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Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

economist.com

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Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#601

Post by ido »

camillomiller wrote: post #479
rexgallorum2 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your estimated costs are pretty average, but I found the €30k figure curious. Used cars are dirt cheap in Germany, and they are often in really good shape and well maintained compared to used cars in other countries. I occasionally drive a 20 year old Opel that was purchased 7 years ago for €2500. It works great. I ride my bike most of the time, but it's really handy to have a car to haul kids or heavy/bulky stuff.

If you have kids, especially more than one, a no-car city center is a nightmare. Even in Europe.

I have 2 kids and live in Berlin car-less without trouble.

We use public transit and bicycles (lots of parents have cargo bikes for transporting little kids e.g. https://www.babboe.de/lastenraeder/big).

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#602

Post by ido »

konart wrote: post #593
adrianh wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s definitely possible without a car — people here in Holland do it all the time. Maybe qualify your answer to “suburban America” and similarly (non)designed places? Point is, it’s not fundamentally impossible to live with 2+ kids and no car.

I live in Russia though. When I went to school (1995-2005) I lived in a 450k city, now it is Moscow. And Moscow have much better public transport than many other places. My point was about little kids, you won't send them off to a public transport. We are not talking about teenagers here. Not me at least.

Sounds like a problem of where you live(d) rather than intrinsic to cars or lack thereof.

I have 2 kids and live in Berlin and never had nor needed a car. I previously lived for 8 years in Vienna and the same holds true there.

The same will be true to most or all decently-sized western European cities.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#603

Post by agumonkey »

JDiculous wrote: post #123

Spent the last 6 months in Seoul and the surrounding cities in Korea. Never needed a car. You can literally do everything without a car, everything is a short walk. I truly believe it makes a huge positive impact on happiness when you can just walk anywhere instead of having to drive. Also you'll notice that in Korea/Japan there are way more small businesses and things to do (eg. karaoke, cafes, etc) because people o…

As much as I agree. It will feel weird to leave (if it happens) the car centric world..

But it's probably an improvement in most dimensions anyways.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#604

Post by magduf »

davesmith1983 wrote: post #576
yongjik wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to quote a three year old article to demonstrate that people do get (occasionally) assaulted on a Japanese train, then yes, it does seem much better to me.

I didn't quote mine. I literally put in "Japanese Train Attack" and pulled some links off the first page to prove that it isn't quite as perfect as it was claimed. I don't like the fact that the UK is demonised constantly because despite a lot of the problems over here we still do a lot of things right. Also it doesn't address the very valid point I was making is that until public transport is pleasant and reliable (…

Obviously you've never been outside your country if you've never seen pleasant and reliable public transit. Even as an American, I've seen plenty of pleasant and reliable public transit, though it's usually outside my country.

Stop claiming that other countries suck when it's only yours that has seems to have a big problem.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#605

Post by magduf »

davesmith1983 wrote: post #577
magduf wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you cherry-pick a few examples (one of which wasn't on public transit at all), and you think that's better than a place where 30,000 people per year are killed in auto crashes? Your likelihood of dying on a train in Japan are almost nil, whereas your likelihood of dying in your car on American roads are actually pretty significant, and it's one of the biggest causes of death of non-elderly people.

I did not cherry-pick, I took some examples off of duck duck go to prove a point that everywhere has their problems and you probably shouldn't be criticising my country (which is quite rude) while completely ignoring the point I was making about public transport being quite unpleasant experience in general and why people quite rightly want to avoid it. The Government wherever that is will have to sort out those probl…

> you probably shouldn't be criticising my country (which is quite rude)

You're the one criticizing your country, not me. You're the one who said public transit there sucks, not me. I've never been there, so I can't comment on the Underground, but I've been to Germany and Japan and the public transit there is absolutely fantastic. It's not even that bad here in DC, though the reliability isn't that great.

>ignoring the point I was making about public transport being quite unpleasant experience in general and why people quite rightly want to avoid it.

No, I'm not ignoring your point at all, I'm calling it out as ignorant, which it is, because there's plenty of other places in the world with excellent public transit.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#606

Post by rpedela »

martinflack wrote: post #597
rpedela wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government reimburses hospitals for ER visits if the patient can't pay.

Citation? Genuinely curious.

