Also, the violence and sexual assaults on public transport is getting worse, the times that it does work it's completely overloaded, and the prices are insanely high and quite frankly becoming unaffordable with the insanely high inflation and interest rates.
A city that was altered greatly to accommodate pedestrians has become a city that does not accommodate anyone. This is likely to be the outcome in other cities that take similar measures, governments always fail eventually, once it becomes impractical to use cars the country's economy will suffer greatly as a result, because there will come a time when the government just decides they don't care about public transport anymore and it can be as horrible as possible because nobody has any choices anymore.
The UK government for example is reducing subsidies for the railway and raising prices sometimes even 12-14% per year. This would be unimaginable 10 years ago. We have many railway workers who feel underpaid and some that feel they deserve the same pay as speciality doctors. This gets directly paid for by price rises. It is strike again /again/ for the railways.
I think the time is now that governments don't care about public transport
You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity. While programmers can live in one room for years and just use Zoom for everything, others can't.
Sorry to say, but most of my European friends who were much anti-car, have changed their opinion after... buying a car. Being able to move in whatever direction at whatever time and being able to carry some stuff in your trunk makes your life convenient. Add to that the privacy and your personal AC and you won't be able to top it off. In South Africa personal vehicle means security at night.
The only places where this works are the places where: 1. People live for retirement and pleasure. 2. The road infrastructure is just straight hell. (Like Portugal. It's bad in Lisbon. It is terrible in there). 3. Where you are not under any circumstances can be robbed by a random person on a street.
So, the so-called cars problem is not something solvable. You just have to handle other factors to and cars will follow. I've seen cities where improvement in economic and social conditions led to the development of nice pedestrian and bike infrastructure.
And let's not forget, that if you want a more fair society, you cannot assume that just everybody can afford a car. I went to university by bus and it was a horrible experience. I could only dream of the modern cheap electric vehicles. But still, the city I studied has barely any infrastructure for this, and you risk your life every time, even though it would be PERFECT for this.
This is such a modern take on life, we have to run everywhere to consume as much as possible as fast as possible. The irony is that you're probably missing out more of what makes life "life" by being entirely driven by FOMO and checking boxes of the infinite TODO list.
What's funny is that the faster the means of transportation the more time we spend time in them, commute times are getting longer, you're most likely literally missing opportunities due to cars more than anything else.
Even if it is widely dangerous to do so (most american cities i've ever visited)
You can hem and haw - but its pretty bang on
When you then add finding parking at the ends of your trip to it it is crazyly more efficient timewise.
Now even copenhagen denmark has rain causing many more to take a car or public transport (that works).
But it is very clear that the time argument is simply not true.
Now you can argue convenience at the start of the trip vs agony in the end (finding that parking space)
Or for "need to lug an ikea sofa across time"
Or even for "my kids and familiy needs to go as well"
That's super fine, and all true - but 70-80% of ALL trips in cars are by 1 person sitting in 1 car. So moving just 10% of car users to alternate means free up a tremendous amount of space in the city.
I love my car, my bikes and my public transports and each does something nice for me - but seriously do you think cities like l.a. are even livable on a human scale - people don't even walk if the distance is over 1000meters.
I certainly agree with the idea of "uhm lets try to plan for otherthings than cars going forward"
'In Romania, one cyclist dies every two days'
> You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity.
This is what’s known as "fomo". Arguments driven on fear never sustainable.
Also apparently you have never been stuck in bumper to bumper traffic in the aftermath of a massive event. Or maybe county closes major roadway for repairs. Or a _single_ motor vehicle accident brings an entire highway to a halt for _hours_ (many people rubber necking as well …)
The other factor I found is that quality and affordability of housing is inversely proportinal to access to services/public transit; that is, in the Netherlands you can live like a king in eastern Groningen for the same amount of money you buy a starter home in the Randstad, but to get to the nearest city you're looking at at least an hour's travel (by car or bus/train).
I will be very surprised if there's anywhere in the world where the expected loss from being robbed on the street while walking exceeds the expected loss from being in a car accident while driving.
Getting in a car is by far the most dangerous thing most people do routinely.
In America the contrast is stark. Most of our public spaces prioritize cars instead of people. I’m lucky to live near the beltline in Atlanta. It’s incredible to see how people flock to the beltline for a car free experience. It’s such a rare thing in America. Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it. Supply on the other hand is unfortunately very difficult to deliver.
Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
I spent some time in NYC during the Giuliani years, after the city did a lot of work cleaning it all up: stopping turnstile jumpers, removing graffiti, more police, etc. It was great. You'd get the occasional guy that jumps on, makes a speech about how he's raising money for something or other, and walks around trying to sell chocolate bars. And there was the occasional dangerous person, insisting on getting up in your face.
So long as this sort of behavior remains at a very low level, something like maybe once every couple of weeks, that's probably okay. But public transit loses all appeal if it happens often. If it rises to the level of violence, everybody starts thinking about the suburbs.
Public transit requires a certain level of unspoken agreement. "We will all behave in this manner." If this unspoken agreement is broken often enough, then it must be enforced. If it is not, and other options present themselves, people will choose the other options.
This happened en masse many decades ago in America. Those that could decamped for other places where their social expectations were met.
I'm a big supporter of urbanism. I loathe the time I spend in my car, and I don't even have that far of a commute, but I have zero other options if I want to live where crime is low and the schools aren't dysfunctional. Until this is addressed, there is no argument about commuter density or efficiency of movement or anything else the proponents of public transit like to talk about that will make a lick of difference.
The worst argument anybody can make is "but that's just life in the big city!" If so, then I'm not going to live and raise my family in the big city. Airy-fairy principles of efficiency or an arguable notion of convenience will not take precedence over safety and quality.
It’s emotionally taxing when you need to keep your guard up all the time. I can’t even imagine how much worse it would be on someone if they had kids to tow around as well.
I no longer speed when I drive because I want the kids to be safe and the insane rage other drivers send our way because I'm going 40 km/hr on a 40 km/hr road. I've had driver try to force us off the road, tail gate us hard, pass us across double yellow lines, scream at us.
Driving is exhausting.
Wait until those kids are old enough to drive themselves. That's when the real terror kicks in.
Cars certainly are dangerous, but the reality of commuting is a lot of it is done at very low speeds. Car wrecks are generally simply expensive, rather than dangerous.
The difference is that when driving, your safety is at least somewhat in your control. Worried about getting t-boned at an intersection? You look before you go.
When you consider the amount of driving that goes on in America, cars are shockingly safe. I saw a number that was like 1.1 fatalities per 100 million miles driven, but something like 1,000 accidents per 100 million miles.
(Okay, so I did a search, and Google's AI says 1.11 for the US, and average of 0.92 for high-income countries. And apparently the people in Hungary are maniacs, because they're at 2.05)
(edit to add: Google AI also says that NYT found 1.2 violent crimes for every million subway rides. 6 million people ride the subway every day, so there's a point of comparison.)
In any event, I don't want to drive. I'd rather hop on a train or light rail or anything else. But that is not a choice that is available to me unless I start making seven figures a year so that money can insulate my family.
People run red lights, they speed, they swerve, they get in fender-benders and flee, they honk, they smoke weed and drink vodka while they drive. All illegal, all common occurrences. And I live in a wealthy, safe suburb.
All of your complaints about lack of pro social behavior applies to drivers too.
That literally all of society.
The American idea that you live in suburban home that is a quasi gated community, drive into a parking garage, then go up to an office, only interact with workmates and then driving back out with no social interaction other then work is just not how most society worked for all of history. And its not how the US worked until the 1960.
The reality is, violence and death on the roads, is far more common then on public transport. There are tons road rage incidents, an absurdly high number. Those lead to all kinds of problems and quite often shootings. You are in more danger then on public transport generally. And yet I almost never hear about that when Americans talk about transport policy.
But yes, there does need to be rules enforcement. But on the other hand its also true that the US often has very user-hostile design principles in pretty much every aspect of their city design and policing policy. And that often invites or re-enforces bad behavior.
Cars are far and away the biggest threat to my safety, and the source of all the harrassment I receive while out in public. I mean, every now and then some guttersnipe blurts out incoherencies at me, but that's not something to be afraid of.
I regard driving, in cities, to be an inherently anti-social activity. If you want a healthy community, you got to be out in it, not sealed off in a protective cage.
I don't get hassled either, but it's not about me. My job as a husband and father is to protect my family.
Of course, motor vehicle crashes are the second biggest killer of kids after guns. I don't know where homeless people sit on the threat scale but it's a negligibly small amount.
In any event, homeless people are low on the threat scale because people generally avoid riding a Schwinn through homeless encampments, which should be perfectly obvious but I guess not.
Here's a fun fact for you: statistically cyclists live longer than non-cyclists, and that's in spite of all the hazards they have to deal with while out riding.
Because we insist on trying to privatize everything, refuse to provide a safe floor for people, and make poverty and mental health challenges moral issues (meaning we degrade people who experience them and leave them to fend for themselves) we create an environment where true community is impossible.
Unless, of course, we apply authoritarian and abusive policing controls against those we've left behind, rounding them up and sending them somewhere else. Which of course achieves a temporary "peace" at the cost of a deep insecurity and fear, because we all know the moment we slip or step out of line, we're gone.
It really is toxic and has led directly to society breaking down to the point where we're now falling into full scale fascism.
I take it there's either no toxic mix of individuality and capitalism, so can you confirm whether it's a collectivist state (no individual expression allowed) or non-capitalist, and which economic system it is instead?
OP is right. The demand is huge and supply is tiny. Even with those scary panhandlers people are jamming onto public transport (when it actually exists) and going far far out of their way to experience walkable areas.
> zero other options if I want to live where crime is low and the schools aren't dysfunctional
Crime in NYC is exceedingly low and the schools are great. Why don't you simply move to Chelsea or the Upper West Side?
Maybe most but there's plenty of public space that doesn't. People choose to live around the public spaces that do. Some even try to change that instead of moving somewhere that doesn't. The great thing about America is that there's plenty of everything for everyone, but it's not just going to come to you.
Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive.
Having grown up in the Netherlands and having a decision to make where we want our kids to grow up (US spouse), this feels painful to read. I suppose the SWE salaries aren't worth it.
Also this is one of the best towns to cycle in the Netherlands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w&ab_channel=NotJu...
And hello from Houten :-). If you’re here and want to talk bikes maybe we could have a coffee some time!
- A largish house in the subs, and a nice car that you'll be seeing a lot of, unfortunately.
- A tiny house closer to work.
While European SWE salaries are significantly lower, they can generally buy you a decent house close to work.
Even in Europe it’s hard to find a decent affordable home where you can raise a couple kids in places you can live without a car.
These 2 houses are 100 meters from each other but you have to walk 1700 meters and most of the distance is without any sidewalk, only "Odell Cir" has it. The small amount of sidewalk is so narrow and close to the cars that it is hardly a sidewalk.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/28.8760292,-81.9827997/28.87...
Edit: compare to this: longer distance for cars but there is a direct walking path: https://www.google.dk/maps/dir/55.6714604,12.3530984/55.6716...
