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And, unlike the grandparent-comment’s assertions, that channel references his family and kids in most videos (in that he and his partner moved to Amsterdam so h

And, unlike the grandparent-comment’s assertions, that channel references his family and kids in most videos (in that he and his partner moved to Amsterdam so his children could have the freedom to navigate safely without having to be driven around).

rglullis 1y ago
My mother lives in suburban Massachusetts. She always said that she never imagined how it was possible for me to live with two small kids without a car in Berlin. She came to visit for one month. After the first week she was already comfortably going around with the Ubahn to pick up the kids at school. I have 4 supermarkets less than 150m away from me, so we would walk to do groceries every other day. I spend ~80€/month with taxi rides (for the occasional trip to meet someone in a less convenient place), which is less than what she pays in car insurance alone, not even counting the cost of gas. At the end of the trip, she got it. Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury.
- skybrian 1y ago
  That’s great for where you live, but why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? They don’t have four supermarkets in less than 150 meters. There are places where cars actually are a necessity. Seems like empathy should work both ways?
  - ajuc 1y ago
    Because people in suburbs are subsidized at the cost of and prioritized over everybody else.
    - skybrian 1y ago
      How do you know? Seems like cities have expensive infrastructure too?
      - rglullis 1y ago
        No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI The whole series of videos from Strong Towns are good, you should take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
        skybrian 1y ago
        I’m not going to watch YouTube videos (I’m a text guy) but the Strong Towns blog is pretty good. I don’t think they’re the last word on this, because they’re often making general observations, and financial problems are often local. For example, I know Oakland, CA has severe financial issues (looks like the school district might go bankrupt) but I wouldn’t generalize from that to all cities.
        rglullis 1y ago
        You are already grasping at straws if you refuse to see something that could quickly give you the information that challenges your preconceived notions. The video I linked to talks precisely about the study done by a consulting company showing how suburbs are net-negative to a city's budget and they do it for multiple cities across the country. > Financial problems are local. There might be differences in the particulars among cities, but they share a lot of common causes and one of them is that suburban sprawl is cheap to begin (acquiring and building on the land) but expensive to maintain.
        skybrian 1y ago
        Could you link to the study? It sounds interesting.
        rglullis 1y ago
        I don't know if there is any published study. The video is relaying the work from https://www.urbanthree.com/services/ https://www.urbanthree.com/services/
  - rglullis 1y ago
    > why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? My hostility is towards people who claim to prefer to live in the suburbs, but do not want to pay for the privilege. Show me people that say "Yeah, I won't mind having higher property taxes, extra fees to keep my many cars in the garage and have to pay full price for the extended infrastructure (sewer, roads, water, electricity lines, etc) just so that I don't have to live among those poor city-dwellers" and I'll be totally fine with their choices.
    - skybrian 1y ago
      Is your lifestyle subsidized too? How do you know? I suspect that even people with strong opinions have little understanding about infrastructure costs and who is subsidizing what. I’m unwilling to take this on faith - it seems like there need to be financial deep dives.
      - rglullis 1y ago
        [flagged]
        prasadjoglekar 1y ago
        I live in the suburbs of NYC. All of NYC's drinking water is stored in our backyards. So much so that the NYPD patrols this area, 90 miles outside their geography. The math has certainly not been done. There are no cities without suburbs. For food and water.
        lupusreal 1y ago
        [flagged]
        rglullis 1y ago
        > because of style of community they want to own their home in? No, I do not care about their choices, provided they are willing to bear all costs from it. The problem is not living in the suburbs. The problem is affluent people that have their lifestyle subsidized by poorer people living close to the city center. Also, it's virtually impossible to claim that people want to live like that in the US, because most places have zoning laws that simply forbid the emergence of any other alternative. Suburbs in Germany are smaller, less dense versions of the urban center, but they are not devoid of life. They are still walkable, they still have local shops, they do not make cars a requirement for everyone, kids do not need to be driven around anywhere, etc. You can bet that if more people in the US could come to visit they would rather live like that than in the traditional cul-de-sacs/picketed fence developments from American Suburbia.
  - tastyfreeze 1y ago
    Most places in the US the zoning restrictions are part of the problem. You can't build a small grocery to serve a neighborhood when its zoned residential. Places that grew before cars, were built with walking distance separations. It wasn't possible to profit as a grocery by building miles away from the people.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    The battle for the suburbs is mostly lost, you need a car if you live there. What the discussion should instead highlight is that with just moderate increases in population density you can escape the need for a car and it ends up being better for everyone. That mostly only applies to new development. Heck, even if you just made cars second class in new suburbs you could see cheaper housing with equivalent land. Put in a shared parking garage for a suburb instead of putting a garage on everyone's home and all the sudden the amount of sqft needed just to get cars in and out gets massively reduced meaning more room for more homes and an easier argument to make for bus service.
