This country has been reconfigured to force almost everyone to drive. Comparing the two on that basis is not fair. Finally, the full cost of car dependence beyond just pollution which is a big one is not bourne by the government but by drivers, just look at the car insurance industry.
Including pedestrians, cyclists and all other forms of transportation that become much more dangerous due to how many cars there are on the road.
Imagine how many people would be biking, riding electric scooters and walking if US cities were actually designed with these modes of transportation in mind.
The good news is that the tide can shift. If you add more bike lanes, people start riding their bikes. People don't like to bike because it's (rightly) perceived as dangerous.
I ride in LA and if you can get a bike lane at all, it's gonna be a faded strip painted 2 feet from the parked cars/along the sewer grates. There needs to be more separation from the batshit drivers here who wouldn't shrug at a hit and run too. Not very inviting, but I can bike all year at least.
I no longer think that bike lanes will get the job done.
Long ago, when I was working in western Tennessee, I noticed that, in that area, the painted bike lanes were almost always on arterial roads. I even found one that was on a stretch of controlled access highway. Asked a colleague who worked for TDOT about that, and it turns out that you could get extra federal money for roads with bike lanes. So of course, the counties would put the bike lanes on the roads that cost the most to maintain, not the ones that made sense for bicycles.
Outside of a few major cities, I suspect that's invariably how bike lanes are going to end up working in the US.
What you could get people on board behind, though, is traffic calming measures. Bill it as fighting back against the hordes of Waze drivers blasting through your neighborhood as a shortcut, and you might be able to get some political momentum behind it. That would then get you to roads that could support mixed traffic without half-assing it by painting cyclists into a thin ghetto full of potholes and broken glass.
And then pair it with movements to get some questions about how to share the road with bicyclists onto the written driving test, so that drivers at least know how to share the road with cyclists. Right now, nobody's telling them, so they genuinely don't know. Even here in Chicago, I've had surprisingly many water cooler conversations where I had to correct a complaining car commuter who thought that it was illegal for all these bikes to be in the road and that they're supposed to stay on the sidewalk.
> how to share the road with bicyclists onto the written driving test, so that drivers at least know how to share the road with cyclists.
That's one of the reasons why the "Share the road" sign is being phased out in favor of the "bikes may use full lane sign".
The proper way to share a lane is in serial fashion, not parallel. This is because lanes are rarely wide enough for a car or truck to pass a cyclist with sufficient distance between the two while both remain within the lane itself.
In fact, many state laws that specify that cyclists must ride as far right as practicable actually have the substandard width lane exception (described above) to that requirement.
The very concept of "traffic calming" is a lie. It's cause for road rage, distraction from watching for pedestrians, slamming brakes, and loud hard-revving engines.
One day when I had reduced ride height due to a tire issue, a "traffic calming" device cracked my oil pan. That was just great for the environment. I leaked carcinogenic used oil all along the way, and then had to get the oil pan replaced. The creation of that new oil pan involved industrial activity that surely was not good for the environment.
Bike lanes are fine on arterial roads if they are separated from traffic well enough. In santa monica they actually give a little room in the bike lane. Arterials get you to places more directly than side streets, that inevitably have to cross 6 lanes of an arterial from a stop sign. Good luck putting a light there without protest.
While that is true, motorcycles are cheaper than cars, but you don't see the majority of people riding motorcycles. Protection from the elements and the ability to carry more cargo is the reason why most people drive cars as opposed to riding bicycles or motorcycles.
Motorcycles are more hassle than both bikes and cars (licensing, attire, helmets) and a WAAAAAAAY more dangerous (about 40 times as likely to die per mile was the figure in the California Motorcycle Safety Course, if memory serves). They're also a pretty big expense since for most people they won't replace a car, and you still need to insure/maintain a motorcycle.
I'm very pro-motorcycle but bicycles have a much lower barrier to entry.
I'll grant you that a car is more convenient for carrying cargo. But with a bike trailer, a bicycle can pretty easily handle most people's cargo requirements—anything from groceries to large appliances like refrigerators. Check out some of these bicycle trailer plans: https://bikecart.pedalpeople.coop
The cargo argument comes up all the time. No, you don't need to buy a truck for the trip to a hardware store. I know some people do, but they often visit the hardware store every day, the majority of people don't. Yet everyone drives a truck up in Montana, I mean so do I, but it was $800 and I can maintain it myself since I bike primarily.
