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How do we even fix car-dependency in the US? It's almost like a mind virus, in that people are so utterly convinced on the need for cars, they cannot even conce
by infotainment 3y ago
How do we even fix car-dependency in the US? It's almost like a mind virus, in that people are so utterly convinced on the need for cars, they cannot even conceive of a world in which they're not necessary.
- MattGaiser 3y agoCars are just too nice, especially when there is bad weather and once you have one, you may as well use it. You would need to have people ok with being outside in the winter for example and walking on ice.
- qwerpy 3y agoYes, I'm not sure why some people have trouble understanding this. I like the quiet suburban/rural life, which necessitates cars. I happen to like cars, so this works great for me. Some people might like the city life and choose not to get a car, and that's great. They should do that. As long as neither group is forced to subsidize the other, I don't see why we can't all get what we want.
- wilg 3y agoWe provide an alternative that is better than cars
- dymk 3y agoCar lobby is doing its best to make sure that doesn't happen
- aniforprez 3y agoPublic transport. Easy. Providing avenues for better buses improves not only the health of the people that use it, it provides an incentive to improve the infrastructure to provide that transport which also improves the lives of people who use cars
- dangrossman 3y agoI live in an affluent town. High average income, mostly expensive suburban housing. We've fully funded a variety of public transit, but that hasn't induced people to actually use it. Buses drive around the town all day every day, with useful routes connecting the places studies say public transit should connect... much of the time without a single passenger inside them. My own single-family home is a 2 minute walk from a bus stop, but I've never taken that bus. My car will get me wherever I'm going faster, after all. Did I mention that the buses have been completely free to ride since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic? They still run mostly empty.
- PlunderBunny 3y agoWhen you’re on a bus, you can do other things while someone else drives you. It’s like getting free time.
- huytersd 3y agoDoesn’t make up for the fact that you’re in a shared space and can’t do whatever you want like you can in a car.
- pmarreck 3y agogermany does wonders with bikes and public transport they also tax gas heavily, which we don't do (and probably should)
- willcipriano 3y agoHear me out. Put the United States in a dryer on high.
- bsdpufferfish 3y agowe do tax gas heavily
- wilg 3y agoGas tax is $0.40-$1.00/gallon and we have basically the lowest gas taxes in the world. (And some of the lowest prices.)
- eesmith 3y agoTo add, gasoline tax Germany is $2.76/gallon and the EU requires a minimum of $1.55 per gallon. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/gas-taxes-in-europe-2023/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/gas-taxes-in-europe-20...
- bsdpufferfish 3y agoAs you just pointed out the tax alone is still about 100% of the base cost. Not many goods are the US are taxed like that. It works because it's a universal good.
- wilg 3y agoOK, but doesn’t invalidate the comparison is to another country where they tax gas more.
- eesmith 3y agoIt is not about 100% but well less than 30%. "On average, as of April 2019, state and local taxes and fees add 34.24 cents to gasoline and 35.89 cents to diesel, for a total US volume-weighted average fuel tax of 52.64 cents per gallon for gas and 60.29 cents per gallon for diesel" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State... In 2019 gasoline wholesale price was around $1.80 - https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=EMA_EPM0_PWG_NUS_DPG&f=M https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E... 0.5264 /1.8 = 30% New York Harbor Conventional Gasoline Regular Spot Price FOB is US$2.61 per gallon today - https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=gasoline https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=gasoline . .5264 /2.61 = 20% Note that the wholesale price does not include the cost to deliver to the gas station or nor storage and dispensing costs at the station, so the percentage at point of sale will be slower than these numbers. Cigarettes are not a universal good. There is a federal excise tax on cigarettes of $1.01 per pack and state taxes from $0.17/pack in Missouri to $5.35/pack in New York, plus possible city taxes. "As of 2011, Phillip Morris lists total government revenue, including federal, state, local, and sales taxes, as 55% of the estimated retail price of a pack of cigarettes in the United States" and "[WHO] estimates that taxes make up 42.5% of the cost of a pack of cigarettes in the U.S." Numbers and quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_taxes_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_taxes_in_the_United_.... That is nearly 100% of the base cost. Some cities have an extra tax on sugary drinks. Also not a universal good. "Kaplan and his colleagues found that, on average, prices for sugar-sweetened drinks went up by 33.1%". https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/01/06/1223243244/cities-with-soda-taxes-saw-sales-of-sugary-drinks-fall-as-prices-rose-study-find https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/01/06/1223243... Note that the additional 33% is on top of sales tax, meaning the total tax on sugary drinks was more than 33%. So both cigarettes and sugary drinks (in some areas) have a higher tax rate than gasoline. Bear in mind that some of the fuel tax is used defray the high cost of car infrastructure; "defray" because most of the infrastructure cost is paid by sources other than fuel taxes.
