I find this article to be too high-minded. Most Americans don't own cars or support car-friendly policies due to some notion of car=freedom or some other culture wars nonsense.
Americans own cars because most of them live in single-family houses on large plots of land, and that doesn't make public transit for daily commuting a realistic possibility. In Paris car ownership is very low, maybe 1/3 of adults, but in rural France the car ownership rate is easily 95%+. I haven't seen a single developed area in the world that has violated the rule that low density = high car ownership and vice versa.
The other rule that I have never seen violated is that the large majority of middle and upper income people do not want to live near low income people, due to crime or other reasons. In Europe, poor people live in the suburbs, so the middle income live in the city with high density housing. In the US and some other places (south asia), low income people live near the business center, so the middle income live in low density housing in the suburbs. These are for historical reasons and cannot be easily changed.
America actually has a huge public transportation system servicing most homes in the US. It’s the bus system for public schools. Running local loops to pick people up in moderately high density neighborhoods with 1 acre per house or less every half hour or so is actually pretty easy. Just read up on the old trolly networks before cars took off.
The real reason Americans own cars is because we’re rich enough to afford a more expensive and more convenient system. Public Transit at scale is surprisingly cheap when compared to all the costs associated with car ownership * 10’s of thousands of people in even a fairly small community.
I lived in Copenhagen’s suburbs, Østerbro, for several years and the public transit—trains and buses with the occasional taxi—were finely grained enough schedule-wise for me to easily work as an appointment-based professional (video/film editing, compositing and FX). I LOVED not having to deal with a car.
I now live in the Seattle suburbs, Redmond — very close to the same distance from the work site as in Copenhagen — and there is no way I could realistically rely on public transit to hit appointments unless I left an hour or two early—and, in bad weather, many hours early. I can’t imagine doing what I do without a car.
You might be able to (hypothetically) do it what might aptly be called Seattle's sister city, Vancouver, BC. You do still need to somewhat deliberately find a spot nearish the train, or a major bus route, or just bike, but it seems like it'd be more doable here. Haven't owned a car in years.
Last time I was down in Seattle though, I noticed they were building a massive elevated (40 mile?) train thing quite far north, which looks somewhat impressive if it wraps up in the near future.
I'm not from Seattle, but it sounds like you're talking about the 3 Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Line_(Sound_Transit) which will join the current 1 Line and head north up to Everett, WA. Estimated completion date of either 2037 or 2041 based on funding.
When I visit Seattle I only use public transit or walk to get around. I use the light rail as much as possible, but it only gets you kind of the way to anywhere. Plan on an up to quarter mile walk to a bus stop and then probably an additional bus to actual get to where you want to go. The previous poster is right in that you need to add at least an hour to your transit time to account for waiting for connections.
Also, a large portion of 1 Line's southern section is at-grade with auto traffic.
Looking at things today doesn’t explain how they got this way. The existence of widespread car ownership changed the way Americans built, where they moved, etc.
I’ve done long commutes and I’ve lived close enough to walk to work. If I and millions of other people had prioritized car free lives 20 years ago we would already had noticeably different infrastructure. Instead I’m back to “needing” a car to get around based on these kinds of choices.
While it’s true we own more cars because we can afford them, a large percentage of Americans require them.
Tiny remote communities rarely make enough for transport entities to care. For instance, without vehicles, in the village I live in, we’d probably be connected via bus to the nearby town, where you can do some shopping from a dollar store and get something to eat at restaurants, but to be connected to the various cities? They may have daily shuttles, but the population (<300) may not make this worth it. And as established in the thread public transport sucks and would make running errands impossible.
This doesn’t even compare to the truly remote individuals who live in the country miles out.
Honestly I feel like people who live in cities really lose their sense of scale for how large the US really is and how small a large percentage of communities are. I mean almost 1/3rd of the US population is crammed into less than 1% of the total surface of the USA. Using the 333 most populace cities in the USA gives an average population density of ~3,150/square mile. Out in the country where I live, we’re maybe 50/sqm, and further out that can drop to .25/sqm or lower.
Not to mention the fact that the reason public school buses work is because for the better part of the year the destinations are ironed out and rarely change. Little Æ is going from home to school and back 90% of the time. That simply doesn’t reflect an adult’s lifestyle, because while every child in a given area goes to a single school, jobs are much less localized. Not to mention errands, hobbies, visiting friends.