> If you add more bike lanes, people start riding their bikes.
Which may be true, but they encourage cyclists to ride at the edge instead of the middle of the general traffic lane. A motorist not paying attention is going to notice an edge riding cyclist later than they would if they were in the center of the general traffic lane.
> People don't like to bike because it's (rightly) perceived as dangerous.
Not really. Assuming one is riding a bicycle in traffic that's not moving at more than 40 mph, it's not that dangerous at all.
> There needs to be more separation from the batshit drivers here who wouldn't shrug at a hit and run too.
That's a problem with law enforcement, not a problem with the road design. Also, separation doesn't work when there are frequent intersections. It makes more sense to build bike lanes along side arterial roads where traffic is moving in excess of 40 mph and intersections are no more frequent than once every mile or so. On city streets with traffic moving at 0 to 30 mph, it makes far more sense to ride in the center of the general traffic lane while following the rules of the road.
Those inter-city highways are heavily used by people commuting through metropolitan areas. For example the only way to drive from the second largest city (San Francisco) to the third largest city (Oakland) in the Bay Area is over an interstate highway.
Reconfigured from what? I live in the West and most of the communities out here were never served by rail. You either got there by foot or by animal. It seems like car is just an upgraded version of walking or animal-pulled wagons.
Kind of hard to refute this with such blurry phrasing, but many cities in Western U.S. had functioning rail systems in the early 1900s. L.A. had over 1,000 miles of rail, for example. San Francisco, Denver, Phoenix, and many others had pretty extensive streetcar systems as well.
Portland used to be very well-served by an extensive trolley system, as well. This was also removed as city commuting turned to cars and gas-powered buses:
Why do you assume cross country is the only way to drive? Most driving occurs to and from cities for commute and within cities. You can have cars for "cross country" driving and also eliminate the vastly inefficient "driving" in cities by improving our virtually non existent public transportation(compared to other first world countries) options.
> reconfigured from streetcars and buses and trolleys and trains in cities
The real sweet spot for Amtrak are trips between 50 and 200 miles. Within a city, subways / light rail are a better option. Longer than that and air travel starts to look better. Many cities also have regional trains that serve the areas between 10 and 50 miles outside the city.
This is how every city in Europe works. There are only a handful of cities in the US with a well-developed rail network -- and most of those are crumbling due to half a century of under-investment.
With high speed rail, the kind that other countries have plenty of, the sweet spot for rail would extend much farther than 200 miles. Tokyo <-> Kyoto, for example, is around 300 miles and is solidly still within the range of rail being a much better option than flying.
We can argue the exact distance, but it is details. His point is correct: rail makes sense for cities that are not very far apart. Rail trips across continents doesn't make sense (except as tourism).
Especially when the full costs of it don't have to be paid right now. Most car dependent places in the US don't enough money to actually repair all of the roads and infrastructure that they have built out. Also, most places there is no option but to drive because of zoning practices effectively banning mixed use. Suburbs from the mid 20th century on are all designed for cars and cars alone. Giant consolidated schools are put far away instead of the traditional smaller schools closer to where people live so kids have to be driven by bus or by parents. It was not always this way but it has indeed been forced by a design choice in how suburbs are laid out.
I guess it depends on where you live (hence the downvoting), but even in a place like NYC, I imagine managing small children on the subway would be pretty challenging.
I live in Brooklyn in NYC and I purchased a car when we were expecting. It is impossible to take a baby on public transit to most places. Buses are not equipped for strollers. Train stations are crowded and inaccessible to strollers. It takes a lot of physical energy to move a child through public transit. Our family, friends, the doctor, babysitter, and schools are not all walking distance and not all at expensive real estate near the train. Having a vehicle is empowering for my family and most like it.
Although I'm all in favor of cars, taking just one baby on public transit isn't much different from going by yourself on public transit. The trick is a sling. Don't even buy a stroller. There are several types of slings for babies. You can use one with a padded pocket and strap, one with fancy parts, a big long strip of cloth, or even just a folded bed sheet with a knot behind your shoulder.
