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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41105944

* 标题：“美国与欧洲城市生活的观察” * 文字概要：用户分享了他们对美国和欧洲城市生活的观察。作者指出，虽然他们在英国的任何地方都是步行长大的，但他们在美国城市中导航时遇到了困难，并且惊讶地发现大多数美国人希望开车去任何地方。他们还指出，与欧洲城市相比，美国城市缺乏步行性，并对汽车文化的盛行表示沮丧。然而，他们承认欧洲某些地区（尤其是瑞士）的公共交通很先进，并提供了另一种出行方式。作者最后表示，他们喜欢在城市和自然中行走，并强调将更多自然融入城市环境的重要性。

While taking a walk near downtown Austin, TX, a police car stopped next to me and the officers started asking weird questions. Including if I know where I am at, where I go, or is there someone who could help me with these apparent struggles in my life.

It took me a couple awkward minutes to realize that I'm the only one standing on my feet and not sitting in a car wherever I was looking. I apologized (???) and told them I was heading to a museum, bc I'm a visitor here and that's what we do right? I added a colleague's address and assured them that I'm not "confused", and will take an Uber now.

This was simply unbelievable in my world; for the next week I observed my colleague, whenever they took me out, or went to somewhere: we never walked outside. From the building to the parking lot, from the destination parking lot to the resto and vice versa.

Today, of course, I know that there are walkable cities too, I enjoy walking from my Chicago hotel to the office building :-) every single time I enjoy my US visits, but after a couple weeks I can't wait to get back to my 98% car free European life.

Had a somewhat similar experience in Houston (minus police), which seems to be a city whose infrastructure is comprised of one 9000-lane monstrosity of a freeway. I was staying in a hotel right across the street from the office I was working in, maybe a 3 minute walk. A coworker offered to give me a ride each morning, and when I mentioned I could just walk they said 'the only pedestrians around here are homeless people'. So I guess that's their general attitude about walking, which might explain the attention from police.

When I lived in Houston I would bike to work occasionally but it’s not a pleasant thing to do 4-6 months out of the year. Even walking to the bus stop at 8am in the summer I would be sweating. People who harp on Houston for being designed around cars (notably the “Not Just Bikes” channel on YouTube) usually live somewhere like the Netherlands with moderate weather and never address just how uncomfortable it is to be outside in Houston half the year. It also rains heavily in Houston quite frequently (90 days of rain/year).

I would love more walkable infra but I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to walk in Houston.

A substantial contributor to that heat is asphalt and concrete though (absorbs heat and releases it at night). And to make it worse there's no tree cover. Winter is also more manageable if you don't have to wait 20 mins for a bus in an uncleared snowbank just because non-car mobility is second-class

True. Another issue with all the concrete is that it doesn't absorb rain and has made the constant flooding worse. Zero tree cover is also a shame, there are hundreds of miles of concrete bike and walking paths along the bayous that would be great for commuting but most of it has zero tree cover so you're just baking in the sun.

The older parts of Houston have massive oak trees that provide a lot of shade (and acorns the size of walnuts). But the older houses aren't large enough for modern Houstonians (roll your eyes here); when you tear it down to build a McMansion the trees also have to go.

The elementary school near my friend's house had a playground that was 100% shaded by just two massive trees. They tore the school down for a modern replacement. The new playground has no shade at all, not even those stretched fabric triangles you see all over the southern US.

I'm from Montevideo, I wouldn't call it "tropical" but yeah, compared to an US city it's absolutely a million times more walkable.

We do have humidity and heat and I don't enjoy it and I use A/C several months a year.

There's a big push for more cycling-centric and more cycling lanes, and the bus infrastructure is obviously a lot better than the US. I don't have a car by choice.

I haven't been to Houston but I have been to Dallas and it was an extremely frustrating experience and it feels like an awful soulless city to me.

I don't know the distinct history of those cities but Houston's population didn't hit 1 million until the 1960s, nearly all of its growth has taken place in a car-centric world. At least 3/4 four of those cities have been around for a long time pre-car and I suspect weren't designed with cars in mind.

How about Miami, e.g Miami Beach and downtown Miami, both extremely walkable? Like Houston, Miami did not reach 1 million pop until the 60s.

Or Panama City, did not reach 1 mil until the 90s

And "designed with cars in mind" is part of the problem, is it not? Using that as a filter is like saying "there are no parking garages with good canoeing routes"

Humidity is the worst part, when it's hot but not so humid it's OK.

And at least here in Montevideo we're literally by the beach. I am two blocks away from being able to swim :)

I do complain a lot about the heat+humidity combination and I use A/C a lot.

Agreed. No matter how good the biking infrastructure in major cities in Japan is (and apparently it was good enough for me to see someone biking at almost any given moment, so I assume it was pretty good), I cannot fathom how people did it. You open a door to the outside, and you feel like you got blasted with a human-sized heatgun. Just standing outside for more than a few minutes, and you pretty much gotta take a shower after. And no, I am not ultra-sensitive to it, as I managed to survive 90F summers in Seattle with no AC just fine before.

I had a similar experience in Mexico City, except it wasn't a cop who stopped me, it was a friendly civilian driving by, and they asked if I was confused because they had observed two men stalking me from 3 blocks back for a while who were likely to jump me.

I don't think anyone stopping to genuinely help is a "bad" thing, or robs one of their dignity. If you do, maybe that is a comment on your internal worldview instead of on that of the person stopping.

Dense cities where passersby ignore you wantonly are decried as impersonal, lacking community, etc and now we are saying we WANT MORE of that? That it brings DIGNITY?

I don't understand what you're arguing. It seems like you're saying you'd rather have a city where cops and concerned citizens stop to ask if you're confused than a dense, walkable city? I also don't understand how you got that dense, walkable cities would be someplace "where passersby ignore you wantonly".

Cities used to be filled with tight knit communities in neighborhoods where everyone knew each other. Kids played outside and roamed around and no one cared.

Then mass suburbanization happened in the 60s/70s. American cities became high crime places. Everyone became anonymous. No one knew their neighbor.

Such is the paradox of modern urban life. Nowhere are you closer physically to your neighbor, but more distant socially. The 5 acre farms outside of town all know each other’s grandkids by name. Does a city dweller even know the name of the resident across the hall?

>Cities used to be filled with tight knit communities in neighborhoods where everyone knew each other. Kids played outside and roamed around and no one cared. >Then mass suburbanization happened in the 60s/70s. American cities became high crime places. Everyone became anonymous. No one knew their neighbor.

Here in Tokyo, it's still like this: kids play outside and roam around, taking the subway by themselves, etc. But people don't know their neighbors here either, since it's a city with tens of millions of people; it's just safe because it's built into the culture, just like petty theft almost never happens here and when you drop your wallet, it's almost certain to be turned into the nearest police box, with all the cash still inside.

> Cities used to be filled with tight knit communities in neighborhoods where everyone knew each other. Kids played outside and roamed around and no one cared

There are many neighborhoods in cities and towns in the US where this is still true. I know because I live in one, and I've visited others. There are also a ton of US suburbs and exurbs where people barely know their neighbours.

Having a friendly neighborhood has much to do with the strength of community institutions and the existence of "third places". Those can be present (or not) in a variety of community layouts and densities.

My take is that it requires a sweet spot of economic security where people aren't struggling so much that they can't/don't trust in community, but also aren't so wealthy that they don't need/rely on their community. Beyond that, it also helps to have physical layouts that enable friendly unintentional encounters between residents.

The problem is that none of these places will be cheap to live in, because all else equal, the existence of that lifestyle will drive up demand (and therefore housing prices).

Yeah it’s interesting. The kids in the upper peninsula know everyone else their age within a 150 mile radius by the time they graduate from high school (usually via sports). Many of them live on roads that share their last name. Very, extremely rural with small towns sprinkled around.

Bus riding I can sort of understand, that tends to be the case everywhere outside of manor metros IME (and not without a certain amount of truth to it) - but to think of walking or cycling like that seems really sad, what a way to live, shielded from the natural environment, shuffling from one air conditioned box to the next.

Sure but if you decide that's not a way you want to live then you also don't want to live somewhere where it's uncomfortable for you otherwise.

(And while I'm here 'manor' in GP was a typo for 'major', in case that's not clear to anyone.)

> if you decide that's not a way you want to live then you also don't want to live somewhere where it's uncomfortable for you otherwise.

well, our living choices aren't necessarily choices these days. Nor comfortable. More like compromises for suvival. Already had more than a few friends priced out of California and needing to move out of the state in its entirety.

I am not a lawyer, but that does not seem like a law that could pass a constitutional test. You can say you have to be in a car to be on a freeway for safety reasons, but you can't ban people from being in a place because they are not in a car because you don't like the people who aren't in cars. From reading the article the intent seems to be that you suspect people who aren't in cars.

> I am not a lawyer, but that does not seem like a law that could pass a constitutional test.

