People need cars to do things. Bikes are great (I live somewhere more expensive partly so I can cycle to work) but they don't replace the incredible general utility of a car.
It's possible with a very different lifestyle, a lot of a luck or a very decent income to structure your life in a way that allows zero car usage, but for most people a better car is the best option.
This is a design choice by urban planners for the past 60 years. This has statistically lead to detrimental aspects of every day living, and additionally cars are often not an attainable mode of transport for the poor, and the poor are often living in areas that have to deal with the by-product of pollution.
The incidental-exercise aspects that are positively impacting mental health health and obesity. We need to build better places for people, not cars, and this is something that's been ingrained over legislation from the automotive industry for the past century.
Cars are part of the puzzle, and shared cars could be exceptional. They are not sustainable to produce or operate and never will be.
In the US, people need cars because of how cities are designed. In almost any European city you can live with just a bike just fine. Maybe get a rental or carsharing once a year for a trip to IKEA. Even in more rural places it can be an option if your workplace is close enough.
There are plenty of mid-sized cities with decent bus service and bikeability, where living car-free may not be the easiest option but is totally possible and preferred by many people. Austin, Seattle, Portland OR, Boston, DC...
Those are all gigantic cities, Portland is about as big as the largest city in my country.
There are far, far more cities below 200k and in those its very hard from what I understand. Even some large cities with 500k people have really bad public transport and bad bike infrastructure.
And to live a car free live, you need to live reasonably close to the center where housing is very expensive. From what I understand, the places that are best to live for walk-ability are usually the most expensive.
I've been to Austin and while you can definitely live without a car I don't think it's going to be ideal. It's definitely a grid city that's optimized for cars. I'm not sure about Boston, it's pretty spread out as well but it's enjoyable to walk in, I still wouldn't compare that to any city in Europe.
The winter problem can easily be solved with proper clothing. There are lightweight rain trousers you can wear above your normal clothes when it rains or snows, and of course a jacket with good ventilation.
The summers are more or less solved with e-bikes: you spend less energy paddling, while still profiting from airflow. I hear France has a subsidy for them. Unless you're in Spain or Southern Italy I guess, or there's a heatwave going on.
This is where picking a bike that suits your climate/circumstances come in.
I commute on a bike (at least, if I'm not going out after work) in London. I have a foldable Brompton bike fitted with an e-bike conversion kit from Swytch. I can ride in the middle of summer (ok, maybe not in those 40C days we just had) and arrive with no sweat. And if it rains, no matter, I stop, fold up my bike and jump on the Tube, or a bus.
> In almost any European city you can live with just a bike just fine.
I don't think so. Imagine: two people, each with a job not in cycling distance, and they have two kids at two schools in opposite directions. What do?
It's easy if you get lucky with locations of places you need to go to each day, or (more often) you have enough money to buy your way there, or if you have enough money to buy a place on good public transport routes, but as with most people if you don't, then cars are still the most affordable way to do it.
Not if you have decent public transportation. This is probably a novel concept in America, but in most other parts of the developed world a decent public transportation allows one to live car-free. I use my car so rarely that I am considering selling it.
Most people need cars may be true now, but it's not a law of nature. These things affect each other. The village I was raised has about 8000 inhabitants. That sounds like sparsely populated and indeed, it has no good public transport connection - the closest light rail station is 5 km and there's no bus. But within a 10 km circle, you'll find 14 towns and villages, with a combined citizenship of ~60 000 people. And within 20 km, you'll find 6 actual cites with a combined citizenship of > 500 000 people.
You could run an actual public transport network there. But outside the cities and some light rail, it doesn't really exist - there's just a few bus lines that run every hour or so. Why? Because people have cars. When they tried to set up a bus line for that 5km to the light rail (which runs every 15 minutes, until late night), nobody would take it. People took the cars because they were used to it and didn't want to rely on public transport - especially since that was explicitly branded as "trial" - why change habits? And now, that bus no longer runs and people have to take the car.
