn't much of a benefit. Security is a bit better, they mostly make you put your bag through some sort of X-ray machine that I doubt they are looking at.
  • no_butterscotch 3y ago
    > does not move us to protest the obvious failure of ambition. Speaking of protest... After the events of the past few years, I think about protest when I think about public transportation infrastructure. Seeing people chain themselves together across roadways, railways, and entrances to other infrastructure - it honestly made me more supportive of automobiles. Less susceptible to be corralled by government or interest groups if we all have personal transportation.
• koch 3y ago
  Archived: https://archive.ph/asq7z https://archive.ph/asq7z
• finnh 3y ago
  Wow the first sentence was the most Gopnik sentence ever - even before the em dash! I don't typically check the byline before I start reading, but Gopnik always gives himself away. This one set a record.
• Workaccount2 3y ago
  Can someone explain where this recent flurry (last 2 years or so) of anti-car evangelism has come from? I can't help but feel that many people who now work remote and therefore don't need to commute suddenly are all for moving to mass transportation...that other people will use to get to work.
  • lantry 3y ago
    I think part of it is caused by a growing awareness that we can't have good car infrastructure and good public transportation infrastructure ("can't" in the sense of "not enough political will", rather than "not physically possible"). People want good public transportation, and they recognize that they aren't going to get it in a car-centric society
    • JKCalhoun 3y ago
      I would add that cars have become outrageously expensive in the past so-many years as well. My sister and I watched day-time game shows on days when we were stuck inside during the Summer months as kids in the mid 1970s. Even as kids we knew when watching The Price is Right that the first digit in the price of a new car was a "3". (Oh, forgot to mention the price of a new car was also only four digits.) I know, I know, that was nearly five decades ago....
  • eppp 3y ago
    I have commuted an hour each way for 20 years in a rural area. I hate cars and will evangelize against them at every opportunity. I am glad others are starting to come around.
  • lagniappe 3y ago
    Bikes are fun, cars are expensive. It's hard to explain. I could drive the same roads for 10 years and you ride it once on the bike and notice all kinds of noises, smells, things to see that you didn't notice before.
    • matsemann 3y ago
• Eumenes 3y ago
  [flagged]
• josephcsible 3y ago
  > The fact that it takes six hours to get from Baltimore to Boston, when a faster train can cover the longer distance between Paris and Marseille in four, does not move us to protest the obvious failure of ambition. By this logic, since planes can cover longer distances in shorter times than trains, should we quit trains in favor of planes?
  • dfinninger 3y ago
    When you factor in a couple hours of wading through security checkpoints (at least in the US), it flips the timescale again for the short/medium trips.
    • some_random 3y ago
      Where do you live that takes multiple hours to get through security?? Also, https://www.tsa.gov/precheck https://www.tsa.gov/precheck
      • dijit 3y ago
        You have to arrive at least 1hr early before your scheduled boarding time. 30 minutes boarding, means your "6hr" flight is actually more like 7.5hrs because you need to be at the airport. Then you need to factor the fact that airports are not often in easy to reach places. (exception: LCY and JFK). That applies to both ends. The times stack up very rapidly. In theory it's 2hrs to Birmingham from Copenhagen, but that trip will take approx 5hrs when you factor in all the "early arrive" and last mile shenanigans.
        • josephcsible 3y ago
          > You have to arrive at least 1hr early before your scheduled boarding time. You don't have to. It's a recommendation. The only true "have to" is that you have to be at the gate before the scheduled end of boarding, which is usually 15 minutes before takeoff.
          • 3y ago
• IIAOPSW 3y ago
  This is a long winded way to say you can only have agreement on what ought to be if you've already established agreement on a system of values to judge it.
• 0zemp2c 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • MrGrumbly 3y ago
    [flagged]
• milsorgen 3y ago
  Man people talk... a lot. Complain about cars, postulate on 15 minutes cities, clamor for railways... Meanwhile I've owned three cars in my life, maybe driven 1-2 years total. I lived on the Oregon Coast and then moved to the Treasure Valley in Idaho and the last car I owned was in maybe 2010? Be the change you want to see in the world. It's that simple. If I can do it where I've lived then I have a hard time believing others can't or that they need regulations or specific infrastructure or something else from the top down. These days with rideshares, smart phones, electric personal transport, etc it is MUCH easier now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. So what exactly is stopping anyone? The situation is never gonna be conducive to your exact wants and needs but you can and should make at least a small carless change today or even if it's just skipping the car to the next trip to the grocery store.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    This is exactly it! It is entirely possible to live without a car in the USA, millions do it every day. Does it require choices and perhaps sacrifices? Sure! But you can do it now and the more that choose it the better that choice will become. Work-from-home has made it even more possible. You'll never have the same utility without a car that you will have with one; but you can still have a quite satisfactory, perhaps even enjoyable life. Amusingly enough on the r/fuckcars subreddit awhile back, they asked about "what cars do you have" and most everyone .... had cars.
  • shipscode 3y ago
    I like how this comment comes from someone who actually gave up a car but validates my own sentiment and research into people dragging me online. None of the anticar keyboard warriors seem to live in cities or even be 'about that life'. I did the opposite and kept a car in NYC for years, spending 3 hours a week street parking it. If I can do that, surely they can put the effort in to do the opposite if they're so passionate.
• bearmode 3y ago
  My car can take me from my front door to anywhere else in the country that I want to. Often cheaper and/or faster than public transport can in the UK, as well. My family live a 30 minute drive away, however there are no buses that go directly there. No trains, either. I would appreciate more public transport, for sure, we absolutely need that as well. More, higher-quality public transport that is ideally available 24 hours. But nobody is ever going to build that from my front door to my family's. The best I can hope for is to reduce the number of changes I have to make. Right now it would take a bus to the nearest town, another bus to another town in sort of the right direction, another bus to the town center nearest to my family, and then another bus to get me to a street 15 minutes walk away. Even if that drops to two buses, my car will still simply be faster & more convenient. Quitting cars in cities is a fine goal -- when commuting into cities I tend to get a bus or a train rather than drive, but for everybody that doesn't live in a city, or travels outside of cities, it's simply not possible to get rid of cars. Sheltered personal transport, which largely comes in the form of cars, is not going to go anywhere.
  • dijit 3y ago
    > My car can take me from my front door to anywhere else in the country that I want to. This is nice, but you absolutely must recognise that the amount you're paying for your car does not begin to match what it costs the country for you to have a car. Road infrastructure is heavily subsidised by the tax payer. If you had to pay 3x more to operate your car, would you be more or less likely to be in favour of bolstering public transport? Population density is definitely a factor, and private vehicle ownership should always be possible. But the sheer size of our current personal vehicles and the tiny amount we pay vs their actual cost to society needs to be addressed.