Nor am I, but a constitutional test used to cost about $250,000 or so over a decade ago (does inflation affect these things?). For someone who can't afford a car, that's a tough bill to eat.

As someone who has litigated a ton of constitutional challenges, you can definitely do it without representation if you want. I would think pretty much anyone on HN is educated enough to figure it out. (Attorney fees being your biggest cost; costs you'd have to swallow are deposition fees and filing fees if you're not indigent).

[Usually you can make two separate attacks on these kinds of constitutional cases since most states have their own constitutions that are practically identical to the federal one, so you can sue in both state and federal court separately if you want two tries at it -- this is good if you screw it up the first time and want to use the arguments the defendant fired at you in the first case to bolster your retry]

With representation though, I have a current case I finally settled today with the government and my legal counsel ran up a bill that was north of $500K for a very simple constitutional case. His firm swallowed it because it was part of their yearly pro bono requirements.

Walking / using public transportation is associated with low status when it is done for cost savings reasons. When it’s done for convenience it doesn’t convey much.

Using a bus in a ski resort is higher status than a car in a large city.

Strange. I have been to Austin a number of times for work and I find the city to be very walkable. I also enjoy the riverfront parks and pay a visit to SRV (may he rest in peace). I stay in downtown or at UT so I don't really know what it is like beyond there. I've also used their b-cycle system with great success. In addition, I remember their public transport system to be decent for an American city. That's how I get to the airport for something like $1 from downtown.

The hire bikes are great but if you don't have a North American phone number you can't sign up in their app! (I relied on a friendly stranger who offered her phone number for the confirmation code.)

Great city to ride around! Surprisingly good facilities.

I was in Austin for work in the 1990s and there was a mall, which I could see from my hotel so I figured I'll just walk to the mall. Nope.

I think either an older colleague (I was not old enough to rent a car, this is a long time ago) ferried me across or maybe the hotel took pity and sent me in their minibus ? There was no practical way to walk that short distance, the infrastructure is designed only for cars.

I mainly remember that mall because I found a (possibly mislabelled) copy of the version of Tori Amos' "Under The Pink" which is actually 2CDs, so "More Pink" is inside the case too but it was the same price as the regular album, and that was an amazing bargain for teenage me. But yeah, it was staggering to me that these Americans just expected to drive everywhere. I have grown up in an English village where I walked everywhere, to school, to the shops. to a friend's house, everywhere. I guess I was old enough to realise that most English villages aren't also served by the London Underground, but the choice to build only car infrastructure seemed very strange indeed.

There are places in Austin where you can go for pleasure/scenic walks. (eg think the green belts). But it's hard to use walking for utility in Austin. Not to mention socially you'll consistently be invited to places >5 miles away and the presumption is you have a car and you'll all drive separate.

FWIW, I live near downtown Austin, haven't owned a car in over a year, walk/bus everywhere, and have never been questioned by police. I typically see quite a few pedestrians out. As far as Texan cities go it's the most walkable, though it's still not very good.

Yes, I've lived here 17 years and see pedestrians most places I go - although to be fair there are many roads where pedestrians don't go (say, the service road alongside 71). Perhaps OP was in such a place.

I also did not own a car for years, commuting only by bicycle, and never had a problem.

Indeed, Austin's core is only about 5 square miles (the entirety of the East Side to the Greenbelt, Hyde Park down to far South Congress, say). Fairly compact.

It is no New York or London but it is walkable and bikeable.

> Except for the very hottest of summer days, I see a lot of pedestrians in downtown Austin.

I don't know if this is true of Austin, but trying to convince people to get off the street in the afternoon can be part of the city's heat management plan in some parts of Texas.

if there was a dictionary of "american urbanism" they would define humans as having four wheels rather than two legs

they really do act like it whenever the USA plans a city or a neighborhood. why wouldn't everybody have a car? except we actually have plenty of reasons now that we didn't before

I own the domain AmericanUrbanism[.]org - I've been thinking of setting up some kind of advocacy group (501c4) or even political party there focused on changing this reality.

Cars made more sense in the industrial age, when people needed to commute to a factory for work. But, in the age of knowledge work and especially remote work, we aren't commuting as much. So, walkable neighborhoods become far more important and impactful.

I think there should be just many types of neighborhoods. Those who need a car for longer distance travel should accept living further away from city center, where there's enough space for parking slots, while the rest can enjoy pedestrian-first neighbourhoods closer to services. Public transport should of course reach all areas, so that the car owners have no real need to use their car much to reach the denser areas.

>Those who need a car for longer distance travel should accept living further away from city center

Strongly feel this acceptance will be difficult to actualize sans coercion.

The least coercive way to do it is probably by making areas closer to the city center worse for driving — narrow roads, no parking, etc — and better for walking and biking. Then people will naturally sort themselves based on their preferences. The problem being that establishing the needed urban environment is itself a political struggle.

How so? We've built huge amounts of infrastructure (parking being the obvious one) to explicitly enable people to have cars in city centers- stop doing that and my gut (scientific, I know!) says that'll get you most of the way there.

Having cities arranged on grids with huge wide roads is generally a recipe for non-walkable environments. If you are having to wait ages for a light to change every time you go from one block to the next, you lose much of the efficiency of walking.

> Having cities arranged on grids with huge wide roads is generally a recipe for non-walkable environments.

There's no problem with grids or wide roads as long as there is infrastructure in place for pedestrians. Bridges can allow people to cross over wide streets/traffic without having to wait for a light for example. Tunnels can be an option as well. Grids can really help a city be more walkable since it becomes dead simple to navigate and you aren't wasting time on long winding roads or labyrinthine paths which increase the distance between two points and make it easier to get lost.

> There's no problem with grids or wide roads as long as there is infrastructure in place for pedestrians. Bridges can allow people to cross over wide streets/traffic without having to wait for a light for example.

Infrastructure for pedestrians would be you cross as soon as you get there, cars wait. Bridges are not pedestrian infrastructure they’re “cars are the priority” infrastructure, “cars mustn’t be delayed or inconvenienced, pedestrians can be” infrastructure.

" without slowing anyone down. " - but the very first image you provided will slow down pedestrians, it's harder to cross compared to a simple direct crosswalk and it's less friendly to ppl with mobility problems. Such bridges are relatively ok to implement outside cities where you have highways/roads with cars driving high speeds but these are bad solutions inside cities where the priority belongs to pedestrians and cars must drive slower

If you are in hurry, you will avoid those. They add more time to your trip then one would guess intuitively.

What do work for pedestrians is a network of smaller roads that you can "just" cross safely without waiting or taking detours. Basically, a few big roads you cross once in a while and the rest being smaller roads where cars are forced to go slowly.

Grids are better than culdesac but worse than randomness for a human brain so that it would be interesting to walk there. Wide roads aren't good for walkability in any sense: even if we ignore huge noise and pollution created by lots of cars, wide roads are more dangerous to cross and since it's wide you as a pedestrian need to walk more on non pedestrian infra to get to points of interest. Walkability isn't just about being able to walk

The fact safety is a limiting factor means those places don't have social control, meaning these are not places ppl tend to hang out in so probably not that walkable. P.s. walkable in this context doesn't mean it's just possible to walk, it means it's a nice experience to walk with nice environment/shops/othwr points of interest

"Highly walkable" means many people would choose to walk even if able to take a car.

To be walkable a city needs to be quick to walk between destinations and pleasant to do so.

Most US cities are too spaced out, require waiting at each block, or are not all that pleasant for walking.

I had something similar happen to me in Miami about a decade ago. As a New Yorker I'm just used to walking and taking public transit everywhere. I was down there for some data center work I needed to do out of the NAP of the Americas, and one night I decided to go to see a friend of a friend DJ at some bar in downtown Miami. So I took the free Miami elevated train to a stop near the club (The Vagabond) and started walking over. I get a block into the walk and someone pulls up on a bike and is like "wtf are you doing? are you lost? you should not be walking right now, do you need help?". It was a totally fine walk, maybe 5 minutes at NYC walking speeds, if maybe a bit desolate. The guy proceeded to slowly ride next to me while I walked to make sure I was ok. Ended up buying him a beer in the club and chatting for a while, he just thought it was dangerous to be walking.

Maybe it was a dangerous (i.e. high-crime) area? A lot of areas can look OK but are not someplace you want to be at night especially alone. And if you're from out of town you might not know.

Similar happened to me. I was at The Oaks Card Club on the border of Emeryville and West Oakland. I needed to get to BART, and it was just a few blocks on one street, so I thought I'd just walk. About half way down, a taxi driver actually pulled up without me hailing him and said "Man, what the fuck are you doing walking here? Get in and I'll drive you wherever you need to go!" It was either a great sales pitch or I was actually in danger and didn't know it.

