How the Car Keeps Americans Apart

I grew up in Hong Kong, one of the densest place in the world. Most of my childhood, getting to places was either walking or taking a bus (with family). I moved to the US / SF Bay Area in my teens and while here, experienced living in both the suburbs and the city, as well as my college town ("deep suburbs", if you will). My feeling is that living in the suburb (either where I currently live in a suburb in the bay area, or my college town) is way more pleasant than the city (either HK or SF). I felt this way before I had kids, and I feel this way even more now after having a baby.

Yes, you have to drive everywhere. It seems that for some people, "having to drive everywhere" is automatically a negative point, by definition. IMO, it's only negative when you do that in San Francisco, where traffic is everywhere, and you can't park anywhere or have to pay exorbitant parking fees.

Take some anecdotes of my current life now. People in SF and cities love to bring up the point of being able to walk to coffee shops, restaurants, bars, parks, and not having to find parking (which is an SF problem). I don't drink, so bars and DUI is not a thing for me. I reach my favorite coffee shop in 10 minutes of local driving (no traffic any time of the day, any day of the week), and there's always ample parking, and there's never a line. Same for all the restaurants I frequent in the east bay (Fremont/Newark/Union City area). Places in the city always have a line; whereas the longest line I've had at my coffee shop was 2 people in front of me. There's always seating available there, unlike most coffee shops in SF. I spend $3 on my favorite coffee there, not $6. This same example works similarly for every other aspect of life really, whether it's restaurants, parks, even urgent care/ER at the hospitals. Drive to get there in 10-15 minutes, there's always parking, no line at the place, and it's cheaper. Same applies for friends, even those who live a city or two away (Milpitas, San Leandro, Castro Valley) -- 15-30 minutes to get there, no traffic.

I live in an older part of town, where houses are generally 50+ years old, so you can imagine the kind of neighborhood. I know each one of my neighbors by names. It's not like I grew up here too; I've only lived here for 5 years since I bought the house.

Pulling from my own experience, I really don't see how the car keeps us apart, and how living in the city is better. Everything is more expensive, there's more wait time, more transportation time, and people are ruder in general because everyone is understandably frustrated with everything, whether it's patience, gentrification issues, homelessness, etc. In the suburb crawl, everything is the opposite of all of above. People are nicer to each other.

I commute to the city for work (because the jobs are mostly in the city), and it's the least favorite part of my life.

Yes, I was being sarcastic. I don't like the homeless problem here either, but it gets slightly better once you move out of SLU to a residential area with $1M houses. We still get things like car break ins though, my neighbor had one just this Tuesday. I'm also thinking about moving some quieter nicer place, but knowing myself, I probably won't.

There's Gilman Playground in Ballard with baseball park. It also has tennis courts. There's another baseball park at NW 63rd St and 20th Ave NW, and another one at 60th and 26th. There are more baseball parks in Woodland Park, and they also have soccer fields. Ballard High School has a football stadium, though I don't know how easily accessible it is to non-students. There's another baseball park/football/soccer stadium at Local Heights Playfield.

But yeah, if you're into basketball, you're probably out of luck if you're looking for any outside basketball place, it's not really that popular here.

Our zoning regulations enforce the automobile's hegemony, increasing distances and exposing pedestrians to the elements as well as dangerous traffic.

Without being forced to build in this financially insolvent manner, [1] no community would choose to isolate people from each other in the way that we do now in the United States.

Our neighboring country, Mexico, (among many others) shows that a costly design is not required for urban and suburban environments to work for humans.

The impending arrival self-driving car gives hope that the gigantic proportion of land devoted to car storage can be radically reduced, giving space for more buildings and habitable spaces between the buildings we have already constructed. This is a good sign for the future but we sure took an expensive, circuitous route to get there, all the while losing local power over our communities to industrial interests.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/4/19/the-sprawl-con...

> Both have reasonable use cases.

Building is a reasonable use case for cars while protecting yourself from polar bears is a reasonable use case for guns [0].

I don't understand why you, and a large number of other people, are being willfully obtuse about this. 10+ miles on dirt roads to get to a tractor is not someone who lives in civilization, it's someone out in the wilderness.

[0] https://www.cntraveler.com/story/alaskan-town-kaktovik-polar...

I had a bike when I was a kid. Had to ride over an hour just to visit my nearest friend. It was a pretty dangerous route on roads designed for cars too, so my parents wouldn't let me do it alone until I was 14.