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    Where do you see a lack of empathy?
  - mrgoldenbrown 1y ago
    The issue is that we don't tax externalities properly in the US. We heavily subsidize car usage and then make people pay to use the subway. The incentives encourage behavior that is bad on a global scale even if it makes sense for each individual.
    - skybrian 1y ago
      This seems like an odd example. Aren’t many forms of public transportation partially funded and subsidized via taxes? It doesn’t make them bad, but they aren’t self-sufficient either.
    - throwaway2037 1y ago
      I'm not here to defend the incredible subsidies for car-based travel, but public transit globally also gets lots of subsidies. Outside of a few of the highest density cities in the world (Seoul, Hongkong, Osaka, Tokyo), almost no public transit has more than 100% "fare box recovery" (no public subsidies required). Even in those cases, normally the national government pays for (or subsidizes) the initial build.
    - bpt3 1y ago
      In my area (Washington DC), fares pay about 10% of the budget for the subway each year. Why should those subsidies be expanded, yet any subsidies for cars (which certainly exist, but drivers pay for more than 10% of their vehicle costs) should be eliminated?
      - bombcar 1y ago
        The “cars get subsidized” arguments almost always fail to take into account that the entire capital and maintenance cost of the vehicle is borne by the driver. You have to do some pretty creative accounting to get it as subsidized as public transit (which isn’t to say PT shouldn’t be subsidized, mind you).
- OptionOfT 1y ago
  Your choices make the car not a necessity. I made different choices, and I am being taxed for those. But what I don't get is the hostility towards people who make this choice? I choose to not live in a place with supermarkets within 150m. When I look outside I see the edge of my property and then I see untouched nature. I pay for that, in land cost, and in fuel cost because I live (by choice) further away from everybody.
  - tidbits 1y ago
    You don't pay for the externalities of using a car. Nobody does. That's why people are hostile towards cars.
    - CalRobert 1y ago
      Dead people and their friends and family certainly do.
  - rglullis 1y ago
    > I made different choices, and I am being taxed for those. No, you aren't. - Suburbanites are being subsidized by city-dwellers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI&t=19s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI&t=19s - The gas for your car is heavily subsidized. - You don't pay for the increased costs in healthcare caused by air pollution or the amount of concrete needed to keep all those roads. - Car owners are not taxed extra for the economic impact in social security due to the tens of thousands of people that die every year. I could go on. There are countless other environmental and economic externalities that suburbanites are not being accounted for and they only get away with it because that's in the interests of the privileged elite.
    - hulitu 1y ago
      > The gas for your car is heavily subsidized Maybe in US. In Europe this is not the case. On the contrary gas is heavily taxed.
      - 1y ago
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  > Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury It is unfortunately a necessity in many parts of America where public transportation is lacking or nonexistent. And making it a "luxury" just further stratifies our society into different, non-interacting economic classes. When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others. As someone who grew up in abject poverty in a very rural area and was homeless and on completely on my own by 16, I have already seen how this plays out. The trajectory of my life was majorly affected by a lack of a car or adequate public transportation. I have since had to make choices about where I live in order to minimize car use in order to align with my own philosophy around transportation, but it comes at great cost in America when such walkable cities are so desirable that cost of living shoots through the roof due to demand. And conversely, poorer areas often lack walkability or sufficient and accessible public transportation. Berlin does not have the same problems as America, a sprawling empire in decline.
  - rglullis 1y ago
    > When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others. I'll never forget one of my last lectures from my high-school History class teacher. She said "People talk about societies in terms of two classes: the kings and the plebs, the haves and have-nots, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. I hope you managed to learn that throughout all of history, what we have is actually three different forces - priests or monks in Ancient times, or the merchants during the Renaissance, land owners in the US - and that it's this third class that is crucial in determining the course of History. Every time they aligned with the elites there was no change in the status quo, and every time a revolution happened was because they in the middle shifted their support to the other side." I'm saying this for one simple reason: the way to fix this problem is not by pretending that car ownership isn't a luxury, but by de-stigmatizing public transport. I can bet you that if political forces shifted and started putting pressure against car-ownership, you would quickly see a swing from the middle class in support for better public transit, mixed-use zoning, YIMBY-ism, etc. "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation"
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  I don't live in a place that has public transit or "walkability". It will never be able to afford that, the tax base isn't sufficient. When the fuck-cars people start ranting, what they mean is that they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic. I do not look forward to becoming the termite people that they wish to become. The luxury is living in a place where this is a possible lifestyle, and then thinking every one of 300 million people can live in such a place or make the place they live into such.