My SF story: Chinatown, near the convention center. My wife wanted me to pick some stuff up while I was there. I had been there by day, seemed perfectly reasonable. I get done with the trade show, head over there near closing time to get what she wanted (perishable, so I left it to the last minute) and coming back I realized the character had changed considerably and it was a place I didn't want to be. I hadn't gotten a car because the hassles of parking made it a negative to me.

Yeah, that's what he was saying. I mean it didn't look the safest, but that's never something that has bothered me. A large part of my 20s were spent being places I probably shouldn't have been all around Brooklyn in the early 2000s. As soon as I got on the Miami metromover and noticed I was the only one not strung out I knew what I was getting myself into. The palm trees were maybe throwing me off -- as a New Yorker palm trees meant vacation.

It's pretty wild. I'm in a very car-centric city in Canada, and there have been days where I drive across the city and not seen a single pedestrian (across multiple types of areas). Usually in the winter, but still a very weird thing to not see people in a city.

I think it was around Waterloo park and capitol; I was on my way to the Texas State History Museum.

I looked around now on Google Street View, but can't recognize the slight hill I was walking on (it happened around 10y ago). Funnily enough, also street view shows streets with no pedestrians anywhere :-)

Yeah this is so weird for us. I'm so glad i didn't need to own a car in the last 7 years and I haven't even driven any car in the last 6.

It's perfect that way. I hate driving.

I wouldn't let the cops bully me into taking an Uber though. Afaik it's still legal to walk in the US?

Living in Southern California, I like to go on walks with my family in the evenings or mornings, but I couldn't imagine having to take public transportation or having to walk everywhere. It seems picturesque, but it also sounds terrible in the sense that you can't just get in your car, go some place, park in a parking lot, go shopping, and then head back home, all on your own terms.

I visited London a long time ago and the public transportation is amazing and it I did want to walk to see the city, which I did. But I imagine even living there, I would want my own car to be in control of my life.

So, visiting a place is good for walking. But living in a place is not. At least that's my experience.

The best public transport in us is usually worse that bad public transport in most of eu so no wonder you felt that way. Let me tell you a counter point: in Switzerland public transport and trains are so frequent and fast due to own lanes that you don't even need to check the schedule, you just go to the station which is usually nearby and wait at max 5 mins to get into something, usually a tram, for intercity between biggest cities trains are usually coming about each 15 mins. In this regard you are more independent than with a car- you don't care about fuel, about parking, about being focused all the time on the road, you just get in and get out. Even for buying tickets they have an app where you just check-uncheck it and it calculates the fare based on gps. also in many dense eu cities you'd probably have enough shops in sub 5 mins nearby so you can either walk there or go with a bike or take a taxi that would cost pennies for such a small distance - again, no worrying about traffic, fuel, parking and so on

It's true for city life in Switzerland.

I haven't owned a car for more than 15 years now. I have city year bus pass but I also frequently just walk to wherever I'm going, there's lots of paths and shortcuts for pedestrians, but if the weather is a bit rubbish, there's bus stop outside my flat that runs every 5-10 mins.

I'm a member of the mobility car share for the rare times hen I do need a car, usually to pick up or move something heavy, or take a bunch of stuff to the decheterie.

Maybe sometimes after a night on the town, I might grab a taxi home, but I do not miss having a car.

Well that's pretty easy, Dutch trains are unreliable.

In fact all public transport there is pretty bad. Here in Barcelona the metros come every 3 minutes during the day on each line. In Amsterdam it's more like 15.

>But living in a place is not

I’m 40+ years old now and have never needed or wanted to have a driving license. I simply hated America when I had to visit and use taxi or someone else’s help to get anywhere. In Berlin even with a child the need of a car is so rare — sometimes it’s even more pleasant to walk an hour to a museum or a club than use public transportation.

That’s strange coming from someone whose country has the famous autobahn. What if you want to get out into the countryside, where busses and trains don’t go? Don’t you need a license to rent a vehicle?

> What if you want to get out into the countryside, where busses and trains don’t go?

I don’t have any business in such countryside. What would I find there? A good beach on Baltic sea is 15 min walk door-to-water plus 2 hours on express train. The list of tourist attractions and vacation destinations accessible by train, plane and/or taxi within half a day or so is so big here that I cannot imagine going to such inaccessible place. Worst case I will pay a few hundred euro for taxi if such improbable situation occurs.

And what's going to happen long term with exploding Berlin rents? The only affordable rents will be out in the suburbs of Berlin, where you'll either have to drive in or spend 2-3x the time on a probably crowded train possibly standing room only. As in the example of Switzerland above, mass transit is a luxury for those able to pay high rents. Previously in Berlin this was subsidized by the rest of Germany and by price controls but the right-wing courts have pretty much gutted Berlin's price protections in favor of billion-euro property developers.

I lived in Germany for years without driving as well, because I could afford to live by the city center. But over half my colleagues drove because that's all they could afford to do, and you should try stepping out of your bubble and understand the pressures that force Germans to drive. They're not all just wanting to spend more time in their Audis.

First, I’m not representing all Germans here, just sharing my own experience which is a good counter-example to “life without a car is impossible”. I’m of course not arguing that car is unnecessary for everyone.

Second, don’t tell me about my “bubble”: you have no idea who I am and what I have experienced in my life. I’m very well aware of many sides of it, maybe more than you are.

Third, do you seriously want to lecture a person who is both a landlord and a tenant in Berlin about local rent controls and price development? We do have some issues here, but it is nowhere close to neither London or NYC where prices are crazy nor Moscow where commuting can be truly exhausting.

>I’m of course not arguing that car is unnecessary for everyone.

Sadly, many are. This topic often does turn into one of lifestyle judgement and it isn't very productive when arguments go from practical to personal. As if any one car-goer or bus-goer determines the fate of a city's urban planning.

Agree. Especially when you add bike-goers to the conversation it can get ugly very quickly. A parent with a stroller is the most neglected person in such talks.

I myself believe that personal cars are mobility edge cases and the world will settle on vendor-managed rental fleets eventually, where most people will occasionally use rental cars with autopilot.

Nevertheless this is not going to happen for the next 50-80 years, so we just need at least to stop promoting car-centric lifestyle and find a real compromise between cars, bikers and pedestrians.

In Switzerland, people in villages use trains to get to and from work. Quite literally, they bike to train, park bike, use train to go to work. Some ride car to train, ride train and then go to work.

It is just not true that mass transit is only for those who pay high rents. It is other way round pretty much all round world and historically - rich people were buying cars more and poor used public transport.

> but I couldn't imagine having to take public transportation or having to walk everywhere

Well yes, the US transportation system is utter trash, even in California

> but it also sounds terrible in the sense that you can't just get in your car, go some place, park in a parking lot, go shopping, and then head back home, all on your own terms.

In Europe I have three supermarkets in a 800m radius around my place, the closest shopping center/mall/whatever you call it is a 30min walk away (10min by public transport, 8min by bicycle). I can walk to the closest supermarket without even leaving the private ground of my block of buildings and its park, no street to cross, no cars in sight

> I would want my own car to be in control of my life.

Are you working for these fine gentlemen ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_lobby

I'm European, spent the first 10 years of my independent adult life without a car, and have always lived in urban areas, within walking distance of supermarkets and other amenities, and with good public transport services. Yet I agree with him

When I finally did get a car, it was a massive QoL upgrade. I can go anywhere, at any time, usually considerably faster than PT, and carry an order of magnitude more than before. I didn't enjoy having to go to the supermarket multiple times a week, but I had to when I could only carry maybe 4 bags (fewer if heavy) in one trip. I still do use buses and trains where it makes sense, e.g. visiting other cities or the centre of mine

Cool, too bad it isn't sustainable. If life was about doing everything you want whenever you want and carry a lot of useless junk around without having to worry about side effects we'd have won the game by now

And the goalposts move again. We were talking about the convenience, not the sustainability. If you want to argue that the inconvenience is a necessary price for environmental sustainability, sure, that's a valid position, but don't pretend that there's no convenience cost

It's interesting that I've been downvoted to -3 for factually detailing how cars are in fact useful. Shooting the messenger won't change the facts

> So, visiting a place is good for walking. But living in a place is not. At least that's my experience.

This is a common Internet meme -- the American tourist that goes to Europe and loves their experience of walking around nice, dense cities designed at a human scale and functioning public transit. Then they return to their life of highways and parking lots and strip malls, which, to me, is dystopia.

