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% invested in the myth of motorized freedom.
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.
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!
Yeah, I agree. I've just happened to live in two capitals, so I've had access to top-tier public transport. But even in the capitals, a simple 10-minute drive can turn into a 50-minute journey on public transport (this is a literal common example of mine, not an exaggeration!). So even then, you have to consider how much your time is worth.
Even in the first tier cities there is usually significant personal car ownership, often with more than half of households owning one.
Is that because many people find even first tier city public transit inadequate for much of their normal in-city transport, or are there a lot of people living in the first tier cities who need to visit the smaller cities or rural areas often enough that it is worth keeping a car just for those occasions?
Categorically this isn't true, I easily found good and affordable public transport in smaller towns. It's definitely less common, but to bluntly say that only first and second tier cities have gold and affordable public transport is inaccurate and dismissive.
My motorized freedom dreams got stuck in increasingly worse traffic. Nowadays I dream of a "bikeable" commute and grocery shopping and whatever works best between public transport and driving on the weekends.
My area is fairly "bikeable" but I seldom ride my bike for errands because I can't be sure that it will still be there when I get out of the store. The local authorities do almost nothing to prevent bike theft.
Sure, cars can also be stolen. But modern cars are now fairly theft resistant and police at least take it seriously as a crime.
It has gotten significantly worse to the point where I stopped taking it. Prices on public transport are now also so high I'm better off taking the car on most trips.
Also it it me or are "just have walkable/bikeable cities people" more obnoxious than vegan speed cyclists
I'd say the decline is happening (in my experience) in most public services, not just transport.
But anyway, I'm purposely staying away from discussing politics here since it's pointless, so I'll just share my experience as a public transport end-user, and the rest can fill in the gaps with their perspectives.
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.
Make it like Japan, not public, private. Then, like Japan, provide positive feedback loops so it’s in each of the 100+ train companies in Japan’s best interest to provide good service. They do this by letting the private train companies have complementary interests like shopping centers, office rental, apartments, etc such that the more people ride their trains the more business they get to their other interests.
Conversely, “public” transportation always needs flawless perfect politicians to continue to fund it
I don't get it. If you've been enjoying public transportation for so long, then why is your reaction to it getting worse not: OK, we need to fix it so it's as good as it was.
Instead you are just saying: OK, I have the resources to fix the problem for myself, so I don't give a F.
I do give a F. I'm paying a fair amount in taxes every month despite not using it.
On top of that, what's your proposal? Whether I use it (and be miserable) or not doesn't move the needle either way, so I choose not to be miserable.
If there were actually a way to make it better, I'd maybe get involved. But since I see zero options, I just stay away from it. Virtue signaling doesn't work for me.
Look one layer deeper and likely the issues are classist. Of course you didn't mention where you were, but, in the places I've lived, it goes down like this: the people who are wealthy enough to not need to use use public transit have more sway in terms of voting/persuading politicians, and push for policies that directly benefit them, even if it's to the detriment of the city overall.
Thus: more resources go towards those places with insane house prices, leaving everyone and everything else behind. The problem isn't public transit, it's the wealthy.
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.
I think bicycles work very well in a dense and flat city where people respect traffic laws. I am highly skeptical that they are the answer everywhere. Take for example San Francisco with all of its steep hills, or Rio where you have both hills and low adherence to traffic laws. How about Mexico City with its at time horrendous air pollution. In the United States, where many cities didn't really mature until after the automobile, you have low density to deal with, for example in Houston or San Jose. How about for someone who is older? Bicycles may be great if you are in your 30s, but what about for someone in their 70s?
Bicycling is a great solution for some people in some cities, but it's not going to work as well everywhere or for everyone. Public transit, cars, walking, etc. will all have to continue being part of the mix.
ebikes solve the hills and age issues. Although they're not actually an issue. Cycling is incredibly low impact, and proper gearing makes going up hills as easy as on flats, just slower
Air pollution is the same in a car or outside, no? Most cars don't have HEPA filters. At least on a bike you're getting exercise
At least San Jose has huge potential for biking inftastructure. I've lived there for a month, and taking the riverside cycling path (Guadalupe) to Santa Clara was amazing. Yeah, San Francisco is less suited. New York could also be amazing. I agree that it's not a solution for everyone, but good cycle infrastructure takes a lot of pressure from public transport.