Public transport thrives of network effects, but these are hard to establish. I believe it can be done, but only if you have an actual plan and the will to pull it through. It's a marathon, not a sprint as they always say.
If you're getting into regions where public transport is really hard to provide, then you're very quickly away from "most people need cars", because these regions may be large, but very few people actually live there. Let them use cars. Go for the large chunk that should not need cars.
Where I live in Switzerland my very rural village of 5k people had a regular train connection and a regular bus going to village up hill area where my parents used used to live.
Switzerland is somewhat exceptional with even small villages being connected by very regular trains, but its very possible.
And this is not some place where there are lots of other larger villages around.
You don't need to live in city centers to make this perfectly feasible.
My city is 70k people and its perfectly fine without a car or bike. Around this city, there are many smaller towns from 20k to 5k. In almost all of them its mostly feasible to live in without a car.
Before I moved out of my parents house, I lived in a 5k village about 25min by car outside of a 70k city. My parents have literally a herd of cows next to their property. And I live there just fine without a car.
The idea that you somehow need to be Paris density to have decent public transport is just not true.
And that was before E-Bike was even an option. I used to take the normal bike for all activities in the village and that was fine too. With a modern E-Bike, it would be very easy.
I'm contesting the claim that "in most parts of the world one can live car-free". It isn't the case, even more so in the case of the poorer constituency this subsidy is aimed to.
You know that before cars people used horses, which are wildly more inefficient than a car, and disgusting en masse, to the point where there were concerns in the 1800s that London streets would be entirely rivers of horse manure. Bring back the beasts of burden! An ass for every home!
Modern bicycles on modern roads have better range and are far faster than horses. The problem in 1800s London was that bicycles weren't invented yet and the roads weren't asphalt. Vulcanization was only invented in 1839. The Pony Express for example averaged to 10 miles per hour and had stations every couple of miles.
When was the last time you rode an electric bike in summer? Unless humidity is also very high I find it much more pleasant than just walking. You can't compare it to riding a motorcycle because you're not clad in leather from head to toe.
Most southern countries in Europe people aren't clad in leather when driving motorbikes, the most crazy ones might even only have a bathing suit as clothes when going around the traditional Summer vacation regions.
Avoiding sweat is not a good reason to keep people in 5,000lb mobile air conditioners. There are plenty of hot cities where the majority commutes by walking or non-air-conditioned trains.
Hearing what you are saying, and asking myself which has closer form-factor to a horse: a car, or an e-bike?
Also, your (valid!) point that a horse is "wildly more inefficient than a car", how does a car stack up to an ebike, in daily use, in total lifecycle (including disposal), and in land usage?
No they really didn't. Horses were for cargo, people in a hurry, and rich people.
For the most part people walked or more recently used a train or trolley. Now we have bicycles and it turns out if you don't spend trillions designing your towns and cities for the benefit of the auto industry you can get where you're going on a bike or train faster than if you do and use a car because you don't have to spread everything out.
We need to stop framing this issue as "car" versus "no car". It's "cars" versus "fewer cars".
I live in the suburbs of a HCOL city in the US. My wife and I could absolutely afford two cars. We have one. I don't think we could go down to zero cars any time soon, but the transition to one car was a lot easier than we thought it would be.
> I don't think we could go down to zero cars any time soon
Of course I have no idea the specifics of where you live, but I think many suburbs could make this possible within 5-10 years by:
-zoning an area to be the suburb's "downtown", i.e. a few blocks of small apartment buildings with ground floor retail including a grocery store and restaurants
-building high-quality bike lanes to get to the new downtown
-subsidizing a service like car2go to make it easy to access cars on-demand when you need to go somewhere farther
In any existing suburb, you won't get widespread purchase and demolition of existing buildings, rebuilding in a new footprint, and occupancy by businesses in a 10-year timeframe.
That's just not true at all. With the current nationwide housing shortage and sky-high rents, developers will jump on any opportunity immediately. All you need to do is set the right zoning code and streamline the approval process.