I think the discussion is more focussing on is that 'flexibilty and convenience' from the car based on the fact we have designed and allocated our cities, suburbs and town in the way we have already.. Not so much, well this tool is right for the job, more a question of, did we make this job that requires a tool.
If you were the only person with a car, then all cities are more flexible and convenient with a car than without. It is only when somebody other than you has a car that you get gridlock and the other problems of cars.
If the kindergarten is on a subway/bus stop, it's really not an issue. How do you think we can get more public transport near schools? Hint: fund public transit more than roads. Instead of driving your kid to school, you just take them with you on the subway/bus.
One year in the black? I guess Trump actually got some good people in there, eh?
Outside of the Eastern Seaboard, has anyone ever attempted to book a rail trip? It's insane. You have to really work at it and you are losing a ton of time, have overnight "connections" and other odd problems. Furthermore, nearly all the train stations of any size are in the ghetto. The whole system has not kept up with the times. And while there is still some romantic notion of "riding the rails" it quickly gets subsumed by the price, which is also ridiculous.
Unfortunately there is no other way to 'configure' a mass affluence society (where most people live in separate homes usually having ample plots). We don't have that awful level of car dependence in Europe, true - but we also force most people to live in apartment blocks similar to those which you can see only in slums in the U.S.
The most expensive and desirable locations in the U.S. are mostly apartments/condos, not single family detached homes. Take New York or San Francisco for example -- hardly slums by most measures (yes there is homelessness, but that's partly a byproduct of just how high the cost of living is).
There's nothing about affluence that requires single family detached homes, that's just a fantasy that's been marketed to us for the past hundred years, and at a huge cost in terms of walkability, time/money/land wasted on traffic and parking, traffic fatalities, etc.
Single family detached homes go for $2,000,000 in San Francisco. The condos are less, generally, so I think that says that the most expensive and desirable locations in the U.S. are mostly single family detached homes.
Expensive and desirable locations - sure, but we are speaking of mass society, of everyone - everyone in the U.S. is dependent on cars, not just people in "expensive and desirable locations". These actually have less of that dependence.
This idea have been marketed and for a good reason, it was good way to save U.S. population from Soviet nuclear threat - in a way Coomies could neither counter, nor replicate on their side - when Commies launch their nukes, it's much better if most people find themselves in separate houses with large tracts of land and little combustible materials, and good basements to protect from fallout, and in a few days, can emerge from there and drive their cars in whichever direction civil defense points as safer.
If you need to evacuate everyone at once, sure. But they would evacuate gradually over many days from ~4 days to ~2 weeks from the attack, basically as soon as they will become desperate running out of drinkable water (something a house with a heater tank in the attic is also a good thing for).
No public infrastructure will work for that - bus drivers will quickly die of radiation sickness or just refuse to do their work, but for one, one-way trip to save your own ass it's okay.
Essentially, this is why suburbanisation come to being: war planners realized exactly the thing you are pointing out: that evacuating people in a crisis - while the Soviet bombers will be flying (it was before ICBMs) was an impractical idea, it will kill more people than it will save; but what works instead, is to evacuate people in advance: just make them live far from city centers which can be attacked. And redline the city centers: let only people you don't care about surviving, live there.
In 1950s Soviet Union, "workers and peasants" lived in villages and suburbs, these were replaceable anyway and killing them had little benefit. Difficult to replace cadres - engineers, most qualified workers, high ranking military, Party officials and such - lived in posh Stalinist apartments in city centers, and would perish inevitably. In 1950s U.S., it was already other way around. Soviet Union could do nothing about that: they simply couldn't afford an individual house, and thus inevitably, individual car, for everyone - they still can't. It was a clear win and moved a balance in the Cold War a great lot in U.S. favor.
One thing to realize here, it will best of all work if U.S. attacked first - then they choose the timing and attack in late evening in the U.S. when everyone is at home already, are warned, and don't leave their houses in the morning to avoid being caught in road panic, and have some hours to prepare for the Commie attack such as letting go of any combustibles, covering car so it doesn't suck fallout particles in, and stocking water and if possible, food.
