>Why don't you simply move to Chelsea or the Upper West Side?

Because I'm not in the top 0.1%.

"Why don't you just move into a $2-5 million dollar home?" is an astonishing take.

The semi rural and rural US south is, in many places, much more dangerous based on crime statistics. Stranger danger is also much less of a factor than is perceived.

How is driving not emotionally taxing the exact same way? Driving with my kids is fucking terrifying. I have 2 under 6, and I have to lock them into these giant car seats to keep them safe (to be clear I like modern car seats, their designs just remind me how vulnerable kids are). Every time I go through a intersection I worry what happens if someone runs the red and smashes into our side.

I no longer speed when I drive because I want the kids to be safe and the insane rage other drivers send our way because I'm going 40 km/hr on a 40 km/hr road. I've had driver try to force us off the road, tail gate us hard, pass us across double yellow lines, scream at us.

Driving is exhausting.

I can make most of the same arguments about driving.

People run red lights, they speed, they swerve, they get in fender-benders and flee, they honk, they smoke weed and drink vodka while they drive. All illegal, all common occurrences. And I live in a wealthy, safe suburb.

Or it becomes too expensive like in germany. Then it will suck too.

Wow! Can you explain why Canada hasn't declared all of its streets car-free, and does that mean it's a fascist state too?

I take it there's either no toxic mix of individuality and capitalism, so can you confirm whether it's a collectivist state (no individual expression allowed) or non-capitalist, and which economic system it is instead?

From a website I read last night:

> Mountain Life

> I love the fact you can drive down the road and wave at friends you know.....and hell you probably will be drinking a beer with them later that day. I love the fact everyone is pretty laid back and neighbors know each other..Anyone for BBQ?. I enjoy the fact I can chill out relax NOT hearing the city noise. I love the fact at night you can look up and see the night sky and here coyote's screeching in the background. I respect the fact I grew up in an environment that was NOT surrounded by pavement and was NOT surrounded by buildings. There was endless landscapes and forests of exploration. I could find any tree and build my fort. I could spend hours hiking with my dog and find no end. I could take a nap in a field of grass and not worry someone would cross my path. The Santa Cruz Mountains have so much to offer and I feel like there is so much to learn about them.

https://santacruzmtns.com/About.html

Do you have a wife? Kids? Would you let them bicycle through the homeless district?

I don't get hassled either, but it's not about me. My job as a husband and father is to protect my family.

"Nobody I know voted for Nixon."

Many cities have been losing population for a while, regardless of your intimate knowledge of what other people do or don't feel. Incredulity isn't really much of a solution if you want to address issues that people might have.

Barcelona is in Spain, on the Mediterranean, where the weather is fair all year long. It's not the case in many parts of the world. Bicycles are a rather dangerous mode of transportation, and I wouldn't use it with kids, especially in a city.

Yeah, if you live in the most expensive part of the town, which is often the epicenter, it may be ok. However, not everyone can afford this, or justify the expense, especially since you are pitted against childless couples that don't have to support children financially. Also, the presence of bikes on the sidewalk makes it hostile for vulnerable pedestrians, and generally turn a pleasant experience (walking in a city) into a stressful one.

Fourth paragraph:

"Her war on motorists, who last year were hit with a double whammy of speed cuts on the capital’s ring road and the tripling of parking fees for heavy vehicles, such as SUVs, has also sparked fury among families."

Right now in Paris, when you have a newborn, the only mobility solution is to take an Uber if you need to go somewhere >1km from where you leave. Buses are very slow and crowded, the subway doesn't have elevators for strollers, cars are just inaccessible financially due to the war on surface parking space.

- Paris' subway doesn't have elevators, impossible with a stroller.

- Buses are crowded, very slow, and being blocked for >1h because of protests or roadworks with a sick newborn is a rather unpleasant experience. I did it already. And in general, public transportation in Paris has degraded a lot. Who wants to explain to his 3-year-old son what this fine gentleman is doing while heating crack in the back of the train car?

My message starts with "it's a reason among others".

And bike-centric policies have led the city to invest in bike lanes, rather than in the aging public transport and to remove surface parking, making it almost impossible to own a car if you have a family. All of this is in the article that I linked.

