> If people want to remove the American dependence on cars, they need to make American cities a more than a playground for the young professional class, and make them places a large proportion of Americans would actually want to live in.
This is precisely what happens when you remove cars from cities.
This is the heart of what needs to change in the US. World-class bike cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen were just as car-centric in the 20th century as any American city. It took decades of deliberate, systematic change to make what they are today. This is just as possible for American cities as it was for their foreign peers.
>everything is just closer together over here
To this point, human-scale cities with fewer cars directly enable closer and denser habitats. Cars are a direct impediment to more livable cities. If you remove the cars, all of a sudden you have more space for people.
> If people didn't need cars, they wouldn't buy them.
This is a chicken-and-egg problem. US cities have spent billions on highways and parking and rewrote ordinances to require low density, car-dependent development. You could argue all of that is an honest reflection of voter desires (or at least voter desires of 40 years ago, when most of that stuff happened), but many have undoubtedly bought a car because their environment was designed that way.
> But the reason we find them convenient is that, at least in most of the US, cities are built for cars.
A subtly better way to frame this is to say that American cities were destroyed for cars. Streetcar tracks were ripped up. Roads were widened at the expense of sidewalk. Neighborhoods were demolished and replaced with parking lots, freeways, and car dealerships. Many municipalities stopped maintaining their core inner cities and bet the house on big-box stores on the outskirts. It cost hundreds of billions of dollars collectively to subsidize the car in the U.S., which had the side effect of cannibalizing passenger rail and metropolitan transit, as well as building places that are prohibitively dangerous to cycle or walk in.
One illuminating exercise is to find photos of Houston from the 1920s and compare them to the 1970s. You would think that someone had carpet-bombed the city.
> If you want to be free from cars, build walkable and carless cities people can afford and want to move to.
Oh man would I love that, but our legal system makes this nearly impossible, especially when combined with car culture.
It's a guaranteed way to reduce pollution, improve happiness and health, save lives, etc etc etc. But it is easier to solve computer vision than go get cities to ban cars.
> We covet our automobiles so dearly that we have decided to ignore the perils of air pollution and traffic stress on our own health.
This is not how we got here. The reason most cities are built around cars is because of a long and successful campaign by special interest groups to remake cities (human living in general, even) around the automobile. I never chose for things to be this way because of how much I like cars (I don't). Almost no one was ever given a real choice for things to be this way. It just happened because it was profitable and because corrupt governments did not force external costs to be paid for by those making the profits.
Car-dependency is a city planning issue, first and foremost. We destroyed the cores of our cities, demolishing block after block of buildings to raise interstates and parking lots.
You will never eliminate car-dependency in rural areas, and you can at best remove the need for it in suburbs with mixed-use zoning (i.e. corner stores and cafes), better funded public transit, and sidewalks.
Cities should first stop expanding interstates and look to remove them entirely. There is absolutely no need to have an interstate through urban cores. Next, you need to redesign streets to make the car part narrower and the sidewalks wider. And you need to repeal zoning ordinances that ban anything but single family homes on 80% of urban residential land. It's ridiculous that there exist single family homes within walking distance of the downtown of cities with a population in the millions when under a properly zoned system, there would be mid-rises.
Rural areas will never be free from car-dependency. Suburbs need light modifications to mixed-use zoning policies and transit, as well as infeasibly high taxes. Urban areas, where walkability should be most feasible, have to remove highways through cores, repeal oppressive zoning laws, and prioritize walkability.
The actual policies are rather straightforward. There are plenty of countries that planned around the automobile and later reverted this mistake, so there exist many playbooks for achieving this worthy goal. Unfortunately, the problem is political rather than technical: too many people are invested in the automobile for a lot of good reasons, and too many people are invested in the current land use regime which make automobiles necessary.
> Cars and car owners have had completely unchecked rights in American cities for decades.
That's like saying fish have unchecked rights in the fishtank. American cities have been built around the automobile, so of course the automobile will have an elevated level of importance. It would be absurd to think anything else. I appreciate people want alternatives, and more power to them, but until cities are organized so that an individual's living radius is miles rather than 10s of miles, the automobile will continue to be king. And rightly so.
> just build new cities less around cars and let people choose that life if they want
We should modify existing cities with better transit and make them hostile to cars, and then offer excellent car transfer points. If you want to use the city, use the train.
> While it’s true we own more cars because we can afford them, a large percentage of Americans require them.
If people stopped buying cars, and stopped voting for people promoting zoning and a car shaped country, shared transports (bus, be they public or private) would take over. The thing is as long as people keep buying and using cars, there is no market for the shared transport. And US people tend to have difficulty to grasp the concept of a non profitability focused public service.
> But cars are different. For many people, driving is not essential. It should be a luxury to drive a huge hunk of metal around a smooth road. By right that shouldn't be affordable, given the current situation. We just got used to cheap cars and cheap fuel, and built our culture and our cities and our lives around that.
So you'll pay to bulldoze people homes and build massively dense downtown housing that offers a better quality of life than the suburbs?
> Over a few decades the availability of cars naturally destroys the usefulness of other modes of transportation unless there is active effort to prevent these effects.
That is simply not true. The car isn't some inherently superior mode of transportation. People will use whatever infrastructure a city invests into most. If you build a city where all the infrastructure budget is spent on cars, then is it any surprise people will use their car to get everywhere?
Once you force people to use cars to get anywhere, then of course that kills local shops, but that didn't happen simply because of the availability of cars. It happened because the city stopped investing into any infrastructure that's not designed for the car.
>Cars aren't individual choices. They are a societal choice that costs a trillion dollars a year to make work. The issue is cars. No matter which way you slice it, we need to remove cars, and that will necessarily mean making driving a car worse.
Where is the better option? Most of what I ever hear proposed or implemented are fair weather or inflexible solutions that don't replace my need for a car[0], and thereby only serve to make my transit experience worse.
[0]And this is having lived in a variety of minor to major urban centers in the States.
There are PEOPLE in the cars. The cities are built for people.
A car is a human amplifier - it takes human transportation and carrying ability and amplifies it. A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc).
Taking it away would be like removing computers because they are too fast so we should all do things by paper again.
> I live without a car and that complicated things.
It complicates things quite significantly. In fact, if you were to remove this constraint then the problem becomes much more tractable. This factor alone limits you to urban locations because public transit alone is hard enough to find and absolutely nowhere in the US had decent public transit outside of an urban core except for a few cities that are already expensive to start with. There are not many of these places where you are not going to be competing with either university students, well-paid 20/30-somethings, or both.
To be honest I don't think any American city is going to provide this and until Americans get over their automobile fetish I don't think any place will even try to serve this requirement. It is quite normal in Europe, but only big, expensive cities work well for people without cars.
> But since so many Americans live in the suburbs without easy access to public transportation, car ownership just makes the best sense for some people.
And I doubt many folks would have a problem with that, except for the fact that car transportation is by far the most heavily subsidized lifestyles around without even factoring environment or societal external costs. Add suburbs to that and the people living the worst possible lifestyle for the environment are being bailed out by the rest of the country who does not live like that.
That's my major problem with car culture in the US. It's basically welfare for the wealthiest of Americans.
This is precisely what happens when you remove cars from cities.
reply