5 ms·

It's an extremely inconvenient situation that Americans find themselves in, a sort of self-perpetuating cycle of car dependency that they reinforce because alte

• bcrosby95 1y ago
  For lots of America alternatives don't take that much investment. Creating a safe bike network would be relatively cheap and is feasible in large swaths of suburbs.
  • dijit 1y ago
    Due to the aforementioned car dependence: points of interest are further apart from each other than in other cities with solid cycling infrastructure (in Europe for example). Enormous car-lots several times larger than the buildings that they serve for example, sprawling 6-lane roads that take 20s to clear a junction on a slow moving bicycle, these things contribute to it being infeasible for more poeple. Connecting the bike lanes is not a problem, though people will fight it tooth and nail because they wan't all infrastructure spending to go to cars... hence, reinforcing the issue, because when all you have is a hammer...
    • bcrosby95 1y ago
      Yes, they are further apart than they need to be, but they still tend to be within relatively short cycling distance. At certain times cycling is even faster than driving due to gridlock traffic, even in suburbs. For example, this very moment, because the main way through town is clogged with parents picking their kids up from school. I think a majority of the problem is cultural and/or political. I know people who take a longer drive over a shorter bike ride (due to gridlock traffic).
    • oblio 1y ago
      Bikes can reach remarkably far in flat areas if the infrastructure is there. And with a folding bike you only need 1 bus as a range extender to go really far. However lots of money is relying on both those things not happening.
  • Iwan-Zotow 1y ago
    > Creating a safe bike network would be relatively cheap and is feasible in large swaths of suburbs hard to do biking if there is 33C outside with sun in top of it
• Retric 1y ago
  It doesn’t take that much to for huge numbers of people to be able to transfer to car free existence. Zoning laws inside cities do a amazing amount to force cars on millions of Americans. Car free access to existing transit hubs like metro stations is often horrible and not particularly expensive to improve.
  • supertrope 1y ago
    Cities could create bus and bike lanes literally overnight. Load up a truck with concrete parking curbs and cones and drop them. No one is going to bike until the infrastructure makes it safe and convenient. Like safe enough to let a kid or 65 year old woman bike. We just choose to continue subsidizing a triangle of car dependency. The government finances toll-free roads, mandates parking minimums, and enforces restrictive zoning. Businesses and real estate consumers pick up the tab on the real cost of free parking (higher rents and mortgages, parking garage construction costs). Drivers pour money into car loans, insurance, maintenance, and fuel.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
• arjvik 1y ago
  > if you don't properly invest in the maintenance of the thing For me, it's not the money that's annoying (though of course I'm not pleased by the bills every once in a while). It's the amount of time it takes to keep a car maintained! Seems like just yesterday I took a whole day remote to sit at the mechanics shop for a tire change, but now I have to do the same for an oil change! For this precise reason I end up doing a lot of maintenance late.
  • hyghjiyhu 1y ago
    I haven't done it myself but isn't a tire change suppose to be pretty easy thing to do, certainly better than sitting the whole day in the shop?
    • maxerickson 1y ago
      Usually it involves swapping the new tires onto the rims. It's not easy to do.
      • MegaDeKay 1y ago
        Plus balancing the new tires on those rims, and next to nobody has the gear to do that.
        • Ccecil 1y ago
          When I last priced the equipment it wasn't that bad costwise. In my case though it was only worth it to get rid of the whole "dealing with tire shops" issue. A close friend owns a used car dealership and they bought the mounter and balancer. IIRC...it just needed a 240v line. I have also lost days waiting for tire shops and alignment...as those are the only 2 things I don't do myself.
          • potato3732842 1y ago
            A tire machine is life changing in a good way if you have a lot of cars you're responsible for. China is starting to make mid-market ones (simple pneumatic ones that are powered bug geared to home use rather than professional like the ~$1k electric machines) for ~$400ish that I'd take seriously if I was in the market Once you have a tire machine you'll spend more time at the tire shop (outside business hours, lol) because their trash pile will be your best source for reasonably new used tires. They sell a lot of sets of 4 when 2 would do.
• ifyoubuildit 1y ago
  I'm glad you have that opportunity too, but purely on the financials it's probably not so much of a win when you consider the heightened cost of everything (housing in particular) in a city, right?
  • SecretDreams 1y ago
    Depends when you got into it. If you're an older gen, you got into that city early and are likely unburdened by high dwelling costs - instead, you've got a windfall of appreciation ahead of you. Reality is, outside of housing, city life is generally cheaper because it's much more accessible and the tax base is better suited to covering those expenses. So, older generations get the best of all worlds, per usual.
    • carabiner 1y ago
      > Outside of housing > Outside of what makes it more expensive for virtually everyone, it is actually cheaper
      • SecretDreams 1y ago
        Pull up the age demographics for any major city. The older demographics largely got into housing at more affordable times and are less sensitive to rent and mortgage prices increasing. Housing costs is a cost that OVERWHELMINGLY impacts younger demographics.
  • 999900000999 1y ago
    Depends on the city. Chicago is cheaper than car dependent LA in terms of rent. You can do very well on a modest salary.
  • dangus 1y ago
    You don’t have to be in a large or even a medium sized city for car dependency to be alleviated. There’s a not just bikes video about this exact thing. https://youtu.be/ztpcWUqVpIg https://youtu.be/ztpcWUqVpIg
  • 1y ago
• jeffbee 1y ago
  Converting away from cars costs almost nothing compared to continuing cars. The project to put California route 37 above water near the Sonoma-Marin County line is going to cost $10 billion without adding any capacity. That's one tiny little project. And people don't even want to attach a number to the external cost of pollution.