That's so funny, because in my mind it's the complete opposite: I feel free because I don't have the burden of keeping a vehicle-object. However, where I leave is car unfriendly. People who always late are the two friends of mine who try to use their car

(Actually I tried both lives. I used to have a car in the past. Still prefer being car free)

No one is arguing that you would have to take public transportation or walk everywhere. They are just saying that it is good if where you live is walkable. I also live in Southern California and I would say that a lot of most expensive places to live are expensive because they are more walkable. You could live in downtown La Jolla or by the beach in Santa Monica and walk around. You could also own or rent a car and drive to Lake Tahoe. It's not either or.

this is the real lie, that cars give you agency and freedom. except that you have to find a place to park, and keep the fueled, deal with minor breakdowns like punctured tires that leave you to deal with them for hours. and insurance. and a drivers license. and a place to keep them at night. the threat that they will be broken into. the constant switching back and forth between inattention and attention while driving. getting delayed by traffic. spending quite a bit of time complaining about traffic even though it is you. the inevitable collision. the abysmal process of purchasing. knowing you're are getting screwed at the repair place. having to deal with rentals when you travel. the complete loss of function when you become old or injured and cannot drive for yourself.

no thanks

Yes! At least a third of the population can’t drive, because too young, too old, handicapped in some way, or too poor. And we have built an environment that requires driving. That’s pretty messed up.

Depends on where you live. In most of the US if you don't have a car you'll be spending hours a day on busses. You have no freedom - you are either sleeping or commuting or working. You can't sleep less, you can't work less. But you can commute fewer hours a day with a car.

Walkable/bikeable places exist in some cities, but are reserved for the rich.

As for the costs of owning a car - these are real, but the cost of not owning a car is much greater. As electric cars filter down to the used market cost of car ownership will also drop a fair amount.

And mass transit you have to deal with line failures, the inability to transport more than you can reasonably carry, and the curfew created by the end-of-line time for the evening.

not much different from a human in the grand sceme of things. Need to maintain energy, treat minor and major injuries, deal with insurance, keep an ID on me (which costs money to renew), and either avoid or accept the risk of night walks. Fights can break out, routes can get deterred, and Just keeping up with living expenses is hell.

Adding a 2nd mechanical maintenacnce isn't as bad as dealing with the flesh skin version.

Portable wearable air conditioning and sun protection, that's what you'd need to make it comfortable. Maybe like a robotic exoskeleton, we can't be far from making that affordable.

Wheels might make it energy efficient but engines powered by oil from deep under the Gulf of Mexico shipped to refineries, then shipped hundreds of miles to gas stations, then people driving a ton or two of steel and plastic and rubber to the gas station so they can “efficiently” get one person 4 miles to a shop isn’t so efficient.

A bicycle on flat asphalt is more efficient than a person despite person+bike moving more total mass; but still the cost of mining iron ore, making steel, making a bike for every customer, compared to just building the store and the homes close enough to walk and not doing any of that…

Energy.gov says “In 2021, 52% of all trips, including all modes of transportation, were less than three miles, with 28% of trips less than one mile”, it’s daft either way that people want to use a car for such short distances or that urban spaces are designed so that things are relatively very close but juuuust too far for convenience.

That is why cultures in such climates tend to have a mid-day siesta when no one goes out, and a lively late night when the temperatures become bearable, the sun no longer tries to murder you with its rays, and people go outside to eat, shop and meet friends.

Nah, as someone who lives somewhere with actual humidity “mid day” is basically “whenever the sun is up”.

85 and humid here is worse than -00 and dry in Phoenix. It’s so humid your sweat can’t evaporate because the air is already saturated. It’s beyond miserable, and actively unhealthy to many.

The map of US rainforests shows an active rainforest along the western side of North Carolina. It is not all that hard to believe said forest could have been much larger before the human touch.

The easternly side of the forest to the easternmost points of NC is not further than LA from SF, though. Unless you live way out in the ocean, but still consider that to be North Carolina for some reason, you are closer than said distance to the forest.

I heard the same from a Scot who visited Texas and decided to go for a 45 minute stroll to his destination. In summer. He regretted it 15mins in and luckily a local stopped and gave him a ride, saying that he could die in this heat (not sure if that was a joke)

For a Scot it would be a bit of an extreme change. For a Spaniard it wouldn't.

It's important to pace and hydrate oneself and people from hot climates know that because they deal with it all the time.

Texas is ground zero for the car centric mass psychology.

South Florida and the north suburbs of Detroit are #2 and #3 in my direct experience.

The south is very well suited to the e-bike. It will probably take the total die off of the boomers before anything really changed though

An old roommate moved from the Bay Area to Dallas years ago and on a nice day in the park he decided to lay down on the grass, as he would normally do in the Bay Area. Pretty soon cops arrived.

>>That being said, you're in a city, what did you expect?

Literally every single city I can think of it's better to walk than drive, so I guess it's a uniquely American perspective? Or like the other commenter said - a joke?

I wouldn't generalize this as an American perspective; at least many of my US friends envy the walkability of the European cities they visited (while recognizing the disadvantages / inconveniences about it, too)

As an American (New Englander), I would say that if it's better to drive than walk or take transit, you are not actually in a city, you're in the suburbs. So this definitely isn't a universal American perspective.

As a European, it's... hard to fathom.

I've lived in big cities most of my life and I take the car maybe 10 times per year, including cabs. And that's mostly to get away from the city, where I can't go by bus.

I lived in the suburbs of a very large European city. I still drove to work every day. Sure I could walk to the bus stop and wait or walk KMs to the train station and wait. But my car was the most direct and easy way to get to the office.

I never had a big city job. Mostly office buildings in office parks. So I guess me and my co-workers' lifestyles were very similar to Americans.

This is the thing about tourists who come back from Europe raving about "walkability" well of course, you were staying in the heart of a major city probably, of course there is a lot of stuff you can walk to, and there's good public transit. Get a few miles away and you'll find that many more people have cars and drive.

Living in The Netherlands, and unless you live very far out in the country, everything is easily walkable or bike-able. The closest supermarkets are generally a 5-10 minutes walk, a train or bus station is almost always close by, etc.

I myself do not own a car, and besides some very rare moments (like bringing large trash to the junkyard or something, in which case I can ask friends to quickly borrow their car), I do not have any hindrance from it.

> That being said, you're in a city, what did you expect?

:-) I giggled on this one 10y ago when I first saw this difference in mindsets, and also smile at it today. I sometimes wonder if I were growing up there, would I also feel weird when I see my alterego walking around on the _streets_ of Zürich, where I don't even have a vehicle to _drive_ to one of the national parks.

> you're in a city, what did you expect? If you want to spend time walking outside drive to one of the many National Parks

Is this a joke? I hope this is a joke and I’ve misunderstood it.

Cities are not synonymous with cars. There are lots of walkable cities in the world. Driving to a place where you can walk is a very strange inversion of the norm.

" Driving to a place where you can walk is a very strange inversion of the norm."

Can is a strong word here.

I am an avid walker with around 13 thousand steps daily on average (counted over last three years), but in my daily life, I generally take some form of transport if the expected walking time exceeds some 25 minutes. A tram or a bus, but I don't regularly walk 7 km to the centre of my city and back, even though I certainly can. It would simply take too long.

> Driving to a place where you can walk is a very strange inversion of the norm.

There's no way for that to be true; driving to a place where you can walk is a possibility. Walking to a place where you can drive would be useless, because you wouldn't have a car there.

> Walking to a place where you can drive would be useless

You could walk to a vehicle rental shop or (eg London with Zipcar) walk to where a vehicle you can rent is parked. But not a normal situation, definitely.

> or (eg London with Zipcar) walk to where a vehicle you can rent is parked.

I never got Zipcar. They made themselves completely pointless by charging you for time when you didn't need the car, inflating what appeared to be reasonable fees into ludicrous overcharges.

If I want to visit my family 90 minutes away over the weekend, I might pay for three hours of car rental. I'm obviously not going to pay for 48 hours of car rental. Who exactly is using Zipcar? Where did the model "like long-term car rental, but we'll lie about it" come from?

Former Zipcar employee. Nothing here is confidential afaik.

In London, they did have the one way concept for some time - I don't know if it's still there. They experimented with dedicated spaces as well as charging by the minute with approved parking areas. I don't think any of the competitors in that space are still using that model because it didn't work out financially. (Parking was a giant issue - our competitors and us could only negotiate for parking in some places. If the user parked outside of that, we got fined, and GPS was terrible in trying to make sure they were in the right area - the buildings were too close together. And users were frustrated if the area they were allowed to park was full.)

The fundamental problem is that the cars end up getting bunched up away from where people want to take them. Let's say you're driving to your parents for 90 minutes. Who is going to rent your car 90 minutes away? Are they going to go to your parents' house to use it when you don't have it? What if there's no car when you get back, because they put it somewhere else? How many places allow you to park a car for days without prior agreement?

Zipcar is meant and priced for shopping trips or other short errands on the order of a few hours. If you want multiple days for a longer trip, that's what traditional car rental exists for. If you're "obviously" not paying that, that's your choice and nothing to do with Zipcar.

You don't get to break down Zipcar's hourly pricing into just the hours you need to drive each way. In the interim inbetween then the Zipcar isn't at its spot and therefore unavailable for other use. Zipcar's hourly pricing includes the fact that it will be returned and immediately available for other customers.

