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How the Car Keeps Americans Apart

citylab.com

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Re: How the Car Keeps Americans Apart

#101

Post by GiorgioG »

dionidium wrote: post #100
GiorgioG wrote: post #93

I personally love driving - but I work from home. Nothing makes me happier than remote starting my F150 and hearing its V8 roar from inside the house through several walls/doors. Have kids? When your kid spikes a fever at 1am and you have no car and you need to go buy some children’s ibuprofen, what are you going to do? I can run to my local 24/7 grocer or Walmart and be back in 10 minutes flat. My son had a bad reac…

> When your kid spikes a fever at 1am and you have no car and you need to go buy some children’s ibuprofen, what are you going to do? I could hit 3 bodegas from my front steps with a rock. I don't need to start a truck to get Ibuprofen.

I’m happy for you but not everyone lives in such a place that has that many options within spitting distance.

Re: How the Car Keeps Americans Apart

#102

Post by vladgiverts »

roymurdock wrote: post #12
yosito wrote: post #4

Anecdotally, I always loved having a car and the sense of independence and freedom that came with it. Then at the age of 25, I moved out of the country to a small, walkable town in Latin America where I either walked, drove my scooter, or took motorcycle taxis everywhere. After two years of living there, I moved back to the US, bought a Jeep, and was super excited to have the autonomy and ability to travel between ci…

What happens if/when you have kids. I’ve seen many people biking around Amsterdam with their kids in protective bike high seats. But this is unheard of in many US cities. Minivans are the usual solution. Would you teach them to take public transport or try to live within walking distance of everything? Obvs doesn’t apply if u don’t plan on it, but curious if anyone has found a solution in US cities.

This is part of the reason I moved with my wife and two kids to The Netherlands. My girls were 5 and 8 at the time. Almost everyone here rides bikes here in a city of 350k (Utrecht). We don’t own a car and either ride our bikes or walk everywhere. If we’re going to another city we take the trains.

My older daughter goes to school on here own bike 1 mike away and goes over to friends houses on her own. Decent used bikes here are 50-100eu and bike shops are in every little neighborhood. The city is amazingly quiet despite being notably more dense than San Francisco (where we’re from).

All of us love the freedom of not dealing with cars and everything that implies. We could never move back to a “car culture” city again.

Re: How the Car Keeps Americans Apart

#103

Post by WhompingWindows »

GiorgioG wrote: post #93

I personally love driving - but I work from home. Nothing makes me happier than remote starting my F150 and hearing its V8 roar from inside the house through several walls/doors. Have kids? When your kid spikes a fever at 1am and you have no car and you need to go buy some children’s ibuprofen, what are you going to do? I can run to my local 24/7 grocer or Walmart and be back in 10 minutes flat. My son had a bad reac…

What about the choice of an individual to get an F150 which has an unnecessarily large V8 engine roaring and idling when no one is using it for what it was designed for? I am in a city surrounded by cars that are far too large for their designated duties. People choose, like you mention, and yet it's the children with asthma and my mother with asthma who pays the price for the ridiculously oversized and smog-producing vehicles that are everywhere in society. I'm all for pickup trucks and minivans and buses, but only in the right application. At other times, which is probably 80-90% of the large vehicles I see, your choice to go alone in the car hurts all of our lungs and our planet.

Re: How the Car Keeps Americans Apart

#104

Post by djrogers »

dionidium wrote: post #98
ef4 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's precisely because I have kids that I prioritize a walkable place. Because kids can't drive! So in car-dependent places, they have no autonomy until they're nearly adults. I think it's much more healthy for them to slowly and steadily expand their autonomy, rather than a sudden discontinuous break when they learn to drive. The same argument applies in reverse to old people too. In places with good transit and wal…

> It's precisely because I have kids that I prioritize a walkable place. Because kids can't drive! This point is tragically under-appreciated. Kids who live in car-dependent suburbs are in a very real sense alienated from the larger society. A twelve-year-old should be able to visit the library, stop by the park, grab a sandwich at a lunch counter, mail a letter, and wander back home all by themselves in an afternoon…

I grew up in a suburb, and am raising my kids in a suburb, and all of that is completely doable. You don’t need a car to get around a suburb...

Re: How the Car Keeps Americans Apart

#105

Post by mrep »

xyzzyz wrote: post #90
mrep wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in seattle because I live in south lake union and there are no parks anywhere near me that I could have used as a kid to play ultimate frisbee, basketball, and football like I did as a kid. They are all way too small, overcrowded, and not generally safe in my opinion.

You just need to buy a $1M house in Wallingford or Ballard, it's as easy as that.