  - rglullis 1y ago
    > they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic. No, we want you simply to pay the full sticker price for all the things you are consuming and exploiting. It's simple as that. Drop the pretense that you are actually carrying your own weight and that your lifestyle is sustainable. If you do just that and start paying for the privileges you have, we'll leave you in peace.
    - everdrive 1y ago
      This is just tribalism. There are plenty of groups which could be considered a negative tax burden, but you're not focused on them.
      - rglullis 1y ago
        > There are plenty of groups which could be considered a negative tax burden Most if not all of these groups are minorities or have a clear need for the tax relief. This is not the case for wealthy suburbanites.
        _cxy8 1y ago
        1. I don’t know how familiar you are with Suburban America, but it’s far from simply a place for affluent people. You do know people escape places like NYC because of the high cost of living right? What do you think an apartment in your average safe neighborhood in NYC vs. the average safe Jersey Suburb costs? And what kind of amenities do you think you get for that price? Now stretch that comparison to other suburbs of smaller cities and it’s a stark difference. Your description of the affluent suburbanite vs. the poor city dweller is reductive and untrue. Living in desirable American cities is very expensive. In actuality many people leave cities they love, because to have a similar lifestyle as they would in the cheaper suburbs would require them to be inordinately well off. 2. You can complain all you want but we live in a democracy. Your idea of “fairness” and “paying your share” would have to be voted on. And the populous would have to agree with your view of the world. Good luck with that. 3. Your view of a disjointed America where people are city folk or suburbanites is not how the country operates. People move about freely. You may live in the city and vacation “upstate” for a break. Or live in a suburb and commute into a city for work, paying city taxes, etc. It isn’t as disjointed as you presume.
- rwyinuse 1y ago
  Whether having a car is necessary or not depends on where you live. Here in Northern Europe we literally can't reach my or my partner's parents with public transport, because they happen to live in the countryside. For us having a car is not a luxury, it's a necessity if our kids ever want to see their grandparents. So yeah, making car ownership generally expensive is a bad idea, and would only make Europe's already expensive housing market worse. There are more fair and effective ways to make city centres car-free, and suburb-dwellers to pay their fair share for infrastructure.
  - rglullis 1y ago
    > For us having a car is not a luxury, it's a necessity if our kids ever want to see their grandparents. This is absolutely no reason to justify owning a car. People can still rent a car, people can still do car pools, people can still can have intercity buses.
    - rwyinuse 1y ago
      Intercity buses would be nice, and perhaps a car pool among few friends could work. Renting a car however remains very impractical for any longer trip. Still, I'm not sure what is so bad about owning a car in a small or medium-sized city like mine. Average age of a car in my country is almost 14 years, and rising. Very few people are buying new cars, and keeping the old ones around, using infrastructure already built isn't so bad. The population is barely growing and will soon fall, further reducing need for new car-centric infrastructure. I drive less than 8k kilometers a year.
    - XorNot 1y ago
      People who say "just rent a car" don't do that. I just rented a car for a holiday. It was much more expensive then the cost of keeping my own car on the road, and took a whole lot of time to book including avoiding a number of ways any minor damage would cost thousands more.
      - CalRobert 1y ago
        I used gocar extensively when I lived in Ireland..
- bluescrn 1y ago
  Having a car is not a necessity... for city-dwellers.
  - rglullis 1y ago
    Plenty of people who live in the suburbs of Berlin and also do not have a car - because here even the suburbs are not car-centric. I can even tell you of a friend who works in Berlin and prefers to make a 50-minute commute by train over having a car.
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    My grandma lived in a farm, she used to go to the nearest city by bicycle almost every day. This is not unreasonable to think it can be done again. The thing is we have made so much room for cars they have eaten all the space and are endangering everyone. But this can change.
- balder1991 1y ago
  If the zoning laws in a place aren’t the same as the US/Canada, everything will look different. Here in Brazil I also walk 3 min. to the nearest market, public transport is quite accessible everywhere. Schools can also be nearby and walking distance — though Federal Universities have a tradition of being quite far away from the city center. Now, if you live in a smaller town it’s a whole different story and I suppose it’s the same in Europe. I don’t see the need to own a car living in a capital in my State, but in smaller towns basically everybody has at least motorcycles.
- btilly 1y ago
  Whether a car is a luxury or not, really depends on where you live. European cities started on a scale designed around the limitations of human walking. Even before they built out mass transit systems, living without a car was doable. Adding mass transit is icing on the cake. If you live in such an environment, it is easy to make the case that cars are a luxury. That's because other people's daily experience is that it is a luxury. As your mother discovered when she visited you. Most American cities are built on a scale designed around human driving. Even where they built out mass transit systems, between scale and density they can't work as well as European ones. (Fun fact. Across the USA, busses are on average so underutilized that we'd save gas by making everyone drive instead.) Underinvestment in mass transit is icing on the cake. This was your mother's daily experience in suburban Massachusetts. And even though she sees how you can live without a car, it's pretty safe to bet that she doesn't think that she can live where she does without a car. Which means that, in America, saying that cars are luxuries is a poor argument. It directly contradicts everyone's personal experience. Yes, this is fixable. But fixing it literally requires tearing cities down, then rebuilding them on a scale where walking makes sense as a major mode of transportation. We can't even manage the political will to build enough housing to keep people off the streets. Any lifestyle change requiring this level of rebuilding is a nonstarter. No matter how many lectures we get from Europeans.
