While it is true that Americans rely a bit too much on their cars, and have built infrastructure based on it instead of public transportation, it's hard to envision a world where individual transportation is no longer needed.
Look at Japan, they have a great train network but still use cars a lot. Because while train works well in cities, you still need people living in the country side to grow your food.
The average American likely doesn't want a life without cars. That seems to be an HN obsession seemingly (my perception) fueled by people who have lived and stayed in very dense urban areas.
Creating larger spaces that aren't made for cars is great, but people will still need long-range individual transportation.
And, before people start saying "you don't understand, America is so big, we need cars," well, that's only true when you're talking about farmers and rural residents.
In reality, most Americans live in cities and suburbs, concentrated on the costs and in the Midwest, with urbanization only increasing over time.
In other words, most people in the US already live in areas where there is sufficient density and short enough distances to live in a place where maybe you need to own a car but you shouldn't necessarily need to use the car for every type of trip.
There are suburban designs emphasizing single family homes that can still accommodate a lifestyle that isn't using a car for every type of trip, but North America has simply not developed that way.
Development in North America goes wildly beyond just accommodating cars, it instead actively designs in hostility toward pedestrians, cyclists, and generally having the chance of using anything but a car for getting around. Features like:
- Winding suburban developments separate themselves from the main street grid to eliminate thru traffic, but that also makes walking/cycling out of the development impractical by extending travel distance
- Stroads [1] and big box developments make it unsafe/impossible/impractical to walk to businesses that are right next door or otherwise in the same development, never mind crossing the actual street.
- Transit system design and schedules that emphasize downtown travel during bankers hours.
Right but in the US the vast majority of areas require cars. Things are just very spread out and so everything was designed for cars. It's not feasible to do public transportation like in Europe in most places because of the very low density and vast areas.
The United States is massive. Expecting that public transportation will replace cars to any significant scale is to reveal a lack of exposure to the vast majority of the country. Las Cruces, NM for instance — they aren’t going to build a subway and suddenly replace cars. Midland, Texas, Imperial, California — most people don’t live in a tight urban core. In France, outside of Paris — most people have, and need cars. The idea that millennials are all just dying to live in Manhattan is an out of touch myth. Cars as we know them will certainly change, but personal transportation will always be important — as will suburbs where your kid can grow up with an actual yard. Not everyone wants to live in a Hong Kong-style beehive.
I think one of the issues is that once you start designing places around driving, cars become non-optional for day to day living, whereas many places designed around transit generally do not expect people to use transit for every single outing.
For example: most car oriented American suburbs simply require a car for anything other than visiting a neighbor, whereas in a transit oriented city you might use transit to commute to work, but be able to walk to some local shops and services.
I think many people who are familiar only with car dependent lifestyles make the mistake of imagining a car-free lifestyle that involves replacing all of the car trips they make one-to-one with bus or train trips, which would indeed be really cumbersome, but isn’t really how things work (at least in my experience growing up in a rural small town in the US and having lived in a couple of European cities and NYC).
>I can appreciate having a car can be useful, but I'd not call it a necessity. Perhaps things are different in the US of A.
American urban planning is heavily car-centric. They talk about "walkable communities", because the opposite is the norm. A large proportion of American towns and suburbs are sprawling, low-density and strictly segregated between residential and commercial developments. Public transport is often meagre or nonexistent. Parts of America are practically uninhabitable without a car. It's probably true to say that Americans are unreasonably attached to driving and averse to walking, but at this stage it's a self-perpetuating cycle.
It's not a bad thing that people take trains rather than drive or that economic incentives favor living in cities.
Those are, in fact, things a country can want - for a multitude of reasons. Environmental impact, cultural centers, oil politics, etc. The fact that car-centric suburban culture is difficult to attain may be feature, not a bug.
Higher population density in urban areas severely reduces the need for cars. It's possible to live in cities developed pre-car (London, Berlin, Boston, New York) without owning a car. Americans have put ourselves in a pickle by building sprawling suburbs, which then require cars to increase the "number of highly specialized people" they can interact with.
Well, but cars don't work very well as soon as you concentrate parts of your population in urban centres. Both are needed and both are optional depending on where you live. At least individual ownership, because you will always need trucks, but you will also always need goods trains.
I grew up in a small rural town where people were not slaves to cars because you could get around with or without a car.