An unexpected casualty of this is that it's now complex to get trade workers to come to Paris for construction jobs, and, funnily enough, public works to build bike lanes are more costly as trucks and workers spend a lot of time in the traffic now.

And the cost to buy into these developments where they do exist suggests a supply and demand imbalance. Near me a new-ish 'town center' development with a mix of apartments, shops, restaurants, grocery store, townhouses, and single-family homes is easily double or triple the price of an equivalent house in a standard cul-de-sac neighborhood a 15 minute drive away.

Car focussed development destroys far more land (e.g. parking) than similar size developments that enable walking/cycling/public transport.

Look at London - most people don't bother driving into the center of London andit's technically counted as a forest due to all the greenery. When you design for cars, all other travel modes are made impractical as cars take up so much room that all the facilities end up being miles away from people.

I don’t enjoy the 15 minutes I spend packed in the NY subway when I have to take it during rush hour, but I do enjoy hopping on the subway off-peak when the cars are half empty and I get a seat and open my subway book.

Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life. But I do really enjoy driving on new routes when the road is half empty.

My two observations are that bumper-to-bumper traffic feels much more stressful to me (a lot more honking, people trying to cut into faster lanes, etc) than the subway (crammed and sometimes there’s a homeless person with bad BO), and that I spend much less time on the rush hour subway than in traffic jams in the past (even during rush hour, the subways are not that packed until you get into Manhattan).

I love my personal car bubble as much or more than most people (though maybe not as much as you), but at some point we have to get over ourselves. We're all so spoiled. Why the hell do we deserve to all have our own giant speed machines careening through cities where people (including us drivers!) are trying to live? It doesn't make any sense and it's a shame that we've let it go so far, especially in the US.

It should be discouraged (financially, logistically, socially) to drive in dense urban places. Obviously, in order to achieve that, these urban places need to have alternative means of transportation.

The thing that is so great about better transit for folks in cities in America is that it benefits you specifically in the lifestyle choices you want to live. Introducing better transit options gets folks out of their cars and onto the tram or sidewalk and that leaves you with your desire for solitude with more open highways.

> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

Fair but you have to remember that this anti-car lobby is rather tiny in comparison to the pro-car lobby which is every state department of transportation, automaker, insurance company, oil executive, auto dealer, etc. they aren’t as loud and annoying because they don’t have to be, but take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.

> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!

Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit. Plan your route so you get access to a seat, settle in with a book or music. The other people melt away. Whereas driving a car involves constant interaction with other drivers which in many places (including rural areas, not to single out pickup drivers but there is a pattern) can be quite fraught.

>I don't see myself ever not being a driver.

Cars aren't getting cheaper, car maintenance has become absurdly expensive (compared to what it was), auto insurance is set to get far more expensive, and making your entire lifestyle dependent on the existence of cheap gasoline is not a great strategy. A lot of people will simply be priced out of driving.

>It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

Personal car commuting gets in the way of vital freight trucking. The highway system wasn't built to facilitate people going to work or traveling to see their grandma, it was build to move goods.

>I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future,...

The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. For instance, rural roads, rural hospitals, rural electrification, rural broadband, rural airports, etc. It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".

> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people.

I get the same independent feeling from others you describe while riding my bike (not a bubble, but that’s a false sense of security in a car giving the 40kish car occupants who die every year in the US). In fact, I generally enjoy that bike experience more than I ever do driving because I never get stuck in car traffic, never get stuck behind a line of cars at a traffic signal. Never need to work about parking, other than finding a secure place to lock up (which some destinations lack). I used to love driving, but I started commuting by bike for work and realized over time that I enjoy biking so much more that I go weeks at this point without ever driving.

FWIW I live in a smaller American city of about 120k people, but is part of a greater metro area.

I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.

Totally get that, some people don't like cities and crowds. But, they should also accept that more space (in this case, access to a car, roads, parking, etc) comes with costs and they should be willing to bear those costs personally.

> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it.

I understand what you mean. I don’t especially love it either. But I honestly 100% prefer that to being stuck in traffic, being attentive to everything everywhere just not to kill anyone.

And I say that while owning a comfortable car.

I truly enjoy and cherish not having to use my car to go to work because I did it in the past and I hated it.

Being stuck in my car alone is far worse for me than being stuck in a train station because my train is late or cancelled.