The US just radically and systematically destroyed its own cities, Europe did its fair share of that, but simply not as bad. I think what saved Europe is that they were behind the US in investment, and when they finally wanted to adopt those US polices, people had already figured out how shit it was, and in many cities the worst urban highways were prevented.
In the US, very few cities survived and very few highways were stopped.
European cities are do not have more evolvability, in fact, large US roads actually means you have more op. Its more a matter of the US refusing to evolve. Its political far more then an aspect of the build environment.
One immediate one off the top of my head is the Long Island Expressway: when it was constructed, it was built in mostly-undeveloped or under-developed land, and space could have been reserved for a rail line running parallel to the highway.
Another is less obvious: the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line in northern NJ was constructed in the late 90s and early 00s, including a disused rail right-of-way that went from the southern part of Jersey City to the southern tip of Bayonne, near the Bayonne Bridge that connects to Staten Island (a notorious transit desert). While there were plans to extend the light rail line when the bridge was raised in the late 00s, it was decided against, even though it would've been a boon to all three cities/boroughs.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/parents-charged-manslaughter-boy-s...
Just as a counter point, I grew up in suburban Massachusetts and this wasn't the case for me. My friends and I rode all over town on our bikes. Bike lanes weren't a thing back then at all, and this was in the 90s when violent crime was at its peak in the US. We just tried to stick to streets with less traffic, rode on sidewalks where available, and took alternate routes through the woods, the cemetery, private property, etc. to avoid busy areas. This is anecdotal, of course, but no kid from my town ever got hit by a car when I was growing up (one kid did die chasing a ball into the street, though).
I'm all for building bike lanes and public transport. And also not all suburban areas are equal - I've definitely seen areas of the US where I would not feel safe riding a bike even as an adult. But I think whatever is keeping kids confined to their homes is just as much a cultural change as it is a lack of infrastructure.
No amount of cultural change is going to make suburban charlotte a good place for 8 year olds to bike alone.
Drivers will come out of nowhere and complain, will start suddenly caring about people with disabilities (of course in no car areas we will figure out how emergency vehicles, deliveries, and people with disabilities will get around).
Sure our public transit system needs a lot of work, but that is not an argument for keeping the current car centric system we have in place now.
Cars obviously have their use cases and I can also understand why most of the US will never do this. But the car culture within cities is insane.
The "air pollution" argument is disappearing fast as well with the ongoing transition to EVs.
What we need is a good balance. Pedestrians, bicycles, public transport, and cars.
All that's left is the enormous amount of death, destruction, and injury motor vehicles cause through crashes. The leading cause of death for children!
Edit to @Zigurd below: What have all you guys replies to do with air pollution? You don't have to agree with my original comment but please at least try to bring something to the discussion. I feel like I stepped into a meeting of an anti-car cult...
Every single thread or post about anything adjacent to cars or public transportation devolves into this. There is hardly any nuance, little effort is made to respond in good faith, and there are insults and insinuations thrown around all the time. Anyone perceived as being on the “wrong side” is instantly given a label and mocked. You don’t even have to be overzealous about it. Even the most benign comment will have someone piling on usually. “Just one more bus bro”
I wrote it because in my experience a "balance" between modes can mean something like Amsterdam, or it can mean the status quo in the USA-outside-NYC, which is to say extreme and punishing car dependence. Sorry if I had you wrongly pegged. My belief is that a good balance is radically fewer cars in city centers. What's your idea of a good balance?
This review is a good jumping-off point for research on the subject if you are interested: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096669232...
Amsterdam is a great example [0] and well-known for a lot of tourists, with the city center being the tourism hub, the zones around it for living, west/northwest for industry/shopping, south for highrise offices and football stadiums, etc. Most tourists won't go that far out though.
[0] https://www.amsterdamsights.com/about/neighborhoods.html
Even European subburbs are generally better, smaller roads, more mixed use, more trees, more dynamics, more commercial and building times mixed in. The extreme separation between building types that became the standard in US zoning-codes simple never happened to the same extent in Europe.
Car centric design caused these problems, and moving away from car centric design is how you fix them.
It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.
> It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.
This is such a stupid populist argument. It's poor people that are hurt the most by lack of access to affordable dense multi family housing units in north american cities. Making poor families move further and further away from cities to find housing and then waste multiple hours a day sitting in traffic (and waste huge amounts of money on cars) is a ridiculous solution to affordability in cities.
It's rich people who can afford detached single family houses close to city centers, or fancy condos in skyscrapers. It's everyone else who are better served by more modest 3-4 story tall dense housing units.
Sure, there's public transport... but only until it takes six times longer than driving a car - and that's not even counting all the issues public transport has in many places, which some people deny even exist, although doesn't matter to me because I just experienced them first hand way too many times (I have never owned a car until recently).
At that point, you might as well move farther out to a nicer house, less expenses and just drive a bit longer.
Obviously in larger cities it will take longer to travel from one extreme to the other, but that is a similar problem as trying to travel to another city. Trips that are 20km long need to be treated as such, no matter if they're in the same city or not.
Some suburbs in Barcelona and Madrid have more than 20K hab/km2. And they are expected to have as low car transit as other European cities with around 3K to 6K hab/km2.
It is obvious that even though lots of people might be able to switch to alternative ways of transportation car is still extremely useful for many use cases.
The solution is the right city design: more populated areas in the district centers, and less densely populated areas towards the outskirts. Spain is terrible at this, as they design high density areas everywhere. Americans do the opposite, it's mostly all low density.
A balanced solution is how dutch cities are designed. You can live in your own garden house, while having access to commerce, offices in higher density areas, just by 5-20minutes by bike (up to 5-6km).
if everyone is driving, noone is. This is simple game theory and a system fault happens when there are too many cars. You can't widen city streets.
For example: public transportation in NY is often faster and cheaper than a car + parking.
Actually, the bigger the city, the more efficient public transportation is. Just look at LA with it's 16 lanes of car traffic, and compare it to London - the fundamental difference being that LA has no real public transport and London has an extensive tube and train network. Oh, and London has about twice as many people as LA... which one would you rather be a commuter in?
Just an example: a colleague of mine was commuting from Reading to Canary Wharf (before the Elizabeth line even), this is now an hour long train ride, if you tried to take it by car it would be double that - and then you'd have to find parking for your car in Canary Wharf, which is not easy and very expensive.
That has the consequence that all people wants to live in the city center, and not in peripherals areas. This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it, while the salary that you get in the city rests more or less the same. Having a lot of people concentrated living in a small place produces also other unwanted effects, that lower the quality of living.
Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers of 20 floors but with nice houses where everyone can afford, for example, to have its own property, with its own garden, its own peace, without having being forced to share its living space with people he didn't choose.
To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way. Thanks to car we can think of reclaiming villages where all the population migrated to the cities in the past years.
Example in Italy, where I live, why should I go to live in Milan, where houses cost 10 times the rest of the country, while having a car and a job that allows me to remote work at least half the week I can live in a small village near Milan and reach it by car when needed?
To me a society without cars is a less free society, in fact the development of the USA to me is to take as an example, while where they didn't have cars is the Soviet Union, and look at it...
Look around at places with very high car use (especially in North America) and you'll discover that this solution simply does not scale. Cars take up a gigantic amount of room on roads, and even gigantic highways like Onatrio's 401 [1] just have not been able to keep up with the level of sprawl that occurs when people move out of the city to surrounding suburbs and commute into the city by car.
Adding lanes to the highway does not help and just induces more traffic on it, and it also causes all the surrounding villages to sprawl outwards until they become indistinct blobs that merge into the nearby metropolitan city.
Trains are a much better solution to this problem because they have way better throughput, don't destroy cities with massive highways and parking garages, and encourage denser development that lets nearby villages retain their character and size.
Live remotely in low density villages in italy if you want, you can accommodate everybody's car just fine there - but when you need to visit Milan, don't complain that it won't let you bring a car in with you and they kindly ask you to leave it outside & take public transit to reach the center.
There is nowhere to go without driving. Kids who grow up in the suburbs are pretty much trapped on an island. There’s nowhere to explore because the surrounding 5 mile radius might be nothing but more developments
I am writing this comment from a Italo Treno train, having been in Paris, Switzerland, Milan and Venice over the past week and half, so I have now seen the other side of this conversation.
The only freedom that cars bring is when travelling out of the city to remote places. Switzerland's inter-city rail service is so good I would never want to drive between cities if I lived there.
> This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it
Except that in some of the largest cities in the world rents aren't that high.
> Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers
Go to Switzerland, it look like that before cars and still does. You can get affordable houses and apartments on rail lines where you can be in the city in 15min.
You don't need to own a car to live in a house with a garden if you have proper public transport.
And you can live in the city and have plenty of access to nature as well. And cites don't need to be ugly and ful of skyscrapers.
> To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way.
People living remotely with cars are the opposite of sustainable, in fact, literally every study on the subject shows the opposite. Not communing makes it better, but its still nowhere near as good as a city.
Citation is really needed for this one. Especially if you consider Swiss real estate "affordable."
Most European villages and town are unreachable without cars.
Some can already consider themselves lucky if there is a daily connection into one direction.
Everyone likes to think we are all living in Paris, Berlin within city boundaries.
Imagine a city without personal cars in its inner limits. Residents who decide to own a personal car can park it in a Park&Ride which also includes unlimited transit access for the duration of the parking.
Deliveries, you say? Those aren't personal cars, but I'll comply. Businesses will be able to drive in the cities, within the permitted times/routes.
Emergency vehicles? Those aren't personal cars, either. They're also allowed.
What I need is a transport infrastructure that cares about people that live outside city central area.
Maybe it will blow your mind that with P+R some of us take about 2h to come to work, versus 45m with a car.
Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy? P+R isn't even a known concept.
It is dangerous for pedestrians to walk on sidewalks, because cyclists on their electric motorbikes are driving there 30 mph!
Aggresive off-leash dogs are everywhere! Entire cities, parks and streets are one big dog toilet!
What I suggest instead: make electricity super cheap use all the ways possible create space for charger system but let brands compete( don't over regulate) Allow autonomous system to operate, be a trailblazer in the field.
Your EV argument does not address the main issue of urban sprawl in car-centric design and how the ever-increasing infrastructure costs (and decreased revenue: parking lots dont create wealth) are bankrupting cities.
I've ridden public transit in a bunch of cities, and this makes a huge difference to how welcoming the experience is. Hong Kong is #1 for me. The trains and stations are clean enough to eat off of - probably cleaner than my car. On/off boarding is fast and orderly even during peak travelling hours. This is not a universal, and there are definitely cities where I would hesitate to take public transit if I had some other choice - which is the root of the problem when you're trying to convince a population to fund and use such a system instead of bringing their cars.
I am in Madison, Wisconsin and we have a number of areas like State Street where walking is the norm: https://visitdowntownmadison.com/
By and large this is not the case but it isn't as if it's unimaginable what it would be like.
All of Greece is car oriented. Of course if you stay near Acropolis you get the impression of walk-ability. Spain outside of the historic city centers is car oriented. Average mileage traveled by car per person in Germany is about the same as is in Canada.
I can continue your generalization about my home city - Montreal. Which is walk-able .. but not really, see the second part here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yDtLv-7xZ4
In fact, if you use their transportation network, you actually get somewhat better treatment: in all of the parks, there's a shorter walk to/from the transit terminal than to your car, and in one of them (Magic Kingdom), you are required to park a distance from the park and take a connecting ferry.