Now I'm in a suburb, and the closest services are about a mile away, so everyone is dependent on a car. I can get most of my day done on bike, and the kids definitely prefer bikes to the car, but as they get older and have needs further out we will be car dependent again
But it doesn't have to be that way. Transit can fill that gap when you want something bigger than a small rural town. However, cars have been baked into most of our suburban design in a way that transit can not grow to fill that gap. We have planned our entire suburban areas around the idea of being stuck in a car for all needs.
My partner and I would honestly prefer a city, but cities have also been planned to keep as many people out as possible, so very few new apartments get built, and when they are built, it's usually almost entirely single and two bedroom apartments because there's such a huge backlog of demand to live in cities.
There is a better life possible, but US law has made it illegal to build.
I think we're talking past each other a bit. I think that the degree to which America is car dependent is ridiculously stupid for our safety, solvency of our cities, and enjoyment of everyday life. In Europe, many people are comparably rich but there are far fewer cars. There is also significantly better public transit.
If your entire city is designed for cars, and there are some buses that sit in traffic with everyone else, I'm not surprised that people buy cars. It doesn't mean that's what they want - it's just the only option.
In the end I think viable alternatives should be available. I think it's stupid to drive 15 miles into a city on the same 8 lane highway as everyone when 1 or 2 train tracks could meet the same demand and function (and a streetcar/subway/walk for the rest of the journey).
I do not think cars shouldn't exist. I think they're completely necessary for tons of people at the moment, but I think we should invest in other options that are working extremely well in other places.
I'm just commenting on why people consider having a car a necessity in the U.S.; the reasons for it are more complex. Population density is one reason, but infrastructure planning and preferences is a big part of it. Most Americans live in the populated parts of the country in or near a city, not in rural Nevada or Nebraska, so those huge expanses on their own don't make public-transit impractical (they do complicate intercity rail, but that's a different issue).
Urban sprawl does make things more difficult, but doing better than the current state would still be quite possible in many cities. For example, taking the two most recent cities I've lived in, Houston and Copenhagen have closer population densities than people may think in the majority of their commute basin. If you draw a circle with radius roughly 30 km from each city's downtown, both have a density of about 1,000/km^2. Yet Copenhagen has 5 commuter rail lines, a subway, and an extensive 24-hour bus network, while Houston has 3 light-rail lines and a pretty bad bus network. So of course it's harder to get around in Houston without a car, even in the dense parts (for example, it's a huge pain to get from a high-rise condo in the Galleria area to an office building downtown, even though these are both dense areas and only about 15km apart). Houston is slowly improving in the past 10 years, though.
The US was huge and spread out before the automobile was invented. People used to live close enough to local markets that they could get by on foot, bicycle, or horseback. We used to have train stations everywhere, enabling long-distance travel, but day-to-day travel did not require mechanization.
There is no reason we cannot create towns and cities where people do not require cars. New York City is like this (having grown up there, I did not get my driver's license until I was 25 and living in a different state). We can create local transit systems with buses, trolleys, and light rail. The only place where cars really make sense is in very rural areas, where the population is extremely sparse.
Also, the US explicitly designed new development around the idea of people owning cars. Public transportation is kind of a moot point when you just have tracts of housing completely separate from commercial areas.
All you have to do is visit Seoul or Tokyo to see how valuable and useful public transportation is, when it's done correctly and city planning takes it into account. Even if one is rich, actually driving and parking is a complete hassle most of the time in cities. It's so much more convenient to take a bus or train.
Exactly. America is structurally dependent on cars. The working poor have been forced into increasingly long commutes to find affordable housing. We need big structural changes: densification, massive investment in sustainable transit systems and urban design.
I’ve visited Europe many times and I do like how the region is so easily accessible without a car, largely because of trains, but there are many more factors outside of just having trains. European cities are far more walkable and accessible without a car. For decades the US has just not been built up in this way so just dropping trains in doesn’t suddenly make them preferred and thus viable. The reason people drive small/medium city to small/medium city is because once arriving in that city they now need transportation while there. Currently the most convenient and cost effective way to do that is to simply bring the car you already own for moving around in your home small/medium city. If the US is going to move to an environmentally friendly passenger rail system it is going to take a MASSIVE cultural and shift in mindset to reshape cities across the country. Many of which are broke. I’m not saying it’s impossible or an unworthy goal. I simply think it is an extremely unlikely goal until mindsets shift and realize things need to be done differently.
Look at Japan, they have a great train network but still use cars a lot. Because while train works well in cities, you still need people living in the country side to grow your food.
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