Oh, easy - bikes and/or public transportation, of course. /s
The idea of abandoning a car is silly at this point because it's just not going to happen. Maybe if urban sprawl wasn't a thing we could figure something out. On my team, I live the closest to work at 6 miles, with many of my coworkers commuting 40+ minutes. There's no complete replacement for that. Even when I was a public transportation commuter at a previous job in a different city, I had to drive a few miles on a highway to get to the bus depot. The anti-car sentiment seem to me to be localized in tighter packed cities with better public transit, which is a minority of the cities in America (sorry for being so US-centric, I haven't lived or worked outside of the States).
Sprawl is just a subsidy for cars. Remove the sprawl subsidies and find out just how quickly your 40-mile commuters move to a home closer to the office (or find another job that isn't out in BFE.)
Another way to look at "sprawl" is: Enough space to have privacy, enough space to pursue your own interests, enough space to have the kids enjoy the backyard as opposed to a 4'x3' balcony on the 20th floor of an apartment building. Enough space to design your own home or addition, perhaps, if you have the inclination. And enough space to have a car that gives you more independence (when you want it) than being at the mercy of public transportation schedules concocted by central planners.
You also might enjoy sports cars, as I do, and enjoy owning a very well-designed vehicle that does 0-60 in under four seconds and is a joy to drive on the windy roads near my house -- though it would be nice to add a self-driving car to the garage too. (HN trivia: I had lunch with Steve Jobs in 1989, and he drove up in a black Porsche 911. Larry Page bought a Tesla roadster. I recall Cypress Semiconductor CEO TJ Rodgers telling me about his Mercedes; you can probably track down the interview if you're interested.)
Also: I don't live in a downtown area. Nor do I live in suburban sprawl. But "sprawl is just a subsidy for cars" is a weak argument that gets the facts wrong: car commuters are subsidizing public transportation via gas and other taxes, not the other way around.
Here's Randal O'Toole on single-family homes in the SF Bay area:
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/do-single-family...
"The vast majority of population growth continues to be in low-density suburbs. Surveys of millennials show that more than three out of four aspire to live in a single-family home with a yard. The data also show that crowding people together isn’t really effective at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions or addressing other urban concerns. Population densities in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose urban areas have already grown by nearly 60 percent since 1990, yet per-capita driving still has increased."
I do apologize in advance for injecting facts into a religious argument about that loathsome invention known as the automobile. :)
> car commuters are subsidizing public transportation via gas and other taxes, not the other way around.
Do you have numbers for this? Last I checked, gas taxes didn't cover the costs for road construction and maintenance, let alone have enough left over to subsidize public transportation.
Billions of dollars are taken from so-called Highway Trust Fund, paid for by your gas taxes, to fund public transport. Cite:
http://reason.com/archives/2012/02/14/house-aims-to-stop-hig...
>>Every time you buy a gallon of gas in this nation, you pay 18.2 cents to Uncle Sam. The original rationalization for the federal gas tax was that it was collected in a "Highway Trust Fund" and used to pay for road infrastructure. In 1983, a transit account was created [pdf], diverting 20 percent of the trust fund to pay for the mass transit dreams of local potentates.<<
That's not counting $$$ coming from general FedGov income tax revenue. Because far more people use cars regularly than use public transport regularly, those are additional subsidies extracted (involuntarily) from automobile and truck owners.
Year, those numbers make basically no sense. Even your link doesn't prove what it claims in the headline. The government shovels billions from the general fund into the highway fund every year. The highway fund disburses a much smaller number of billions into transit projects every year. Therefore the fuel tax does not cover the cost of highway spending.
I'll stop here because I have a policy against arguing with libertarians on the internet, but in case you are interested in facts from actual research rather than from political mouthpieces here's one. The URL says it all:
For some reason, the other side basically looks at interstates and then calls it a day, ignoring that the vast majority of road expenditures isn't federal.
(OK, the reason is pretty obvious: it's the only way to make the numbers come out "right".)