TLDR: You may only use the Zipcar for a few hours, but it's out of its spot and unavailable for the entire trip, so that's what you're paying for.

> You don't get to break down Zipcar's hourly pricing into just the hours you need to drive each way.

This is how all other vehicle rental works. It's the only advantage of rental over ownership.

> In the interim inbetween then the Zipcar isn't at its spot and therefore unavailable for other use.

That's just logistical incompetence on the part of Zipcar. Why would the Zipcar be unusable when not at "its spot"? My car doesn't become unusable when it leaves my driveway. The Zipcar is usable as soon as I return it to Zipcar. Their choice to refuse my return is just their commitment to an unworkable business model.

I think they would like to pick up the car, drive somewhere else, and then leave the car parked somewhere for a weekend without paying for it in that time. Which is difficult to make work as a business (is anyone else going to rent it in that time? Would they be happy if all the cars were to be driven away somewhere else?) Even more traditional rental companies will often charge you extra to drop off a car one of their locations which isn't the one you picked it up from.

Zipcar and co are generally aimed at daytrips, the kind of thing where you occasionally need a car or van for a day but no longer, not for longer distance trips where you are away for a few days.

Sorry but you are wrong.

I live in Zürich, in my experience the city with the best public transport system(Stockholm a close second, but Switzerland has much better public transportation overall). In case I need a car in Switzerland I would simply rent one for the day using one of the many rental options.

Public transport for 95% of my trips, 3% cab, 2% rental. It’s better for me, it’s better for the environment, the people around me. Reducing cars on the road also makes it so much more pleasant and nice just to be in the city. I travel frequently to London and it’s unbelievable how big difference it makes to be in a city designed for pedestrians and not cars(and London is absolutely designed for cars first).

I travel world wide for work and my default option is always public transport, with the occasional cab ride for convenience. In some places it sadly doesn’t work out so then I end up renting a car.

I mean, walking from my home to the beach is almost as fast 70% of the time (the summer month make finding nearby parking spot really difficult and time consuming), and it's definitely better to come back walking too, as I don't like sand in my car. Going to the farmers' market by foot is faster (unless I go at 6am and find a free parking spot), and less alienating (I say 'hello' to a dozen persons on the way, another dozen on the way back, meet friends, flirt a little). The only exception is going to see my parents, It's definitely faster to drive around the small marsh than the 40 minutes it takes to cross it, but I usually cross it, and when I don't, I use my bike rather than my car.

And when I used to drink, I definitely walked to my bar rather than drove to it despite the free, often empty parking nearby and the 10 fewer minutes it took.

I honestly don't see situations where a walk is worse than a drive in my living area. At worse I take a bike? When I was alone, I managed with rentals only tbf (now it's a bit more difficult, also the windsurfs are easier to handle with a car, and are the primary reason we own one)

Yeah, but you have to find somewhere to park at both ends which is a hassle, you are limited in where you can go - couldn't stop and have a drink with friends either.

> You would prefer to walk around a city because it's that's dense as opposed to walking around nature that's specifically set aside for this type of enjoyment?

I've taken some very enjoyable walks in cities that I wouldn't rank either above or below some of my favorite hikes. It's just a completely different type of experience.

Rather than discovering interesting birds and plants, I can notice architecture, discover new restaurants and cafes and maybe check out their menu, window shop etc.

> I don't understand the complaint, here, other than "America is unlike Europe."

Even though America and Europe have developed differently, what's wrong with reevaluating some of the results of these developments in American cities, in particular with regards to whether they're meeting the needs of the people living there?

> Were they designed intentionally as such or this that an outcome of history?

Both. And with different constraints at different time periods.

Aside, people in the past weren't stupid and they built cities purposefully. Just like cavemen weren't stupid, they just had less _stuff_, knowledge, tools, etc.

> In any case what value does this "norm" have?

Using less fuel. Enjoying a more healthy body and mind, enjoying life. Leaving a better world for its future inhabitants.

> You would prefer to walk around a city because it's that's dense as opposed to walking around nature that's specifically set aside for this type of enjoyment?

Strawman ("because it's that dense"). I like walking in cities AND nature. Both can be true.

Also, why should nature be "set aside"? What a weird notion. Why shouldn't we have more "nature" in our cities, in fact we know it's probably better to do exactly that, for a myriad of reasons that have been scientifically researched. Why should WE "set aside" nature, as if it was somehow external to us.

because, absent being set aside and reserved for nature, the land in the city is Very valuable and would be sold off to developers to be razed for buildings and parking lots.

> Were they designed intentionally as such or this that an outcome of history?

Amsterdam was re-designed for cars in the mid-20th century, it was not designed for cars and had been historically for walking. Then they realised the mistake in the 70s and started to re-design the city again prioritising walking, and biking, now we have Amsterdam as the poster child of a city designed for that.

You seem to forget that in the mid-20th century everywhere was being designed for cars, we are seeing a response to that after the failed experiment.

> you're in a city, what did you expect? If you want to spend time walking outside drive to one of the many National Parks

Many Europeans are used to "cities as Open Air Museums". (If you are not under the time constraints of appointments, and instead you have the time and want to enjoy the place and what is contained with some natural attention, you need to walk.)

That's a weird assumption, given that it's the exact opposite. In most European cities it's better to walk especially if you're under time constraints or have an appointment, it's going to be usually quicker and more predictable in terms of time needed than driving.

Which assumption?

Just to be sure there were no misunderstandings: I wrote that "If the agenda allows, you will need to enjoy the open-museum city by walking - faster methods will decrease the ability to pay attention": that is not inconsistent with "If the agenda does not allow enjoying the open-museum city, you may want to consider walking as a more reliable way to respect the scheduling".

The fact that you get downvoted is mind blowing. European cities have a clear policy to make it harder for cars and easier for other transportation.

The previous poster is basically saying "Most Europeans use the cities they live in as open air museums, and not to live in. They don't have time constraints, they don't have appointments, they don't work there". Living the life in Europe, as a full-time open air museum visitor, it's great!

> The previous poster is basically saying

No. For fuck's sake no.

The parent poster (parent to my original post) wrote that there is little to «expect» from a city, and recommended at least the in turn parent poster - who wrote about having been an exception as a city walker - to go to a park for walking.

So I informed the parent poster that to walk in many European cities is, opposite to that idea, an experience of architecture, monuments and art. I.e.: walking many European cities is far from unusual and with reason.

The idea of the poster above about time constraints and appointments is delirious and completely disconnected from what I wrote, literally, briefly, clearly, and exactly with the purpose of avoiding misunderstandings.

I hope the above post is at least only the consequence of rushed reading.

> Many Europeans are used to "cities as Open Air Museums".

LOLNO. ~330 million Europeans in the EU live in cities. Or I guess you count them as museum exhibits? :-)))

I counted the subset of them living in nice cities full of remarkable architecture, art and monuments as people who could call walking the city a privilege, as opposed to the post against which I commented, that went "what do you expect if not bewilderment if you are seen walking through a city".

I think one of the key points that is often not understood widely is that car-centric infrastructure causes things to be spaced so much farther apart (with unpleasant empty tarmac) than necessary. If every building is surrounded by a border of 15 meters of roads, that significantly expands the distances that a person needs to travel to get anywhere. This further prioritises cars and drives demand and cultural norms.

I don't think we should be trying to get away from cars altogether by any means, but I think we should seriously consider banning them almost entirely from city centres. There's still a need for emergency vehicles and goods to be transported within the city, so we would still need some roads, but we could eliminate a considerable number of lanes.

I have a very loose mental framework for thinking about cars that I think is helpful:

If you look at space taken up length-wise in a lane the length of the average car in the US is 14.7 ft. For a person standing on a sidewalk the average person's foot size is ~10 inches. Let's hand wave the math and say cars are 10x longer.

Very loosely our built environment scales 10x to match that new scale. Roads need to be 10x bigger, parking lots take up even more space.

The ultimate result is not that there are far more unique destinations available to the average person, but that they are further away, bigger, and costs are far higher.

Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded.

It's a clear example of the tragedy of the commons.

"Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded."

Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was.

The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.

The problem with your argument is why would people buy cars if they were so terrible? While the infrastructure was obviously worse than today clearly they afforded tremendous advantages which motivated their adoption!

In the early days that advantage was the ability to rapidly traverse relatively developed areas with more convenience. Over time infrastructure and adoption chased each other, but now the most populated parts of the US are developed to the point that there's little way to ease congestion with more road infrastructure. The only way to grow is to sprawl into new cities.

For a long time in population centers the pattern was new car infra. -> more driving convenience -> more cars -> repeat. In cities that's running into bottlenecks.

Today people primarily buy cars out of necessity, but in areas where most people live congestion and a more sprawling environment has diminished much of the time saving advantage.

It was terrible. People bought cars anyway because it was still better than walking.

