About the appeal - it depends on your cultural background. Here are some other ways people from different backgrounds think about this (not necessarily consistent with each other):
* A private car is bulky and noisy, bicycles and pedestrians aren't.
* Lazy people drive in cars, healthy people walk or cycle.
* A private car removes you from society, while using public transport/walking puts you with a group of peers, and cycling is a bit more singular but you're still surrounded by your peers with no physical barrier. So using a private car is somewhat disdainful towards the rest of society.
* A car is either a truck for people who need it to move things around, or if its a private car - it's probably some young man wasting his money to feel macho.
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”
- Gustavo Petro
Although I much prefer the adaption: "A prosperous country is not a place where everyone has a car, but one where everyone meets in public transit".
After all, prosperity is more than development, and there is something very accurate about meeting in public transit. When your richest person and poorest person are both around each other, it is a huge empathogenic.
How realistic is that for a big country (USA) that is really big & sparsely populated in lots of spots outside of major metro areas?
(Disclaimer: I’ve drive only 5k miles a year, and actually just sold my car, since I prefer walking & PT... but I live in a giant city where that’s a legit option)
The sparse bits are by definition sparsely populated. And the size of the country is for most trips irrelevant. You don't drive across half your country just because. You drive to work, and the shops and you only have the same 24 hours in a day the same as everyone else, so its the same upper bound. This[1] suggests the US has fairly short commutes, so it would seem country size is irrelevant for that at least.
Pretty much every major metro is lacking in transport so starting there is great. Halting development in wildlands and favoring growth around transit infrastructure is the next move. The sparsely populated areas are just that and are a drop in the bucket compared to people who live in areas that absolutely should have excellent transit and biking infrastructure.
The united states only has a handful of 'large' cities. Most cities with larve populations are only populated because they encompass large geographies. A large city shouldn't be defined by population but by density and the united states has very few dense cities. Maybe only new York, Philadelphia, washington DC, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston, and even some of those are a stretch.
But that's the ultimate problem to solve. Build dense cities, and people will (a) want to live there and (b) will want to use transit and (c) transit will make the most sense. The city density issue is one completely controlled by the government. Developers are incentivized to produce high-density housing, because it yields more money. Cities don't want it.
Do people who don't own or have interest in owning a car really get that upset about other people's choices? The way you've worded those makes it sounds like they're feeling pretty judgemental.
I live in SF, previously Chicago, and I'm annoyed everyday at:
* I have to cross large streets that have been built for cars all the time
* Public transport sucks
* The city is against other modes of transportation like kick scooters and people comolain about how much space they take when you have large cars parked everywhere
* Because people move in cars, no area is really densed. Restaurants and bars are miles apart.
* Because few people take the bus, there are all sorts of crazies there. I took the bus twice when I moved here and almost got beatten up the first time, witnessed someone getting mugged the second time. I'll never take the bus again here.
* When I'm in the shuttle, and the traffic is freaking slow, I look outside the window and see one person per car. Why don't more people take shuttles instead of taking so much space on the road? Well there is no public transport.
* Noise, noise, noise
* The roads are all broken. Shuttle rides are uber bumpy.
I think this is nuts. I lived in san Francisco for many years and the entire city is accessible by public tranit. The city is even building more like the new subway line.
And Chicago takes the cake for crazies on buses. Ive never felt so unsafe on a bus as Chicago.
Id rank san Francisco's situation on par with londons core urban areas. Maybe you're also including the surrounding burbs?
Which line were you on? I take a bus to work every day in Chicago, and I've felt unsafe maybe once or twice. Definitely felt way less safe walking through downtown SF with the homeless population heckling me for my soda.
Chicago's public transit ranks much, much higher than SF's. The fact that you compared it to London shows just how conceited you are.
I don't think that's quite the word you're looking for.
We took the bus from downtown to UChicago. The express was fine, but on the way back on the regular, going through south side. It was way worse than SF.
That being said, the commuter buses in Chicago and the L were basically as nice as any other respectable public transit option.
> The fact that you compared it to London
In both cities I have lived near the downtown core. In both cities I was able to get mostly where I wanted to go in under an hour, within and immediately surrounding the city. SF is moderately better in that, within an hour and a half on public transit I can not only visit the city, but also wilderness in Marin county.
