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It’s a shame this country is so obsessed with cars. There’s so much land yet we devote it to destroying lush ecosystems (that help reduce effects of Mother Natu

• pc86 2y ago
  I'm not sure what you think the alternative is. The US is huge compared to any similarly developed country. Is the answer huge cities right next to thousands of square miles of untouched nature? That hasn't happened in any society on the planet. It sounds like you just want everyone to live in a city and take public transit everywhere but cities are awful for your mental health[0] and most people in the US do not want to live in a major urban area. You can't have a huge geography and rural or suburban life without private vehicles. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7892359/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7892359/
  • yossi_peti 2y ago
    If people want to live in rural areas, that's fine by me. They don't particularly contribute to the problems with car-centric infrastructure in the US. The main complaints are how most cities in the US are designed in ways that are hostile to anybody who doesn't have a car, such as: - making it difficult to get around safely by bike - zoning restrictions that force development to be clumped in certain areas - underdeveloped public transport with infrequent stops and limited range - parking space requirements that limit development - food deserts where people have to drive long distances to get groceries There are many places in the world that have solved these problems. I don't get why it's so inconceivable to solve them in the US.
    • bamboozled 2y ago
      Japan is awesome like this, they have amazing highways and rail. Tokyo in my option is a bit too car friendly but it’s still very walkable and rideable.
      • kulahan 2y ago
        Japan is an extremely small island. I don’t think a lot of their experience would apply to us. China may be a better example.
        • nercury 2y ago
          Extremely small island that stretches from New York to Atlanta..
        • ludsan 2y ago
          Honshu is the 7th largest island in the world. It's area is a little more than 1/3 of texas.
          • kulahan 2y ago
            The fact that it barely measures up to our second largest state would reinforce my point.
        • bamboozled 2y ago
          LA to San Fran could be doing a lot better is what you’re saying ?
      • m1n1 2y ago
        If that system existed in America, what would it take to keep it as clean and as safe? (Edit: I visited Japan and loved the train system)
    • Ostrogoth 2y ago
      As someone who recently bought a house (and used to live in an apartment), those were some of the reasons why I opted out of apartment life. I would prefer to live in a denser urban area if other amenities and quality of life benefits came with it, but they don’t in my city. Even if you live close to the city core, there are either extremely limited or entirely nonexistent options for groceries, fitness and recreation, coffee shops, affordable eateries, non-alcohol entertainment and art, etc in most neighborhoods. You would still have to drive most of the time anyway. Most of the denser areas closer to downtown can also be quite dangerous for pedestrians after dark. The few places that have denser housing with those amenities within (safe) walking access are exorbitantly more expensive. Meanwhile apartment and townhome developments are now springing up everywhere in my area of town, but without any amenities to go with them, leading to even more vehicle congestion on the local streets as people try to escape the neighborhood and reach the highways.
  • lelandbatey 2y ago
    The US being huge has no bearing on the requirement that I have to own a car to get to work every day, or to go to the grocery store, or to take kids to school. I live in a more suburban area than I used to and having to pilot a huge deadly vehicle everywhere is vastly more stressful than just walking to handle my groceries. Note that the study you link to there is from 1994 and only controlled for the following criteria: sex, age, social class, marital status, unemployment, chronic illness and region of residence. Those aren't the things that put folks on edge about cities in 1994 or in the preceding years. 30 years on from 1994 and now in a different world, many of us are wondering why we're locked out of some of the benefits of a bit more density. No ones saying we abandon all beyond our city walls to nature, instead they'll be farmland or productive rural activities like we already use them for. But we don't need every city of 500k people to mean that there's a 15 mile radius circle of strip malls in every direction.
    • anonym29 2y ago
      >having to pilot a huge deadly vehicle everywhere is vastly more stressful than just walking to handle my groceries. That's a nice luxury to have. I take it you're fortunate enough to live in a very temperate area with palatable weather year-round, rather than somewhere that gets 110° F in the summer, or ice storms in the winter? Not everyone can afford to live on the beautiful, comfortable, and exorbitantly expensive cities along the west coast.
      • felipellrocha 2y ago
        Have people not lived in those places in the past?
        • anonym29 2y ago
          They have, but if you mean before the introduction of the automobile, it was in an era where nobody had to commute to get groceries because a majority of the population were subsistence farmers.