That tweet series shows a bunch of individual parcels developed over a typically 6-11 year timeframe. That's necessary, but not sufficient, to generate an entirely "new downtown" widespread redevelopment all happening simultaneously over a 10-year timeframe.
The dates there are just when the street view photos were taken. All of those smaller apartment buildings can be built in under a year, and 1-3 years for a highrise.
So, where I'm at, there's at least 2 months a year where it would be miserably hot to ride a bike for any distance. At least 3 weeks this summer, it's been dangerously hot. We get about 1.5 months total of days at or below freezing. Another 1.5 where you'd really have to bundle up. Then add in days when it's snowing or icy. Then add in days when it's pouring rain.
It would probably be possible to get away with a bike around here if you lived near everything you needed and really planned things out as far as getting places early in the summer and having an emergency plan if something happened and you were stuck somewhere in the freezing cold. At least you have some time in a vehicle cab before the temperature drops dangerously low.
There's definitely places where an ebike can replace a car. There's a lot of places where it would really limit your ability to get anywhere outside of walking distance.
Riding bikes in winter is normal in Scandinavia. If its too cold, you're wearing the wrong clothes.
Too hot, well, people are riding bikes in India. I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one.
Too far? That's an urban design problem. Nobody is suggesting rural people change their cars for bikes, although I do know some people who are loving their ebikes for property inspection...
It's also a scale problem. Inhabitants of dense, large cities like Paris or New York are famously considered generally rude, and I don't suppose there's anything special about those places other than density that would cause this.
Also real estate in dense cities is disproportionately more expensive.
Unclear why people believe this, but it's absolutely not true. Spend a day watching people walk to work in Manhattan vs people sitting still on the freeway in LA and it's clear who's happier and friendly. Road rage is real, and cars make people miserable.
> Spend a day watching people walk to work in Manhattan vs people sitting still on the freeway in LA and it's clear who's happier and friendly. Road rage is real, and cars make people miserable.
Even taking your claim as true, you’ve confused unhappiness with rudeness in placing it here, without that conflation it's a non-sequitur.
> Inhabitants of dense, large cities like Paris or New York are famously considered generally rude
Eh, I moved from a rural farming town to inner London. People in dense cities aren't rude, they're busy. If anything, city people are much more willing to help out, they just won't make a deal out of it. This twitter thread basically sums it up: https://twitter.com/jordonaut/status/1352363163686068226
> Also real estate in dense cities is disproportionately more expensive.
That's not a law of nature. It's a result of deliberate choices made by city governments to restrict the supply of housing over the last few decades. Also the fact that it's so expensive and people keep moving there shows that it's an attractive way to live.
> That's not a law of nature. It's a result of deliberate choices made by city governments to restrict the supply of housing over the last few decades
Is it even possible to build new housing when the population density is already at 20k people per square kilometre, like in the cities mentioned?
> Also the fact that it's so expensive and people keep moving there shows that it's an attractive way to live.
Did you consider that not everyone has a choice in the matter and the alternative is often unemployment? There's a trend towards urbanization because people move to where the jobs are. That alone doesn't make any place more livable.
If you have that kind of density, you can build out and each part of the city is like its own mini city that is perfectly reasonable to live in. If you need to go to another mini city you can bike or jump on public transport.
In Berlin these are refereed to as Kiez for example.
Very large cities don't really have a city center as such, or at least not for most people. And you can have reasonably priced apartments or townhouses in a well connected Kiez that has everything you need to live.
> Did you consider that not everyone has a choice in the matter and the alternative is often unemployment?
And about far more often its the case that people would prefer to live in the city but are forced to live some-where on the far edge and then having to buy a car to drive into the city.
This is what the real problem with the kind of low-density city surrounded by sprawl. The actual city centers are tiny to non existent and lots of cars.
> Is it even possible to build new housing when the population density is already at 20k people per square kilometre, like in the cities mentioned?
Absolutely. The most expensive parts of Manhattan have tons of 3-4 story townhomes that would become 12+ stories practically overnight if the zoning allowed it. Not to mention all the single-family detached homes near subway, PATH, and LIRR stations nearby.