The source is my wife who is a clinical pharmacist at a large hospital which has a sizable uninsured patient population. Here is the first result on Google which does talk a little about federal funding for "uncompensated care" [1] starting near the halfway point.

My wife's hospital was hit hard by ACA because it reduced federal funding for uncompensated care. The idea was that the funding could be cut because more people overall would be insured. Unfortunately enough of their patients still are without insurance that the funding shortage led to two rounds of layoffs. They seem to have adjusted to the new financial reality now and are hiring again. But the first couple years after ACA passed were tough.

I guess it would be more accurate to say that the federal government funds uninsured ER visits, but the funding falls short of what is necessary especially after ACA.

1. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/07/03/who-...

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#607

Post by northwest65 »

cgrealy wrote: post #93
northwest65 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even necessarily without cars... imagine if you could sell the populous on a car with limited range that took ages to fill back up. If they were gullible enough, you could probably even sell it at a premium. What a wonderful stepping stone to the post freedom era.

Yes, if only said car had some other benefit, like being cheaper to run and maintain. Imagine if the same car had more than enough range for 95% of people's travel and could be filled up at home for a fraction of the cost. Finally, imagine if there was some other indirect benefit, like helping stop the world burn. What a dystopian nightmare.

Sadly your snippy little comment doesn't make them any better. They cost more, don't go as far, take longer to refill, and do very little to help stop the world burning. If people need to head to the capital to protest or whatever, electric vehicles make that demonstrably more difficult. There is nothing about them that gives their owners more freedom than they have now. We are definitely in a golden age of freedom, and electric cars are just another method in which that will be chipped away.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#608

Post by ekianjo »

jefftk wrote: post #474
ekianjo wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can literally do everything without a car, everything is a short walk when you are young and single. By the time you have kids this changes everything.

We live outside of Boston with two kids, now 3y and 5y. We're about 10min from the subway, and we've never had a car. We do a lot of walking with our kids, and when they were younger we used the stroller more. I'm as happy with this as I was before kids.

The difference is that most people can't afford to live just a few minutes away from the subway. City centers are very expensive. You can't expect people to live with the same standards if they have to walk for 1 hour to get to the nearest public transport.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#609

Post by jefftk »

ekianjo wrote: post #608
jefftk wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live outside of Boston with two kids, now 3y and 5y. We're about 10min from the subway, and we've never had a car. We do a lot of walking with our kids, and when they were younger we used the stroller more. I'm as happy with this as I was before kids.

The difference is that most people can't afford to live just a few minutes away from the subway. City centers are very expensive. You can't expect people to live with the same standards if they have to walk for 1 hour to get to the nearest public transport.

My parent post is saying that even in situations where walking is very practical it stops working after you have kids, and I strongly disagree there.

As for the question of how generalizable this is, the US situation is much worse than other cities around the world. Boston has very good public transit for the US, but it's still pretty minimal globally, and we could build out transit far better. It's also only expensive to live near transit, or generally to live in cities, because we've massively restricted housing construction. Allow people to construct tall dense buildings, use the tax money to build out transit, and for the price of an apartment in the cheapest part of Boston today you can have something better that's a short walk from a transit stop that will get you all over the city faster than the T does today.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#610

Post by n4r9 »

padobson wrote: post #573
n4r9 wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A meaningful comparison is difficult, granted. If anything, doesn't that make OP's point about food prices being low due to agricultural subsidies less tenable though?

No less tenable than the food standards proposition, unless you have data that shows the difference in industry expenditures on food quality.

I found a USDA publication [1] which is a little dated but raises a large number of factors that affect food household expenditure differences between the US and EU. Broadly speaking these are:

- Food prices inc. agricultural protection & consumption taxation;

- Income;

- Food availability;

- Consumption patterns;

- Preference trends inc. health, food safety, production process & taste;

- Demographic trends;

- Retailing & regulation (e.g. consolidation laws).

Some of the factors it highlights that may cause lower expenditure on food in the US than in the EU are:

- Lower food pricing due to protection & taxation;

- Food safety concerns in the EU since mad cow disease and dioxin in chicken feed (and foot & mouth disease in the UK) leading to lower confidence in food supply regulation;

- Greater willingness in the EU to pay more for higher animal welfare in the food chain;

- Higher proportion of organically grown food across the EU and differing definitions of "organic";

- Longer history of consolidation laws in the US.

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