I recently read a book about the history of cars in my country [0], and how they came to dominate. It's quite astonishing how quickly we went from the streets belonging to the people, to the few privileged owning a car taking all that space. In 1920, 15 pedestrians were killed with only 2000 cars in the country. Instead of that being a killing blow to the cars, the rich people owning cars organized. They had power and stood together, and managed to make it so that it was "uncultured people walking in the road getting run over". Some of these organizations still exist today, like Trygg Trafikk ("Safe Traffic"), and they're true to their roots: they're not really advocating for less traffic deaths, they're advocating for making it easier to drive everywhere in the guise of promoting "safety".
> In 1920, 15 pedestrians were killed with only 2000 cars in the country. Instead of that being a killing blow to the cars, the rich people owning cars organized.
What's missing in this analysis is a comparison to the numbers of injuries and fatalities caused by horse drawn carriages. Also, cars didn't leave horse poop everywhere on the streets, with all of the health and sanitation implications.
One indicator is that horseback riding today is one of the most dangerous things you can do. The injury rate for recreational riding is higher than American football, car racing, and skiing. https://tsaco.bmj.com/content/6/1/e000728
I would venture to guess that since stop signs, lane markings and traffic signals were all deployed after cars started killing people, there were a significant number of people annually run over by horse-drawn vehicles, thrown from horseback, or run over by pre-car vehicles like trolleys and trains. Urban streets looked something like this: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM24987
You’d have to look at the annual per capita numbers. Anyway I agree it’s possible cars today are way more deadly. We have no way of knowing, but we know for sure that it wasn’t all wine and honey pre automobile.
You're comparing horse riding to being a pedestrian though. People on the street didn't consent to the risk the same way a rider or a driver has. You'd need to compare horse bystander injuries to get something remotely comparable.
It can contain listeria, giardia, roundworm, e. coli, salmonella, clostridium and all sorts of other nasty business. Most healthy horses have low amounts of these in their stools, especially compared with dogs or humans. However, each horse produces about 5 tons (11,000 lbs) of poo a year.
A bunch of horses in a big city on a rainy day is a recipe for spreading disease.
It's fun to see the patterns of history repeat themselves. Two things stood out:
1. Open Source - auto inventors shared ideas because of their desire to prove skeptics wrong about their new industry, and in response to being sued by a patent troll.
> I believe I am entitled to say I have never collected a cent in royalties from them, nor will I. Lawyers have tried to argue me into bringing suits for infringements, but it so happened we pioneers always worked together. We loaned ideas. We loaned tools. We loaned patents. If we worked out a good idea, we loaned that.
2. Lots of Companies - most were either scams or too small to support their products.
> When you know that more than 500 automobile companies came in and went out in those first few years, you will better understand some of the forces working against those of us who were honestly trying to succeed.
AI is the new hotness now, and both of these patterns are in full force.
Worth contemplating are the unforeseen negative externalities of the automobile as they reached scale. The article, written 30 years later, didn't even mention any. Makes me think about what we won't be able to perceive and believe in our current tech. Just think of what we're still learning about the web's externalities some 30+ years into it!
That is an overly broad characterization. We can look to the Wright brothers as pioneers who vigorously enforced patent.
As the Wikipedia entry puts is: "The Wright brothers did not have the luxury of being able to give away their invention: It had to be their livelihood. Thus, their secrecy intensified, encouraged by advice from their patent attorney, Henry Toulmin, not to reveal details of their machine." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers
http://wintonhistory.com/ adds "[Winton] was also generous in passing the technology along to competitors when safety was an issue." The steering wheel described fits that characterization.
] Unfortunately, Winton's local competitors were simultaneously working on a very similar system and beat him to the patent. The Ohio Automobile Company, later renamed the Packard Motor Car Company, added their version of the steering wheel, based on Winton's early developments, to the second car they launched in 1899. It was immediately successful, and Winton, whose company custom-made every vehicle, found the competition difficult and was forced to stop production in 1924.
Except that the Wright brothers would never have pursued powered flight without the prior pioneering example of Otto Lilienthal:
"Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted." ~ Wilbur Wright, 1912
What is your point? That the Wright brothers were not pioneers of flight?
In that case, Winton also was not a pioneer in the automobile industry, as he too built on previous work. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen came out a decade before Winton's first car, which in turn built on previous work.
Yet Winton called himself a pioneer.
And people at the time definitely considered the Wrights pioneers. Eg, the Aero Club of the United Kingdom gave them gold medals in 1908 for their "pioneer work".
I think this is important to read but for the opposite reasons.
The first cars were looked upon with skepticism in 1893 to 1895. But the article makes it clear that the American public was accepting of the idea by the 1900s.
We're looking at a period of 5 to 8 years to go from skeptical of an idea to accepting. This lines up with my experience with smartphones, internet, and other inventions of my lifetime.
There are other... inventions... which have had more than 10+ years to prove themselves. Maybe they'll prove themselves soon, but I have my doubts.
I'm wondering if I'm in the minority as crypto rightfully draws a lot of skepticism (presuming OP is implying crypto) but I have a hard time wrapping my mind around how anyone can call financial instruments with more volume than the NSYE and a higher market cap than any company in the world anything but "successful" already. Yeah, plenty of scammers and people with good intentions make a lot of claims that haven't come to fruition and most of them probably won't, but the same can be said of all the failed vehicle manufacturers as well. Yet, I don't think anyone was calling vehicles a failure at even orders of magnitude less valuation.