    • bearmode 3y ago
      You forget that the vast majority of taxpayers are those same road users. Even those who don't drive likely still get lifts off of other people. They're not a separate entity. They already are paying for that infrastructure. And to those who are in the small minority who don't use it, would you also ask childless couples to pay for schools? Or people never intent on flying to pay for airports?
• putnambr 3y ago
  I've purposefully chosen, and paid the higher rent for, an apartment that's on the greenbelt in my city and close to work so that I can use my car less. As a couple we still own two cars but really only use them to transport our dog to trailheads. The exercise pays dividends, and at just over two miles from work it takes maybe three minutes longer getting to work than driving to a parking garage. I feel fortunate to make enough money to easily afford the rent, but it's insane that in most places you need a high paying job to escape needing a car. Refugee and low-income housing here is clustered around major streets like six-lane one-way transport corridors. Unless they work downtown or close to a stop on one of the few bus lines that run frequently and reliably, they need cars. Usually the cheapest they can afford, which likely means they need to spend money they don't have to get them passing emissions tests at registration time, deal with breakdowns, high insurance premiums, etc. It doesn't help that most of the planned transit improvements seemingly are focused on greenification of buses rather than just getting more buses on the road to expand routes, make lines frequent enough to use for commuting, etc. My city did pass some new zoning codes which heavily cut back on parking requirements, I'm excited to see how that (slowly) pans out. I expect more high-capacity parking structures to go up, fewer surface lots. People might need to walk further or explore other last-mile options, I have hope that will turn people's eyes towards non-vehicle transportation improvements.
  • JKCalhoun 3y ago
    > As a couple we still own two cars but really only use them to transport our dog to trailheads. You can probably lose one. When the wife and I left the Bay Area for the midwest we kept only one car. It simplified moving and if we needed another we could get one in the midwest. Soon we'll have been a single-car family for two years.
    • putnambr 3y ago
      Definitely. We actually own three, the intent of the newer one is to replace the other two eventually. Old cars are a Prius for interstate trips, and an early 2000s Outback for camping/interstate trips where we need to bring more things with. Prius got severely damaged in our parking lot and I used the insurance payout to help with a down payment on a Crosstrek, which will eventually replace the Outback as well. I feel bad for taking up the (free) parking space, but the cost of ownership of the Outback when infrequently used is something like a $40 insurance premium every six months. That's another benefit of not driving much -- low mileage and safe driver insurance discounts.
• rwbt 3y ago
  I would love to make more trips on a bike rather than a car. Especially for trips less than 5 mile radius. But the city where I live (Los Angeles) has very few protected bike lanes. I'm glad things are gradually moving in the right direction, but boy do we have a long way to go.
• karaterobot 3y ago
  > The downtown-centered city that we yearn for is, perhaps, an archaic model, and Americans have voted against it with their feet or at least with their accelerators. Those of us who live in and love New York have a hard time with this argument, but it is not without merit. Los Angeles is a different kind of city producing a different kind of civilization, and its symbol, that vast horizontal network of lights dotting the hills in the night, is as affectionately viewed as its polar opposite, the vertical rise of the New York skyline. Surprisingly good article, thank you for posting it. I got the sense that Gopnik is aware there may be places in the country outside of New York and Los Angeles — that he has a vague awareness about a sort of middle area where people might not live in apartments or be within a fifteen minute walk of everything in their life. Now, he never actually mentions this liminal space between the coasts, but it seems like he's inferred its existence based on the persistent popularity of cars. I appreciate someone with that kind of perspective writing for the New Yorker.
• keiferski 3y ago
  It’s odd to me that these anti-car polemics never talk about why Americans don’t want to ride public transit, while people in most other countries have zero issues adopting it wholesale. Instead they just make it into a simplistic, moralistic crusade about how the suburban car owners are evil people, told from the perspective of a righteous city-dweller. Here’s a better theory: because American public transit is, when compared with the alternatives, not safe, not clean, and not convenient. Take LA, probably the most car-dependent big city in America. Riding the bus or subway in LA is not an enjoyable experience. Nor is it enjoyable to walk around the areas where the stops are. If I were trying to get more people to use public transit, I’d start by making the stations and buses/subways beautiful, clean, safe places that are just nice urban places to hang out in. There’s no need to make it a moral crusade; just offer a better product and more people will use it.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • uoaei 3y ago
    It's a chicken-and-egg concern. If there was a higher amount of passenger load on public transit there would be more eyes, accountability, and generally a feeling of being around people who are going somewhere rather than using the trains and buses as living rooms. Safety in numbers and all that.
    • Jayschwa 3y ago
      I disagree. I lived in NYC for 10 years without a car and used public transit for everything. There are plenty of passengers, and that didn't matter. It was just a larger captive audience for whoever was having their mental breakdown.
      • digging 3y ago
        The US's approach attacks public transit from both ends. Transit is gutted, cars are prioritized, making transit not good enough. And social services are gutted, the poor and the unwell are demonized, and then the only people riding transit are scary. And these two feed into each other; by making transit inefficient to use, and making expensive cars necessary, poverty is increased.
• acabal 3y ago
  I've been railing against cars in the US for years and years. The thing is that today most people in the US under the age of 60 grew up in cars, usually in a suburban environment, and it's actually impossible for them to imagine what life without a car might even look like. It's like trying to describe a color. If we can't even visualize an alternative, how are we supposed to achieve the alternative? Only by traveling to places that were developed before cars took a chokehold on the world can people realize how nice it is to live without them absolutely everywhere. Many Americans get a taste of that when they vacation to Europe. They often choose to leave their suburb and spend their 2 weeks in urban environments like Barcelona, London, Munich, Paris, Rome, etc., that where built for people and not cars, because it's so pleasant to live like that, and because letting cities develop for people first leads to cities that people actually want to be in, with car-free streets, plazas, promenades, etc. (Yes, today those places are also full of cars. But, unlike American cities, their skeletons are people-first and cars are the invasive element.) It could be argued that so many problems of American life - weight gain, loneliness, fracturing of the social fabric - stem from how we've isolated ourselves in unwalkable suburbs, where there's no spontaneous social interaction because everyone's always in a car, and where our only exercise is the walk from the parking lot to our desk. What's depressing is visiting developing countries and seeing them start to ape the worst of American car life. Places like Colombia, which I visit often, are building shopping malls, big-box stores, parking lots, suburbs, and freeways, while after almost 100 years of that type of car-first development in America we're only just starting to realize that actually it might not be that great.
  • Tade0 3y ago
    > Many Americans get a taste of that when they vacation to Europe. What I don't like about this is that people (even urbanist bloggers) tend to form their opinions on their experience as tourists, while reality is much more nuanced and full of tradeoffs. Case in point: I once visited my friend in Bilbao and the one thing I couldn't get over was that despite this being a beautiful, walkable, full of life city jobs were hard to come by and low-paid. Youth unemployment in particular in Spain stands at a whopping 46%.
