Why would you want to own a car if you could avoid it?
(correction applied)
Because I can go wherever I want, whenever I want, with my whole family (pets included), with a trunkful of cargo, as I see fit.
I keep a bunch of gear in my car which makes me pretty much independent. No way I'd be hauling "go camping on a moment's notice" stuff and other equipment everywhere on the bus. Nor would I have the basic equipment to fix the bus should it break down.
7 years ago, awaiting dinner sitting at the bar at Longhorns and halfway thru a margarita around 9PM, my wife suggested we go see a new litter of puppies from our dog's breeder. Called to ensure we could, and minutes later we were making the 1,000 mile drive there. Next morning little Crossley was part of the family.
Personal long-range transport is very freeing. Mass transit & communication devices may be convenient, but rely more on others than some of us are comfortable with.
Because I can go wherever I want, whenever I want, with my whole family (pets included), with a trunkful of cargo, as I see fit.
But at very high cost, per The High Cost of Free Parking, and at high time costs: I'm struck by the way that, when I lived in Tucson, it took seemingly 30 or 40 minutes to get anywhere. Now I live in New York City and it takes about the same, but the default transportation mode is different!
In my own experience, if you're working outside peak commuting hours, public transport is horrible. Take a cold winter, services 20 minutes apart. One service is missed, cancelled, whatever, you're now there for 40 minutes waiting for your bus. Of course, you don't know that the service is missed, you're just waiting at a pole. And in my case, it was a connecting service, so repeat the process for the second leg of the journey. Sometimes it would have been just as fast to walk the 75 minutes home - though of course, there's no way of knowing from the outset.
My housemates were dyed-in-the-wool public transport users, the 'everything we need' variety, and then I went overseas for three months in which they had use of my car. On return, "we're getting our own car". Driving crosstown for a commute is faster than the 15-minute walk to the bus, the two-leg bus/train commute, and the 10-minute walk from the station.
Carrying your groceries on public transport sucks. Apart from a handful of cities, post-midnight travel sucks. Cancelled services suck. Being squished into someone else's armpit during peak commute sucks. Having to commute (walk) to your commute (bus) then commute again (walk) sucks when the weather is bad. Public transport with more than one leg in the trip sucks. Public transport that doesn't go where you want to go sucks.
Public transport is awesome and there should be much more investment in it, but there are a ton of reasons why personal cars are fantastic.
Bear in mind that you're comparing mostly-decent road transport to generally-awful public transport.
Buses, for example, suck - they're always going to be a worse experience than a car (walking 10+ minutes to the stop at each end + waiting, to be stuck in exactly the same traffic).
Now if public transport had the same investment as private, it'd be a different kettle of fish. Take a look at http://carfree.com/intro_cfc.html and http://carfree.com/topology.html as an example of what might be possible with rail and sufficient political will. <5 minutes to a train stop, <30 minutes to anywhere else, <5 minutes to your final destination == max 40 minute trip in a city of 1M people.
This. I live in Berlin, which invested heavily in public transportation over the decades, leading the majority of my friends to not even having a drivers license (me included).
You can get anywhere pretty much anytime, often considerably faster than taking a car, especially on day time when you easily spend 30min just looking for a spot.
Plus if you combine public transport with a decent bike - no car will ever beat you in this city.
Sure, cars suck for some scenarios. Bikes and public transport work much better there. Frankly, I don't like living in those conditions.
Bikes and public transport suck for other scenarios. Right now I'd spend more time just walking to & from bus stops than my entire commute, and biking the 15 miles to work would get me killed by the end of the week.
Live where it suits you. Ticks me off that the public transport crowd wants to actively deny me both my money and preferred mode of transport, when I wish to deny them nothing but my involvement.
I'm struck by the way that, when I lived in Tucson, it took seemingly 30 or 40 minutes to get anywhere.
I'm currently staying in Tucson for a brief spell, and I am struck by the very same thing! It's kinda crazy. I certainly don't live in a completely walkable city neighborhood back east, but I can be at the office in ~25 minutes on my bike, and most errands can be done on my bike or my scooter.