> 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.
Huh, that's interesting; those sorts of park-and-ride facilities tend to be quite popular in many places (though, sometimes too popular, of course; they fill up).
They're a slightly awkward form of infrastructure, in that they have a very specific usership at which they work; if no-one uses them, they're pointless and expensive, but if too many people use them, they're a bit of a disaster, and can cause local congestion.
When I lived in a major city, I went 10 years without owning a car. Should I for whatever reason need a car, I could rent one. But other than that, public transportation, walking, and biking for me. Hell, I often preferred public transportation over a car.
But as soon as I moved back home, a rural area, a car has more or less become a life necessity. I simply can't imagine living out in rural nowhere without a car, it would be such a hassle. Where I live a bus goes 3 times a day to the neighboring towns, that's it.
It really depends on where you live, and what your logistical situation looks like.
I spent 17 years without a car - first Berkeley then Brooklyn. It was a huge boost in financial freedom and stability - nothing worse than a major repair on something you depend on.
But most of the US this is impossible by design. Where I grew up you might live right next to a grocery store- but it is a mile walk because of the wall and road design. Nuts.
If the only road that goes past your house is a bicycle path, a bicycle will be the most convenient. If the only road that goes past your house is a railroad, then a train will be the most convenient. If the only road that goes past your house is a motorway, then a car will be the most convenient.
But the transport infrastructure isn't an immutable property of the land, it's collectively-planned-and-built infrastructure. So the most convenient mode of transportation will settle into an equilibrium as the initial investment begets convenience, begetting more people choosing that method, begetting more investment and planning of towns and cities to accommodate that transportation method.
Where I lived all this summer the only transport infrastructure that was available for the last 80 years since the reservoir dam was completed was an old diesel tractor and an equally old motorboat with an evil 2T outboard, or a 3 km walk to a pier that was being visited by a 1957-built ferry twice a day, if it did not break down.
Then there are two to four months in a year when there is no transport except a single emergency services hoverboat while the ice settles or melts. Depending if it didn't break down, there isn't any emergency elsewhere, and a host of lesser things, like hovercraft travel isn't exactly cheap or fuel-efficient.
And then snowmobiles in winter. But also cars, if you're not afraid enough to test the ice thickness by driving on it.
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 city.
Focus on improving where you live, I do, but when you live in a city, recognize that improvements need to take into account those who don’t live there. The city is where they work, go to school, shop, and often interact with government functions.
Getting rid of dumb laws I can totally get behind as someone who walks daily.
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.
There's a lot that can be done outside of cities too. The main thing that makes it scary and inconvenient to take an e-bike eight miles to buy groceries is... sharing a road with cars! A bike path is much cheaper to build and maintain than a motorway, and especially cheap in rural areas where the rights-of-way can be purchased more cheaply.
It's also possible to have rural areas accessible by transit. If you ever visit Japan or Switzerland, you'll find a robust and convenient bus and train network that will take you all the way into very small towns.
The world outside cities is inaccessible without a car only because we've built it that way. It doesn't have to be built that way! It's not a law of nature. There are other ways to build it!
>The main thing that makes it scary and inconvenient to take an e-bike eight miles to buy groceries is... sharing a road with cars!
If the cars weren't there, gangs of bandits would be. Bandits were a common threat to people living outside cities. If you didn't carry a gun or a sword out in the country, you were practically on your own against a possibly large number of criminals.
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.
I never felt the need to have a car in most of Europe, so didn’t even bother to get a driving license. Urban population is 75% on average, so reaching rural or uninhabited areas is almost an edge case (at least for me). So it is not theoretical, it works great, even if it is not reaching the perfection of Japan. Looking at two of my favorite cities, Berlin and Moscow, I find that they are spending reasonably on expanding networks (and the most recent highway project in Berlin — extension of A100 — was very expensive and stupid, looking at the traffic jams there).
> 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.
