6 ms·

Yale Climate Connections - didn't expect a politically neutral post from that. But they make a good argument for higher density, which I agree with. But there a

Yale Climate Connections - didn't expect a politically neutral post from that. But they make a good argument for higher density, which I agree with. But there are some advantages to a car-centric society: - higher personal freedom - you can go anywhere, anytime. With transit / walking, you can go some places, some of the time. This is huge and opens up a lot of possibilities for work, vacations, socializing, healthcare. - bulk stores like Costco is only possible because people have cars. You will have to pry my Costco membership card from my cold, dead hands. It's a lot cheaper to let people drive in to a central bulk store like this and buy what they want in large quantities than to have a network of tiny, walkable stores and try to predict demand and optimally distribute goods to them with delivery vans.

epistasis 3y ago
> bulk stores like Costco is only possible because people have cars. You will have to pry my Costco membership card from my cold, dead hands. Costco users in urban areas would disagree with your assessment that it's only possible with cars. I'm looking at this Costco in Soma right now and watching people walk out with enough bulk goods to carry in their granny carts or bags in hands.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  I wish that Costco didn't have cars. I used to bike past it on my morning commute and it was heart-poundingly dangerous. Drivers will jump in front of you and slam on the brakes so they can get into the parking garage entrance. The taxis aggressively pulling out from the stop just add to the thrill.
schoen 3y ago
I had a friend in the city who was doing pretty well with Zipcar, where one could somewhat spontaneously rent a car in one's urban neighborhood to use for errands or trips. This could be a good solution in dense environments for Costco runs, especially when the nearest Zipcar lot is just a couple of minutes' walk away. I personally go shopping by bike, but I notice there are some things I can't readily buy that way, like furniture. (I did successfully buy a microwave by bike, but a larger appliance than that would be pretty daunting.) I have family visiting me right now in the big city from the small town, and it's weird for us to notice how different things are.
- agensaequivocum 3y ago
  Having to walk a couple of minute just to get to the car is not acceptable. I have five kids (with hopefully at least another five in the future) which requires 10+ minutes just to make sure everything is in the car that we need. There's no way I'm going to hall them down the street to get in the car. The convenience and freedom of having a car in my garage is irreplaceable.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    The goal is not to get rid of all cars. The goal is to be less car-centric. Those 10 kids, once they get older, will want to go to places, meet friends, and participate in activities. If the only option is a car, then you or someone else must be their chauffeur. Quite a few parents do it, but not all enjoy it. If the place you live were less car-centric, you could give each of the older kids a bus pass and let them go places on their own, or your kids could walk and bike places on routes which are not shared with cars.
    - true_religion 3y ago
      That’s true but it seems the suburban ideal is to protect children by not allowing them to leave the community without their parents. It’s basically an artificial village.
      - eesmith 3y ago
        That's an accidental side-effect due to being car-centric.
    - agensaequivocum 3y ago
      I grew up in a suburb. I biked around just fine. We have a bus stop just down the street from where I live now. However, I would let my kids carry a gun before I would let them on a bus.
      - eesmith 3y ago
rdedev 3y ago
You can have both. At my home in India I can just walk and get all essentials I need (food medicine etc.) If I need to buy a lot of things I take a car and go to the nearest supermarket. There is an environmental cost to using only cars to get your essential things. We need to start considering them now
- rickydroll 3y ago