As for high costs, I think it's all a trade-off, right? We're a one car family (I've never actually driven to work in 15+ years), but we travel extensively in our VW van. So, the benefits we get from owning it out-weigh the costs. That said, I've applied the same analysis to owning a car for getting to work--it's far cheaper, and more enjoyable, for me to bike (and occasionally take the bus) rather than deal with another vehicle. I suspect most car-bound commuters (or suburbanites who must drive 15-30 minutes to get anywhere) have done similar math in their head (or on paper), and decided that the benefits of location and car ownership out-weight the costs. Of course, plenty of those folks also likely complain about gas prices and traffic, too!
There are so many different factors in those two situations that they're barely comparable.
Yes, there are many costs associated with car ownership, and I'm sure there are some in terms of behavior that that book may describe. But depending on where you live there are also costs to not owning a car, including the inability to get anywhere, either at all or in a timely manner.
I'm looking forward to living in a city (thought not in the US) and going without for a while, but the only reason I'll try it is because I know I'm going somewhere with vastly better public transportation and in proximity to the things I need and want to do.
Living without a car makes sense for some people, in some places, in some situations. Sometimes, though, expensive or not, it just doesn't.
Even in Japan if you only rely on Public Transportation (and you probably have heard its one of the best out there, worldwide), there are a number of situation where it just does not work. For example: you want to come back later than 11h30 pm ? Bad luck, most of the metro/train lines have stopped.
Or, there's usually always a way to get from point A to B with public transport, but unless you go to major stations or hubs you need to change several times, take an additional bus and walk an additional x minutes. It's very tiring and inefficient, and costly as well, because public transports aren't subsidized here as much as in Europe for example.
And of course, if you ever want to carry something large and heavy with you, welcome to hell, with a number of stations with no elevators and just stairs, and lack of space in trains to even put your stuff.
It's fairly obvious there are excellent use cases for having a car. Or at least renting one when you need it.
ANd that's not even considering : confort, risk of viral transmission (did you take this in account when considering the cost on society ?) and freedom aspects.
Yes, although owning, driving, and parking a car in Japan are not pleasant experiences, either. I remember one drive in particular when traffic was stalled so badly people were just leaving their cars idle to go pee on the side of the road.
I do think the most ideal setup would be public transport for most occasions combined with car rentals / delivery for large items.
Well - he made it easy for you because based on how he phrased it, you only had to come up with one reason cars are good. You picked some low-hanging fruit (not an ad hominem attack; your reasoning is sound). Cars are a clear solution to certain problems.
That said, I think that these reasons tend to diminish when contrasted with the downsides (not that it matters, but I do own a car, and am not just trying to shill the other side). Example: having a car also contributes to the degeneration of the city. This is a point well-illustrated in the original article. Is it worth owning a car when it is intrinsically tied to urban sprawl and the decay of cultural vibrance? Ownership comes at a cost.
I, too, like to go wherever I want. But it doesn't mean that every active member of the society HAS TO own one. I adore the freedom it gives me on nights/week-ends. But we don't need 2/3 cars per family. Carshare has something to offer too. I am not against cars, but it's way too unbalanced towards cars. Drivers should bear the costs of their habits and not out-source them. City centers must be made more liveable for urban dwellers. That means less surface parking, reducing parking minimums, paid parking, more bike paths, street designs with lower deisgn speed...
Some want to live in the suburbs, no one can oppose that, we are free to do so. But if you want to live in a liveable urban neighborhood, this choice needs to be catered too.
> Why would you want to own a car if you could avoid it?
I used to live approximately half a mile from the epicenter of the 6.7 magnitude Northridge earthquake. I was actually at my desk programming at 4:31AM when it hit. It was, by far, the most violent quake I have ever experienced. The vertical component was brutal. It actually shot me up off my chair when it compressed the height adjusting air cylinder and propelled me upwards. I have this vivid memory of being up in the air along with all the books in the bookcases surrounding my desk. The lights went out. We all came down. The shaking begun.
