I've purposefully chosen, and paid the higher rent for, an apartment that's on the greenbelt in my city and close to work so that I can use my car less. As a couple we still own two cars but really only use them to transport our dog to trailheads. The exercise pays dividends, and at just over two miles from work it takes maybe three minutes longer getting to work than driving to a parking garage.
I feel fortunate to make enough money to easily afford the rent, but it's insane that in most places you need a high paying job to escape needing a car. Refugee and low-income housing here is clustered around major streets like six-lane one-way transport corridors. Unless they work downtown or close to a stop on one of the few bus lines that run frequently and reliably, they need cars. Usually the cheapest they can afford, which likely means they need to spend money they don't have to get them passing emissions tests at registration time, deal with breakdowns, high insurance premiums, etc.
It doesn't help that most of the planned transit improvements seemingly are focused on greenification of buses rather than just getting more buses on the road to expand routes, make lines frequent enough to use for commuting, etc.
My city did pass some new zoning codes which heavily cut back on parking requirements, I'm excited to see how that (slowly) pans out. I expect more high-capacity parking structures to go up, fewer surface lots. People might need to walk further or explore other last-mile options, I have hope that will turn people's eyes towards non-vehicle transportation improvements.
I’m surprised by the association that Americans make between suburbs and cars. Sure, it’s common there, but it wasn’t always, and it’s not outside of the USA.
Take something as far back as New York in the 60s depicted in _Mad Men_: Don Draper commutes by train. He lives a little away from the station, but that’s hardly something a well-timed local bus couldn’t easily bridge.
Many people still do today. It’s the same thing in most capitals where I’ve lived, and those big enough to be featured in movies. Suburbanites commute to London, Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Chicago, Tokyo, Moscow, Delhi, Peking, Shanghai, and every large China city by local train. I know places where people don’t, but I can’t think of a single place where that’s not a nightmare.
Light rail is a super slow form of transport in LA and Portland.
I think you are right that cars are reaching a certain tipping point of efficiency but they still beat the public transit in most categories.
Mass transit has the issue in that it tries to serve too many masters. Should it be faster (more expensive, serving few people)? Should it be serving the less wealthy (more stops, less money)? By trying to appease too many groups of people it tends to miss both marks.
I don't remember specifics from the show but probably Don Draper's wife drove him to whatever commuter rail station in Westchester Country or southern Connecticut and he took the train to Grand Central Station and walked to his office on Madison Avenue from there.
If I worked in Boston/Cambridge, I could (and sometimes do) take the train in a similar manner though it takes me 90-120 minutes each way depending upon destination.
He lived in Ossining, NY, which is large enough that many residents would not live within a 30 minute walk from the train station, which also has a small parking lot for geographic reasons, so it made sense that his wife would drive him to the station.
When you live in an average American suburb you cannot walk down the road to a store. You may or may not have a sidewalk. There will not be reliable public transit. You have to get in the car and drive to do anything. There's no other way.
Saying something like "New York" immediately invalidates the rest of your comment as New York (City) is one of the few areas with meaningful public transit.
We worship cars here. Cars are like Freedom Jesus. If you do anything to mess with cars you are a filthy communist who should die according to the general public.
Saying something like "New York" immediately invalidates the rest of your
comment as New York (City)
New York != New York City. Don Draper lived in Ossining, which is about forty (40) miles north of Lower Manhattan (New York City). What's being discussed is commuter rail, not dense intracity transit. Commuter rail systems exist across the country and are absolutely a viable way of getting folks out of cars.
A commuter rail still requires a person to navigate the suburbs to get to the station which requires... cars.
I'm not against public transit. I just understand the reality of the United States. If it helps the poors or minorities with tax dollars we don't do it here.
People find cars the easiest way to get around and they support things to make that easier. The average person wants to be able to travel somewhere easy and when they get there park. If that means more parking and wider roads they may support that. I hate arguments that latch onto a small extremist view and try to paint everyone with that broad stroke. Supporting cars is not some right wing agenda.
Every suburb I have lived in has been walkable for the main items (grocery, bar, getting to public transit). If you want to live in the suburbs and walk you have to make that your priority but it is very doable.