In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day. The roads were lousy in 1919. But even then, it was better than a mule train.

> In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day.

They used the Lincoln Highway, which wasn't fully paved until the 1930s. In 1919, it was a (bad) dirt road except in cities. In 1919 there was an awful lot of space between cities, especially once you got west of Chicago (that not too far from the truth today, except you might say Omaha instead of Chicago). You can't really compare the convoy experience to walking-vs-driving in cities :)

People bought into cars early because they could get around quickly to more destinations, not because walking was uniquely awful.

In Philadelphia's paper in the early 1900s there was a daily column about "pleasure drive" routes and constant advertisements appealing to new drivers with destinations near the city.

That advantage of being able to "get out of the city" is still there, but it's further and further away. For day to day life the experience of walking / transit / biking in a pre-car US city or a modern US city is somewhat comparable in terms of time and enjoyment.

However US cities and suburbs, due to car-centric scale, allow more people to live on larger plots of land.

Walking was uniquely awful in many situations as soon as the alternative of cars were available. Peoples' options were "get a car", "suffer what you now realize is awful", or "don't do those things". Unsurprisingly, many people chose the first option.

You think they - we - chose wrong. To put it charitably, we who disagree with you do not feel the need of your opinion on what we should want and should choose.

If you have a better way, show us the better way, and make us want it. Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist. We live them. Don't tell us the parts we enjoy don't exist. We experience them. Don't lecture us, entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.

Cars were better than horses, not walking, and you conveniently forgot the "use the streetcar/bus" option. Why is that?

I lived in the suburbs from West Mass, I lived in downtown Boston, I lived in Manhattan. Guess where I was the most miserable?

> Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist.

The point is less about "cars vs no cars", but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning. Do you live in the suburbs? Have you ever considered how much your lifestyle is subsidized by those who live downtown? Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?

> entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.

Ask anyone in Amsterdam (which was in the 70s on its way to become as car centric as most North American cities) if they would like to go back to their ways.

> Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?

This is such a weird line of inquiry.

Yes! It is the largest single QoL improvement I have after my house.

Almost everyone who can afford it buys a car as soon as they can. Yes, even in the UK, even in Europe. It is such a huge boon.

If cars were made more expensive I would sooner work harder to keep the car than give it up.

I don't know what sort of answer you're expecting? Why would I possibly not want a car? The only reason I can think of is if it became so expensive that just paying a personal driver was cheaper.

First, kind of weird of you to associate the idea of having no car to losing your penis. I'd joke about it, but I learned to avoid making jokes about potential psychological issues.

Second, I don't think you are aware of how much of cities' financial troubles in North America are related to the budget imbalance between suburbs and downtowns.

Third, I'm talking about all the externalities. It's not just gas or street parking. It's also the cost of all those parking lots doing nothing productive. It's the health cost of having an overweight and sedentary population who can't even walk to get groceries. It's the cost of increased air pollution that brings hundreds of thousands of people to the hospital with respiratory issues. It's the cost to a city's economy that wastes a sizeable portion of its GDP to car traffic. Car owners pay only a tiny fraction of that.

It's not weird at all. Both vastly improve my quality of life. I could get by without either, but I'd rather not. I'll edit it out of my reply since you seem averse to analogy.

Cars are everywhere. American choices to have huge multi lane streets everywhere and parking lots the size of cities are optional.

It's a false dichotomy. Across Europe we have cars, even in London, a public transport mecca with tiny roads, >50% of households have cars.

They are great. Properly super useful. I think that people who deny that utility are ideological zealots to be honest.

No one is denying the utility of cars. The argument is against (a) car dependency and (b) the fact that its total cost is not fully born by their owners.

Also, you can re-read my original comment. Notice the "the point is less about cars vs no cars, but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning" part, and please realize that talking about London has nothing to do with the original point.

Sure.

I simply gave my 2c on your question.

> Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?

Yes. I would. And honestly there really isn't much in it. In the US, basically everyone drives. In the UK, pretty much everyone who pays taxes drives.

At least in my situation, I think that if the costs were moved from general taxation to directly falling on car owners, I'd end up net positive!

Holy shit, talk about reading things out of context.

You, dear sir, have absolutely nothing in common with the average North American who lives in the suburbs. The question was not directed at you.

If you want to at least try to understand the context before jumping to give your opinion and share with us your psycho issues, try watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0

I am making the case that the advantages once enjoyed by cars have been substantially reduced, for day to day life where most people live, as most people need a car.

The irony of your argument is that very few people who want more car-light or car-free cities are "forcing" anything on anyone, but the inverse is absolutely not the case.

A tremendous amount of taxes are allocated only for highways or car-centric revenue. Federal and state politics prevents cities from putting that money elsewhere. Highways were plowed through US cities and are maintained there over the objection of city residents. States intervene to prevent cities from running bus priority lanes. Cars purchases are subsidized where bikes and transit passes are not. Federal road standards, which are applied in cities, are designed for cars and not pedestrians / bikes.

A prominent example is NYC being forced by NY State to cancel congestion pricing.

The list of ways car-centric decision making is forced on dense cities is very long. Very few people are trying to "ban cars" but are instead trying to let cities too dense for cars guide their fate.

Before the very first car has been made people in the West and Asia had been using horse-drawn carriages for centuries and built cities to accommodate those. If your logic is sound then adoption of cars has shrunk the cities as a horse-drawn carriage had been longer than a motor-driven car.

Carriages were extremely rare and cities were not built to accommodate them until the rise of the coach in the 16th century.

Carriages are not much longer than cars, and they're significantly narrower and articulated in the middle. The simplistic model of "length" breaks down when you want to compare two things of similar size, but it's good enough when we're comparing two things where one is 10x the size of the other.

If you visit old cities in Europe and the Middle East you'll definitely see a difference in size and layout between cities that were built for horses (not even necessarily for carriages, just pack-horses) and cities that weren't. And then you'll see another big shift if you go to e.g. South Africa where all the cities were built in the post-coach era.

Horse-drawn carriages were typically used for moving goods or for shared transit, not for most individuals in single horse drawn carriages going to all sorts of day-to-day trips.

The point is that the default mode of transportation requires vastly more space than it used to.

How does it matter how they were used? It's not like they shrunk when used for "noble" causes from your PoV and required narrower roads (and from my reading of classics, horse-drawn carriages were used by city dwellers for individual transportation just like cars nowadays).

It matters because there are far fewer delivery of goods than people getting around for day to day trips.

If you look at the average amount of space taken up by a person traveling around if they walk, or take transit, for most trips then they'll on average take significantly less space than using a car.

And a car takes significantly less space than a carriage with a horse so I don't see what are you trying to say here. You compared length of a car to the length of a foot and made far reaching conclusions but when offered to compare a horse carriage with a car and make the same conclusions you seem to compare cars and feet again.

My point is about the average space taken up on a trip.

In the far past some trips were taken via horse + carriage but tons more were taken via walking and transit. Our built world has scaled to account for that increase in space used on trips.

I am sorry, you are still making little sense. The space taken by a car is the same no matter how many people walk, crawl or stay at home and don't go anywhere. It's more than a man but less than a horse carriage. And since you still refuse to compare the space taken by the horse carriage to the space take by a car, I figure you understand now that your logic is not sound, which is good enough result of this thread.

A horse carriage takes up similar space to a car, yes.

But if 80% of day-to-day trips are walked and 20% are horse-carriages that's much more efficient in terms of space than a world where 80% of trips are via car and 20% are walked.

That additional space manifests in more wider roads to reduce bottlenecks and more large parking lots to store cars at different destinations.

I've phrased this multiple different ways. The concept isn't complex: a car (or horse carriage!) is much bigger than a person walking so if we design a world that encourages more travel via car (or horse carriage!) that world will be less spatially efficient.

But, as I've pointed out repeatedly, in the past far more people walked to take trips than take a horse carriage.

> that's much more efficient in terms of space than a world where 80% of trips are via car and 20% are walked.

I feel like you are trying to say that it will require less space? Like roads can be made narrower or shorter? Why though? The road width is defined by the vehicle size and the number of lanes, and you don't want to cut the number of lanes below 1 but realistically you want 2 so a broken vehicle won't block traffic for everyone. And there are already not many 3 lanes in each direction roads so you are not saving much. Also most 3+ lanes roads I see are arterials and interstates, people driving those routes usually cannot walk them physically as they are tens if not hundreds of miles.

I'm talking about parking lots and roads.

If every destination needs parking for nearly its peak capacity then that creates substantial sprawl.

Similarly if an area gets a high volume of peak car traffic then over time it will tend to get more arterials and interstates connected to it.

As sprawl and road networks increase it becomes more difficult to get around without a car, incentivizing more cars, which requires more large parking lots / roads.