  - rglullis 1y ago
    > Most American cities are built on a scale designed around human driving. That's absolutely not true. It only became true in the post-war when there was a push for suburban sprawl, lobbied by GM and all the auto industry [0] > it's pretty safe to bet that she doesn't think that she can live where she does without a car. "Where there is a will, there is a way", right? The discussion is not even if she can go by without a car, but whether she would want it. > We can't even manage the political will to build enough housing to keep people off the streets. Ok, but then don't go around trying to rationalize your bad choices and poor capacity for civic organization. [1] Don't go around saying "I lived in NYC and I thought I could live without a car, but after I had kids I realized they are not so bad", and please don't go around saying "it can't be done". Amsterdam and Rotterdam were once also car-centric cities which managed to turn themselves around in less than a generation. There is no inherit limitation in the US that forbids this change to happen. There is no amount of American Exceptionalism that can prevent people from clamoring change. Maybe it won't be done in the US, because people are lazy and not willing to sacrifice their own convenience for some communal benefit, but it's super annoying to always get in these discussions when people try to hide their preferences on external circumstances. North American cities are they way they are by choice. [0]: How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo) [1]: The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ)
- tomcam 1y ago
  How does someone in Berlin practice tuba or drums? (Serious question, no shade intended.)
  - rglullis 1y ago
    In most cases the music schools have instruments, so you keep can your own at home, but I have seen plenty of teenagers carrying cellos in the ubahn.
  - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
    for those of us not blessed enough to attend university for music, there are still a lot of options to practice and rehearse outside the home. speaking as a drummer, the last time i was reasonably able to play at home was growing up as a kid in a detached single family house. as an adult, i've always rented shared spaces with other musicians (in the US and in Europe). there are a lot of facilities where you can either rent by the hour (including or excluding the instrument) or by the month (usually 100% self-furnished including some, but not all, instruments and equipment) and play as loud as you want. most of these hourly spaces will provide a drum kit minus "breakables" (cymbals, snare drum and kick drum pedal) and a basic PA system for singers/keyboards etc. the facility is responsible for maintaining these things (YMMV; some places replaces drum heads often, other places you might end up with a broken cymbal stands or worse). often they'll also come with speaker cabinets for guitar and bass amps, and the guitarist or bassist will bring their own instrument, cables, effects pedals and often a combo amplifier or amplifier head, per requirement or personal preference. sometimes you can pay an additional fee to rent an instrument like a guitar or bass but this isn't guaranteed at all spaces and quality is usually not great. i don't personally know much about how it works for brass players. not sure people are too excited to share those instruments that involve a lot of bodily fluids :) i imagine most horn players prefer to keep their own instruments. i know a lot of rehearsal facilities also provide storage for large instruments - you just retrieve your instrument when its time for rehearsal or for a gig, then return it to the storage facility. the monthly option is usually called a "lockout" in US slang and a lot of times you go in on a unit with other musicians; for example, a full band will rent a room, or multiple bands; or a group of individuals who agree to keep a schedule for reserved access to the room. i've been in spaces that have up to 7 different full bands and time is precious, and others where the monthly cost was low enough that only one or two bands used the space.
lelanthran 1y ago
> that channel references his family and kids in most videos (in that he and his partner moved to Amsterdam so his children could have the freedom to navigate safely without having to be driven around). Then they are unlikely to be unbiased - someone who uproots and moves their family due to an issue they care about is almost never going to express any regret, no matter how bad things get.
- fluoridation 1y ago
  Of course it's not unbiased. It's an opinion channel about a highly politicized topic.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    >>> It's worth watching a couple of those videos. >> Then they are unlikely to be unbiased > Of course it's not unbiased. Then why, in the words of GP, "It's worth watching"?
    - fluoridation 1y ago
      That's a question for that person. I couldn't tell you why they think so. I'd guess the implication is that someone who's interested in the urban infrastructure of the Netherlands and how it compares to North America's might find it interesting. Having said that, what a strange question. Do you only find it worthwhile to engage with unbiased content?