> There's a trend towards urbanization because people move to where the jobs are.
Look at how many people stayed in or moved into NYC after their jobs became fully remote in the last 2 years. It's a lot.
dangerously hot on an ebike!! I live in an extremely hot place, it may be mightily inconvenient, or gross reaching all sweated to office, but not dangerous.
And this is a bit of a theme: anywhere close to a school - even close enough to cycle - costs more to live in. It's fine if you have a good job and can cycle the kids to school and then cycle back and work from home, or you've got enough money to buy somewhere near work and school (because you were fortunate enough to work and live on the same side of the same city) but this will not be the case for huge numbers of people. Huge numbers of people don't have that luxury.
This is exactly what we (my family and me) do. We don't currently own a car and don't plan on buying one but instead use our Babboe Big-E as mentioned. If we - on some rare occasion - require a car/van I can rent one rather cheaply from the local car sharing initiative, called StattAuto.
I’m not sure I understand the car message here because almost none of my friends in France have a car. Hell, I only got my driver license at 31 because I moved to SF and I found it crippling there (for the first time in my life) not to have a car.
Some people need cars to do some things. For many of them it's easier and cheaper to use taxis and rentals than to own a car. As more people give up car ownership it becomes easier for others to follow.
Have you consider that this is the case because it was designed like that, and that it could change if you just stopped constantly doubling down on cars?
Like, its perfectly reasonable in many places to live without a car. In fact, its the opposite of what you suggest, its possible LESS INCOME then having to own a car.
Compare the total cost of living and transportation when living a car centric lifestyle, compare to a bike/public transport one. I personally don't even use a bike, walking and public transport are perfectly fine in most even small (50k) European cities.
Now of course, sadly in many places in the US, living and work is often so far separated and so badly connected that the car is the only viable option. But that is exactly what needs to change.
I live in Oxford, which was definitely mostly designed pre-car. People with kids pretty much still need cars, unless they want to buy a £1m+ house located in the perfect spot.
People who have young kids right now might be a minority, but people who have had kids a some point are a far larger fraction of the population. If the expectation is that all parents of young kids need a car, then there's a high likelihood that they just continue using a car afterwards, too.
Just because you need a car at some point doesn't mean you always want a car forever.
And as soon as kids are old enough to ride bicycles or public transport themselves you live situation changes and you can very likely get rid of your car.
And if you actually look into places like Netherlands you will see that lots of people don't have cars even with small kids. The 'Soccor mom with SUV' cliche in the US, is replaced in the Netherlands by the 'Bicycle mom' who brings here kids in on bicycles.
> Just because you need a car at some point doesn't mean you always want a car forever.
Certainly, but I think it still sets up a certain tendency which gives car usage a headstart.
> And if you actually look into places like Netherlands you will see that lots of people don't have cars even with small kids. The 'Soccor mom with SUV' cliche in the US, is replaced in the Netherlands by the 'Bicycle mom' who brings here kids in on bicycles.
Absolutely, I'm not arguing that. I was mainly responding to the point that the behaviours and needs of parents with small kids supposedly don't matter because at any moment in time there aren't that many of them around.
You absolutely don’t need a car if you live in a French city or in the suburb of the largest ones. Locally public transports are great. Nationally the railway works fine.
I haven’t had a car for a decade. I rent a vehicle once or twice a year when I need to transport things. Economically it’s a lot cheaper than owning a car.
It's quite possible in many cities for a family to have one car rather than the accepted standard of two, however. You don't need to give up both cars.
I guess it works for both, but as a European living in a city, I know far more households with 0 cars than with 2 (and indeed, more with 0 than 1 for that matter).
In the US it's because the least car-dependent cities all enacting zoning ordinances in the mid-1900s that prevented housing supply from keeping up with demand and made it very expensive to live there.
It's possible with a very different lifestyle, a lot of a luck or a very decent income to structure your life in a way that allows zero car usage, but for most people a better car is the best option.