How do we even fix car-dependency in the US? It's almost like a mind virus, in that people are so utterly convinced on the need for cars, they cannot even conceive of a world in which they're not necessary.
It’s simply not possible to live decently without cars in most of the US. Ask me, I lived in Texas for 8 years without one. It’s not easy. My Sunday ritual was to spend 2+ hours each way to get a meal in Waffle House and catch some movies in AMC (plural because if I’m spending this amount of time I’m catching more than one movie lol).
The few years I spent in somewhat small town College Station, I tried using a bike. For the most part I was biking on the sidewalk because the (often drunk) kids raised trucks would never even notice a civic in front of them leave alone a bike.
There was one particular intersection which led to a highway ramp, and it had a pedestrian walk signal. I have spent up to 15 minutes for at least one driver to notice I’m waiting here to cross on the walk, hundreds of cars will pass by me taking a right on this signal without ever seeing I’m waiting to cross. So why do you think anyone who’s not homeless would keep doing that?
I did out of stubbornness and oppositional nature, and I kept doing it and advocating for myself and now there's much better cycling infrastructure than when I started. But I'm also not in Texas, where I think there's probably some additional ingrained hostility toward the social signaling associated with bikes.
As someone who's about to buy a new car, I thought about this. I can bike to work. I can walk to the grocery store. I did this all through college. Then I thought, "what happens when I move?" How do I buy furniture on Craigslist? How do I pick up my girlfriend from the airport? How do I visit my friends across the Bay Area? It's a real tragedy of the commons. I'd like to save the money but I would have to sacrifice too much else unless many, many other people were willing to put up the same gamble.
I think we can start by just building it. Make it fast, reliable, and safe. Make it go places people want to go. Make it go to the grocery store, airport, and random blocks across the entire area. Look to what we did 100 years ago when a train station was a palace of transport, not a dingy slab of concrete. People want alternatives, they just want better ones than what we have now.
how often there is no viable alternative? How much does the car cost if i live in a this place or an similar region, including the mantenance costs over the time? use that info to get the costs per trip (costs/total miles*mile for trip). Don't use guesses, most car owners are bad at guessing the anual costs.
Using average cost analysis for a marginal trip decision can lead you to a wrong conclusion. If you "must" have a car for essential life function L (commuting to work perhaps), then it's entirely reasonable to burden many of the fixed costs of car ownership onto that activity and mentally charge only the marginal costs to a marginal trip (like going out to dinner some random evening).
Even that analysis can lead you astray. If you only need a small car for essential life function L but opt to buy a bigger car because every few weeks you want to take the entire family out to dinner then it's not reasonable assign the entire fixed cost to L.
The calculation becomes more complicated: a smaller car is likely cheaper to operate for L, and the cost savings over using a bigger car for L may be enough to pay for a taxi or ride-hail for the occasional times you need a bigger car for dinner, or to pay for a rental car for a vacation trip, or to pay for delivery if you need a large volume purchase.
I love car culture. I get to have a large house with a huge yard and still live 10 mins from an urban center. I don’t want my neighbor to be on the other side of the wall. I like my wood/metal working shop, being able to raise goats and chickens and shoot guns in my backyard. I’ve lived in the heart of Manhattan for about 5 years and even though it was a great experience I would not want to go back to it. Long live car culture. That being said I run 3-5 miles on trails 5 days a week and get more than enough exercise just doing stuff around my yard so car culture isn’t effecting my ability to stay fit.
Even for someone who doesn't really want a yard, what I do not want is for others to have a say in the value of my largest asset. I probably would prefer condo living for whenever I buy a property, but the tendency of many to defer maintenance is a dealbreaker as they would also have a say.
So I am going to buy a detached home as that is the only way for me to fully decide the maintenance of my property.
Public transport. Easy. Providing avenues for better buses improves not only the health of the people that use it, it provides an incentive to improve the infrastructure to provide that transport which also improves the lives of people who use cars
I live in an affluent town. High average income, mostly expensive suburban housing. We've fully funded a variety of public transit, but that hasn't induced people to actually use it. Buses drive around the town all day every day, with useful routes connecting the places studies say public transit should connect... much of the time without a single passenger inside them. My own single-family home is a 2 minute walk from a bus stop, but I've never taken that bus. My car will get me wherever I'm going faster, after all. Did I mention that the buses have been completely free to ride since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic? They still run mostly empty.