      - lelanthran 1y ago
        > Do you only find it worthwhile to engage with unbiased content? Of course not, but there's a huge difference between: 1. Pointing someone at (for example) a church's website when you are trying to support an argument against pro-choice, and 2. Pointing someone at the relevant wikipedia page Both are biased in some way, but one of them is so biased that it is effectively useless unless you are already on board and in agreement with the argument. > Having said that, what a strange question. It's only a strange question to the people who are already ideologically aligned in that direction.

rglullis 1y ago

My mother lives in suburban Massachusetts. She always said that she never imagined how it was possible for me to live with two small kids without a car in Berlin. She came to visit for one month. After the first week she was already comfortably going around with the Ubahn to pick up the kids at school. I have 4 supermarkets less than 150m away from me, so we would walk to do groceries every other day. I spend ~80€/month with taxi rides (for the occasional trip to meet someone in a less convenient place), which is less than what she pays in car insurance alone, not even counting the cost of gas. At the end of the trip, she got it. Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury.

skybrian 1y ago
That’s great for where you live, but why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? They don’t have four supermarkets in less than 150 meters. There are places where cars actually are a necessity. Seems like empathy should work both ways?
- ajuc 1y ago
  Because people in suburbs are subsidized at the cost of and prioritized over everybody else.
  - skybrian 1y ago
    How do you know? Seems like cities have expensive infrastructure too?
    - rglullis 1y ago
      No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI The whole series of videos from Strong Towns are good, you should take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
      - skybrian 1y ago
        I’m not going to watch YouTube videos (I’m a text guy) but the Strong Towns blog is pretty good. I don’t think they’re the last word on this, because they’re often making general observations, and financial problems are often local. For example, I know Oakland, CA has severe financial issues (looks like the school district might go bankrupt) but I wouldn’t generalize from that to all cities.
        rglullis 1y ago
        You are already grasping at straws if you refuse to see something that could quickly give you the information that challenges your preconceived notions. The video I linked to talks precisely about the study done by a consulting company showing how suburbs are net-negative to a city's budget and they do it for multiple cities across the country. > Financial problems are local. There might be differences in the particulars among cities, but they share a lot of common causes and one of them is that suburban sprawl is cheap to begin (acquiring and building on the land) but expensive to maintain.
        skybrian 1y ago
        Could you link to the study? It sounds interesting.
        rglullis 1y ago
        I don't know if there is any published study. The video is relaying the work from https://www.urbanthree.com/services/ https://www.urbanthree.com/services/
- rglullis 1y ago
  > why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? My hostility is towards people who claim to prefer to live in the suburbs, but do not want to pay for the privilege. Show me people that say "Yeah, I won't mind having higher property taxes, extra fees to keep my many cars in the garage and have to pay full price for the extended infrastructure (sewer, roads, water, electricity lines, etc) just so that I don't have to live among those poor city-dwellers" and I'll be totally fine with their choices.
  - skybrian 1y ago
    Is your lifestyle subsidized too? How do you know? I suspect that even people with strong opinions have little understanding about infrastructure costs and who is subsidizing what. I’m unwilling to take this on faith - it seems like there need to be financial deep dives.
    - rglullis 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - prasadjoglekar 1y ago
        I live in the suburbs of NYC. All of NYC's drinking water is stored in our backyards. So much so that the NYPD patrols this area, 90 miles outside their geography. The math has certainly not been done. There are no cities without suburbs. For food and water.
      - lupusreal 1y ago
        [flagged]
        rglullis 1y ago
        > because of style of community they want to own their home in? No, I do not care about their choices, provided they are willing to bear all costs from it. The problem is not living in the suburbs. The problem is affluent people that have their lifestyle subsidized by poorer people living close to the city center. Also, it's virtually impossible to claim that people want to live like that in the US, because most places have zoning laws that simply forbid the emergence of any other alternative. Suburbs in Germany are smaller, less dense versions of the urban center, but they are not devoid of life. They are still walkable, they still have local shops, they do not make cars a requirement for everyone, kids do not need to be driven around anywhere, etc. You can bet that if more people in the US could come to visit they would rather live like that than in the traditional cul-de-sacs/picketed fence developments from American Suburbia.
- tastyfreeze 1y ago
  Most places in the US the zoning restrictions are part of the problem. You can't build a small grocery to serve a neighborhood when its zoned residential. Places that grew before cars, were built with walking distance separations. It wasn't possible to profit as a grocery by building miles away from the people.
- cogman10 1y ago
  The battle for the suburbs is mostly lost, you need a car if you live there. What the discussion should instead highlight is that with just moderate increases in population density you can escape the need for a car and it ends up being better for everyone. That mostly only applies to new development. Heck, even if you just made cars second class in new suburbs you could see cheaper housing with equivalent land. Put in a shared parking garage for a suburb instead of putting a garage on everyone's home and all the sudden the amount of sqft needed just to get cars in and out gets massively reduced meaning more room for more homes and an easier argument to make for bus service.
