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 disagree, I think they’re completely adequate for the majority of people. Between that and a backbone of busses and subways and trains, cars in the city basically don’t need to exist. They act as a crutch for shitty city planning, since you don’t have to (and sometime can’t) build communities where what you need is close to where you live.
According to the census, 80.7% of americans live in urban areas. We really should be creating spaces where people don't have to have a car to do the basic necessities. When talking about car dependence, it's about creating viable options that are more sustainable and more equitable for getting where you need to go. Kids, elderly, disabled people all have issues driving and if we create a way for them to get around without a car, it makes the city a better place.
The issue isn't cars specifically. The issue is our built environment requires cars. Maybe more things should just be down the block.
Renting cars when you need them, buses, trains? How do you think old people who can't drive anymore get around in Europe?
Cars are obviously useful for the country side, but that's not really the issue. The issue is that cities in America are designed with cars in mind first, the whole idea of the suburbs is a car-centric city design. Reducing the need for cars is a huge ordeal that doesn't just touch transportation but housing and jobs as well.
I think it's pretty conceited to think we can have both sustainability and car-centric design at the same time. But it is possible to transition, I mean, the city I live in (Melbourne, Australia) has lots of suburbs but you can get anywhere by tram, train or bus and this obviously includes residential suburbs and the city center. It's a little crazy to me when you say people don't live five minutes away from bus stops, I just can't imagine how you'd get around such a living situation. I mean, what do you do when you go out drinking? How do you get home? I guess you rely on ubers and taxis?
But reducing the need for cars of course means increasing the means people for people to go places in different methods of transporation and changing the way our cities are structured. To me, starting to invest in public transporation is the right way of moving forward, rather than subsidies to electrify cars.
Realistically, we share enough of an origin, destination, and schedule for the differences to be irrelevant. Most of us go to work at the same time, to the same areas, then go back to the same residential areas. That's exactly why rush-hour congestion happens. If it wasn't like this, cars would indeed be a good solution.
I live in a city with very good public transport. My average tram trip is about 20 minutes, and there is usually one that goes directly to where I want to go. I live within a hundred meters of a tram stop - and this is far from unusual. I also live within a mile of a rail station, and there is a bus stop within a hundred meters.
As I see it, there are two intertwined problems:
1. American cities are built around the car. Homes are distributed across vast areas, in the form of suburbs.
2. Many cities have very bad public transport options. This makes cars more viable, despite the inherent inefficiency of what is essentially a road-train with a hundred drivers.
If you experience transport in the context of a society built around the car, then sure, a car is going to seem viable. Vast amounts of capital has gone into the system that makes it viable. Living and working patterns are all built around it. It doesn't change the fact that fundamentally, physically, a car takes more money to build, run, takes up more space to carry fewer people, requires more infrastructure - and, even given a network of roads vastly more comprehensive than any train or tram system ever designed, works very badly.
Suburbs are also horrible from an efficiency perspective.
You assume the issue is binary: cars or no cars. Nobody is asking for no cars. We want less cars.
Right now, cars are first class citizens in every American city. Motorists get what they want, and walkers, cyclists, and transport users get what's left over.
It doesn't have to be that way. European cities get by fine without cars in city centers.
Do you really need a car to get to work in midtown Manhattan? Why are the 2 subway systems with stops every 5th block, 3 rail systems, and 2 bus systems that serve it not good enough? Do you really need 6 car lanes on 6th Ave while cyclists fear for their lives in the traffic and pedestrians smoosh on the sidewalks?
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.
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.
Do you live in the USA? We don’t “prefer” cars. Cars are the only way to get around in this country. There are no options for a majority of people.
It’s not a preference. It’s a choice shoved down our throats by decades of destroying urban cores, bulldozing poor communities/neighborhoods in favor of massive highway projects, and removing bustling streets of human activity with useles parking lots.
The suburban experiment is a massive failure on all levels. It’s not scalable. It’s incredibly wasteful. Federal/state/local governments dump trillions of dollars on maintenance of this fucking mess.
>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.
I agree with everything above minus the last part. Bikes, walking, and mass transit can (and should) absolutely replace car usage if the infrastructure is there to support it. This has been proven in many European cities, Americans are just stubborn and carpilled.
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 see replacing cars in major urban cities with high population density. And I'd love to see more options for long distance travel in the US (like fast trains).
