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I have a very loose mental framework for thinking about cars that I think is helpful: If you look at space taken up length-wise in a lane the length of the ave

I have a very loose mental framework for thinking about cars that I think is helpful: If you look at space taken up length-wise in a lane the length of the average car in the US is 14.7 ft. For a person standing on a sidewalk the average person's foot size is ~10 inches. Let's hand wave the math and say cars are 10x longer. Very loosely our built environment scales 10x to match that new scale. Roads need to be 10x bigger, parking lots take up even more space. The ultimate result is not that there are far more unique destinations available to the average person, but that they are further away, bigger, and costs are far higher. Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded. It's a clear example of the tragedy of the commons.

ajuc 2y ago
It's even worse if you don't limit the velocity to sth like 30km/h - because then you need more space for turning and acceleration/breaking; and also noise increases with speed - which tends to make people put their houses further away from the streets - which makes everything even less dense, which requires people to speed up and use cars more. So in practice it's worse than 10x.
alexawarrior3 2y ago
"Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded." Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was. The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.
- kettlecorn 2y ago
  The problem with your argument is why would people buy cars if they were so terrible? While the infrastructure was obviously worse than today clearly they afforded tremendous advantages which motivated their adoption! In the early days that advantage was the ability to rapidly traverse relatively developed areas with more convenience. Over time infrastructure and adoption chased each other, but now the most populated parts of the US are developed to the point that there's little way to ease congestion with more road infrastructure. The only way to grow is to sprawl into new cities. For a long time in population centers the pattern was new car infra. -> more driving convenience -> more cars -> repeat. In cities that's running into bottlenecks. Today people primarily buy cars out of necessity, but in areas where most people live congestion and a more sprawling environment has diminished much of the time saving advantage.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    It was terrible. People bought cars anyway because it was still better than walking. In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day. The roads were lousy in 1919. But even then, it was better than a mule train.
    - kettlecorn 2y ago
      People bought into cars early because they could get around quickly to more destinations, not because walking was uniquely awful. In Philadelphia's paper in the early 1900s there was a daily column about "pleasure drive" routes and constant advertisements appealing to new drivers with destinations near the city. That advantage of being able to "get out of the city" is still there, but it's further and further away. For day to day life the experience of walking / transit / biking in a pre-car US city or a modern US city is somewhat comparable in terms of time and enjoyment. However US cities and suburbs, due to car-centric scale, allow more people to live on larger plots of land.
      - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
I don't think your logic works. Cars are 10x longer, but (for example) my house is not 10x longer in all 3 dimensions. The streets in downtown Salt Lake City were famously designed to be able to turn a horse-drawn wagon around. That width turned out to be pretty good for cars when they came - no additional scaling needed.
- kettlecorn 2y ago
  Salt Lake City has a huge volume of parking lots, highways, and many roads. While individual streets may not have scaled up there were other parts of the built environment that did to accommodate cars.
pandaman 2y ago
Before the very first car has been made people in the West and Asia had been using horse-drawn carriages for centuries and built cities to accommodate those. If your logic is sound then adoption of cars has shrunk the cities as a horse-drawn carriage had been longer than a motor-driven car.
- kettlecorn 2y ago
  Horse-drawn carriages were typically used for moving goods or for shared transit, not for most individuals in single horse drawn carriages going to all sorts of day-to-day trips. The point is that the default mode of transportation requires vastly more space than it used to.
  - pandaman 2y ago
    How does it matter how they were used? It's not like they shrunk when used for "noble" causes from your PoV and required narrower roads (and from my reading of classics, horse-drawn carriages were used by city dwellers for individual transportation just like cars nowadays).
    - kettlecorn 2y ago
      It matters because there are far fewer delivery of goods than people getting around for day to day trips. If you look at the average amount of space taken up by a person traveling around if they walk, or take transit, for most trips then they'll on average take significantly less space than using a car.
      - pandaman 2y ago
        And a car takes significantly less space than a carriage with a horse so I don't see what are you trying to say here. You compared length of a car to the length of a foot and made far reaching conclusions but when offered to compare a horse carriage with a car and make the same conclusions you seem to compare cars and feet again.
throwaway22032 2y ago
This isn't really true outside of some very tarmaccy American cities. I live in London, UK. I can use my car to get to places, it just costs more, through congestion charges, parking, and time. The car hugely, hugely increases my exploration radius vs. walking and public transport. There is also a value in things being bigger. I remember going to a random grungy arcade bar in LA that had fifty pinball machines. We don't have the space for that, at least, not unless it's an Experience(tm) with a corporate backer .
- kettlecorn 2y ago
  Those very "tarmaccy" US cities are what you get when you "stretch" cities to accommodate the scale of cars. Other US cities are gradually moving towards that design by adding incrementally more parking and highways, but it's a slow process. I have no opposition to cars, but designing cities where nearly all trips require a car is an extreme that most people in the US live in. If you own a car you use here and there that's absolutely fine, but if there's nowhere for someone to live where they can comfortably get by without a car that's a bad place to be. And as I argued in my initial point when everyone needs to drive the congestion and distance between things substantially reduces the advantage of driving in the first place.

