Exactly. Folks who prefer public transit have been forced to live in car culture by folks who fund roads at the expense of pretty much every other form of transportation. In many cases very unethically so.
Due to the societal and environmental effects, I think it's pretty clear roads should be in no way subsidized like they currently are. If the "suburbs" had to carry their full economic costs, they would be unaffordable.
There have been several great articles that have floated to the top of HN in recent years about how practically no city in the US can afford to maintain its own road networks because of the extreme subsidies in the past.
It is a combination of population density being artificially lowered through cheap road subsidies, constant pressure to eliminate taxes, and gutting alternative transport meaning roads need to satiate all human mobility and thus need huge capacity.
Mass transit is so heavily subsidized that if had to carry it's full economic costs, it would be unaffordable.
The light rail lines in my state (MN) don't even make enough from fares to cover their day-to-day operating costs, much less maintenance, and of course tax payers were 100% on the hook for initial construction - with a large chunk of the money coming from automobile taxes.
So yes, I would be fine with the costs of roads coming more directly from the people using them, but then we are going to do the same with transit. Deal?
Agreed. America's forced dominance of the automobile is pretty grossly unethical. Freedom means the ability to make meaningful choices, and if biking is incredibly dangerous, transit is slow and infrequent, and nothing is within walking distance, then those are hardly meaningful options, are they?
Building to support multiple modes of transportation is the freedom-loving thing to do. Want to walk? Go for it! Transit? Sure! Biking? Why not? Driving? Works for me!
"Freedom" doesn't mean living wherever you want and having every option available to you. It means choosing to live in places that offer the amenities you desire.
Want walkable, bikeable, mass transit, etc? Live downtown. Want bigger homes, yards, quite, etc? Live in the suburbs.
> "Freedom" doesn't mean living wherever you want and having every option available to you.
Obviously there's a limit to how reasonable multimodal transportation is. Nobody's expecting decent transit among rural farmland. But we could do better than we're doing now -- MUCH better.
> Want bigger homes, yards, quite, etc? Live in the suburbs.
The biggest problem with this is that in the US you usually have to choose between one of two extremes which dovetail with your examples. You're either in a big ugly apartment block downtown (or in a downtown-ish area) or you're in a super low density suburb where Cars Are Law.
Plenty of countries manage to have more of a gradient, where you can have, say, suburbs of middling density, where driving is easy, but so is walking, biking, and taking the train to the city. I live in Munich at the moment and the suburbs nearby fit this mold perfectly, but in the US such towns are extremely rare.
There are still plenty of cars in Munich proper, for that matter. There are just lots of other options too.
* Also in most American cities even the downtown still isn't very walkable, definitely isn't bikable, and has crappy transit. There really are only a handful of cities in the US where these things all work reasonably well.
Biking is not "incredibly dangerous". It plenty safe. It is healthy. It however sometimes slows down cars and some drivers are then motivated to frame biking as dangerous activity to stop it.
But really really really, biking is not incredibly dangerous.
I've bike commuted to work. In a very bike friendly area.
Everyone I know has been in an accident of some sort. Hit & runs, side swipes, doored, pushed (deliberately), etc.
After better infrastructure, the most effective way to improve safety is to have more cyclists. I think we're in a rough transition period, but things are definitely getting better.
One of my bike buddies thinks things will really change once moms start cycling en masse. That'd change the perception from gonzo bike dudes to totally uncool in a heartbeat, evoking much less hostility.
I live in the Netherlands (16 million people, 23 million bikes). I went to San Fransisco a few months ago, one of the most bike-friendly US cities from what I've heard. Riding a bike there made me want to make sure my will was updated.
I have several coworkers that have stopped biking to work here in sunny, liberal SF because of near-death experiences commuting on a bike.
These are both avid riders with professional-grade equipment taking a short Mission-FiDi route.
Regardless of its "project zero" marketing, SFMTA has bikes last on its priority list. It has to be pushed by guerrilla infrastructure groups to do anything meaningful.
In some areas, it is quite dangerous due to a lack of bike infrastructure and the driving habits of locals. My ex husband sometimes commuted to work by bike and often bitched about this.
I live in an area with good roads, good cars. We get a bike fatality a few times a year. At dusk I find even the well-lit bikes a little hard to discern. We also have some bad drivers. In the most recent fatality the lead rider of a bunch riding on a road was decapitated.
I used to ride bikes all the time as a kid but I would not make a habit of riding on our roads. It's too much of a gamble.
