How many people want to live in dense cities without any means of escape? It sounds miserable to me.
But I live in a really small city (< 250k) and drive maybe 3-5k miles a year (mostly to our cabin in a neighboring state) and bike a LOT. It's kind of ironic I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it.
It sounds like you bike for most of your transportation in your city? That's what "anti-car" people (speaking as one myself) want: to emphasize infrastructure that enables and encourages that. The "anti-car" thing isn't "ban cars entirely in all cases", just "stop assuming everything needs to be car-first at the expense of every other modality".
Yea my point is that if you want to be less car centric, maybe try moving out of the big city. It's ironically easier to obtain that lifestyle in a small city in America than the "walkable urban utopias" everyone seems to desire on HN.
Super obvious response, but it depends on the city. Smaller denser European cities that were not designed, but evolved over hundreds of years from earlier settlements, don't handle car traffic very well and are better suited to walking and cycling (or battery operated scooters). But even larger cities over here work well for walking and cycling because you tend to find lots of bars, restaurants, convenience stores and shopping malls all over them. In my home town, you can't walk a mile without passing a dozen bars, a dozen restaurants and two decent grocery stores.
But it's not just down to city size. Take a city like Provo in Utah. It's not large by any standard, but it's completely designed for cars. It has awful public transport, a grid 'motorway' system cris-crossing it, everything-as-a-drive-thru, lots of unused space, lots of parking lots... If you try walking around it, you'll just spend hours walking past nothing in particular to get to nowhere special.
It seems that everything is way too far apart because it's all separated by huge sprawling parking lots that are mostly empty. 50-70% of the acreage is devoted to cars not even counting the ultra-wide roads and only occasional pedestrian crossings every half mile. These roads usually have speed limits well above 45 mph. The worst examples I can think of are Scottsdale AZ and Irvine CA.
It isn't surprising that so many cars are on the road when just to cross the street you need to walk a quarter mile on average. Then you have to cross the death trap parking lots with zero shade and 120 degree black top.
Here in Europe it's often the opposite.
E.g. in Austrian cities you have decent bicycle infrastructure and everything in reach in the cities while in rural areas that's often not the case.
I've been in the US once, 13 years ago, and it was pretty shocking for me to experience the concept of "car centric" in its full glory for the first time.
I was at CES in Las Vegas and went to some club one evening with a friend. At some point I left and wanted to walk to the Hotel alone in order to calm down and enjoy the nice climate.
Turned out, there was simply no walkable connection between the 2 locations. I couldn't believe it, but - being stubborn - walked anyway, in the dirt along some highway, a bit scared of being picked up by the police, not even sure if walking there was even legal.
Later that week I moved to LA and first saw the endless suburbs of an American city, from the air.
I don't know how representative those 2 places are for the US, but having seen that, I can totally understand why many Americans have a very hard time imagining life without a car.
Mostly only out of American big cities (at least in the developed world), the point is to fix that. A lot of big cities in Europe and East Asia do fine without being car-centric.
You're right, in my zeal I overstated a bit. But among the richest/most developed nations there are the US & a few similar countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) where a lot of people drive cars and on the other hand western europe and the reach east asian countries (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore) where mass transit (and in Europe sometimes also bicycles) is the main form of transportation in the large cities.
I'm not sure I fully follow "I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it", but I think there are two potential points of disagreement:
1) Living in dense cities is not for everybody, but given that large and (at least pre-covid) growing majority of people in the developed world do choose to live in cities, I think it's safe to say that there is a very sizable demand. For an example of the benefits of density, see [0].
2) I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a "means of escape", but getting rid of cars of course necessitates replacing them with other modalities. If you want to go skiing does it matter to you whether you take a train or a car? Or, for further afield trips, take a train to a car rental far from the city center? (If you mean escape in a literal sense, like "evacuate in the face of a disaster", then cars are clearly not fit for purpose -- if roads can barely handle rush hour traffic, mass evacuation is a recipe for gridlock)
The pre-covid world is kinda over. Density has very clear downsides that have never been more apparent. I don't know how often you do the train + car rental thing, but the friction is much, much higher than driving (especially if you have any sort of gear like you would for skiing). Not everyone wants to be so contricted both in freedom of movement and in living space.
Blaming disease spread on density is kind of a cop out after how we saw the world respond to crisis. Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong, and most Chinese cities are super dense places that, for most of 2020, I would have preferred to be living in compared to the US.
