In the USA, the working poor generally don't work downtown, and it's really the industrial areas where there is awful transit service. So cheapo used cars are a must for these folks.
There is some awful HN bias here where young healthy well-paid tech workers live in some boogie part of SF/NYC/Boston/etc and enjoy the "car-free lifestyle" (and I've been there), without any idea how the other half lives.
I've seen this "car free utopia" idea dismissed as an idea by and for "elites" (see Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's comments on people who ride the subway in NYC) plenty of times as a tactic to avoid doing anything about reducing dependence on cars. It's quite a counterproductive argument in my opinion. Even if there are well paid tech workers who are able to enjoy a "car-free lifestyle", why should it end there?
Just because the system we created means that currently the only affordable place for the working poor is in suburbs where they must rely on cars doesn't mean that it needs to continue to be that way. You can support building infill housing and adding transit to eventually reduce the need for so many people to have cars.
It's one thing to call it "bias" and use that as an argument to not make things better instead of coming up with ways to help make car independence available to everyone across classes.
Because the truth is nobody has any real idea how to retrofit the last 70 years of American suburbia so that mass transit is actually effective and useful for people. "Transit-oriented development" really only helps downtown workers and doesn't get you to the grocery store or daycare. (And even in NYC, the subway is not great out in Queens/etc, so people own cars.)
But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go.
I find it fascinating how the debate around cars in cities evolves. Initially counter arguments always are that reducing cars is not desirable "nobody wants less cars in cities, people need to do their weekly groceries, nobody wants to bike in bad weather...". Once these points are refuted it always evolves into "yes it would be great, but it can't be done, because it's too expensive, politically controversial...". It's almost like there is an irrational fear of less cars in cities.
Regarding it can't be done I encourage anyone to read up on how the investment into public transport transformed Bogota. Which is both much poorer and in a much more challenging geographical environment than most US cities. So if they can do it, why can't US cities?
You are putting a lot of pointless words in my mouth. As I said, I have actually lived the San Francisco car-free bike and streetcar lifestyle, and quite enjoyed it. So I have the perspective of why it does or does not work (for Americans). I would love to see some concrete solutions proposed here other than just the usual Cars Bad/Cars Good handwaving and downvoting.
(I just looked at Bodega in Google Maps, and it is significantly more dense than all but the most "boogie" American cities. Compare it to say Chicago.)
Chicago has a density of 4500 people per sq km compared to Bogota at 4100 so Chicago is denser? That said I actually meant Medellin not Bogota which is significantly denser. However Medellin topology makes it extremely challenging to build infrastructure, the central valley floor is more than 1000m lower than most of the suburbs. Moreover the GDP of Medellin is 70 billion compared to a GDP of Chicago of 800 billion and Chicago can't build public transport infrastructure because it's 1.5 less dense? That doesn't make any sense.
Genuinely curious, do you have a good article about Bogota? Because your entire demeanor is acting like you have some "gotcha", without advocating for anything concrete.
For example, from my brief perusal of Google Maps, it looks like they have some sort of growth boundary, because it goes from dense city to farms in a sharp line. For historical reasons, America is not organized that way. (And Chicago is fucked-up, so be it.)
Bogota is interesting for their bus rapid transit (dedicated bus lanes), which as far as I know was built out for a fraction of the cost of a metro system.
Yep, San Francisco's BRT line has been a huge success (despite being typically way late and over-budget). And actually SF has had 'proto-BRT' for a long time, but IMO they still need more subways.
Bodega does have a growth boundary, per google. (IMO the lack of that is the 'root of all evil' of USA development patterns.)
Except that many European cities copied US cities in their development styles, and then later reversed them. So we absolutely do know how to reverse it.
> But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go.
Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development.
Here is a guide on how to improve American cities that are surrounded by lots of suberbia:
- Remove/close all highways that go across the city, only keep the ring road. People will simple reclaim those space for recreational uses as soon as cars are gone.
- Increase price of parking space or eliminate them completely. Most parking in city is not used by residents anyway.
- Redo even if its with paint and few concrete bolders, the city streets according to Dutch street regulations. Massively increase safety for everybody.
- That frees up lots of space for bike lanes (as US cities tend to have far to many car lanes). This is actually a benefit to the history of US cities, we can't do that in some of the older dense cities.
- Change your zoning code and other access regulations, so proper urban development is actually allowed to happen. The US could adopt something like Japan zoning laws. A heavy use of mixed use and allow living in almost any zone. The US has a hilarious amount of commercial development land that completely underutilized. This also means no more minimum parking space and all that nonsense. See maybe like this: https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/land-use-zones-in-japa...