Having grown up with excellent public transportation outside the US, I can tell you I'd much rather ride a car than ever enter a bus again. Public transportation is great when it allows me to skip traffic (subway), but buses are just worse versions of cars; in theory I could be reading while in the bus, but in practice there is too much vibration for me to read comfortably. Also, you have to share a seat with a random person, waste time waiting for the bus (and inefficient routes depending on where you're going) and often deal with crowds.
Turn up the temp, listen to music, stop at a random restaurant or historical site, go car camping on a whim, pick up someone from the airport, buy and get furniture on marketplace, buy a week of groceries for my family, tow my RV etc. It’s an endless list of things and I can’t imagine being hamstrung by walking and using public transport to do things. We have a large country and do way more things than the average European.
If you are from a country built around cars, then your life has been shaped to want and do the things built around a car, and discount or ignore the things you can't do.
When you drive, you can't step into the dining car and grab some lunch and a beer while you catch up on podcasts as the scenery goes passing by, like you can in a long distance train.
When you're stuck with a car you can't make day walking trips from village to village, unless you plan to make a circle to get back to your car. Doing something like the Pilgrims’ Way, a 10 day pilgrimage walk from Winchester to Canterbury, is right out.
Gud is from Switzerland, where there is no need to pick someone up from the airport because all of the airports have excellent transit connections.
I guess you won't visit a random restaurant or historical site in Zermatt, as that's one of the car-free places in Switzerland, and the train you'll take likely won't have the temperature set at the warmth you require.
When you're in a place built for cars, you expect stores to be far away, so need to buy in bulk since you only want to shop for a week. When you are on a place built for walking, stores are also in walking distance, and you can easily go every day or two. But even if you don't want that, grocery stores can deliver - friends of mine in the UK got a bulk Tesco delivery every week.
For that matter, the last few times we got furniture we paid someone to move it for us - I've never had a car big enough to move more than a couple of chairs or some flat pack box from IKEA.
The US has "soccer moms" because their younger teens essentially require a chauffeur to do any after-school activity. For some that idea of being chained to the kids' free time activities is great, to others it's a nightmare. In places with good mass transit, kids have more freedom to travel on their own and be independent.
I dunno. It seems like the Europeans I know have done a lot of things. It helps they have 4-6 weeks of vacation time. And Portugal to Norway is quite a long way.
And, cars take time. They need to be maintained, you need figure out insurance, if there's something wrong you need to get it fixed, and have backup transportation. You've got to deal with traffic jams, you've got to figure who is the DD for the night if you go out drinking with friends, if you get kids you might have to buy a new car - it's an endless list things.
It's not that simple. We rebuilt our cities around the car. Without changing our cities, there is no substitution for cars.
We need to rebuild our cities. Eliminating cars and adding sidewalks isn't enough; without density, you have nowhere to walk to, and transit doesn't scale.
As you just pointed out the tax alone is still about 100% of the base cost. Not many goods are the US are taxed like that. It works because it's a universal good.
"On average, as of April 2019, state and local taxes and fees add 34.24 cents to gasoline and 35.89 cents to diesel, for a total US volume-weighted average fuel tax of 52.64 cents per gallon for gas and 60.29 cents per gallon for diesel" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
Note that the wholesale price does not include the cost to deliver to the gas station or nor storage and dispensing costs at the station, so the percentage at point of sale will be slower than these numbers.
Cigarettes are not a universal good. There is a federal excise tax on cigarettes of $1.01 per pack and state taxes from $0.17/pack in Missouri to $5.35/pack in New York, plus possible city taxes. "As of 2011, Phillip Morris lists total government revenue, including federal, state, local, and sales taxes, as 55% of the estimated retail price of a pack of cigarettes in the United States" and "[WHO] estimates that taxes make up 42.5% of the cost of a pack of cigarettes in the U.S." Numbers and quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_taxes_in_the_United_....
Note that the additional 33% is on top of sales tax, meaning the total tax on sugary drinks was more than 33%.
So both cigarettes and sugary drinks (in some areas) have a higher tax rate than gasoline.
Bear in mind that some of the fuel tax is used defray the high cost of car infrastructure; "defray" because most of the infrastructure cost is paid by sources other than fuel taxes.
Car-dependency is a city planning issue, first and foremost. We destroyed the cores of our cities, demolishing block after block of buildings to raise interstates and parking lots.