• itsme0000 1y ago
  It’s honestly becoming a national subculture. Being a “burnout”. In tech burnout means you’re exhausted on working on things. In America “a burnout” is someone so deeply in debt they don’t even try to really pay it off, they just ignore the debt and spend money on cheap thrills when they can. Obviously not something that you advertise about yourself, but go to any bar in rural south and they know what am talking about. As bad as the debt situation is in the US there’s not much a collection agency can do to force you to pay relatively petty sums under 100,000 they will just harass you basically. The Roman proverb goes “The begger laughs in the face of the bandit” so burnouts spread money before it can be taken from them, then turn around and beg for more. A person who’s established this mentality, the exact amount they owe is the least of there problems.
• rayiner 1y ago
  This is an extremely privileged viewpoint. Even in Tokyo, people in the bottom half of the income distribution do not live close enough to popular transit lines to be as mobile as someone with a beater car in Dallas. They spend a lot more time commuting (and they can’t “just do some work on the train” because they have real jobs). Even in Tokyo, their commutes are crowded, they’re subject to the weather. Being tied to transit lines—again, because even in Tokyo transit isn’t as convenient as point-to-point car travel—limits where people can look for jobs. That makes it a poverty trap because people can’t easily find jobs in different areas. And it makes having a family and kids much more logistically complicated. The most transit-dependent cities have abysmal birth rates.
  • dijit 1y ago
    It's only privileged because I'm living in a city that has actively prioritised other modes of transport. I invite you to compare Orlando and Malmo. If you have the opportunity to visit both, I would recommend it. They have the same population size (actually, Malmo has more people in it, but, close enough) yet in one it's impossible to get across the street without a car, even to go to the grocery store, and the other has entire portions of the city where cars aren't even able to go. -- Yet everyone manages to get around, and most people would consider it very convenient to do so.
    • rayiner 1y ago
      Why are you comparing the cities based on whether you can get around “without a car?” In America, even the vast majority of the poorest people have a car. 96% of occupied housing units in Osceola County (where Orlando sits) have a car. American cities are optimized for that. It’s almost certainly more convenient to get around Orlando by driving (as long as you aren’t going to Disney) than taking transit in Malmo. There is no city in the world where transit is more convenient and flexible than driving. I visit Tokyo once or twice a year, and even in Tokyo it’s usually more convenient to take an Uber than to take the train. And you’re not going to do better than Tokyo in terms of transit. You can see this in the statistics. The average commute time of someone in the greater Tokyo area is 1 hour and 40 minutes round trip, or about 50 minutes one way: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commute-time-japan https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu.... The average commute time for someone in Dallas County is under 30 minutes one way: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113. And the American commute is by yourself in a climate controlled car, instead of a crowded (even if clean and punctual) train.
• gensym 1y ago
  It sucks that you need to own a car to get anywhere in most of the US. When my wife and I moved to Southern California from Chicago, we had a single car and tried to make that work for a while, but it was just not doable. We have a grocery store 2 miles away, but any other services are further than walking distance (and even the grocery store requires walking on the shoulder of a busy arterial road at a couple points. I used to bike everywhere in Chicago, but doing so here is too risky). That said, the problems of car loans are far beyond that - From the article: " The average monthly repayment now stands at more than $750.". That's nuts! I make a solid upper middle-class income, and I can't imagine spending that much on car financing, regardless of the loan length. When we needed a second car, we bought a 6-year-old Volvo station wagon in good condition, it it's still serving us well. Many of my neighbors, who make about half what I do, think we're poor because of it.
  • oblio 1y ago
    If the Volvo us well taken care of, it will probably last decades more.
  • ryandrake 1y ago
    Exactly. This is going to come off as incredibly privileged, but I'm not a huge fan of car loans. In fact, I'm not a huge fan of leveraging to afford any asset unless it's appreciating in value or generating income. I buy and drive old, nearly junker cars because I can't afford a $40K new car. I can "afford" the monthly payments on a $40K car, but it's just a terrible financial idea. Totally nutty. A $750 monthly payment (I don't even want to know the term) for something that is losing value every day is absolutely bonkers. The amount of debt Americans routinely and causally take on is honestly ridiculous.
    • raw_anon_1111 1y ago
      The problem with old junkers is that if you don’t have the money in cash, how do you fix a major car repair? You can get a loan for a new car with money. The car “generates income” because it allows you to get to work and hopefully make more than your car note.
• potato3732842 1y ago
  Being on the bottom rungs is actually a lot cheaper than "HN style" car ownership. Nobody expects your shitbox to be legal, or have compliant papers all the time. You're blue collar so you know people who wrench and trade favors here and there. Boss expects you to be late a few times a month. There's a "welfare cliff" when you try to get into a "must have reliable transportation" job though
  • supertrope 1y ago
    Lower end jobs tend to be unforgiving on not planting your butt in seat at the scheduled time. I find the higher end your job the less BS you are forced to endure. e.g. No drug tests, no doctor's note to justify sick leave. If there's a layoff there's severance. Flex time. There are some accommodations for poor drivers. Politicians loath to raise fuel tax. This shifts costs of roads from drivers onto general taxpayers. Car insurance limits are the same as in the 1970s. This shifts cost of accidents from poor drivers onto accident victims who are not fully compensated. Emissions testing and safety testing is either not done at all or waived for drivers who claim hardship.