It's not simply because "they can," but that the towns and cities get built so that things are distributed and not served comparably by bus lines. For example, in my median-density medium-sized city, by USA standards, my grocery store is 16 minutes away by bus, but 5 minutes by car. A coffee shop I'd go to is 29 minutes by bus and 6 minutes by car. Things are much worse for where >60% of Americans live too...
It's because a lot of the problem has to do with how Car centric the US is and Suburbs in particular are extremely car dependent. It's not super clear you can change that without massively rebuilding them.
So take an example: let's say you want to go grocery shopping from your home in a walk-able urban center, it could be a 10 minute walk to get that done.
In my suburban neighborhood a 6 minute drive to the nearest grocery store becomes a 50 minute walk along 3 lane highways.
The main problem with cars in the US is suburban sprawl. A large percentage of the population live in places where a car is required to go anywhere. It's a mess, a disaster of urban planning that's probably impossible to fix.
In Germany, even in the more rural areas, you can typically walk 15-20 minutes to a town with shops, or get a bus even closer than that. That's not so in much of the US. If you don't live in one of the few walkable cities with decent public transit, you're gonna need a car.
Yes, it's difficult if not impossible to live in most places in the US without a car, the only real exception I can think of is NYC.
However, it has nothing to do with the size of the country, it's in the way towns and cities are laid out.
For one thing, discrete residential and commercial zones separated by vast distances and linked by highway are the norm. This makes it impractical to walk or bike to work or shopping. In suburbia, there is no such thing as a corner deli...
Except that cars have influenced the way we build towns and cities: separate everything by non-walkable, non-busable distances because the basic assumption is that everyone has a car.
Public transit "sucks" for a number of reasons, many of them car-related: (-) buses have to share roads with cars, so they have to put up with the congestion they are trying to solve, (-) money that would have been spent on public transit is being spent on road expansions to "solve traffic", and others.
> cars are the worst solution except for all the others.
This doesn't explain cities that have successful public transit systems...
We wouldn't have built our offices and homes so far from each other if the expectation was to walk/bike/bus everywhere.
Unfortunately this is a chicken-and-egg problem, where things may need to get worse temporarily for things to get better.
The US still hasn't finished industrializing/urbanizing, so we still have relatively large rural populations that drive longer distances to go to and from stores schools etc. The schools can't even cover the area they serve with bus service for children. Those areas will continue to meed cars, and they aren't a corner case, they are still roughly a fifth of the population.
And buses dont work that well in suburbia and that is over half of the population. Only about a quarter of the US lives in denser urban environments.
And on top of that, zoning in the US makes it basically impossible to reach densities where public transit works well. The last 50 years of construction were entire designed around everyone owning an automobile
Those are of course true at face value, but (other than the furniture example) they highlight the deeper problem with American urbanism.
A train is not necessarily a substitute for a car. For example, I have never needed a train to go food-shopping, because in all 7 different locations in which I have lived I have always lived at most a 10-minute-walk away from a supermarket (often significantly less). This was in different towns and cities in Spain, France and the UK.
Regarding going to school, my parents never needed to drive me to school. That's because I lived 5/10 minutes walking distance from my primary school and my high school (to which some of my classmates came by train, metro or bus). This was in Madrid.
And when I need to go door-to-door with no direct route, I virtually always have a trivial train/metro/bus combination available which at rush hour is faster than a car. This is in a town outside of Barcelona.
I'm not saying that all America's cities (let alone its suburbs) just need more public transport and less restrictive zoning as a magical solution. The overall residential density and cultural expectations are what they are. However, the very reason that this solution appears unfeasible is part of a self-reinforcing spiral that makes even minor gradual improvements less likely to be effective, thus less likely to be implemented, thus making other minor improvements less likely to be effective... and so it goes.
This is an extremely simplistic view of the situation. In reality, many of the largest cities are almost entirely unusable without a car while many small cities (in the extreme case, most college towns) have excellent walkability and public transit because of their dense layout. I have personally experienced these. This is not a problem of urbanization to large cities, but of overall urban design.
It is common in Europe for small towns and villages to be quite walkable, have a large relative percentage multi-family housing, and have a decent train or bus connection to a regional hub. Of course, they have the advantage of being around longer than the automobile has existed.
The problem in the US is mostly cultural. Most rural/semi-rural/exurban people think nothing of an hour driving each way. So why would they want what they perceive as a tiny lot, with more expensive housing where they can hear their neighbors when they can get a huge lot and drive a little more?
The non-cultural part of the problem is that the drive-everywhere paradigm is so heavily invested that even in a small walking-oriented European -style village, everyone would need to own a car anyway. If you built a train to a regional hub it wouldn’t solve the problem of the regional hub itself having terrible public transit. Plus, it’s a lot easier to build a road than a train politically.
Again, more than half of Americans do not live in a city. Being able to get from one city center to another solves none of the problems that having a car solves.
Chances are pretty high that living further from the city with a car is more cost effective than living in a city near transit with no car for a lot of people and jobs.
That, of course, is why people do it. I wish it wasn't true, I wish things were like Switzerland where every remote mountain town still has fast and effective connections to the national transit system. But they aren't, this is America.
No, American cities are more spread out mainly because many Americans don't want to live in small apartments, and cars enabled that.
Public transit is much less convenient and desirable when the 1) distance between adjacent stops is too large, 2) there are too many stops between different destinations, and/or 3) the stops at a particular location are too infrequent. I think all of those undesirable factors increase as density decreases.
Using a personal car effectively reduces #1 to zero, #2 to zero, and increases #3 to infinity.
The problem with rural areas and cars is not usually getting from unincorporated settlement to the big city, it’s getting from your home in an unincorporated settlement to the Main Street of the closest city with a Walmart. Especially as you look eastward into the US, there is a spider web of tiny junction cites, settlements, town, etc, all would be difficult to serve with mass transit effectively.
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.
Only true if you ignore the history of American zoning laws, and Americas obsession with the car.
Current zoning laws in most of the US make it pretty much impossible to build anything except suburbs, attached to ginormous parking lots you call cities, by massive highways. It’s not hard to see why building better public infrastructure is so difficult when the current layout of most American cities means it’s difficult to even walk between shops on the same road, so public transport can’t move people between pedestrian hubs.
Changing that fundamental issue with American cities would require people to realise that current approach (which they grew up with, and was touted as the future for most of their lives) is broken and needs to change. As much as it needs to change, I can understand why people have a lot of difficulty accepting that.
I think this problem is bigger in many US cities compared to Europe, because of the urban sprawl. There is almost no way to make it efficient to go from most people's houses to the city using public transport, since the area to cover is so great.
To me, the solution is to re-think why everyone needs to go somewhere by car to get anything done. Why not have a grocery store closer? Some restaurants? Everyone having to travel from their house to the city centre to do basically anything is so wasteful. Most of this is because of zoning laws.
Some cities simply can't do this, such as Los Angeles, Dallas, and Atlanta. It's not in their DNA. Things are simply too far apart and the infrastructure couldn't hold it. Other cities are moving toward "no cars" by simply allowing gridlock to make driving a car worthless. I visit NYC very often, and we used to take cabs all the time. Now, we never do, unless we have so much luggage we can't manage - it's a nightmare getting a cab through Manhattan. They might as well close most of Broadway, it's just a quagmire.
You seem to presuppose that people couldn't possibly get around in any way other than by driving, which is simply not true in general.
Obviously most US cities are extremely car-centric today but that's hardly evidence that it necessarily must always be so.
Having everyone use individual vehicles for all transportation needs is generally fine when cities are small but it scales very poorly. That's what we're witnessing here.
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