    • 3y ago
• penjelly 3y ago
  ive been living without a car on my own for 9 years now. The biggest thing about not having a car is the culture expects it, so youre mildly judged for not having/using one. That impact is bigger when dating too.
  • Gigachad 3y ago
    Feels very different in Australia. When I tell people I don’t have a car, the general response is something like “yeah good idea, wish I didn’t need mine”
  • bombcar 3y ago
    I can believe the dating part but that can be covered by having and not using, if you really needed to.
    • penjelly 3y ago
      why would i have a car i dont use?
      • bombcar 3y ago
        Apparently to impress the lady-types.
    • Gigachad 3y ago
      What is the dating culture in the US around this? I’d have thought you’d have an easy time trying to play it as you being very environmentally conscious an in touch with society to impress the more progressive types rather than “I can’t afford a car”
      • the_only_law 3y ago
        Turns out what people say and how people behave are often very different.
• geff82 3y ago
  Individual transportation has been a staple of civilization for the last few thousand years. As people all have individual ideas on where to go and when, individual transportation is a close to perfect solution to the problem. The question is more: does it need to be SUVs and pickup trucks? I had a Renault Twingo (non electric, current model) once and it dawned on me that this is the maximum size a normal person would need on 99% of the days. Offer them with a slightly enlarged trunk and it would be good 100% of the time for a family of 4. Those cars take half the space of an SUV and still provide the same basic benefit of getting to places on your own schedule. Another related topic: we should not change cars all 3 years. Why not drive them 20-30? Get replacement parts when needed, get the interior freshed up every 15 years and be happy. With the rising of electric cars, the only really critical part has become the batteries (and they seem to last longer than what we all thought).
  • polygamous_bat 3y ago
    > Individual transportation has been a staple of civilization for the last few thousand years. I can't imagine what you mean here by individual transportation. Could you explain a bit more?
    • nayuki 3y ago
      It is what it says. Buses, trains, and planes are mass transportation - you have to travel with other people and make stops with them. Cars, bikes, and walking are individual transportation - you travel alone and navigate yourself. geff82's observation that individual transportation is the norm forever is in fact true. But they fail to notice that making a city more walkable and bikeable - with appropriate paths and distances - also promotes individual transport.
  • MisterBastahrd 3y ago
    My parents are in their mid 70s. My dad was almost 60 before he bought his first brand new vehicle. His house was paid off, his kids were out of the house, and he was making $140Kish a year. The most I've ever paid for a vehicle is $19K for an almost fully loaded compact SUV with about 50K miles on it. The only reason I bought it is because the used $14K SUV I bought in 2014 was totaled in a car wreck. I was 4 payments left from fully paying the car off and had absolutely intended on continuing to drive it for another 8 years or so. Same with this one.
• JKCalhoun 3y ago
  > Public transit is now the cause of the reforming classes, and the car their villain. I wonder if this would have been the case had cars stayed as diminutive as they were becoming in the mid 70's.
• kortex 3y ago
  I skimmed the article and I feel like nothing really answers the question to "How to quit cars", aside from pricing parking better. Personally, I'd love to be able to rely on cars less. They are kind of the epitome of tragedy of the commons. But as a lifelong suburbanite with 2 cars in a 2-person household, this is what I'd have to see to quit cars: - Ability to get a vehicle on-demand (say within 5-10 minutes) 24/7/365, anywhere in Upstate NY, from cities to boonies. - That vehicle would need to allow me to transport large goods, bulky goods (to an extent), lumber <6', flammable solvents - also needs to accomodate 2 medium dogs - I'd need dedicated bike lanes to the nearby shops and groceries before I could even attempt to use that as an option. There's stores only a few miles from me but the roads to get there are treacherous There's more but those are the bare minimums, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
  • geff82 3y ago
    I think the main problem is how American cities are built: they are not intended to be walkable (the same is true for some modern European suburbs). Compare this with European city centers: having a car there is not a benefit, but a liability. You can get around mega cities such as Paris without having a car (taking a taxi for the 2 occasions a months where you'd need one). I recently visited Milan: we parked the car and then did not need it again once - despite having little kids. Why? Classic European cities are dense. They were built in a time where "walking" was the main means of transportation. And now that policies and opinions change, this older style of building gets fashionable again.
    • bombcar 3y ago
      To be fair to the Europeans who own cars (In Europe, for example, the median national share of car owners was 79 percent [1]) life as a tourist is easy; the entire city is doing everything to make your car-free life work. And every time I've touristed in Europe it's been great wandering around without a car (the times I've driven the backcountry with a car have been fun, too). But all the people I've worked with when in Europe have a car (sure, it might be small) and drive when it makes sense, which is often. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-17/a-pew-survey-charts-global-car-motorcycle-and-bike-ownership https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-17/a-pew-sur...
• bambax 3y ago
  > The fact that it takes six hours to get from Baltimore to Boston, when a faster train can cover the longer distance between Paris and Marseille in four... The TGV (high speed train) between Paris and Marseille takes 3 hours and ten minutes, not four hours. The distance is 780 km or 480 miles. The distance between Baltimore and Boston is ~410 miles (660 km).
• lynx23 3y ago
  I moved 20 years ago into an apartment 5 minutes walking distance from work. It was simple, I like it, and saved tonnes of CO2. I don't even need to use public transporation on a daily basis. Oh, and I don't use much artificial light. I also refuse to use elevators if the target floor is not above 6. I know nobody who beats my energy consumption... Besides, I have acquired these traits long before the "Last Generation" was even BORN! But stil, if I mention that, people get jealous and start to either downplay or outright ridicule me. Well, a good chance to learn something about other people. They like talking, almost nobody likes doing.