Pripyat had 53,000 people evacuated by bus in one hour.
Hurricane evacuations even a week in advance are horrible by car. Highway infrastructure simply cannot cope with large movements of people in one direction.
A mobile and well-resourced population is a cornerstone of US disaster planning. When a hurricane is comming and an evacuation order given, the assumption is that most americans can drive themselves.
Mass transit is cool, but evacuating an entire modern city on busses isnt viable. (Inter-city rail connections cannot be scaled up in such times.)
Makes no sense. You can’t evacuate a full city on cars. It would get clogged all the way. You would want to use the entire bus system. Don’t know why you say it’s not viable, you can scale up passenger/meters much more with buses.
No you can't. The problem is we don't have enough buses to do that. Every mass bus system large enough to have significant people on the bus works on the model of the bus running all day with a large number of people who use it. That is it goes in full, heads back out, and picks up more people before heading back in.
In the evacuation model those buses drive out a day full, and then need to drive a day to get back before they can pick up more people. It just doesn't work. No transit system has enough buses.
That is before we point out that if you have anywhere near that many people served you probably have some rail systems that cannot operate outside their lines (third rail power or overhead electric)
Cars have the advantage of there are enough of them. Note that in most evacuation situations the cars are full. (the roads don't have the capacity, but the cars do)
It is much easier to stage extra buses near areas that will need rapid evacuation then it is to scale up road infrastructure. There is a fixed limit on howany people can be moved by car out of major metropolitan areas, conversely, most major metropolitan areas are with 12 hours drive of other major metropolitan bus areas which means that well staged buses could easily arrive to rapidly scale evacuation speed. Finally, as car based evacuation reaches it's limit, the rate dramatically decreases, there is no such issue with buses.
It is more complicated than just moving people. Anyone traveling by bus isnt bringing stuff with them. They need shelter. The US evacuation model assumes most people will bring enough with them in thier cars to be self-sustaining for a period of days. The assumption is tgat 90+% of people wont need government help... due to thier independant mobility of people and stuff.
See the recent evac of fort mcmurray canada. That was all cars for hundreds of miles. No hope for busses there.
The "car" evacuation plan seemed to have verged on failure in Fort McMurray. People didn't have enough gas and the roads were clogged. The 25,000 people who fled north ran short of supplies quickly.
So the assumption that "90% of people won't need government help" clearly failed to hold true for this relatively small evacuation of 88k people.
There are logistical issues to be improved on, but if (big if) we learn from experience we can solve them.
The fact remains, most people who are told to evacuate by car will pack their suitcases and enough spending cash so that they can live on their own once they get out. The majority will end up sleeping on the floor of friends/relatives, so once you get them out of danger you don't think about them again. All that is required is enough warning that they can pack (if you don't have this much warning nothing can work anyway), and enough fuel (accounting for gridlock!) along the way.
Government needs to deal with the small number of people who cannot care for themselves, but the vast majority of people can be self sufficient, and having their personal car makes them more self sufficient.
> Government needs to deal with the small number of people who cannot care for themselves, but the vast majority of people can be self sufficient, and having their personal car makes them more self sufficient.
More 25% is not a small number. A car only helps if people can actually get out. A mass evacuation by car of LA, San Francisco, Seattle or NY would fail utterly. Any place that already has significant traffic issues during rush hour (the sorts of places where buses are needed) would face massive drops in the evacuation rate due to gridlock and the areas that they would be evacuating through would rapidly run out of supplies (as happened with Fort McMurray with only 88k people being evacuated).
What are you suggesting exactly? I don't quite grasp your point
We shouldn't use bus when they are available for evacuation? Why? If we can get all the bus to be used + add bus from other cities nearby, why should we prevent people from using them? This is scaling much better and people with cars are free to leave with their own cars.
"Cars have the advantage of there are enough of them."
--Surely not the case in many urban cities.
I'm suggesting that all the buses in the city, are not enough to make a significant dent in the evacuation needs. This would be the case even if all transit in the city was by bus (no train/subway, and no private cars - obviously this is unrealistic).
New Orleans had huge numbers of school buses. They went unused and were destroyed by flooding.