- BenFranklin100 3y agoSupport Bus Rapid Transit. That is, dedicated bus lanes. See Mexico City: https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/04/29/mexico-city-bus-rapid-transit-model https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/04/29/mexico-city-bus-rapid-t...
- ZoomerCretin 3y agoIt's not that simple. We rebuilt our cities around the car. Without changing our cities, there is no substitution for cars. We need to rebuild our cities. Eliminating cars and adding sidewalks isn't enough; without density, you have nowhere to walk to, and transit doesn't scale.
- huytersd 3y agoI love car culture. I get to have a large house with a huge yard and still live 10 mins from an urban center. I don’t want my neighbor to be on the other side of the wall. I like my wood/metal working shop, being able to raise goats and chickens and shoot guns in my backyard. I’ve lived in the heart of Manhattan for about 5 years and even though it was a great experience I would not want to go back to it. Long live car culture. That being said I run 3-5 miles on trails 5 days a week and get more than enough exercise just doing stuff around my yard so car culture isn’t effecting my ability to stay fit.
- MattGaiser 3y agoEven for someone who doesn't really want a yard, what I do not want is for others to have a say in the value of my largest asset. I probably would prefer condo living for whenever I buy a property, but the tendency of many to defer maintenance is a dealbreaker as they would also have a say. So I am going to buy a detached home as that is the only way for me to fully decide the maintenance of my property.
- lgleason 3y agoSingle family homes can also have HOA's which can become a pain if not run well, but at least it is not part of the structure that you own.
- ramraj07 3y agoIt’s simply not possible to live decently without cars in most of the US. Ask me, I lived in Texas for 8 years without one. It’s not easy. My Sunday ritual was to spend 2+ hours each way to get a meal in Waffle House and catch some movies in AMC (plural because if I’m spending this amount of time I’m catching more than one movie lol). The few years I spent in somewhat small town College Station, I tried using a bike. For the most part I was biking on the sidewalk because the (often drunk) kids raised trucks would never even notice a civic in front of them leave alone a bike. There was one particular intersection which led to a highway ramp, and it had a pedestrian walk signal. I have spent up to 15 minutes for at least one driver to notice I’m waiting here to cross on the walk, hundreds of cars will pass by me taking a right on this signal without ever seeing I’m waiting to cross. So why do you think anyone who’s not homeless would keep doing that?
- SauciestGNU 3y agoI did out of stubbornness and oppositional nature, and I kept doing it and advocating for myself and now there's much better cycling infrastructure than when I started. But I'm also not in Texas, where I think there's probably some additional ingrained hostility toward the social signaling associated with bikes.
- acchow 3y agoIt's because cars create a problem that only they themselves can solve: low density and enormous distances created by car infrastructure and parking.
- inamberclad 3y agoAs someone who's about to buy a new car, I thought about this. I can bike to work. I can walk to the grocery store. I did this all through college. Then I thought, "what happens when I move?" How do I buy furniture on Craigslist? How do I pick up my girlfriend from the airport? How do I visit my friends across the Bay Area? It's a real tragedy of the commons. I'd like to save the money but I would have to sacrifice too much else unless many, many other people were willing to put up the same gamble. I think we can start by just building it. Make it fast, reliable, and safe. Make it go places people want to go. Make it go to the grocery store, airport, and random blocks across the entire area. Look to what we did 100 years ago when a train station was a palace of transport, not a dingy slab of concrete. People want alternatives, they just want better ones than what we have now.
- stop50 3y agohow often there is no viable alternative? How much does the car cost if i live in a this place or an similar region, including the mantenance costs over the time? use that info to get the costs per trip (costs/total miles*mile for trip). Don't use guesses, most car owners are bad at guessing the anual costs.