Anyhow, after it stopped I was covered in a pile of books. I made sure everyone was OK, found my car keys and got out of the house. I threw some tools int the back of the car and immediately drove near CSUN where my girlfriend lived and picked her up. Her place was trashed. We helped a few of her neighbors. We gave a few of them rides to nearby friends and family. We also visited some of our friends in the neighborhood to make sure they were OK. Being the guy with a garage full of tools, I probably helped a dozen, if not two dozen, people with various issues from gas main shutoffs to broken water pipes and a whole range of other things that happen during a bad quake. In the days that followed we helped get water and supplies to those in need and generally made ourselves useful to the extent possible. Of course, we had our own issues to deal with, which required frequent trips to the hardware store to haul construction materials.
After that incident I never go to sleep without my gas tank at least half full and never leave my car keys on a table (because I had to dig them out of a pile of stuff when all of it went to the floor). My car was the single most valuable tool during that incident.
Many years later. Now married, living elsewhere, with a young child and a couple of dogs in tow our neighborhood was surrounded by fire. The hills around us just went up in flames. We were told evacuation was imminent. My wife, kid and dogs went into our two SUV's while I went in and out of the house prioritizing what to bring into the cars. We actually had to drive a block away from our home before we were told the situation had reversed and we could go back.
I realize these are extreme examples, but to say that public transportation is all you need is kind of unreasonable. It's almost like saying that the police force is all you need in order to keep you and your family safe. As a tourist I've always enjoyed public transport in Europe. Love it. If I lived there I would most certainly own a car or two. Public transport isn't going to be there when you need it most.
With the advent of electric cars a whole new set of possibilities starts to open up. Electrics with long range capabilities have something no liquid fuel vehicle can offer: easily convertible energy that --with the right equipment-- is compatible with the needs of any home. In the event of an emergency your electric SUV's could very well power your home and basic necessities such as lights, cooking and keeping food safe.
What if you didn't had your car? Would you have lost any property, or have anyone harmed?
Assuming not having your care would have been bad, what is the frequency of such events? Are they, say, more frequent than serious car crashes?
Not to mention the sheer costs of having most people owning their own car, compared to a decent public transportation system (which doesn't exist, I know). Even if cars save more lives than they crush, this money could go to more efficient life-saving effort, such as medical research, or existential risks mitigation.
It's all cost and benefit. Don't let your personal experience get in the way of numbers. They may be abstract, but at that scale, they matter more than your own family.
The problem with decent public transportation in the US is that our cities were not designed for it.
Just one look at a megalopolis like Los Angeles and it becomes clear there's almost no way to exist without your own car outside of a narrow set of locations and life styles.
If you are a single guy or gal living and working in Santa Monica and can bike to work, well, life is good.
The minute you move away from those areas, turn into a family with multiple kids things change. Work might no longer be a bike ride away.
Work for many is anywhere from thirty to sixty miles away from home. Each adult in the family is likely to work at a very different location. Schools are not centralized. You have separate elementary, middle and high schools. Many families have kids in all three at the same time. This means potentially driving and picking-up kids from three different schools at three different locations every day.
Look at Silicon Valley and their commute scenarios.
In general terms, yes, I agree, good mass transportation would be good for many reasons. In practical terms this dream is not really attainable without major structural, cultural and labor changes in most US cities. This, for all intents and purposes, probably means this is a pipe dream.
The original article explains it well. It's okay to own a car, maybe even one per adult in the household (though I would advocate greater car sharing). The original article's point is using the right tool for the job. In your cases the car was the right tool. For many people, especially city dwellers, you can leave your car at home and ride a bicycle for your daily city commutes. If everyone physically able followed this rule.. We'll, we'd probably look a lot like Sweden or those other uber bike friendly European places.
> For many people, especially city dwellers, you can leave your car at home
I do one better: I work from home now. When I had an outside office it was less than five miles away. Now I try to concatenate as many trips as possible into a single loop. Works out well most of the time.
If Tesla hadn't screwed-up the electric SUV design I would have bought in. I'll have to wait for another company to get it right. That's what's missing in my life right now, an honest electric powered SUV. Short of doing a conversion on something like a Suburban I'll have to wait for something like that to become commercially available. Shame that Tesla decided to go for a Gucci-bat-mobile instead of building a true sports-utility vehicle. I have a horrible feeling their SUV is going to be a failure. I hope I am wrong.