- This will make it so suburbs can go from single house only to a mix of single house, duplex, fourplexes, townhouses and so on. Like suburbs used to be. And it will make it so that light commercial developments can happen in subburbs. Meaning a single house can turn into small shops, coffees and such.
- In the city select a few core blocks in different places in the city, make those pedestrian only. Or like Montreal does, a whole long street. Each year add more of those pedestrian zone, improve walking infrastructure between them.
- Make it so subburban residents start to pay full price for their utilities including water and other infrastructure. New subburban developments are often hilariously subsidized, needing more water pumps and such.
- Redevelop current stroads into much fewer lanes and create separate access roads to the commercial developments. This improves flow on the stroads, reduce accidents and makes walking and biking along those stroads safer. Of course some of those lanes would turn into bike infrastructure.
- In the subburbs, also reduce road with, install protected cycle lanes. Break open the horrible cul-de-sac, the city can buy part of peoples garden to create cross connects between different cul-de-sacs and surrounding developments (cross connects for people and bikes, not cars).
- Make all the bus services public, heir a real transportation engineer to come up with a plan. Consisting of a few main routes, using the old stroads and highways, and smaller buses that serve as connectors to these major routes. Of course for that you would make some lanes on the highway, busways. Despite what some people in the US think, you can actually do decent bus service in suberbia. Combine that with public on demand service, that gets you cheaply to the next closes major public transport node. Maybe start planning a tram route along the major bus-routes.
- Look at your old rail infrastructure and develop a plan for a decent regional service. Develop a 50 year rail plan.
- The city can also simply buy up some cul-de-sacs that are strategically located and redevelop them into proper nice walkable neighborhoods. The city can even own the land and only rent half of the appartments, some at affordable price. This worked well in Britain and still does work well in Austria. And of course develop a transportation plan for those new neighborhoods. See an example, where old soviet style neighborhoods were developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfonhlM6I7w
- Change your property tax into a land tax, or a property tax heavily focused on land. Or potentially do more with sales or what taxes, importantly, just don't do property tax.
- Like in Japan, require anybody that wants to own a car in a city, to first prove the have a private place to part.
- Make all car registrations based on weight, meaning you pay more for a heavier car.
- Focus development on the city and the first suburban ring around the city. Offer intensives for people in the outer rings to move into the inner rings. So for example somebody that owns a small house in the far outer ring of the city, could move into a duplex in the inner rings.
- If yours city has repair backlog (and most cities do) focus on the city core and the inner ring of subberbia.
- Do not develop more land, US cities already are far to wide spread. Simply announce no new infrastructure or roads. And not taking over into city property stuff that developers have built.
I could list more, pretty much all of these have been discussed in urbanism research.
Pretty much all of these have been done in different places at different times. And the all pretty much work. Doing them all together hasn't been done but there is no reason to believe it wouldn't work.
Of course this does not mean that for 1 day to the next everybody will go from suberbinate to die hard city person. But the culture after 1-2 decades of such changes will be dramatically different.
It's funny, seems like people had me pegged as some Suburb Guy, when that couldn't be further from the truth. (I have mostly walked the talk, which is more than I can say of some of the former Bike Guys I have known.) Anyway, I completely agree with much of this, just a couple nits:
> Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development.
Yes, the poor always lose out versus Hypothetical Utopia. I'm referring to reality as it exists in the current and near future where many many poor & middle-class people need cars. You can't just take them away because of a dumb student-type notion that "cars are only for rich people".
> Change your zoning code and other access regulations (etc)
Yes, I would love to tell Silicon Valley how to zone, but even the popular governor is having trouble doing that.
(Meanwhile, my urban SF neighbors are arguing about what paint colors should be allowed, like it is a HOA or something.)
> Develop a 50 year rail plan.
We have that, but it doesn't actually help because it's mostly about building rail out to new suburbs where people can get into city center office jobs (and the rail agency can get tax money). In the meanwhile, we built an urban subway with 3! stations.
Like I said, it's a trillion dollar problem, and there's no easy button. Just incremental improvements.
> It's funny, seems like people had me pegged as some Suburb Guy, when that couldn't be further from the truth.
I didn't, I read your comment. I think you are just haven't done the necessary level of research or you just have a doomer outlook.
> Yes, the poor always lose out versus Hypothetical Utopia.