  Thank you, I was beginning to think I was the only person with the understanding that transportation is multimodal at the person level. One blind spot that I'm aware of is where you are, need, and point of service don't always align. For example, my medications cost a lot more if I go to the Walgreens a quarter mile away versus the CVS a mile and a half away. My partner has a special needs child and she needs to be able to get the child to a variety of services during the day a few times a month. Driving makes it possible. Public transit would make her unemployable.
0xdde 3y ago
> It's a lot cheaper to let people drive in to a central bulk store like this and buy what they want in large quantities than to have a network of tiny, walkable stores and try to predict demand and optimally distribute goods to them with delivery vans. Cheaper for who? Car ownership can be a huge financial burden compared to transit.
AlotOfReading 3y ago
Stores like Costco and Ikea exist in countries with good public transit. They're just one among many types of store. Transit advocacy isn't about eliminating everything except public transit. It can just be about improving transit so that the infrastructure for vehicles isn't overwhelmed with all the people who don't need to use cars and don't have other options.
- ansmithz42 3y ago
  Very True! It is about choice of transit. The US has NO Choice of Transit. It is either Car or nothing. How very free that is to be limited to 1 choice!
- FredPret 3y ago
  It sure does eliminate other forms of transport. You ever see the bill for a bit of rail, or a subway, or a bus line? These things are horrendously expensive to build, maintain, and run. The money comes from taxes. Now that tax money might be better spent on other things poor and homeless people need, or might be better off circulating in the economy and not taxed at all. But freezing all that value in the form of public transit isn't going to yield the best payoff for society.
  - 303uru 3y ago
    Freezing it in the hands of Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc... is? You do realize people build all the infrastructure, right? That entire industries are formed? It's quite literally the definition of mobilizing money into the economy.
  - mlsu 3y ago
    Have you seen the bill for a freeway interchange? Or the bill for lung cancer due to living next to a busy road? Or the bill for hearing loss due to noise pollution? Or the bill for having a kid getting hit and killed by a 3 ton pickup truck? Or the bill for birds choking on oil after a spill? ... I can go on.
CalRobert 3y ago
Your freedom to drive generally reduces other people's freedom to walk, bike, and take transit. Among other things it's often illegal to build homes where people want to live so that you can park your car there.
- FredPret 3y ago
  Except those other people also want cars. So we all live in a sprawling, low-cost-of-living city and we are happy. Of course, some people call this slice of heaven a "nightmarish hellscape of stroads" [0] but thank goodness those people can move somewhere else and leave our cars alone. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39081965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39081965
dublinben 3y ago
Car-centric design reduces freedom, because it requires an expensive car in order to go anywhere. Nothing says freedom like a $900/month car payment in order to get to work and buy groceries![0] Bulk stores like Costco are only necessary because people live in such sprawling communities. In places where you live a short walk from a grocery store, you can practice just-in-time logistics, and buy whatever you need as soon as you need it. It's a lot cheaper, both in economic and environmental terms, to build cities where people don't need to drive for their daily needs. [0] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-ownership-crosses-10k-mark/ https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  >requires an expensive car in order to go anywhere. ... the prevalence of 2000s Nissan Altimas on the road suggests that a cheap car works pretty well for many people.
  - dublinben 3y ago
    There's no such thing as a "cheap" car when you compare it to the cost of walking or cycling. You could buy a new pair of shoes and a bike every month for the cost of just insuring and fueling an average car. Car-centric design is a tax on all of us. It's just less burdensome for some than it is for others.
    - pandaman 3y ago
      If your time is worth $0 then walking is cheaper, even at the federal minimum wage it's $1.80-2.40 per mile.
- TexanFeller 3y ago
