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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Fuck Cars
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"A bus is only helpful when it actually runs regularly. And by 'regularly' I don't mean one each morning and another one each afternoon".
I absolutely agree.
But if mass transit had the same investment as road infrastructure gets, it'd be a slam dunk.
somehow even turborural areas here in sweden can manage it, so there's no reason other places can't do the same.
the crucial thing is that you don't have to run public transport literally everywhere, just run robust services between population centres (as many ones as you can manage) and build infrastructure such that people can get to the closest stop and transfer onto the public transport there.
Im actually surprised how well I am able to get to the city from my village. If I drive 3km with my bike to the next village I am able to get to the city every 30 Minutes.
If I drive 20 miles I can pay $10 to park in a lot where my car is guaranteed to be broken into 3 times a year so I can pay $8 to take a bus for the last 3 miles. And it only adds 60 minutes to my commute each way, provided I catch the bus!
Not everyone lives in Europe where cities were located and developed prior to cars and where being outside for 10 minutes isn't lethaly dangerous in the summers for a significant percentage of the population.
Cities in the USA also existed before cars. As Not Just Bikes said "cities weren't built for the car... they were bulldozed for the car"
The cities in the Southern US were essentially built by the invention of air conditioning, which became widely available for residential homes in the 1950s.
Between 1940 and 1960 the US as a whole few 35% with the Baby Boom.
In that same period, Houston grew over 250%, Albequerque grew over 500%, Vegas grew by 800%, and Phoenix grew by 1200%.
The population of Houston in 1940 was 385,000 and it had virtually no metro population outside the city itself. Its metro is now 7 million people.
I know that there are big parts of the world(even in Germany) where public transport is absolutely shit.thazs why I said that I'm quite surprised about how well it works for me. It does add quite some time(45mins with the bus and about 20-25 Minutes with my car), butbit works well for me.
I think the big issue a lot of people don't understand is that due to housing costs some daily commutes in America cover crazy distances across areas with no transit.
I put 35,000 miles (56,000 km) a year on my car.
Okay, that's a lot of travelling. I knew that you're quite fucked in the states, but I didnt knew it was that Bad.
I'm a somewhat bad case even here.
The rent for a tiny 1br apartment in the city where I work starts around $2500/month. For $725/month I can rent a 3 bed/2 bath trailer house about 90 minutes away.
Even without accounting for the extra space, I'm essentially getting paid $30/hr for my commute with the savings, which more than offsets the extra miles and gas.
Can't get your life back though
Meh. I'm in a long-distance relationship. I live alone and meet her at the family lakehouse between our 2 cities some weekends, so it's not a big deal having a long commute on weekdays. I like my van and love audiobooks, so half the time when I pull into the driveway I end up sitting there listening 20 minutes to the end of a chapter anyway.
My salary has more than tripled while living in the same place, so it's not like moving closer to work would be impossible. But right now it's not a priority and I'm finally getting my finances in decent shape.
Damn, that's a lot. I can absolutely understand why you choose to drive that long. U would absolutely hate it, because you loose awful amounts of time on the streets, but is a good deal.
What a lot of people also don't understand is that automobile-oriented zoning and development is one of the major factors driving up housing costs. In a nutshell, you pay a lot of money for housing in exchange for the privilege of driving long distances to it.
The opposite is true in my case. The long drive is what keeps my life affordable. Rent in town would be quadruple the cost for 40% of the living space. The long drive decreases my cost per square foot by an order of magnitude.
And the zoning in town has zero parking requirements. I know all about it because I work in the development department.
I essentially get paid $30 an hour for my commute with the savings and have a much bigger house.
That's great for you, as an individual, but the fact is that that same pattern of distance vs. affordability holds true all over the U.S. Actually, I mean distance vs. cost. Here where I live, housing gets cheaper further from the central city, but the economic and population growth is still pushing the cost up out of the affordable range even for the "cheap" stuff.
When I worked at the local grocery, I had a cheap apartment because of long tenure and luck. All of my co-workers, though, commuted in from outlying communities. Not only did they pay half of their income in rent, but then they had car expenses on top of it.
Land is more expensive in city. That's reality whether or not cars exist. When the city removed parking requirements housing and real estate costs continued to rise at the same or greater rates, except now landlords could charge an additional $400 a month for a parking spot as well since it became a luxury instead of a right for their renters.
The reality is when you live somewhere as spaced out as the US, owning a car is a requirement unless you want to essentially return to a feudalist system where people have to stay within a few miles of their homes for their entire lives while giving all their money to the landlord.
Hahaha, that is an amazing bifurcation fallacy! Cars or feudalism. Amazing then that Americans settled a whole continent without cars.
That aside, the truism in real estate is that the three most important characteristics of a property are: location, location, and location. Land in cities is always more expensive because its value is very closely tied up with the things it's close to. In that sense, auto-oriented development is a massive theft of value, because everything in cities has to be further apart than it otherwise would be, in order to accommodate wide streets, and parking spaces.
Less philosophically, "more expensive" is a scale, not an absolute condition. If all of that space currently devoted to speedy car travel in cities were instead available for people to live in, yes, the central city would be the highest demand, and the most expensive. But the spatial scale of cost would be very different. My grocery store co-workers would still live on the edges, but the edges could be only a mile or two away, not 15 miles away. That, and lots of cities wouldn't be structurally insolvent due to all the infrastructure they need to pay for.
