If you want to live spread out, fine. There’s plenty of space for that.
If you want to go into the city for the amenities it provides, take a reasonable form of transportation that doesn’t require millions of parking spaces and bulldozing neighborhoods for new freeways.
Heterogeneity of options is good. I don’t think most people who advocate for good urban spaces think that everyone should be forced to live that way. They just want it to be an option instead of only building homogenous suburban developments everywhere.
Right now the supply and demand for those kinds of walkable, bikeable cities, towns, and neighborhoods is out of whack. You can tell this because the places that are built like this tend to be very expensive places to buy a home.
In my area a house in a normal suburb costs around $500k. A similarly sized house near a local town center with walkable shops, restaurants, park, grocery store, library, etc cost $1m+.
As a concerted urbanite i totally agree with you. The problem is that people like the author are arguing for a third type of place, the suburb, which is unsupportable and harms us. Its a post-war experiment which has largely failed.
Yes in the sense of suburbs that commute by car into the city, requiring that city to maintain adequate infrastructure, but prefer the lower taxes of the suburbs.
If you choose a lifestyle that requires more to be spent per capita on roads, utilities, and public services then you should pay for that cost.
Suburbs themselves should also have variety. People love small towns, but instead of a mix of small towns with vibrant dense centers surrounded by less dense housing options, we just build sameness stretching in all directions.
Urban, suburban, and rural spaces all have different pluses and minuses. People have different needs for living spaces throughout their lives, and I feel it's important to recognize and acknowledge that and support them in finding the right place to live.
To me, the fundamental reason behind suburban failure is the lack of affordable housing in the city, forcing city mice to move out to suburbia, bringing their city mice habits and expectations with them. Build more housing in cities, and suburban problems will work themselves out.
Yes. Letting cities be actually dense would make suburbs work better.
But we tend to resist upzoning existing low-density development that is now in the density gravity well of the expanding city, keeping housing prices artificially inflated.
> This would be a big claim for me to make as someone that has no formal education in the topic, I wonder if the massive shift in urban vs. rural living over the past 200 years has happened at the expense of our natural inner urge for open space
This is a big claim for you to make for sure :) . As someone who also lives in Texas, I'll just say that wanting space is not a problem in it self, but the argument of Texas has ~millions of acres of land and therefore wanting a few for yourself is not bad just does not hold when you consider the resourcing required to fulfill your want (tax money, water plumbing, electrical wiring, concrete and the alike).
If we take into consideration 'efficiency', resource-wise, when attempting to build a city that works for most, not just thee, it would end up looking like a high-density urban area that is in-fact walkable and small individual space for those in it.
This of course, does not preclude the existence of outskirts and places outside core density, which is was you want. By all means, you can have it, but degradation of shared infrastructure is to be expected. As in, maybe you have some unpaved roads, no water line or electrical etc.
This way the city saves on aforementioned resources, and yes including the good'old tax payer money. "Don't want my tax payer money subsidizing your choices" is common phrase used in this state. By that logic, "I don't want my tax payer money subsidizing your choice to live outside the would-be dense city" would apply here.
Sadly, this state does rely in ever-more sprawling city design that will bring about its financial demise as the cost of maintenance and upkeep catch up to a slow down in the state/city tax revenue. Checkout urban3's work on city financials https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/
Sure choice of needing space, walking sure these are subjective, but for many many people the choice to where to live in not determinable. America is such a selfish society in regards to this when it comes to local democracy. (ie NIMBY, car focused, no care given to future population densities)
I spent 20 years of my life in Houston and saw first hand how horrible it is for non drivers and poor people to get around, lose their livelihood when losing car access etc -ie the working poor
Any major city must support the needs of its poorest majority as much as possible, and a city the size of Houston must have a better transportation and social spaces -it is absolutely horrible.
now if you want space and move to places that only work with cars sure, but our cities are suffering the lack of support for walkability and public transport. Anyone who has spent time in European cities where these spaces and public transportation options exist by necessity can see the value
Yes, I think a lot of people miss that the issue is that we have forced a reduction in variety, options, and market choices by dictating single-family detached zoning in huge swaths of the country, even in congested metro areas.
The people asking for some amount of consideration to non-car transit options, density, and housing affordability aren’t generally suggesting that this be forced on everyone, but that it at least not be artificially suppressed. That options and variety be allowed and that people have a choice to live in such areas if they want to or if it is what fits their means.
If you set such a low density ceiling in a giant metro area in the face of market forces that want density, you also raise the floor of the cost of living in that area to be being able to afford a single-family detached home and buying, maintaining, and insuring one car per working household member.
That increases the cost of living for people working in restaurants, shops, warehouses, and other service industry jobs, making your goods and services more expensive.
Issue for me with cars isn't space vs no space, it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies. 20 minutes to work. 20 minutes home. Add another 20 minutes if you do anything else but home to work. That's an hour a day. You've also wasted an hour doing nothing that might have otherwise been spent walking. Now you need to borrow another hour for the gym or some kind of physical activity… and that assumes you don't drive to a gym (one of the the most bizarre things people do). But that's two hours a day that just feels "wasted," and that's a best case scenario. Then there is the cost of the car, insurance, gas, maintenance. The hours that all translates into. Add it all up over the year and you spend like 15-20% of your waking hours dealing with the reality of the car. For some, it's more.
I also feel like a peculiar externality of car-centric society is anger. I get why. You are wasting all your time in the car. You aren't walking. No exercise. Fast food. Parking. I can see why people who are pro-car want space—they are angry all the time. They need space to cool off. There is even a face that I call "car face" which is that kinda pissed off for no reason always in a rush face. People who "love cars" and don't find it "stressful at all" seem to have this face to the max.
Yeah, I didn't even account for that. Drive enough and you get into an accident. Add all the hours and cost to dealing with that. You'll probably get somewhat injured, even if minor. Physical therapy and healing time. Lifelong back pain. Now you DO need to drive to a gym for physical therapy. More car time.
I also think about how my nutrition has declined DRAMATICALLY with a car. Gone are the days of fresh lettuce and berries unless you drive to the grocery store every day. Gas stations should sell ozempic at the pump.
