At some point I really don't get how people can't just accept that historically, the US is a car-centric suburban-centric culture, and that's just who we largely are. If you want to do things like improve the environment, you can either scream and stamp your feet about it or you can meet people where they are and devise solutions that work in a car-centric culture.
It just is what it is, like Brits drinking tea, Scandinavians liking their saunas, or the French being obnoxious about Frenchness.
I don't think your historical analysis is very correct. What you think of as car-centric suburban-centric culture didn't really arise until after World War II. It's really a relatively new thing, even considering how young the United States is.
Obesity rates track historically with car-centric culture, should we just accept that is who we are, or can we work on cultural and policy changes that alleviate that problem?
Other countries like the Netherlands went through the same car-centric design phase and realized it was too expensive and bad for the country so they reverted. We can and should keep cars, but our reliance on them for our very existence is quite fragile and unnecessary.
Why does the average American have to spend $300 - $800/month or more in direct costs (insurance, gasoline, tires, loan payments, etc.) plus indirect costs (taxes for infrastructure) in order to go to the grocery store to buy a tomato or take their children to a playground?
> If you want to do things like improve the environment, you can either scream and stamp your feet about it or you can meet people where they are and devise solutions that work in a car-centric culture.
Instead of "screaming and stamping my feet" - isn't that what Road Rage is? I prefer to just work with organizations and political leaders to devise and implement solutions that reduce our need for car-centric culture and improve our economic resilience. That means fewer surface parking lots which are economic outflows, more bike lanes, slower speed limits, and better roadway design that incorporates segmented bike lanes, bus lanes, and more.
> Other countries like the Netherlands went through the same car-centric design phase and realized it was too expensive and bad for the country so they reverted.
Where did you get the idea that they reverted? Car ownership in Netherlands has continued to rise despite widespread biking culture.
> Other countries like the Netherlands went through the same car-centric design phase and realized it was too expensive and bad for the country so they reverted. We can and should keep cars, but our reliance on them for our very existence is quite fragile and unnecessary.
The Netherlands is roughly the size of Maryland. If The Netherlands was a U.S. state, it would be 42nd in terms of land area.
> The Netherlands is roughly the size of Maryland.
How is this relevant in your mind? Do you imagine most Americans crossing entire states in their daily commute? Do you imagine people and goods do not cross European borders?
It is considerably easier for a country that would be equivalent to one of the smallest U.S. states to abandon their dependence on cars than it is a country 237 times larger. Furthermore, the further west you go in theU.S. the more spread out things get until you reach the west coast. To the east of where I live there is a highway that is 287 miles long and is almost devoid of any services whatsoever, no civilization to speak of, not even a gas station. You can Google it, it is known as the "Loneliest Road in America". Not sure how less dependence on cars handles situations like that. Guess my overall point is until you drive across the U.S., it is difficult to fully understand the scale of the problem, let alone the solution.
> It is considerably easier for a country that would be equivalent to one of the smallest U.S. states to abandon their dependence on cars than it is a country 237 times larger.
I'm not sure it is. Have you visited the Netherlands? You don't walk or ride a push bike between cities there, any more than you do in the USA. Bicycles are the predominant form of transport because of how they design their suburbs. A car in suburban Holland isn't going to move any faster than a bicycle, and there nowhere to park. This is a deliberate design choice.
The population density of Utrecht (a major city in the Netherlands) is 1000 people / sq km. The population density of Annapolis (the capital of Marylands) is over 2000 people / sq km. If density is the reason Marylands should be less car centric than Holland.
> To the east of where I live there is a highway that is 287 miles long and is almost devoid of any services whatsoever, no civilization to speak of, not even a gas station. You can Google it, it is known as the "Loneliest Road in America".
Doesn't the word "lonely" give you a hint on why this is irrelevant? You aren't going to ride a push bike to pick up fuel for your tractor in the Netherlands either.
It's the USA's sprawling suburbs that weld you to your car's, not your cities or your rural expanses. It's true that's hard to change now. But there is no reason it had to be that way. Your suburbs could have been as compact as those in the Netherlands. The Netherlands made a conscious choice not to do it that way (they built free ways, decided they didn't like them, and turned them into canals [0]). I'm not sure how the USA arrived at their current arrangement but it wasn't because you "had to".
> Doesn't the word "lonely" give you a hint on why this is irrelevant? You aren't going to ride a push bike to pick up fuel for your tractor in the Netherlands either.
The relevance isn't that it is lonely, the relevance is that it is not unique west of the Mississippi. But I welcome you to point me to a country the size of the United States that has solved this problem. I think you'll find they come in two varieties, either they're as spread out as the United States or the entire population is almost entirely against a coast/border wit much of the rest of the country remaining mostly empty.
> It's the USA's sprawling suburbs that weld you to your car's, not your cities or your rural expanses. It's true that's hard to change now. But there is no reason it had to be that way. Your suburbs could have been as compact as those in the Netherlands. The Netherlands made a conscious choice not to do it that way (they built free ways, decided they didn't like them, and turned them into canals ). I'm not sure how the USA arrived at their current arrangement but it wasn't because you "had to".