- sokoloff 3y agoUsing average cost analysis for a marginal trip decision can lead you to a wrong conclusion. If you "must" have a car for essential life function L (commuting to work perhaps), then it's entirely reasonable to burden many of the fixed costs of car ownership onto that activity and mentally charge only the marginal costs to a marginal trip (like going out to dinner some random evening).
- eesmith 3y agoEven that analysis can lead you astray. If you only need a small car for essential life function L but opt to buy a bigger car because every few weeks you want to take the entire family out to dinner then it's not reasonable assign the entire fixed cost to L. The calculation becomes more complicated: a smaller car is likely cheaper to operate for L, and the cost savings over using a bigger car for L may be enough to pay for a taxi or ride-hail for the occasional times you need a bigger car for dinner, or to pay for a rental car for a vacation trip, or to pay for delivery if you need a large volume purchase.
- jsz0 3y agoWhat's there to fix? Most people want to own cars. Those people buy cars. Why shouldn't they buy cars if they want cars?
- mslate 3y agoBecause it is a public health problem. The US is 7th for GDP per capita among nations. It is 59th among nations for life expectancy. These are policy choices, not individual choices.
- huytersd 3y agoSo you want to force everyone to walk and bike and give up the conveniences of a private vehicle? Why not just mandate that everyone has to do compulsory exercise everyday instead if we’re going to be paternalistic like that.
- mslate 3y agoNo, I do not want everyone to be forced to drive--a reality that many are discussing in this thread but you choose to ignore. The mandate is accomplished with parking minimums, federal highway subsidies. I cannot find an apartment in my community that does not have a parking space--it has been illegal to build such a unit of housing for decades. The amount of publicly owned real estate that is given for free to car owners to store their cars is worth trillions. And you tell me I'm being paternalistic :)
- eesmith 3y agoYou've read too much into the response. "Why shouldn't they buy cars if they want cars?" is a loaded question. Why do they 'want' cars? For many people it is the only reasonable means of transport. We know even from comments in this thread that some of the people who "want" cars now would prefer alternatives. When you speak of force, remember that alternatives were often taken away by force, as when a walkable part of town (often where poor and/or black people lived) was torn up to create a highway. Speaking of paternalism; zoning, backed by the force of law, prevents people from building a granny flat, and prevents someone from converting their garage into a neighborhood corner shop. Paternalism is why we have so many outsized parking space mandates. Paternalism is why modern suburban sprawl is subsidized over old-style compact and walkable so-called streetcar suburbs. If you are really against paternalism, help get rid of these paternalistic zoning laws, like laws which end up forcing most people to live in single family homes even when they would not want to pay for such expensive housing if other options existed. (And no, not all zoning laws are paternalistic. Don't build a toxic chemical processing plant in a residential area.)
- lgleason 3y agoThe population density in most areas doesn't make it economically viable. In many area the climate makes biking a messy proposition of needing shower after a ride, or to put on a bunch of rain gear etc. vs a car where you just take a shower in the morning, get in your dry car and exit clean for the office etc..
- ZoomerCretin 3y ago> How do we even fix car-dependency in the US? Car-dependency is a city planning issue, first and foremost. We destroyed the cores of our cities, demolishing block after block of buildings to raise interstates and parking lots. You will never eliminate car-dependency in rural areas, and you can at best remove the need for it in suburbs with mixed-use zoning (i.e. corner stores and cafes), better funded public transit, and sidewalks. Cities should first stop expanding interstates and look to remove them entirely. There is absolutely no need to have an interstate through urban cores. Next, you need to redesign streets to make the car part narrower and the sidewalks wider. And you need to repeal zoning ordinances that ban anything but single family homes on 80% of urban residential land. It's ridiculous that there exist single family homes within walking distance of the downtown of cities with a population in the millions when under a properly zoned system, there would be mid-rises. Rural areas will never be free from car-dependency. Suburbs need light modifications to mixed-use zoning policies and transit, as well as infeasibly high taxes. Urban areas, where walkability should be most feasible, have to remove highways through cores, repeal oppressive zoning laws, and prioritize walkability. The actual policies are rather straightforward. There are plenty of countries that planned around the automobile and later reverted this mistake, so there exist many playbooks for achieving this worthy goal. Unfortunately, the problem is political rather than technical: too many people are invested in the automobile for a lot of good reasons, and too many people are invested in the current land use regime which make automobiles necessary.