But it may be my personality. I came from the countryside, so I was using my parent’s car everyday.

When I moved to the nearby city (in Europe) I truly felt not having to care about a car to be absolutely freeing.

Now I’m back in the countryside but near a train station that I use everyday to commute and the idea that I may, somehow , if I change job, need to use my car everyday (which I like, btw) is really frightening to me.

Exiting a train and walking two minutes to catch a tramway or a metro then a bus without real waiting times and without thinking about it then taking another route on the way back because a friend invited you for an afterwork really feels like society is just working.

I would have to admit that even I, I public transit nerd, would prefer an empty subway car. I also don’t like driving when I’m stopped dead in traffic, or biking when it’s next to a highway with no lane, or the bus when I miss my transfer, or walking when it’s pouring rain.

I guess my point is that everything has a worst it can be. The idea, though, is that a city should offer all of them so that you can choose. And a subway at its worst, unlike driving at its worst, will still get you where you need to be on time.

> From a quality of life point of view

The only thing that makes my occasional commute to office or distant family not a complete waste of time, is that I can read something or do a ton of language flashcards on the way. (plus a tiny small health benefit that like 20% of the commute is spent on foot.) In a car, even that would be taken away, with me being forced to focus on the road instead.

> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation".

Funnily, that's kinda how I feel about being in a car, having to constantly keep some level of awareness of others moving around.

For the record, I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.

Note that public transport in the Netherlands isn't particularly good, cycling is.

> I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people

Hard agree, but so long as I have a seat, it means I can have a nap.

One of the things that I can't do driving (safely!) is have a nap.

> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people.

Then, you've experienced poor public transit systems. A good one doesn't make you so packed in because there's enough trains for people to have comfortable amounts of space.

Anyway, it's moot - if your city has lots of people, the only feasible way to move them around is public transit. Trying anything else will fail due to the nature of two things not being able to exist in one place at the same time. One somewhat packed subway car is several hundred square meters of unmoving packed highway.

> Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.

I’m not sure why you have a right to solitude while out in public. While I sympathize with your desires, your need for a private bubble while moving about in the world has negative consequences for those around you. This is, quite simply, an anti-social attitude.

I of course understand this attitude, but it fills me with hopeless dread that this country will never be able to do anything hard again. Our addiction to cars is one of the hardest to swallow and easiest to fix problems, and yet the will to do so is simply non-existent.

To convince an American to give up on any collective, just point out they'll be mildly inconvenienced. No wonder we never even tried to fight our carbon emissions.

> just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.

Have you tried taking a walk in a forest, a desert, or on an ice sheet? Plenty of solitude to go around...

The trouble is that your personal hangups are not compatible with a properly functioning city and the common good. There is no general, indiscriminate right to car ownership and use in the city; "discomfort" is not an especially compelling reason to permit it. So, in the city, someone with your "discomforts" must either accept the discomfort of public transit, or consider living elsewhere. (For the record, no one enjoys being packed in a train. They just deal with it, because there are superior competing goods and because it's preferable to the shitshow of living in a city mired in traffic and jammed with cars.

> Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this.

I don't believe this as a real rule. 10min vs 40min, maybe. 1h commute vs 4h commute? I don't believe that you would prefer spending 8h per day in a car.

> The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers.

The youtuber NotJustBikes keep saying that "the only thing that can improve traffic is viable alternatives to driving".

I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history, and that drivers would actually need to pay for the externality costs they incur, instead of being leaches on society.

>> Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.

Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment. Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport. I want a yard where my dog can hang out unsupervised without worry about stranger dogs coming around. I want to set off fireworks on holidays. Listen to a country-western station. That is the lifestyle that a great many people dream of living.

I used to work with a guy from Belgium. He is now in Canada. The guy works in IT (secure stuff, government) but he loves animals. So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day. Doing that means he can have a hobby farm where he keeps a few horses. He bought an old tractor and is looking at growing/bailing his own hay next season. His lab just had puppies. His kids are growing up on a "farm" but go to a great school and have faster internet than I do in my "big city" apartment. Such a lifestyle just isn't possible without easy personal transportation.

Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases, but also have higher marginal costs. They also take up a lot of space, which in a dense city where space is at a premium makes them even more expensive due to the cost of things like parking and big roads.

The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.

