It's been a decade-long journey but my wife and I finally got EU citizenship and are picking where to live (Utrecht and Freiburg are the frontrunners) specifically so our child can have a proper, independent childhood, and not the painfully lonely, infantilizing, ones we had in stroad-infested Californian suburbs. We're not young! But I applaud this development.
Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars
101–110 of 835 posts
Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars
#102I grew up in a very rural part of northern Florida. When I was 16 my parents said I’d have to learn how to drive so I could get to the job that I’d use to pay for a car. I thought that was dumb and just decided to get by with less money and no car. Throughout high school, I’d walk to the general store a mile away and that was about all I did other than go fishing (my favorite thing to do at the time). For a bit of mo…
You grew up someplace serviced by bus that got you to school, work and the general store. That’s harder to come by these days.
Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars
#103I really wished this demonisation of the car stopped. Modern cars are way more climate friendly than merely 10-20 years ago and many climate-conscious persons do pool to commute. But we need to understand. There are cases where the car is a must. Unavoidable. Imagine having toddlers, having to do heavy groceries, and living in a place with difficult landscape or challenging weather. Imagine having a neurological dise…
Replace the words "the car" with "good public transit" and your last paragraph makes equal if not more sense. There's different ways of living a life, and the current trend shouldn't be seen as car demonization. I see it more as a new generation seeing the current US car-centric society and pushing for a better (for the life they want to live) alternative.
It depends where you live. Good public transit is unfortunately the exception in many places and not the rule. Cars are still needed in many use cases.
Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a real city? I live in one of 20 biggest in the US, but even #2 LA is pretty hard to get around without a car. My experience in traveling has been that places where carless transportation is easy, are places I can only afford to visit, not live.
If you don’t count the suburbs LA wouldn’t be anywhere close to #2.
I'm not sure what you mean by this... if you only count the population inside the city limits? Then LA has nearly 4 million residents (of course, inside city limits includes a lot of neighborhoods that are suburban in character). Whether you're talking city limits or metro area, LA is number 2, though the Chicago metro area is pretty close behind.
Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars
#105The young are falling out of love with home ownership, cars, dating, drinking etc. I suspect a lack of money is the common factor.
I have plenty of cash and a paid-off house and I'm planning to spend even more money so I can live somewhere I don't need a car.
Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There's 138 trains per day between Amsterdam and The Hague. It's faster to take the train than to drive on that trip If you're going from the Hague central station to Amsterdam central station, sure. Now plan a more typical commute from say the Hague Wateringen to the over Amstel industrial estate (It takes two times as as driving) Play around with real life scenarios. Say you're going from Amsterdam Osdorp to your…
> It takes two times as as driving That really depends on the amount of traffic jam you end up in. It's true that not every route has a direct train connection, and there are definitely trips where cars are faster, but during rush hour around big cities, cars become a lot less reliable. On top of that, cars are only fast if you have access to parking on each end of the trip. Otherwise you still need to park somewhere…
>That really depends on the amount of traffic jam you end up in.
And on the ammount of leaves/snow/rain/wind/heat/strikes impeding rail traffic. Terrible traffic jams happen but let's not pretend the NS doesn't have a long list of excuses to run less or no trains or massively delayed trains. I can't count the number of times NS announced that they would stop running trains because of some weather where i had no issue driving home. On average driving is going to be twice as fast for most typical commutes.
Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars
#107Cars are falling out of love with them. How is one expected to pay for a $1500/mo apartment and a $40k car on a $60k salary?
This is a better comment than other replies are seeing. Many, many "car people" are into older cars - the GMT800 is an object of lust these days. You can buy them for ~4000 in OK shape. Hot rodders were using literal scrap hunks from 30 years in the past. Chicano lowrider culture (one of America's greatest creations) uses very, very cheap old work trucks. Cost is generally not the barrier to entry for any of these, interest is.
Maybe the Zoomer/Millenial focus on luxury goods has lead to a world where people aren't interested in vehicles outside of the high end?
Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars
#108Some of us don't want to impose the externalities of car ownership on others. The suburbanite who drives a car barely feels these inconveniences, but everybody else does. Cars are dangerous to both pedestrians and cyclists. They make our streets noisy, our air polluted -- even electric cars shed particulates from their tires and their brakes. Cars require extensive amounts of parking, which is ugly dead space which c…
Mass transit isn't without its own inconveniences:
"In 2017, the average amount of time people spend commuting with public transit in Toronto, for example to and from work, on a weekday is 96 minutes. 34% of public transit riders ride for more than two hours every day. The average amount of time people wait at a stop or station for public transit is 14 minutes, while 10% of riders wait for over twenty minutes on average every day. The average distance people usually ride in a single trip with public transit is 10 kilometres (6.2 mi), while 25% travel for over 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) in a single direction."
Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars
#109There's 138 trains per day between Amsterdam and The Hague. It's faster to take the train than to drive on that trip. Driving in either city in an exercise in frustration. Why would anyone in a rich country with a high functioning rail system like The Netherlands want to drive? I don't know how many rich countries that describes, but I lived happily for years in Boston in the USA without a car. I have one now but onl…
The US anti-car narrative often refers to the Netherlands as some kind of beacon of proper public infrastructure, whilst not knowing a damn thing about it.
First, let's establish that the Netherlands is a car country. We have 11 million cars on a population of 17 million. On a typical day, 1 million people use public transport. Cars are the norm, not trains or bicycles.
Public transport is rarely faster, not even in the most idyllic example that you give where you go from big city to big city. The thing you conveniently forget to consider is that nobody lives near the station of city A and then also works very closely to the station of city B. It almost always includes additional travel towards A and from B. Cycling, trams, buses, multiple stops in both directions. It adds up.
To illustrate how absurdly slow public transport can be, a personal example. I used to live directly behind a train station in a mid-sized city. Doesn't get much better than that, right?
Let's explore the commute to work, some 60km away...
I have to get up early and be there some 10 mins before departure to secure somewhat of a reasonable spot. Next, I'm on route to the first big city station. This route is slow, it stops 5 times along the way as everybody needs to connect to a big hub to get where they need to be.
I arrive at the hub, where there's a 20 minute connection wait to take the train to the big city destination. This route is longer but fast, no stops along the way.
I get out and have a 10 minute connection wait for the bus to take me to the place closest to work, after which there's a 5-10 minute work.
Total commute time: 2.5 hours single way. To move 60km. And that's living behind a train station and working at one of the countries' largest employers.
What works really well in the Netherlands is living within a cycling radius from work, every other option sucks.
Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars
#110The article specifies rich, maybe beacuse, at least in the US, only the rich can afford to live in places where cars aren't strictly necessary? Some choose to live elsewhere anyway, for scenery or privacy, but the poor or even median 60% can't choose an area with a 15 minute walk to necessities. The Seattle walkability map on hn recently highlighted that fairly well I think? I also wonder if it is truly cars or just…
We made it illegal to build nice neighborhoods, so the existing ones got very expensive.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/11/3/our-self-impos...