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The End of Car Culture

nytimes.com

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Re: The End of Car Culture

#51

Post by qu4z-2 »

HaloZero wrote: post #39
neutronicus wrote: post #36

I don't know, man. I live in Colorado, in a super bike-friendly city, and I'm buying a car. Can't take public transportation to a campground. Can't take public transportation to a mountain bike trail. Public transportation for skiing is a huge pain in the ass.

But will you ride it daily to work? I think an argument isn't that nobody needs cars but more people will be relying on them less and the total # of hours spent driving them will be reduced.

Indeed. As you carry on in that direction, hiring a car when necessary may become much more attractive compared to the upkeep on a car you only use occasionally.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#52

Post by Apocryphon »

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…

Can the same thing be said about desktop computers and laptops?

That's a separate can of worms but I have to say, I really don't see those form factors disappearing because of tablets. I think it's more of a "modern technology and better performance leads to longer use before replacement"- which may also apply to modern cars.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#53

Post by sowrong »

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…

Manual transmission is but an example. The idea is that ownership rates declined before the downturn unrelated to the economy. What is declining, is the value proposition that the current set of new cars offers compared to older cars and, that many would-be car buyers just aren't finding what they want in a car. Imagine the cell phone market before the iPhone, that is the state of the car market today.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#54

Post by shalmanese »

For me, this is where lyft is so exciting. It used to be, if you could depend on walking/biking/public transit for 90% of your usage, you either still had to get a car for the other 10% or suffer a 10% downgrade in lifestyle.

Services like lyft perfectly patch over that hole. The cost of taking lyft indiscriminately is still less than owning and maintaining a car and the time I spend waiting for a lyft is counterbalanced by the time I would have spent parking.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#55

Post by mertd »

Apocryphon wrote: post #44
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?

Small talk with strangers every single day would get boring extremely fast.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#56

Post by sliverstorm »

sowrong wrote: post #53
sowrong wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Manual transmission is but an example. The idea is that ownership rates declined before the downturn unrelated to the economy. What is declining, is the value proposition that the current set of new cars offers compared to older cars and, that many would-be car buyers just aren't finding what they want in a car. Imagine the cell phone market before the iPhone, that is the state of the car market today.

What is declining, is the value proposition that the current set of new cars offers compared to older cars

What is happening (IMO) is that "old" cars (in relative terms) are lasting longer and longer. The car I learned to drive in had a 5-digit odometer. The car I drive today can reasonably be expected to reach 250k with regular maintenance.

many would-be car buyers just aren't finding what they want in a car

Ok, what do they want? 'Cause I assure you, "it doesn't have a manual transmission" is not the complaint of the majority.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#57

Post by mertd »

ttrx wrote: post #50
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…

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 fle…

> everybody is licensed driver, which means everybody can drive stick.

You can take your driving test in an automatic in many states (US).

Re: The End of Car Culture

#58

Post by scarmig »

veemjeem wrote: post #41
Domenic_S wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ironically, though that's correctly pointed out as a vulnerability of "public transit," it's also a vulnerability of private automotive transit: if not for public transit, it would be far, far less convenient to drive from point A to point B, at least for some values of A and B

Re: The End of Car Culture

#59

Post by discodave »

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…

I think your argument is wrongheaded. People want cars to get them from A to B, that is all. Some people pay more for bigger cars because they have families, want presteige etc. Modular cars is so far down the list of things that people want/need.

Even software is often hard to make modular, things in the physical world... even harder.

Re: The End of Car Culture

#60

Post by fragsworth »

> When adjusted for population growth, the number of miles driven in the United States peaked in 2005 and dropped steadily thereafter

The reason for this is more directly "The Internet" than they suggest. Nearly everything that used to require you to drive somewhere is now done online. You order products off Amazon today.

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