  Rather hyperbolic. No one needs to pay $1000/mo for a basic reliable car, not even including gas and insurance.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> higher personal freedom - you can go anywhere, anytime. With transit / walking, you can go some places, some of the time. This is huge and opens up a lot of possibilities for work, vacations, socializing, healthcare. It seems like people have gotten stuck in this false dichotomy where the only two possibilities are detached single-family homes on an acre of land or 50-story high rises with hundreds of housing units. An acre of land is 43560 sq ft. That's enough for a 10,000 sq ft per-story multi-story building and dozens of ground-level parking spaces. You can fill a neighborhood with those, put shops on the ground floor and housing above it, and have a walkable neighborhood where every household has one car instead of two. > bulk stores like Costco is only possible because people have cars. You will have to pry my Costco membership card from my cold, dead hands. You could pretty easily replace this with ecommerce for bulk goods. It's actually kind of weird that this isn't more popular because bulk purchases should reduce shipping overhead. Why isn't there a Costco truck that drops off a month's supply of groceries at your front door once a month?
- agensaequivocum 3y ago
  No everyone should own the land they live on. You don't have much freedom when your property ends at the front door.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    If you divide the amount of land in Brooklyn by the population, the average person gets ~1049 sq ft of land, not accounting for roads or parking or sidewalks or anything like that. How much of yours would you like to allocate to grass?
    - rickydroll 3y ago
      none.. I have a 2500sqft house on a 10k sqft lot. I am eradicating the grass, rewilding as much as possible, increasing veggie garden with drip/soaker hose irrigation, expanding strawberry/blueberry patch. it is a multi-year project but it is one of those things that make life worth living.
kredd 3y ago
I really don’t understand this post. You can obviously have both? Like it’s very super-duper obvious how you can just live in a city and don’t use your car at all, but drive out to get outside of the city. I live in Vancouver, I go to Costco which is downtown (15 min walk or 7 min metro ride), drive up to skiing or hiking mountains multiple times a month (weather and etc. depended). I don’t even want to point at even better cities in other countries (most of Japan, Switzerland, parts of France and many more) as that’s cheating. But you really can have your cake and eat it too, it’s very much been done multiple times around the world.
eesmith 3y ago
There are also advantages to a less car-centric society. - "In 2022 the average vehicle costs $11,450 per year to own and operate. The breakdown of the figure comes to $4,496 for purchasing the vehicle, $3,120 in gasoline and motor oil expenses, and $3,834 in other vehicle-related costs." - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/08/cost-car-ownership.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/08/cost-car-ownersh... . If you are in a two-car family, and a less car-centric environment means you only need one car for those Costco runs and wind surfing afternoons, then you can save thousands of dollars. - You can go out with friends to a bar and drink, and not worry about having a designated driver. - There's much less need for “Restricted” or “Hardship” License for repeat DUI offenders. - Kids have higher personal freedom as they don't depend on a parent to drive - People who aren't able to drive (due to any of many reasons) have higher personal freedom - During your commute you can read or do other things which occupy your attention. - You don't have to worry about finding parking or paying for parking. - Your taxes go down as you don't need to subsidize so much driving infrastructure Having mass transit access also opens up possibilities for work you can't as easily get with a car. That's why places already have Park&Ride - parking at the job location is too expensive with only car access. In a less car-centric society there should be little difference between the health car you get with a car and without. Plus, if your health condition means you can't drive, you'll likely have better healthcare access.
303uru 3y ago
>higher personal freedom Strong disagree. Having spent good amounts of time in parts of the world where you can operate for months without getting in a car, it felt far more free. The barrier to entry in the US being owning a car, paying insurance and paying for a place to store it is the opposite of freedom.