• diversionfactor 3y ago
  As an American living in Germany I bike to work every day, even in the snow in winter. There are dedicated bicycle paths which are free from obstruction where I can commute, get groceries (I have a special trailer for heavy items), and enjoy a weekend with the family. I can cycle between cities, all the way to the Netherlands, which has even better dedicated cycling routes. https://www.radroutenplaner-deutschland.de/veraDNetz_EN.asp https://www.radroutenplaner-deutschland.de/veraDNetz_EN.asp Should I choose public transport, it is ubiquitous and very cheap (even free for some people). Fast and slow trains, streetcars, some subways and buses, but most importantly frequent and with total coverage by law if I remember correctly, no one can be more than 500m from a public transport stop. Even in the countryside you can take public transport everywhere: I have visited rural areas entirely by train and even a farmhouse by bus with a short walk. This is typical European lifestyle at least for the wealthier northern continental countries. https://www.german-way.com/travel-and-tourism/public-transport-in-germany/ https://www.german-way.com/travel-and-tourism/public-transpo... There is a downside, however. Everyone - that is everyone except the very rich and those in the countryside - lives in an apartment. An apartment which, even by lower class American standards, is tiny, dark, grungy, often ridden with mold, and with non-existent amenities. For the price I pay in rent, including exorbitant utility costs, I could get a much nicer place anywhere outside the coastal elite urban cores. My fellow software developers, who are paid far above average for German engineers (or even doctors here) are in the same boat. Tiny and grimy is the norm: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/berlin/berlin/wohnung-mieten?pricetype=rentpermonth&sorting=4 https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/berlin/berlin/wohn... What I wish I saw less of in the car/transit debate was moralizing, and what I wish I saw more of was engineering tradeoffs. You can try to have cars and houses and transit and high salaries and (relatively) low taxes and what you get is NYC or SF - a playground for the rich and a dystopian hellscape for the average middle class worker. If you make transit ubiquitous and affordable with affordable housing and restrictions on cars you get everyone in tiny accommodations, the kind of mass single family home communities and even NYC townhomes and billionaire skyscrapers would never be approved by German town planners. Engineering tradeoffs, which can mean many tiny cars you never see sold in the USA: https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/shopping-auto_dealer-car_dealer-car_dealership-auto_dealerships-transport-CC119024_low.jpg https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/shopping-auto_dealer-c... Let's have more discussion on the tradeoffs, and maybe we can find solutions of which Larry David would say: "You're unhappy. I'm unhappy too. Have you heard of Henry Clay? He was the Great Compromiser. A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied, and I think that's what we have here."
• seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  I quit cars for ~11 years while living abroad, and just got one when my wife was 7 months pregnant. Once the kid is high school, I might be able to quit them again, but kids with their activities make it hard in the states.
• cagey 3y ago
  Given the article's title, I didn't expect to find the following within: Public transit is now the cause of the reforming classes, and the car their villain. The car is the consumer economy on wheels: atomizing, competitive, inhuman—and implicitly racist, hiving people off to segregated communities—while the subway and the train are communal zendos. Good people ride bicycles and buses; bad people ride in ever-bigger cars. It seems like a pretty even-handed summation of the situation: the "reforming classes" need a target, thus "Good people ride bicycles and buses; bad people ride in ever-bigger cars." Another surprise: People always maintain, similarly, that the big auto manufacturers killed L.A.’s once efficient public-transit system, leaving the city at the mercy of polluting and gridlocked cars. That this is, at best, a very partial truth does not weaken its claim on our consciousness. (The surprising part to me is that this is claimed to be a "very partial truth". In the multitudes of HN discussions of "cars evil" articles, this claim is almost always trotted out, and almost never challenged)
  • yamtaddle 3y ago
    > (The surprising part to me is that this is claimed to be a "very partial truth". In the multitudes of HN discussions of "cars evil" articles, this claim is almost always trotted out, and almost never challenged) Yeah, you don't need a conspiracy to end up where we are. You just need cars to be very-beneficial to owners when most things aren't built up with car infrastructure and most people don't own cars (and they are! That's true!); and for us to start catering to that in our infrastructure-planning since, you know, it's better; and for there to be a hard-to-see-in-the-moment tipping point where suddenly everyone needs a car because everything's built with cars in mind and everything's very far apart now, but also everyone's worse-off, in precisely the ways that cars were suppose to improve things (time savings, especially), plus some others, than if we'd never had widespread private car ownership in the first place (which, there was such a tipping point, and we blew past it many decades ago). Self-interest takes care of the rest.
    • skulk 3y ago
      You don't need a conspiracy, but here is one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... The default assumption should be that people who benefit from auto sales are actively trying to block public transportation. It's foolish to think otherwise.
• WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  Having lived in a place where I don't need a car, I purposefully moved to a location where I can drive my car. I had to go to the doctor. Punch in address and drive there, park the car and walk in. No need to check at what time public transport shows up, or if it does at all. While I live at the foothills with direct access to hiking trails, I don't need to drive through 45 minutes of urban unplanned jungle before I can jump on a congested freeway in the case I want to visit another place. No, the freeway is right there. I want to go do my weekly Costco run. Couldn't do that before. Took too long, so I was stuck paying the inflated prices at Pavilions around the corner. All of this, plus the fact that I don't need to worry to have a to step over a homeless guy to walk to work, or dodge shit, or being awoken by police 3 times per night make me REALLY happy to be where I am. Far away from civilization.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    And amusingly enough, once you're "far enough away" from civilization you probably end up in a small town or near one, and suddenly ... it's entirely walkable.
  • skulk 3y ago
    Great example of how in the aggregate, perfectly reasonable individual thinking can lead to the construction of desolate hellscapes. (source: grew up in Phoenix, Arizona)
• oatmeal1 3y ago
  https://archive.ph/asq7z https://archive.ph/asq7z
• oatmeal1 3y ago
  Having an independent media is essential to quitting cars. I've never heard a discussion on quitting cars on the nightly news, but on YouTube this discussion is made possible. YouTube de-ranking independent media in favor of traditional media could really limit the growth of the "fuck cars" movement.
  • JimtheCoder 3y ago
    "I've never heard a discussion on quitting cars on the nightly news" I've never heard a discussion on quitting cars anywhere offline, to be completely honest. The amount of people who currently drive cars who think to themselves, "You know what would be better? If I were sitting on some form of public transit right now..." is a very small portion of the real world population I assume (In North America) Sometimes, the internet is not real life...
    • kfarr 3y ago
      I think most people would agree with the following: "You know what would be better? If I were not sitting in a car right now" We can both recognize that cars can be necessary in certain conditions AND ideally not a big part of our lives. I think that's reasonable and possible.
    • digging 3y ago
      > The amount of people who currently drive cars who think to themselves, "You know what would be better? If I were sitting on some form of public transit right now..." You're looking at it backward. I think almost everyone who sits in traffic or nearly gets in a crash by someone doing something stupid thinks, "Driving is awful." They've just been conditioned to think there's no alternative.
      • goatlover 3y ago
        They tend to think driving is awful under those conditions, but still better than not being able to drive. The thing with a car is that you can go anywhere at anytime where there's a road, which is virtually everywhere. You don't have to share the car with strangers, you can transport things in the car too heaving to carry in all sorts of weather. The convenience is hard to beat even with good public transportation.
• Decabytes 3y ago
  When I moved to Michigan I never realized that a suburb could not have a side walk. This is not uncommon in Michigan. That means that if you walk, or run, rollerblade, skate it has to be done in the street. Also lots of things are so much farther in Michigan than they were when I lived in Mass. In Mass I could go 3 miles in 30 minutes. In Michigan I can go 70 miles in 60 minutes
  • csdreamer7 3y ago
    Same in North Carolina (was from California).
  • inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Oh there are whole neighborhoods in the Bay Area with no sidewalks.
    • local_crmdgeon 3y ago
      There are neighborhoods in DC and Denver with no sidewalk. In the city proper, sometimes near a transit station.
    • hot_gril 3y ago
      Los Altos. I feel like that's more to discourage random people from loitering.
      • digging 3y ago
        I feel like loitering, like jay-walking, is a crime invented for the purpose of selling cars. There's nothing inherently wrong with just hanging out on foot in a place where people are meant to be on foot and/or hanging out.
        • hot_gril 3y ago
          If you own a house in a suburb, and some random people are sitting on the sidewalk directly in front of your house instead of going to a nearby park or anything else of interest to them, you might wonder what they're up to.
• efitz 3y ago
  If people want to live in cities and want to have a car-free lifestyle, then more power to you. Cities are becoming increasingly unaffordable and increasingly violent. I think that we are past “peak metro” and that the absolute refusal of many people to return to office work is going to result in an acceleration of out-migration from cities. This in turn will exacerbate other urban problems as the revenue base dries up and low wage employees become ever more difficult to find in urban areas.
  • bertil 3y ago
    Do you have any data to support the claim that cities are becoming more violent? That’s a common trope that is generally debunked by police statistics.
    • paulddraper 3y ago
      San Fransisco crime increased 5% last year. [1] NYC crime increased 22% last year. [2] Chicago crime increased 41% last year. [3] [1] https://missionlocal.org/2023/01/explore-how-crime-changed-in-2022/ https://missionlocal.org/2023/01/explore-how-crime-changed-i... [2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00071/nypd-citywide-crime-statistics-december-2022 https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00071/nypd-citywide-crim... [3] https://www.illinoispolicy.org/chicago-crime-spikes-in-2022-but-first-drop-in-murder-since-pandemic/ https://www.illinoispolicy.org/chicago-crime-spikes-in-2022-... ** That said, the OP said "violent" and technically the increase was almost entirely non-violent crimes (e.g. theft).
      • sva_ 3y ago
        > San Fransisco crime increased 5% last year. If you want to decrease your crime rates, just make crimes more legal tips forehead.
      • jjxw 3y ago
        Also important to note that "last year" includes the tail end of the pandemic where crime as a whole fell due to lockdowns. SF and NYC fall far below other, less dense, cities in the US such as Cleveland Ohio, Lansing Michigan, Rockford Illinois, and Anchorage Alaska in violent crime rates. Granted, Chicago is in the top 20 in violent crime, though, if I had to guess those statistics are driven by crime that occurs outside the "urban core". Perception certainly matters -- perceptions of SF BART and MUNI probably are not helping ridership -- but the narrative that San Francisco has become an urban hellscape is not borne out by the data nor by my personal anecdotal experience.
• nologic01 3y ago
  The issue of quiting cars is nowadays far from just a matter of values as the article seems to be implying. Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and urban planning disaster across the world. We are stuck with them. As a mode of transport it has grown uncontrollably at the expense of all others (except the airplane) and practically everything has been shaped to accomodate it. Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person. Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way. In the best scenario it will be an excruciatingly long transformation (~50 yr) as car oriented cities (or city sections) get slowly deprecated and the car-free or car-lite segments become more desirable, more livable.
  • ohmyzee 3y ago
    I don't mean to be rude but are you over 45? There is a will with most people under that age in my experience. Or maybe cars are important culturally where you live?
    • afavour 3y ago
      I live in New York City and even here I’m really not convinced most people under 45 have a will to get rid of cars. There isn’t a huge passion for them either, more like a resigned acceptance.
    • JenrHywy 3y ago
      Many people under 45 don't have the same requirements for transport, though. It's easy to say you don't need a car when you're mobile and don't have to ship kids around. We try to minimize our car usage - we have one car for our family of 6; I ride an electric scooter to work etc. Not having a car at all though would be basically impossible unless we decided to cut out the kids sport and traveling to visit family.
      • brewdad 3y ago
        You're still way ahead of the game compared to so many American families. Most of my neighbors have more cars than licensed drivers at home. We aren't going to eliminate cars in my lifetime (hopefully I've got a good 40 years or so left) but if we can get more households going car-light that's still significant progress.
• bit_logic 3y ago
  Here's a radical idea: disband and shutdown the public bus system. Before you reply with an angry post, read the rest of the plan. These systems take hundreds of millions of public funds and are completely ineffective in suburban areas (most of the country). Take that money and give a "rideshare card" with funds automatically filled every month (lower income will get more free funds). Either work with Uber/Lyft or start a similar government rideshare service. Something like this will actually get people to consider giving up their cars. After a while, certain high usage routes will be noticed in the rideshare data. It will become obvious which streets and destinations could be optimally served with high capacity buses. Now is the time to bring in bus routes. Setup these bus routes and offer a discount for using them. The current system isn't working, we need to try something different.
  • ako 3y ago
    By what metrics do you determine public bus system isn’t working, and how would you expect these metrics to change in your proposal? As far as I can tell many people are using public transport, including buses, so it seems to work to some extend.
    • bit_logic 3y ago
      This whole thread exists because the public bus system is a failure in the US. How many threads on car dependence has there been on HN? The bus system is used only by the lowest income members of society who can't afford a car. They suffer long transit times, lack of point-to-point mobility, and delays. Sure that "works" to some extent for those who have no other options. And this leads to other effects like decreased health and social mobility. Want to go to college after work to improve your life? Can't because the bus routes take 2x or 3x the time it would in a car to get there. Want to get a checkup for that cough? Again riding the bus takes too much time. You can't force a top-down solution for public transit with the road system in the US. The great strength of the US road system is point-to-point transportation. Let everyone benefit from that instead of running buses that only the poorest use. Publicly funded rideshare is the way to do this. After a while, the bus routes will naturally appear in the data. This is the bottom-up way to build a bus system.
• hot_gril 3y ago
  How to quit vim
• swalling 3y ago
  > They crowd streets, belch carbon, bifurcate communities, and destroy the urban fabric. Will we ever overcome our addiction? Betteridge's law of headlines says no. Even extremely well-planned and progressive cities like Portland (which has been expanding light rail for 30 years straight) haven't budged above 15% commuting by public transportation. No city outside SF and NYC have meaningfully addressed this. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/public-transport.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/pu... This is why electrification is so important. North American civilization is dependent on cars and trucking and will always be so when our countries are continental at scale.