Your post contains false dichotomies and incorrect assertions of fact.
False dichotomy: sprawl vs. 20th floor apartment. There are many single family homes with yards in dense urban areas. Note in this aerial image how the compact residential areas with grid streets are bracketed by commercial corridors on major streets. Walkable access to work, shopping, entertainment, and long-haul transportation are the features lacking in "sprawl". https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8412554,-122.2511705,700m/da...
You claim about gas buyers subsidizing transit has already been addressed in your other post. I will just add that every time I get on the bus I have to disgorge another $2.10 whereas every time I get on the freeway I pay no direct user fee.
Your data about per-capita driving is also obsolete. According to FHWA data, per-capita vehicle miles traveled has fallen 8 years in a row. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring... It's not back to 1990 levels yet, certainly, but it's headed there and is mostly a matter of demographics.
My job is in the city, and I'd love to live within walking distance. The problem is I would have pay ~2x for a place to live, and still end up in a noisy high crime area.
When you eliminate zoning laws and allow greater density, housing supply increase and housing prices decrease (relative to what they would do if there was less housing stock available). With greater density, public transit makes a lot more sense.
So you have to find two places of work, shopping, school (potentially several different schools), worship, and recreation all within say 2 miles of your home?
Huh? EDIT: Ah I guess you are saying two places of work, one for each adult in a household? Well have you heard of these things called buses and trains? They're awesome. You don't need everything to be in walking distance, as long as both ends are walking distance from transport.
Also the nice thing about not being a superstitious throwback is I don't have to find any place to worship, walking distance or otherwise.
> Well have you heard of these things called buses and trains? They're awesome.
They ARE awesome, but often come at the expense of time. I live in Tokyo, which has an amazing public transportation network.
Including walking to/from stations and bus stops, taking the bus/train costs me around 80 minutes of my day each way -- that's over 2 1/2 hours of my day.
If I take a taxi directly from my apartment to work, it takes about 15-20 minutes to get directly to work. Let's call it 40 minutes of my day.
I can get back two hours of my life every single day with point-to-point transport. That's two hours I could be catching up with friends, reading a book, cooking, exercising, etc. It matters so often to me that I end up paying the 4000 yen or so it costs to take a taxi twice a day a horrifying number of times.
This is to say nothing of the fact that I can sit in the taxi and read a book or something rather than being crammed and crushed in public transport.
> I live in Tokyo, which has an amazing public transportation network.
> Including walking to/from stations and bus stops, taking the bus/train costs me around 80 minutes of my day each way
That's not actually how we define "amazing public transportation network". My experience of public transit in Seattle is "about 5 minutes away from a bus stop, anywhere, and about 30 minutes to anywhere I care to go in the city, and maybe an hour if I go across the lake to Bellevue or Redmond".
The fact that it takes you longer for traveling within the city than it does for me to change cities suggests to me that Tokyo's public transit is either ridiculously bad or you have an extremely unusual case.
> That's not actually how we define "amazing public transportation network".
It's pretty comparatively amazing to me. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania in a town with no buses or taxis. The closest train/bus station was about 50 minutes away by car.
My apartment has a bus stop right outside its door, but I have to travel the entire bus line to get to where I want to go, and that's 15 minutes from work.
There's a train station five minutes from work and two others within ten minutes from work, but none of them go directly to the station closest to my apartment.
Just because you don't live ars' life doesn't mean the world should be your way and not his/hers. The term "superstitious throwback" is a really assholic way of dismissing an argument because you don't agree with it.
That's trivially easy in most cities, on foot or bike, because we're talking about 12 square miles of city.
Add in reasonable public transportation between places, and we're talking more like within 5-10 miles.
I simply don't believe that there's an area anywhere around an urban center where you can't find all of that within ~75-300 square miles, as most urban areas simply aren't that big.