You will never eliminate car-dependency in rural areas, and you can at best remove the need for it in suburbs with mixed-use zoning (i.e. corner stores and cafes), better funded public transit, and sidewalks.
Cities should first stop expanding interstates and look to remove them entirely. There is absolutely no need to have an interstate through urban cores. Next, you need to redesign streets to make the car part narrower and the sidewalks wider. And you need to repeal zoning ordinances that ban anything but single family homes on 80% of urban residential land. It's ridiculous that there exist single family homes within walking distance of the downtown of cities with a population in the millions when under a properly zoned system, there would be mid-rises.
Rural areas will never be free from car-dependency. Suburbs need light modifications to mixed-use zoning policies and transit, as well as infeasibly high taxes. Urban areas, where walkability should be most feasible, have to remove highways through cores, repeal oppressive zoning laws, and prioritize walkability.
The actual policies are rather straightforward. There are plenty of countries that planned around the automobile and later reverted this mistake, so there exist many playbooks for achieving this worthy goal. Unfortunately, the problem is political rather than technical: too many people are invested in the automobile for a lot of good reasons, and too many people are invested in the current land use regime which make automobiles necessary.
So you want to force everyone to walk and bike and give up the conveniences of a private vehicle? Why not just mandate that everyone has to do compulsory exercise everyday instead if we’re going to be paternalistic like that.
"Why shouldn't they buy cars if they want cars?" is a loaded question.
Why do they 'want' cars? For many people it is the only reasonable means of transport. We know even from comments in this thread that some of the people who "want" cars now would prefer alternatives.
When you speak of force, remember that alternatives were often taken away by force, as when a walkable part of town (often where poor and/or black people lived) was torn up to create a highway.
Speaking of paternalism; zoning, backed by the force of law, prevents people from building a granny flat, and prevents someone from converting their garage into a neighborhood corner shop. Paternalism is why we have so many outsized parking space mandates. Paternalism is why modern suburban sprawl is subsidized over old-style compact and walkable so-called streetcar suburbs.
If you are really against paternalism, help get rid of these paternalistic zoning laws, like laws which end up forcing most people to live in single family homes even when they would not want to pay for such expensive housing if other options existed. (And no, not all zoning laws are paternalistic. Don't build a toxic chemical processing plant in a residential area.)
The population density in most areas doesn't make it economically viable. In many area the climate makes biking a messy proposition of needing shower after a ride, or to put on a bunch of rain gear etc. vs a car where you just take a shower in the morning, get in your dry car and exit clean for the office etc..
Cars are just too nice, especially when there is bad weather and once you have one, you may as well use it. You would need to have people ok with being outside in the winter for example and walking on ice.
Yes, I'm not sure why some people have trouble understanding this. I like the quiet suburban/rural life, which necessitates cars. I happen to like cars, so this works great for me.
Some people might like the city life and choose not to get a car, and that's great. They should do that.
As long as neither group is forced to subsidize the other, I don't see why we can't all get what we want.
Anecdotally among friends working in NYC, people don't walk as frequently as they used to because they're not commuting into the office 5 days per week (which generally involves 10-20m of walking). Some are working totally remote out of their apartments, others hybrid 3 days per week.
But on the flip side, some are spending that saved commuting time on exercising more, and are healthier for the change.
I read the article and it didn't sound like any point they were making couldn't be explained as 'well we were in a pandemic during that time, and also people shifted to working from home more, so they weren't forced to move as much'.
Even the uptick in 2022 can be explained with 'well we were coming out of a pandemic, and there was an RTO push, but still bad habits are from before are hard to break'.
The article says that biking increased and walking decreased. I don't think I can explain those things simultaneously with just "well we were in a pandemic during that time."
Wait, what? This is literally not the point of research. The point of research is to form some theory and gather data that is relevant, and then analyze statistically. Plus propose follow up theories and studies.
This is how almost every research publication in every field - from medicine, through psychology, to computer science looks like.
I'm curious as to _how_ the data was collected for this report. Did they use camera feed data? Walk-button push counts? HR rideshare incentive data? Sending out surveys?
The article talked about trips -- but I didn't see any differentiation between commutes to work and walking in the park, for example.
I had the same question. The "source" of this information, StreetLight Data, does have a functioning website and an impressive customer list, though it mostly invokes "big data" to explain what it does.