• jcpst 3y ago
  I am going hiking in New Mexico next week. I am taking the train there. After looking at the excellent public transportation in the Santa Fe area, I decided to make the whole vacation car-free. I’m from Kansas City, and public transportation is pretty much a joke. They have buses and a street car, but you just can’t get around town that way. It would take me an entire day to do things that would take a 1/2 hour in a car. In Santa Fe, as long as I have a few bus schedules on hand, there is not much to worry about. I’m even couchsurfing with someone that lives 15 miles out of town, and there’s a bus that will get me within a mile. What’s the worst is where I live now, the ‘burbs. Not quite the freedom and nature of the country, not quite the dazzle and immediacy of the city. At least it’s bike-able. Anyway, I’m really excited about my trip and getting around in a different way.
  • LarryDarrell 3y ago
    Make sure to take the Rail Runner down to Albuquerque. Our buses are free, and we have new Rapid Transit buses that go down the length of Central Ave.
• Havoc 3y ago
  The infra has to be there. I've lived in places where of course you have a car and I've lived in places where of course you don't have a car. The person wasn't the difference
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• aabajian 3y ago
  Dogs aren't allowed on buses.
• w0mbat 3y ago
  This kind of thinking is so out-of-date. Cars are rapidly going electric, silent, and intelligent. The first two improvements will remove the problems with pollution and noise. The idea that the production of an electric car produces a vast amount of waste and pollution is nonsense, big oil propaganda. The added intelligence will provide benefits further down the road, some of which we don't even know yet. Once cars are smart it promises to radically improve safety, with smart cars able to avoid most accidents, drive drunk people home in the back seat, able to drop the owner at their office door and then find somewhere to park on their own, either in a more spaced-out area or an automated dense public garage.
  • r00fus 3y ago
    You forget - this isn't just about the car. It's mostly about the roads. Roads cause all sorts of issues with land use, and even if the cars are clean and intelligent, they still take up lots of room (probably a bit less with EVs that are more situationally aware and non-polluting). Removing some roads and replacing with more shared/human-centric transport will make a huge difference to the utility of cities. We can do this independently of electrifying vehicles - see superblocks [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33279811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33279811
  • mcdonje 3y ago
    Cars are not and cannot go silent. Most of their noise comes from tires. Stand near a highway and pay attention to specifically where the noise comes from. It's primarily not the engines. Trains already exist. They are proven technology. Smart cars have proven to be difficult to make safely. Smart cars will still be less efficient for moving lots of people than trains. It's not just the cars. It's also the land use. All that extra pavement and other infrastructure for all the low-density land patterns cars necessitate is resource intensive to build and maintain. This is just like lab grown meat. People think technology that will hit the market at a competitive price point in some indeterminate amount of time will save us from existential problems that are already manifesting. And that technological optimism is interfering with the development of the needed level of urgency.
  • nayuki 3y ago
• jiggyjace 3y ago
  I'm really surprised this article is gaining any sort of traction on this site, as it hardly talks of anything to do with the headline, yet that hasn't dissuaded hundreds of comments discussing their own ideas to answering the question.
• epolanski 3y ago
  As an European who went to Ohio State for a six months exchange it was crazy. I've witnessed things I just don't see on tv like people going to the post office and actually delivering mail with a giant vacuum. Even more striking was just how an absurdly huge amount of ghettization and poverty lack of public transport leads to. Columbus was full of jobs and yet people living in suburbs had like no ways to get there unless they had a car.
  • MH15 3y ago
    The area around Ohio State leading towards downtown (the “Short North”) is a really nice and walkable area. It’s a shame that most Columbus residents have to drive to experience it.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  From the article: "The electric car is a chimera, producing more pollution in its construction than its existence justifies, and the dream of a driverless car can never be realized."
• eliseumds 3y ago
  My car stays in my garage 80% of the week, I only use it when visiting other cities on the weekends. I chose a relatively dense Brazilian city and I do everything here by bike or on foot (about 6-8mi per day). People have started noticing that I'm looking healthier, fitter. It'd be very very hard to do the same in any American city other than New York, you people are trapped.
  • pimlottc 3y ago
    While it’s by no means the norm in most of the US, you can definitely live that way in other American cities besides New York. Chicago, DC, San Francisco all come to mind.
    • bombcar 3y ago
      I would say that you'd be hard pressed to find a city of any moderate size where it was not possible. Some would be better than others, but it's possible nearly everywhere.
    • eliseumds 3y ago
      I drove and walked all over SF a few months ago, and while I agree it’s feasible, the lack of bike lanes is disheartening, much worse dedicated ones. Your standards are so much lower, it looks like your tax money goes into a blackhole never to be seen again, and I’m saying that from a very corrupt third-world country.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• kderbyma 3y ago
  I have never had a car. I never grew up with easy access to a vehicle throughout my entire life and even now I do not have one. This addiction is wholly alien to me. Cars are luxuries to me. I live in a city 1.5M people and the city is not a walking city imo, and takes 2h+ to get across the city. I do not travel the entire city unless necessary, and instead I spend most of my time in 1/4 of the city. I bike, scooter, walk, skateboard and generally I don't miss the vehicle. there are two exceptions. Moving into a new house, and going camping or hiking. Cars are unnecessary for the rest of my lifestyle. it would only be a negative in many ways - with the costs, the insurance, the parking, the maintenance, the oil changes, the collisions etc. again...going out of the city ...and moving.
  • qwertox 3y ago
    How do you transport the groceries? I feel like this is my only problem, 90% of the reason why I need a car. I would be unwilling to use some kind of cargo bike in the winter.
    • drewr 3y ago
      Just carry them, or use a small cart. When the grocery store is small and it's a convenient walk across the neighborhood it's actually a pleasant experience that you can do several times a week.
      • odessacubbage 3y ago
        here at least that just leads to ditches and bike paths strewn with shopping carts.
        • Clamchop 3y ago
          Travel by car has covered the land with pavement, polluted the air, and filled our public spaces with endless noise.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• SirMaster 3y ago
  I have absolutely 0 desire to live in a city though... Too noisy, cramped, expensive, more dangerous, etc. I want space, a yard, isolation, privacy, etc. Living more out in the countryside is much more ideal to me.
  • xputer 3y ago
    Nobody is arguing against car usage in the country side. People are arguing against car dependency in cities and suburbs.
• tatrajim 3y ago
  There are many different environments in the U.S. I grew up on an isolated farm in the midwest, where the nearest neighbors were miles away and the closest shopping some thirty miles. Access to cars gave me, compared to the horse era of my great-grandparents, access to wide swathes of urban culture, not to mention mind-expanding forays to locations in adjacent states beyond any alternative transportation. Without the auto, I would have lived a much more conscripted life, likely never leaving my home state for a life spent roaming around the world. The situation for the current generation in my home town has not changed at all. On the other hand I lived more than a decade in sites in East Asia, including a long stint in Seoul, and never drove once. The public transportation there largely suffices to meet the needs of the majority of the population, although personal automobiles became increasingly popular in Korea from the 1990s. Within the confines of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong or Singapore cars are absolutely less necessary, and I would be content not driving. Different environments require varied means of transportation, and among them the personal automobile has its own valued place.