In the low traffic volume world of carriages, one lane in each direction is ample or even excessive for most roads. Many pre-car roads aren't wide enough to even accommodate one carriage in each direction at the same time.

I don't think your logic works. Cars are 10x longer, but (for example) my house is not 10x longer in all 3 dimensions.

The streets in downtown Salt Lake City were famously designed to be able to turn a horse-drawn wagon around. That width turned out to be pretty good for cars when they came - no additional scaling needed.

Salt Lake City has a huge volume of parking lots, highways, and many roads.

While individual streets may not have scaled up there were other parts of the built environment that did to accommodate cars.

It's even worse if you don't limit the velocity to sth like 30km/h - because then you need more space for turning and acceleration/breaking; and also noise increases with speed - which tends to make people put their houses further away from the streets - which makes everything even less dense, which requires people to speed up and use cars more.

So in practice it's worse than 10x.

This isn't really true outside of some very tarmaccy American cities.

I live in London, UK. I can use my car to get to places, it just costs more, through congestion charges, parking, and time.

The car hugely, hugely increases my exploration radius vs. walking and public transport.

There is also a value in things being bigger. I remember going to a random grungy arcade bar in LA that had fifty pinball machines. We don't have the space for that, at least, not unless it's an Experience(tm) with a corporate backer .

Those very "tarmaccy" US cities are what you get when you "stretch" cities to accommodate the scale of cars.

Other US cities are gradually moving towards that design by adding incrementally more parking and highways, but it's a slow process.

I have no opposition to cars, but designing cities where nearly all trips require a car is an extreme that most people in the US live in. If you own a car you use here and there that's absolutely fine, but if there's nowhere for someone to live where they can comfortably get by without a car that's a bad place to be.

And as I argued in my initial point when everyone needs to drive the congestion and distance between things substantially reduces the advantage of driving in the first place.

What I absolutely don't understand: Why are there no parking garages, why only surface parking lots? Isn't that prime real estate?

Why is there no incentive to stack the cars can stack in 10 layers on one lot instead of taking up 10 lots with surface parking?

Can’t say for certain but intuitive guess is it’s dirt (literally dirt in some cases) cheap to do a ground level parking slot?

Slap some paint on the ground, put up a booth and a sign, and you’re good?

Whereas an elevated garage is probably a years-long project?

I also think most of these parking lots are probably owned by small time chumps, not consolidated mega parking companies.

Yeah people I know in the parking industry have a saying that if you want to print money build a parking lot or garage. They're stupidly easy and result in tons of recurring revenue if they're in a good location. Even the little lots can produce thousands per month of revenue.

Say you've got a lot with like 420 spaces a few blocks away from Minute Maid Field in Houston. You charge $25 for parking during the event and you're guaranteed to fill it up every game. 81 home baseball games a season. That's $850k in revenue a year, practically guaranteed, and just for the baseball games. How many other events will they host there?

Let's say on an average workday your lot is like 60% full. You charge like $8/day for normal workdays or something. 252 spaces * 8/day ~$10k/wk. Lets say 50 of these normal weeks in a year, that's $504k in parking for the normal workdays.

Normal workday and baseball games gives you ~$1.35M in revenue for something you need to repave every decade and paint every couple of years.

Another way to think about it is cars allow people who live further from the campus along routes not served by transit (either at all or in a timely and convenient manner) to still work for the company. A multi-story parking structure would also have reduced the amount of surface area dedicated to vehicles.

Given that Apple is the most successful company in the world perhaps it's not a waste and there's something in your model that doesn't capture reality.

Along a similar vein, I'd be interested in the correlation between car use and economic growth is between similarly developed territories is. I know that the US and EU were roughly equal in economic size when I was in school and now it's more like a 3:2 ratio. China has also aggressively adopted cars over the past 3 decades while passing many other countries in per capita GDP.

I always think when walking around the USA that one could literally insert a narrow block into the middle of even a 2-lane-each-way road and end up with similar spacing as a typical Tokyo neighborhood. Imagine how much density that would create.

Another thing I've noticed is that people drive even when there are nearby options. I live in a suburb of DC, right where a residential area meets a commercial area. There is a large Korean grocery store less than a block away, fully accessible by shaded sidewalks. My neighbors always drive 10-20 minutes to different stores. I go to the nearby one because it has cheaper and fresher produce, although I still make bulk purchases by car.

There is also a lot of times when you could walk to a place but you may be motivated to drive because other drivers are more accommodating to a car. It may sound crazy, but in Los Angeles (my home) drives are often more patient and behave in a safer manner toward cars then they do bicyclists or pedestrians.

A nice thing about electric bikes is that it seems to be making bikes more common. It really needs to be normalized that a person doesn't have to be in a car to use or cross the road.

I mean, I sort of get it. There was a time when I stopped driving to the grocery store all together but it was only because there was a great independent grocer right on my walk home from public transit. The fact that I couldn’t really make big bulk purchases didn’t matter because I could just stop in each evening on my way home to get what we needed, and I wasn’t even going out of my way to do so. It was fantastic, I loved it. Maybe once a month we drove somewhere to get anything we needed that they didn’t carry, or for a big pantry restock.

If I had a grocery store I could walk to now, I don’t know that I would because it would be an extra trip all on its own. So unless I’m making that walk each day on principle, it’s inconvenient and I don’t know I would.

And yes, that is absolutely because of the car-centric suburb I now live in. When circumstances allow it, I look forward to moving back to some walkable, urban neighborhood again.

> The fact that I couldn’t really make big bulk purchases didn’t matter because I could just stop in each evening on my way home to get what

Once someone's gone full r/fuckcars it's sort of difficult to talk sense to them, but have you maybe considered that some people don't want to make the tradeoff of free-time-for-transportation-storage-capacity? Like, for another 2 hours time per week, I'd be willing to buy an SUV so large that statistically 3 kindergarteners would die of smog-related early deaths, with a curb weight of 1.9 million pounds.

Supermarkets in dense cities with most people walking tend to be much smaller (no clothes etc) so it's easy to go round in a few minutes — less if you know exactly what you want.

There is a fixed time in every supermarket trip no matter how big or small it is. Multiple trips accrue these costs. For example, I live next to a supermarket, a big one. It's a 3 minute walk door to door, 6 min round trip. Inside it takes about 5 min to find what I am looking for and another 2-10 minutes to checkout depending on the size of the line. So, at the very best I am spending 13 minutes per trip. If I shopped for groceries there every day I would be spending at least 1.5 hours per week shopping. Instead, I drive my car to Costco every two weeks and spend less than 1.5 hours on that (20 min drive x2, 30 min picking groceries and checking out, 5 min parking, 5 min loading and unloading), saving more than 1.5 hours of my life every other week.

I also use Costco for bulk purchases too, but buying in advance requires careful planning. Unless you have a repetitive diet, supplement with a quick grocery run mid-week, only purchase frozen/shelf stable food, or throw out a bunch of expired food each week it's hard to predict what you need two weeks in advance.

I usually eat out so my diet is quite varied, which is another problem for walking advocates because they are limited only to the restaurants in their walking distance, or cold soggy deliveries, or, ultimately, have to spend a lot of time cooking themselves (or making large batches and eating the same leftovers for days in a row). This is besides the point, which was the time spent with daily shopping by foot. It's incredible waste of time and I know that because I used to do just that.

> so it's easy to go round in a few minutes

x7 days a week. But it's not just the time in the store, it's also whatever detour there is to get to it. At walking speed. Whatever the wait time is at checkout.

> less if you know exactly what you want.

So now, I also increase my mental load because I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so? I have to have my meal planned out hours in advance.

And if there is another pandemic like event, I'm also constrained to the one day's supply of food that I have in my house at any given moment (maybe less than that, realistically). And it's still a fucking pain if I'm anything other than single. There was a point in my life not so many years ago, when we were going through about 4 gallons of milk per week. Hell, some of the things that we like to eat, that we should be eating for health reasons... you can't even buy those in single meal sizes. We'll probably have 3 (plastic) bags of vegetables home for salad.

> So now, I also increase my mental load because I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so? I have to have my meal planned out hours in advance.

Oh, the horror. Usually I would just go in an see what looks good and decide then what I wanted for dinner.

The detour is small. I think it's also more common to go every second or third day, rather than every day.

Search "supermarket" in Copenhagen — not the city centre — and see how many results there are: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@55.703748,12... . You may well need to zoom in and refresh the search to see everything.

> I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so?

Rather than knowing a week in advance? Come on.

> Pandemic

You can easily build up some reserves.

> Milk

You clearly have a large family, so you might consider that your situation is not universal. I think many Danes with a large family would mix the two options — shopping by car (or online for delivery) every week or two, and supplementing it with additional trips for fresh food.

Two adults is also two people to share the shopping.

> The detour is small.

For you. That one time. Honestly, I always seem to be on the wrong end of the curve when it comes to salaries... betcha I end up in the ghetto apartment in the food desert.