Europeans must marvel at being able the size of living accommodations in the US. They can not even fathom in their brains what it's like not to be crammed into a tiny 20sqm flat.
A map link showing the current state:
https://kartat.tampere.fi/oskari?zoomLevel=7&coord=327979.56...
Paris may not yet be at Amsterdam’s scale, but only 5 % of daily trips in the city are made by car. It’s staggering that roughly 50 % of public space is allocated to cars [1], despite their minimal share of actual mobility. And I'm all in favor in further reducing car lanes, parking spots...
[0] in french - https://www.airparif.fr/actualite/2025/comment-la-qualite-de... [1] https://www.transportshaker-wavestone.com/urban-transports-s...
It's the same everywhere, as most European cities are dominated by 20-35yo people. They vote for green parties and then move out when they have children, as they realize that the policies they supported are not child- or family-friendly at all. The extreme example is Seoul, with its zones where kids are forbidden. It's a shame, as families require more public services and infrastructure (hospitals, schools, playgrounds, swimming pools, and so on), but they are being pushed away by childless youngsters who hate cars. Unfortunately, no middle ground seems acceptable for this crowd, so I'm unconvinced that it will change.
Another negative aspect is that cyclists do not use public transportation, so they lead municipalities to decrease investment in this sector, which is, however, the most inclusive, safe and efficient way to move people around. This is also seen in Paris, where the bus speed has never been so slow, the fleet is aging,, while the city hall spends like a teenager on a weekend trip with daddy's credit card on new bike lanes.
In the EU at least, the next nail in the coffin will be the low-emissions zones that will make it prohibitively expensive to enter/leave the center, forcing families to leave metropolises altogether.
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/09/06/why-the-mi...
Eventually I gave in and bought a car, not because it was necessary but rather to leave the city on weekends and get closer to nature.
And I think Paris and Barcelona share a lot in that respect (the mayors - Hidalgo and Colau - met a lot to discuss exactly those topics and share experiences).
The land value of your city will be so much better if you have a walkable city. Walkable is always the start, then you map bikes, and public transport on top.
You will have city that is economically productive and vibrant.
About a year ago I started to take the bus. My commute went from an hour on the bike to over two hours. Spending four hours a day on a bus to travel such a short distance is not a fun experience. The bus meanders through a city choked with traffic. It's often faster if I get off and walk that part of the journey (I've checked). I enjoyed cycling for the most part. It was great for fitness and clearing my head. The parts of my commute away from cars were beautiful but there was a significant risk of death or serious injury every time I got on the bike. More and more drivers are buried in their phones. Cycle or bus and you'll see this.
The bus was slowly killing me. It was hard to work as the crowded bus wobbled around narrow Dublin streets along with various degrees of anti-social behaviour. I got off the bus angry and frustrated and groggy.
I've just bought a small little electric car and I can get to work in around 40 minutes. I don't have to listen to other people's loud voice calls or TikToks that are so loud they penetrate through ANC. I don't have to ask someone to make space on the seat they are occupying all by themselves and their bag and endure the dirty looks for it. I don't have to wait and wait for buses that never show up. I hate the bus. I hate that I hate the bus. I feel like a failure for having to buy a second car but I fucking tried!
I'm happy in my car. It's fun to drive and it makes me happy and guilty. I feel like I have so much more freedom. I'm not tied to the bus schedule which placed very tight limits on my time, and the bus frequently didn't show. Otherwise it would take much longer to get home. I can stop by somewhere on the way home and pick something up. Like the bike, I am by myself in the car and I can decompress. I can sing if I want.
It makes no sense for a 25km commute to take two hours. Its madness. By travelling from one suburb to another via the city centre the bus becomes wholly impractical. A public transport system has to work so that people leave their car at home. London worked for me, I got the tube everywhere. Valencia has an amazing public transport system. Dublin is completely broken.
cars are just people that move from A to B.
if there is no sensible way to move where you need to go it is not a city made for humans but just hostile to people and their requirements.
i need exactly 63 downvotes please, don't be cheap.
I prefer that cities are walkable and have good inter and intra public transport. So I'm with the anti-car crowd on that.
However, I do not prefer cities in general. So I'm with the pro-car people on this one. I enjoy the trend of spacious car-friendly suburbs and rural areas. I value the space and freedom over the conveniences of the city.
The fact that you park your private car in a public space is crazy: if you don’t have room for your freezer, do you put it on the sidewalk?
I completely understand dedicating space to public transport instead of cars. But dedicating space to cars seems entirely reasonable in isolation, because the city has an interest in making it possible to get there. Parking spaces store cars - but is that their entire function? Or is that just an aspect of enabling people to drive into the city?
Consider the fact that you cannot in fact store a freezer in a public parking space. Nor even a car, actually, beyond a certain period of time, precisely because it's all about enabling movement.
But, when talking about the expectation* that every public space have acres of free-to-use public parking, it makes a fair amount of sense.
* In my experience, this is a very common expectation in the USA.
Compare Brookline MA, which allows on-street parking, but only during the day to neighborhoods in Boston proper which has free on-street parking permits for residents.
But similar to any other "product" the evaluation depends on the user's needs. As a single guy I loved that NYC was dense and walkable - because that meant (among other things) literally millions of date-able women within a 30 minute walk radius of my house. Great! Now as a dad of 3 I don't care about that at all - and the lower density suburb let's me have a backyard for my kids and makes shopping easy, or taking the kids to activities (yes you can do all those things without a car but people chose not to when they have choice)
There should be some sort of mom-friendliness factor in these conversations. If my whole town is old people, terminally single younger people and migrants (as seems to be the case for the city in question) then high density walk ability is perfect. What's the density and transportation situation in places people actually have kids?
Small towns where your kids can get to their friend's house by walking or biking a couple of blocks over can be great for raising a family, as opposed to all of their friends' houses being in a different gated communities up and down a 4-lane 45mph highway and where the line of cars picking up kids from school each day backs out onto the road and blocks traffic.
Sadly, it's illegal to build streetcar suburbs in most of the US today, because outfitting every house with a private driveway, setbacks, etc., would move everything far apart enough to significantly hurt walkability.
Note that most dense cities have within the same city limits less dense areas that look like suburbs. These are often called "inner city" they are generally affordable but because the schools are bad are not places I'd want to live. For this discussion I'm going to count them as suburbs...
It doesn't have to be like the above. I've seen dense cities around the world that are very family friendly. However not in the US.
People always seem to talk about these things like it's one size fits all, when needs vary massively from one city to another. And even from one neighborhood to another.
Bike lanes and public transport will reduce traffic congestion as long as they are well-designed and people actually use them. And being able to get into a car and drive somewhere is incredibly convenient when traffic is light and parking is plentiful.
Houston is almost entirely lanes and parking, they're still congested. At which point do you have enough car lanes?
The rest of the lanes sure; a fully used bike lane like Boulevard de Sébastopol is worth 8 lanes of car traffic. That helps. But more car lanes?
I'm not very familiar with Houston, but a quick google search shows that there is a big project underway right now to add more lanes in Houston [1]. So it would seem that civil engineers there have found a place to put more car lanes that they think will help with traffic congestion.
> At which point do you have enough car lanes?
As long as Houston is growing (currently it is the second fastest growing city in the US), I don't think there will ever be enough. They need to continuously improve their transportation infrastucture. As I said above, I think this should include bike lanes and public transportation too. But if engineers identify a solution to alleviate traffic congestion by building more roads, then I think that is worth considering, too.
[1] https://www.txdot.gov/about/newsroom/local/houston/i45-const...
The thing most mass transportation advocates need to understand when it comes to the US is that we don't want cars necessarily for convenience, we want them to be able to avoid other people. We don't want to have to endure the constant micro aggressions of other passengers. We certainly don't want to have to endure the assaults, murders and rapes that happen. We don't want to be forced to mix with the most violent of society while unarmed and packed liked sardines.
Every argument you make about cars being more dangerous are 100% valid, we just don't care. We would rather die 10 times due to an accident than a violent murder. Its just our nature. Until you can get crime to essentially zero or ensure either an armed officer in every train car or allow citizens to carry mass transportation will not be a thing in the US. Especially not in Red states. I'm talking complete removal of all inconveniences, including things as minor as someone playing their music loudly on a blue tooth speaker. This murder of the Ukrainian woman combined with the treatment of Penny essentially killed any hope of mass transit being popular in Red states for the next 100 years. I am not arguing for or against Penny's actions I am simply stating the effect that it had on most people that support what he did, the same people that would need to support mass transit for it to catch on.
Again I am not arguing numbers here, mass transportation is obviously statistically safer than car travel by a massive degree. I am arguing human nature. We will not subject ourselves to criminals and intentional violence when there is an alternative no matter how much more dangerous that alternative ends up being
It feels great.
Now let me hear your objections to why public transport could never work at your location
It has an impact on businesses and delivery operators that end up being obstructed.
Ideally I think one should move towards layered cities, pedestrians on the ground while beneath them roads, parkings and especially train and train carts thrive.
For one a self driving taxi fleet could take up vastly less space - you'd no longer need one car per person, you'd need far fewer parking spots, most cars could be single or double seaters again taking less space and running more efficiently.
The space savings could be used to boost rail-based public transit options, which would see more adoption as self driving taxis make last-mile transport cheaper and easier. A bunch of positive feedback loops driving public transit adoption and improvements.
Result is cleaner and more efficient transport for all, and vast amounts of space returned from serving cars to serving people.
At least that's the dream!
> It's not an either-or. You can have streets which are car-friendly, bike-friendly, and pedestrian-friendly at the same time. Just look at the Dutch, they've been doing it for years. That is until recently in some big cities, though, where some less knowledgeable politicians have also adopted this false populist either-car-or-bike concept. Though the traditional principle still applies to about 99% of the country's roadworks, and it works really well.
Adding onto that, sentences like "made for people, not cars" absolutely validate my point that this is nothing but populist activism. I'm hoping that we can all have a honest, intellectual discussion on how to make infrastructure better for everyone. Just make sure to always remember in every discussion about this topic: it is never either-or, not even in the densely populated Netherlands.
stephen_g•2h ago
Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers. We spend many tens of billions of dollars a year on roads in my state and traffic in the cities (and the highways between the biggest population centres in the south east corner where most of the people live) just keeps getting worse. When you give people real alternatives (convenient, frequent public transport, more cycling infrastructure, better planned cities so you can walk and cycle to things you need nearby) that actually gets people off the road and that is the one thing that can reduce traffic (apart from somewhere having a dwindling population).
Focusing all out infrastructure spend and making cars the primary mode continues to make car driving worse, but people get angry when too much money is spent on public and active transport, because “not enough” is being spent on road infrastructure. So politicians spruik their “congestion busting” road spending, and it keeps getting worse. It’s wild.
As someone for whom driving was just the default, I came around full circle.
giraffe_lady•2h ago
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/one-more-lane-bro-one-more-la...
tialaramex•2h ago
colejohnson66•2h ago
dijit•2h ago
If it's an average of 1.2 persons per car (which is the typical average) and counting roughly 1,200 cars on those images (in aggregate) it would take roughly 28-29 rail cars to transport this number of people.