Poking a little further, it sounds as if they're aggregating smartphone data, though we're not told much about how they get it, or how they adjust for people walking with or without their phones on.
As a driver and pedestrian, I swear I see people staring at their phones while driving.
Probably need phone cupholders — phone locks up unless it’s mounted in its slot and enters CarPlay mode. Have to do it for passengers too, since can’t differentiate
A big thing that concerns me is the absurd levels of tint people are putting on their windows.
I bought a used car last year that came with 20% all around, and I removed it from the front windows almost immediately. It was so insanely hard to see outside at night properly, especially in dim or unlit areas. How do people with less than that see? I guess they don’t.
I honestly wouldn't walk around in most U.S. cities, with all the street violence and homelessness plaguing the nation. Drug needles everywhere, trash, human feces. Why take the risk?
I haven't observed a substantial change in the last four years in the cities I live in and frequent. If anything, my neck of the woods in Chicago has improved a bit... not that it was ever a poo-riddled wasteland to begin with.
I’m sure it’s totally unrelated to the increase of street junkies and urban crime resulting from the post 2020 “reimagined” policing in many major cities.
What major cities have "reimagined" policing exactly, and in what way? Why would that be related to walking, especially as the first thing that comes to mind for you?
I suppose if you’re not American you may not know there was a defund the police movement in 2020 along with decriminalization of “urban camping” around the same time. As a result there are less police on the streets, more crime, and many more mentally ill and addicted homeless. See my home town of Austin, Texas for example. Just yesterday a teenager was hacked by a machete maniac at our town lake. Sane people are now more hesitant to walk many of our popular streets. As a side note, traffic on pedestrian fatalities are up because the mentally disturbed and intoxicated junkies wander into traffic fairly often.
There was a decent amount of _talk_ for some time by mostly fringe figures. What major police departments were in _any_ way defunded by any stretch? None. Not one.
> along with decriminalization of “urban camping” around the same time
Again, where and exactly how?
What actually happened is largely that conservative news spent the year talking up crime and blaming the non-existent increase on their favored political foes.
I suppose there were no full-on defunding, but it does look like there was some reduction in funding, which (from the article) is a trend reversal [1]
> With public pressure on them, mayors and city councils responded. In 2020 budget votes, advocacy groups won over $840m in direct cuts from US police departments
> Portland, Oregon, cut $15m from its budget
> Austin, Texas, has made some of the most dramatic changes in the country, directly cutting roughly $20m from the police department
....so after all of that effort to create walkable cities, remove car lanes for bike lanes etc. this is where we end up? Not sure if trying to create more walkways, removing traffic lanes for bike etc. are the answer if this is the net result.
What effort? Most US cities are complete garbage for walkability.
When I lived in Germany, I'd see little towns of a few hundred people that were more dense and walkable than US cities 100x their size.
And bikability is even worse, sub-garbage level. People don't do it because it appears to be insanely dangerous because our infrastructure is generally shit tier, like painted bike lanes (though off street trails are often okay, where they exist).
People are mostly rational when choosing day to day transportation options. If biking was supported well they'd do it. But it's not, so they don't.
All the "Vision Zero" announcements were mostly politicians doing politician things with no real oomph behind them. There are things that can be done quickly and effectively, but the political will usually isn't there due to our horrible cultural momentum.
The problem with mass transit in the US is that the US has a lot of wide open spaces and most places do not have the population density to make it economically feasable.
In Atlanta, for example, many parts have been removing car lanes for bike lanes and parking has become a real problem in some neighborhoods. Places that used to be free to park in charge a small fortune at times and there are not as many options to park your car in these areas.
Instead of doing development with adequate parking, they don't provide enough and charge a fortune for what we have. Between the climate and the poor mass transit it is the worst of both worlds but hey.
When I was visiting downtown Austin recently it seemed like a similar story from what I observed.
I'm not from the US, but I do follow the issue due to the US-centric nature of internet culture. From what I understand, it is a bit of a catch-22:
- You cannot make public transport a feasible option because
- Most places do not have the population density required because
- Places are designed in a car-centric manner, with strict zoning laws that enforce low-density suburbia because
- Everyone has a car because
- Public transport sucks because
- You cannot make public transport a feasible option because
To me, the solution to the problem you state is not more parking, but less cars. Break the cycle.
The reasoning is reverted: people want houses where they won't be bothered by neighbors and won't bother neighbors thus they limit density via zoning. They don't build houses on big lots just so they had a reason to drive.