Some cities build dedicated bike paths. This is much nicer as you aren't fighting with cars that way.

unfortunately i think the crab bucket mentality kicks in when sitting in stop and go traffic and seeing someone breeze by in a bike lane makes people so enraged they’re against cycling infrastructure for the rest of their lives

High-throughput transit isn't there to be better in 1:1 comparison with one person's car trip, but to make better cities possible.

If you only imagine this as a static scenario where everything is the same except you swap car for a train, of course car looks better.

The problem is you're not in a single-player game full of NPCs. When everyone else also chooses the car, you physically run out of space for everyone's cars, and end up with a city full of asphalt and large roads that are dangerous/inconvenient to cross and unpleasant to be around.

Car infrastructure takes a lot of space. When it can be reduced, it allows building amenities closer together, so you can have multiple useful destinations within walking distances not much worse than crossing a Walmart parking lot, and you get an environment that's nicer than a parking lot.

Being crammed in a train that moves 3 million people a day is the price to pay for not having a sea of asphalt for ~3 million cars.

People very much prefer sedentary lifestyle too, yet is very bad for your health. Likewise, cars are nice as long as you continue to ignore all the negative externalities it has - pollution, climate change and above all the massive waste of space in parking lots and highways that could be used better.

> rather than spend potentially far more time navigating a crowded subway system.

That isn't how it should be. A good subway system is faster than your car for the trips you normally make, and it comes so often you don't think about waiting. There are very few good subways in the world, (much less the US), and so people think it needs to be bad because that is all they see - but it need not be that way.

> They pick their mode of transportation based on their needs and priorities.

Transit isn’t a free market. The federal, state and local governments in the US heavily, heavily subsidize car transit to the exclusion of every other alternative. If consumers paid the fully-burdened cost, cars would be much less popular.

> If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.

They’re called buses, street cars, ride-shares, bicycles, etc. This has been a solved problem for about a century.

> There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.

Interested to see any statistics showing which subway system is less safe than a car in the same area per passenger per mile traveled.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-public-transit...

You choose where you live and work

Life is full of impossible choices. Do I worry about the perfume of a lady on the train or worry about death/disability from a drunk driver on the road. Car deaths per year in the US are about 40 - 45K; injuries, some of them permanent are most likely 20 - 30x. Deaths and disability from perfume on a lady on the train are most likely far higher.

I wish schools teach something, whats that called, math? probability? to help everyone make decisions to wisely use a car and keep themselves safe from lady with a perfume attacks on the train. This will also free up emergency room infrastructure, we don't need that many EMTs, ambulances, helicopters, trauma doctors and an incredible range of equipment and facilities to deal with odor attacks.

---

Google search for "car accidents single largest cause of death under 50": motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people under 50 in the United States, and for several specific age groups within that range, such as 1-54-year-olds and 5-29-year-olds globally.

Oh yeah, public transportation is fucking horrible. Still, it is basically the only viable way to support a large population density and not turn everything into a wasteland of parking lots and car lanes. Let's face it: cars just take an order of magnitude or two more space than e.g. metro for the same number of passengers and, in big cities, space is a very scarce resource.

I mean, mine does lol. Of course this is the Netherlands so it'll be different to the states, but I literally live across the street from a train station, and it goes directly to the dead center of the city in less than 5 minutes. There's a train every 10 minutes. The same journey is, minimum, 15 minutes by car (or 10 by bus since we have dedicated bus lanes), at the end of which you have to find a parking spot. You then still have to actually get to your destination cause the chances of parking in the center are slim to none. People really underestimate how much of our public land is taken up by cars just... sitting there, doing fucking nothing.

With the train I step off at my stop, and get on a bicycle and it takes me max 15 minutes to get anywhere else I want to go. The cities in NL have been built in such a way that it's often faster to take a bicycle than any other mode of transport. Usually buses/trams are tied with cars unless you live in awkward spots where the coverage isn't great.

> Oh and you might be odor sensitive

I guess who cares about literally everyone else who isn't in your car that has to breathe in and smell your exhaust fumes? Sure we've got EVs these days, but they still contribute substantially to air quality degradation via tire shedding, and not every car out there is an EV yet either.

I’m worried that my young child will die crossing the street. Sorry—these two just aren’t the same!