That's 3-5 trains worth. All that traffic could have been saved (in theory) by 3-5 trains.
I don't imagine a train would serve all those people, but imagine the massive dent it would make to have good train systems between large population centers.
markus_zhang•2h ago
One middle point I think might be more reachable is to build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals, so people can still drive to the terminal and then switch to bus.
I live in a suburb on the Montreal island and this is the model the city is trying to build IMO.
loloquwowndueo•2h ago
Public transport gives much better ROI for more people - you don’t need the added expense of the car to benefit from it.
mytailorisrich•2h ago
That's a bold claim without data.
loloquwowndueo•2h ago
ljf•2h ago
mytailorisrich•2h ago
Edit to @loloquwowndueo below: I haven't been shown any data, not has my point been replied to. Please guys let's try to have a grown-up discussion.
loloquwowndueo•2h ago
fayten•2h ago
There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury
Well done video essays:
Parking minimums https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=xAxUHCA0xmxCIZWg
Noise pollution https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=Eov6X3Z3I1T0l_bd
Infrastructure strain https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KrVJ3tDaODHNGBwm
More on Infrastructure and Sprawl https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?si=0ulEtryX4K6Ysy-N
Articles:
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation#:~:...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379358672_Vehicle_n...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-sprawl/Costs-of-urban...
Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources.
Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI.
Some extra historical context is helpful too: https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=ZGXF81qJnD_Fgw0L
The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read.
In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
markus_zhang•1h ago
forgotoldacc•2h ago
I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years. And that's not even starting on their high speed rail system, which went from not existing to connecting basically every major city across the country within 20 years, and connecting the biggest cities within 10.
Every construction site in America is endless thumb twiddling, guys holding signs, senseless traffic for sham work, and zero results after decades. One highway near me was under constant construction for one segment for 5 years and still didn't get finished. Every single day, it was the same construction vehicles parked in the same spots and some dudes holding signs while absolutely no progress was made. In Asia, it's a job that'd be done in a few days.
orwin•2h ago
mschuster91•2h ago
Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment and the rights of its citizens - the Party and its interests always come first.
> I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years.
Easy to do when you got the perfect combination: a lot of young single poor men that can be shuffled around the country because they got nothing tying them down to a specific place, combined with a lot of hard dollars from exports.
And China has another incentive... the threat of gulag. When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged, and usually it's going to be someone from the CCP when someone higher-up thinks it's a good time to audit projects of the underlings to have some fall guys to take the usual "corruption" blame.
akudha•1h ago
bluGill•55m ago
forgotoldacc•25m ago
These ones aren't really accurate in this century. China is making massive gains in clean energy and undoing a lot of the mess they made in the 20th century. I'm honestly blown away by how clean the water, air, and everything as a whole is over there. And I'm a freak who loves visiting places in the middle of nowhere, so it's not some Potemkin village stuff like YouTube China Truthers(tm) pretend is widespread.
> When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged
Yeah, you watch a little too much YouTube. That stuff doesn't happen. Why would anyone be stupid enough to be an engineer if they risk having their entire family being arrested? Seriously.
abraxas•2h ago
Is this a joke? I grew up in Poland, a relatively poor country (and used to be a lot poorer) and in most cities it has public infrastructure that flagship North American cities can barely dream of. It's not a question of money but of societal priorities.
mschuster91•2h ago
anonymars•2h ago
mschuster91•1h ago
I'll admit though, a bus network is faster to set up and with mini-buses the size of a MB Sprinter van cheaper to operate even in challenged suburbian hellscapes.
skitter•1h ago
mschuster91•1h ago
stephen_g•1h ago
Then there’s ride quality (much smoother) and psychological differences - e.g. you can run them through pedestrianised areas because people know exactly where they are going to be - a bus can possible swerve and hit you but the tram will always be on its tracks so people feel (and are) much safer sharing space with them. And just because they feel more ‘premium’ than busses people seriously are more likely to use them.
bluGill•36m ago
This is a negative! Service matters. If you have more than 50 passengers per hour off peak, or 200 peak you should be adding more service. A small 50 passenger bus can easially handle those numbers (they are per hour, people shouldn't be riding any bus for more than 10-15 minutes). Only when you are running a bus every 5 minutes should you start thinking about putting more people on vehicles you have, and thus only then is a tram worth thinking about. When a bus and tram is handling the same number of passengers the bus is cheaper to run (the bus shares the cost of the road with other users, while the road is more expensive than tracks you will have it anyway)
> and are way more energy efficient to boot.
This isn't significant enough to worry about. A bus is a lot more energy efficient than a car (assuming people use it), the additional gain from a tram for the same number of people is minimal.
djrobstep•2h ago
Public transport is far, far more cost effective than car infrastructure. And that's just direct costs - not even including the cost of sprawl (which makes all other infrastructure more expensive), road deaths and injuries, noise, pollution, storage costs for vehicles, the health costs of inactivity and social isolation, etc etc.
> build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals
This is a terrible idea because the numbers simply do not stack up. A typical metro train can carry roughly 1000 people. A large car park might fill half of a single train. At a station with good frequency, a train will leave the station roughly every 5 minutes.
A much better idea is to run good regular public transport to the station, build bike paths to the station and quality bike parking at the station, and build more housing at/near the station instead of a big parking lot.
bluGill•45m ago
Note that I said "place" not station - stations should be your highest demand places since they are so easy to get to. That real estate should be far too valuable to stores too waste on a parking lot. That parking lot should have a shuttle to the station, not be a station itself.
Remember once somebody has got into a car they have paid most of the costs of having a car. They will always be asking why not drive all the way instead of stopping part way. Your goal should be every family sells a car because they don't need two (they still keep a "truck" for towing the boat or whatever they think they need it for, they just don't use it for most trips and don't need a backup vehicle)
jcranmer•2h ago
What happened to most NA cities is that they fully embraced the car by tearing down the city to make room for parking lots; there's a few cities where every other block in the city center is a surface parking lot. Combine this with systematic underinvestment in public transit (because it's seen as for people who are too poor to own a car), and you can see how we ended up where we did.
The main obstacle to fixing this isn't really money, it's in getting people to accept public transit as something that could be a viable mode of transit for them. There are far too many people who think that public transit is inherently unsafe and that by riding it they are at extreme risk of getting shanked (which includes the current Secretary of Transportation).
troyvit•1h ago
bluGill•51m ago
Actually that makes it easier, particularly if it is really nothing between as you can built high speed routes that are faster than cars, and put hubs out on the edges where people are. the reality though is it is rarely nothing inbetween.
Most people are not going to the "hub", they are going to some other location and so you need an anywhere to anywhere system that doesn't require traveling to the central hub. Most transit systems assume you work downtown and wouldn't use transit for anything else so they optimize for getting to the hub making any other trip impossible instead of optimizing for closer trips but making getting to the hub annoying (I think this is the wrong compromise, but ...)
prmoustache•2h ago
goosedragons•2h ago
noosphr•2h ago
bluGill•1h ago
notorandit•2h ago
In towns, and large towns especially, public mobility should be the rule and private one the exception. If any.
And maybe also for long distance mobility.
CalRobert•2h ago
colejohnson66•2h ago
CalRobert•2h ago
Zigurd•2h ago
CalRobert•2h ago
gazook89•2h ago
CalRobert•2h ago
hulitu•41m ago
Yes you may. They fall short though for distances bigger than a couple of km, when carrying something or by bad weather.
dijit•2h ago
The starkest example of this for me is comparing Orlando, Florida with Malmö, Sweden. Orlando is the end game of car-centric planning. The city feels bigger than its population suggests because you spend half an hour in a car just to get anywhere. The eight-lane highways and endless parking lots are supposed to make driving easier, but they create the very congestion that makes driving miserable. This architecture of disconnection means fewer spontaneous encounters and more social isolation. The city is designed for a machine, not for people.
In contrast, Malmö's population is actually larger than Orlando's, yet a 30-minute bike ride can get you literally anywhere. The largest road through the city center is a quiet, two-lane street that prioritises people over cars; as there are large crossings and lights. This isn't an accident, it's a choice. The city's excellent public transportation and extensive bike lanes make the car a choice, not a necessity and because it's penalised: the only drivers are the ones who need to be driving, for which now there are open roads (as long as you're patient).
The truth is, every person on a bus, a train, or a bike is one less car in front of you. Giving people real alternatives is the only thing that can truly reduce traffic. This isn't an attack on cars. It's a demand for sanity, a call to build cities that work for everyone, including those who choose to drive.
maxerickson•2h ago
robin_reala•2h ago
bluGill•59m ago
That is a bad reading. If there is more congestion it is because you made some trips that were impossible before possible and so people are better using your city. The point of a city is all the things you can do - otherwise people would live in a rural area with less options but not traffic - so limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city. You need to build enough to get out of this, eventually people will no longer find new/better opportunties opened up by building and congestion will no longer increase (if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway).
Note that I'm not advocating you build a road to get ahead of congestion. Generally it is much more cost effective to build a good public transit system. However system is the key here, roads only where because you can get anywhere on them anytime you want to go, if your transit system isn't the same people won't use it.
dijit•46m ago
But I used Malmö and Orlando as specific examples of extreme behaviour because in Malmö I can get around very easily. I can go anywhere in the city at any time with complete freedom even though there is good public transport it only enhances the situation. - I don’t depend on it in the same way you imply.
Where as in Orlando I was completely dependent on a car and any public transport that could exist would be wholly insufficient due to the distance you would have to travel: because of all the enormous car parking lots and expansive highways.
Othan•46m ago
No, this means that the trip was made easier by car, not that a trip was impossible and is now possible.
> limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city.
Not building massive freeways everywhere != limiting the things people can do in a city. Building public transit and better cycling infra is a much more effective way to allow people to do more things.
> if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway
Yes, in certain circumstances, you can build big enough roads where the capacity is greater than the demand. This does not work in populated areas with high demand. (This is incredibly well studied)
bluGill•14m ago
If someone chooses to not make a trip then I count it as impossible. I could walk across the North Pole to Europe, but I think everyone would agree when I say the trip is impossible anyway despite that.
> This does not work in populated areas with high demand. (This is incredibly well studied)
You absolute can and I disagree with the studies. Now I will agree that building 50 layers of highway bridges needed is not a reasonable thing to do, but it still a solvable engineering challenge if we wanted to put the money into it.
silvestrov•2h ago
One subway line can transport more people than even the widest existing highway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif...
(edit: spelling)
yostrovs•2h ago
lm28469•2h ago
I think you missed the entire point, it's a design choice, if you design everything around cars of course going grocery shopping will require a car... my supermarkets don't even have parking lots.
xnx•2h ago
Yes. Americans chose big houses and yards.
CalRobert•2h ago
ericmay•2h ago
There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing. You either have the existing housing stock, which is astronomically more valuable, or you don’t. There’s no developer building those formats anymore.
bluGill•1h ago
Every time I look those houses are on lots of similar sized to modern lots. People back then choose space as well. They did allow stores in those neighborhoods though, so you could do some of the basic things in life without getting on the streetcar or walking. Those neighborhoods were also closer to jobs or close to a streetcar (depending on era) because you obviously couldn't drive. However the size wasn't much different from today.
