In practice the market has spoken as to what kind of a form-factor people find the most useful for personal transportation in different climates and economic development scenarios. There’s no reason why ICEs couldn’t have supported the kind of vehicles some people imagine other people need.
The market has spoken, EVs only started gaining traction when they started resembling actual cars in form and function. Think of it as parallel evolution. Dolphins and fish.
The market is profoundly distorted by single use zoning, parking minimums, density maximums, wide (and high speed) stroads, and other urban design choices that force long journeys. It's also not safe to be on an ebike surrounded by electric Hummers, F-350 super duties, and your normal "whole kindergarten class in the blind spot" Escalades.
Having just spent a week in Utrecht it's very clear that "the market" can certainly show a preference for ebikes over cars.
The situation in Utrecht isn’t a function of “the [free] market” though. It’s distorted by significant taxation of cars and subsidization of biking. It’s legislation on both sides, and American legislation can change, especially locally.
How about the fact that America's most walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods are also the most expensive and highest demand?
People want this kind of development, they flock to it, and they are willing to pay astronomically high prices to get it. The government keeps the supply low with exclusionary zoning that makes all types of construction except car-centric single family housing illegal.
You have evidence of that claim? I took a look around me. The most expensive and highest demand areas are actually not transit accessible at all and walking is not really feasible as the houses have lots of land and are very spread out. I am in the Sacramento area for reference.
Well for starters Sacramento is just a really poor example. Most of CA isn't. It's a consequence of hyper aggressive SFH zoning (~80% of the SCAG area is SFH, used to be even higher) and the era in which CA grew being the mid century period.
There basically aren't any properly transit served and walkable areas in Sacramento. Closest would be Midtown and Richmond Grove, but they aren't really very good at all compared to neighborhoods in cities with actual infrastructure.
But despite that they are _still_ some of the most expensive neighborhoods in the area on a cost to sq foot basis. The trend of walkable transit served areas being in high demand is near universal across the US.
Again just like the other poster you are trying to move the goal posts. The comment did not say some. The comment said "the fact that America's most walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods are also the most expensive and highest demand". I provided a single example that proves this statement is not a fact.
To be fair, the comment didn't say "every expensive and high demand neighborhood in america is walkable and transit accessible" either.
Never forget that most statements, especially imprecise ones like the one you quoted can be interpreted in many ways. It is very easy to find an interpretation that is incorrect, especially if you disagree with/dislike the premise.
The reason I say this is that your single example didn't seem to disprove the statement in my eyes. I read the statement as meaning that walkable neighborhoods are in most cases in much higher demand than other neighborhoods in the same region.
I don't really think either of us is wrong, more that the imprecision of the statement and language in general can be unfortunate and cause disagreement.
Also note that nobody will ever respond well to being accused of a logical fallacy. They are useful to understand what is happening and to rile people up. Not so much to convince anyone (that doesn't already agree with you) about anything.
I don't have a metric for in-demand, but as I said, they are amongst the most expensive on a per-sq-ft basis, which is a much more useful metric for "expensive" than total cost. I didn't move the goalposts at all.
I will break it down for you. The original poster said 'most expensive' not the 'most expensive on a per-sq-ft basis'. You are arbitrarily adding the words on a per-sq-ft basis because you FEEL like its much more useful. You provide 0 evidence to support this.
Yes, Granite Bay is a great place to keep your sports car collection, but places in Sacramento where you can walk and bike command a premium compared similar places without the same walkability.
But you are moving the goal posts here. The person I responded to didn't say compared to similar places without the same walkability. They said "the fact that America's most walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods are also the most expensive and highest demand". Granite bay shows this to not be a fact.
I would add that the most expensive are the areas with biggest density, naturally with this kind of traffic a city council would create as many means of transportation as possible.
Which is why I'm always surprised by the makeup of the coalition of voters that support strict zoning. Personally, I don't understand how zoning isn't seen an impairment of property value requiring ongoing payments from the government to the owners, with the idea being that if the zoning is a benefit to the community then the community's taxes should be paying for that benefit. As it is, it's a hidden tax that prevents open discussion and accurate cost/benefit analysis.
That may be true in some places, but I'm skeptical of any causal relationship. To use Portland as a example familiar to me, the urban area is the least wealthy. The most expensive, exclusive neighborhoods are around the edges and have awful transit service. Looking at bigger cities, what's a better example? You certainly don't move to Manhattan just because it's walkable.
"You certainly don't move to Manhattan just because it's walkable."
depends on the person. People might move there because of the "vibe" or "excitement" and that tends to go hand in hand with places you can walk.
If it counts I emigrated in large part to be somewhere nicer to walk, but I am unusual. Not unique, though! Jason Slaughter (of NotJustBikes) moved to Amsterdam from Canada explicitly for its urban design.
Depends on what you mean by "wealthy". Cost per sq. ft. of housing in the urban area of Portland is much higher than the suburbs of Portland. That's indicative to me of higher market demand in the urban area.
> How about the fact that America's most walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods are also the most expensive and highest demand?