          • 2y ago
  • rbetts 2y ago
    The US is large - but roughly 1 in 10 residents live around LA or NYC. As much as it is large, it is also non-uniform.
  • xyst 2y ago
    Love how you cite a study performed in the _UK_ in _1994_ as irrefutable evidence that cities are "awful" for your mental health. Yet more recent studies in the US indicate exactly the opposite. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34315817/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34315817/ (2021)
  • dopidopHN 2y ago
    It’s not about rural places. It’s about how cities are centered around car. Cities in the us are basically highway with warehouse around it. It’s hard to navigate without a car, and public transportation are a afterthought.
  • felipellrocha 2y ago
    I love how you claim that there doesn’t exist, while at the same time mentioning a (very old) study that would imply an alternative exists so that such study can take place. If you go to anywhere in Europe you will find plenty of places that prove the opposite.
  • p_j_w 2y ago
    >I'm not sure what you think the alternative is. We could start by making people who choose rural or suburban life pay the costs of such a life rather than foisting them on everyone else. Roads should either be toll roads or entirely paid for by gas taxes and vehicle registration costs. Gas taxes should have to include the cost of removing the pollutants from the environment.
    • gustavus 2y ago
      Setting aside the shocking myopia of this comment (it turns out most of your food that magically appears in grocery stores comes from those useless rural yokels that use these roads) A major driver of the interstate highway project was military in consideration because of the importance of logistics in being able to move troops around the country.
      • nayuki 2y ago
        > your food that magically appears in grocery stores comes from those useless rural yokels that use these roads That's fine. Roll those costs into the price of food. That way, the amount of road tax you pay is proportional to how much goods and services you consume. Meanwhile, the status quo is that everyone pays into the road system regardless of how much or little they use it - even if they don't own a car. Roads have to get paid for no matter what. The only choice we have as a society is between taxing everyone versus taxing only the users.
        • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
          > Roads have to get paid for no matter what. The only choice we have as a society is between taxing everyone versus taxing only the users. Exactly right, but proving the opposite of what you request. Once roads are built they're a sunk cost. Roads have to be resurfaced as a result weather damage regardless of how many people drive on them. Road capacity that exists and isn't used is lost. The incremental cost of an additional car driving down a road, the actual wear caused by the act, is trivial. Far less than the pro rata share of building or maintaining the road, or than existing gas tax, or the cost of even the collections infrastructure for road tolls. But the use has value to the driver and plausibly to others in society (e.g. their customers/employers/friends), so we don't want to discourage it unless its value is less than the incremental cost, since the cost of building the road and most of the maintenance is a sunk cost. Which leads to the conclusion that the sunk cost of the road should be shared by everybody, since everybody benefits from having products delivered and emergency services even if they don't have a car.
• jcfrei 2y ago
  The US Highway building industry is in many ways a form of a state run social system. First of all the road construction and maintenance uses a huge amount of tax dollars and redistributes it to lower class construction site and road maintenance workers and some engineering bureaus. Secondly it gives everybody equal (highway) transportation access by continuously expanding capacity on existing roads and building new highways to growing towns on the countryside. Poorer people need to buy or rent housing far away on the countryside and highways therefore democratizes their access to the urban centers with lots of jobs. In the specific case of Texas there's also a toll road system, however this only covers a fraction of the highways in the state and the tolls themselves don't account for all the incurred costs.
  • consp 2y ago
    Poor people should not have to buy a car as it is a massive drain on finances to keep it running. There are better solutions
    • jcfrei 2y ago
      Theoretically yes but a lot would need to change for that to happen in the US. In reality having a car and traveling lots of miles every day is the cheapest variant for most people.
      • xyst 2y ago
        > In reality having a car and traveling lots of miles every day is the cheapest variant for most people. Realistically, it's the _only_ way to get around the US.
        • delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
          That's because the US is built that way. In turn because every city that's not New York has just expanded horizontally with hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of detached house-driveway-backyard-frontyard suburbia. In most of the Old World, cities have existed for centuries—if not millennia—and were built for the human foot, not the car tyre. Hence most European and Asian city centres are dense, mostly walkable, and fairly small. From the 1800s onward as transport speeds have increased they've built dense mid-/high-rises in the suburban bits, and developed cheap, efficient, and highly-utilised bus and heavy rail public transport, both within and between cities. Many such cities additionally have 'green belts' to prevent urban sprawl. Actually I am misrepresenting the situation in the USA. The US expanded with the railways, and many American cities were built along and at the end of railways. But then in the 1950s, Americans collectively decided that public transport was useless and they bulldozed through their city centres, ripped up the trams and railways, and splatted veritable plates of highway spaghetti right through the middle of their cities (often through slums and ghettos mainly housing poorer people of African descent).