The success of these cities is due to political action that is unpalatable to most in the west. Hong Kong in particular demonstrates what happens when even vestigial western ideals and the necessary political structures for this sort of action mix.
You can look at San Francisco which did better than most places in the US. It was actually funny to watch tech bro's flee the city for places where the pandemic ultimately hit far worse.
The friction of owning a car is much, much higher than having to care a few times a year on how to carry your skis or sporting gear on a train and renting a car afterwards.
Personal anecdote: I was born, grew up and lived up to my mid-20s in São Paulo, Brazil. It's a city where a car is a basic necessity, much like in the US, public transportation sucks and is spotty, never on time. I owned cars, I loved the frictionless way to get out, getting the elevator out of my apartment, down to the underground garage, turning my car on and driving away, easy. But that car sat idle 98% of the time, I paid road taxes, maintenance, parking spot, etc. for the convenience of having a car ready to go at an instant time.
Nowadays I live in Sweden, I never need a car apart from moving houses or carrying some large furniture. A few times for a road trip here and there, I can just rent a car when needed and I come out on top of expenses still, the peace of mind of not having to take care of a car is another huge bonus.
The pre-COVID world will still exist, cities are a necessity if you want to have good public services, without higher density a city has no way to fund high quality public services.
I would like to know what clear downsides, apart from disease spread, has COVID showed from living in high density cities? And I mean cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, and so on.
I actually find renting a car offers me significantly less peace of mind, because while I don't care if my own car gets dinged, the rental agencies do. In my experience a weekend car rental costs about 3+ months of upkeep, so for me car ownership is an easy financial decision, even though I mostly walk and bike. I might have a different calculus If I had to pay for a parking spot, but this, along with other premiums for space, I feel is more accurately a cost of high-density living, not car ownership itself.
Some aspects of the pre-COVID world may make a comeback, but hopefully as a society we have realized the omnipresent threat of new diseases is very real. This will impact high-highdensity areas more than low-density areas. It is not just disease spread, but also the policies enacted to limit the spread. My friends in NYC tell me that exorbitant rents for tiny apartments they were forbidden to leave was not particularly enjoyable. Paris seems like an exceptionally bad place to be in 2020/21. Public services are nice when you have access to them and not-so-nice when you are dependent on them and they fail. Often access to services is limited based on economic factors in the best of times, much less in times of stress.
It really depends on where you live and what kind of car you own. My car is very low friction. I can just walk out my front door and drive my car wherever I want to go. Fuel, maintenance, and insurance are all pretty cheap.
By contrast renting is extremely high friction. Even if I reserve a specific type of vehicle in advance that doesn't guarantee that it will actually be available when I show up.
I really doubt this is the case. In fact people are placing large bets of the opposite. Just saw in the news that some texas developer is planning a new 23 story commercial building in Vancouver's downtown.
Cities have been the norm since humans started living together. They been been a success despite many, many pandemics. They are not going away.
The US isn't gonna change much. Don't know about elsewhere.
I was in a supermarket last Friday afternoon, in Michigan, and it was "I don't want to be here" busy for normal times, never mind during a pandemic. There were people with no masks and people going through the motions of having a mask and so on. People are moving on before they should! Another couple of months is likely all it will be.
People aren’t always choosing cities, there are greater work opportunities in cities and so that is where people have to go. This was true of factory work in the past when people migrated in droves from farms to work in factories because that was their only option and moving to work in cities for office jobs has just been the latest form of this.
Many people (although not all) would choose space in the countryside over dense in the city if they had a choice. I imagine this becomes even more likely as people have families and begin to prioritise other life aspects over and above work.
I live in Berlin with 2 little kids and have no car. We bike and take transit (including long-range trains when going out of the city). There's plenty opportunity to escape (corona lockdowns notwithstanding).
Did you rent one? Are you young and healthy enough to walk/bike everyone? If yes, then your assumption about the world is indeed crazy since not everyone would have the same abilities as you.
Cars offer a level of freedom far beyond that of public transport.
That doesn’t mean they are the best vehicle to offer that freedom and electric vehicles will definitely be an improvement over ICE vehicles but in my experience as soon as you’re outside of major metropolitan cities public transport options fall apart and are often incredibly inconvenient compared to owning a car.