> it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies
Commuting by train also involves a lot of stress: unexplained and indeterminate delays, filth, crime, dependence on multiple stages (walking, bus, train, walking, etc.)
I appreciate the tact taken by the writer in general, despite deeply disagreeing. However the gross generalizations and myopia of the argument are clear enough from the closing lines:
> I wonder if the massive shift in urban vs. rural living over the past 200 years has happened at the expense of our natural inner urge for open space. Am I bad because I want to live on land that otherwise would have been used for hay farming?
This extrapolation, that humans innately desire to live apart from one another, is a bold claim and directly refuted by the immense populations of voluntary urban dwellers. For certain, pro-density arguments against car-centered development can suffer from the inverse generalizations, and it should be called out in either case.
I like my city a lot, but "urbanists" really need to update their priors and examine what they're advocating for. Ride share, electric micromobility, and (soon) self-driving cars totally change the equation for transportation.
Chicago is about to spend $440 million(!) to update a single train stop for a system that is carrying 25% less riders than before the pandemic.
Self-driving cars don’t really do much to increase density of moving people or decrease infrastructure costs per-passenger-mile.
Some parking needs may be reduced, but you still need somewhere for the cars to hang out while waiting for each morning and afternoon directional commuter rush.
You still need the same number of freeways with ever expanding lanes.
They mostly decrease the monetary, time, and mental cost of taking a car to work as an individual choice, which will increase the load on roads and freeways.
How many passengers per hour does that train line move, versus the costs to build and maintain an equivalent capacity freeway with one person in each car?
It’s worth asking why the estimates for the station have doubled over the course of the last two years (I can’t find a source explaining why, right now).
But it’s still perhaps an unfair point to make. State/Lake is one of the busiest stations in the system, in the heart of the downtown corridor. It is not a simple “update” - it’s a full, in-place rebuild. And, that rebuild includes adding elevator connections from the elevated platforms down to the subway below. The elevated infrastructure in question is about 130 years old, and they have to keep running the trains over those tracks the whole time.
It’s a massive engineering problem, even before you add in the additional costs of paying crews to work overnights so that the whole CTA doesn’t come to a grinding halt while they do it.
If you search around a bit, you can find the construction costs for other overhauls the CTA has done recently, which far more agreeable price tags. If this one is huge, there’s probably a very good reason why.
Ridership keeps increasing as the system rebuilds from the mass staffing shortages of the pandemic. Every time they increase the frequency of a bus line, ridership increases. The trains will be the same as operators continue to be hired.
State/Lake has been sorely lacking an in-system transfer for damn near a century, and the feds are funding the rebuild. It's one of the busiest stations in the whole city, and evening rush demand still exceeds capacity on two of the six lines it services.
As someone who actually uses the station to get home from work it's ridiculous to hear you talk about this project like it's a bad thing.
It is frustrating how so much in life can feel car centered, I think. That said, so many of the counter arguments cannot contend with the fact that having a car is convenient. To an absurd degree.
There is a reason why everyone in the dormitories knew who had a vehicle. And though you could get to some of the off campus areas by foot, it was far more likely that you would hitch a ride.
If your campus had a subway stop in the middle of it, I highly doubt students were more likely to leave by car than via some other form of transport.
That being said, my 2nd cousin who lives in Copenhagen owns a car. It is convenient. She doesn't use it a lot since usually a bicycle or mass transit is also convenient but having the option is nice for certain trips or conditions. Copenhagen is a pretty nice city to drive in. Hundreds of bicycles at every intersection slows you down a lot less than hundreds of cars at every intersection.
That's the secret -- make your city convenient to use without a car, which significantly reduces the number of cars, which makes it much better for those using a car.
The campus I lived on had a transit stop not far off. I'm sure more people used it than my little anecdote made it sound.
I agree that places should be made as convenient as they can be for walking, as well. I just get annoyed with so much of the discourse assuming you can design the cities so that a car is not more convenient. It is almost always a massive convenience. Obnoxiously so.
But those cities do exist. Just mostly not in the US.
They also don’t need to make non-car options more convenient for all people, or even most people. The larger the share of non-car trips the better things get even for those who still drive, even if that share is going from 10% to 20%. Less congestion and pollution. Fewer traffic accidents. More density of housing in places that have high demand, reducing housing costs.
My point is that, even in the cities that you are referencing, the more affluent people almost always have a car. Because they can afford it, and because it is more convenient.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this. Essentially, my assertion is that you get more people out of cars by making them expensive than you do with city design. (Unless, of course, you consider parking costs part of city design?)
Yes, affluent people will pretty much always own cars. But with a pedestrian/cycle/transit friendly design, they'll use them much less.
I know affluent people in Copenhagen. They own cars. They are basically only used on the weekend, for travel outside of Copenhagen.
Amsterdam has 0.45 cars per household. So lots of households own cars, even in Amsterdam. But the miles driven per household per day is less than a quarter of what it is in the States.
I mean, cars per household is 2+ in large portions of the US.
Again, I'm largely inline with what you are speaking towards. The only change I'm making to the discourse is that, if you want fewer people owning cars, you pretty much have to make it more expensive. You can't just make the city more walkable. You have to make it expensive to own cars.
As I say downthread, this is inline with cheaper dense housing. If you want cheaper dense housing, you wind up with smaller living units. Often without dedicated parking allotments for all residents.
The goal isn't, or shouldn't be, fewer people owning cars. The goal should be fewer miles driven in urban areas. My cousin in Copenhagen basically only uses it for driving out to a rural area to visit her parents.
Owning a car in Denmark is incredibly expensive. That does significantly impact the ownership rate. And of course if fewer people own cars the miles driven by cars does go down. But lowering the ownership rate is a means to the end, not the end itself.
> you get more people out of cars by making them expensive than you do with city design.
The city design is the prerequisite. If you don't have transit etc, people will own cars no matter how expensive the cars are (within reason, of course). Households in rural Denmark without access to transit own cars despite it being 2X as expensive as elsewhere.