Brick is much less common today - but that is because brick is a terrible building material if you look at it like an engineer. It is hard to change, has a poor R value, it is expensive, and slow to put up. People whose knowledge of building comes from "the three little pigs" think brick is great and sticks are bad, those who understand real engineering understand the real complexity and trade offs. You can get brick today if you want - but it is almost always a decorative facade for engineering reasons.
ericmay•1h ago
But there are other benefits. That local coffee shop or clothing store is better able to compete, because they don't have to compete on efficient product delivery which is something that you see in the suburbs Ala Starbucks or Wal-Mart. This increases entrepreneurial activities and helps money spread instead of concentrate. It's no coincidence in my mind that income inequality has increased partially because of tax rates, but also because of concentration of businesses that can best realize supply chain efficiency.
To your point about brick, sure yea homes don't have to be brick, but generally plastic siding sucks visually, plus suburban houses are built incoherently, so if we could just get something that looks good that's half the battle. But perhaps the most important part, which I'm not sure suburban housing design can really accommodate, is the layout and streetscape design that enables a healthy mix of SFH, apartments, and other living arrangements mixed with businesses and amenities.
potato3732842•51m ago
Zoning became a thing during the height of the greatest generation's political relevance[1]. Pretty much everything that generation did was use government authority and planning as a cudgel. It's understandable that they would make this error considering that when they were young they saw central authority save the world. But they banned a hell of a lot of things that didn't need banning and they had the government meddle in all sorts of things that would've naturally turned out fine. This worked initially, but the problem is that democratic-ish government always leans toward stabilization and status quos and existing interests and whatnot. They are always re-active and never pro-active because it literally cannot be any-active until after the public cares so much as to vote based on it (whereas a dictator or whatever is substantially more free to take speculative action).
Now, here we are generations later with a substantially different society, different economic situations, different problems, the institutions those people created have run the usual course of expansion and co-option over time, etc, etc, and it's clear that what they built is acting as a force that tries to keep society stuck doing things that are no longer appropriate. What was fine to have the government regulate in favor of when there were half as many people, twice as much opportunity and everyone shared mostly the same values and desires no longer works.
Doing more of the same, having government intervene and micro manage cars, use zoning and other rules to encourage "the right kind" of development (which is exactly what they were trying to do back when they adopted zoning) or transportation or whatever won't work because the entire premise that we can do it this way and get good overall results is flawed. The whole approach we are trying to use does not work except for nearby local maximums and on short timelines. We need to get the government out of managing land use, out of managing transportation, or at least as out of these things as it possibly can be, and let the chips fall where they may. Developers will build slummy SROs, people will sit in traffic, but eventually it will all work itself out and reach equilibrium. But the longer we dam up demand behind regulation the higher the pressure the leaks we are forced to chase are.
[1] Dare I say it came about partly a reaction to the fact that they had to start sharing society with the quality of adults that resulted from their "quantity has a quality all it's own" approach toward producing children.
potato3732842•1h ago
Worse, they're not an option for more americans specifically because of zoning and regulation. If not for government micro management there'd be more density, more cheap housing and you wouldn't need to drive 4hr out of the city to find a single family that's affordable.
>There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing.
There would perhaps be if not for all the regulation. Maybe not brick, probably something with brick veneer, but someone would be shoehorning them into small lots.
pclmulqdq•2h ago
When I moved from Manhattan to an "evil" suburb full of "stroads," my door-to-door time to pretty much everything decreased. Getting rid of waiting for the elevator was a big time saver. Waiting 10-15 minutes if you get unlucky about the arrival of the train was pretty bad. Added all up, most walks took at least 10 minutes to go each direction and non-local trips took 30 minutes or more.
jeromegv•1h ago
Now if you have decent train service to the main city, this is starting to be interesting urban design.
pclmulqdq•1h ago
bluGill•1h ago
Most people do not work in Manhattan. I'm not sure about OPs situation, but there are a lot of other places people work in New York City, not to mention other cities.
nonethewiser•1h ago
lm28469•17m ago
Yeah I mean that's like 99.9% of the surface of the world, nobody is preventing you to go live your dream. We're specifically talking about cities, a city without population density is not a city by definition
account42•1h ago
esarbe•33m ago
No need to wrap yourself in two tons of steel, aluminum and plastic. 100 grams is enough.
lm28469•19m ago
Sometime I wonder in what alternative world people live in which rain is a problem... Yes it's life, sometimes it' warm, sometimes cold, sometimes dry, sometimes wet. Buy a $10 rain poncho or umbrella and move on lol. How fragile are you that you can't deal with basic things like rain ? There are hard things in life, like your kid getting diagnosed with leukemia or your spouse dying, rain is waaay down the list.
We need a reality show about you people, I don't pay for netflix but I'd pay for that
account42•10m ago
dijit•2h ago
I always found it infuriating to have a discussion like this with people who prefer to fly.
For example, a flight from Copenhagen to Stockholm (or, Malmo to Stockholm) is about 50 minutes.
But a train is four hours.. clearly the train is slower!
Except the train takes you into downtown Stockholm- no express train, no getting to the airport 1hr+ before your flight and no travel to the airport in the first place.
I once raced my girlfriend (our travel plans lined up pretty perfectly) and the train ended up 25 minutes faster back to Malmo from Stockholm.
So, even though I have an anecdote that supports your claim, I'm going to go ahead and say that if you have congested traffic a train can easily be faster- even with the time at both ends. But yes, we should be making rail a much more attractive option, not running trains at the same speeds as cars.
arethuza•2h ago
walthamstow•2h ago
CalRobert•2h ago
arethuza•1h ago
npteljes•2h ago
Or urine.
Or they want to beat you up, or worse. I can't imagine good public transport without the "good public".
dijit•2h ago
The wealthy population also take public transport, it's sort of expected that its for everyone... this seems to alter the behaviour of people in a positive way. Maybe through enhanced enforcement by police? or perhaps social conditioning through higher expectations? idk.
US Public transport is not a model of what public transport is like; it's only an example of failed infrastructure that has been intentionally sabotaged over half-a-century.
pclmulqdq•1h ago
Aurornis•1h ago
Anecdotally, among myself and my friends we have more stories of problems with theft and encounters with hostile people from very brief travels to Europe than all time spent on public transport in the USA. To be fair, I haven’t lived in NYC where public transport is famously more dangerous.
I also suspect that foreigners are more targeted for wallet thefts while traveling in Europe.
However, watching multiple friends get pickpocketed on European public transport and having to shake some sketchy people who were being aggressive with women in our group during our brief travels shattered my illusions that European public transport is universally superior in safety.
Edit to add: I also thought it was funny when we met up with someone’s friend in a populous European city who refused to ride public transportation with us. He would drive his car from point to point and meet up with us at the destination. He seemed to believe that the underground was not something people his age liked and was surprised we were riding it without a second thought.
dijit•1h ago
I could imagine Paris and London in that list, despite both being very safe for locals (and.. both being Northern Europe)- but perhaps less safe for tourists.
I would imagine Prague being a middle-European tourist destination that is plagued much worse by this (but, also, very safe for locals- I lived there briefly).
Where were you in Europe?
potato3732842•1h ago
Depending upon the issue you might reduce europe down to the rich western bits. You might include or exclude the former soviet influenced areas depending upon the context. You might only look at nations on the Mediterranean or only exclude them, etc, etc.
Yet whenever you look at the US you always include the whole thing no exceptions.
[1]just to be clear, by "I get a chuckle" I mean "the way we just accept this behavior is a condemnation of the community and the people who make it up"
cglan•1h ago
TimorousBestie•1h ago
account42•1h ago
pjmlp•1h ago
npteljes•37m ago
vjk800•2h ago
nonethewiser•1h ago
Based-A•42m ago
thelastgallon•2h ago
I wish schools teach something, whats that called, math? probability? to help everyone make decisions to wisely use a car and keep themselves safe from lady with a perfume attacks on the train. This will also free up emergency room infrastructure, we don't need that many EMTs, ambulances, helicopters, trauma doctors and an incredible range of equipment and facilities to deal with odor attacks.
---
Google search for "car accidents single largest cause of death under 50": motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people under 50 in the United States, and for several specific age groups within that range, such as 1-54-year-olds and 5-29-year-olds globally.
bluGill•1h ago
As someone who will have a runny nose all day if I sit next to that lady, yes I do worry about her perfume more than I worry about the drunk driver. While the drunk driver is a worse situation if the odds hit me, the odds the perfumed lady is too close to me is much higher.
buellerbueller•49m ago
thelastgallon•10m ago
This is what all economists get slightly wrong? They say humans are rational agents, soak in all the information, calculate the costs and benefits with the probabilities and make rational decisions. But humans almost always make emotional decisions. A perfume lady is way more scarier than a 5000 lb vehicle hurtling down at 60 mph, custom built to protect the person driving the vehicle, on surfaces built for vehicles and vehicles only (trillions of dollars in maintenance and tens of trillions of dollars healthcare costs).
Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...
yostrovs•1h ago
account42•1h ago
mlsu•44m ago
sensanaty•7m ago
With the train I step off at my stop, and get on a bicycle and it takes me max 15 minutes to get anywhere else I want to go. The cities in NL have been built in such a way that it's often faster to take a bicycle than any other mode of transport. Usually buses/trams are tied with cars unless you live in awkward spots where the coverage isn't great.
> Oh and you might be odor sensitive
I guess who cares about literally everyone else who isn't in your car that has to breathe in and smell your exhaust fumes? Sure we've got EVs these days, but they still contribute substantially to air quality degradation via tire shedding, and not every car out there is an EV yet either.
forinti•2h ago
trial3•2h ago
lukan•1h ago
aendruk•1h ago
We’re so instinctively competitive though it feels hopeless.
nonethewiser•1h ago
osigurdson•2h ago
lukan•1h ago
I am all for it out of general principle, but most car drivers will likely disagree.
scott_w•1h ago
scott_w•1h ago
nonethewiser•1h ago
newyankee•2h ago
basilikum•2h ago
What you are describing is just a much less efficient, worse version of a subway.
maweki•2h ago
One part of the solution is bikes, the other is mass transit. What self-driving EV pods may be able to do is be people mover for the last mile to a mass transit hub. But for individual traffic across longer distance it simply does not scale.
bluGill•1h ago
arp242•21m ago
gspencley•2h ago
From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I do look forward to travelling to the Netherlands one day and I will enthusiastically use public transit there just as a personal experiment to see if my experience differs enough from the subway transit in Montreal or Toronto that gave me nightmares and has me thinking every time I travel there: "Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this."
The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers. I don't see myself ever not being a driver. I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.
ericmay•2h ago
> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Fair but you have to remember that this anti-car lobby is rather tiny in comparison to the pro-car lobby which is every state department of transportation, automaker, insurance company, oil executive, auto dealer, etc. they aren’t as loud and annoying because they don’t have to be, but take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.
inetknght•1h ago
A bit of a segue, but this is true for just about anything with lots of money and/or power.