• bamboozled 2y ago
  [flagged]
• annexrichmond 2y ago
  I see this "induced demand" critique a lot, and I am curious - if it's wrong, how is it different than adding housing to a region to make it cheaper?
  • jaccarmac 2y ago
    You're right that it's not entirely different. But I'll start with the simple version of the critique. Individual commuters make their decision about whether to make a trip based in part on the time that trip will take (a function of road congestion). Thus, adding road capacity will temporarily lower the cost of a trip, allowing more people to make it until congestion reaches the pre-expansion level. Housing does not have this problem because consumers make decisions about where to live much more infrequently. As you can tell, "induced demand" is a bad if rather catchy name. To be fair to urban planners, the throughput of an expanded road does increase. However, the experience of using it stays the same or gets worse, and the cost (both $ and space) is disproportionate. Is the pro-transit argument, which I subscribe to. Of course, the real world includes large real estate firms which are making frequent decisions on housing stock. So I agree that the build-more-housing-and-everything-will-improve crowd is wrong. But I don't think YIMBY/transit and anti-transit are the only choices. The former is a common archetype these days.
  • nayuki 2y ago
    Oh The Urbanity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7FB_xI-U6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7FB_xI-U6w , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wlld3Z9wRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wlld3Z9wRc
• 34-9t6i 2y ago
  Houston is currently planning its fifth loop. They already have four, and they need a fifth, which mean converting many more square miles of marshland into pavement. Meanwhile there are hundreds of square miles of abandoned real estate in the middle of the city. It's cheaper to just buy and build new than the tear down the old building first. And they can't figure out why each hurricane season is more destructive than the last .... huh. I grew up in Houston and I hated it. I refuse to even visit family there now.
  • arcticfox 2y ago
    I recently moved near the 4th loop and - it’s hard for me to imagine anyone crying for the land beyond it. There’s just nothing there. It’s like playing SimCity on an infinite flat map. I’d much rather they put another 2-5 million people here over the next few decades than try to sprawl out from Seattle or Boston or some of the other places I’ve lived.
  • telotortium 2y ago
    Houston only has three loops: I-610 and Beltway 8, with State Highway 99 under construction. The latter 2 are both toll roads. (I guess the highways around downtown form a loop, but as a former resident of the city, I never heard anyone call that a loop - I-610 was always the inner loop.) If you’re going to shit on Houston, at least get the facts right. Also, what’s wrong with beltways? The main flaw in the interstate highway system, from an urbanist perspective, has always been the highways cutting through the historic urban core, which tend to attract traffic just passing through. Houston has those too, but not really any worse than most American cities. Beltways are really great at diverting such traffic away from the urban core. Unfortunately, as cities expand, beltways tend to become part of the urban core, so farther out beltways need to be built to retain their advantages.
• refurb 2y ago
  Most of the US is undeveloped in terms of highways and suburbs. Whats the point of having all that room if you’re going to trap yourself in a small apartment tower?
  • rangestransform 2y ago
    There’s a critical mass of population density needed to support a vast diversity of specialty businesses. NYC, for example, has the second- or third-best examples of basically every country’s cuisine.
• specialist 2y ago
  Robert Caro's book The Power Broker details how Robert Moses hacked govt post WWII, so that urban areas unwittingly financed sprawl. So much so that when NYC nearly went bankrupt, the victim was blamed. So thoroughly was the con job that just now some groups have started to question it. Orgs like Sightline, Stronger Towns, micromobility, renewed interest in mass transit, and so forth.
• numpad0 2y ago
  I think the US kind of gets a pass for that. You guys have so much land to cover. No one's going to be surprised that US including Alaska and Nevada and all those deserts is technically 600x more sparsely populated than Singapore or 17x more than Germany, but I bet many do if they learn it has 10x more land per population than UAE, 4.5x over Ukraine, 4x over global average, and so on. US forces had hard time moving about in Iraq due to its lower land use and actual US is 7.7x sparse-er. There's no way American car culture could just stop being car dependent. Abundant fast cars is potentially the only way it can work. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
• variant 2y ago
  We prefer cars. It's fine.