- CalRobert 1y ago
  Where do you see a lack of empathy?
- mrgoldenbrown 1y ago
  The issue is that we don't tax externalities properly in the US. We heavily subsidize car usage and then make people pay to use the subway. The incentives encourage behavior that is bad on a global scale even if it makes sense for each individual.
  - skybrian 1y ago
    This seems like an odd example. Aren’t many forms of public transportation partially funded and subsidized via taxes? It doesn’t make them bad, but they aren’t self-sufficient either.
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    I'm not here to defend the incredible subsidies for car-based travel, but public transit globally also gets lots of subsidies. Outside of a few of the highest density cities in the world (Seoul, Hongkong, Osaka, Tokyo), almost no public transit has more than 100% "fare box recovery" (no public subsidies required). Even in those cases, normally the national government pays for (or subsidizes) the initial build.
  - bpt3 1y ago
    In my area (Washington DC), fares pay about 10% of the budget for the subway each year. Why should those subsidies be expanded, yet any subsidies for cars (which certainly exist, but drivers pay for more than 10% of their vehicle costs) should be eliminated?
    - bombcar 1y ago
      The “cars get subsidized” arguments almost always fail to take into account that the entire capital and maintenance cost of the vehicle is borne by the driver. You have to do some pretty creative accounting to get it as subsidized as public transit (which isn’t to say PT shouldn’t be subsidized, mind you).
OptionOfT 1y ago
Your choices make the car not a necessity. I made different choices, and I am being taxed for those. But what I don't get is the hostility towards people who make this choice? I choose to not live in a place with supermarkets within 150m. When I look outside I see the edge of my property and then I see untouched nature. I pay for that, in land cost, and in fuel cost because I live (by choice) further away from everybody.
- tidbits 1y ago
  You don't pay for the externalities of using a car. Nobody does. That's why people are hostile towards cars.
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    Dead people and their friends and family certainly do.
- rglullis 1y ago
  > I made different choices, and I am being taxed for those. No, you aren't. - Suburbanites are being subsidized by city-dwellers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI&t=19s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI&t=19s - The gas for your car is heavily subsidized. - You don't pay for the increased costs in healthcare caused by air pollution or the amount of concrete needed to keep all those roads. - Car owners are not taxed extra for the economic impact in social security due to the tens of thousands of people that die every year. I could go on. There are countless other environmental and economic externalities that suburbanites are not being accounted for and they only get away with it because that's in the interests of the privileged elite.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > The gas for your car is heavily subsidized Maybe in US. In Europe this is not the case. On the contrary gas is heavily taxed.
    - 1y ago
soulofmischief 1y ago
> Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury It is unfortunately a necessity in many parts of America where public transportation is lacking or nonexistent. And making it a "luxury" just further stratifies our society into different, non-interacting economic classes. When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others. As someone who grew up in abject poverty in a very rural area and was homeless and on completely on my own by 16, I have already seen how this plays out. The trajectory of my life was majorly affected by a lack of a car or adequate public transportation. I have since had to make choices about where I live in order to minimize car use in order to align with my own philosophy around transportation, but it comes at great cost in America when such walkable cities are so desirable that cost of living shoots through the roof due to demand. And conversely, poorer areas often lack walkability or sufficient and accessible public transportation. Berlin does not have the same problems as America, a sprawling empire in decline.
- rglullis 1y ago
  > When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others. I'll never forget one of my last lectures from my high-school History class teacher. She said "People talk about societies in terms of two classes: the kings and the plebs, the haves and have-nots, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. I hope you managed to learn that throughout all of history, what we have is actually three different forces - priests or monks in Ancient times, or the merchants during the Renaissance, land owners in the US - and that it's this third class that is crucial in determining the course of History. Every time they aligned with the elites there was no change in the status quo, and every time a revolution happened was because they in the middle shifted their support to the other side." I'm saying this for one simple reason: the way to fix this problem is not by pretending that car ownership isn't a luxury, but by de-stigmatizing public transport. I can bet you that if political forces shifted and started putting pressure against car-ownership, you would quickly see a swing from the middle class in support for better public transit, mixed-use zoning, YIMBY-ism, etc. "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation"
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
I don't live in a place that has public transit or "walkability". It will never be able to afford that, the tax base isn't sufficient. When the fuck-cars people start ranting, what they mean is that they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic. I do not look forward to becoming the termite people that they wish to become. The luxury is living in a place where this is a possible lifestyle, and then thinking every one of 300 million people can live in such a place or make the place they live into such.
- rglullis 1y ago
  > they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic. No, we want you simply to pay the full sticker price for all the things you are consuming and exploiting. It's simple as that. Drop the pretense that you are actually carrying your own weight and that your lifestyle is sustainable. If you do just that and start paying for the privileges you have, we'll leave you in peace.