If you channel them to be somewhat more linear, commuter rail can work okay for suburbs. Copenhagen took that approach, with a goal that even quite far out suburbs should be in reasonable biking or bus distance to an S-train station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_Plan
Then you're just arguing for one way of life over another. I like living in the suburbs. I don't want to feel like a sardine packed into a can.
You (or whoever is arguing for it) would rather not live in a world that has tainted nature with roads and automobiles.
Why does it have to be one way or another? In the present, there are plenty of places to go and see nature that hasn't been tainted by cars and roads.
Many of the people in this thread write as if cars are manifestly obviously bad, and that we should go to great lengths to remove or drastically reduce them from society.
You're welcome to live in whatever kind of place you want. I think what people object to is the massive subsidies slathered on the suburban lifestyle under american policies.
Look at this thread. Most of what I see are people advocating "sin taxes" and the like. Or, increasing subsidies to shape a world more fitting of what they want.
Thanks for the insult saraid216! Is there anything else about me that you'd care to attack? (If not, feel free to take a look at my comment history. I'm sure you can find something. If it'll make you feel better, I'm all ears.)
Do you care to elaborate on the "sigh" with any actual discussion?
It seems you're trying to portray any detractors of suburbs as radical tree-huggers, whilst ignoring the fact that the kind of suburban sprawl happening today has a ton of other downsides, and fails to even meet your own standards for a nice neighborhood.
Edit: To give you some context, I live on the opposite side of town from the neighborhood I linked to. My neighborhood is much lower-density than that one, but while still unquestionably suburban, has schools and a large variety of shops within walking distance and safely accessible by foot and greenways and bike routes leading toward the city centers. My neighborhood was built in the 1970s. There are similar neighborhoods in the area covering a broad range of density and property values. We don't even have a mass-transit system worth mentioning, but it's still a much better place for getting around without a car. Yes, suburbs can be done well. But at least in my area, the new residential development is mostly comically tragic, and it's affecting what people mean by suburban sprawl.
The "sigh" was because it seems my point was missed. The particulars of what I happen to enjoy as a living arrangement are borderline irrelevant. The point I was making is that a bunch of people are pushing their way of life on to others (through sin taxes and policy changes and the like) based on the premise that their way of life is obviously superior.
I'm saying the dual of "my way of life is better."
Someone else brought up that there are subsidies supporting my way of life though. I'm fine with removing those. But I personally haven't seen that position advocated in this thread. So I didn't account for it.
> radical tree-huggers
Radical tree huggers? Come now. No need for the flamebait. I love nature. I frequent it whenever I get the chance. But I don't feel entitled to it wherever I happen to be.
> whilst ignoring the fact that the kind of suburban sprawl happening today has a ton of other downsides, and fails to even meet your own standards for a nice neighborhood.
I didn't ignore anything. I never said suburbs were always the best. I didn't even say that I prefer every suburb to any city. I didn't speak with exact precision because the details of "my way of life" weren't crucial to my point.
I didn't say any of this because I never argued that suburbs were, in any way, shape or form better than cities. I merely stated that I prefer them. And that's enough.
You're making a false dichotomy, between the urban no-car life you don't want, and the suburbs that make it impossible to get anywhere without a car. A happy middle ground is possible and exists in many places, and can be done without much extra effort, but it requires some. Zoning regulations and the like have proven to be insufficient for preventing developers from throwing down several square miles of cookie-cutter homes at a time embedded in a fractal maze of cul-de-sacs with no room for commercial development, meaning those neighborhoods end up car-mandatory and impossible to service with mass transit even when they're very dense. There are plenty of sound public policy reasons for wanting alternative forms of transportation to be viable, so even if it feels like someone shoving their way of life down your throat, it'll still probably save you tax money in the long run even if it has to be achieved through blunt means like "sin taxes".
Edit: Many of the subsidies the car-only lifestyle gets are really negative externalities the burden of which is shared by everyone: the public health nightmare of obesity, pollution in the form of smog and runoff, political downsides of dependence on oil. How could those be dealt with in a way that doesn't feel to you like an unjust sin tax or someone forcing their way of life on you?