epistasis 3y ago

> bulk stores like Costco is only possible because people have cars. You will have to pry my Costco membership card from my cold, dead hands. Costco users in urban areas would disagree with your assessment that it's only possible with cars. I'm looking at this Costco in Soma right now and watching people walk out with enough bulk goods to carry in their granny carts or bags in hands.

AlotOfReading 3y ago
I wish that Costco didn't have cars. I used to bike past it on my morning commute and it was heart-poundingly dangerous. Drivers will jump in front of you and slam on the brakes so they can get into the parking garage entrance. The taxis aggressively pulling out from the stop just add to the thrill.

schoen 3y ago

I had a friend in the city who was doing pretty well with Zipcar, where one could somewhat spontaneously rent a car in one's urban neighborhood to use for errands or trips. This could be a good solution in dense environments for Costco runs, especially when the nearest Zipcar lot is just a couple of minutes' walk away. I personally go shopping by bike, but I notice there are some things I can't readily buy that way, like furniture. (I did successfully buy a microwave by bike, but a larger appliance than that would be pretty daunting.) I have family visiting me right now in the big city from the small town, and it's weird for us to notice how different things are.

agensaequivocum 3y ago
Having to walk a couple of minute just to get to the car is not acceptable. I have five kids (with hopefully at least another five in the future) which requires 10+ minutes just to make sure everything is in the car that we need. There's no way I'm going to hall them down the street to get in the car. The convenience and freedom of having a car in my garage is irreplaceable.
- eesmith 3y ago
  The goal is not to get rid of all cars. The goal is to be less car-centric. Those 10 kids, once they get older, will want to go to places, meet friends, and participate in activities. If the only option is a car, then you or someone else must be their chauffeur. Quite a few parents do it, but not all enjoy it. If the place you live were less car-centric, you could give each of the older kids a bus pass and let them go places on their own, or your kids could walk and bike places on routes which are not shared with cars.
  - true_religion 3y ago
    That’s true but it seems the suburban ideal is to protect children by not allowing them to leave the community without their parents. It’s basically an artificial village.
    - eesmith 3y ago
      That's an accidental side-effect due to being car-centric.
  - agensaequivocum 3y ago
    I grew up in a suburb. I biked around just fine. We have a bus stop just down the street from where I live now. However, I would let my kids carry a gun before I would let them on a bus.
    - eesmith 3y ago

rdedev 3y ago

You can have both. At my home in India I can just walk and get all essentials I need (food medicine etc.) If I need to buy a lot of things I take a car and go to the nearest supermarket. There is an environmental cost to using only cars to get your essential things. We need to start considering them now

rickydroll 3y ago
Thank you, I was beginning to think I was the only person with the understanding that transportation is multimodal at the person level. One blind spot that I'm aware of is where you are, need, and point of service don't always align. For example, my medications cost a lot more if I go to the Walgreens a quarter mile away versus the CVS a mile and a half away. My partner has a special needs child and she needs to be able to get the child to a variety of services during the day a few times a month. Driving makes it possible. Public transit would make her unemployable.

0xdde 3y ago

> It's a lot cheaper to let people drive in to a central bulk store like this and buy what they want in large quantities than to have a network of tiny, walkable stores and try to predict demand and optimally distribute goods to them with delivery vans. Cheaper for who? Car ownership can be a huge financial burden compared to transit.

AlotOfReading 3y ago

Stores like Costco and Ikea exist in countries with good public transit. They're just one among many types of store. Transit advocacy isn't about eliminating everything except public transit. It can just be about improving transit so that the infrastructure for vehicles isn't overwhelmed with all the people who don't need to use cars and don't have other options.

ansmithz42 3y ago
Very True! It is about choice of transit. The US has NO Choice of Transit. It is either Car or nothing. How very free that is to be limited to 1 choice!
FredPret 3y ago
It sure does eliminate other forms of transport. You ever see the bill for a bit of rail, or a subway, or a bus line? These things are horrendously expensive to build, maintain, and run. The money comes from taxes. Now that tax money might be better spent on other things poor and homeless people need, or might be better off circulating in the economy and not taxed at all. But freezing all that value in the form of public transit isn't going to yield the best payoff for society.
- 303uru 3y ago
  Freezing it in the hands of Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc... is? You do realize people build all the infrastructure, right? That entire industries are formed? It's quite literally the definition of mobilizing money into the economy.
- mlsu 3y ago
  Have you seen the bill for a freeway interchange? Or the bill for lung cancer due to living next to a busy road? Or the bill for hearing loss due to noise pollution? Or the bill for having a kid getting hit and killed by a 3 ton pickup truck? Or the bill for birds choking on oil after a spill? ... I can go on.

CalRobert 3y ago

Your freedom to drive generally reduces other people's freedom to walk, bike, and take transit. Among other things it's often illegal to build homes where people want to live so that you can park your car there.

FredPret 3y ago
Except those other people also want cars. So we all live in a sprawling, low-cost-of-living city and we are happy. Of course, some people call this slice of heaven a "nightmarish hellscape of stroads" [0] but thank goodness those people can move somewhere else and leave our cars alone. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39081965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39081965

dublinben 3y ago

Car-centric design reduces freedom, because it requires an expensive car in order to go anywhere. Nothing says freedom like a $900/month car payment in order to get to work and buy groceries![0] Bulk stores like Costco are only necessary because people live in such sprawling communities. In places where you live a short walk from a grocery store, you can practice just-in-time logistics, and buy whatever you need as soon as you need it. It's a lot cheaper, both in economic and environmental terms, to build cities where people don't need to drive for their daily needs. [0] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-ownership-crosses-10k-mark/ https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...

NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
>requires an expensive car in order to go anywhere. ... the prevalence of 2000s Nissan Altimas on the road suggests that a cheap car works pretty well for many people.
- dublinben 3y ago
  There's no such thing as a "cheap" car when you compare it to the cost of walking or cycling. You could buy a new pair of shoes and a bike every month for the cost of just insuring and fueling an average car. Car-centric design is a tax on all of us. It's just less burdensome for some than it is for others.
  - pandaman 3y ago
    If your time is worth $0 then walking is cheaper, even at the federal minimum wage it's $1.80-2.40 per mile.
TexanFeller 3y ago
Rather hyperbolic. No one needs to pay $1000/mo for a basic reliable car, not even including gas and insurance.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> higher personal freedom - you can go anywhere, anytime. With transit / walking, you can go some places, some of the time. This is huge and opens up a lot of possibilities for work, vacations, socializing, healthcare. It seems like people have gotten stuck in this false dichotomy where the only two possibilities are detached single-family homes on an acre of land or 50-story high rises with hundreds of housing units. An acre of land is 43560 sq ft. That's enough for a 10,000 sq ft per-story multi-story building and dozens of ground-level parking spaces. You can fill a neighborhood with those, put shops on the ground floor and housing above it, and have a walkable neighborhood where every household has one car instead of two. > bulk stores like Costco is only possible because people have cars. You will have to pry my Costco membership card from my cold, dead hands. You could pretty easily replace this with ecommerce for bulk goods. It's actually kind of weird that this isn't more popular because bulk purchases should reduce shipping overhead. Why isn't there a Costco truck that drops off a month's supply of groceries at your front door once a month?

agensaequivocum 3y ago
No everyone should own the land they live on. You don't have much freedom when your property ends at the front door.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  If you divide the amount of land in Brooklyn by the population, the average person gets ~1049 sq ft of land, not accounting for roads or parking or sidewalks or anything like that. How much of yours would you like to allocate to grass?
  - rickydroll 3y ago
    none.. I have a 2500sqft house on a 10k sqft lot. I am eradicating the grass, rewilding as much as possible, increasing veggie garden with drip/soaker hose irrigation, expanding strawberry/blueberry patch. it is a multi-year project but it is one of those things that make life worth living.

kredd 3y ago

I really don’t understand this post. You can obviously have both? Like it’s very super-duper obvious how you can just live in a city and don’t use your car at all, but drive out to get outside of the city. I live in Vancouver, I go to Costco which is downtown (15 min walk or 7 min metro ride), drive up to skiing or hiking mountains multiple times a month (weather and etc. depended). I don’t even want to point at even better cities in other countries (most of Japan, Switzerland, parts of France and many more) as that’s cheating. But you really can have your cake and eat it too, it’s very much been done multiple times around the world.

eesmith 3y ago

There are also advantages to a less car-centric society. - "In 2022 the average vehicle costs $11,450 per year to own and operate. The breakdown of the figure comes to $4,496 for purchasing the vehicle, $3,120 in gasoline and motor oil expenses, and $3,834 in other vehicle-related costs." - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/08/cost-car-ownership.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/08/cost-car-ownersh... . If you are in a two-car family, and a less car-centric environment means you only need one car for those Costco runs and wind surfing afternoons, then you can save thousands of dollars. - You can go out with friends to a bar and drink, and not worry about having a designated driver. - There's much less need for “Restricted” or “Hardship” License for repeat DUI offenders. - Kids have higher personal freedom as they don't depend on a parent to drive - People who aren't able to drive (due to any of many reasons) have higher personal freedom - During your commute you can read or do other things which occupy your attention. - You don't have to worry about finding parking or paying for parking. - Your taxes go down as you don't need to subsidize so much driving infrastructure Having mass transit access also opens up possibilities for work you can't as easily get with a car. That's why places already have Park&Ride - parking at the job location is too expensive with only car access. In a less car-centric society there should be little difference between the health car you get with a car and without. Plus, if your health condition means you can't drive, you'll likely have better healthcare access.

303uru 3y ago

>higher personal freedom Strong disagree. Having spent good amounts of time in parts of the world where you can operate for months without getting in a car, it felt far more free. The barrier to entry in the US being owning a car, paying insurance and paying for a place to store it is the opposite of freedom.