Having a bad experience when you are in a car is an natural result of mass-transit/walking oriented cities. By focusing on non-car transport, you are going to end up sacrificing things that are good for car tansport. In fact logically car must be the worse experience if we're expecting folks to make other choices.
Just from personal experience, but NYC, SF, and many European cities are cheaper and faster to navigate without a car from within the city. Sometimes it depends where you're going within the city, though, for example outer brooklyn to outer queens will be faster via car, but williamsburg to midtown manhattan you'd be insane to drive during rush hour.
NYC, absolutely. When I lived near NYC I would drive in, park the car in a garage for the whole weekend and never had any need or desire to use it.
SF, not really. Public transport is too fragmented and limited. Most of the time there's no convenient way from point A to B other than to go get the car and re-park elsewhere nearby.
Notwithstanding the obvious subjectivity of such a perspective, presumably you haven't been to NYC, Tokyo, Taipei, London, or basically any modern metro outside America?
Oh I have, I've visited, and I've even lived in those places and gone without a car.
No more. Public transport is horrible, and I'll never again agree to live in a place without private transport. It doesn't have to be a car - but it needs to be exclusively under my control, and it needs to be close to my front door.
And I don't care that I'm getting non-stop downvotes for my posts in this thread, someone needs to speak to reality rather than utopian dreams. I don't care about the votes, but it's prettyu uncool that downvoted posts are greyed out and hard to read - aren't downvotes meant for offtopic messages? Or is the goal to have a uniform hivemind?
The problem is the attitude and not the message. That's mostly the reason why you're getting downvoted. I myself don't agree with you but didn't downvote. Just a heads up.
Public transport is not horrible, but sure you can have other alternative forms of transportation like bicycles, scooters, long boards, segways, horses, etc... The cities that permit non-car modes of transport are nicer to visit and live in.
I think in theory I agree with you. I would _prefer_ private transportation, but if I was stuck between private car and public transit, I would pick public transit because the alternative of sitting in a car commuting every day is dreadful compared to the few thousand steps I could get from walking to/from public transit.
Why do you think public transport is horrible in comparison to cars? Do you feel that e.g. the environmental or cost benefits of public transport are outweighed by whatever cars have going for them?
Public transit takes longer, is less reliable, doesn't let you leave when you want, is often dirty, is harder or impossible to bring a lot of stuff on, and is more likely that you'll end up a victim of a crime on it than while driving.
None of this is true for somewhere like Tokyo, except for the 'harder or impossible to bring a lot of stuff on'. You could say many of the above for cars depending on the place (try driving through Jakarta for speed and reliability or many parts of India for safety).
Paris, Madrid and Manhattan aren’t utopias, you just don’t need a car to get around the majority of the city. Metro, bus and walking/biking can get you almost everywhere.
In NYC a car is definitely more trouble than it's worth for a lot of us. I think the same is probably true in cities with a well functioning train system.
The number of car owners in NYC tells me that this isn't true.
If even in NYC people still want a car, even with all the trouble, what does that tell you about public transport?
And I'm speaking from experience here - I have a ton of friends in NYC who all started without a car "who needs it", and over time every single one bought a car because it's simply too hard without it.
NYC is simply too dense, people need space, there's no reason to jam them all in small homes with little space. Although I suppose some people like that.
I'm also speaking from experience. Anecdotally I know a couple people with cars and both are kinda deep in Queens. In a pinch I can rent, but 95% of the time the subway works. In some cases a cab/uber is a time saver or helps move something heavy. Parking is expensive, or you're spending a lot of time looking for a spot. Time is money.
Only 22% of people in Manhattan own a car, and that’s inflated by a weird swath of the Upper East Side. Most car owner in NYC live nowhere near the subway.
Higher obviously, but less than 20% in lost zip codes on train lines which is the relevant thing here. Staten Island is like 84% but there’s basically no transit there, and outer Queens is similar. Deep South Brooklyn also has higher car ownership. The Brooklyn neighborhood I live in looks more like Manhattan in terms of car ownership.
As someone who lives part time in Barcelona and NYC, and who is from NYC, the people who end up "Needing a car" usually live deep in Queens, or Staten Island. For those who are lucky to have a place where there's parking, they use their vehicles to basically escape the city, not to drive around inside the city.
> The number of car owners in NYC tells me that this isn't true.
What is the number of car owners compared to all NYC residents? Of course, there will always be car owners and starting with a population in the millions is going to make that number appear large.
You know, there are peopling living in these blocks with their kids. So you have at least two parties to consider: people trying to get from A to B and people living where people travel from A to B. In Barcelona and many other places many have decided, that by making life for people going from A to B via car a bit more miserable, people living in these places will have a significant improvement of their living conditions.
I'm really looking forward to superblocks being established in my district in Munich. It would be so nice if my kids and their friends could play in front of my appartment house without parked and moving cars everywhere.
> Why are we devoting so much energy to making people unhappy?
No one is spending any effort to make anyone unhappy. This is about giving a slightly less enormous amount of consideration to people who want to drive everywhere, so that more consideration can be given to those who are willing to use other modes of transport.
Maybe no city has managed to make public transport better than a car in every circumstance, but many times public transport is better. In fact, nobody would take public transport if it wasn't better for them.
In cities where public transport sucks less, there's more circumstances where it is better, and so more people use them.
> Why are we devoting so much energy to making people unhappy?
Few things in life make me less happy than the externalities of car culture. It fosters among other things:
1) Disconnection from one's community and the natural environment
2) Noise and air pollution imposed on one's neighbors without their consent
3) Worse collective physical health due to replacing walking trips with car trips
4) Excess consumption of all goods, including fossil fuels
5) Risk of serious injury or death for both drivers and pedestrians
6) High stress due to the inevitable presence of traffic
7) Environmental degradation and expansion of the urban/wilderness frontier
8) Repressive political regimes propped up by oil exports
Of course there are positives to cars too but many of the positives only exist due to the problems that the widespread deployment of private cars caused in the first place. We need cars to visit our friends and family or go to work because we constructed a society in which we don't actually live in the same communities as our friends, families and employers because the car allowed us to. We buy things that we don't need because the car allows us. Consumerism fills the void of meaning in our lives that is in no small part due to the disconnection that the car created in the first place.
Personally, although driving a car can be great fun under the right circumstance, I find most of the time it is either tedious or stressful. I would almost always rather be walking, which engages my body and allows my mind to wander without fear that I might seriously injure, or even kill, someone in a moment of inattention. At the same time, whatever mode of transportation I am using: car, biking or walking, I know that I am at risk of being hurt by an inattentive or reckless motorist, of which there are many.
I am making a distinction between private vehicles and vehicles in general. Obviously we need some vehicles to move crucial goods and people with limited mobility. And to occasionally make long journeys. Since the pandemic began, I have been only been in a car about a half a dozen times and I have experienced no material deprivation whatsoever. Of course I have been reliant on trucks delivering groceries to my local stores and the occasional home delivery (which again does not require a private vehicle).
Your fear does make me optimistic though. It suggests that people are waking up to the catastrophe that widespread deployment of private cars has had on human life.
Most German cities make public transit a lot easier than driving cars and figuring out parking. Their stations are serious, and their alignment with other transportation systems (bus and ice) are very serious.
If you're going to compare random mostly unused point to point, that's not what public transit is for.(That is something a car or taxi is needed for)