Once you have transit, cranking the price becomes a much more effective mechanism.
> (Unless, of course, you consider parking costs part of city design?)
Absolutely. The amount of space taken up by parking, and its related cost, and things like congestion charges, are part of city planning.
And you can still significantly reduce the number of cars and car-trips without eliminating car ownership. A household with one car used occasionally when it’s convenient needs less parking and driving space than one with two cars driven daily.
So on this we are in complete agreement. My criticism is when people show walkable cities, they need to underline that majority of those people will own a car if they can financially make it happen. Almost bar none.
This really just isn't true. Most people i know here in Chicago take transit or bike in the city. Many people i know who can easily afford a car choose not to because it's so easy to get around without one.
Make a city that doesn't require a car, and people that aren't compelled to use one won't.
Yes the financial component is part of it. Building dense walkable urban developments makes car ownership more expensive and non-car options cheaper and more convenient.
Some would argue that in many places car ownership is being subsidized by the way we develop and tax.
Some households will still have cars, but households are not the same as individual people.
And I think there are plenty of places where the majority of households don’t own cars. You can say they would if it was cheap and convenient enough, but that’s the whole point we’re discussing. Not dedicating so much development and infrastructure to cars will make them less convenient and more expensive options than the alternatives for at least some of the population.
I could just be wrong. Nor am I aiming for exaggerated effect, though. I legit have grown to feel that people will get a car if they can afford it. Pretty much everywhere. As I said, I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this.
This is related with the housing discussions. People have somewhat convinced themselves that cheap standalone houses are the goal. Which, I suppose there is no reason that can't be the goal. But compare average home size in pretty much any US city with some of these walkable cities you have in mind.
When I do that, I start asking how related those two things are. And I'm growing rather convinced that people have built up a mental idea that they can live with all of the benefits of both worlds, without contending with the contrast between them.
I think you're probably right that eventually, most people will own a car. But I think the time in your life where you decide to buy one matters substantially, and is modulated quite a lot by city design.
I'm pretty young now, and I could afford a car. I expect that I will probably buy one at some point in the future. But I can easily live my life without one for now, so I have decided to save that money instead. If I lived in Houston, I don't think that would be the case.
None of my friends that I know in NYC own cars. All of my friends that live in my hometown own cars.
Yes, my point is just that the financial feasibility is related to the policy decisions.
For example you could say that most people who live in Manhattan would choose to live in a 2000sqft+ detached home if it was financially feasible to do so.
But because there is limited space, high demand, and city policy allows high density, such a home is not financially feasible for almost anyone in Manhattan.
And of course that applies in sprawling metro areas like Houston as well. Forcing large swaths of single-family zoning despite the market forces means that housing supply can’t grow with demand, so cost of housing increases.
See where i live my car is drastically less convenient than walking, biking, or taking the bus for basically any trip under ~5 miles. The effort to get out of my garage and out of the neighborhood and sitting in traffic and finding parking on the other end means biking is basically always faster, and for anything within a half mile (which covers most things i need day to day) walking is just easier.
I enjoy having a car for when i want to go on road trips or move something big or go to some specialty shop of the clear other side of town, but it is not at all convenient for ~90% of the places I go.
To what extent is having a car convenient because we've built our cities under the assumption that people own cars? Where I lived for a year in SF (near Church station) I found that for day-to-day life I never once wished I had a car. Groceries, restaurants, bars, and parks were all within (short) walking distance, and my job downtown was easily accessible by transit.
As much as I love college campuses, I think they often miss out on having interesting amenities within the walkability of the campus itself. Still, going to school in Cambridge I never wanted a car and the few times I rented one for a longer trip or a move I wished that I didn't have to.
I think cars are and probably should be convenient for certain things (mainly moving, buying furniture or other big stuff, and to a lesser extent getting into nature). But for day-to-day life, it is a sign of failure (and wasted potential!) when cars are convenient.
Fair questions, I think. I am just pointing out that if you have a lot of options when on foot, you almost certainly have more with a car. And you would have an easier schedule if you own your own car.
I say this as someone that enjoys the long slow walks. They are amazing. But if the goal is to get to the store/office and back, on foot is not as convenient as in a car.
The only times this is not the case, is when something has made the car not possible. Usually this boils down to "it can be prohibitively expensive to park a car at your destination."
I agree that for in-town trips the only thing that reduces the convenience of driving is when you can't drive fast and park directly at your destination for free. But these things (traffic, parking scarcity, etc) are really common, and are often the direct result of the fact that you are trying to go somewhere interesting. They are rarely artificial costs that could be removed.
I do think anecdotes are effective here, so: from my old SF apartment I could bike or ride Muni to the office. I generally chose to bike, but both options were more convenient than driving. The speed of driving and biking were both limited mostly by traffic and traffic lights, so biking was just as fast as driving. Both the traffic and the traffic lights are necessary because other people also want to live and work in a similar place as I do. But since my office was downtown in an urban, popular area where land value is high enough that parking is not a good use of land, if I drove I would have had to park a few blocks away (for a high price) and walk. Since bike parking is so much more space efficient than car parking, I could easily park my bike in my office. Taking the train was faster than either option; if it rained I would simply take the train.
I think you are not correct that a car is a strictly better option for all tasks. I think the convenience of not having to deal with all the things that make driving difficult is extremely valuable, and I think the things that make driving difficult are unavoidable because driving scales extremely poorly.
Asking most Americans to go car free isn’t realistic.
But I think asking for the kinds of development that reduce the need for and length of car trips, as a choice of place to live, is reasonable.
There’s also a vast gulf between a car-free household and the current situation where many suburban households have 3+ cars due to two working adults plus children in high school or college, each of which needs their own car every day.
On this I fully agree, and is largely what I mean with my lead-in. It sucks how much we have to drive around. Back when I lived in the middle of a city, it was remarkably nice how much I could do without a car. I still opened up more options when I had one, is the only point I'm making.
This person misses the point. They seem to be arguing for their right to own a car and to own a large plot of land. Which isn't what NotJustBikes, StrongTowns, etc. are arguing.