But they are not comparing to Utopia, but rather the comparable situation where changes have been made. Or to the same city before and after some change.
Unless you are making the argument that no objective knowledge can exist, the research is pretty clear.
> I'm referring to reality as it exists in the current and near future where many many poor & middle-class people need cars.
Nobody is questioning that. Literally nobody. That why its called 'car centric design'. Who are you arguing against?
> You can't just take them away because of a dumb student-type notion that "cars are only for rich people".
Again, literally nobody is arguing that! You have constructed a complete straw man of urbanist.
The argument is to encourage policy that will make people want to live without cars in the future.
Unless you think, restricting parts of the city center or closing some urban highways is 'taking cars away', you are literally arguing against nobody.
> Yes, I would love to tell Silicon Valley how to zone, but even the popular governor is having trouble doing that.
Yes, all of my suggesting involve politics. And of course not all of them can be implemented practically depending on location. This is always true with literally any suggestion about anything political.
But your claim wasn't 'its politically difficult' rather your claim was 'nobody knows how'.
> We have that, but it doesn't actually help because it's mostly about building rail out to new suburbs where people can get into city center office jobs (and the rail agency can get tax money). In the meanwhile, we built an urban subway with 3! stations.
If be 'we' you mean California, yes there is one. And that is already a lot better then what many other places have. You might not think its enough, but it better then nothing. And the claim that it is bad because its only 'new suburbs' is also factually wrong as part of the rail plan you just had Caltrain electrification, and future improvement to existing rail Caltrain. I'm not an expert on California rail, but the claim that it serves 100% new subburbs is certainty false.
> Like I said, it's a trillion dollar problem, and there's no easy button. Just incremental improvements.
I have no idea why you are claiming its a 'trillion $' problem. That can be said about not doing anything at all too. When we are talking about the infrastructure of 300 million people (assuming we are talking US) then of course, any decision you make its a trillion $. But in that context 1 trillion $ also isn't that much.
And if you actually look at the research you will see that actually many of the suggestion I have SAVE MONEY. The idea that all of this cost unbelievable amounts of money is simply not true.
Lets go threw examples:
- Saver roads pay for themselves because accidents have a really high cost. And the new safer roads will decease avg speed, leaing to easier to maintain roads. In the US today there is a massive amount of overbuilding of incrastructure that simply isn't needed if you were builing roads according to modern scientific principles, rather then some book some engineer wrote in 1960s that just so happens to have been adopted as 'the standard'. And the principles aren't that hard or expensive to implement. This is a clear money safer. Think about all the idiotic lights the US uses at every intersection, each set of lights is expensive, sound road planning would eliminate many of these.
- Closing down urban freeways increases property taxes. Gives the city new land to redevelop and sell, or keep as parks. Also reduces maintenance burden on state level.
- Rezoning pays for itself many, many, many times over, its not even close.
- Increase parking price can raise money for the city. If you don't want to remove them. Removing them is very easy and cheap.
- Putting down protected bike lanes with simple concrete protection is very very cheap and tons of research shows that it is very beneficial. More people on bikes means less car, means less time wasted in traffic. It has also been repeatedly shown that it improves retail on those roads and it also improves property prices.
- Setting up pedestrian zones is also incredibly cheap. Literally a few concert blocks or at most a few bulliards that you can fold down for emergency access. Incredibly cheap, increases property prices and retail.
- Increasing prices on suberbia to reflect actual cost, raises money, rather then losing it.
- Redeveloping stroads is a bit more expensive, but I'm not proposing building anything new, but rather changing the way access and priority works. Cost money but not that much and in the long term it saves a lot of money.
- City buying and developing land does cost money, but since the new mixed use areas will be popular they can actually make a lot of money. Money for this can be raised by cities.
- Setting up a bus network is also really not that expensive. That is some amount of running cost, but if your buses have good priority lanes and are frequent you can cover a lot of the operation. This certainty not a 'trillion $' and each city can handle this themselves, like the do in most of the world. And again, this is increasing tax revenue along bus routes as has repeatedly been shown.
- All the revenue increases are doubly relevant if you switch from property tax to land tax.
The only thing that is at all expensive that I proposed is a long term rail plan. But in terms of your long term transportation plan, you have a lot of cost anyway. And rail is a better long term investment.
I formulate all of my points specifically so they were something cheap that can be done. I didn't propose building huge new parks, or huge metro systems. Or high speed rail. Or anything like that.
You can literally do 95% of what is needed by with paint, concrete blocks, a bunch of buses and bus drivers and a few legal chances. The city will actually increase its revenue a huge amount over time.