However, arguments for getting rid of cars seem to ignore the fact that public transit just isn't economical in areas with low population density. And even in urban areas, there are situations where having a car is very beneficial, such as grocery shopping. If you're a single individual it's probably manageable without a car, but for a family of four, you probably can't carry enough food for more than two or three days. If there were no cars in the city, I have no idea how you would purchase larger items like furniture.
Every anti-car argument I've seen has assumed a particular lifestyle. If you really want to get rid of cars, you'll need replacements that can solve the problems of almost everyone.
I am advocating against car dependency, a particular style of development in the US that few Europeans understand until they live in it.
I am not advocating for getting rid of all cars, or even saying that car-dependent areas should be banned! I'm advocating for allowing those who want to choose something other than a car to have that choice. However, the way that US law is constructed, and 99% of land use is planned, a car is needed to fetch a loaf of bread, get to daycare, visit friends, or to perform any of the basics of life. Imagine your house is an island, and every other destination is an island, and your car is the only way to get between them. That's the assumption of the entire US planning professions.
I see you never lived anywhere with decent public transportation. Better public transportation infrastructure + increased density + parking is expensive + increased traffic = reduction in car usage over time.
It's America's problem of its own making, you need to find a solution, just shoving more lanes for cars, more suburbs with single detached homes, is not solving absolutely anything. No, not every rural small town will have Dutch-levels of access to trains but you can definitely improve the situation on the densely populated areas of the East and West coast, just have to get rid of this obnoxious and gauche car-addiction.
The longer you take to transition out of car-dependence, the more painful it will be.
Good luck on solving it, doesn't seem like American society put much value in it, you seem to like to suffer in traffic.
Without viable mass transit in most American cities the "less cars" mentality falls flat. As a society ruled by "NIMBY" we just don't have the social will, nor seem to care enough about one another to move anything productive forward. As another comment said, the nations that reduced dependence on autos did no decades ago. These towns/cities/suburbs were literally built around a society where everyone has a car. Very difficult/impossible to change at this point without a major catastrophe or other externally influencing event.
In today's age, cars are a necessity in the US largely in part because our cities have been designed with limited amounts of mixed zoning in downtown areas. Many cities in the US were restructured around major highways and have yet to recover from this (Atlanta being the one I can testify for). Car manufacturers have had a very tight grip on USA urban planning throughout the 20th century[1], and the rise of suburbs and accessible (at the time) single-family housing outside of metro areas has helped solidify the presence of cars in the lives of many Americans. Furthermore, our federal and state governments have done little to move people away from cars, despite the fact that the US economy doesn't rely on car manufacturing like it used to.
I am pretty anti-car myself, but the last point of the post makes me think that the author hasn't seen how personal transportation plays in ENORMOUS role in the everyday lives of families who live outside of major cities in the US. I'm a young 20-something pursuing a career in tech, so I'm part of the demographic who is most able to avoid car ownership.
I went to school in the south, and got to see firsthand how many of the thousands of people who worked for my university were only able to get to their jobs because they owned a car. My school, like many others in the US (Virginia Tech, UIUC, UPenn, etc.) was out in the middle of nowhere, and was by far the largest employer in the county (and surrounding counties). My school subsidized a fleet of several buses to make public transportation feasible, but those bus routes often were 5-10X slower than personal transportation and were undersupplied and undermaintained, making it difficult to use them as true replacements to car.
pjc50 and my post indicate the same happens in Europe, it isn't just the US. otherwise, agreed, I don't think anybody argued cities need more cars and less public transport.
Piggybacking to plug notjustbikes on youtube who does a nice job of outlining why the US's obsession with cars and single-family-zoned housing areas has dug us into the value system you're describing. That is not to say that working to fix these vast infrastructure problems is a simple or remotely carbon neutral feat (Amsterdam has taken 50 years to get there). We got here because of choices about how transportation/freedom in the US should look (many lobbied by the car industry). I'm not saying cars shouldn't exist. I don't think that's realistic with an area as vast as the US. But places like Amsterdam and Tokyo can clue us in that it doesn't need to be like this in reasonably dense areas.
What if we could eliminate the need for cars in many areas by creating infrastructure that's vastly more efficient, cheaper, safer, and healthier to use? We already have a lot of this technology (bikes/trains/buses/trams + relevant infrastructure). Building this would be expensive and create a lot of pollution. Does that mean we shouldn't try?
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.
reply