Cars Kill Cities

Two hundred years ago nobody needed a car because it didn't exist. Now people need it because parts of society are so entangled with it that it's nearly impossible to pull them apart.

If somehow planes had wrangled their way into our lifestyle the same way, then yes, people would need a plane every day. How else would they get home to their chalet in an inaccessible part the woods six hundred miles from the office at the end of a work-day?

You may want a car to get to other cities. But to walk around within the city with no car emissions? No cars zooming by everywhere? With an excellent mass transportation, even one with privacy for its users? I would give up a lot to live in a place like that.

cars are not democratic. They restrict freedom. Just to be able to walk around everywhere within a small city without any cars driving by would a dream for me.

One narrative here goes, there are lots of cars, so it creates an unfriendly environment, so people have to live outside the city and have cars.

But that narrative doesn't make sense for how the cars got there in the first place.

Another narrative goes: cars enabled people to move about quickly, they enjoyed this. One manifestation of this ability was to escape from cities and still get to work. Thus carparks and reasonably fast roads.

#

Or maybe people just enjoyed moving about quickly even over relatively small distances and it snowballed

For example, I live about five miles away from where I used to work. I could spend 10 minutes walking to the nearest busstop, 15 minutes waiting for that bus, another 10-15 minutes getting to the busstop in town, another 10-15 minutes waiting for the next bus to work, another half hour or so while the bus drives there (takes longer because of stops).

Or I could just get in the car and be there in 16-20 minutes.

An hour and a half vs 16-20 minutes. And this isn't a bad place for public transport. Buses, on average, every 10-15 minutes is pretty good. It just adds up. Heck, given a couple of hours I could probably walk there.

It's far from clear that it makes sense, even under generalised utility, to agree with the author's desire to make cities better places to live at the potential cost to people who may prefer to live elsewhere and drive.

By contrast, American cities have a couple of arterial freeways, a massive grid of wide-yet-low-capacity surface streets, and neighborhood streets that people speed through in an effort to shave seconds off their commute. And when they get to work, they park in huge parking lots, instead of stacked parking structures (ideally under the target building itself).

American transportation infrastructure is terrible.

For me, living in a city is a horrible existence. So living in the unspoilt countryside a car is pretty useful to get around.

A car is freedom. Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden to some public transport system?