1) Most people prefer to drive... look at any country that is getting richer - people want to buy cars.
2) It is only when people cannot afford to drive or driving is too inconvenient (traffic, or narrow streets/lack of parking in Europe, or outright restrictions ), they will use alternative modes of transportation.
3) The more people are thus inconvenienced, the more public support there is for the alternative modes (simply by the numbers); moreover, an average person biking and taking transit becomes richer/nicer, so the political will to improve the experience increases even faster than the number of people; plus the experience becomes nicer even without extra investment.
It's a flywheel either way.
Now, you could argue that global warming is bad / enough freeways cannot be built / etc., sure. Maybe we cannot have nice things.
But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. Most people everywhere, when they can, want to drive and live in houses. Except in some places many can afford that and have the infrastructure, and in some only a few do. It's not like car ownership and traffic is that low in Europe, given how admittedly convenient it is to not have one and how relatively expensive car ownership is, esp. in relation to incomes.
You don’t know that. You would have to run the experiment - spend equal amount of money on infrastructure for bikes and for cars. Then see.
Most British cities are tiny, you can cross most of them on an e-bike in like 15 to 30 minutes. Except London of course. But there is usually no safe way to cross them.
When I ask people in London, why are your not cycling, 95% say they are afraid of getting hit by a car. They are wrong - they will be killed by a truck. Most cyclists in London due to 4 axle construction trucks. I have seen one of the bastards illegally drive into a cycle lane, then onto a pavement where women walk with kids, and drive on that pavement to get around traffic. I have seen a BMW stuck on a bend in a segregated cycle way at Tower of London. I’ve seen a wolksvagen in a cycle lane upside down.
Go to a rich and cycling safe are of London like hackney, there are plenty of bikes. Go to an area with dangerous roads, like Surrey, no bikes
We spend insane amount of money on car infra. We just built a new tonnes in east London, the only way to cross the river for miles, and you can only cross in a car.
Here's a great link: "Vehicle ownership starts to grow quickly when countries reach income of
about 2,500 per capita in purchasing-power-parity (PPP) terms. Rapid growth
continues until income per capita reaches about 10,000. Saturation level is at
about 850 vehicles per 1,000 people."
The limiting factor for having tons of cars is income.
But you're assuming that people want to own cars to make short journeys.
When I lived in Edinburgh, I had a car but I would never use it within the city or anywhere that I could get to on a train/bus. This attitude was pretty common among my entire social circle.
Reading all your comments in this thread felt surreal to me. I guess I'm in an anti-car bubble, because I've never met anyone with your opinion before.
How short is short? Edinburgh looks pretty small. I just plotted a route from a random point in the center to a place called Bonaly that looks like a residential area, 5 miles away. Two observations is that traffic is pretty bad (red), so it looks like people drive even though transit is available, probably confirming my prior observation that people will choose to drive until driving capacity is used up or over-used then switch to other modes. 2nd is that transit will take 43 minutes vs 25mins of driving (and that doesn't account for waiting time, nobody has exactly perfect timing), so driving is still faster :)
As for cars it's actually one of the biggest things I changed my mind on in my life. I used to be anti-car and always lived in walkable areas till my mid/late twenties. Then I actually tried driving and living in non walkable areas and I couldn't believe how wrong I was :) Especially when I go back to visit walkable areas and it's annoying and getting anywhere takes forever, something I never noticed when I lived there because it was the default.
Countries at "income of about 2,500 per capita" are not exactly known for their car infrastructure. Moreover, by necessity with low car ownership they cannot have car-centric cities - most people don't have cars. I mean have you been to Hanoi or Belize City, or some place similar?
Yet, despite crappy roads, short distances and chaotic traffic (and good climate, in many cases), people get cars as soon as they can afford them - instead of staying on bikes and mopeds that they are already otherwise using. Until, if IMF is to be believed, they reach 0.85 cars per person.
Those places are freaking deathtraps. It's basically what the article is talking about! Those cities are _extremely_ anti-pedestrian. They may not be car-centric, but they are definitely moped centric.
There are usually no sidewalks, or the sidewalks are full of parked mopeds or you'll be walking along and the sidewalk will just end abruptly.
You are usually forced to walk along the road. Nobody will stop when you're crossing the road, they just weave.
A quick Google search shows that Vietnam has 29.81 per 100,000 of population deaths from traffic accidents.
These places are awful examples of safe bike/pedestrian cites. Of course people prefer cars there, it's much safer!