> Edit: Many of the subsidies the car-only lifestyle gets are really negative externalities the burden of which is shared by everyone: the public health nightmare of obesity, pollution in the form of smog and runoff, political downsides of dependence on oil. How could those be dealt with in a way that doesn't feel to you like an unjust sin tax or someone forcing their way of life on you?
I don't want subsidies. I don't want any of them. Get rid of them. Car subsidies are just as much an imposition as sin taxes are.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Automobiles, and in general, industrialization, come with a cost. Externalities (positive or negative) that are a result of hundreds of millions of people acting cannot be eliminated without coercion. And of course, coercion introduces its own form of externality.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. I'd rather we all plead our case to persuade others than shove it down everyone else's throats.
"Oh but that would be great if only people weren't idiots..."
I'm sorry I gave you the impression that I think there are only two options. I don't think that. I don't think my way of life is better. I don't think yours is. I just want people to stop saying their way of life is obviously better (even if it is some sort of middle ground), and that because of that, we should just start taxing people for doing things they don't happen to like.
If you feel the desire to press me more for my view on taxes (because you perceive some inconsistency), and in general, government, then I implore you not to. It's a waste of time, and in all probability, we will vehemently disagree.
When I've been saying "better" here, I'm using it in the sense of Pareto efficiency - more preferred even by people with different preferences. I'm not imposing a single linear scale along which to rank things.
If you don't think taxation or other government intervention are justified in order to achieve a Pareto improvement that the free market demonstrably cannot achieve on its own, then yeah, talking government with you is a waste of time.
> that the free market demonstrably cannot achieve on its own
Are you referring to the free market that caused suburbs to become a thing only "due to the subsidization of the automobile infrastructure"?[1]
So somehow, people are blaming sprawl on the subsidization of automobiles---which, let's not kid ourselves, is done only by government and corporations in bed with government---but you, you, are saying that this is really a demonstrable failure of a free market? (Which, of course, you proclaim because it doesn't meet some arbitrary standard that seems impossible to measure. Which apparently---and conveniently---seems to line up with what you happen to like as a way of life.)
Have I got that right? Or are you referencing some other failure?
The market failure to which I was referring is the ongoing situation where demand for housing does not lead to communities being built, only housing developments that force a car-only lifestyle with all its negative externalities. As I've said, suburbs can be done right, but that's not what's getting built. This should surprise nobody, because the housing market hits pretty much all of the exceptions under which free-market capitalism isn't even theoretically optimal.
But yeah, in my area the cost of upgrading the road network is mostly not borne by the people moving to the area and necessitating the new and wider roads. That's one of the reasons our new housing developments are too big.
> "Which apparently---and conveniently---seems to line up with what you happen to like as a way of life."
This is not a coincidence, suspicious or otherwise. It is part of the definition of Pareto efficiency.
I truthfully don't see anything to disagree with you there. I think it'd be fantastic to live in a small town with good public transit (even if only good bike paths). There are unfortunately few of them where I live (central Massachusetts). Hell, I love a good bike path. I've been on the one up in Burlington, VT. It's awesome. Same with paths in Amherst and around Cambridge.
But the fact that I can walk/bike/scooter down to the corner pub in my little town has very very little to do with why I have a car. For example, my parents live about 25 minutes away. Some of my good friends live 35 minutes away. When I visit, it's common for me to lug stuff back and forth (whether it be food or other various items). My job is about 45-60 minutes away in the city. (That's by car. Want to know how long it'd take with public transit? Over two hours. And it's just as expensive as owning a car!)
There's just no viable way for me to do that with anything other than a car. And some day, when kids get added to the mix, I fret to think of how much more difficult it would be without a car. Hell, I even live in walking distance to the T! (That's the commuter rail that goes from Worcester to Boston.)
Dealing with urban sprawl is effectively the first step. There are ongoing movements to reinvent suburbs into communities, which could theoretically attract localized businesses to reduce the amount that people need to commute.