Internet marketing, for example.
vid•2h ago
etrautmann•1h ago
mystifyingpoi•1h ago
What do you mean specifically? Most of people working regular jobs don't really get to choose the time for their transit. They generally want to get to work as late as possible and get out of work as early as possible. Which means more people, because everyone wants this.
Fun fact, when I was at high school, some students going home by bus would go backwards the bus path and get inside a few stops away from the school, just so they can guarantee a seat and not have to stand up for 60 minutes.
vid•1h ago
mystifyingpoi•1h ago
deltaburnt•53m ago
A coworker once told me his view of his commute drastically changed when he realized he could take the ferry to work. He got fresh air, it was less cramped, and it only took an extra 5-10 minutes.
seanmcdirmid•54m ago
pjmlp•1h ago
gspencley•1h ago
That is physically impossible. Again, it's a "me problem", I'm not trying to say that the world needs to accommodate my unique personality, but if other people are within speaking distance of me with no partition, they cannot "melt away."
When I was younger, discovering my mysophonia and autism, my mother would used to say things to me like "just tune out the noise." If only! I mean, how do I develop that super-power? Please, it would change my life so much for the better. I don't know what that means.
The thing that practically defines mysophonia is an inability to do that with trigger sounds.
But for me it's not just noise. I can't relax in the presence of other people. I guess it could be an extreme form of social anxiety. But it's not so much that I feel fear or anxious ... it's that I am hyper-alert when other people are around me. If I can see someone out of the corner of my eye, my brain can't go "just ignore them." It's not wired that way.
One of my trigger sounds, speaking of mysophonia, is actually people talking. I don't like listening to the sound of people speaking amongst each other. I don't know anyone else that has that particular trigger sound. But if I'm minding my own business somewhere and suddenly I hear people having a conversation ... it can send me into an autistic meltdown.
And yeah, you can put on noise cancelling headphones in public. Which I do when I'm in those situations. If it was just the noise alone then it would be a problem that is not insurmountable. Though it would still be a problem.
But reading a book? Impossible for me when there is even a single other person in the room.
Again, it's a me problem. I'm not saying the world should change for me. All I'm saying is please don't take away my car. It's the only thing that enables me to be at all mobile.
buellerbueller•55m ago
qwertygnu•1h ago
It should be discouraged (financially, logistically, socially) to drive in dense urban places. Obviously, in order to achieve that, these urban places need to have alternative means of transportation.
mystifyingpoi•1h ago
I'm more dependent on my car(s) when I got the first newborn than I ever was.
komali2•1h ago
I hear this all the time yet right now am traveling in Amsterdam and see many parents trucking their kids around in bicycles without issue. Actually I remember seeing this in SF as well, and in Taiwan and Japan I see incredibly young children riding public transit on their own.
seper8•1h ago
tmtvl•1h ago
mystifyingpoi•1h ago
mitthrowaway2•52m ago
nothrabannosir•25m ago
Source: grew up there.
halper•1h ago
NickPollard•1h ago
We rent a car ~10-20 times a year, but that's usually for vacations or trips out of the city to visit family. Regular weekly family life we use buses, the underground (metro), trains, or sometimes taxis.
We are considering eventually getting a car, but we've managed for 4 years with children to not need one and it's not been an issue.
(I live in London, United Kingdom)
mystifyingpoi•1h ago
The context actually get far more granular than it. I lived without a car for 25 years of my life, buses and trains were enough. But all it takes to require a car is having a home 3-4 km from the city center bus stops (which probably covers >50% of population). Unless someone likes walking 1h one way in -10 deg in winter to get to work each day.
mitthrowaway2•55m ago
esarbe•39m ago
That's exactly what "making cities work for people instead of cars" is all about.
kccqzy•20m ago
You don't live in a city. You live in a suburb.
jajko•56m ago
Imagine when people don't live in such shitholes, and spend weekends travelling ie to nature or mountains or culture or history or whatever, on non-congested roads. Heck, imagine going to nature even evenings after work, ie for rock climbing. Public transport would be 2-3x that travel time, if possible at all. Also, much more expensive compared to a single car drive, even when accounting all taxes, maintenance and purchasing costs of a car.
Thats how most of Europe lives. City center folks can keep their car-free existence, just please for god's sake don't force it down everybody else's throats like that's the only way to live.
Some people would happily lose half of paycheck to avoid such life, exactly because they spent part of their lives in city centers and know very well what lifestyle they reject, if they can and can afford it. Quadruple that for families with small kids, like my own.
mystifyingpoi•32m ago
THIS. Europe doesn't end on Paris. People visit huge metropolies and base their judgement on this, which really skews the perspective.
youngNed•1h ago
Ask me how i know
happosai•1h ago
bombcar•1h ago
It's not about the good times (on a good day, moving five kids by walking/stroller is easy) - it's about the bad times, the crying, the screaming, the attempted suicides, etc.
alistairSH•1h ago
If you need to travel more than ~2-3 miles or so to get groceries or get to school (in a populous area) that's a failure of urban planning.
Yes, there will be some people with mobility limitations who still needs cars, but that's a tiny minority of the overall population.
KaiserPro•59m ago
For places like london, paris, amsterdam, you can totally be car free.
So long as you have a pram with space under the seat for storing stuff, its totally not a problem to take kids out and about. The other thing thats invaluable, is that you can concentrate entirely on your kids without worrying about crashing.
mystifyingpoi•51m ago
The issue I see here is assuming that Europe = Paris/Rome/Amsterdam. Probably due to tourism. It makes the impression that whole EU is just amazing and no one needs a car. It can't be further from the truth.
mhl47•22m ago
KaiserPro•12m ago
But it turns out that actually urban density is pretty good indicator of reasonable public transport. of _course_ there are black spots, rural england lost its trains in the 60s and busses in the 2000s.
But
The british didn't make the tube for tourism, given that they've not built anything transport wise since the 90s (except the Elizabeth line)
Paris didn't make the metro for tourists, because they are french, they're not going to spend money on dirty tourists who get in the way.
the Netherlands didn't make trams for tourists, they can cycle like the rest of us.
scott_w•40m ago
Driving your car is absolutely a choice in many cities, and a poor choice at that.
sensanaty•36m ago
tootie•21m ago
foobarian•47m ago
It's hopeless to expect that things don't end up in this state. A decentralized system will naturally tend to a state of equilibrium balancing between desirability and pain, e.g. people will keep moving to a "nice" area until commutes or prices become unbearable.
I think the only way to end up with an utopia-like metropolis is to run it with a benevolent dictator government SimCity-like, which would probably involve restricted entry leading to very expensive real estate; therefore a lottery or similar admission system into low-cost housing would be needed to balance the needed support population. In other words probably unconstitutional in a dozen different ways and never going to happen.
jcranmer•1h ago
The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!
potato3732842•1h ago
These people are just the inverse of the equal(ly stupid) and opposite idiots who think all the problems in society are the result of cars or some other mis-allocation of resources toward transportation. They're incredibly small incredibly stupid groups who's extreme(ly stupid) opinions anchor the discourse, to the detriment of all the adults in the room.
You see this pattern of crap on every issue too, not just cars/transportation.
mothballed•1h ago
Normal people don't want to ride on a vehicle used for turf wars, robbery getaway express, and as a homeless sleeping center. Normal people are alarmed when ear-splitting rap music is being played provocatively, normal people get alarmed when lethal weapons are pulled out for immediate use in a crowded box. An occasion before that, a schizophrenic person tried to corner me in the back of a train car while going on an increasingly aggressive rant about how the government is out to get us.
And this would bother me even less if I weren't disarmed, because of course it was illegal for me to carry a gun or knife to protect myself from the literal knife fights surrounding me on the train. I presume anyone poor enough to need public transit with half a brain in that town bought, borrowed, or stole a bicycle.
knorker•1h ago
I don't believe this as a real rule. 10min vs 40min, maybe. 1h commute vs 4h commute? I don't believe that you would prefer spending 8h per day in a car.
> The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers.
The youtuber NotJustBikes keep saying that "the only thing that can improve traffic is viable alternatives to driving".
I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history, and that drivers would actually need to pay for the externality costs they incur, instead of being leaches on society.
potato3732842•1h ago
Get the government out of the road planning/building business and let the chips fall as they may.
There are two big problems with this though.
First is demographics. Of all the people who currently say they want this "enough to be a problem" will immediately do an about face the first time they catch wind of a news story where some bigCo buys the land and puts a toll road through somewhere they don't want it or some inner-ring suburb of the kind they sympathize with the residents of losing out in gets absolutely screwed by some regional infrastructure conglomeration routes around them for not playing ball.
Second is entrenched interests. Government road management is mostly a result of coincidence. Society was building paved roads for cars at the same time that the modern high touch administrative state was on the up and up so of course the state claimed that as one of the things it administered. Had the 20th century administrative state come 50yr later modern roads may very well have ben built out privately like railroads were. It would be a huge fight to get the government's dick out of it because of all the economic and political interests that are inter-twined with the status quo.
dml2135•1h ago
I’m not sure why you have a right to solitude while out in public. While I sympathize with your desires, your need for a private bubble while moving about in the world has negative consequences for those around you. This is, quite simply, an anti-social attitude.
Ajedi32•1h ago
The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
potato3732842•1h ago
And then you instantly run into the problem wherein people lie in all sorts of ways in order to justify distorting the market to their benefit or preference.
Ajedi32•1h ago
I think there's certainly room for our approach to be a lot more market-like than it currently is though. On the demand side at least it's pretty straightforward to charge people for what they use based on marginal costs incurred, and use those funds to build out more/better infrastructure.
potato3732842•44m ago
Worked fine for the railroad and they started off with not just competing networks but competing form factors (gauges).
As long as users are fairly liquid and can direct themselves at whatever option they consider superior it will probably mostly all work out.
evolve2k•1h ago
Cramped trains and buses and symptoms of under investment they do not need to be this way. Switzerland deeply values trains and as the saying goes once the business class actively uses trains the whole dynamic changes.
Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.
Ajedi32•1h ago
Let trains where people are packed like sardines compete with trains with face to face seating and with self-driving cars with the same features, and people can chose whichever they prefer based on cost, convenience, and personal preference.
pjmlp•1h ago
Then again, one gets to enjoy the countryside and nature.
nick486•1h ago
Not for all the other people around you, no.
komali2•1h ago
I completely disagree. On a train or bus I can stand up and stretch my legs, I'm not cramped into a single valid sitting position. I don't get motion sickness on trains or busses like I do in cars, and don't feel claustrophobic. Also in cars I'm constantly stuck in traffic and can't do anything, whereas a bus or train no matter what's happening I can just read a book or people watch or whatever.
pjmlp•1h ago
yourusername•1h ago
No during rush hour you're more likely to be cramped into a single valid standing position.
komali2•1h ago
yourusername•15m ago
nehal3m•1h ago
shinecantbeseen•36m ago
Each style of transportation is going to have different levels of cost associated with it, likely changing as one or the other has seemingly stable infrastructure for its needs at the time. It really seems like a more useful perspective is to look at the transportation system as a whole and consider any contribution to car infrastructure, public transport, etc as a contribution which makes the whole system better as a whole.
nehal3m•25m ago
sandworm101•1h ago
Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment. Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport. I want a yard where my dog can hang out unsupervised without worry about stranger dogs coming around. I want to set off fireworks on holidays. Listen to a country-western station. That is the lifestyle that a great many people dream of living.