• bojangleslover 3y ago
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• nayuki 3y ago
  > How to quit cars Step 0: Start watching Not Just Bikes - https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes/videos https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes/videos Step 0.5: Browse through r/FuckCars - https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/
• Fr0styMatt88 3y ago
  The cultural aspect is so, so huge and as a person unable to drive due to my visual disability I’ve felt it very acutely ever since I was a teenager. Getting your first car is/was essentially a rite of passage into adulthood, not just a way to get around. All the movies and ads told you that. Pick a girl up to take her somewhere? Nope, can’t do that. Are you even dateable if you can’t drive? Watching all your friends get their license and feeling like you missed out on graduating to adulthood? It’s painful. Want to use buses and trains? That’s cool but be careful of all those ‘bad people’ that want to rob you and don’t travel too late at night or too early in the morning, it’s unsafe! A car is a symbol of freedom, independence and safety for many people. Freedom to roam about wherever you want, whenever you want as you please, without having to rely on your parents. I don’t blame anyone for thinking this way, it’s what we’ve been fed by culture for as long as I can remember. Not that these perceptions are accurate when I look back on it, they’re as much to do with my own insecurity as a disabled person as they are to do with general society. It’s nice to know that this isn’t a thing everywhere in the world. FWIW I don’t hate cars (I think I’m as much of a fan as anyone that grew up with gear-head mates) and over the years I’ve come to terms with never driving and quite like the financial convenience of not owning a car, but still. As others here have alluded to, giving up cars is a huge societal zeitgeist change, not just a change to do with infrastructure.
  • noduerme 3y ago
    This is very well said. Just as a fan of fast cars and classics, I appreciate being able to talk the ins and outs with people who are also so inclined. Many of whom are not really into driving, and more into the beauty of the machines. Yes, they're also a teenage symbol of "freedom" - I grew up in LA in the 80s-90s, where rich kids had expensive cars, but cool kids had hot rods or souped up rice rockets. It wasn't just mobility, it was your most expensive and treasured possession. But it's actually a pretty false, limited type of freedom, as I realized when I grew up, sold my Camaro and left the States for 12 years. That sense of freedom from your parents turns out to be a few road trips in your life. It's not like you can just drive down to Patagonia (unless you want to court imminent death a dozen times along the way). In any event, basically no one does it. So the freedom aspect is kinda bunk, like all the other freedoms Americans think they have but never actually test. In terms of the pure pleasure of driving a difficult-to-drive, classic that I saved and restored from the scrapyard, with a hair trigger clutch, listening to every sound from the engine, I feel like I'm probably one of the only people I know who enjoys doing it every day. But it's driving as an art, just like fixing cars is an art. I think that's the true value of the car culture, not the commercial patina of "freedom" sold with every lease.
• draw_down 3y ago
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• poomer 3y ago
  I find this article to be too high-minded. Most Americans don't own cars or support car-friendly policies due to some notion of car=freedom or some other culture wars nonsense. Americans own cars because most of them live in single-family houses on large plots of land, and that doesn't make public transit for daily commuting a realistic possibility. In Paris car ownership is very low, maybe 1/3 of adults, but in rural France the car ownership rate is easily 95%+. I haven't seen a single developed area in the world that has violated the rule that low density = high car ownership and vice versa. The other rule that I have never seen violated is that the large majority of middle and upper income people do not want to live near low income people, due to crime or other reasons. In Europe, poor people live in the suburbs, so the middle income live in the city with high density housing. In the US and some other places (south asia), low income people live near the business center, so the middle income live in low density housing in the suburbs. These are for historical reasons and cannot be easily changed.
  • Retric 3y ago
    America actually has a huge public transportation system servicing most homes in the US. It’s the bus system for public schools. Running local loops to pick people up in moderately high density neighborhoods with 1 acre per house or less every half hour or so is actually pretty easy. Just read up on the old trolly networks before cars took off. The real reason Americans own cars is because we’re rich enough to afford a more expensive and more convenient system. Public Transit at scale is surprisingly cheap when compared to all the costs associated with car ownership * 10’s of thousands of people in even a fairly small community.
    • actionablefiber 3y ago
      > The real reason Americans own cars is because we’re rich enough to afford a more expensive and more convenient system. Are we? When you zoom in on things like road maintenance backlogs and auto loan delinquencies, it kind of seems like we are not rich enough but have been pretending to be.
      • 3y ago
• userbinator 3y ago
  Go ahead and quit cars and live in your "you will own nothing" apartments crammed together like livestock in a factory farm. That's what propaganda pieces like this are trying to push you towards. The rest of us will keep our cars, all of our other property, and stay the hell away from and fight against that emerging authoritarian socialist dystopia as much as possible. Clearly, the rabidly anti-car fanatics have never experienced the pleasures of driving a comfortable and powerful car on a long highway trip.
• irrational 3y ago
  1. Sell children 2. Sell single family home and move to within walking distance of public transportation 3. Allocate additional time to running errands
• tonymet 3y ago
  every one of these culture stories is about imposing urban norms on suburban and rural communities
• s1mon 3y ago
  I’m baffled by the ideas in the article’s intro that in the 50’s, cars were somehow the realm of hipsters and bohemians. If anything, cars became more popular with the growing (mostly white) middle class which moved to the newly built and expanded suburbs in the post WW2 years. The GI bill, home financing and other incentives helped growing families (baby boom) move into their new lives. Car ads promoted “All This and Victory Too”. After years of wartime rationing, people were eager to buy new shiny bulbous vehicles to drive on the new Eisenhower-era interstate system.
• bane 3y ago
  One interesting thing I think I've noticed is that public buses in general in the U.S. kind of suck compared to elsewhere. The reason why I think I've hit on is that they kind of don't have a place to go, and so most bus routes kind of meander around their local areas going nowhere in particular. It turns short, as-the-crow-flies, trips into long ones. Anecdotally, I've lived in places where it's literally faster to walk slowly between two locations than take the bus -- the car alternative was less than 1/5th of the bus time. However, once an area builds real transit, like lightrail, or a subway or something, there's pressure to integrate the systems, and suddenly bus routes will optimize to connect people with those systems. This is completely anecdotal, but I've noticed massive bus route redesigns in a couple places where transit comes on-line. A 45 minute meandering bus "loop" turning into a 15 minute direct route to the local transit station, which also works well for commuting as offices tend to be in high-density commercial zones near transit so the total commute time is within spitting distance of just driving.
  • eptcyka 3y ago
    This might be by design - if you have a small amount of buses and drivers, then to service a given area one has to have a small amount of long routes. If there was more money to go around, there could be more drivers, more buses , ability to have more routes, maybe even enough to have a hub and spoke system of routes, maybe even some long “useless” long loop routes too. But since bus services are operated like a business, they often don’t get to expand far enough to be really useful because there isn’t enough demand with the bad routing model to accrue enough capital to grow into usefulness.