I'm not entirely sure that correlation implies causation in this case.
Do most people move to cities specifically because they're somewhat walkable with good public transportation, or do people move to cities for other reasons such as more access to better paying jobs?
Would people in cities rather drive to work if it was possible rather than taking a chance every day that the people next to them on the bus/train weren't some strange/risky people?
There are as many reasons for moving as there are people. I lived in Berkeley even when my job was in Newark because I hated the idea of living in a parking lot with a mayor (credit to Ghost Ride the Volvo's apt description of Fremont)
The massive state, federal, and local bureaucracies shaping the public & private realm to always guarantee easy parking for automobiles & a network of high-throughput roadways between them yet only occasionally & reluctantly doing the same for other modes of transportation. Note that guaranteeing easy parking for automobiles also results in destinations being so far apart that other modes of transport usually become impractical.
In lots of the US it's illegal for developers to propose anything other than Single-Family Homes. They are codified to have large minimum size requirements and often have setback requirements forcing the house to be a certain feet away from the street. Businesses are legally required to be segregated from residential used, even corner stores. Lots of businesses in the US are zoned to mandate a minimum amount of parking.
The justification for a lot of these zoning laws is explicitly that developers and the market will not provide adequate home sizes or parking, so minimum requirements are forced on developers. When law forces huge houses, no mixed use, and huge minimum parking lots, the only built environment that emerges is a car dependent one. Older US suburban neighborhoods, like the post-WWII suburbs, had smaller (900-1200 sq ft.) homes because these minimum lot and floor area size requirements weren't in place yet.
If you're curious about areas with different land-use requirements, there are cities in the US like Boston, Berkeley, or Emeryville (just off the top of my head) with more permissive zoning laws that have much lower car modeshare than other parts of the US.
I don't think I said that. All places people live, aside from frontiers, have rules applied to them and those rules affect how people get around. The Netherlands has different rules than the US, and within that framework the market (I didn't say the word free) shows a preference for ebikes.
Similarly, when I lived in the US I had to go 1.1 miles to the nearest coffee shop (or shop of any sort), and opening a coffee shop in my neighbourhood would have been illegal, and shut down very quickly. And that wasn't even all that far from the downtown of a medium-sized city (Sacramento).
Everywhere is distorted. As such it's meaningless to insist one or the other is preferred - it's down to an environment heavily influenced by policy. As such, choices can change if policies change.
>The market is profoundly distorted by single use zoning, parking minimums, density maximums
None of which they have in the developing world yet those nations become wealthier people buy cars basically as soon as they can make the economics pencil out. People like to sit in expensive four wheeled air-conditioned boxes more than they like the alternatives.
Cars are a great way to show you've become wealthy until everyone has one and suddenly driving isn't as pleasant. The developing world (vague terminology there, though - would somewhere like Bangkok count?) tends to have mediocre transport and no infrastructure to stop drivers from killing people riding bikes or walking.
It is also not much representative of "market forces", cars have to respect very strict "Urban Access Regulations" (similarly across Europe, but in Holland in particular)
Not that it is bad in general, but Utrecht is not a good example of what will happen around the World and actually make a difference.
China + India will soon be inhabited by 3 billion people combined, Utrecht has only 500 thousand residents. It's basically a glitch in the matrix.
"Let's build bike lanes that are so scary only the bavest will dare to use them - and also subsidise cars in any way we can." - "The market has spoken, people want cars!"
Well, the market has also spoken as to what kind of councils get elected and what kind of plans those councils approve. Of course, that's in large part because car owners pay infrastructure taxes cyclists don't. But that's also precisely what the market is - the segment who's paying. If wishes built livable cities there'd probably be more of them.
The issue is that you have path dependence in what gets built and the resulting constituencies.
When everyone already drives cars (the US), there’s significant opposition to investment in other types of infrastructure/built in support for investments in car infrastructure. Whereas there are plenty of cities around the global where such constituencies exist for other modes.
Cyclists have cars too and pay the same taxes, since it’s basically unavoidable in the US.
But also bikes cause negligible damage to infrastructure and barely require any resources compared to cars, so the costs are usually much lower for bike infrastructure.
The problem is that it's not just the people who decide who gets elected. Like it or not, the chances of winning an election highly correlate with advertising budgets, and the fossil fuel and car industry has sunk dozens of billions of dollars in campaign contributions, (S)PAC donations and other legal and illegal forms of bribery to make sure their interests were taken care of.
>Like it or not, the chances of winning an election highly correlate with advertising budgets,
This is just BS/lies at the local level.
Moneyed PACs aren't fighting it out over councilor, selectman and planner positions for random suburbs.
Pretty much all the money these candidate dispense is either self raised or comes from an official political party who don't really doll out meaningful amounts to these elections
As one who has run for local office in a Seattle-area suburb, yeah, there's no oil industry money sloshing around. At best one might get a few local businesses (at best), and some individuals for small amounts. If you're the big swinging genitalia incumbent, you might even be able to afford yard signs without dipping into personal funds!