A bus schedule simply cannot replace the flexibility of a car to a large percentage of America.
> While it’s true we own more cars because we can afford them, a large percentage of Americans require them.
If people stopped buying cars, and stopped voting for people promoting zoning and a car shaped country, shared transports (bus, be they public or private) would take over. The thing is as long as people keep buying and using cars, there is no market for the shared transport. And US people tend to have difficulty to grasp the concept of a non profitability focused public service.
The way it used to work is if your job was in a different town, you moved to that town. Cars are a relatively recent phenomenon and yes in your example they are more convenient, but that’s my point.
I grew up next to farms and a school bus showed up 4x a day to take kids to k-6, or 7-12. It was a long and inconvenient trip, but that’s because we were living in the middle of nowhere.
Historically the majority of farmers globally didn’t own horses. They require quite a lot of effort and food while only being partially useful a few times a year.
I wasn’t necessarily drawing a connection between horses and farmers, as I was tackling each point separately and meant modern farmers.
For one, the mere existence of horses and their relatives were mostly in Africa and Asia, meaning that for a lot of unrecorded and a decent chunk of recorded history whether you had one or not was location dependent. And while yes, horses were expensive, renting them when needed was comparatively cheap.
Additionally, especially in feudalist societies, land was especially difficult to own, and an entire village would work on the land surrounding them. Meaning you rarely had need for any sort of transport that wasn’t your legs, as everything you needed was located in your village.
Contrast all of that to modern farmers, who regularly live on hundreds of acres, miles away from the nearest pocket of civilization. Without private transport they’d be stranded.
Modern farmers still generally live within a days walk of hundreds of other people. 1 million acres is a mega farm and still fits in a 1.6 X 1.6 square mile box while needed several people to operate.
It’s again wealth that allows for the modern system of roads and private vehicles rather than inherent necessity. Remember the post office is sending vehicles to every single one of these properties 6 days a week on the cheap. A bus doing the same would be really inconvenient, but also quite cheap.
> The real reason Americans own cars is because we’re rich enough to afford a more expensive and more convenient system.
Are we? When you zoom in on things like road maintenance backlogs and auto loan delinquencies, it kind of seems like we are not rich enough but have been pretending to be.
They're rich enough to have cars even if some are "pretending" through risky loans. Contrast that to poorer countries where many people can't even pretend to have a car.
Are they, though? Surely some people have unusually expensive loans but the full cost of a car comes from loan interest, depreciation, tolls, insurance, parking, gas, maintenance, taxes and any emergency repairs you have to make when something breaks. That can add up to a lot.
The delinquencies are the ones you hear about. What doesn't get reported, statistically, is when people are balancing absolutely everything in their life on a knife's edge to fit the car in with all their other expenses when they are living on a meager salary (or unemployed).
And that is only on the private individual's side. Costing out car-dependent development in terms of building and maintaining roads, bridges, power lines, water pipes, trash collection, wastewater treatment, fire, police is all monstrously expensive, and it is one reason why when the roads get damaged from use and need repair, they get chronically backlogged and problems keep mounting for years and years.
One thing people notice about Japan and the Netherlands is how immaculately maintained the roads are. They are significantly more pleasant places to drive, specifically because they did not overbuild road infrastructure.
It's the age old "growth fixes the old stuff" (bit of a shameless plug but here you go, https://matthewc.dev/musings/no-roads-for-old-men/ couldn't find the HN discussion link). We expect new development to foot the cost for existing roads and infrastructure.
The majority of those risky loans are for cars much nicer than the absolute minimum. A significant percentage of the population is going to live above their means, even if making millions end up in significant debt.
That’s not quite true. The simple reason Americans drive cars is because it’s impossible to live without one. I spent a week in Austin and the difference between its suburban layout and that of any European city is stark.
It’s really hard for someone who hasn’t lived it to really understand what it means to be able to walk to the shop. Then compare to when that’s not physically possible.
>It’s really hard for someone who hasn’t lived it to really understand what it means to be able to walk to the shop. Then compare to when that’s not physically possible.
I got you, friend. I grew up in the USSR, where private cars were luxury and public transit was so abundant that people referred to locations by the subway stations. The cities were designed for the citizens without cars (no parking anywhere, "microdistricts" in the newly built areas). It objectively sucks. I now live in the USA and can compare, if you have any questions I will be glad to explain what the life without a car is really like.