It's true that low density handicaps us in some ways, but
1. That's an entirely intentional choice. A big country means you'll inevitably have lots of space between cities, not within them. Our metro areas are low density due to zoning regulations that we intentionally chose. Most residential areas in the US, building densely is literally illegal.
2. You could still have decent biking in many suburban and urban areas even with current density levels. Just takes protected bike lanes and intersections (and the occasional off street trail) but we don't do that. Instead you get painted bike lanes in the door zone as drivers buzz you two feet away. Of course hardly anybody bikes in those circumstances, they don't have a death wish.
In my native bay area, I'd see painted, unprotected bike lanes on goddamn expressways where cars are going 50+ mph, it's completely insane! Who the hell thought this was a good idea?? That's how dumb and bad bike infrastructure commonly is in the US, it's one step away from Futurama-style suicide booths.
I could totally be off base here but the more frequently you need to make a trip, the less likely you want to drive to complete it, and therefore pine for something in close distance, regardless if you have access to an automobile or not.
Specifically, in the context of retail, what a retailer stocks (e.g. in a supermarket) or produces (e.g. a sandwich shop) is a function of how much space they have to pay for and how many customers they can get through the door.
For example, our expectation of a supermarket is one that carries everything we may possibly want on our grocery list. Whereas our expectation of a regular market, is the limited selection that covers most of what we need. Apologies for the contrived example but the point I’m trying to make is those of us who live in denser areas are used to walking to one of these locations, or making more frequent trips, or both, but it’s not the same feeling for the other.
Putting a bike lane next to a supermarket isn’t going to dramatically increase the number of cyclists nor customer foot traffic in relation to what the store already receives. The people coming to a large supermarket are potentially buying a large weight of items across different categories.
Even if there was a targeted approach that was marketed towards cyclists (“50% off your entire order if you show up in a helmet and racing attire”, or something extreme of that nature), I don’t think that would move the needle meaningfully because the resulting transactions wouldn’t achieve a hypothetical ideal kg-per-customer ratio (or even a repeat customer multiplier).
This would create a situation in which the store has too much product or if you go in the opposite direction of purchasing less product: unappealing empty shelves.
So as long as retail density remains low due to limits on how small a landlord is willing to subdivide available space for a tenant, the retailers will continue to engage in business activity that potentially encourages driving via loading up bulk/heavy items, or casting a very large advertising net to attract people outside of walking/biking distance to pack a place. Both of which the end goal is to at least cover their overhead.
When you examine dense European cities, I’m not sure you find retail shops that have the same square footage compared to American retail shops. They’re sized (and configured) to cover their overhead by servicing a small amount of customers at a time. If you were to offer an American-sized lease to a European retailer, my guess is they would turn it down unless they were already a very, very popular spot with lines out of the door.
In these conversations, I think the general focus should be on what’s occupying the physical destination (and its size) rather than availability/quality of public transit. Since in some places, the transit exists but the impetus to actually use it is minimal.
It's definitely a multi-faceted problem. As you say, you usually need higher density to support more frequent, smaller format stores.
Although you do see some smaller grocery stores in the US: Aldi, Lidl, and Trader Joe's come to mind. I live close enough to a Safeway, Trader Joe's and a Whole Foods for biking to be viable, and I have an ebike, but I don't bike there. Why not? The bike infrastructure is shit to get there, and parking lot/front of store area is not designed for bikes at all. Fix those two things and I'd start biking.
The flip side is that it's more convenient and faster to do it.
Biking to local grocery stores and getting through them when I lived in Munich was generally much faster than doing the same now that I'm in a typical US suburb using a car. Getting onto and off a bike, parking it, and getting from there into the store is much faster than the equivalent for a car. Finding things and getting through the store is also much faster than in the US because it's smaller. In total, grocery trips for basics tended to go significantly faster there.
Pedestrian fatalities are up in pretty much every metro, so this isn't a meaningful signal. It's still worth pursuing banning high-fatality vehicles from urban areas.
You don't think increasing pedestrian fatalities could be linked to people choosing to walk less? I've certainly noticed in my area that drivers have been much more aggressive since the pandemic started and I walk less because of it.
It seems that many of the cities that invested in those ideas had improvements.
However, compared to 2021, 18 metros observed an increase in walking activity in 2022, with California metros dominating nine out of the top ten spots. New York City ranked 10th
