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.
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.
>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.
Primarily: the need to get around in whichever city/area you are in once you get there. In all but the most dense cities (NYC/SF/Chicago), you have to have a car to get around. If I had a high speed train to get between Kansas City and Houston it still wouldn't do any good because you need a car to get around when you arrive. This is true for nearly every area of the USA. We tend to build out, rather than up, making public transport impractical and expensive. Building out does have the advantage of keeping land/home prices relatively low, though.
Many Americans prefer the freedom of being able to go A to B at any time without needing to wait at a bus/subway stop or hoping the transportation system is still running for the day. The amount of money it would cost to get the entire country walk able or reachable by public transit would be astronomical.
The problem is that the US have relatively few cities proper, in the European meaning of the word. If you live in NYC, most of the time you don't need a car, and a ton of people here don't even own one. If you look at, say, Houston, it's a whole different business.
They are required BECAUSE cars are base for the sprawl.
Again even in Denmark and other places that are extremely pro-public-transportation and anti-car, cars are still used by the majority of people because its the base means of transportation which provides the most benefits when you boil it down.
Forcing people to live in big cities with public transportation makes no sense on a continent like America.
Public transportation is only good for very dense areas and becomes extremely expensive once you need to cover less dense areas. This is true even in countries like Denmark which are geographically pretty small.
Denser cities mean more expensive real-estate which means less money for yourself and your family.
The sprawls and laws came after the cars, not the other way around.
That car is not inherently required. It's required because US cities are designed around cars.
There's a great channel called "Not just bikes" that demonstrates what cities look like that don't follow this pattern. Denser buildings, narrower and fewer lanes, less space wasted on parking, better pedestrian crossings and islands, better signaling/timing for pedestrians, etc.
Those cities have lower noise, lower pollution, better economics (road maintenance is a massive cost) and are way safer.
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.
Exactly. Furthermore, the US is a comparatively young country. A lot of cities with great public transport either already existed before cars were around, or had the necessary population density to support mass transit.
I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car (I did take an Uber because I wanted to see what it was like to drive from the left side!). It was fantastic being able to take the Underground anywhere I needed to be, but it was very clear that it was only possible because the city was already there and densely populated before the arrival of cars.
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.
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.
What are you basing that on? In dense cities with good transportation infrastructure people don't own cars nearly as much and the people that do own cars use them less.
Density of the entire country is not super relevant — the vast vast majority of travel is within a city or two away from where you live.
I’m not saying that nobody should ever drive, and if you have a long ways to go between obscure locations it totally makes sense to drive.
But if the US optimized for the 99% of trips that people make, within 30 miles of where they live, then it just comes down to regular urban planning where density can be “whatever you design”.
But yeah this is specific to cities and suburbs, I’m not trying to imply anything about people who live further out or who are making far-away trips.
If your household only needed one car for the monthly trips to grandmas or out for camping in the wilderness, and you didn’t need to drive at all around your city, that would still be a huge win for Americans today. Especially those with kids who depend on the parents for transportation by car.
Unless we intend to depend on unsustainable transportation technologies forever, dense cities are a requirement. I live in a sparsely populated city, and I have to drive 15 minutes to get anywhere. Without a car, this city would be unlivable.
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.
So to clarify, it sounds like you think maintaining the good parts of modern society requires cars? Can I challenge you on that?
First, I'm curious generally where you live. As a Houstonian, I once certainly couldn't imagine life without cars. After all, how else could I visit my friends in Pearland, accessible only by freeway and 30km away? Then I visited Paris and saw that there were different ways to build cities, and that how you build a city dramatically affects how you can get around it.
If you've been to a city like Houston and a city like Paris, do you think we should build more cities like Houston, or more like Paris? To clarify, my perception of Houston is hot concrete and freeways as far as the eye can see. The downsides of this was no freedom of travel as a child, inability to do more than one or two activities in a day, being angry for 40 minutes twice a day when I was commuting to work, and everything being really far apart because most space in the city is dedicated to parking. Whereas my perception in Paris is that children can get around without depending on their parents, a commute could be as simple as walking and sitting on a train (allowing for reading a book or something), and a much denser selection of activities to choose from.
That's without even mentioning the incredible harm to the climate cars and freeway building cause.
If you believe Paris style cities are better than Houston ones, would you also be open to the idea that building even better than Paris could allow us to get rid of private cars entirely?
I can maybe guess at some initial objections so let me add some caveats:
There's plenty of places far away that it doesn't make sense to run bus routes to all of them, probably renting a car is a good solution for these rural areas. I thought it'd be interesting to build car depots at major metropolitan edges, so as density decreases to some amount people can grab a car for their rural destination, and rural visitors can easily drop off their cars when they visit the city.
Obviously, for those with mobility issues, a transit system must be inclusive.
And of course, a city should still be designed in a way for emergency vehicles to get around quickly. Though, the less private cars on the roads, surely the better response times emergency vehicles would have? Not to mention the less busy they would be...
Cars are a necessity in America not because of car advertisements, but because of the low density of American towns and cities. Things are built that way because Americans want them like that, and it's nothing new: Americans started moving to the suburbs in the 1950s, partially because of the availability of inexpensive automobiles and fuel (mostly thanks to the post-war economic boom), and also because they didn't want to live near the black people in the inner cities. Outright racism drove a huge amount of why America looks the way it does now, as far as infrastructure and urban planning go. And it hasn't changed: just look at what Americans on online forums say when you try to suggest they live in dense, walkable cities and use subways. It'll either be comments about how they like having such a huge house and yard, or comments about the people living in inner cities.
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.
We’re not talking about why Seattle is far from Miami. American city sprawl is largely a recent phenomenon (post WWII) and was enabled by the rise of the personal automobile. Even the sprawl-iest of cities (Houston, TX) used to be respectably dense and walkable. The need for a car to achieve basic needs (groceries, school, work) is a phenomenon well less than 100 years old. America has this problem in part because it’s much younger than a lot of European cities, but it’s certainly not purely a function of topography.
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.
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