You might demand that the government not be incompetent, but the reality is that government will screw up badly. Individuals with cars can screw up, but the effects are limited to the people screwing up.
The disaster planning argument is a huge red herring. I've yet to see my home city evacuated like you're saying for any reason. Whereas I've spent the last 17 years driving around everywhere for lack of any other options. So it seems to me like disaster planning is something we would have time to think about even if my city replaced all of our cars with trains and buses. So it just doesn't seem very important.
Yet, in the U.S. they mostly achieved that. 60% of the population live in separate houses. And yes, living space per capita is 2x-3x the EU level. Would be a no problem at all to put 100% in them, if some didn't live in large cities where it's impossible.
Just the economic and yeah, transportation infrastructure we have in Europe won't support that. It's not even the population density really.
Having lived in the US I know what it means to have "mostly achieved that". Gridlocked highways, unwalkable neighborhoods, the requirement of owning and driving a car (at least one car per family, usually 2 or more), and catastrophic CO2 emissions, both from cars, and from the fact that heating free-standing houses is way more expensive than heating apartments that share walls/floors/ceilings.
Until we invent teleportation, putting everyone in their own separate house is unsustainable.
It's hard to see that perspective when you have never seen it. It's funny because I would think that for someone with some knowledge of IT could understand the argument that it just doesn't scale.
For most people, the ideal life is having your yard and be able to drive everywhere with enough lanes on the street to be sure you never hit traffic. Except that ideal situation rarely exists, all the roads are clogged (induced demand!) and having a large house for every person means a big desirable city to work can't scale. Even LA has understood they couldn't keep building highways and needed to densify, it just doesn't scale.
Having lived in a European city I was appalled of how bad the air quality was, how noisy the streets were, how annoying trash collection at 5am was, I had to use a wet mop on the hardwood floor almost on a daily basis to and it was black every day. I had to walk a half a mile to a tiny parklet, always packed with kids as it was the only location in the play. Every morning on the packed subway and street buses. It was awful, I couldn't wait to get back home.
Back home I live in a green environment, trees everywhere, I got my lawn, there are no fences, I forget to close my garage door at night no problem, nothing is ever missing ... I use a wet mop every other week and it is never dirty.
Do you know what generates the CO2 emissions? All that useless junk we buy shipped from all corners of the world. The fix is buying less junk not blaming on someone that happens to want to live in a green environment.
The funny thing is that this has all been measured. Shipping emissions are nowhere near what they are for personal vehicle transportation. On top of that, all suburbs still require shipping in an even more unsustainable way (you need a truck to go around the neighbourhood for hours instead of having a single truck that can fulfill a single condo tower).
I know it's hard to be criticized for your lifestyle, but please do your research, suburbans lifestyle is nowhere near sustainable. That's not anecdata, that's data.
Honestly, it is not so obviously better to have hundreds of tiny stores in each neighborhood, stocked every day rather than going out doing grocery shopping once(!) a week! I am sure there is a tradeoff there - the many delivery trucks suffocating the same space they are supposed to serve.
I don't actually live in the suburbs, just a small town that looks like a suburb, and I also lived in European style cities hence I understand the attractiveness of a suburb. It is a different lifestyle and you can't "fix" the suburbs with the wrong kind of arguments - "you my friend suck for wanting to live there" Find a suburb looking place in Europe and check the prices ... now think about it, do Europeans assign value to that?
The vast majority of cities do not even remotely look like some of the elite and lucky European cities that are built on the many advantages they got from (not looking for a flamewar here) but exploiting other nations (the behavior is in the past, but the advantages remain and accumulate), all I am saying is that it cannot be a model for <insert eastern european city here>.
If anything the clean, quiet, well kept European city is non-sustainable and non-replicate-able as a global model. We need to fix the problems of the suburbs but not by imposing a model that cannot work.
I know this might be a tangent, but separate houses has caused HUGE housing problems. Wealthy homeowners refuse to give up their single family homes near large cities where that space should house 30 families.
I will throw in here that apartments in Germany I have seen or lived in are mostly nicer and have better construction quality than apartment complexes in even nice and high priced US regions (E.g., Texas, California). Hardly slums.