I don't understand your last paragraph at all. Inverters aren't all that expensive and will run all those basic necessities you mention from a normal gas-powered car.
Something like a Tesla has some 80+kW available at 500V. This is very different from running an inverter off a 12V lead acid battery. This is power at an entirely different scale. As battery technology evolves I can easily see cars, and particularly trucks, having far more than 80 kW available. A household with a couple of cars would, effectively, have a roving UPS that could provide lots of power during any time of need.
Heck, even a camping trip could change radically if surplus electrical power is available from your electric vehicle. I don't know about you, but I'd rather cook my food with electric power at the campsite than burn wood or charcoal. Over the last year or so I've convinced myself there's very little you can do with a BBQ that you can't do with a skillet and an oven. I am actually considering getting rid of my outdoor BBQ.
The Tesla has a 60 or 85kWh battery. The h is important; it's capacity, not power output. The power output is actually much higher, up to 310kW. But of course that means that if you run it at full bore, you'll only get about 16 minutes out of it. In any case, that kind of power output is vast overkill. A typical house only needs a few hundred watts, and that's easily provided with an inverter on a normal car. So again, I don't really see the advantage here, since both can do the job fine. One major difference is that when your electric car runs out of electricity you are screwed until the power comes back on, while a gas car can potentially be refilled. Even if the gas stations are down, you can stockpile gasoline, while you can't really stockpile electricity.
Don't know where you live but "a few hundred Watts" would only power my computers.
I keep a couple of deep cycle 12V batteries fully charged in the garage. We typically use them as power sources for chargin LiPo's for electric model aircraft at the field or to power the glider launch winch. A nice side effect is that the are available for emergency power if ever needed. I still have a 4 kW propane generator because the 12V batteries are simply not enough. I say this from experience not conjecture.
The refrigerator seems like the only real substantial load. I looked that up, and while it'll draw over 1kW when starting, the continuous load is something like 200W for a modern one. Nothing else is in my house is going to approach that. I'm not going to be running desktop computers during an extended outage, and laptops will add a negligible impact. In colder weather I'd want enough power to run the gas furnace, which I imagine is not a ton. Lights can be kept to a reasonable minimum, and you'd want LED bulbs available for all the lights you'd use during an extended outage anyway, and so also won't be a whole lot. Thus: a few hundred watts.
But let's say you need 2kW. (That's not quite double what a normal car can put out, from my quick research. Typical car systems seem to top out around 1200W, give or take.) The Tesla would be able to provide that no problem, of course, but! It'll only do so for about 22 hours before you run the battery all the way down, at which point you have no electricity and no transportation and no way to remedy either until the power comes back on. If you really do need 4kW then your Tesla will last you half a day, which is just about useless. If your needs are low enough that the Tesla battery could last for a couple of days, then you can run off a regular car too.
Giving your preference for buying puppies from a breeder, it's not surprising that your opinions about transportation also only revolve around what you want and not what is moral or best for society or your community.
A "rescue" bit my daughter in the face and very nearly destroyed her eye. I'll stick with pets of known social and medical histories, thank you very much. BTW: having a car meant I could race her to medical help without having to wait for public transportation (aka ambulance).
(correction applied)
Because I can go wherever I want, whenever I want, with my whole family (pets included), with a trunkful of cargo, as I see fit.
I keep a bunch of gear in my car which makes me pretty much independent. No way I'd be hauling "go camping on a moment's notice" stuff and other equipment everywhere on the bus. Nor would I have the basic equipment to fix the bus should it break down.
7 years ago, awaiting dinner sitting at the bar at Longhorns and halfway thru a margarita around 9PM, my wife suggested we go see a new litter of puppies from our dog's breeder. Called to ensure we could, and minutes later we were making the 1,000 mile drive there. Next morning little Crossley was part of the family.
Personal long-range transport is very freeing. Mass transit & communication devices may be convenient, but rely more on others than some of us are comfortable with.