I assume you are being sarcastic because my parents raised me in a $1M massive single family home in midwest suburbia which was also in one of the top 100 public high school in the country.

However, I cannot find a single public basketball court in either neighborhood you mentioned, and I can see maybe one park per neighborhood that can each support 1 open space sports game which means my friends and I would have likely had no opportunity to find an open space to play a sport game when growing up due to how crowded parks are.

Add on the homeless problem here and it should come as no surprise my GF and I are planning on moving back to my midwest hometown once we start trying to have kids.

Re: How the Car Keeps Americans Apart

#106

Post by linkregister »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #99
didibus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you lived the alternative? It's obvious people are raised to want large houses and large yards, its cultural, but given we'd know the true experience of both would we still feel that way? I've lived the big city, high density European lifestyle, I lived it in America too, and in Canada, and I've lived the American and Canadian small town life. They're both nice. The small town life is great if the community is h…

I'm not sure about Europe and America but where I live (Australia) living in the city is ridiculously expensive (Sydney routinely ranks as one of the highest cost of living cities in the world). When I was growing up I lived in the suburbs, I hated it so far from everything, very infrequent public transport (lucky to get one bus an hour). Maybe worst of all as a young geek poor internet speed. I was stuck on dial up…

Why not move to a smaller city that is more affordable? Brisbane has software jobs and a lower cost of living.

Condos in Perth near the CBD are surprisingly very affordable, though there are fewer good jobs.

Re: How the Car Keeps Americans Apart

#107

Post by zjaffee »

flaque wrote: post #78
claydavisss wrote: post #14

Americans want to be "apart"! Most people in America see high-density living as a negative. Most want a yard and a garage. The country is huge - you can fit three UKs into the state of Texas alone. We have the space, we have the roads, we like our yards. I have moved our family into progressively rural environments and will continue to do so until the distance to basic necessities is intolerable. In most rural enviro…

That's not true though. 80% of Americans live in an urban areas: https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ua/uafacts.html

This defines towns with ~1000 people in them with nothing else for 50 miles as an urban area.

Re: How the Car Keeps Americans Apart

#108

Post by dionidium »

GiorgioG wrote: post #101
dionidium wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When your kid spikes a fever at 1am and you have no car and you need to go buy some children’s ibuprofen, what are you going to do? I could hit 3 bodegas from my front steps with a rock. I don't need to start a truck to get Ibuprofen.

I’m happy for you but not everyone lives in such a place that has that many options within spitting distance.

Sure, but the point is that nothing in your post was made possible by the automobile. People in walkable cities do everything you mention and they did all those things before the invention of the automobile.

If you build a suburb so that you need a car, then, sure, I guess you'll need a car. But that's not because any of those activities require a car. It's just that your town was built to require it!

If we put a dome over your town and sucked out all the oxygen, then you'd also need spacesuit to perform all those tasks, too. But it wouldn't be because any of those tasks require a space suit. You'd need the space suit because we sucked out all the oxygen.

Re: How the Car Keeps Americans Apart

#109

Post by dionidium »

djrogers wrote: post #104
dionidium wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's precisely because I have kids that I prioritize a walkable place. Because kids can't drive! This point is tragically under-appreciated. Kids who live in car-dependent suburbs are in a very real sense alienated from the larger society. A twelve-year-old should be able to visit the library, stop by the park, grab a sandwich at a lunch counter, mail a letter, and wander back home all by themselves in an afternoon…

I grew up in a suburb, and am raising my kids in a suburb, and all of that is completely doable. You don’t need a car to get around a suburb...

"Suburb" is a pretty generic term. My hometown has older, inner-ring suburbs that are built more or less on a street grid, with local shops, connections to transit, and walkable corridors.

It also has far-flung, residential-only, cul-de-sac communities where literally nothing is within safe walking distance. [0]

We call both "suburbs," but they're very different places.

[0] What would somebody who lives here walk to, for example: https://goo.gl/maps/nX5ttfsYJBq

Re: How the Car Keeps Americans Apart

#110

Post by linkregister »

BRAlNlAC wrote: post #38
couchand wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that America isn't only New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but those three areas do make up over 10% of the population, which is nothing to sneeze at.

While that is true, LA makes up a big portion of that "over 10%" hardly anyone in LA lives in anything remotely like high-density housing or lives there for much beyond the fantastic weather and job opportunities. Also, you don't do anything to address the parent comments point that plenty of people who live in higher-density areas would prefer to move to somewhere more rural, but can't because of life.

100% of the my friends and family who live in New York would live nowhere else in the country in spite of the extreme costs of living in Manhattan, when they could have equal incomes elsewhere.

I know it's hard for you to believe, but some people like living in high density areas.

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