I think many people /want/ to drive everywhere, but at the same time would prefer to live in the kind of place you get when /not everyone/ constantly drives everywhere (if they had some experience with such places).
Many/most people living in a lot of cities still own cars so that they can easily travel outside the city. It's a perfectly valid preference to live in the denser part of a city but it is a preference and not an absolute.
Certainly many people enjoy that type of life. The frustrating part is the one-size-fits-all zoning that has made it difficult to build anything but that type of community. It's illegal to build car-free apartments in many places because car owners think they should be able to drive and park everywhere.
But the question was why would "Anyone" buy a car, and almost by definition, not everyone can move out of "Impractical Big city A" into "Utopian Small City B", because then "Utopian Small City B" becomes "Impractical Big City B" :)
There simply isn't a place in North America, let alone the world, that a) Is amenable to a non-driving lifestyle, and b) has room for all the people in the world.
It is not a universally applicable advice; it is virtually by definition only doable by select few. The rest of the population will still have to deal with reality of things.
Nah, the majority of people like and want to be able to go anywhere whenever they want. It’s nice to have nice cities and nice public transport but you don’t need to get rid of cars for that.
Some people have a weird fixation on having everyone live in giant cities with giant buildings with as much density as possible. That would bring its own issues and then you’d end up spending huge resources to try to fix those issues instead of maintaining the road infrastructure that gives people freedom.
Maybe you are right, but I would challenge the assumption that the overwhelming majority of people want cars and want to live in the suburbs. Many lament having to live there, but have little choice due to factors such as cost, schools, crime, etc. It is interesting to see how many American's choose for vacation, a high density hotel, condos, cruises, etc. Maybe Americans prefer living in villages and higher density communities more than people realize.
Do people actually enjoy car-centric living, or are alternatives just not available or something the average American has much exposure to? If you want to live somewhere in America that's walkable/bikeable/good public transit, your choices are a lot more limited than if you're willing to live somewhere where you need to drive everywhere. And those limited choices tend to be more expensive, which I think says something about their popularity.
Interestingly though, it seems like there is a trend to expand car alternative options, at least in some areas of the country. There's not much you can do about an exurban bedroom community because density is so low and nothing besides other houses is remotely within a convenient non-car distance. But in places that could be less car-centric, you're starting to see expanded public transit and bicycle infrastructure. And even in what would normally be a suburban area, I've started to see more mixed use development with higher density housing options. And of course more high-end condo type housing in large cities themselves. The fact these all tend to be relatively expensive places to rent or buy a home suggests to me that demand is fairly high, so clearly not everyone loves the car-centric choice.
I also think there is a segment of Americans who love the idea of low-density, car-centric, single family development in theory, but they're running into the reality that trying to build that for everyone means that people are going to have to live increasingly far away from anywhere they want to go. Even if you don't mind driving everywhere, car-centric becomes a lot less fun when everything is a 30+ minute drive away and gas is becoming more expensive.
You're describing urban environments. A lot of people live in those places already. But a lot of people prefer to live elsewhere. Differences in preference is fine.
What doesn't make sense though is driving in urban environments, especially single-occupant vehicles that make up the vast majority of motor traffic in major cities. Keep the suburbs. But I think it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in for all but the folks who need it (e.g., people with mobility issues, or families with small children). If you're able-bodied in an urban environment, you should be the last person to be driving around regularly.
As others have said, driving really isn't a choice in much of the US, but rather an artifact of finding a residence with desirable attributes (price, size, form-factor, noise level, green space, school zone) in the same metro as one's workplace. Just as the article notes that framing driving with moralistic terms is a recipe for ruin, so is framing it as a conscious choice on parts of perfectly average people who "decide" to drive to work that day. So quit focusing on driving -- driving isn't the problem, despite the pollution deaths, despite car crashes, despite whatever evil cars and trucks bring upon the world -- they're tools, like just like fossil fuel power plants and oil refineries and other terribly unpleasant things that enable a modern, globalized, distributed, and hyper-specialized society.
As this and other articles find, driving is a symptom of land use, but car-centric suburbia was not build because of cars, but merely enabled by them. Greenfield land has many perks, not the least the lack of pre-existing baggage like badly configured buildings, under-sized streets, and aging underground infrastructure. In the US, this wave was helped by white flight and the increased demand after WWII, but demographically homogeneous countries in Central and Eastern Europe are going through a wave of suburbanization right now, driven solely by income inequality. I've said it before [1], as car suburbs are aging themselves, they're becoming worse places to live, which makes it harder to pay for their upkeep, and those who can afford to move move either further out to brand new exurbs that have a better balance of commercial vs. residential, or back to revitalizing urban cores, leaving only those who can't afford to leave.