I used to work with a guy from Belgium. He is now in Canada. The guy works in IT (secure stuff, government) but he loves animals. So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day. Doing that means he can have a hobby farm where he keeps a few horses. He bought an old tractor and is looking at growing/bailing his own hay next season. His lab just had puppies. His kids are growing up on a "farm" but go to a great school and have faster internet than I do in my "big city" apartment. Such a lifestyle just isn't possible without easy personal transportation.
haspok•1h ago
Despite all this, property prices in Zürich (city), for example are sky-rocketing (much more than in the neighbouring villages), and for any available rental flat the viewing queue is usually longer than you can count. How is that possible, if nobody wants to live in a city?... Some people might appreciate a 15 minute walk to their workplace, or a shop open after midnight on the next street, or just the buzzing life of a city in general.
simianwords•54m ago
epolanski•42m ago
This means that cities have generally higher income taxes as they offer more services.
But here's the catch, since suburbs and neighboring villages have lower income taxes...property is still expensive, because high earners are going to raise the prices in order to pay less taxes.
It's a very balanced system.
In any case, most Swiss cities have pedestrian downtowns and areas combined with normal car-friendly roads.
sandworm101•41m ago
Some do, but many need to for work. As mobility for non-rich average people is reduced, more and more people simply must be in the city for work/services. (That is the only reason I am in a city. I would escape in a heartbeat if my job allowed it.) Where personal transport is cheaper and more available, people flock to suburbs and even "exurbs", which are a big thing now in Texas.
My example: I am often on 1-hour 24/7 recall (military, I don't get to choose my work location). That means I suffer on both ends. I need to be in the city and I must either live/sleep/shop within mile of work or have instant access to a personal vehicle. I guess could setup a cot and sleep beside my desk. That would reduce congestion. But is that a life anyone wants to live?
sensanaty•17m ago
Considering that, almost by definition, urban environments house a magnitude more people than rural areas, I'd wager a guess that indeed most people do want walkable cities, or at least they would if they weren't brainwashed by car lobbyists to believe that covering an entire continent in asphalt just to park our metal boxes wasn't an idiotic use of space and resources.
> Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store.
I'm not really familiar with what a "boutique" corner store means here, but fair enough if you don't, though this sounds like more of a "I'm used to doing things my way" type of thing. I buy groceries 3 times a week on my way back home from wherever I might've been, it takes me no longer than 5-10 minutes, all I need is a single backpack, and it's a 2 minute cycle from the store to my house. And it's an actual house, with a garden and all the other fancy stuff people have in the suburbs. At the same time, I know people who have cargo bikes and do the once-every-2-weeks shopping sprees that you're talking about.
> So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day.
Some of my colleagues take a 1-2h train journey once a week, and they live in farmland as well. I understand the US is very large, but rural doesn't have to necessitate a lack of transport options either.
adrian17•15m ago
I do value having several gyms and restaurants (and friends) within just a short bike ride from my current house; and since one of the gyms I visit regularly is in the shopping mall, if I have an interest to cook something specific, I can buy whatever's necessary with like 5-10 mins of extra overhead.
And I do go to the local convenience store more or less daily anyway, if only for some snack, produce or fresh bread. There's a shop in each direction wherever I'd want to go, so the only way for me _not_ to inadvertently pass by one would be if I didn't leave my home at all entire day.
I'm not discounting anyone's general preference for country life, it's perfectly valid; I'm just saying that some of the things you're saying seem overexaggerated.
MangoToupe•1h ago
To convince an American to give up on any collective, just point out they'll be mildly inconvenienced. No wonder we never even tried to fight our carbon emissions.
cvwright•1h ago
Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.
bryanlarsen•1h ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-19/new-yo...
mothballed•54m ago
the_gastropod•1h ago
MangoToupe•1h ago
This concern never even occurred to me. Are you not far more likely to die in a car crash?
p_j_w•54m ago
Indeed they are. GP has done an extremely poor job of risk assessment.
mlsu•52m ago
mothballed•42m ago
The public transit stations I rode in the eastern part of Cleveland would become or already were hood rat hangouts where I would routinely see vicious beatings. I eventually started biking, which was a bit safer, although still then someone tried to rob me at gunpoint when my bicycle got a flat near the public transit line. I finally moved to somewhere with no public transit and haven't dealt with such violent threats since. I learned public transit = robbery/gang express, get further away and you get further away from their getaway -- although many of them know not to 'shit where they eat' by doing it right on the train car. Another plus of getting off public transit was the ability to carry a weapon, in case some jackass tried it again.
arethuza•20m ago
mothballed•16m ago
So this might kill his attorney's opportunity to even claim that the Ukrainian woman was tormenting and threatening his life or something. It's one of those things that sounds irrelevant but turns out to have a gigantic impact on self-defense claims, which really, are the only hope the neck stabber has of not going down for some kind of murder charge.
komali2•1h ago
Then, you've experienced poor public transit systems. A good one doesn't make you so packed in because there's enough trains for people to have comfortable amounts of space.
Anyway, it's moot - if your city has lots of people, the only feasible way to move them around is public transit. Trying anything else will fail due to the nature of two things not being able to exist in one place at the same time. One somewhat packed subway car is several hundred square meters of unmoving packed highway.
ux266478•55m ago
delta_p_delta_x•1h ago
Have you tried taking a walk in a forest, a desert, or on an ice sheet? Plenty of solitude to go around...
christina97•1h ago
Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life. But I do really enjoy driving on new routes when the road is half empty.
My two observations are that bumper-to-bumper traffic feels much more stressful to me (a lot more honking, people trying to cut into faster lanes, etc) than the subway (crammed and sometimes there’s a homeless person with bad BO), and that I spend much less time on the rush hour subway than in traffic jams in the past (even during rush hour, the subways are not that packed until you get into Manhattan).
bombcar•1h ago
At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car.
But transportation is not Car vs the World™ no matter how many people (online) want it to be. It's a question of "how do you get people where they want/need to be". And that is a multi-faceted question with complex solutions - and the car will be part of it except in extreme/absurd situations that are so rare as to be ignored (like the "islands with no cars" (they have cars) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_islands).
One of the best ways to discuss transportation is to NOT do "r/fuckcars" which makes everyone defensive and hate you, but instead talk about how the benefits are for everyone - grade separation of rail is nice, but it's also self enforcing (trains will crush cars). But grade separation for bikes and pedestrians is a win for everyone! Cars don't like bikes next to them, and bikes don't like being next to cars. Cars don't mind driving a few miles out of their way, but pedestrians just don't want to deviate from the crow-flight line unless rabidly enforced.
LastMuel•52m ago
SoftTalker•31m ago
cycomanic•6m ago
dqv•10m ago
People tend not to point it out because most don't actually care about the profitability at all, it's just a meme opinion they present because they prefer cars and look at it like a competition. Other meme opinions that get used:
- disabled people need cars and you want to take cars away from them! (fake disability advocacy - disability advocates who have spent 10 minutes thinking about this know that disability is a spectrum and that many disabilities prevent people from being able to use cars or they are unable pay for the necessary modifications to be able to drive; also no one said anything about taking cars away from people)
- cyclists are a danger to pedestrians and cars! (rhetorical trick to get people to think bikes pose a greater danger to pedestrians than cars)
- buses are ugly! (so is your car)
- it increases traffic (so does your car)
- not everyone wants to ride a bike/walk/take the bus (no one said you have to)
They say these things even in non-adversarial contexts. Like in a discussion about wanting more pedestrian infrastructure and bike paths, they will say "just use [existing bike path], some of us have JOBS and ERRANDS to run" as if people only walk/bike for leisure. No, you don't understand, I'm trying to get as far away from the horrible drivers with Texas/Florida plates as possible!!
bombcar•8m ago
SoftTalker•38m ago
Or driving with no passengers at all, not uncommon for the buses where I live at certain times and routes.
It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. You can optimize equipment usage by running more buses on heavily used routes but you can't encourage new ridership on new routes without running enough buses to make it at least somewhat convenient. If you miss your bus and have to wait an hour or more for the next one, most people don't find that very appealing.
But at some point if you're running a whole bus to move a small number of people, you need to admit it's not worth it and eliminate that route. It would be more economical to just give those people taxi rides.
bombcar•29m ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI1yM9mzCAE
jjani•15m ago
cycomanic•8m ago
Hold on, if we talk about efficiency and profitability, you also need to compare to roads. You can't on one hand subsidise road/car travel and at the same time demand profitability from public transport.
If we would make road charges actually cover the costs it would become completely unsustainable in rural areas and would likely not become profitable in urban centers (factoring the price of the real estate of roads into the equation would likely increase cost significantly) except for rush hour.
The main thing that will bring cost of public transport down is going to be self driving, not cars but trains.
throw0101d•59m ago
Being on a motorcycle in a jurisdiction where lane filtering is allowed/tolerated is awesome during rush hour (or any hour, really).
mothballed•52m ago
bluejekyll•1h ago
I get the same independent feeling from others you describe while riding my bike (not a bubble, but that’s a false sense of security in a car giving the 40kish car occupants who die every year in the US). In fact, I generally enjoy that bike experience more than I ever do driving because I never get stuck in car traffic, never get stuck behind a line of cars at a traffic signal. Never need to work about parking, other than finding a secure place to lock up (which some destinations lack). I used to love driving, but I started commuting by bike for work and realized over time that I enjoy biking so much more that I go weeks at this point without ever driving.
FWIW I live in a smaller American city of about 120k people, but is part of a greater metro area.
adrian17•1h ago
The only thing that makes my occasional commute to office or distant family not a complete waste of time, is that I can read something or do a ton of language flashcards on the way. (plus a tiny small health benefit that like 20% of the commute is spent on foot.) In a car, even that would be taken away, with me being forced to focus on the road instead.
> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation".
Funnily, that's kinda how I feel about being in a car, having to constantly keep some level of awareness of others moving around.
For the record, I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.
eric_h•1h ago
Don't wait too long - I did that and had to take the test again! :)
SubjectToChange•1h ago
Cars aren't getting cheaper, car maintenance has become absurdly expensive (compared to what it was), auto insurance is set to get far more expensive, and making your entire lifestyle dependent on the existence of cheap gasoline is not a great strategy. A lot of people will simply be priced out of driving.
>It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Personal car commuting gets in the way of vital freight trucking. The highway system wasn't built to facilitate people going to work or traveling to see their grandma, it was build to move goods.
>I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future,...
The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. For instance, rural roads, rural hospitals, rural electrification, rural broadband, rural airports, etc. It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".
ux266478•14m ago
This is an uncritical viewpoint, you're simply describing a society. It doesn't matter where you live, you're soaking up the labor and capital of the wider net of people. That's what it is to have a civilization, and ours is so deeply interconnected that all relationships are inherently reciprocal. The trivially measurable flow of money doesn't say anything of substance as it's a second order abstraction, only that the mechanisms and pipelines by which money move are situated in cities. It's not urban labor and urban resources that builds, maintains and operates that infrastructure.
> It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".