> Rather than knowing a week in advance? Come on.

Nah. You just get the things you usually get, and you make whatever of that you feel like that evening. No need to plan, you figure it out when you open the fridge.

> You clearly have a large family, s

Just the two children. Even with just two children, this quickly becomes absurdly impossible. For any more than that, the walkable city people just sound like stooges. Well, they sound like that long before we start talking about large families.

I was under the impression that skyscrapers weren't good for dense walkable areas. 4-7 story tall mixed use buildings are supposed to be the best.

I'm afraid I don't have a source for this. The Youtube channel Not Just Bikes might have said this.

it's a mixed bag. Some argue that sporadic skyscrapers might be a good thing since those would act as a point of easier orientation in space + providing housing/work area for ppl that want to live/work high. The problem appears when there are too many of them or public transport infra is not adapted to handle such an inflow of people towards a single point

exactly, especially in the suburbs. My closest places to talk to

- ~half a mile to a local taco stand. Could be closer but railroads are in the way and they run on the hour (and a big ditch also discourages that). kinda bad, but still on the verge of "walkable".

- now, the other direction about a mile away is a wal mart. But, half a mile of this walk is a vertical 200 foot climb. You'll be exhausted at worst and sweaty at best before you even get halfway there. But if you make the walk you got a plaza of whatever you need.

- And that's really all the "walkable" areas. The next closest plaza is 3 miles from the taco shack, a bit outside of "walkable" if you just need to grab some tools from Home Depot or wait for an order at In n Out (inside isn't much better than the drive-through). Buses do run here, but only every hour (and is next to the taco shack. so half a mile walk)

Those in EU places can find it hard to understand. But there's just so much dang land between everything if you're not downtown.

>I don't think we should be trying to get away from cars altogether by any means, but I think we should seriously consider banning them almost entirely from city centres.

If we had a better bus schedule, I wouldn't mind that. even if we just have to drive to a bus stop, it could be the start of this walkable city concept in downtown areas. But there's a lot of powers opposing that.

It honestly isn't _that_ different in the UK.

Outskirts of a smaller city, you are 0.5-1 mile from everything. A corner shop, a takeaway, anything.

Some Americans think that everywhere is like central London or Berlin or whatever. Most of it is like an American suburb but with poorer condition smaller houses.

About the only difference is that if you are poor and in a suburb you can probably take a slow bus that is infrequent. But no-one actually wants to do that if they can afford otherwise.

I sure hope y'all don't have to climb 200 ft hills in those areas. If it wasn't for that I'd say it's a walkable enough area for my needs.

I understand that not everything will be packed in all of EU, but better public transportation makes up for that. The other annoying aspect of non-urban us cities tends to be geography. It's very hilly in the western US with little fertile land, and blazing hot and humid and the deep south. We'd absolutely need better bussing to overcome that.

It’s worth remembering that a lot of car centric design has political roots. For example many of Berlin’s wide roads were built so that Nazi tanks could traverse them. Likewise Paris’s wide streets were built so that cavalry army’s could pass. And a big part of America’s single family home suburb design (which necessitates cars) is born out of a desire keeping white and black people separate (as well as regulatory capture by the auto industry).

My favourite places in the world tend to be much older and basically built at random by the people who lived there, like London’s Soho and Clerkenwell or Barcelona’s old town.

Very subjective question I know, but how significant do you think racist intentions are compared to the many other factors? I wasn't under the impression it was one of the top two factors that pushed us towards a car centered built environment.

> car-centric infrastructure causes things to be spaced so much farther apart (with unpleasant empty tarmac)

Good example here is Salt Lake City - the streets were designed intentionally to be very wide everywhere.

Are you sure that's a good example of car centricity? The streets in my town are wide enough for a six lane highway, yet the streets were built before the car was even a glimmer in someone's imagination.

Even in suburbs, it does seem that the potential of in-fill development and mixed-use repurposing is undervalued. For example, I've lived in many low-rise apartment complexes; they always had one or two ground-floor units that were unpopular and frequently vacant because of their proximity to a road or something, and it never made any sense to me that they couldn't be converted into a small commercial space for the neighborhood. Something like a small cafe or corner store. With a higher commercial rent, residential rents in the area could be lower, and car trips to similar spaces would be reduced.

These complexes also were always roughly 50% parking by land-area. Converting some amount of it to new units would be so helpful. Or even something as simple as converting a one or two reserved parking spaces to one of these (https://i.pinimg.com/736x/56/42/1b/56421b53bcffe6b0c92369c44...) so that cyclists wouldn't have to lug their bicycles up 2 or 3 flights of stairs after every ride.

The "logic" of anti-pedestrian thinking is just a desire not to see anything at all change.

Detached houses and tenament houses also space things out compared to commie blocks which is why I have unpopular opionion that low-height (+- 4-story) commieblock neighbourhoods designed before cars were widespread are the best form of walkable cities.

When they are well designed and well-maintained they allow for more green spaces than any alternative AND everything is closer together AND they aren't dehumanising like the 10+ story commieblock districts. All that without causing "concrete canyons" like medieval parts of cities or UK-style rows of detached houses with token lawns.

I mean sth like this - from before commie blocks were adapted to cars: https://maps.app.goo.gl/uGFKGntsHU85qwpu8

There are parts of SF that have another "dignity" problem unfortunately. I know too many who refuse to walk in many areas there due to feeling unsafe and the smell issues. I know another one who refuses public transit now due to similar issues. They tend to be small women and it's super sad and it really limits a lot of their transport options in life.

I agree this is the current situation, but I think the concentration of homelessness in urban areas is largely a consequence of policies that favor suburbia:

- Requiring a car for daily life drives up cost of living, pricing the bottom tier of earners into the streets

- Restricting housing unit supply by mandating single family zoning makes whole regions unaffordable

- Blocking effective public transit into the suburbs effectively geofences homelessness into urban centers

- Concentrating the overwhelming majority of homeless services downtown is a policy choice, not a natural outcome

I think a lot of people look at urban areas in the US and think "that looks awful, my area should make the opposite of those policy choices", and it leads us to subconsciously hold some weird beliefs. Tall buildings and public transit don't make people homeless. They do the opposite. But something about the American lifestyle (my own upbringing included) plants these negative associations with urban centers, and it wasn't until I saw other cities around the world that I realized it didn't make any sense at all.

A lot of times it isn't by choice, but as a consequence of zoning and parking minimums that are affecting housing stock and it's prices (both in the city and in suburbs). You may not have problems walking in sf(debatable but doesn't matter), but could you say the same about detroit/huston?

If people live their lives in the suburbs and that's what appeals to them, I am not going to say they shouldn't (so long as their suburban town is economically viable), but as a city dweller, I think they should have to pay (not just parking) for coming into the city with their cars.

Not sure what this has to to with the article. Kind of wondering why there are so many off-topic comments attached to mine. Maybe the word suburbia sets people off?

You're essentially just raising taxes on the poor. Why? Let's take SF above as an example. The median salary in SF according to Gusto is $104,000 annually, which at the 30% maximum federal recommended housing payment would be $2,600 monthly all-inclusive. Using Zillow to see what I could afford with zero down at this monthly payment (VA loan), I find nothing in SF, and virtually nothing in the Bay Area, except some shacks which are essentially land in Richmond:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1964-Van-Ness-Ave-San-Pab...

Perhaps I could erect a tent and live homeless on my own land, but with Newsom's new alt-right homeless policy, probably not. The closest I could find which was (barely) habitable in Concord, a true fixer-upper but something anyone can do with enough time and effort and watching home repair tutorials:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/168-Norman-Ave-Concord-CA...

This is about one to one and a half hours each way, depending on traffic, to my old office in downtown SF (before I was offshored). Currently, the house above is what I could afford and what I would most likely buy if I received a job again and had to go into the office a few days a week (or six days a week as some startups want now). Driving, although long, is the only viable option. Even when mass transit routes can be found, they add 1-2 hours to the already long commute (each way).

People in this thread within the technobubble generally miss what driving is for most Americans: a necessity. It's not an option because we prefer SUVs and huge houses, that's true for some people, but most people don't have many options of where to live or how to live, they are wage and price takers, and we go where we can afford. And that's somewhere we need to drive, nice walkable areas served well by mass transit are luxury items in the USA only for the rich. The rest of us must drive, and hindering that only makes those of us already struggling on the edge of middle class even poorer.

The usual counter argument is that you can take the money raised by making cars expensive and give it to the poor. That’s fairer than subsidizing cars, since rich people tend to have more cars and use them more than poor people.

The only reason everything you mention is a problem is because SF's zoning policy is a disaster that doesn't actually reflect true demand for housing.

A properly zoned SF would look like New York, with 5x more transit options than it currently has.

When I am driving through suburbs in central Texas I think it is interesting to note that there are rarely people outside the houses. Mostly the the people I see are mowing.

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