Supporting cars is not the right-wing agenda. Blocking public transit funding and buildouts are.
> Every suburb I have lived in has been walkable for the main items (grocery, bar, getting to public transit).
Every suburb I have ever lived in or been to has not been walkable for any items. No bar, no restaurant, no store, no public transit. There were also no bike lanes nor any sidewalks. I live where I can afford to be within reasonable distance to employment. I don't have control beyond that to decide to live elsewhere.
You pick where you live. If you want to live somewhere that doesn't require a car you need to pick carefully. It does exist in the suburbs from Miami, to Portland, to Seattle, to LA, to Chicago, there are suburbs you don't have to have a car for and almost every major city in the US has that option.
You pick where you live but it's not a matter of having a free choice. You can only live so far from where you work or where employment is. There are constraints on your choice. I live in a place I can afford within reasonable commute to my employer as does nearly anyone else.
Isn't the reason the rent is higher because you can forego a car? For example, the average monthly car payment for a used car is supposedly $526[0] and insurance $168[1]. So if you get rid of that, you can afford nearly $700 more per month in rent (assuming you can still qualify by having household monthly gross income of 3x the rent).
So, in your case, you only really need to make more to afford a walkable lifecycle if you still want to own a car and have the option to use it to drive to places outside of your walking distance. Of course, completely moving to a lifestyle where all travel is public trasit and airport-based is tough to achieve, but it could be a worthwhile price to pay depending on how often you travel and where (since the time investment is also high for cars in the U.S. with how far apart each city is from the next).
If you are rich the payment might be $500. The poor are buying used cars for $5000 and keeping it for a few years, so lets knock that down to $250/month (including maintenance). Their insurance is cheaper as well (if they even bother with it...). You can get your monthly costs even lower if you know how to buy a reliable car that you maintain yourself (or for free by friends/family) - which the poor are likely to do.
I went without a car for a year a few years ago (personal challenge / to save some money), and had a spreadsheet detailing the cost of ownership for a $10k car. Costs:
* Insurance: $640
* Registration: $51
* Repairs: $200
* Depreciation: $300
* Opportunity cost (assuming a 6% ROI on the $10k): $600
All in cost (excluding gas): $1790
At the time, I was comparing the cost of owning a car vs using car2go, uber, etc for a few trips a month. In the end, it basically just showed that owning a car wasn't all that expensive, and the convenience was WELL worth it.
My current car is worth ~$5k, and these numbers are actually a fairly good representation of my costs over the past few years. I take it in once a year to get the oil changed, and do other small repairs, but otherwise it just kinda.. works. Parking and other costs from living in a city might swing this calculus a bit more, but at the end of the day, you don't need a brand new car, and a modest 10 year old car can drive well, without costing you very much.
Until you're poor you don't realize how cheaply you can keep a vehicle running, nor how many people are just driving around without insurance, license, and various other "necessities".
This is the secret underbelly to the car-centric design of the US. People drive illegally all the time. They drive over legal BAC limits, they drive without insurance, they drive unlicensed, they don't pay parking tickets, they drive looking down at their phones and not at the road.
When you're poor and you live in an area completely unserved by public transit and you lose your license because you can't afford to pay parking tickets, are you really going to stop driving and lose your job and become homeless?
We have statistics to show what unlicensed and uninsured driver crash and fatality rates are like and they're a lot higher than the rest of the cohort, but there's still a sizable part of the US population that does all of these things and still uses the same public road infrastructure as everyone else, often out of lack of alternatives.
And to get your car registered in most states, you usually only have to pass an emissions test, have a valid license, and have proof of insurance at the time that you register the car.
This means that 11 out of 12 months, you get to drive around without insurance.
Pretty much illegal everywhere in the US except for a few weird outliers. I think there’s one southern state that lets you have a bond instead of insurance?
Let's not. Average car payments and loan duration continue to rise. NerdWallet is putting the average new car loan at $700/mo for 70 months and the average used car loan at $525 for 68 months. About half of all Americans can't afford a $1,000 emergency, so it's pretty damn unlikely they'll be paying for even a $5,000 car without a loan. If you're poor not only are you taking out a loan you're getting socked with a high interest rate subprime loan that's going to cost you more than a loan to a wealthier person.