Capitalism works within the same metro too; local governments compete against each other for businesses and residents. The low-populated outskirts are often at risk for annexation by a nearby town, so they can instead incorporate themselves to capture local tax base and keep it from paying for "somebody else". There is no free lunch and income is redistributed either way: either the city annexes a far-flung reach of greenfield land to build some high-profit industrial park to help pay for the city's aging infrastructure or its attempts to gentrify, or the local residents organize into smaller and smaller independent municipalities that focus on fostering the character of the particular neighborhood while keeping the tax income closer to the site, but fragmenting the metro into entities that compete for the same dollars. This is fundamentally an economic problem, one that's not driven by regulation and NIMBY, but mostly by average people looking to maximize their self-interest for 5-to-15-years at a time, but much longer if they're unlucky.
The reason zoning in the US requires developments to take cars into account, is that people in the US want cars. And if someone builds a new residential or commercial development that doesn't recognize this reality, it creates problems for everyone as people have nowhere to put the cars that they definitely want to use.
Yes, there are some people who live in cities and are happy to have the entirety of their life limited to the region they can walk to, or the places where government-organized mass transportation can deliver them like cattle. But those people are the vast minority. Everyone else wants a car.
Except those other people also want cars. So we all live in a sprawling, low-cost-of-living city and we are happy.
Of course, some people call this slice of heaven a "nightmarish hellscape of stroads" [0] but thank goodness those people can move somewhere else and leave our cars alone.
The whole point of the thread is that there's a lot of variance in density within the US, and we shouldn't regulate the rural midwest like we regulate NYC.
> It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads for private vehicles is very much a policy decision.
It's an amalgamation of a hundred years of policy decisions and private investment based around those decisions, and it would take as long to reverse it even if there was political appetite for it. And there's not much appetite for it because most people prefer the convenience and comfort of cars. To that end:
> There's absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is impossible here.
It's not a matter of whether that lifestyle is possible, but whether it's desirable. Most Americans find the convenience and comfort of cars to be preferable to public transit.
So much of this is the fault of oft-ignored local zoning boards. Everyone complains that Americans don't want to give up their cars. Well, of course they don't. In 99.9% of the US, it's illegal to live within reasonable walking distance of your job or your grocery store, and it's illegal to build densely enough to make public transportation practical. So of course everyone drives everywhere, they have no other choice.
The better the roads get, the further out people live. I call this the law of constant misery. People will move out of the city as far as a ~45 minute commute will allow them.
This is a very common theme all across the world and time. It's quite literally the tragedy of the commons, nobody has any direct incentive not to move further out or drive all the way across town or whatever and we all suffer in traffic for it.
Yeah, I understand it's not a good pattern of development for huge metro areas. But someone managed to get the laws on the books to basically require the US to develop in this way, and people aren't fighting _too_ hard to change it. It's not hard to imagine, then, that there might be some competitive advantages to a car-centric lifestyle for individuals to live in that situation even if it's worse for the collective.
Living in a walkable place is not mutually exclusive with driving. I live in one, I have a car, all my neighbors have cars and/or trucks. You can use Google's Street View and check out SF and NYC, there are plenty of cars there too. That's because your options are not more pleasant and convenient for everyone, I'd guess.
Meh I live in the Midwest, in an area that pretty much requires a car. Yet my use is extremely limited (a few thousand miles per year). Mostly going to stores and back as I work from home.
Yet we travel around the area to state parks, bike trails, etc.. every weekend. Even if I lived in a city, that doesn't mean I would want to be confined to the same 10 square miles my entire life. We live in a vast, beautiful country. Why isolate yourself to a tiny little block? Life is too short for that.
Cars aren't the terrible thing that many pro urban folk here seem to make them out to be, and I suspect most people prefer driving them to cycling or using public transport.
Similarly, the whole idea of automated driving becoming the default and humans not being able to drive is something I'm 100% against, since it'd be both a privacy nightmare and take away a lot of people's freedom.
The problem is really more that some places are designed to only be usable in a car, and that's what's poorly designed.
Speaking of which, also that suburbs aren't a bad thing. Again, it feels like people take the car focused design common in the US, and assume that's how these have to be. Thousands of identical houses in the middle of nowhere with everything interesting a 30 minute drive away.
But that's not necessarily true, and (as seen in most of the world), suburbs can be quite nice places to live in. A walkable one (like many in Europe) can be just as valid a place to live as a dense city neighborhood or rural area.
What fails this is many people don't want to live in cities. Living in apartments with others, taking public transportation with others and walking down the street with other is more unpleasant than cars.
There's a tragedy of the commons here.
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