• FredPret 3y ago
  Unpopular opinion: public transport fundamentally sucks. I've spent vast amounts of time commuting on public transport and by car. You can't pay me to ever get on a bus again. And not just in the US/Canada either. Even in the dense cities of Europe, public transportation << car transport. No bus can ever beat the comfort and convenience of putting a large amount of shopping / luggage in the back, getting in your private bubble, and going directly to your destination. Then there's the people you meet on public transport. 99 / 100 of them are just people who want to go from A to B. But then there are the trouble-makers and weirdos. Do you really want to be stuck on a bus or train, straining under shopping bags or holiday luggage, with some unpredictable idiot eyeing you? Some people, like newyorker.com, have a platonic ideal of public transport where we are all happily whisked from A to B on hyper-efficient and advanced vehicles, perhaps humming kumbaya to ourselves. But the reality is that it will always be inconvenient and slow - at best - and dangerous and super unpleasant in reality. The one instance where public transport works well is when you want to travel 5-10 blocks, there's a lot of traffic, and you are carrying nothing, and there just so happens to be a subway going the right way. The real way forward is to have electric cars, nuclear power plants, remote work, and maybe this new Musk tunnel thing.
  • haspok 3y ago
    > Even in the dense cities of Europe, public transportation << car transport. ...and then talks about buses. Buses? Ever heard of trains? Commuting by car sucks. You have to actively participate in traffic, as opposed to just sitting on the train and reading a book, for example. In most EU large cities trains are faster and more convenient than cars. You also forget the fact that even in the 2x8 lanes of LA motorway systems you still get traffic jams, you cannot imagine what would happen if in an EU city all people would follow your advice. And if you live closer to your work, you can hop on a bike (an ebike, even!), and enjoy some fresh air. Luckily on this side of the world people are not forced to live in those prison-like residential areas where the only way to get to anywhere is by car. > maybe this new Musk tunnel thing. It is inconcievable to me how people can take anything that man says seriously, even as a passing thought. But if you do, just look at the Vegas tunnel, how well that turned out!
    • 3y ago
• meerita 3y ago
  I have no intention of ever using public transport again. It is inherently unsatisfactory. It is slow, dangerous, expensive, and uncomfortable (one cannot always find a seat). I apologize, but I will never trade the comfort of my Mercedes Benz or the speed of my electric scooter for my daily commute.
• pzo 3y ago
  I wish some ideas from South East Asia taken in western countries 1. More common driving scooter + in Thailand / Vietnam / Indonesia driving scooter is very common even for teenagers + easy to find (free) parking place and doesn't require so much space + they don't consume much fuel + still can have 2nd passenger + cheap, mass produced and easy available + easy to lock and more heavy so less likely to get stolen than bikes + have some (small) trunk space for storage (helmet, groceries, etc.) + in taiwan you have electric scooters that easy to swap batteries + you can still move forward in traffic jam E-bicycles on the other hand: - feel less safe when driving >20km/h (small wheels) - doesn't have indicators, mirrors, lights out of the box - feel like too fast for sidewalks and too slow for roads (unless have dedicated bicycle lanes) - much more expensive, most cannot swap battery or replace it - much less places to park - easier to steal (and because they are more expensive they are better target) - no space for groceries or storing helmet/gears 2. Shared taxi. Thailand has kind of public transport called Songthaew [0] (pickup car with 2 benches of seats) that you stop, pay small fee and it distribute people that go along the same direction. Similarly angkot in indonesia. With some modern app this could be probably even better optimized 3. Motorbike taxi - e.g. gojek in Indonesia, grab bike in Thailand [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songthaew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songthaew
  • Broken_Hippo 3y ago
    * More common driving scooter* South East Asia is warm. I simply cannot feel safe driving a scooter with a few centimeters of winter ice on the roads. And I'd have to buy even more winter clothes: Wind chills are a thing. (I live in Norway. It snows, more so when you get inland) And as far as e-bikes: They can have storage, quite a bit of it - just like a regular bike. You just have to get the right model or accessories. People use them with a trailer for their children, too, and there are at least a few around here that are used for goods. People locally use them all the time for groceries and stuff - you just go to the store more often. You can take the batteries inside to charge them: Of course you can swap them out most of the time. If you don't have places to park, that means your city doesn't have bike racks and other such things. A few places here have bike lockers that allow you to keep your bike out of the weather, too.
• p0w3n3d 3y ago
  Simple thing: I own a car and when the route I want to go has a public transport or e-bike AND the time is acceptable, i usually take it. If not then I take car. E.g. to my office I commute by bicycle because it's much faster than stand in jam. But on winter I must not take bicycle, or I'll get fully sick and lose 10-14 days. Then I take tram which is second in terms of time. However when I get my kids to music school, tram is so slow and rare, I have to take car, or I would need to leave 20mins earlier. That's this simple. So govt, please stop planning how to prevent me from driving my car. Just do your duties, better as you did, and make pub transport better
• throwaway019254 3y ago
  I bought a car just to avoid some type of people in public transport. I had a weekly encounter with either a homeless person with very bad odor, or somebody aggressive that was usually kicked out by a bus driver or by police. It was acceptable when I was riding alone but now I have a kid and there's no way I will bring him to this environment. Unfortunately, our cities are not dealing with these issues adequately.
• davidthewatson 3y ago
  Cars have an effect on culture that is very similar to software in that cars have evolved from being a technological symbol of innovation in the industrial era to a cargo cult of exploitation ironed into the social fabric by commercial and social forces in barely a hundred years: https://www.alexanderrea.com/project/mcdonalds-happy-world/ https://www.alexanderrea.com/project/mcdonalds-happy-world/ It's difficult to summarize the impact of commercial and social collusion while understanding the impact on daily decision making as easily as that. Of course, all the beautiful people ride around in electric cars with their brains being told indirectly to consume the diet of Mr. Creosote by a conspiracy of corporations that have neither their best interests nor well-being at heart. Two things provide hope. Young people who, when given the choice, choose not to get a driver's license, and old people who've become accustomed to cars but choose to abstain from car transport moving forward and have the freedom, health, and wisdom to choose other alternatives such as 2 feet, 2 wheels, or mass transit instead. These choices arise from the fact that time (as in slow-* culture) and health are the new wealth for those who have the privilege to recognize and realize such beliefs as differentiators in the life they seek, not yesteryear's symbols of innovation.
• junkilo 3y ago
  heres the archive.org link for those just loking to read the article, cheers: https://web.archive.org/web/20230519170640/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/22/carmageddon-daniel-knowles-book-review-paved-paradise-henry-grabar https://web.archive.org/web/20230519170640/https://www.newyo...