The actual argument is that when developing infrastructure we should be developing it so that people can also safely and comfortably walk and bike, etc. Notably that was historically possible in rural farming communities for thousands of years before the car.
Is it okay if in this imagined town you can safely and comfortably walk and bike everywhere but there is no public transportation at all, the town is sprawling and
so very little is within walking distance to any given person, little to no mixed use zoning, and everyone owns a car? I think that distills the argument down to its essence. Totally car dependent town but the sidewalks and bike lanes are top notch.
No, that isn't "okay". A key part of walking- and biking-friendly infrastructure is ensuring that there are places to go (in many places it is flat out illegal to build places to go near housing!). This definitely means changing zoning and land use regulations to make distributed commerce legal, but likely means adjusting development incentives to incorporate the external costs of, e.g., people driving to a big-box store vs visiting a neighborhood grocery store.
This is, broadly, the point I was getting at—you need the "other stuff" for all those bike lanes and sidewalks to be worthwhile. There is a tendency
among proponents of walkable cities to downplay the comprehensiveness of the changes needed, and how firm the government's hand needs to be to get to the desired result. Your last point especially as "pricing in external costs" is a polite way of justifying a sin tax on behavior you don't want to see. It's necessary to tip the market forces in your favor and start the 'flywheel' so to speak but you can see how this might rub people the wrong way, making their current way of
living more expensive to nudge them into a lifestyle they don't necessarily want. Nobody likes being told to eat their vegetables but especially no one likes being told to eat their vegetables by someone they see as a condescending adversary who presumes to know what's best for them.
All this is to say that I believe the discussion of this initiative is complicated by the framing that the current way is a problem and this is The Way to fix it.
I think it's an unfortunate reality that people don't necessarily get to have exactly what they want. I don't get to live in a place where I have access to world-class high speed rail, as much as I necessarily want that.
I also think the evidence is extremely compelling that car-centric society is a problem, that driving has real external costs that we have ignored (deaths, injuries, pollution, noise, inefficient land use, high infrastructure costs) and further that our reliance on cars has been the result of subsidies that themselves tipped market forces (by government hand!).
I agree that there is a hurdle to overcome when discussing this stuff because driving is such an essential piece of many people's lives. I think there are a lot of arguments that can help convince people that there are gradual improvements that we should make that would make their lives better---I'd recommend the Strong Towns book as a good option for market-oriented people.
I think many things in this article are wrong (the claim that EVs are silent is plainly false). But I'll just say that even though you might want open space, does that necessarily mean that you are entitled to it (at a reasonable cost)? Strong Towns made a pretty compelling point that urban downtown areas overwhelmingly subsidize suburban areas due to their much higher tax density, and I have to think that rural areas where it's truly possible to own "open space" are even more subsidized than suburbs.
Yes and one that is aesthetically characteristic of the places the author has spent time in. The idea that community development and the project of raising the social "floor" is somehow being "forced" on the middle class is infuriating and i encounter it often.
In defense of big oil, single occupancy vehicles, abandoning public transportation, climate inaction, and walkable cities because anything else is "communism".
This is a superficial, selfish, ignorant take. Instead, smaller and walkable villages exist that have enough of everything close by without having to be Houston, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, or tiny town texas where groceries and hospital are 30-45 minutes away. The closest I've seen to this is Davis CA. There are probably others but not many. 90% of Americans will rationalize meat-eating, owning guns, and ICE vehicles until the end of time because "me, me, me" entitlement.
PS: I live in hill country in close proximity to SATX not entirely by choice. I wished there were public transportation, bike highways like the Netherlands, and more essential services nearby.
Damn right. Cars are freedom. The Foucault biopolitics crowd will never understand this. I’m glad that the lefts so called “anti authoritarian” accolades are being massively called into question on things like the demand to get us out of our cars.
No! I want my damn air conditioning, my music, and to be away from the smelly masses. Trying to force me to be around others is authoritarian bio power. Car centric society is amazing. Everyone who doesn’t have it desperately wishes they did have it. Singapore people pay 100K+ for a shit car in a place with the best mass transit in the world and virtually zero crime for a reason!
The day I bought my first car, my personal freedom skyrocketed.
Same when I later moved to a transit-heavy big city (Toronto). I tried to tough it out for years, but buying a car completely transformed my experience of living there.
The creator of the video linked in the article talks about Toronto a lot and its major shortcomings on transit and general urban planning.
A lot of North American cities are bad places to live without a car, even though the population density should make that a reasonable option since there is not room for everyone to drive and park a car.
Correct. The car industry intentionally socially engineered the US to associate the giant individual and social burden of car ownership with freedom. A great documentary called Century of the Self covers this and other related things ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s )
Man, my parents are such fools. Driving me to school, to putt-putt, ice cream. Then, off to work in their car just to make a payment and buy gas and cover my college tuition. The doctoral thesis of my post capitalism art history professor proves they were scammed by their capitalist overlords.
most/many people want car, but the question if humanity can afford to give car to everyone: climate and ecology change, fossils which we take from our children and which could be used with more impact.
Let cities be cities, let rural be rural.
If you want to live spread out, fine. There’s plenty of space for that.
If you want to go into the city for the amenities it provides, take a reasonable form of transportation that doesn’t require millions of parking spaces and bulldozing neighborhoods for new freeways.
Heterogeneity of options is good. I don’t think most people who advocate for good urban spaces think that everyone should be forced to live that way. They just want it to be an option instead of only building homogenous suburban developments everywhere.
Right now the supply and demand for those kinds of walkable, bikeable cities, towns, and neighborhoods is out of whack. You can tell this because the places that are built like this tend to be very expensive places to buy a home.
In my area a house in a normal suburb costs around $500k. A similarly sized house near a local town center with walkable shops, restaurants, park, grocery store, library, etc cost $1m+.
As a concerted urbanite i totally agree with you. The problem is that people like the author are arguing for a third type of place, the suburb, which is unsupportable and harms us. Its a post-war experiment which has largely failed.