I am 63. As I look at my future, "freedom" and "walking" look more and more distant from each other.
My wife has a handicapped tag. Freedom for her doesn't look like walking.
My mother in law is over 80, and she had polio. One leg is not fully functional. Freedom for her doesn't look like walking.
My son-in-law has something that looks a lot like long covid (not diagnosed, so I can't say with certainty). Freedom for him doesn't look like walking.
Yeah, I know, everyone I mentioned is an exception. But the point is, there are a lot of exceptions. Not just rural people (who have too far to go), but also the old, the temporarily or permanently ill, the handicapped. If you live long enough, you will probably become one.
So, it's fine to want a car-less future, but recognize that it's just less cars, not no cars. Some of us legitimately need them for our freedom.
I think transit would serve these people much better too. Driving independently is for people who are fit enough with reflexes, judgement, and eyesight. Level boarding means you can get your wheelchair into a train much more easily than having your grandchildren lift you into a car passenger seat. Having a bus driver drive for you means you can get around even when you no longer pass your eye exam. Being able to access restrooms at stations is much better for the elderly than having to hold it through a traffic jam. At some point you may not be able to safely drive yourself, and it will be much better if your other options are safe, comfortable, quick, and convenient, and don't leave you dependent on your children or spouse to drive you around.
One could certainly argue "but it's not convenient in my area; the train doesn't have level boarding, the bus comes too infrequently and gets stuck in the same traffic jams, the stations don't have bathrooms". That's a symptom of low investment, which is a symptom of low ridership, which is a symptom of car dependency, and so on.
A train with level boarding is fine, but first I have to get to the train. For the average location in the city, how many blocks away is the train? That is a non-trivial problem for some people.
Electric wheelchairs are compatible with public transport and accessible taxi. If you have disabilities that prevent you from walking, it doesn’t automatically mean that you need a car (which still won’t get you anywhere by the way).
Your argument makes sense if you’re talking about dense urban centers, but it doesn’t reflect the reality of millions of people who live outside of them. If you had to walk 4 miles to school every day, you would understand why a car means freedom. If the closest grocery store was 15 miles away, you would understand why a car means freedom. If you ever had to drive through a snowstorm just to get to work, you would understand why a car means freedom. If you had to take your sick child or elderly parent to the hospital in the middle of the night, you would understand why a car means freedom. If you had to balance two jobs in towns unreachable by public transit, you would understand why a car means freedom.
For millions of people, a car isn’t a trap or a luxur. It’s survival, opportunity, and dignity. Cities may be able to rethink their dependence on cars, but for everyone else, the car is still the bridge to basic participation in life.
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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!
Is that because many people find even first tier city public transit inadequate for much of their normal in-city transport, or are there a lot of people living in the first tier cities who need to visit the smaller cities or rural areas often enough that it is worth keeping a car just for those occasions?
Categorically this isn't true, I easily found good and affordable public transport in smaller towns. It's definitely less common, but to bluntly say that only first and second tier cities have gold and affordable public transport is inaccurate and dismissive.
Sure, cars can also be stolen. But modern cars are now fairly theft resistant and police at least take it seriously as a crime.
Also it it me or are "just have walkable/bikeable cities people" more obnoxious than vegan speed cyclists
But anyway, I'm purposely staying away from discussing politics here since it's pointless, so I'll just share my experience as a public transport end-user, and the rest can fill in the gaps with their perspectives.
Conversely, “public” transportation always needs flawless perfect politicians to continue to fund it
Instead you are just saying: OK, I have the resources to fix the problem for myself, so I don't give a F.
On top of that, what's your proposal? Whether I use it (and be miserable) or not doesn't move the needle either way, so I choose not to be miserable.
If there were actually a way to make it better, I'd maybe get involved. But since I see zero options, I just stay away from it. Virtue signaling doesn't work for me.
Thus: more resources go towards those places with insane house prices, leaving everyone and everything else behind. The problem isn't public transit, it's the wealthy.
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.
Bicycling is a great solution for some people in some cities, but it's not going to work as well everywhere or for everyone. Public transit, cars, walking, etc. will all have to continue being part of the mix.