> Chicago's public transit ranks much, much higher than SF's
I don't buy most 'rankings'. Portland, where I live now, is supposed to have one of the best transit systems on the west coast. We're looking for neighborhoods to live in. From one neighborhood six miles from downtown, it would take me one hour by bus to reach the city. In SF, I have lived in the city, but I've also lived in Silicon Valley (~ 40 miles away, but still only an hour to SF via Caltrain), and in Marin (~15 miles away in San Rafael, but still only an hour to the city). Still, Portland for some reason is ranked higher. Portland is about on par with Los Angeles. The system is slow. Something is wrong with most rankings IMO.
But what would I know, I'm just some guy who's lived in a bunch of cities, and never commuted by car to work, ever.
You're in luck, I also lived in London before moving to SF. Daring comparing these two cities public transport is FUD. I've never taken a cab in London, bus and some metro lines are 24/7. Public transportation of SF and the bay is a joke if you've ever been outside the US.
Yes, I do agree the 24/7 thing is very annoying. Although living in Marin for the past few years, it's weird because bus service to/from SF is actually 24/7 there. But, it's totally misplaced.
Within the city though, for everyday tasks, SF is basically on par with most cities in the world. Most cities do not have 24/7 transit.
It's your personal choice only if you don't expect to have (non-congested) public roads and parking spaces for your car. Space in cities is shared and finite, so something has to give.
When I visit U.S. I'm shocked how much of city space is sacrificed to seas of asphalt and mountains of dull concrete. Multiple very wide lanes cutting cities into inaccessible islands, making everything spaced further apart. Where I'd expect to have a 5-minute stroll by a park to a local cafe, it turns out to be a dangerous 30-minute walk through viaducts and parking lots to a mall.
It depends a lot on where you go to. The cities of the NEC (Boston-Washington axis), along with Chicago and (to a lesser degree) San Francisco are generally pretty hostile to cars and have dense and compact cores. There's a tranche of cities that are trying to develop more towards that transit-heavy/car-lite scenario, which includes Seattle and Portland (and surprisingly, Los Angeles, but they have a long way to go). Then there's the cities that embraced the automobile and have blocks of nothing but parking in their downtown--Kansas City is one of the worst offenders here. And of course the suburbs tend to lean heavily into the space-wasting, automobile-centric design.
It's quite striking just how compact things are in the first set of cities compared to the automobile-centered places elsewhere in the US. Apple's spaceship campus is about the size of downtown Providence. Or, if you impose it on Midtown Manhattan, it would cover the entire area between Penn Station, Grand Central, Broadway, and the Empire State Building (which incidentally houses more employees by itself than Apple's campus does).
The reflexive, condescending erasure of the advantages and necessities of owning a car on the part of wealthy Bay Area urbanites is illuminating as to why some people get pissed off enough to roll coal.
Thinking that everything is about you and your diesel F-250 that you genuinely need for work is the very definition of narcissism. I am willingly to guess, however, that a very large number of people I saw on the way to work here in the 'burbs this morning did not require a two ton wheelchair to get to their place of employment.
The cultural background you're describing isn't a "background", it's an attitude/viewpoint (I'm not sure what to call it) that is only popular among people mostly of/above a certain wealth threshold (poor people wish they could have cars) living in certain urban areas (the ones that have a high cost of car ownership and good alternative options) mostly located in the US and Europe. For everyone else in the world driving around in a luxury car in the city is a symbol of wealth.
There is also no "back" to it. If you traveled back in time to the 90s with that opinion you'd be lucky to encounter anyone other than the most die hard public transit proponents sharing it even in the aforementioned urban areas.
Just because you and the people around you hold an opinion today does not make it a cultural background.
Edit: Is my opinion wrong or have I just struck a nerve?
* A private car is bulky and noisy, bicycles and pedestrians aren't. * Lazy people drive in cars, healthy people walk or cycle. * A private car removes you from society, while using public transport/walking puts you with a group of peers, and cycling is a bit more singular but you're still surrounded by your peers with no physical barrier. So using a private car is somewhat disdainful towards the rest of society. * A car is either a truck for people who need it to move things around, or if its a private car - it's probably some young man wasting his money to feel macho.