ajuc 2y ago

It's even worse if you don't limit the velocity to sth like 30km/h - because then you need more space for turning and acceleration/breaking; and also noise increases with speed - which tends to make people put their houses further away from the streets - which makes everything even less dense, which requires people to speed up and use cars more. So in practice it's worse than 10x.

alexawarrior3 2y ago

"Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded." Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was. The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.

kettlecorn 2y ago
The problem with your argument is why would people buy cars if they were so terrible? While the infrastructure was obviously worse than today clearly they afforded tremendous advantages which motivated their adoption! In the early days that advantage was the ability to rapidly traverse relatively developed areas with more convenience. Over time infrastructure and adoption chased each other, but now the most populated parts of the US are developed to the point that there's little way to ease congestion with more road infrastructure. The only way to grow is to sprawl into new cities. For a long time in population centers the pattern was new car infra. -> more driving convenience -> more cars -> repeat. In cities that's running into bottlenecks. Today people primarily buy cars out of necessity, but in areas where most people live congestion and a more sprawling environment has diminished much of the time saving advantage.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  It was terrible. People bought cars anyway because it was still better than walking. In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day. The roads were lousy in 1919. But even then, it was better than a mule train.
  - kettlecorn 2y ago
    People bought into cars early because they could get around quickly to more destinations, not because walking was uniquely awful. In Philadelphia's paper in the early 1900s there was a daily column about "pleasure drive" routes and constant advertisements appealing to new drivers with destinations near the city. That advantage of being able to "get out of the city" is still there, but it's further and further away. For day to day life the experience of walking / transit / biking in a pre-car US city or a modern US city is somewhat comparable in terms of time and enjoyment. However US cities and suburbs, due to car-centric scale, allow more people to live on larger plots of land.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

I don't think your logic works. Cars are 10x longer, but (for example) my house is not 10x longer in all 3 dimensions. The streets in downtown Salt Lake City were famously designed to be able to turn a horse-drawn wagon around. That width turned out to be pretty good for cars when they came - no additional scaling needed.

kettlecorn 2y ago
Salt Lake City has a huge volume of parking lots, highways, and many roads. While individual streets may not have scaled up there were other parts of the built environment that did to accommodate cars.

pandaman 2y ago

Before the very first car has been made people in the West and Asia had been using horse-drawn carriages for centuries and built cities to accommodate those. If your logic is sound then adoption of cars has shrunk the cities as a horse-drawn carriage had been longer than a motor-driven car.

kettlecorn 2y ago
Horse-drawn carriages were typically used for moving goods or for shared transit, not for most individuals in single horse drawn carriages going to all sorts of day-to-day trips. The point is that the default mode of transportation requires vastly more space than it used to.
- pandaman 2y ago
  How does it matter how they were used? It's not like they shrunk when used for "noble" causes from your PoV and required narrower roads (and from my reading of classics, horse-drawn carriages were used by city dwellers for individual transportation just like cars nowadays).
  - kettlecorn 2y ago
    It matters because there are far fewer delivery of goods than people getting around for day to day trips. If you look at the average amount of space taken up by a person traveling around if they walk, or take transit, for most trips then they'll on average take significantly less space than using a car.
    - pandaman 2y ago
      And a car takes significantly less space than a carriage with a horse so I don't see what are you trying to say here. You compared length of a car to the length of a foot and made far reaching conclusions but when offered to compare a horse carriage with a car and make the same conclusions you seem to compare cars and feet again.

throwaway22032 2y ago

This isn't really true outside of some very tarmaccy American cities. I live in London, UK. I can use my car to get to places, it just costs more, through congestion charges, parking, and time. The car hugely, hugely increases my exploration radius vs. walking and public transport. There is also a value in things being bigger. I remember going to a random grungy arcade bar in LA that had fifty pinball machines. We don't have the space for that, at least, not unless it's an Experience(tm) with a corporate backer .

kettlecorn 2y ago
Those very "tarmaccy" US cities are what you get when you "stretch" cities to accommodate the scale of cars. Other US cities are gradually moving towards that design by adding incrementally more parking and highways, but it's a slow process. I have no opposition to cars, but designing cities where nearly all trips require a car is an extreme that most people in the US live in. If you own a car you use here and there that's absolutely fine, but if there's nowhere for someone to live where they can comfortably get by without a car that's a bad place to be. And as I argued in my initial point when everyone needs to drive the congestion and distance between things substantially reduces the advantage of driving in the first place.