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The car is not the future: On the myth of motorized freedom

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Re: The car is not the future: On the myth of motorized freedom

#21

Post by poisonborz »

You only need to move a bit towards suburbia/countryside to create your deep disbelief in public transport. Cars are everywhere, for a reason.

Public transport is great in theory only. With actual human societies - maybe the western ones, that is, except China/Japan - it just doesn't work. Corruption, laziness, bureaucracy, lack of proper planning and security makes the creation and maintenance of these projects unsustainable and so much worse compared to personal transport. This only isn't true for million+ metropolises due to physical constrains.

You may frown at the traffic jams with SUVs having a single driver, but building additional highways is easily doable around the world, while any sort of mass transit infrastructure projects seem to take decades, billions, while still end up underwhelming - if not instantly, then after the machinery ages or maintainers change.

Re: The car is not the future: On the myth of motorized freedom

#22

Post by jader201 »

> In the early 2000s, sitting for a driver’s license was seen as a near-universal rite of passage. By 2020, Generation Z teens were significantly less likely to get their licenses and later, when they do, it's driven by necessity rather than aspiration.

I feel like this is a naive take, and making some assumptions that may not be true.

I feel like this has less to do with preferring other modes of transportation over driving, as much as it has to do with not wanting/needing to go anywhere, particularly outside of the city. You can do most things without even needing to leave home, especially when you’re young.

You don’t need to meet in person with your friends to socialize. You can text, use social media, play only games, etc.

My young adult children both have licenses, but they have found it hard to get their friends to want to hang out. They’d rather stay home and stay on their devices.

Re: The car is not the future: On the myth of motorized freedom

#23

Post by adrianN »

p_ing wrote: post #20

I’m curious to see how the author would react when it is two miles one-way to the crappy grocery store and eight miles to the good one. And there is a bus shows up about once every four hours. While cities can do a lot to improve the non-car experience, there’s a whole world outside those cities which would become inaccessible without a car. These are generally the “affordable” places to live in order to work in the…

Car dominance is cemented by decades of car centric planning which made cars indispensable in some areas. That is a well known fact, but planning can be changed. If you prioritize other forms of transport in a few decades cars can be a lot less important.

Re: The car is not the future: On the myth of motorized freedom

#24

Post by mattlondon »

outime wrote: post #3

It's interesting how people's positions can be so different. As a European who has lived in two (european) countries with good and affordable transport, I've always been a happy public transport user... until a couple of years ago, that is. Much of the transport is now filled with unpleasant people, dirt, delays, etc which paired with the insane prices of housing in the "walkable" parts of cities, has made me 100% in…

Even in large cities like London there are huge areas where public transport is a joke. Yes it's fine in the very tourist center, but get out further from the center where normal people with families actually live and what is a 5-8 minute drive to a large grocery store becomes a mammoth 50-60 minute journey each way. I personally don't want to spend 15% of my waking day going to and from the shops and paying huge prices for public transport (and also struggle back carrying heavy bags) when I can pay pennies in electricity to drive there and back in a small fraction of the time. I can leave, do my shop, drive back (with heavy bags being carried by the car not my fingers!) and unpack and be sat down again and half way through a TV episode before I'd even have got there by public transport. And this is London where we have "good" public transport.

Re: The car is not the future: On the myth of motorized freedom

#26

Post by mojuba »

nradov wrote: post #15
outime wrote: post #3

It's interesting how people's positions can be so different. As a European who has lived in two (european) countries with good and affordable transport, I've always been a happy public transport user... until a couple of years ago, that is. Much of the transport is now filled with unpleasant people, dirt, delays, etc which paired with the insane prices of housing in the "walkable" parts of cities, has made me 100% in…

European countries only have good and affordable transport in the first and second tier cities. I usually spend a few weeks per year in Europe, often in smaller cities or rural areas, and the only public transport you'll find is some occasional bus service at inconvenient times. In those places everyone drives everywhere. Or they just sit around and home and don't go anywhere.

And then there are third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable and you again don't need a car.

My ideal city of the future is a small walkable town with everything within a 15-20 minute walk, possibly a part of a conglomerate of towns that run trains or buses between them.

