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The End of Car Culture

nytimes.com

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Re: The End of Car Culture

#41

Post by veemjeem »

Domenic_S wrote: post #40
veemjeem wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess one has to balance the time spent in traffic and being crammed with others in public transport. Here in the bay area, one can get stuck on 101 for 2 hours when it would take only 40 minutes via Caltrain. I'm sure quite a few people would rather save 1.5 hours every day being crammed in with others.

Well, 40 minutes not counting getting to the train, waiting for the train, exiting the station, getting to your car & driving from the station home.

My 40 minutes includes that calculation already. If you plan accordingly, you don't need to wait for the train... just arrive on time. I bike to the station so that I don't need to pay for parking at the station.

On a side note, BART is probably going on strike this week, which means that an hour BART commute is soon going to turn into a 4 hour commute when the traffic on the highways double.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#42

Post by rglullis »

Yhippa wrote: post #37

Right now I'm stuck in the suburbs and the city I live in just doesn't have good public transportation and probably won't ever. There is one scenario that I'm looking forward to that could make my life easier. What if Google or another company perfects self-driving cars? You could have "cars" that are basically motorized shopping carts. You go online and register your car with a particular store. Your car could drive…

Wouldn't this usage fall in the "better mouse-trap" model?

Instead of having your car driving around, it would be much better to have businesses' trucks and vans going to customers. This way, companies get a better distribution process, parking lots become a thing of the past, you get to reduce your car usage... and perhaps this even makes it viable to have car-sharing companies working in the suburbs.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#43

Post by sowrong »

dublinben wrote: post #38
sowrong wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this article is wrongheaded in many, many ways. The crux of the problem is that cars are designed and produced ahead of what is actually wanted and desired without concern whether there is actually an impedence mismatch with what consumers want in a car. For example, modular design in cars no longer exists. You can't find a car anywhere that can be transformed with add-ons between a commuter car to a weekender car to…

>there just aren't any cars on the market that match what consumers want I don't know about that. The Tesla Model S seems to be just that, according to every reviewer and customer I've heard. What other mainstream car has a waiting list?

fair enough. should have stated "there just aren't enough cars on the market that match what consumers want". Some people want a car like the Model S, true enough. That's because Elon Musk has the vision to produce what (some) consumers want - an electric car. There's a market for the Model S. I'm sure there are lot of other types of cars that would have waiting lists, were they available. Give the owner back more control over options, add-ons, individuality, there's surely another tranche of people for that. others likely too.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#44

Post by Apocryphon »

nostromo wrote: post #10

One thing missed by most of these post-auto stories: transit used to be sooo boring , and no longer is. I'm old enough to remember riding the bus before mp3 players and smart phones. Your only options were to read or to bring a CD player. Walkmans (Walkmen?) were a pain: batteries got expensive, and carrying more than 1 or 2 CDs was a pain, so you ended up listen to a few tracks over and over. Newspapers and books we…

What about chatting with fellow passengers? What happened to simple human interaction?

Re: The End of Car Culture

#45

Post by rosser »

I know it has a great deal to do with this city, but since I moved to San Francisco, I've found myself using my car so rarely that every time I pull back into my garage, I need to disconnect one of my battery terminals, or I'll have a dead battery the next time I need to drive somewhere.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#46

Post by forrestthewoods »

andyl wrote: post #5

The end of car culture can't come soon enough.

I think public transportation culture can't die soon enough. It's a ham-fisted solution to poorly designed cities. Even in "good" cities like New York and Vienna I think it's awful. I despise public transportation in almost every conceivable way.

The good news is that the future is a fleet of self driving cars. Everybody wins in that world. Safe, efficient, clean, and fast. It's gonna be great.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#47

Post by sliverstorm »

sowrong wrote: post #33
sowrong wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"certain vehicles no longer offer a manual transmission" Exactly right.

if the make and model of the car of your interest is not available at all in manual transmission, then yes, absolutely yes, it's simply not available anywhere. Henry Ford famously said "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black" and that's the problem today. An entire market of buyers is being ignored. If you accept that only grey color cars are being made and wonder why peopl…

Ah, ok. I see what we're doing here. We're retroactively re-interpreting your argument to try to close some of the holes.