  - everdrive 1y ago
    This is just tribalism. There are plenty of groups which could be considered a negative tax burden, but you're not focused on them.
    - rglullis 1y ago
      > There are plenty of groups which could be considered a negative tax burden Most if not all of these groups are minorities or have a clear need for the tax relief. This is not the case for wealthy suburbanites.
      - _cxy8 1y ago
        1. I don’t know how familiar you are with Suburban America, but it’s far from simply a place for affluent people. You do know people escape places like NYC because of the high cost of living right? What do you think an apartment in your average safe neighborhood in NYC vs. the average safe Jersey Suburb costs? And what kind of amenities do you think you get for that price? Now stretch that comparison to other suburbs of smaller cities and it’s a stark difference. Your description of the affluent suburbanite vs. the poor city dweller is reductive and untrue. Living in desirable American cities is very expensive. In actuality many people leave cities they love, because to have a similar lifestyle as they would in the cheaper suburbs would require them to be inordinately well off. 2. You can complain all you want but we live in a democracy. Your idea of “fairness” and “paying your share” would have to be voted on. And the populous would have to agree with your view of the world. Good luck with that. 3. Your view of a disjointed America where people are city folk or suburbanites is not how the country operates. People move about freely. You may live in the city and vacation “upstate” for a break. Or live in a suburb and commute into a city for work, paying city taxes, etc. It isn’t as disjointed as you presume.
rwyinuse 1y ago
Whether having a car is necessary or not depends on where you live. Here in Northern Europe we literally can't reach my or my partner's parents with public transport, because they happen to live in the countryside. For us having a car is not a luxury, it's a necessity if our kids ever want to see their grandparents. So yeah, making car ownership generally expensive is a bad idea, and would only make Europe's already expensive housing market worse. There are more fair and effective ways to make city centres car-free, and suburb-dwellers to pay their fair share for infrastructure.
- rglullis 1y ago
  > For us having a car is not a luxury, it's a necessity if our kids ever want to see their grandparents. This is absolutely no reason to justify owning a car. People can still rent a car, people can still do car pools, people can still can have intercity buses.
  - rwyinuse 1y ago
    Intercity buses would be nice, and perhaps a car pool among few friends could work. Renting a car however remains very impractical for any longer trip. Still, I'm not sure what is so bad about owning a car in a small or medium-sized city like mine. Average age of a car in my country is almost 14 years, and rising. Very few people are buying new cars, and keeping the old ones around, using infrastructure already built isn't so bad. The population is barely growing and will soon fall, further reducing need for new car-centric infrastructure. I drive less than 8k kilometers a year.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    People who say "just rent a car" don't do that. I just rented a car for a holiday. It was much more expensive then the cost of keeping my own car on the road, and took a whole lot of time to book including avoiding a number of ways any minor damage would cost thousands more.
    - CalRobert 1y ago
      I used gocar extensively when I lived in Ireland..
bluescrn 1y ago
Having a car is not a necessity... for city-dwellers.
- rglullis 1y ago
  Plenty of people who live in the suburbs of Berlin and also do not have a car - because here even the suburbs are not car-centric. I can even tell you of a friend who works in Berlin and prefers to make a 50-minute commute by train over having a car.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  My grandma lived in a farm, she used to go to the nearest city by bicycle almost every day. This is not unreasonable to think it can be done again. The thing is we have made so much room for cars they have eaten all the space and are endangering everyone. But this can change.
balder1991 1y ago
If the zoning laws in a place aren’t the same as the US/Canada, everything will look different. Here in Brazil I also walk 3 min. to the nearest market, public transport is quite accessible everywhere. Schools can also be nearby and walking distance — though Federal Universities have a tradition of being quite far away from the city center. Now, if you live in a smaller town it’s a whole different story and I suppose it’s the same in Europe. I don’t see the need to own a car living in a capital in my State, but in smaller towns basically everybody has at least motorcycles.
btilly 1y ago
Whether a car is a luxury or not, really depends on where you live. European cities started on a scale designed around the limitations of human walking. Even before they built out mass transit systems, living without a car was doable. Adding mass transit is icing on the cake. If you live in such an environment, it is easy to make the case that cars are a luxury. That's because other people's daily experience is that it is a luxury. As your mother discovered when she visited you. Most American cities are built on a scale designed around human driving. Even where they built out mass transit systems, between scale and density they can't work as well as European ones. (Fun fact. Across the USA, busses are on average so underutilized that we'd save gas by making everyone drive instead.) Underinvestment in mass transit is icing on the cake. This was your mother's daily experience in suburban Massachusetts. And even though she sees how you can live without a car, it's pretty safe to bet that she doesn't think that she can live where she does without a car. Which means that, in America, saying that cars are luxuries is a poor argument. It directly contradicts everyone's personal experience. Yes, this is fixable. But fixing it literally requires tearing cities down, then rebuilding them on a scale where walking makes sense as a major mode of transportation. We can't even manage the political will to build enough housing to keep people off the streets. Any lifestyle change requiring this level of rebuilding is a nonstarter. No matter how many lectures we get from Europeans.
