121–130 of 345 posts
Plus car travel is dead time since you’re forced to pay attention to the road at least somewhat. I’d rather have a longer journey that is hands free
I was back in Taiwan last year after an extended absence. It's pretty amazing how easy it is to get around with a combination of the mass rapid transit (MRT) system and high speed rail (HSR). When I was last there, you still needed to take a bus or taxi from TPE to the city center. Now right from TPE airport, you can be in either Taipei city center in 30 minutes (MRT) or on the other end of the island in short order…
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Because that scenario isn't universal, and while you can't think of a reason, others can. Perhaps someone would rather shop at Costco because they've got a big family and need to buy items in higher quantities. You can't get a Costco in a small city setting, so you need to drive there, and even if you could, shared transit isn't amenable to getting home the types of things you buy at Costco. Or perhaps you wish to ha…
> Because that scenario isn't universal, and while you can't think of a reason, others can. Thank you very much for this island of sanity inside this topic’s sea of bewilderment. These comment sections always seem to end with someone up asking: “How could anyone like things I don’t like??” and then a bunch of commenters just shake their heads and conclude “Those poor souls, they don’t know how they are suffering.” I’…
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I've lived in a number of cities across three continents and I tend to think that the idea of a "car-free" city is a quintessentially North American overreaction to a quintessentially North American problem. Like yes Wired we know that the suburb and the American commute have some serious downsides and the US leaned way too much into this model during a period of high population growth. However it's not like other ap…
It's tricky too, because a lot of "low density suburban wastelands" was already significantly phased out over a decade ago, in a lot of the US anyway. People hear "suburbs" and imagine a single-family home on 1 to 2+ acre lots -- something that looks like this -> https://st2.depositphotos.com/1658611/5485/i/950/depositphot... . And while that definitely still happens, it's really limited to the exurbs in the US these…
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I've lived in a number of cities across three continents and I tend to think that the idea of a "car-free" city is a quintessentially North American overreaction to a quintessentially North American problem. Like yes Wired we know that the suburb and the American commute have some serious downsides and the US leaned way too much into this model during a period of high population growth. However it's not like other ap…
> But this is a huge reorganization of people's lives and existing property development that there's going to be a lot of pushback against and it's not all going to be nimbyism If anything, I feel like Taiwan's model should prove that you can do it anywhere precisely because it was already so dense and built up on top of being in an area with very high seismic activity. It's not like they could find a lot of room to…
I can say a lot of these places became what they are by bulldozing a lot of medium-density shophouses and destroying a lot of local businesses and tightly knit communities that most people including myself would consider really charming places to live.
They replaced them with places where far fewer people can afford a space large enough to raise kids comfortably and where everyone around you is a stranger.
Now I enjoy the big dense city lifestyle, I like the awesome public transit, I like the massive selection of businesses and services and basically everything, but it's not for everyone and I couldn't see myself raising a family in the middle of it, which eventually if you want your country's population to not collapse, you need people to do somewhere.
I think also considering some of the massive redevelopments that have happened in Asia over the years, you would see massive pushback in the US from essentially an individual rights point of view if you were to try to do that.
As someone who has worked in London for many years, the difference is amazing. Biking in the city is now enjoyable, and the air quality is (subjectively, even without the data) dramatically better. There was an incredible resistance to the recently introduced ULEZ (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) expansion, but I'm incredibly grateful for the sake of my children, if nothing else, that it has been pushed through.
There's probably also a bit of selection bias going on. People who prefer car usage will be less likely to go live in places where car ownership is difficult. The longer a city is "car-free" the more of that bias will accumulate. There's really not much in the article to suggest that the same people are first against and later in favour. It shouldn't be surprising that some people prefer to live in car-free places, b…
My biggest point on car free cities is that it is supported fervently by the people who would gain massive amounts of power over others if nobody had a car. If you're dependent on public transport, it can be taken away from you as leverage.
I don't get your argument, we have a huge dependency on the oil distribution infrastructure. A switch in transportation system is a switch in the type of infrastructure, not a freedom vs control thing.
You either think mandatory car-free cities are a terrifyingly dystopian idea, or you've never experienced human culture outside of dense urban areas.
As-is, I have a car (the absolute cheapest thing I could find, for Home Depot runs during home renovation) but drive it once a week and commute to the city center by public transit because New England lets you do that, even if it's not as convenient as I'd like.
This whole idea is fucking terrifying. Normalizing not having cars i.e. making people dependent on the government from birth. If you didn't understand what Americans were complaining about with gun laws you will soon.
IMHO relying on cars makes us more dependent on the government, overall, because then we depend on road maintenance, fuel supply, fuel subsidies, raw materials and transport for auto parts, et cetera. The government is a critical actor in ensuring all of this.