It's important to recognize that the long commutes came about because of cars. Because it was possible to take the open road to get to work, sprawl was a reasonable option. And then everyone joined in on the fun and the open road vanished. It's a bait-and-switch.
This doesn't mean that getting rid of cars will automatically fix things, but deliberately removing our dependence on them will absolutely help because part of that action is fixing things.
Long commutes are enabled by cars, but I don't think they're the direct cause - sprawl was a thing before cars as we know them came about. It's a natural phenomenon to move away from the civic center, we are just able to move father away because of cars. Before that, it was horses and carriages. Cars let us move further our, sure.
Specifically in my case, the company I work for is located in my city (despite recent sale to an SF-based one). They chose a prestigious address over being near where the already sparse urban living was, and even that is geared at singles and young couples. I couldn't live near work if I wanted to.
Personally I don't think cars are a bad thing and I don't want to trade mine for a bike or the bus. I like the freedom a car gives me. I don't have to plan my route to work on anything or anyone. I can leave when I want. I can go to lunch farther away from my office. Yes, it's contributing to climate change, and we need to solve that problem, but I don't think the solution is removing dependance on cars.
> sprawl was a thing before cars as we know them came about. It's a natural phenomenon to move away from the civic center
It is to a degree: it is a sign of status to be able to afford actual land from which you can bar others, and therefore actually using it isn't terribly surprising. This has been true since before castles were invented. The main difference is that, in those times, it was understood that the occupants were aristocratic elite.
> we are just able to move father away because of cars. Before that, it was horses and carriages. Cars let us move further our, sure.
Right. The issue isn't the combustible engine; it's the attitude that comes with being a car driver, which isn't that much different from being a horse rider. This is coupled with an illusion that you don't lose the connection to the urban center as a consequence (indeed, in many places, you find that another urban center inexorably becomes necessary).
> Yes, it's contributing to climate change, and we need to solve that problem, but I don't think the solution is removing dependance on cars.
The problem that I want to solve is a fundamentally broken social structure incapable of doing things like opposing the NSA in a meaningful sense and the IDL is an exception rather than a rule. Cars contribute to this problem by weakening the social basis by which we commit civic action and by disenfranchising the core of our human populations (the percentage of human beings in urban centers broke 50% a long time ago) in order to service the more far-flung.
This is the essence of the city. Everything is connected. Our democracy is broken and this is part of the reason. People complain about how no one cares about the real issues. Why not? In part because they're exhausted from their commute. Certainly there are other reasons, but this is one and it's big.
The Bay Area is basically the epitome is car-based planning gone horribly, horribly wrong. I am told you have similar circumstances in Atlanta and Houston, but I haven't seen them first hand.
I think it varies, actually. Nearly everything on the peninsula, and everything in the East Bay south of Oakland is pure car dependence. But SF, Oakland, and Berkeley grew up in the streetcar era and are still walkable with decent rail and bus service that can be readily improved when the cheap oil interval finally ends. The string of little towns from Concord to Walnut Creek to Alamo and Danville have walkable nuggets at the core of their sprawls and these can easily be connected by streetcar on the old Santa Fe rights of way if anyone wants to. Livermore also has a proper downtown and even mainline rail service to San Jose. Plus Livermore is dead level and you can bike all over it in no time.
When driving becomes too expensive there is definitely going to be a lot of abandoned sprawl but there's also plenty of decent places to live. By definition, few people live in the sprawl. It's a shame that they wasted so much of their and your money building out those subdivisions in the middle of nowhere, but that's a sunk cost now.
The Valley sort of is a transit problem, more than SF. Although SF's lack of a crosstown subway doesn't help: the N-Judah streetcar plus the Geary bus, between them add up to a pretty poor crosstown transit situation. But the Valley explicitly opted out of BART and used the money to build county expressways instead (San Tomas, etc.), which is one of several reasons that it's a sprawling mess.