Yes in the sense of suburbs that commute by car into the city, requiring that city to maintain adequate infrastructure, but prefer the lower taxes of the suburbs.
If you choose a lifestyle that requires more to be spent per capita on roads, utilities, and public services then you should pay for that cost.
Suburbs themselves should also have variety. People love small towns, but instead of a mix of small towns with vibrant dense centers surrounded by less dense housing options, we just build sameness stretching in all directions.
Urban, suburban, and rural spaces all have different pluses and minuses. People have different needs for living spaces throughout their lives, and I feel it's important to recognize and acknowledge that and support them in finding the right place to live.
To me, the fundamental reason behind suburban failure is the lack of affordable housing in the city, forcing city mice to move out to suburbia, bringing their city mice habits and expectations with them. Build more housing in cities, and suburban problems will work themselves out.
Yes. Letting cities be actually dense would make suburbs work better.
But we tend to resist upzoning existing low-density development that is now in the density gravity well of the expanding city, keeping housing prices artificially inflated.
> This would be a big claim for me to make as someone that has no formal education in the topic, I wonder if the massive shift in urban vs. rural living over the past 200 years has happened at the expense of our natural inner urge for open space
This is a big claim for you to make for sure :) . As someone who also lives in Texas, I'll just say that wanting space is not a problem in it self, but the argument of Texas has ~millions of acres of land and therefore wanting a few for yourself is not bad just does not hold when you consider the resourcing required to fulfill your want (tax money, water plumbing, electrical wiring, concrete and the alike).
If we take into consideration 'efficiency', resource-wise, when attempting to build a city that works for most, not just thee, it would end up looking like a high-density urban area that is in-fact walkable and small individual space for those in it.
This of course, does not preclude the existence of outskirts and places outside core density, which is was you want. By all means, you can have it, but degradation of shared infrastructure is to be expected. As in, maybe you have some unpaved roads, no water line or electrical etc.
This way the city saves on aforementioned resources, and yes including the good'old tax payer money. "Don't want my tax payer money subsidizing your choices" is common phrase used in this state. By that logic, "I don't want my tax payer money subsidizing your choice to live outside the would-be dense city" would apply here.
Sadly, this state does rely in ever-more sprawling city design that will bring about its financial demise as the cost of maintenance and upkeep catch up to a slow down in the state/city tax revenue. Checkout urban3's work on city financials https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/
Sure choice of needing space, walking sure these are subjective, but for many many people the choice to where to live in not determinable. America is such a selfish society in regards to this when it comes to local democracy. (ie NIMBY, car focused, no care given to future population densities)
I spent 20 years of my life in Houston and saw first hand how horrible it is for non drivers and poor people to get around, lose their livelihood when losing car access etc -ie the working poor
Any major city must support the needs of its poorest majority as much as possible, and a city the size of Houston must have a better transportation and social spaces -it is absolutely horrible.
now if you want space and move to places that only work with cars sure, but our cities are suffering the lack of support for walkability and public transport. Anyone who has spent time in European cities where these spaces and public transportation options exist by necessity can see the value
Yes, I think a lot of people miss that the issue is that we have forced a reduction in variety, options, and market choices by dictating single-family detached zoning in huge swaths of the country, even in congested metro areas.
The people asking for some amount of consideration to non-car transit options, density, and housing affordability aren’t generally suggesting that this be forced on everyone, but that it at least not be artificially suppressed. That options and variety be allowed and that people have a choice to live in such areas if they want to or if it is what fits their means.
If you set such a low density ceiling in a giant metro area in the face of market forces that want density, you also raise the floor of the cost of living in that area to be being able to afford a single-family detached home and buying, maintaining, and insuring one car per working household member.
That increases the cost of living for people working in restaurants, shops, warehouses, and other service industry jobs, making your goods and services more expensive.
Issue for me with cars isn't space vs no space, it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies. 20 minutes to work. 20 minutes home. Add another 20 minutes if you do anything else but home to work. That's an hour a day. You've also wasted an hour doing nothing that might have otherwise been spent walking. Now you need to borrow another hour for the gym or some kind of physical activity… and that assumes you don't drive to a gym (one of the the most bizarre things people do). But that's two hours a day that just feels "wasted," and that's a best case scenario. Then there is the cost of the car, insurance, gas, maintenance. The hours that all translates into. Add it all up over the year and you spend like 15-20% of your waking hours dealing with the reality of the car. For some, it's more.
I also feel like a peculiar externality of car-centric society is anger. I get why. You are wasting all your time in the car. You aren't walking. No exercise. Fast food. Parking. I can see why people who are pro-car want space—they are angry all the time. They need space to cool off. There is even a face that I call "car face" which is that kinda pissed off for no reason always in a rush face. People who "love cars" and don't find it "stressful at all" seem to have this face to the max.
It’s also a real, significant, direct hazard to human life.
Over 100 people a day in the US die in traffic incidents. And that’s not counting survivable but traumatic injuries.
Yeah, I didn't even account for that. Drive enough and you get into an accident. Add all the hours and cost to dealing with that. You'll probably get somewhat injured, even if minor. Physical therapy and healing time. Lifelong back pain. Now you DO need to drive to a gym for physical therapy. More car time.
I also think about how my nutrition has declined DRAMATICALLY with a car. Gone are the days of fresh lettuce and berries unless you drive to the grocery store every day. Gas stations should sell ozempic at the pump.
car face vs pedestrian face: https://theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences/cutting_off
Love it.
> it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies
Commuting by train also involves a lot of stress: unexplained and indeterminate delays, filth, crime, dependence on multiple stages (walking, bus, train, walking, etc.)
I've never experienced crime on the train and i live in Chicago. The train isn't always clean but I've never found it filthy, either.
I put my headphones on and read on my phone. It's never stressful.
It'd be fairly easy to argue that all of these are due to transit being treated as second-class transportation for poor people.
Some of these and I think you’ve got cause and effect mixed up
I appreciate the tact taken by the writer in general, despite deeply disagreeing. However the gross generalizations and myopia of the argument are clear enough from the closing lines:
> I wonder if the massive shift in urban vs. rural living over the past 200 years has happened at the expense of our natural inner urge for open space. Am I bad because I want to live on land that otherwise would have been used for hay farming?