In many areas, just removing outright hostile barriers to pedestrians would vastly improve walkability in the US while possibly going entirely unnoticed by drivers. I once walked to a shopping center with a fence partway around the property that forced me to go far out of my way to go in using the car entrance. A small gap in the fence next to the cross walk would have done wonders for me and most drivers would not have noticed the difference.
I don't see where you get the idea that I am doing anything or have any goal to force anyone to do anything. That seems like a huge and unwarranted leap of logic.
I don't see how that in any way suggests what you are saying. There are a lot of people who currently feel forced into long commutes who hate them. There are a lot of people who are trapped in the situation of they need a car to get to work, they need a job to afford a car because a car is often the second biggest household expense after housing itself.
I am talking about opening up options, not putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to give up their car. We currently have many people who feel they have a gun to their head in terms of being forced into needing a car they don't want. Where is your sympathy for their right to choose?
They have right to choose to limit their standard of living, as you have done, and move to an urban core and be completely dependent on transit for transportation.
Only one of us wants to "change this substantially."
Many people are genuinely trapped. Just because I have been able to pull this off does not mean other people are simply free to choose.
Urban cores are often insanely expensive and not necessarily where someone wants to live just because they don't want a car. I am wholly unimpressed with your hypocritical comments here that boil down to "Don't tread on ME or interfere with my right to own a car and drive all over the place while the world bends over backwards to make that convenient, but your lifestyle preferences? Oh, fuck you."
They have right to choose to limit their standard of living, as you have done, and move to an urban core and be completely dependent on transit for transportation.
This is dismissive, insulting of my preference to live without a car and rather hostile. If you were intending to say that you support my right to choose, you failed to communicate that. It came across as contemptuous and is in no way sympathetic to the fact that walkable neighborhoods and public transit are not hostile to drivers the way the current car centric American landscape is hostile to pedestrians.
Only a minority of the country lives without children where a car is necessary. And who's rich enough to live in an urban centre with 2 children? More importantly who would!
I wish. Then I wouldn't get woken up by little brats every Saturday morning. I live in one of the densest, most expensive neighborhood in the US outside of SF, and there's still a bazillion little kids and screaming babies all over the place living in lofts with no green area in sight, and even though the nearby schools are terrible.
People can't really though, because of zoning and government planning. Like even if you wanted to make an area more walkable by inviting, say, a corner grocery store to set up shop in your neighborhood, usually you can't, because of single-use zoning.
And before you say, "well then just move to the city center!" perhaps you should consider that we're talking about a very common urban form across the world that is strikingly uncommon in the US due to government forces? Not exactly "people making their lifestyle preferences", more like "government imposing lifestyle preferences", and it's mostly just due to cultural momentum at this point.
>They have right to choose to limit their standard of living, as you have done, and move to an urban core and be completely dependent on transit for transportation.
As opposed to being completely dependent on public roads for transportation? Or out away from the "urban core" do you just get around on four-wheelers and snowmobiles? If so, maybe we can stop spending so much of our taxes building roads out to wherever you want to live.
Is your argument against "forcing others to live how you see fit" as in your original comment, or against change from the status quo as in these follow on comments? These are not the same thing.
They don't have that freedom now because of zoning that restricts the development of urban-core-like development and because of subsidies that favor sparsely populated suburbs over the urban core.
I used to walk to the grocery store in Germany six days a week with a toddler and an infant and a backpack for my groceries. I was in American military housing.
After I moved to Kansas, I ran into a soldier I did not remember, but he clearly remembered me. The soldiers who knew what it was like to carry a 60 pound ruck sack had all kinds of respect for me.
It can be done. Not by everyone and I am not saying you are required to live that way. But giving other people options doesn't preclude you from driving everywhere. And that's the entire fucking point here.
Feel free to drive. But I like walking. I liked walking even when I was carrying groceries home in a backpack with an infant strapped to my chest and a toddler sitting on my shoulders.
Preferring to walk in no way makes me some undeveloped savage. Maybe you haven't noticed, but I am online. I spend a lot of time online. I make my earned income online.
For the last time: My desire to see more walkable environments and better public transit in the U.S. in no way bars people from driving. Busses use the same roads that cars use. This is in no way whatsoever a situation where we must choose one or the other.
well by choosing to drive yourself to work every day in a wasteful petroleum burning vehicle you are forcing the rest of us to live with your pollution
The lead batteries make them less "clean" than many people imagine. Lead is a hazardous waste, batteries do not last forever and car batteries are quite large.