NIMBY-ism is also a problem in the few places of the Valley that do have decent transport, though I think it's the secondary problem. One place it's noticeable is Palo Alto: why isn't there high density housing near the Palo Alto Caltrain station (which is also conveniently near Stanford and a number of tech companies)? Because Palo Alto homeowners don't want anyone with less than a $1m house to live there. However afaik this is a minority situation in the Valley, and most of it just doesn't have decent transit that could attract high-density housing in the first place. San Jose has also been more development-friendly, although it's too bad there that the VTA light rail is so near-useless, or that area could plausibly have a more urban feel.
Isn't a big problem in the Bay Area is that a lot of people living in SF don't work there? In that case, if everyone in google lived next to the googleplex that would free up their appartments for the guy working at the deli downtown.
The daytime population of San Francisco is much higher than the actual number of residents, so no, this isn't the problem. If the daytime population was lower then you'd be on to something.
Google has repeatedly tried to stimulate residential construction in Mountain View but the city of Mountain View just doesn't want it. We're all waiting for windshield perspective baby boomers to just hurry up and die so we can have proper urban forms on the peninsula. And I'm not talking about high rise, I'm talking about 3-5 stories over street level retail. Mountain View currently has lots of single-story and surface parking lots, even in their "downtown" which I reckon to be at Castro and Villa.
Other than the car4hire thing which if required by over 90% of the population amounts to just inserting an intermediary along with all the costs, whats the solution above 80F and below 50F? Icy roads and 10F this morning, no big deal for my car, but everything on your list is a non-starter.
Also no kids or elderly or handicapped or...
It might be that what works perfectly for 20-somethings in socal doesn't work anywhere else for anyone else.
Finally I already live as close to work as financially possible, and its about 20 minutes. And I'm a very well compensated senior developer-type person. I can't live any closer and I'm fairly wealthy, the median income dude is going to have to live much further away.
You're asking the wrong guy about weather -- I bike year-round in Boston. There are other people doing it on other vehicles I mentioned.
And I assure you, children and the elderly manage to survive carfree in cities, towns, and villages all over the world. Quite comfortably, in many cases.
I don't consider a twenty-minute car commute very far at all, certainly not out of bicycle range.
the elderly and the handicapped are most likely to need public transportation or a walkable community. Both of these situations inhibit income (especially blue collar). A car that can pick up a wheel chair is not cheap.
your comment is highly degrading to the significant portion of the population that can't afford cars and do have children.
studies also show that children who venture on their own (walking and biking) establish greater independence and a better happiness index. (and more than likely fewer asthma /allergies if not in a car centric area )
Besides the obvious alternatives in cities, having more efficient cars (i.e., self-driving cars that can algorithmically ease congestion and find efficient ways to carpool) would be a big step forward. Take a drive on any American highway and you'll see the amount of cars with a single occupant is overwhelming -- what a waste!
Do you think more people would share rides if cars could drive themselves? If this wouldn't be the case, I can see how the technology would help parking congestion but not how it would help traffic congestion.
Having smaller cars would actually be a good thing in that it would reduce the space wastage without changing the number of occupants. Don't know if you'd count that as technology in the sense of self-driving cars, though.
Self-driving cars can help traffic congestion in the sense that, if you can tell your car you don't care how long it takes to get somewhere, it might route you through a longer path and consequently help rebalance the load. Maybe.
This seems intuitively true but isn't. The majority (90%) of the space taken by a car at highway speeds is actually due to the buffer zone around it due to speed and not the size of the vehicle itself. Smaller cars don't increase highway throughput appreciably.
Maybe not carpooling, but proponents of self-driving cars often talk about how their efficiency (i.e. algorithmic efficiency in how they drive) would greatly ease traffic congestion. Much of the issue with traffic is just bad drivers (inefficient merging, accidents causing backups to name a few examples) but also current traffic controls like stop lights could essentially be removed if cars could reliably communicate with each other.