(That last bit is a sore point for me, as city is facing a $22 million budget deficit, and they're considering cutting things like emergency services, or even the municipal pool. While the water utility shores up century-old pipes, we're still subsidizing the parking utility.)
If you buy a new couch, how do you get it to your door? A truck.
If someone has a great attack, what do you call for? An ambulance.
99% of the road infrastructure requirements we have with developers aren't about minimum parking or sprawl, but about having minimum leave sizes and turning radius for fire trucks.
Even if personal vehicles weren't a thing, we'd still need most of the road infrastructure we have to move goods and services and provide access for emergency vehicles. Adding parking spaces over subgrade detention where the weight of a building can't be located anyway doesn't significantly spread things out.
The chief generators of traffic here are the high cost of land in cities, the dangerous heat levels (people who aren't in shape, children, and the elderly can be killed by a 15-minute walk in the summer), and the insane focus on in-person office work.
I had to come into the office a few times during the lockdown, and my commute was reduced by an hour each way. Most of the people working from home during that time should still be working from home today. It would solve the traffic and real estate issues by giving people the freedom to live where they want.
Saying "cars bad" and thinking that's a solution screams of living in a fantasy world. Get a degree in planning them go work in an area where we have these problems and you'll quickly learn that it can't be solved by city planning.
We don't spend decades working on these problems and then increase the lane count because we're lazy. We do it because it's the only thing we can do that alleviates any issues.
This to me comes across as reaching: It's easy to design streets that are for people, but accommodate the occasional delivery vehicle, or ambulance. (A standard ambulance is only about 8 feet wide.) How often are people buying new couches or having heart attacks, anyway? We also don't need most of the road infrastructure for transport of goods, and service vehicles. Every city street, county road, state highway, or Interstate highway that I've ever driven on, anywhere, has a vast majority of consisting of personal vehicles, with the exception of I-80/94 through Gary, Indiana. Freight-carrying trucks aren't even allowed in the 3rd, left-most lane most of the time. Suburban streets are crazy wide; much wider than needed for freight delivery, or even the large units that fire officials insist upon. Smaller fire trucks exist, too, and are very effective where they are used. And, even if subgrade detention is the best solution in a particular situation, something like, say, a park can go on top, and offer much better infiltration than a parking lot. I know of stormwater vaults in large buildings, so they don't necessarily preclude buildings on a site. In any case, how many parking lots have a detention basin underneath?
Lastly, you're severely misrepresenting my point of view by comparing to wailing, "cars bad," and thinking that's a solution. No, I look to solutions that cities around the world (including my own, in some limited cases) have actually, successfully implemented. Adding lanes is the only politically viable solution sometimes, but it mostly just makes the problems worse in the long-run.
Suburban streets are literally designed around firetrucks. We make them design around allowing firetrucks to reach all houses without having to back out of the neighborhood. That's why cul-de-sacs exist 90% of the time. They're firetruck turnarounds.
The developers don't*why to do this. They want 16ft roads with people folding their mirrors to pass each other so they can cram in more 1500 square foot houses they sell for a million dollars.
They also want zero green space, but we require impervious cover. Specifically, we limit IC to 25% because we're in a recharge area for an aquifer. We also require water quality treatment of that 25%.
That's generally what's under a lot of the roads here. They do rooftop rainwater collection and storm drains that are piped to underground storage that discharges slowly to a retention pond through a jellyfish filtration system.
We allow the grass to treat water naturally where we can and put the storage under the pavement.
the cities with the worst infrastructre are the ones that predated cars then were forcefully ripped up and paved. my town museum has pictures of people on horses and old timey big wheel bikes going peacefully down what is now a 6 lane road with no bike lanes and a sidewalk on only one side.
And now imagine all the people who are physically incapable to ride a bike for 3km, and where the village with a bus every 30 minutes is a mere fantasy.
If you want I could drive from my Village. My local administration arranged a service where they have a car that drives you to bus stops to improve access to public transport, but I don't want to book that, because you usually need to book it some time in advance.
I just learned the other day that 40% of the residents of my city (Madison, Wisconsin) can't or don't drive. Apparently, this is a bit greater than the U.S. ratio, but not by much. So you've just articulated a really good reason to abolish cars.
For people in the cities, no problem. Outside, abolishing cars before you even think of creating viable means of transport is putting the cart before the horse.
I'm certain that my grandfather's mobility scooter from back in the 1980's could have covered 6km in day (there and back). I looked up the specs now, and there are mobility scooters that can go 40 miles. So, the alternative already exists. If folks can't ride a bicycle 3km, a mobility scooter will do just fine.
I don't know what it's like in other places but I tend to find that in cities with an actual dedicated serious transportation agency, busses run every hour at minimum. Even regional busses in the small city where I attended university ran 6-8 times a day per line for three very similar routes. Local busses ran every 20-40 minutes depending on time of day. That's shocking good for a city of 50,000 in America.
It might surprise you, but there are people living outside of large cities.
The point seems kinda moot outside of cities.
Are you expecting a bus stop outside every farmhouse? Who's going to ride it, cows?
Or in a small town where everything is reachable on foot within fifteen minutes anyway and the road has like 2 cars per minute? Regional bus service that takes you to nearby towns that comes a few times a day is probably as good as it gets.
And exactly that makes people drive in cars into the cities.