- rglullis 1y ago
  > Most American cities are built on a scale designed around human driving. That's absolutely not true. It only became true in the post-war when there was a push for suburban sprawl, lobbied by GM and all the auto industry [0] > it's pretty safe to bet that she doesn't think that she can live where she does without a car. "Where there is a will, there is a way", right? The discussion is not even if she can go by without a car, but whether she would want it. > We can't even manage the political will to build enough housing to keep people off the streets. Ok, but then don't go around trying to rationalize your bad choices and poor capacity for civic organization. [1] Don't go around saying "I lived in NYC and I thought I could live without a car, but after I had kids I realized they are not so bad", and please don't go around saying "it can't be done". Amsterdam and Rotterdam were once also car-centric cities which managed to turn themselves around in less than a generation. There is no inherit limitation in the US that forbids this change to happen. There is no amount of American Exceptionalism that can prevent people from clamoring change. Maybe it won't be done in the US, because people are lazy and not willing to sacrifice their own convenience for some communal benefit, but it's super annoying to always get in these discussions when people try to hide their preferences on external circumstances. North American cities are they way they are by choice. [0]: How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo) [1]: The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ)
tomcam 1y ago
How does someone in Berlin practice tuba or drums? (Serious question, no shade intended.)
- rglullis 1y ago
  In most cases the music schools have instruments, so you keep can your own at home, but I have seen plenty of teenagers carrying cellos in the ubahn.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  for those of us not blessed enough to attend university for music, there are still a lot of options to practice and rehearse outside the home. speaking as a drummer, the last time i was reasonably able to play at home was growing up as a kid in a detached single family house. as an adult, i've always rented shared spaces with other musicians (in the US and in Europe). there are a lot of facilities where you can either rent by the hour (including or excluding the instrument) or by the month (usually 100% self-furnished including some, but not all, instruments and equipment) and play as loud as you want. most of these hourly spaces will provide a drum kit minus "breakables" (cymbals, snare drum and kick drum pedal) and a basic PA system for singers/keyboards etc. the facility is responsible for maintaining these things (YMMV; some places replaces drum heads often, other places you might end up with a broken cymbal stands or worse). often they'll also come with speaker cabinets for guitar and bass amps, and the guitarist or bassist will bring their own instrument, cables, effects pedals and often a combo amplifier or amplifier head, per requirement or personal preference. sometimes you can pay an additional fee to rent an instrument like a guitar or bass but this isn't guaranteed at all spaces and quality is usually not great. i don't personally know much about how it works for brass players. not sure people are too excited to share those instruments that involve a lot of bodily fluids :) i imagine most horn players prefer to keep their own instruments. i know a lot of rehearsal facilities also provide storage for large instruments - you just retrieve your instrument when its time for rehearsal or for a gig, then return it to the storage facility. the monthly option is usually called a "lockout" in US slang and a lot of times you go in on a unit with other musicians; for example, a full band will rent a room, or multiple bands; or a group of individuals who agree to keep a schedule for reserved access to the room. i've been in spaces that have up to 7 different full bands and time is precious, and others where the monthly cost was low enough that only one or two bands used the space.

lelanthran 1y ago

> that channel references his family and kids in most videos (in that he and his partner moved to Amsterdam so his children could have the freedom to navigate safely without having to be driven around). Then they are unlikely to be unbiased - someone who uproots and moves their family due to an issue they care about is almost never going to express any regret, no matter how bad things get.

fluoridation 1y ago
Of course it's not unbiased. It's an opinion channel about a highly politicized topic.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  >>> It's worth watching a couple of those videos. >> Then they are unlikely to be unbiased > Of course it's not unbiased. Then why, in the words of GP, "It's worth watching"?
  - fluoridation 1y ago
    That's a question for that person. I couldn't tell you why they think so. I'd guess the implication is that someone who's interested in the urban infrastructure of the Netherlands and how it compares to North America's might find it interesting. Having said that, what a strange question. Do you only find it worthwhile to engage with unbiased content?
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      > Do you only find it worthwhile to engage with unbiased content? Of course not, but there's a huge difference between: 1. Pointing someone at (for example) a church's website when you are trying to support an argument against pro-choice, and 2. Pointing someone at the relevant wikipedia page Both are biased in some way, but one of them is so biased that it is effectively useless unless you are already on board and in agreement with the argument. > Having said that, what a strange question. It's only a strange question to the people who are already ideologically aligned in that direction.