Until 2 years ago, I lived without a car and walked to work until 2018 (when I switched to remote working). I know the pros and cons. The USSR being shit doesn't make living without a car shit.
Even now, owning a car, I typically walk or ride. If I tried to do this in the USA, I'd be getting scraped off a stroad.
I imagine that if you work at home, have no children and have other people driving cars for you (delivery, taxi etc) it's not that bad. Not many people can afford this lifestyle though.
You didn’t read what I said: I only started WFH in 2018. I used to commute on foot before that.
My fiancé’s mother can’t drive and managed to raise 3 children by herself without a car, too. In the right environment, yes it is possible. No, she’s not rich by any stretch.
I did read it, I don't know what you wanted this to express but I understood it as the admission that walking to work became untenable. 2018 is not 2020, WFH then had a great income/career progression penalty.
And a whole lot of people managed to raise even more children before cars were invented or even horses were domesticated. Eg my gran-gran raised 3 children without running water and electricity (and obviously no horse or car), that does not mean she enjoyed it.
> I understood it as the admission that walking to work became untenable
I don't understand how you inferred that unless you chose to.
> And a whole lot of people managed to raise even more children before cars were invented or even horses were domesticated.
What on earth are you talking about? Either you've never been to London, or any major European city, or you're making spurious comparisons in bad faith.
You mentioned some woman raising children without a car as if it somehow supported your point, I pointed out that somebody doing something in the past is not a proof of that being somehow superior or even acceptable now. Even in the present time millions live and raise children without running water and electricity, should we start arguing that Americans need to quit these too because they cannot imagine living without them?
> It’s really hard for someone who hasn’t lived it to really understand what it means to be able to walk to the shop.
Every time you reply you only further prove this point.
> I pointed out that somebody doing something in the past is not a proof of that being somehow superior or even acceptable now.
Either you’re unable to understand my point because your English comprehension is terrible or you’re arguing in bad faith. Either way, talking to you is a waste of time.
Okay, I see you are being just combative. As I said I lived in the USSR and not as a single childless man working remotely and ordering deliveries too (I was a child myself though).
People got around before cars existed, the ability for people to buy cars resulted in creating a system where they were needed. Now what would have happened if people couldn’t have afford cars? You don’t end up where we are today.
I lived within walking distance of my job and shopping for years near DC. To the point where I would go weeks without driving. But I didn’t sell my car and quickly went back to driving when it was even moderately less convenient.
Recognize that it's a fantasy for everyone to live near their job. As cities grow the mean distance between housing and job grows. It isn't so much social policy or cussedness or selfishness, as it is geometry.
We build cities based on peoples desires not some intrinsic need to separate jobs from homes, but that’s irrelevant here.
Both public transport and cars can both serve low density suburban commuters as demonstration by many cities around the world. America doesn’t lack public transportation because of it’s size, population density, layout etc, it’s simply people choosing driving consistently in how they vote, where they move, and what they do when given the option.
NYC doesn’t have good public transportation because New Yorkers are different, they have it because it’s the only option that scales.
That doesn't make the poor US city design the inevitable outcome, however. Not Just Bikes has some great videos outlining why US design is particularly shocking compared to other countries.
I compare Austin because I've been to Austin, so I saw it for my own eyes. I've been to a range of European cities (especially the UK where I live) and all of them were more walkable than Austin. I'm not the only person to observe this. There's a number of Youtube channels (Not Just Bikes for one) that talk about this in great depth.
Reading comments on this page, the problems with public transport are listed - not safe or clean or uncrowded enough.
But, the only alternative considered is private individual/family transport.
Why is private mass transport not more widely available given that it can solve a lot of these problems?
Having an Uber for buses which does smart scheduling based on current demand, possibly involving transfers so that frequent local routes connect with each other without long delays, should be possible.
Of course, prices will fall when things scale. So, the government can be involved as a facilitator but operations are mostly run by companies which can pay a fee to the government rent necessary infrastructure.
You still have the problem of higher prices for odd hours/locations but sharing costs ahould make it cheaper than uber.
Various places have carpool lots where you can park your car for the day and ride with someone else. They are often illuminated at night and patrolled by police.
No one does Uber for busses because it would be way too expensive. Fares don't even come close to covering the cost of running busses. If a company wasn't just burning money VC money, they would have to charge at least taxi rates to get on the bus and it would be significantly less convenient. Uber for cars is barely profitable now, and they get to be extremely cheap with driver labor.