I have 4 supermarkets in a 10 min walk radius, to reach one of them I don't even need to cross a single public street. Same for schools, I know of 3 in my street, there are probably more but as I don't have kids I wouldn't know.

I think you missed the entire point, it's a design choice, if you design everything around cars of course going grocery shopping will require a car... my supermarkets don't even have parking lots.

Exactly. Cars isolate you from other people and just as importantly the weather all the way.

Yeah, that's why you build stations periodically and run trains at faster speeds than cars.

I always found it infuriating to have a discussion like this with people who prefer to fly.

For example, a flight from Copenhagen to Stockholm (or, Malmo to Stockholm) is about 50 minutes.

But a train is four hours.. clearly the train is slower!

Except the train takes you into downtown Stockholm- no express train, no getting to the airport 1hr+ before your flight and no travel to the airport in the first place.

I once raced my girlfriend (our travel plans lined up pretty perfectly) and the train ended up 25 minutes faster back to Malmo from Stockholm.

So, even though I have an anecdote that supports your claim, I'm going to go ahead and say that if you have congested traffic a train can easily be faster- even with the time at both ends. But yes, we should be making rail a much more attractive option, not running trains at the same speeds as cars.

>there's a lady next to you on the train that covered herself in perfume.

Or urine.

Or they want to beat you up, or worse. I can't imagine good public transport without the "good public".

You shouldn't be packing people like sardines. If your subway is that full then you should be adding more trains, or building more lines to ease congestion. (depending on your cities exact situation). In the US we have made building for a reasonable price impossible and then say it is impossible to fix the problems, but it shouldn't be like that.

That's only true because of car-centric design, not a rule of the universe. We can easily make public transport the better transport option if we wanted to.

Yes, going to bumfuck nowhere will be more efficient by paving 800 miles of concrete, but by definition most people are in urban centers, and there's no reason you can't have cities that are human-friendly while still having cars as options for the people that need it. In the Netherlands, ~65% of people still have cars and take their cars for long journeys, it's just that we have alternative options to get around so the people who can't or don't want to have a car can choose to do so without being crippled in their mobility.

Tunneling underground is extremely expensive. Individual self driving pods aka cars are very expensive. But most importantly cars do not get more efficient in capacity just because you put them underground, plus now you have to build entrances and exits to the underground system everywhere. Traveling also becomes a lot less appealing when you're in a black tube all the time rather than seeing the city around you. It's also not possible because the underground is not just unoccupied but there is already other existing infrastructure down there.

What you are describing is just a much less efficient, worse version of a subway.

pods (i guess 2 to 4 passengers) simply do not scale. It doesn't matter whether you put them underground or not. The only solution is for people to not use them.

One part of the solution is bikes, the other is mass transit. What self-driving EV pods may be able to do is be people mover for the last mile to a mass transit hub. But for individual traffic across longer distance it simply does not scale.

Underground is expensive. Cars are heavy and need a lot of ventalation. Lets leave the cars at ground level and move humans to underground or skyway systems - thus getting them out of the weather (I live where is snows so this is a very useful feature. People who live where it doesn't snow generally report hot summers and so again want to be inside anyway)

Yes, this sounds nice in principle. Also insanely expensive, difficult to build, and basically just completely unfeasible in reality.

I save a lot of time by taking a parking spot far from the door and just walking. People who drive spend a lot more time than they think looking for a parking spot close to the door. Plus nobody cares if I take up 3 parking spots way out there (so long as I'm not in a lane of course) so I can stop whereever without checking for the lines saving even more time not trying to get perfectly in the parking spot.

Yeah, the reader of the audiobook is pretty good, although I slightly prefer Grover Gardner, who recorded the audiobooks for his series on LBJ, as a narrator. If you like The Power Broker, I'd highly recommend those.

Don't get me wrong, I ride my bike to work, but it's abundantly clear that (at least americans) really fucking love cars.

To make matters worse, in the near future it looks like most cases of self driving will be solved, so now people will have their personal pod that moves them around.

Exactly. If you have plenty of community spaces spread around an urban area - cafes, pubs, small businesses, public parks - you both reduce the amount of travel required, and strengthen local communities

> If there is more congestion it is because you made some trips that were impossible before possible and so people are better using your city.