Maybe the solution would be to build better public transport systems outside of major cities but to do that requires funding and local governments (in the UK at least) seem to be chronically underfunded so I doubt that it will become a reality anytime soon.
In my experience, currently public transport works really well for high density routes, but no one has managed to solve the low density route issue. Take a bus going towards a leaf node at 10 pm on a week day, and you're often the only one in a huge bus with the driver (that's of course if you're in a place where such a bus exists). Environmentally and economically, that's dreadful, worse than a car. I don't think public transports running at 5% capacity is the solution.
The solution might be full self-driving cars, but we're far from it yet.
Ha, I totally agree with this. I have seen so many of those big empty buses with just 1 or 2 people in them. Perhaps self-driving cars and autonomous vehicles will be the solution to this.
Well you are free not to own it. Nobody's forcing you.
Actually my main mean of transportation in Toronto is bicycle myself (well I work from home for the last 20 years anyways).
I also own car (van actually) and it gives me great and hassle free degree of freedom. If I am in a mood and I often am I can jump in and in few hours be in complete wilderness swimming in some godforsaken lake. Or if I need to grab some heavy stuff and bring it somewhere which happens rather often. And I do not need to arrange / wait for anything. Just get in and go.
So no. Screw that dense car free living. To each their own.
Yes and you can say that a helicopter would offer you even more freedom, but does that mean we should build our cities so that everyone has there own helipad?
Ironically it probably would take up less space than the infrastructure build for cars.
But this is the point made by the OP, essentially for the convenience to jump into your car a couple of times a year and drive to the wilderness without having to walk or take a means of public transport, you require cities to be build around those cars. The issue is you don't directly see the cost associated with it, because you're used to it. The thing is, if you actually had to pay for that convenience (because if we would not have to build the car infrastructure cities could be much cheaper) directly there clearly would be a point where you would say it is not worth it.
Yes, too many people can't bear making anything they sense to be a sacrifice on their part. The solution is definitely to shift the car ownership economic burden more towards car owners instead of everyone. Giant empty parking lots and huge roads are an insane cost with a terrible maintenance story.
I like to think of it as moving away from a datacenter to cloud based solutions. You don't need to buy all that capacity ahead of time anymore just for those short bursts.
>"Yes, too many people can't bear making anything they sense to be a sacrifice on their part."
Sorry but I do not live to make sacrifices for the "benefit of everyone". I already left one country because of that. It was called USSR. And the first thing I did as soon as I could - got myself a car and traveled all over the places on my own.
My small software development company does not use cloud either. Self host and rented dedicated servers. Orders of magnitude cheaper that that cloud. I prefer to feed myself rather then keep filling pockets of FAANG and the likes.
But you are expecting everyone to make sacrifices for your benefit, because non-car drivers are significantly subsidising car drivers. Lets make car cost exactly what they should be then, things like lets make real-estate used for roads in cities go into rental costs for those roads (via taxes, road tolls etc.), lets price the environmental costs appropriately, including the health cost from noise etc. If you still want to pay for your car then, go ahead, but don't expect others to subsidise your living.
How can it be 'complete wilderness' if reachable by car? Isn't there some sort of infrastructure necessary in order to reach it by car which ultimately destroys nature?
Gravel / dirt road and then take canoe to some secluded spot. No one is around which to me is enough to call it "complete wilderness", does not need to be Ellesmere Island. No visible "destruction of nature" either.
And I don't know a ton of people that "buy" cars they can afford, they buy car payments they can afford. I just can't help but feel that breaking that cycle would be a societal good ( for people, sorry automakers).
Everywhere where daily amenities are too spread out and the streets are too dangerous for children and old people to cycle on them. That's most of the developed world outside of some very large cities.
I would definitely agree with you about the merits of smaller cities, but half the value of density is that "escape" is easier. Driving for a solid hour through nothing but housing estates is not my idea of freedom.
It does depend on your idea of "escape" though. Good trains to beauty spots make a world of difference.
The no means of escape from NYC was what I could never handle (so got a bike, motorcycle, car and eventually just moved out) but there are many people who grew up in big cities for whom the endless concrete blocks is just the normal environment, though I think its kind of sad.
But I live in a really small city (< 250k) and drive maybe 3-5k miles a year (mostly to our cabin in a neighboring state) and bike a LOT. It's kind of ironic I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it.