The current model of trying to support ever increasingly distant suburbs is what is actually bankrupting cities.
I suggest you look at the detailed research from Urban3. They clearly show how cities that have done many of the chances I propose, are good for the cities finances. In fact, some cities have implemented some of these changes specifically because they are out of money.
So please do not spread the idea that American cities can't change because its to expensive. That is the sort of thing far-right wing people spread, the whole 'we can't afford bike-lanes' nonsense.
A friend of mine is writing a history of the Massachusetts Hill towns. The Strathmore paper company plays a big part in that history the mill owners built housing for their workers within walking distance of the mills.
I also know of a tourism industry company that is buying up older hotels that are no longer competitive in the local market to use as seasonal worker housing.
There are solutions other than having someone drive a beater for 45 minutes to get to a low paying job.
When I look around on the subway here in NYC I see every type of person imaginable. There are wealthy people going to work and unhoused people and everyone in between. There are certainly transit deserts and I have friends that live in them who do have cars -- largely out in Queens, East New York, etc -- but many of the people I know in the city with cars are financially doing just fine.
It's also important to note that the extreme cost of living in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn is relatively recent. My friends that grew up here in the 80s, taking the subway to school, were far from bougie. They were living a car free lifestyle then and now just because that's how the environment of many parts of NYC is built. It's not like NYC was constructed as a walking paradise only for wealthy people in the 19th century.
True, I'm an old urbanite/suburb-hater. But because of ppl like me, I don't think there's any place left in the USA which has 'good' transit and isn't expensive. (And solutions like congestion tolls only work because of the boogieness.) What's done is done.
Yeah, agreed. We built the country for the car and there’s no easy path out of that. Every time I’m in LA I think “man we could have had a city like Barcelona” and get bummed it’s just a sprawling car dependent amalgamation of suburbs. There’s clearly demand for more cities like NYC in the US, but we’re not going to get it.
Yeah, some local billionaires want to build "San Francisco by the Sacramento Delta", and it's been nothing but NIMBY opposition. My guess it will be McMansions in 20 years instead. Politically, we can't even build one high-density suburb.
Thank you for saying this. My household is smack dab in the middle of a food dessert. We have a 25 year old car we got 10 years ago for $2000, and we use it primarily to go to the nice supermarket because you can get fresh, non moldy food at prices better than you can at the sketchy “supermarkets” and bodegas that always have rotting, moldy and non rotated food products on shelves. I do most of the shopping and I keep the freezer full of meat we can get on sale (just got 7 pounds of chicken wings for 2.49 a pound this week) and cook through that. A lot of the types in spaces like these don’t know how to cook and just use services like grubhub, and thinks everyone should too, or they buy 8 dollar a pound organic chicken thighs from Whole foods the day of. Everybody doesn’t live this way.
Also, I use the bus and train to go downtown and places where it would take an hour to find a parking spot. I even lug big bags of food from Aldi on the crowded bus at rush hour weekly. I don’t know why it has to be either you drive everywhere or never need a car in these discussions. Use what you need to use given the situation.
The working poor struggles to find work and stays poor also because mobility.
By the way that's not something I'm making up, it was literally told me by several people in struggling neighborhoods, lacking a car can be easily make a difference for many between being able or not to have different opportunities in life.
Might be different elsewhere but it made sense to me.
I've heard the same thing, because there's a lot of jobs out in suburban industrial parks and etc. (Some local transit agencies have tried to solve this, but the situation still isn't good.)
Wasn't GP specifically complaining about the other half not being able to enjoy the "car-free lifestyle"? (/not be forced to use the car to live their life.)
Yeah, "mobility opportunities". I recognize the issues, and the lack of easy answers, so I think I'm only "touchy" about is simplistic solutions.
European car commuter rates are almost identical to USA's. But I know little about the details, so don't really have any commentary, other than not all of Europe some glorious bike/transit boogie utopia. (And some ppl get "touchy" about that.)
> European car commuter rates are almost identical to USA's.
Hilariously untrue. Using the bus and bike to go to work is normal here. Buses and cycle paths are full of people during rush hour. In the US using those gets you weird looks. Depends on what part of Europe and what part of US we're talking about of course, but in general this holds true.
> European car commuter rates are almost identical to USA's.
Do you have source for this? I believe this could be true now but I find this kind of arguing dismissive and missing the point.