> America actually has a huge public transportation system servicing most homes in the US. It’s the bus system for public schools.
That quite a straw man, my friend!
A bus that runs twice per day, with a fixed number of passengers, all of which go to the same destination... that's not really the kind of service that can get you free of private cars!
It actually does allow many one car families to stay one car families and saves an amazing amount of driving by parents in aggregate while being very cheap.
Also these busses generally go by homes 4x times per day twice for middle school and twice for high school. They don’t go by every home every time if no kid lives on a street, but in suburbs there’s a lot of school bus traffic.
Expanding that to adults would require more trips and a backbone network between collection points. But, the point still stands that sending busses to most homes in America say 40x or more times a day is hardly impossible when we are already sending them 8x a day on the cheap. Being inconvenient compared to a more expensive car option is the core reason why this doesn’t happen.
Public transportation operated by public entities in the U.S. outside of a handful of large, dense cities always sucks. The reason lies with the "operated by public entities" bit. Heck, even in NYC, private companies built the lion's share of the subway system, then the city "nationalized" them and very little additional development was done.
Around the world governments "nationalize" what they allow themselves to, and at each level they nationalize the most salient and notable industry that's not too small to be small potatoes. In the U.S. the federal government doesn't allow itself to nationalize anything, the States do allow themselves but they can't bring themselves to hurt their industry as they compete with other States, but cities don't see themselves as competing with other cities, and cities allow themselves (and the States allow them to) to nationalize public transportation.
Take Argentina where a strong national government has at times nationalized steel production, oil production, etc., but they wouldn't deign to bother with nationalizing bus service -- it's like it's beneath them -- and so Buenos Aires has one of the most fantastic privately operated public bus systems in the world. You never have to wait more than a few minutes for a bus during business hours. But in the U.S. you're lucky if buses run more often than every 30 minutes at rush hour.
Do you want Americans to not drive their cars so much? Fine, it's easy: allow private companies to operate all public bus services, and also to operate small buses without set routes (a sort of Uber of buses). If you insist on the cities running public transportation then you can be sure that the public transportation system will never ever be good enough that Americans will be happy to relinquish their cars.
It's that simple.
And no, trains won't cut it. Laying tracks down is unbelievably expensive, will never pay for itself, and you can't ever change them afterwards, and you won't be able to place them where people can use them because that would be way too disruptive unless you make it subways, and that's even more unbelievably expensive.
You could also argue that we should try to follow a formula where high population density = low car use and vice versa.
I live in a large European metropolitan region with excellent public transport and bicycle infrastructure - at least comparatively. While both leave massive room for improvement a car is not needed, especially as alternatives like car sharing exist for moving heavy stuff once every few months.
There is quite the large support to completely prohibit car use in the inner city aside from transportation, taxis and deliveries. There are hundreds of streets and places where cars have NO value, take a lot of room, blockade other participants in public life and actively worsen the urban environment for everyone. Getting rid of personal cars in these areas would free up massive amounts of space as parking slots can be reutilized and 3-lane roads become single lane.
I love cars and love driving but I hate hate hate them in inner cities. Dense, well-connected urban centers are very suitable to completely outlaw cars whereas suburban or rural areas are absolutely unsuitable to do so.
Both can be true. America also has a "missing middle" urban planning problem - not that that's by chance. Zoning laws, NIMBYs and mandatory parking all favor this outcome.
But also, compare average car sizes to the EU. The average car in the US is a fuel-guzzling battle tank, side by side. The options for anything else are pretty sparse, but they do exist.
I was surprised by the stat, it does check out. Out 130 M housing units, 90M are single family (on a phone, citation needed, but that us what I found after a quick google)
Americans own cars because most of them live in single-family houses on large plots of land, and that doesn't make public transit for daily commuting a realistic possibility. In Paris car ownership is very low, maybe 1/3 of adults, but in rural France the car ownership rate is easily 95%+. I haven't seen a single developed area in the world that has violated the rule that low density = high car ownership and vice versa.
The other rule that I have never seen violated is that the large majority of middle and upper income people do not want to live near low income people, due to crime or other reasons. In Europe, poor people live in the suburbs, so the middle income live in the city with high density housing. In the US and some other places (south asia), low income people live near the business center, so the middle income live in low density housing in the suburbs. These are for historical reasons and cannot be easily changed.