On the contrary, the negative health effects of cities are empirically measurable[1][2][3]. We should be striving at all times as human beings to move past having them at all, and should look to building towards healthier, lower density living and encourage it for anyone who is capable of doing so. We cannot fall into the trap of building, encouraging and valuing objectively worse living conditions in the name of efficiency, the entire point of this whole system is to lead better lives, not to make the numbers go up. Is it not obviously better for there be 5 thousand humans on the planet who live in a Hesiodic golden age than 5 trillion living in psychological and physical agony?
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26630577/
[2] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23015685/
[3] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31610855/
KaiserPro•1h ago
Hard agree, but so long as I have a seat, it means I can have a nap.
One of the things that I can't do driving (safely!) is have a nap.
alistairSH•1h ago
Totally get that, some people don't like cities and crowds. But, they should also accept that more space (in this case, access to a car, roads, parking, etc) comes with costs and they should be willing to bear those costs personally.
pkulak•54m ago
I guess my point is that everything has a worst it can be. The idea, though, is that a city should offer all of them so that you can choose. And a subway at its worst, unlike driving at its worst, will still get you where you need to be on time.
scott_w•27m ago
Scarblac•47m ago
pjerem•10m ago
I understand what you mean. I don’t especially love it either. But I honestly 100% prefer that to being stuck in traffic, being attentive to everything everywhere just not to kill anyone.
And I say that while owning a comfortable car.
I truly enjoy and cherish not having to use my car to go to work because I did it in the past and I hated it.
Being stuck in my car alone is far worse for me than being stuck in a train station because my train is late or cancelled.
But it may be my personality. I came from the countryside, so I was using my parent’s car everyday.
When I moved to the nearby city (in Europe) I truly felt not having to care about a car to be absolutely freeing.
Now I’m back in the countryside but near a train station that I use everyday to commute and the idea that I may, somehow , if I change job, need to use my car everyday (which I like, btw) is really frightening to me.
Exiting a train and walking two minutes to catch a tramway or a metro then a bus without real waiting times and without thinking about it then taking another route on the way back because a friend invited you for an afterwork really feels like society is just working.
lo_zamoyski•3m ago
account42•2h ago
bluGill•1h ago
Ekaros•1h ago
daveliepmann•58m ago
bluGill•10m ago
Aurornis•1h ago
They pick their mode of transportation based on their needs and priorities. Taking the subway works when there’s a stop near your home, a stop near your destination, and you have all of the time necessary to wait for it. If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.
There’s also the matter of weather, which is less obvious to people who don’t live in locations that see extreme weather or deep snow. Safety and cleanliness is another issue depending on the location. There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.
People who hold up numeric metrics like number of people transported per unit area don’t understand why people prefer to hop in their car and go to their destination rather than spend potentially far more time navigating a crowded subway system.
bluGill•1h ago
That isn't how it should be. A good subway system is faster than your car for the trips you normally make, and it comes so often you don't think about waiting. There are very few good subways in the world, (much less the US), and so people think it needs to be bad because that is all they see - but it need not be that way.
TimorousBestie•1h ago
Transit isn’t a free market. The federal, state and local governments in the US heavily, heavily subsidize car transit to the exclusion of every other alternative. If consumers paid the fully-burdened cost, cars would be much less popular.
> If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.
They’re called buses, street cars, ride-shares, bicycles, etc. This has been a solved problem for about a century.
> There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.
Interested to see any statistics showing which subway system is less safe than a car in the same area per passenger per mile traveled.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-public-transit...
pornel•1h ago
If you only imagine this as a static scenario where everything is the same except you swap car for a train, of course car looks better.
The problem is you're not in a single-player game full of NPCs. When everyone else also chooses the car, you physically run out of space for everyone's cars, and end up with a city full of asphalt and large roads that are dangerous/inconvenient to cross and unpleasant to be around.
Car infrastructure takes a lot of space. When it can be reduced, it allows building amenities closer together, so you can have multiple useful destinations within walking distances not much worse than crossing a Walmart parking lot, and you get an environment that's nicer than a parking lot.
Being crammed in a train that moves 3 million people a day is the price to pay for not having a sea of asphalt for ~3 million cars.
iamacyborg•49m ago
And all the associated pollution, overheating and flooding issues that go along with it
devnullbrain•1h ago
happosai•1h ago
MangoToupe•1h ago
philipallstar•1h ago
sensanaty•47m ago
Yes, going to bumfuck nowhere will be more efficient by paving 800 miles of concrete, but by definition most people are in urban centers, and there's no reason you can't have cities that are human-friendly while still having cars as options for the people that need it. In the Netherlands, ~65% of people still have cars and take their cars for long journeys, it's just that we have alternative options to get around so the people who can't or don't want to have a car can choose to do so without being crippled in their mobility.
nonethewiser•1h ago
People who primarily drive cars? People who primarily drive cars when competitive options exist? People who argue for cars in areas where its not very feasible? People who prefer car oriented cities?
I think most people who primarily drive arent estimating subways at all.
throwaway894345•56m ago
sleepyguy•55m ago
frereubu•2h ago
arethuza•2h ago
frereubu•1h ago
ascagnel_•30m ago
djrobstep•2h ago
Cars are inherently spatially inefficient, which makes them a terrible form of transport for cities. That is the hard mathematical reality that so many people avoid reckoning with.
Think of the space taken up by 1000 people on a single metro train, vs 1000 people in nearly 1000 cars. Think of 1000 people on bikes vs 1000 people in cars.
It's so obvious that this is a terrible way of moving people about, and we see this in congestion, in longer commutes in spite of cars traveling at higher speeds, sprawling patterns of urban development, road deaths (the biggest cause of death of children in most western countries), noise, pollution, sprawl, inactivity and social isolation.
Only ideology (car brain) prevents people from seeing it as the problem it is.
aunty_helen•2h ago
There’s cities that are not setup for efficient public transportation or walkable living. Redesign it from ground up and put a metro smack bang through the middle. Until then, it’s just not going to work.
People, and especially people who like the idea of walkable cities that reside in council chairs, often miss this fundamental step.
“Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living. All key ingredients for walkable cities with well served public transport.
basilikum•1h ago
Of course there are limits to this, but cities are often grown historically over centuries and city planning usually takes place in such constraints rather than planning cities from scratch. Don't let the perfect be the enemie of the good.
stephen_g•1h ago
The first thing we should do is target development. For example, planning laws should require new development (suburbs etc.) to be built around some kind of transit (ideally rail). Zoning should always be mixed - for example it should always be permissible to have at least small apartment blocks, groups of townhouses (like row houses), and small shops and cafes in suburbs. The idea of mandating areas be dedicated to only detached single family dwellings should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
There’s just so much like that that can be started right now. But we don’t - we just keep making the same mistakes and things get worse.
bluGill•1h ago
Yes it does. It will take 20 years, but if you don't start now you will never get there. Are you willing to invest in a better future or just accept the status quo?
sensanaty•54m ago
This canal was, in fact, always there, they just turned it into a highway at some point in the 70s. So the reverse is more than possible, it's a question of will to do so and convincing the, frankly, selfish car drivers. Having lived in the US myself for a stint, there's plenty of cities that could easily have work done similar to what happened in Utrecht, it's just that there's a lack of a will to do so to make things much better.
Sure, you won't have a direct train from NYC to Dallas (although, seeing China's high speed rail I don't see why that couldn't be on the table), but we're talking about individual cities making these changes a bit at a time.
nehal3m•52m ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9kql9bBNII
Utrecht did something similar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPGOSrqXrjs
People centric infrastructure didn't fall out of the sky, we recognised bad ideas and reworked cities over decades to make them liveable. And it worked!
graemep•50m ago
Most British cities predate cars. They have had tramlines put in, taken out, and put in again. They have had roads widened, then bus and cycle lanes added. Train underground lines have been built.
> “Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living.
You can build and change housing. We have lots of what used to be big houses that are now blocks of flats. You can encourage small retailers in many ways. Services can be reorganised or public transport routes designed to ensure access to them
Not sure what you mean about climate - there are cities you can manage without cars from the tropics to very cold places.
You can pedestrianise roads in existing existing towns and cities.
discomrobertul8•2h ago
stephen_g•1h ago
The other problem is that city councils historically have run busses, whereas the State Government runs the rail, so a lot of our bus network competes with the rail instead of working together as an integrated network. At least the ticketing is integrated, but the network still has never felt like it’s designed to work together as an integrated transit network.
Workaccount2•1h ago
But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation.
Anything that reduces traffic, just makes driving a car more palatable.
So we are stuck forever at an equilibrium of tolerable traffic. More people taking the bus, train, bikes, and walking? Great! I'll zip down the highway and get a parking spot right in front.
bluGill•1h ago
I hate driving even when I'm alone on the road. I'm forced to stare at the road when I want to be doing something else. I can't even take a break, since a simple 5 minute nap has high odds of killing me even if I'm the only car on the road.
Plus cars are slower than trains or airplanes. Even on the autobahn with unlimited speed allowed, most people are not going nearly as fast as a high speed train, much less an airplane.
Workaccount2•1h ago
To make matters worse, in the near future it looks like most cases of self driving will be solved, so now people will have their personal pod that moves them around.
hammock•1h ago
arethuza•36m ago
Not if you are like me and likely to take a short nap after a long day at work...
Edit: I own a car, I use it all the time. But I also use the train a lot - all depends where I want to go and what I will be doing when I get there.
Edit2: I sometimes even drive to the train station, get out of my car and into a train!
cryptopian•13m ago
What this means of course is that an effective way of reducing traffic is by speeding up the alternatives.
akudha•1h ago
All this to say, if the public is sufficiently informed, they are not going to reject public transport. We've been brainwashed that car centric transport is the best.
Then there is Japan, they kept a station open just for one girl, so she can get to school - https://www.ndtv.com/feature/kyu-shirataki-station-japanese-...
meetpatelcurry•1h ago
LtdJorge•1h ago
stephen_g•1h ago
graemep•1h ago
I prefer to walk and take public transport, but where I live now (small town) busses are infrequent, and fairly short journeys can require changing. It can take two hours on the bus to get somewhere that is less than half an hour by car.
I think people here would be delighted with more public transport. The main complaint I hear about roads is not repairing potholes which is not hugely expensive. The problem is that the political push is to use a stick (make cars more expensive and inconvenient) rather than a carrot (provide better public transport).
hammock•1h ago
Even driver-centric is less anti-human than car-centric.
Maybe we need a “People First” movement in this world. I know the climatists and PETA won’t like that, but it’s worth considering as some sort of competing, balancing force in the world vs everything else we have today.
nehal3m•44m ago
cryptopian•6m ago
lucideer•42m ago
scott_w•36m ago
I 100% agree. I live in Newcastle, a city that is fairly car centric, but we have a Metro line and have had pushes to increase bus and bicycle transport (though Labour are generally bad for active travel).
My brother moved to Leeds, one of the largest cities in Europe without a Metro or tram. Driving anywhere in the city is fucking awful. The planners clearly kept trying to add one more lane and the result is congestion everywhere, even at quiet times.
I've also driven round Liverpool and Manchester and found, though they're better as they have Metro lines, the car-centric roads are still really awful to drive on.
ambicapter•24m ago