I currently live in one such historical town in Southern Europe that's protected by Unesco. The streets are so narrow that not only there's no public transport, all non-resident and non-delivery traffic is prohibited and there's no Uber even. And yet you have everything you need for life and work within a 15-20 minute walk max. More for remote work, obviously.

An ideal city of the future doesn't need to be medieval but maybe we should go back to a city planning concept that is made for humans and not cars. And you know, narrow pedestrian streets are totally fine, they are cute!

Re: The car is not the future: On the myth of motorized freedom

#27

Post by ang_cire »

dkiebd wrote: post #16
ang_cire wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is "interested" in making public transit worse, the issue is that people in power are not users of it and so are not invested in it, and civic and national pride is generally dead in the West, being replaced with vapid nationalism, so there's no drive (no pun intended) to invest in public works projects.

The way I understand your comment, it implies that a) users of public transportation should be invested in it, whilst it’s more likely that they use it because they have no alternative, and that b) civic and national pride results in higher demand for public transportation. I don’t think those are universal truths.

You don't think that people who use services care more about the service than non-users? Whether they're forced into using it or not, the fact they do absolutely makes them more invested in it being good.

Civic and national pride makes citizens (which includes politicians and the wealthy) more likely to care about the actual state of their country. That's what national pride means, as opposed to nationalism, where they are proud without reason. Is public transit guaranteed to be one of those reasons they feel pride or shame? Not at all, but support for it is certainly more likely to come from that than a bunch of nationalists who don't actually feel any shame at failings of the country, of which public transit is currently.

Re: The car is not the future: On the myth of motorized freedom

#28

Post by tonyedgecombe »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #9

"That's just like, your opinion, man." The car is clearly not the best way to navigate a dense city. It is impractical to have, say, tower block apartments and also have a car for each resident. It is unreasonable to build enough parking for peak time around every destination that anyone might want to go to. On the flip side - not everyone wants to live in a dense city, and people's opinions on this change throughout…

> On the flip side - not everyone wants to live in a dense city, and people's opinions on this change throughout their lives.

If you look at the cost of living in an urban area it’s clear there is a lot of demand. Rural is cheaper because most people don’t want a long commute.

Re: The car is not the future: On the myth of motorized freedom

#29

Post by m-schuetz »

I've lost a lot of enthusiasm about close-range public transport. In Vienna, bicycles get you nearly every twice as fast as public transport, and mostly about as fast as cars, depending on your destination. Bikes are about four times cheaper as public transport too.

Public transport ist great to connect cities, and perhaps districts. Beyound that, it quickly hits diminishing returns. It's prohibitly expensive to connect at a city block level, and even more expensive to connect rural towns. And Austria recently started doing very odd things. We are now building train stations in the middle of nowhere, not connected to any town. They are not meant to become new city centers, they are meant to be accessed via cars. They are useless for car-free people, and people with cars almost exclusively continue to commute the entire way by car.

In any case, the Netherlands is where I really got a sense of true mobility-freedom. You can get absolutely everywhere cheaply, safely and comfortably by bicycle. I've never before experienced such relaxing commutes as cycling along rivers and through meadows to work, then taking a detour through woods and parks on the way back home.

Re: The car is not the future: On the myth of motorized freedom

#30

Post by p_ing »

adrianN wrote: post #23
p_ing wrote: post #20

I’m curious to see how the author would react when it is two miles one-way to the crappy grocery store and eight miles to the good one. And there is a bus shows up about once every four hours. While cities can do a lot to improve the non-car experience, there’s a whole world outside those cities which would become inaccessible without a car. These are generally the “affordable” places to live in order to work in the…

Car dominance is cemented by decades of car centric planning which made cars indispensable in some areas. That is a well known fact, but planning can be changed. If you prioritize other forms of transport in a few decades cars can be a lot less important.

The place I live in was founded in the 1880s and incorporated a few years before the Model T debuted. Prior to the 1880s, Native Americans resided here. How is that car centric planning? And exactly how can one afford to live in a city where rent is $2500+ for a two bedroom or $1m+ for a SFH? That’s not going to happen on a McSalary. Those folks instead commute 1+ hours from affordable urban or more likely rural areas.
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