I'm not from environment you have described. Still remmeber people in my East European corner were able to easily commute to work by bus/train without car. However since they got richer they adopted American commuter patterns more and this led to deterioration of public transport outside of urban areas.
No wonder people get "touchy" because you are not really arguing for those who are not "young healthy well-paid tech workers". But against them. It is not about just ditching the cars but changing whole design of living around the need of cars - which is the point that actually started this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43666410
Great, some discord found this a couple days later and wants a google-a-thon. Since I don't know anything about "Europe", I don't care who is "european" enough to qualify for the 50% or 70% or whatever. Just that they have much better public transit, but still largely drive to work.
You are completely correct about the bias on HN against cars: that will change when they get older and have kids. Not everyone is a young single urbanite working remotely or downtown.
I don't have kids but I do have 4 nephews. They all take their bikes or if not possible for whatever reason, buses/trains/trams/metro to school and elsewhere. My 1 sister lives in the countryside and her kids still take the bike to school, which is ~10km away from their house, and if they go to another city they can take their bikes on the train.
Why wouldn't you want your kid to be independent like this? Why force them to have to rely on you and your car if they want to go out and see their friends? It inconveniences you and makes their life much more dull and restricted, not to mention the health benefits of taking the bike vs sitting in a car for a kid.
I'm not judging them for choosing to use public transport or bicycles, that's their right. They should not judge car drivers, but they often do and want them banned.
The secret to successful urban living is tolerance, but sadly that is in short supply.
Speaking as "the other half": this is wildly condescending, ignorant, and ironic. The irony of declaring that HN doesn't understand "how the other half lives"...
...while also declaring that "used cars are a must" for poor people (if you can afford a car in a city, you're substantially above a huge number of people, and car ownership rate goes up dramatically with wealth. It rises higher than 1 car/person once you start hitting the single digits. A huge number of service industry people, not to mention students, get around on foot or bicycle. They just don't commute 9-5, and they don't live in your neighborhoods, so you don't see them)
...while also making wildly sweeping generalization about where transit does and doesn't go (in my city, poor people get busses, rich people get trolleys and light rail and commuter rail, and it's pretty clearly purposeful that it is very difficult to get to the rich residential parts from the poor residential parts)
...while also making wildly sweeping generalizations that working poor don't work downtown, and only work in "industrial" areas in cities. It really goes to show how invisible we all are to you....even when you're wagging your finger at the rest of HN for not understanding people like us, lol.
Downtown, who exactly do you think handles all the cleaning, maintenance, repair, delivery, food service, retail, etc in the "downtown" area of a city?
Who do you think delivers the paper towels and bottled water and k-cups? Everything around you in your office - every single fucking thing down to the carpet you're standing on - is there because a poor person put it there.
Who do you think is driving the busses and taxis and trucks and vans?
Who do you think works the "gig" "jobs" delivering everything from dry cleaning to laundry to a fancy lunch for to those "young healthy well-paid tech workers"? (and FYI, your boss/admin assistant/office manager, when they order that big lunch from the fancy place across town? They're shit tippers. And bad communicators. And take forever to show up to grab the order.)
Do you realize that even in the "boogie" (sic) part of the city, the guy running the cash register at that hip coffee joint is making as close to minimum wage as the company thinks they can get away with, which is likely, at best, a buck or two an hour more than average?
Who exactly do you think fills all the entry-level jobs, including in tech companies? What do you think the front desk receptionist is paid? The desktop support person?
I feel like you all think that someone who cleans the offices for the big dot-com or white-shoe law office...or someone who dishwashes or busses or does prep work for a fancy restaurant where a plate costs $50, is getting paid anything remotely proportional to the difference in cost from a restaurant a plate for $18 or the hourly rate of that law firm.
It's the opposite - the fanciest places and the biggest name corps squeeze people the hardest. That's how they got to where they are.
Criticism accepted, I am not trying to generalize everyone. I am an urban dweller from back in the days when that was the cheap (and less desirable) way to live. So I obviously wish we had much better transit and more affordable housing, and all of the good things. Its not like people want to spend an hour in traffic in a beater-ass car, they do it because they have to. (Because all of the shit you mention is even worse in the suburbs.) I would just like to see some real solutions which don't involve taxing the fuck out of the little guy or nuking the suburbs or the usual Cars Bad handwaving. It's a hard problem which nobody has a real good answer for.
There is some awful HN bias here where young healthy well-paid tech workers live in some boogie part of SF/NYC/Boston/etc and enjoy the "car-free lifestyle" (and I've been there), without any idea how the other half lives.