No, this means that the trip was made easier by car, not that a trip was impossible and is now possible.

> limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city.

Not building massive freeways everywhere != limiting the things people can do in a city. Building public transit and better cycling infra is a much more effective way to allow people to do more things.

> if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway

Yes, in certain circumstances, you can build big enough roads where the capacity is greater than the demand. This does not work in populated areas with high demand. (This is incredibly well studied)

I mean, you’re right you need systems and people need to get places.

But I used Malmö and Orlando as specific examples of extreme behaviour because in Malmö I can get around very easily. I can go anywhere in the city at any time with complete freedom even though there is good public transport it only enhances the situation. - I don’t depend on it in the same way you imply.

Where as in Orlando I was completely dependent on a car and any public transport that could exist would be wholly insufficient due to the distance you would have to travel: because of all the enormous car parking lots and expansive highways.

It's because in the West, we decentralized and privatized too much. Interests at local/national/global level are divergent and misalign all the time, which makes everything take more time.

> Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals

Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment and the rights of its citizens - the Party and its interests always come first.

> I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years.

Easy to do when you got the perfect combination: a lot of young single poor men that can be shuffled around the country because they got nothing tying them down to a specific place, combined with a lot of hard dollars from exports.

And China has another incentive... the threat of gulag. When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged, and usually it's going to be someone from the CCP when someone higher-up thinks it's a good time to audit projects of the underlings to have some fall guys to take the usual "corruption" blame.

But it's already being done. Now to propose new spending...it's really difficult judging from the financial status of major NA cities. (And take a look at the California railroad...)

> Public transport gives much better ROI for more people

That's a bold claim without data.

I'll add that cities in the U.S. west, which did most of their growing after cars were invented, just don't have what it takes. At this point they're trying to find a way to squeeze bike lanes into roads that were never designed for them. They're trying to pay for public transit between metro centers that are 50 miles apart and separated by gulfs of nothingness. A hub system is much harder to support when the center is so far from the edges.

Parking lots near stations make sense only at the farthest out place. They are for farmers coming into town for that big once a month trip, and hobby farmers driving from their "acrage" to their day job. The vast majority of people should be taking transit from their door to where they are going.

Note that I said "place" not station - stations should be your highest demand places since they are so easy to get to. That real estate should be far too valuable to stores too waste on a parking lot. That parking lot should have a shuttle to the station, not be a station itself.

Remember once somebody has got into a car they have paid most of the costs of having a car. They will always be asking why not drive all the way instead of stopping part way. Your goal should be every family sells a car because they don't need two (they still keep a "truck" for towing the boat or whatever they think they need it for, they just don't use it for most trips and don't need a backup vehicle)

The problem is, the Americans literally dug up a lot of the public transit infrastructure they had. Tramways and cable cars used to be widespread. You'd need to lay down all that track again.

I hold out hope that many more Americans will get E bikes, and demand separated bike lanes. There's plenty of room for them on most American roads especially newer suburbs.

> Might I suggest bikes are a great form of private mobility?

Yes you may. They fall short though for distances bigger than a couple of km, when carrying something or by bad weather.

But that's not a personal pod on a pseudo-train that a tech-bro could sell me

I love quality public transportation. The problem is that most of the time people make cities less car-friendly, but don't improve public transport, as it's expensive and their electorate wants bike lanes, making the situation worse for everyone. In my city, they removed the parking space near the farmer's market, but didn't add any bus line or renovate the tram, which doesn't allow disabled people or just strollers to hop in. How are we supposed to come there?

For a period in my 20’s when I wasn’t well paid I lived in some nice places car free (San Luis Obispo, Santa Monica, Berkeley) but this was when rent was cheap and I didn’t have a family.

Even in Europe it’s hard to find a decent affordable home where you can raise a couple kids in places you can live without a car.

Really interesting, can you share the salaries, cost, and size of three high-paying jobs in: NYC, London, and Paris? Curious about the big houses you're getting for cheap in London and Paris!

Interestingly the town in the video is actually quite new- built in the eighties.

American cities, almost all were also built before the car. At least the city centers. Both US and European cities grew after WW2.

The US just radically and systematically destroyed its own cities, Europe did its fair share of that, but simply not as bad. I think what saved Europe is that they were behind the US in investment, and when they finally wanted to adopt those US polices, people had already figured out how shit it was, and in many cities the worst urban highways were prevented.