Western expansion in the United States was a deadly affair prior to railroads and highways. The Netherlands was largely already a developed country when they did all of what you describe. Much of the United States today lives and dies by what little transportation options they have. There is a reason there are over 3,000 ghost towns scattered across the United States west of the Mississippi and it is not because of the sprawling suburbs. When you have one major highway in or out, city planning kind of takes a backseat.
> But I welcome you to point me to a country the size of the United States that has solved this problem.
Russia, China, India. Almost everywhere because to pull the US pattern of suburbia off you needed two things: to build the suburbs in the era of the car, and be rich enough to afford the cars. The USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand met those two criteria. Almost no one else did.
The size of the place had nothing to do with it. New Zealand isn't that big. As I said the Netherlands for a while decided to emulate what USA pattern. They had the money, and they started to build the freeways to enable the expansion. They decided against it. Whatever caused them to do that, it wasn't size. It was probably because the preferred the denser style of living.
Most people do, because it and easier and cheaper lifestyle. Maintaining all the larger house block, the long travel times, the increased freight - it all takes effort and money. Perversely, you get more exercise in these denser cities because you walk / cycle everywhere.
> Do you imagine most Americans crossing entire states in their daily commute?
The size of Maryland? Yes, I do. Not likely "most Americans", but a much larger portion than you'd suspect.
My commute was ~30 miles for over a decade, back before I went remote. That was considered "local". From 2016-2017, my commute was ~80 miles.
All of the above are one-way distances, and they're not at all exceptional in the US. Yes, the size of the Netherlands relative to the US is definitely relevant to this discussion.
I live in Columbus, Ohio with a current population roughly of 2.5 million, which is about 13% of the entire population of the Netherlands, and that's within 30 miles or less. That's not an atypical American city. In fact there are three of them in Ohio alone.
Within Columbus we have a few buses and that's it for transit, unfortunately - though we are working on building new bike lanes and reforming our zoning code to allow more dense development within the city and hopefully throughout the region too. Nothing but good comes from this and makes us wealthier as a city.
Most people living in Columbus who do commute to some job site, do so within 30 miles or less, and in cases where they commute longer than that it's because they actively choose to live quite far away from their workplace. We also have a large portion of the population (children, elderly, etc.) who do not have to make a daily commute like what we are discussing here, but instead do their daily activities locally.
What's important to note here is that there are no options - we affirmatively mandate that citizens purchase a car and incur all of the associated expenses in order to participate in daily life, whether that's going to church, the farmer's market, to a friend's house, or to the park.
In one area of Columbus I've routinely seen with my own eyes kids crossing 5 lanes of 45mph + traffic to get from one apartment complex to the housing development across the roadway. This is taken as normal. It's not. It's fucking stupid.
> My commute was ~30 miles for over a decade, back before I went remote. That was considered "local". From 2016-2017, my commute was ~80 miles.
Maybe that's a bad, and incredibly expensive design we should stop subsidizing? I'm not sure why we should focus on these edge cases, and they are indeed edge cases, when we can spend money more effectively to move more people more efficiently around our cities. If you want to live 80 miles away from your job more power to you, but I don't think everyone else should have to pay for it.
> Maryland is about 250 miles long and 100 miles wide.
30 miles is a pretty normal commute for people who work in Chicago but live in the suburbs. Not the whole width Maryland but we do have many smaller states too.
That's a shallow, post-WWII vision of history. The US used to build great cities, then it bulldozed large parts of them to build the present highway-oriented dystopia. If one radical change was possible then, so is another, now.
The car-centric, suburb-centric culture cannot be sustained economically or ecologically, and will therefore come to an end. How do we want that to happen - intentionally and progressively, or catastrophically?
You need to be a student of history, otherwise you’ll be blinded by the present and make these kinds of very wrong conclusions.
The US was the world leader in railroads. US cities had state of the rail based public transit systems. LA had the most extensive streetcar system in the world. Even St Louis used to be as accessible as NYC.
People changed because corporations lied to the public and meticulously destroyed public transit in the US.
Too late to edit, but I wanted to say — apologies for being condescending. That was unnecessary and mean spirited of me and I’m sorry for doing that. Truthfully, I do hope at least I was able to communicate that it’s important to keep in mind that there have been other things we’ve done as a society and there are reasons why we are where we are today.
> ... historically, the US is a car-centric suburban-centric culture, and that's just who we largely are.
While we now do have a suburban-centric subculture, the car is just a tool that enables that subculture to easily access economic opportunities without having to interact with the classes segregated out of desirable locations by contemporary (explicitly racist) federal housing policies [0]. Although, I guess now that I look at it in that light (and noting the fact that every major city is still very racially segregated), I suppose that is just who we largely are and historically have been.
Apart from the points made by sibling posters, markets reveal preferences. The eye-watering price of urban land suggests that many, many more people would prefer to live in cities than currently do.
(Full disclosure: I am one of them. Reluctantly living in a suburb because kids; will move back to the City as soon as they get their thumb out and build enough housing to make it more affordable.)
Change is possible and change always feels difficult before it happens, but feels inevitable when looking back. Change would be harder in places like Texas, sure, but East coast cities and the Midwest have so many opportunities to continue to develop more and more public transportation options.
Anyone who has had the privilege to live in a city where walking is easier than driving knows how much more freeing not having a car is than having one.
It just is what it is, like Brits drinking tea, Scandinavians liking their saunas, or the French being obnoxious about Frenchness.