This extrapolation, that humans innately desire to live apart from one another, is a bold claim and directly refuted by the immense populations of voluntary urban dwellers. For certain, pro-density arguments against car-centered development can suffer from the inverse generalizations, and it should be called out in either case.
I like my city a lot, but "urbanists" really need to update their priors and examine what they're advocating for. Ride share, electric micromobility, and (soon) self-driving cars totally change the equation for transportation.
Chicago is about to spend $440 million(!) to update a single train stop for a system that is carrying 25% less riders than before the pandemic.
https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/08/20/state-and-lake-cta-s...
Self-driving cars don’t really do much to increase density of moving people or decrease infrastructure costs per-passenger-mile.
Some parking needs may be reduced, but you still need somewhere for the cars to hang out while waiting for each morning and afternoon directional commuter rush.
You still need the same number of freeways with ever expanding lanes.
They mostly decrease the monetary, time, and mental cost of taking a car to work as an individual choice, which will increase the load on roads and freeways.
How many passengers per hour does that train line move, versus the costs to build and maintain an equivalent capacity freeway with one person in each car?
It’s worth asking why the estimates for the station have doubled over the course of the last two years (I can’t find a source explaining why, right now).
But it’s still perhaps an unfair point to make. State/Lake is one of the busiest stations in the system, in the heart of the downtown corridor. It is not a simple “update” - it’s a full, in-place rebuild. And, that rebuild includes adding elevator connections from the elevated platforms down to the subway below. The elevated infrastructure in question is about 130 years old, and they have to keep running the trains over those tracks the whole time.
It’s a massive engineering problem, even before you add in the additional costs of paying crews to work overnights so that the whole CTA doesn’t come to a grinding halt while they do it.
If you search around a bit, you can find the construction costs for other overhauls the CTA has done recently, which far more agreeable price tags. If this one is huge, there’s probably a very good reason why.
Ridership keeps increasing as the system rebuilds from the mass staffing shortages of the pandemic. Every time they increase the frequency of a bus line, ridership increases. The trains will be the same as operators continue to be hired.
State/Lake has been sorely lacking an in-system transfer for damn near a century, and the feds are funding the rebuild. It's one of the busiest stations in the whole city, and evening rush demand still exceeds capacity on two of the six lines it services.
As someone who actually uses the station to get home from work it's ridiculous to hear you talk about this project like it's a bad thing.
It is frustrating how so much in life can feel car centered, I think. That said, so many of the counter arguments cannot contend with the fact that having a car is convenient. To an absurd degree.
There is a reason why everyone in the dormitories knew who had a vehicle. And though you could get to some of the off campus areas by foot, it was far more likely that you would hitch a ride.
If your campus had a subway stop in the middle of it, I highly doubt students were more likely to leave by car than via some other form of transport.
That being said, my 2nd cousin who lives in Copenhagen owns a car. It is convenient. She doesn't use it a lot since usually a bicycle or mass transit is also convenient but having the option is nice for certain trips or conditions. Copenhagen is a pretty nice city to drive in. Hundreds of bicycles at every intersection slows you down a lot less than hundreds of cars at every intersection.
That's the secret -- make your city convenient to use without a car, which significantly reduces the number of cars, which makes it much better for those using a car.
The campus I lived on had a transit stop not far off. I'm sure more people used it than my little anecdote made it sound.
I agree that places should be made as convenient as they can be for walking, as well. I just get annoyed with so much of the discourse assuming you can design the cities so that a car is not more convenient. It is almost always a massive convenience. Obnoxiously so.
But those cities do exist. Just mostly not in the US.
They also don’t need to make non-car options more convenient for all people, or even most people. The larger the share of non-car trips the better things get even for those who still drive, even if that share is going from 10% to 20%. Less congestion and pollution. Fewer traffic accidents. More density of housing in places that have high demand, reducing housing costs.
My point is that, even in the cities that you are referencing, the more affluent people almost always have a car. Because they can afford it, and because it is more convenient.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this. Essentially, my assertion is that you get more people out of cars by making them expensive than you do with city design. (Unless, of course, you consider parking costs part of city design?)
Yes, affluent people will pretty much always own cars. But with a pedestrian/cycle/transit friendly design, they'll use them much less.
I know affluent people in Copenhagen. They own cars. They are basically only used on the weekend, for travel outside of Copenhagen.
Amsterdam has 0.45 cars per household. So lots of households own cars, even in Amsterdam. But the miles driven per household per day is less than a quarter of what it is in the States.
I mean, cars per household is 2+ in large portions of the US.
Again, I'm largely inline with what you are speaking towards. The only change I'm making to the discourse is that, if you want fewer people owning cars, you pretty much have to make it more expensive. You can't just make the city more walkable. You have to make it expensive to own cars.
As I say downthread, this is inline with cheaper dense housing. If you want cheaper dense housing, you wind up with smaller living units. Often without dedicated parking allotments for all residents.
The goal isn't, or shouldn't be, fewer people owning cars. The goal should be fewer miles driven in urban areas. My cousin in Copenhagen basically only uses it for driving out to a rural area to visit her parents.
Owning a car in Denmark is incredibly expensive. That does significantly impact the ownership rate. And of course if fewer people own cars the miles driven by cars does go down. But lowering the ownership rate is a means to the end, not the end itself.
Fair, but largely to my point? If you want to lower the miles driven, you are going to be going through the same general steps along the way.
No, I disagree with your initial assertion.
> you get more people out of cars by making them expensive than you do with city design.
The city design is the prerequisite. If you don't have transit etc, people will own cars no matter how expensive the cars are (within reason, of course). Households in rural Denmark without access to transit own cars despite it being 2X as expensive as elsewhere.
Once you have transit, cranking the price becomes a much more effective mechanism.
Amsterdam has fewer cars because it is designed to be convenient without one, not because cars are that much more expensive there.
> (Unless, of course, you consider parking costs part of city design?)