Seems like an obvious case of selection bias. Used car loans are going to be a lot higher than average prices people actually pay for cars, because people who take out loans to buy cars are buying more expensive cars than people who don't.
So, no, rich people aren't driving these ballooning loans they're going to the working poor. The excruciatingly poor don't own cars. Defaults were ticking up leading into the pandemic, people are simply living beyond their means at this point. Cars are expensive and have been getting more and more expensive.
In theory, yes, and a lot of lower income people do put that into practice and live in my same apartment complex. These people also usually own cars. The nearest grocery store is about a mile away, and the nearly bus stop is about the same distance. I occassionally bike to the store and have a bike trailer for groceries, but I have felt like I'm risking my life when carefully biking a trailer-full of groceries across the six lane 'street'.
Apart from Uber or hitching a ride from a friend, there's no good transportation option to our airport but I get your point. I think in most cases, given the option between a walkable (to work and restaurants) neighborhood and no car (and no good public transit), and suburbia with a car, most people would choose suburbia. Ease of getting groceries, ease of access to recreation, etc. What's really missing is the transit investment.
If you hit and seriously injure someone, that $35 insurance will not cover the multi-million dollar medical and legal and recompense bills.
This can be a working strategy if you don't have a dollar to your name (whomever you hit won't be able to squeeze blood out of a stone), and never intend to have a dollar to your name, but is generally ill-advised for someone in the middle-class, who has money and assets to lose.
> As a couple we still own two cars but really only use them to transport our dog to trailheads.
You can probably lose one.
When the wife and I left the Bay Area for the midwest we kept only one car. It simplified moving and if we needed another we could get one in the midwest.
Soon we'll have been a single-car family for two years.
Definitely. We actually own three, the intent of the newer one is to replace the other two eventually.
Old cars are a Prius for interstate trips, and an early 2000s Outback for camping/interstate trips where we need to bring more things with. Prius got severely damaged in our parking lot and I used the insurance payout to help with a down payment on a Crosstrek, which will eventually replace the Outback as well.
I feel bad for taking up the (free) parking space, but the cost of ownership of the Outback when infrequently used is something like a $40 insurance premium every six months. That's another benefit of not driving much -- low mileage and safe driver insurance discounts.
People don't realize how cheap it is to keep a vehicle maintained if you don't use it much at all.
And though insurance is officially "tied to the car" it's really tied to the driver; you can't drive more than one car at a time anyway so the third, fourth, tenth vehicle adds less and less.
When I owned two vehicles as a single person it wasn't that cheap to own my two seater car. It was at least a few hundred in insurance, registration, state inspection, some age-related maintenance. I eventually got rid of it for that reason.
> It doesn't help that most of the planned transit improvements seemingly are focused on greenification of buses rather than just getting more buses on the road to expand routes, make lines frequent enough to use for commuting, etc.
Important note here: US public transit use is way down from pre-pandemic levels and might never recover [1]. I've spoken to several city transit representatives about this and they're looking for ways to green and downsize their buses as a result of low demand. Adding more buses not only doesn't help if there aren't enough passengers, it makes things worse because buses are massively expensive (think quarter million dollars each), need expensive drivers and maintenance, etc. That's money that cities could be spending on things like improving housing instead.
I feel fortunate to make enough money to easily afford the rent, but it's insane that in most places you need a high paying job to escape needing a car. Refugee and low-income housing here is clustered around major streets like six-lane one-way transport corridors. Unless they work downtown or close to a stop on one of the few bus lines that run frequently and reliably, they need cars. Usually the cheapest they can afford, which likely means they need to spend money they don't have to get them passing emissions tests at registration time, deal with breakdowns, high insurance premiums, etc.
It doesn't help that most of the planned transit improvements seemingly are focused on greenification of buses rather than just getting more buses on the road to expand routes, make lines frequent enough to use for commuting, etc.
My city did pass some new zoning codes which heavily cut back on parking requirements, I'm excited to see how that (slowly) pans out. I expect more high-capacity parking structures to go up, fewer surface lots. People might need to walk further or explore other last-mile options, I have hope that will turn people's eyes towards non-vehicle transportation improvements.