One would seem to win local elections by being the incumbent, and knocking on a lot of doors.
What about the state and federal subsidies for road infrastructure? A locality that wants to go a different (less car dependent) direction would be leaving that infrastructure money unspent, which isn't fair to the local voters who contributed tax money to the state/feds. They rigged it so that the locals paid for the roads via their tax money, their only choice is to take the money and build more roads, or kiss the money they sent to the state/feds goodbye.
Wouldn't the above kind of hamstring local politicians? Would it be safe to assume that the pro-car lobbyists at those higher level of government want to keep it this way?
The market is rigged by an industry(ies) (auto, oil) to develop society in its favor. Without a major 'refactor', the US doesn't have a chance at efficient urban design that would support individual use transport.
What if the market, often times a manifestation of social and cultural greed and ignorance (and acquiescence and conformity and manipulation), is wrong? What if the market, which has fundamentally brought us to the brink upon which we find our collective selves and is driven by short term profit motives, cannot be trusted to do the right thing for the sake of the future rather than the immediate or even near term? What if the market, the deity that capitaism worships, is only interested in self preservation and not at all concerned with sanctity of all life on the planet.
I do believe it is both interesting and frustrating that people (in general) fail to challenge the validity and utility of their own beliefs, even when those beliefs have been shown to not hold up under the scrutiny of others. Then, there is also normacy bias.
What's kind of silly is the adulation of "market" as some kind of God. Talking about, or implying that "markets are always right" is a diversion, a red herring by those who are served by such "markets". We need markets (super and other types) but just because we need them does not mean they are an intelligent being who is "always right". Is Greed good? Is Greed our next God? I think it was proven in a movie already that greed is not good.
Those other kinds of ICE vehicles are supported in poorer markets. In the Third World people use motorcycles and scooters and so on all the time, for all sorts of things.
If lithium becomes scarce, electric vehicles become more expensive. An increase in the price of vehicles produces a similar effect to a decrease in people's incomes, so the market would push people towards smaller vehicles just like in the Third World now.
As a concrete example, tiny electric cars are common in China. Amusingly, the government doesn't like tiny cars because they are hard to regulate. It really is the market that has spoken. https://restofworld.org/2021/tesla-vs-tiny-cars/
UK and USA have some of the lowest rates of motorcycle usage in the world, they're part of the transportation solution in almost every other nation more than they are here.
It's just never considered because the types of people working on policy in this area aren't motorcyclists.
Motorcycles are unavoidably far more dangerous than cars, that's the reason it's not seriously considered in nations that are rich enough to use cars. I used to ride. Had a major crash and got lucky. My relatives that rode lost organs. Several of our biker friends died or spent months in the hospital after their wrecks.
I wish the market did a better job of ensuring that car owners pay all the related infrastructure costs for their vehicles, as opposed to some things that are paid for by other taxpayers.
Gas might cost more without subsidies. Car ownership in cities would cost more to pay for parking. Roads outside of cities would be paid for from local taxes. Trucks would pay more because they damage roads much more than cars, which would encourage rail and boat transport. Etc.
It's not a free market if these things are being paid for by all taxpayers, including those who don't drive, or don't drive as much.
I don't think it follows from the fact that most people drive (buy) cars in the US that they actually prefer it. Corporate lobbying and politics have ensured that you can't function in the vast majority of the US without a car. People in cities in Europe that support and/or prioritize bike/pedestrian traffic see many to most people preferring it. I went through childhood, uni, and the first year of my professional life living in car-dependent (but still nice) places. I moved to a city where I can (and do) live without a car and I vastly prefer not having to drive. I suspect many who say they prefer cars haven't even had the opportunity to live somewhere where they aren't a necessity.
The fact that some US urban areas are less dense and more car dependent than most European urban areas is at least in part due to the reasons I mentioned already. Obviously people who live in rural areas will need and prefer cars but my point is that it is hard to say "Americans prefer cars" when most Americans have never had the opportunity to live somewhere where they don't need a car.
Answering to my own comment to answer the broader discussion.
- I’m not from the US and I’m not talking about the US market;
- I don’t believe “the market” provides some value judgement. Rather, it’s just the aggregate behavior of people under their existing realities. We can and should aim to change those realities, but ignoring them because “they’re wrong” will not yield workable solutions.
“The market” spoke twice, during the oil crisis of 1975. It was made very clear to said market that if oil was priced at competitive levels, people who made that decisions would be bombed out of existence and the memory of men. Horrors are committed every day, including today, in Yemen, in your name. Starvation, genocide, rapes…
There is nothing more shockingly unethical and disgusting to pretend that killing millions of people every year and destroying entire countries is somehow moral because of “the market”.
In practice the market has spoken as to what kind of a form-factor people find the most useful for personal transportation in different climates and economic development scenarios. There’s no reason why ICEs couldn’t have supported the kind of vehicles some people imagine other people need.
The market has spoken, EVs only started gaining traction when they started resembling actual cars in form and function. Think of it as parallel evolution. Dolphins and fish.