Absolutely. The amount of space taken up by parking, and its related cost, and things like congestion charges, are part of city planning.
And you can still significantly reduce the number of cars and car-trips without eliminating car ownership. A household with one car used occasionally when it’s convenient needs less parking and driving space than one with two cars driven daily.
So on this we are in complete agreement. My criticism is when people show walkable cities, they need to underline that majority of those people will own a car if they can financially make it happen. Almost bar none.
This really just isn't true. Most people i know here in Chicago take transit or bike in the city. Many people i know who can easily afford a car choose not to because it's so easy to get around without one.
Make a city that doesn't require a car, and people that aren't compelled to use one won't.
I think that may be a bit of an exaggeration.
Yes the financial component is part of it. Building dense walkable urban developments makes car ownership more expensive and non-car options cheaper and more convenient.
Some would argue that in many places car ownership is being subsidized by the way we develop and tax.
Some households will still have cars, but households are not the same as individual people.
And I think there are plenty of places where the majority of households don’t own cars. You can say they would if it was cheap and convenient enough, but that’s the whole point we’re discussing. Not dedicating so much development and infrastructure to cars will make them less convenient and more expensive options than the alternatives for at least some of the population.
I could just be wrong. Nor am I aiming for exaggerated effect, though. I legit have grown to feel that people will get a car if they can afford it. Pretty much everywhere. As I said, I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this.
This is related with the housing discussions. People have somewhat convinced themselves that cheap standalone houses are the goal. Which, I suppose there is no reason that can't be the goal. But compare average home size in pretty much any US city with some of these walkable cities you have in mind.
When I do that, I start asking how related those two things are. And I'm growing rather convinced that people have built up a mental idea that they can live with all of the benefits of both worlds, without contending with the contrast between them.
I think you're probably right that eventually, most people will own a car. But I think the time in your life where you decide to buy one matters substantially, and is modulated quite a lot by city design.
I'm pretty young now, and I could afford a car. I expect that I will probably buy one at some point in the future. But I can easily live my life without one for now, so I have decided to save that money instead. If I lived in Houston, I don't think that would be the case.
None of my friends that I know in NYC own cars. All of my friends that live in my hometown own cars.
Yes, my point is just that the financial feasibility is related to the policy decisions.
For example you could say that most people who live in Manhattan would choose to live in a 2000sqft+ detached home if it was financially feasible to do so.
But because there is limited space, high demand, and city policy allows high density, such a home is not financially feasible for almost anyone in Manhattan.
And of course that applies in sprawling metro areas like Houston as well. Forcing large swaths of single-family zoning despite the market forces means that housing supply can’t grow with demand, so cost of housing increases.
See where i live my car is drastically less convenient than walking, biking, or taking the bus for basically any trip under ~5 miles. The effort to get out of my garage and out of the neighborhood and sitting in traffic and finding parking on the other end means biking is basically always faster, and for anything within a half mile (which covers most things i need day to day) walking is just easier.
I enjoy having a car for when i want to go on road trips or move something big or go to some specialty shop of the clear other side of town, but it is not at all convenient for ~90% of the places I go.
To what extent is having a car convenient because we've built our cities under the assumption that people own cars? Where I lived for a year in SF (near Church station) I found that for day-to-day life I never once wished I had a car. Groceries, restaurants, bars, and parks were all within (short) walking distance, and my job downtown was easily accessible by transit.
As much as I love college campuses, I think they often miss out on having interesting amenities within the walkability of the campus itself. Still, going to school in Cambridge I never wanted a car and the few times I rented one for a longer trip or a move I wished that I didn't have to.
I think cars are and probably should be convenient for certain things (mainly moving, buying furniture or other big stuff, and to a lesser extent getting into nature). But for day-to-day life, it is a sign of failure (and wasted potential!) when cars are convenient.
Fair questions, I think. I am just pointing out that if you have a lot of options when on foot, you almost certainly have more with a car. And you would have an easier schedule if you own your own car.
I say this as someone that enjoys the long slow walks. They are amazing. But if the goal is to get to the store/office and back, on foot is not as convenient as in a car.
The only times this is not the case, is when something has made the car not possible. Usually this boils down to "it can be prohibitively expensive to park a car at your destination."
I agree that for in-town trips the only thing that reduces the convenience of driving is when you can't drive fast and park directly at your destination for free. But these things (traffic, parking scarcity, etc) are really common, and are often the direct result of the fact that you are trying to go somewhere interesting. They are rarely artificial costs that could be removed.
I do think anecdotes are effective here, so: from my old SF apartment I could bike or ride Muni to the office. I generally chose to bike, but both options were more convenient than driving. The speed of driving and biking were both limited mostly by traffic and traffic lights, so biking was just as fast as driving. Both the traffic and the traffic lights are necessary because other people also want to live and work in a similar place as I do. But since my office was downtown in an urban, popular area where land value is high enough that parking is not a good use of land, if I drove I would have had to park a few blocks away (for a high price) and walk. Since bike parking is so much more space efficient than car parking, I could easily park my bike in my office. Taking the train was faster than either option; if it rained I would simply take the train.
I think you are not correct that a car is a strictly better option for all tasks. I think the convenience of not having to deal with all the things that make driving difficult is extremely valuable, and I think the things that make driving difficult are unavoidable because driving scales extremely poorly.
Asking most Americans to go car free isn’t realistic.
But I think asking for the kinds of development that reduce the need for and length of car trips, as a choice of place to live, is reasonable.
There’s also a vast gulf between a car-free household and the current situation where many suburban households have 3+ cars due to two working adults plus children in high school or college, each of which needs their own car every day.
On this I fully agree, and is largely what I mean with my lead-in. It sucks how much we have to drive around. Back when I lived in the middle of a city, it was remarkably nice how much I could do without a car. I still opened up more options when I had one, is the only point I'm making.
Per capita consumption-based CO₂ emissions, 2022 [0]
- EU 7.7t
- USA 16.5t
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
This person misses the point. They seem to be arguing for their right to own a car and to own a large plot of land. Which isn't what NotJustBikes, StrongTowns, etc. are arguing.