Well they don't have much car infrastructure either, and operating a car there is much less convenient than a moped or a bicycle, not to mention extremely expensive relative to income. Plus the car is not necessary by definition since most people don't have one. So it's not really massive spending on car infrastructure, or distances created by car-centric lifestyle that's driving the adoption. It really feels like moving the goalposts, these cities are more convenient for bikes and mopeds than cars by any standard (faster, much cheaper, easier to park etc.). I don't think safety is a primary driver either...
Or you can also just take middle-income cities, like Moscow. It wasn't built with many cars in mind, and there's severe lack of parking in particular. People used to have fistfights over public parking spots when I was a kid :) Yet, they still buy cars until traffic becomes completely unreasonable, it used to be that transit across the city (where I was going) tool ~1 hour, and my co-worker who drove a similar route would take 2 hours thru traffic, and he would still drive. Obviously so did all those other suckers stuck in traffic, that's how much they wanted to drive :)
> Well they don't have much car infrastructure either
They have hundreds of motorways -> roads exclusively for car use. They have zero cycle ways. Like this is not subjective, look at the amount of money spent on ‘active travel’ anywhere, it is never even 5% of road budget.
> Moscow
I’ve cycled in Russia. Drivers stick their hand out of the window to yank on the steering or push you. There is zero tolerance for cyclists.
We are talking about in-the-city commuting. The local roads/streets at some stage of poverty are full of mopeds and bicycles, with very few cars. When people have no choice. When they have a choice, they could get better bicycles or mopeds. Instead they get more cars, before these cars are even convenient to use (e.g. you may get stuck behind a bicycle with a produce cart for 10 minutes at 5mph as mopeds stream around both of you).
These cities start out in no way optimized for cars, basically by definition (nobody has cars). The reasons cars do better in them too, before the govt responds with more car infrastructure, is because cars are just simply better in terms of convenience. If people wanted to continue cycling after they get more rich, the govt could have built infrastructure for that much cheaper and easier.
Also btw, no matter what, bicycling is still marginal in most climates and for many people who are not fit. The real thing to discuss is transit... many of the middle-income and even poor cities have great transit, but people don't clog the transit and then grudgingly switch to driving, it's the other way around :)
> It is only when people cannot afford to drive or driving is too inconvenient (traffic, or narrow streets/lack of parking in Europe, or outright restrictions ), they will use alternative modes of transportation.
This is literally a tautology. "People find driving more convenient, except when driving is less convenient".
> But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. Most people everywhere, when they can, want to drive and live in houses.
Price signals are real. The fact that millions of people choose to pay large amounts of money to live in big cities and not drive instead of moving out to the sticks is proof that it is an extremely desirable lifestyle for a large fraction of the population.
It's not. First, there's the "afford" bit, that is the key. And second obviously it's a tradeoff based on infrastructure available, but my point is unless you outright restrict it, everywhere in the world people will fill up as much driving/parking capacity as available, then a bit more, and only then consider other options. Hence gridlock and expensive/scarce/both parking in all of the "big cities".
That is not true for biking or transit - nowhere in the world, that I'm aware of, do people clog the bike lanes or trains until they are barely usable, then switch grudgingly to other modes of transportation.
People in big cities still drive. I mean, LA discussed here is a big car-centric city, why does this have to be about living in the sticks?
> It's not like car ownership and traffic is that low in Europe, given how admittedly convenient it is to not have one
Indeed. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc. are all among the countries with the highest vehicles per capita in the world (it's not as much as in the US, but then in the US people can drive starting at 16 years old, so it messes the stats quite a bit).
1) Most people prefer to drive... look at any country that is getting richer - people want to buy cars.
2) It is only when people cannot afford to drive or driving is too inconvenient (traffic, or narrow streets/lack of parking in Europe, or outright restrictions ), they will use alternative modes of transportation.
3) The more people are thus inconvenienced, the more public support there is for the alternative modes (simply by the numbers); moreover, an average person biking and taking transit becomes richer/nicer, so the political will to improve the experience increases even faster than the number of people; plus the experience becomes nicer even without extra investment.
It's a flywheel either way.
Now, you could argue that global warming is bad / enough freeways cannot be built / etc., sure. Maybe we cannot have nice things.
But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. Most people everywhere, when they can, want to drive and live in houses. Except in some places many can afford that and have the infrastructure, and in some only a few do. It's not like car ownership and traffic is that low in Europe, given how admittedly convenient it is to not have one and how relatively expensive car ownership is, esp. in relation to incomes.