An entire market of buyers is being ignored

If the entire market of buyers you speak of consists of 3 people, it should be ignored. I am a fan of manual transmissions, and nearly all of the vehicles I have ever owned are/have been manual. But I have no delusions- I realize & accept that the gross majority of Lexus customers, for example, have absolutely no desire for a manual transmission.

As best I can tell, automakers are not campaigning against the manual transmission and trying to "shut it down", or any such bullshit. They are simply reacting to market demands. This is most apparent looking at trucks. Base model trucks with manual transmissions can be found with ease. Top-trim trucks of the same model are very difficult to find in manual. As the two examples are identical models (but different trim), they are directly comparable and we know both varieties of transmission are available. The market speaks, however; the buyers interested in the top-trim trucks want automatics. The buyers interested in the base model trucks want manual. This is clearly evident in the scarcity (but not absence) of manual transmissions in top-trim trucks.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#48

Post by ttrx »

nostromo wrote: post #10

One thing missed by most of these post-auto stories: transit used to be sooo boring , and no longer is. I'm old enough to remember riding the bus before mp3 players and smart phones. Your only options were to read or to bring a CD player. Walkmans (Walkmen?) were a pain: batteries got expensive, and carrying more than 1 or 2 CDs was a pain, so you ended up listen to a few tracks over and over. Newspapers and books we…

Not me. Most of my life I lived in cities with very good public transport systems, but I know that once I am done getting educated, I will live in a city that one can't live in without a car.

Public transit and bikes are cheaper and cleaner, I agree. But goddammit, they are so inconvenient. Public transit is annoying because it's never close to where you live or work - your destination gets averaged with everybody else's destination in the area and therefore involves walking to subway, waiting for subway, going places, getting out, walking to work... ugh. Biking is annoying due to whether (both winter and summer is super annoying) and security (locking bike, unlocking bike, findign place to lock it...). you can just leave a car somewhere and press a button and be pretty sure it won't be stolen.

I much prefer a world with big garages, big roads, lots of free parking spaces, spread-out low-rise cities, driving to huge stores for shopping (walmart, costcos, home depot) instead of malls and little shops.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#49

Post by arjunb »

nostromo wrote: post #10

One thing missed by most of these post-auto stories: transit used to be sooo boring , and no longer is. I'm old enough to remember riding the bus before mp3 players and smart phones. Your only options were to read or to bring a CD player. Walkmans (Walkmen?) were a pain: batteries got expensive, and carrying more than 1 or 2 CDs was a pain, so you ended up listen to a few tracks over and over. Newspapers and books we…

Actually it has seemed like this is the primary point most of these stories have been making for a while.

"The percentage of young drivers is inversely related to the availability of the Internet, Mr. Sivak’s research has found. Why spend an hour driving to work when you could take the bus or train and be online?" (from the article)

"...[A]lmost everything about digital media and technology makes cars less desirable or useful and public transportation a lot more relevant." [from May 2010, http://adage.com/article/digital/digital-revolution-driving-...]

Re: The End of Car Culture

#50

Post by ttrx »

sowrong wrote: post #12
andyl wrote: post #5

The end of car culture can't come soon enough.

this article is wrongheaded in many, many ways. The crux of the problem is that cars are designed and produced ahead of what is actually wanted and desired without concern whether there is actually an impedence mismatch with what consumers want in a car. For example, modular design in cars no longer exists. You can't find a car anywhere that can be transformed with add-ons between a commuter car to a weekender car to…

DITTO on manual cars. I always thought that driving stick is so much more fun, but it's impossible to get a rental car with manual transmission. The entire fleet of Zipcars has no manual gear cars, for example.

And I don't understand why... everybody is licensed driver, which means everybody can drive stick. Also manual transmission cars are cheaper. So what compels rental companies to have automatic transmission fleets?

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