The actual argument is that when developing infrastructure we should be developing it so that people can also safely and comfortably walk and bike, etc. Notably that was historically possible in rural farming communities for thousands of years before the car.
Is it okay if in this imagined town you can safely and comfortably walk and bike everywhere but there is no public transportation at all, the town is sprawling and so very little is within walking distance to any given person, little to no mixed use zoning, and everyone owns a car? I think that distills the argument down to its essence. Totally car dependent town but the sidewalks and bike lanes are top notch.
No, that isn't "okay". A key part of walking- and biking-friendly infrastructure is ensuring that there are places to go (in many places it is flat out illegal to build places to go near housing!). This definitely means changing zoning and land use regulations to make distributed commerce legal, but likely means adjusting development incentives to incorporate the external costs of, e.g., people driving to a big-box store vs visiting a neighborhood grocery store.
This is, broadly, the point I was getting at—you need the "other stuff" for all those bike lanes and sidewalks to be worthwhile. There is a tendency among proponents of walkable cities to downplay the comprehensiveness of the changes needed, and how firm the government's hand needs to be to get to the desired result. Your last point especially as "pricing in external costs" is a polite way of justifying a sin tax on behavior you don't want to see. It's necessary to tip the market forces in your favor and start the 'flywheel' so to speak but you can see how this might rub people the wrong way, making their current way of living more expensive to nudge them into a lifestyle they don't necessarily want. Nobody likes being told to eat their vegetables but especially no one likes being told to eat their vegetables by someone they see as a condescending adversary who presumes to know what's best for them.
All this is to say that I believe the discussion of this initiative is complicated by the framing that the current way is a problem and this is The Way to fix it.
I think it's an unfortunate reality that people don't necessarily get to have exactly what they want. I don't get to live in a place where I have access to world-class high speed rail, as much as I necessarily want that.
I also think the evidence is extremely compelling that car-centric society is a problem, that driving has real external costs that we have ignored (deaths, injuries, pollution, noise, inefficient land use, high infrastructure costs) and further that our reliance on cars has been the result of subsidies that themselves tipped market forces (by government hand!).
I agree that there is a hurdle to overcome when discussing this stuff because driving is such an essential piece of many people's lives. I think there are a lot of arguments that can help convince people that there are gradual improvements that we should make that would make their lives better---I'd recommend the Strong Towns book as a good option for market-oriented people.
I actually live in Houston and generally agree that there is more wrong with Houston than just being car centric.
That Not Just Bikes video felt like a personal attack... lol
I think many things in this article are wrong (the claim that EVs are silent is plainly false). But I'll just say that even though you might want open space, does that necessarily mean that you are entitled to it (at a reasonable cost)? Strong Towns made a pretty compelling point that urban downtown areas overwhelmingly subsidize suburban areas due to their much higher tax density, and I have to think that rural areas where it's truly possible to own "open space" are even more subsidized than suburbs.
A straw man argument from beginning to end
Yes and one that is aesthetically characteristic of the places the author has spent time in. The idea that community development and the project of raising the social "floor" is somehow being "forced" on the middle class is infuriating and i encounter it often.
Now idea why you're being downvoted.
The author took the idea of 15- minute walkable cities and presented it as if someone pushes for everyone to live in them, and give up cars entirely.
Did you watch the youtube video linked? That's almost to a T what the video is arguing.
In defense of big oil, single occupancy vehicles, abandoning public transportation, climate inaction, and walkable cities because anything else is "communism".
This is a superficial, selfish, ignorant take. Instead, smaller and walkable villages exist that have enough of everything close by without having to be Houston, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, or tiny town texas where groceries and hospital are 30-45 minutes away. The closest I've seen to this is Davis CA. There are probably others but not many. 90% of Americans will rationalize meat-eating, owning guns, and ICE vehicles until the end of time because "me, me, me" entitlement.
PS: I live in hill country in close proximity to SATX not entirely by choice. I wished there were public transportation, bike highways like the Netherlands, and more essential services nearby.
I've lived my entire life in San Francisco without the need for a car. As a 18 yo, its obvious nobody really needs a car! Boomers just don't get it.
Damn right. Cars are freedom. The Foucault biopolitics crowd will never understand this. I’m glad that the lefts so called “anti authoritarian” accolades are being massively called into question on things like the demand to get us out of our cars.
No! I want my damn air conditioning, my music, and to be away from the smelly masses. Trying to force me to be around others is authoritarian bio power. Car centric society is amazing. Everyone who doesn’t have it desperately wishes they did have it. Singapore people pay 100K+ for a shit car in a place with the best mass transit in the world and virtually zero crime for a reason!
The day I bought my first car, my personal freedom skyrocketed.
Same when I later moved to a transit-heavy big city (Toronto). I tried to tough it out for years, but buying a car completely transformed my experience of living there.
The creator of the video linked in the article talks about Toronto a lot and its major shortcomings on transit and general urban planning.
A lot of North American cities are bad places to live without a car, even though the population density should make that a reasonable option since there is not room for everyone to drive and park a car.
> Car centric society is amazing. Everyone who doesn’t have it desperately wishes they did have it
Yes, this is why a small apartment in Manhattan is so cheap and a large house in the middle of Iowa is so expensive.
> I want my
So much of the argument for cars, housing, indedpendence, "freedom", boils down to this simple sentence, "I want my".
Correct. The car industry intentionally socially engineered the US to associate the giant individual and social burden of car ownership with freedom. A great documentary called Century of the Self covers this and other related things ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s )
Man, my parents are such fools. Driving me to school, to putt-putt, ice cream. Then, off to work in their car just to make a payment and buy gas and cover my college tuition. The doctoral thesis of my post capitalism art history professor proves they were scammed by their capitalist overlords.
Wow, someone named “der_einzige” arguing for egoism! What a surprise!
most/many people want car, but the question if humanity can afford to give car to everyone: climate and ecology change, fossils which we take from our children and which could be used with more impact.
Owning a car isn't a right
Neither is dictating what others can own
That’s a really scary world you’ve imagined!