Air pollution is the same in a car or outside, no? Most cars don't have HEPA filters. At least on a bike you're getting exercise
Huh, that's interesting; those sorts of park-and-ride facilities tend to be quite popular in many places (though, sometimes too popular, of course; they fill up).
They're a slightly awkward form of infrastructure, in that they have a very specific usership at which they work; if no-one uses them, they're pointless and expensive, but if too many people use them, they're a bit of a disaster, and can cause local congestion.
When I lived in a major city, I went 10 years without owning a car. Should I for whatever reason need a car, I could rent one. But other than that, public transportation, walking, and biking for me. Hell, I often preferred public transportation over a car.
But as soon as I moved back home, a rural area, a car has more or less become a life necessity. I simply can't imagine living out in rural nowhere without a car, it would be such a hassle. Where I live a bus goes 3 times a day to the neighboring towns, that's it.
It really depends on where you live, and what your logistical situation looks like.
But most of the US this is impossible by design. Where I grew up you might live right next to a grocery store- but it is a mile walk because of the wall and road design. Nuts.
But the transport infrastructure isn't an immutable property of the land, it's collectively-planned-and-built infrastructure. So the most convenient mode of transportation will settle into an equilibrium as the initial investment begets convenience, begetting more people choosing that method, begetting more investment and planning of towns and cities to accommodate that transportation method.
Then there are two to four months in a year when there is no transport except a single emergency services hoverboat while the ice settles or melts. Depending if it didn't break down, there isn't any emergency elsewhere, and a host of lesser things, like hovercraft travel isn't exactly cheap or fuel-efficient.
And then snowmobiles in winter. But also cars, if you're not afraid enough to test the ice thickness by driving on it.
That is an immutable property of the land.
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 city.
Focus on improving where you live, I do, but when you live in a city, recognize that improvements need to take into account those who don’t live there. The city is where they work, go to school, shop, and often interact with government functions.
Getting rid of dumb laws I can totally get behind as someone who walks daily.
It's also possible to have rural areas accessible by transit. If you ever visit Japan or Switzerland, you'll find a robust and convenient bus and train network that will take you all the way into very small towns.
The world outside cities is inaccessible without a car only because we've built it that way. It doesn't have to be built that way! It's not a law of nature. There are other ways to build it!
If the cars weren't there, gangs of bandits would be. Bandits were a common threat to people living outside cities. If you didn't carry a gun or a sword out in the country, you were practically on your own against a possibly large number of criminals.
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.
I never felt the need to have a car in most of Europe, so didn’t even bother to get a driving license. Urban population is 75% on average, so reaching rural or uninhabited areas is almost an edge case (at least for me). So it is not theoretical, it works great, even if it is not reaching the perfection of Japan. Looking at two of my favorite cities, Berlin and Moscow, I find that they are spending reasonably on expanding networks (and the most recent highway project in Berlin — extension of A100 — was very expensive and stupid, looking at the traffic jams there).
Just one more lane, bro.
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.
My wife has a handicapped tag. Freedom for her doesn't look like walking.
My mother in law is over 80, and she had polio. One leg is not fully functional. Freedom for her doesn't look like walking.
My son-in-law has something that looks a lot like long covid (not diagnosed, so I can't say with certainty). Freedom for him doesn't look like walking.
Yeah, I know, everyone I mentioned is an exception. But the point is, there are a lot of exceptions. Not just rural people (who have too far to go), but also the old, the temporarily or permanently ill, the handicapped. If you live long enough, you will probably become one.
So, it's fine to want a car-less future, but recognize that it's just less cars, not no cars. Some of us legitimately need them for our freedom.
One could certainly argue "but it's not convenient in my area; the train doesn't have level boarding, the bus comes too infrequently and gets stuck in the same traffic jams, the stations don't have bathrooms". That's a symptom of low investment, which is a symptom of low ridership, which is a symptom of car dependency, and so on.
For millions of people, a car isn’t a trap or a luxur. It’s survival, opportunity, and dignity. Cities may be able to rethink their dependence on cars, but for everyone else, the car is still the bridge to basic participation in life.