In the US, very few cities survived and very few highways were stopped.

European cities are do not have more evolvability, in fact, large US roads actually means you have more op. Its more a matter of the US refusing to evolve. Its political far more then an aspect of the build environment.

Hacker News bike meet when? We'll have to get jerseys! :^)

One thing that contributes to cars being non-intrusive in Tokyo is just that there are many less of them than in American cities as there are many systems that de-incentivize having a car in the city.

To buy a car you need a certificate from the police attesting that you have a free parking spot of a certain size. The expressway tolls in Japan are often more expensive than gas for any long distance travel (and even the gas is expensive because there is basically no domestic oil production). The process of getting a license is much more intensive than in America. Japan has significantly more strict drunk driving laws than America (>0.03% for up to 3 years in prison, >0.05% is up to 5). Many workplaces don't allow you to drive to work (even if you could find parking) because by law their workman's comp insurance has to cover commuting and getting a policy that covers driving costs extra. There is absolutely no on-street residential parking.

All of these are deliberate policy choices that contribute to making the majority of road traffic in Tokyo be commercial and for most residents to default to some other form of transit.

Show me a city which banned personal cars and we'll check whether P+R transit to anywhere within is 2h. You can't, because there is no such city. It's personal cars that slow down transit, including preventing new rails being built to not dismay cherished drivers.

It has to do with the fact that air pollution has massively decreased, but cars still kill a lot of people. That's a considered and substantive point, I reckon.

I wrote it because in my experience a "balance" between modes can mean something like Amsterdam, or it can mean the status quo in the USA-outside-NYC, which is to say extreme and punishing car dependence. Sorry if I had you wrongly pegged. My belief is that a good balance is radically fewer cars in city centers. What's your idea of a good balance?

> I feel like I stepped into a meeting of an anti-car cult...

Every single thread or post about anything adjacent to cars or public transportation devolves into this. There is hardly any nuance, little effort is made to respond in good faith, and there are insults and insinuations thrown around all the time. Anyone perceived as being on the “wrong side” is instantly given a label and mocked. You don’t even have to be overzealous about it. Even the most benign comment will have someone piling on usually. “Just one more bus bro”

1 million people a year die on roads every year. Most of them not in cars nor getting the benefit of cars. Substantially cutting those deaths would be like curing malaria in terms of public health impact. But yeah, don't think of the children. You can't see them over the hood of your truck anyway.

What's the number for pedestrians? Half of all road deaths are of people not in cars. That's not an argument in favor of cars.

Tell me you have never driven during rush hour traffic in a major US city without telling me directly…

Skyscrapers aren't practical in most places. On Manhattan you've got sky high land prices and excellent rock, so hence skyscrapers.

But in a lot of places the bedrock isn't very good and the prices are lower and it just does not make sense to build a skyscraper.

Urban densification is a real thing if you don't legislate to prevent it and create a culture which abhors it. The street I live on was here a century ago, but back then it'd have a few dozen scattered family homes. Over time there's infill, maybe we knock down a big house and we put up a semi (I think Americans would call this a "duplex"?), sell both units and so by the 1980s the street has a lot more individual homes, with smaller lots.

But there's still densification pressure, so two things begin to happen. One is that people buy a family home, cut it up and sell the parts. So maybe you take a 5 bed, slice it up, re-plumb and offer three small units each contained to one floor of what had previously been a house.

The other is what happened where I live, builders buy a house with excess land, knock the house down, and put an entire block of dedicated flats ("apartments") where it stood, designed so that it looks basically like a single large house from the street.

Skyscrapers add density but they're only part of the solution. North American cities have plenty of skyscrapers and plenty of single family homes but they have a servere lack of dense multi family housing units.

> It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.

This is such a stupid populist argument. It's poor people that are hurt the most by lack of access to affordable dense multi family housing units in north american cities. Making poor families move further and further away from cities to find housing and then waste multiple hours a day sitting in traffic (and waste huge amounts of money on cars) is a ridiculous solution to affordability in cities.

It's rich people who can afford detached single family houses close to city centers, or fancy condos in skyscrapers. It's everyone else who are better served by more modest 3-4 story tall dense housing units.