I personally don't make great use of crypto other than some speculations (disclosue, I have made a non-life-altering amount in crypto speculation) but that doesn't mean there aren't interesting, valuable things being done with the technology. I see things like https://atalaprism.io/ that seem really interesting as well as more institutional things like bonds being issued on the blockchain (happening in the EU) as things that have potential to continue adding value.
Given that nearly all that volume is made up of artificial wash trading to manipulate the price, I'm not buying it. If crypto had any real world use I would see it when I stepped outside into the world, and I don't.
Either you're saying that something has to benefit you personally for it to have "real world use" (which is a misuse of the phrase) or you're saying you haven't done any research, including the two real world uses I posted in my previous comment. I'm guessing I'm interpreting what you're saying wrong, but I'm failing to come up with any other way to read your comment.
Also the highest trading volume of NYSE is close to 300 billion in a day. The highest trading volume of crypto is something like 500 billion with some estimates saying 51% of all crypto volume is artificial. That still puts crypto's trading volume peak only ~40 billion off from NYSE trading volume peak. So by that metric alone crypto as a financial instrument is successful.
I posted this because I started thinking about what it must’ve been like living in a world where we only had horses and trains and what the absolute freedom that cars brought must have felt like. It must have felt miraculous.
There’s a lot of conversation in this thread about all of the horrors cars have brought into this world, and I can certainly attest that I’m a person who greatly wishes most cities were modeled like European cities with abundant public transit and walkable neighborhoods.
I also really liked the “hacker” nature of Winton who sounds like an SV developer from the early-mid ‘10s. I miss the days when we just built shit and shared (knowing full well the days when we _really_ just built shit and shared happened like 40 years prior).
Do you know what 100,000 horses did to the streets of New York in the 1890s?
Poop. Lots, and lots, and lots of Poop.
Not only that, but to feed those horses, you needed a horse to pull a carriage full of horsebread (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebread). Those horses that pulled the horsebread into the city also pooped. IIRC, 30% of all traffic was horsebread, supporting the other traffic that was going on.
I guarantee you. A horse has more environmental impact than gasoline. In particular, one-ton of gasoline moves more gasoline than one-ton of horsebread moved horsebread.
I’m not sure if that’s true. We’d have to account for all the externalities of “harvesting” a gallon of gasoline and frankly that seems like an actually difficult thing to do (either unintentionally or entirely intentionally).
Regardless, it still seems like it would’ve been incredible to live in a time where cars didn’t exist, and then they did exist. I have to imagine the next leap like that would be around the time humans couldn’t regularly travel off planet, and then they could. Probably outside of my lifetime.
> but I have a hard time wrapping my mind around how anyone can call financial instruments with more volume than the NSYE and a higher market cap than any company in the world anything but "successful" already
That's a very odd metric.
The success of the NYSE is its ability to raise money to new (or experienced) companies.
That is, NYSE doesn't exist to trade stock. NYSE exists to raise money (and as a side effect, trades stock). Companies who need servers, factories, or other equipment go to NYSE (or Nasdaq, or other exchanges around the world) to IPO (for new companies), or Secondary Offerings (for established companies).
We measure the amount of money raised each quarter in the tens-of-billions. This creates new companies, new factories, new equipment and catapults our economy into the future.
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In many ways, the trading activity is a side-show, just there to enable the raising of new money. (The easier it is to trade stock / exit a position, the more likely people are to buy stock in the first place).
There was a time a few years ago when cryptocoins were trying to be a new grounds for raising money. But that effort failed ("Initial Coin Offerings" are so full of scammers and rug-pullers you'd be an idiot to participate in one today). But even at its peak, it never succeeded at raising money like the NYSE does.
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So now I ask: what value does coin volume have for society? I posit, not much value at all. Its a distinction without much importance.
The other measure of success is maybe transaction-volumes. But this too is under decline. I'm pretty sure "peak cryptocoin" was ~5 years ago when Steam and other webpages tried to use BTC to buy video games, fund microtransactions and other such services. Alas, $50 transaction fees put a dampener on that, especially since video games were $20. It turns out that the system cannot support a large number of transactions.
I barely understand how cars culture work in the USA. Infrastructure costs are huge, yet people in this country do not want to pay taxes and will build schemes to avoid them at all costs. And they don't want to have shops and restaurants at a walking distance from their house.
It can only lead to bankrupting country or cities, drive on barely maintained roads and suffer traffic and lose precious time every day.
Australia has quite a few, especially around Melbourne. And they are all the most expensive places to buy or rent. Made up for the fact you save a fortune not needing a car.
> Also there are barely any walkable neighborhoods in America
There aren't enough, a lot more walkable neighborhoods would be quite welcome.
But it's an oft-repeated exaggeration that they don't and can't exist. There are tons of walkable neighborhoods in the US. Every place I've lived in California (four) has been a very walkable. My current suburban location is extremely walkable to pretty much anything I could need (and it was built in the 1990s, so it's not some pre-car era relic).
Considering they were the leading cause of dead kids until recently (guns have overtaken them, both are worsening at present) I'm skeptical of present day ones too.
Sure, but death rates in the US are super low overall, so #1 is irrelevant when there is always a #1.
And you can’t ignore benefits with any cost. Giving someone cancer drugs has a chance of killing them but we don’t stop using them because a chance at a cure outweighs the costs.
They kill thousands of kids despite the fact the we stole the streetscape from those kids and with it their independence. How many kids walk or bike to school compared to 1940? If we put sharks in all the pools it would reduce drownings too ..
Don't bother arguing with them, they obviously are not rational enough to see what is in front of their face. Most people are like this, although they will die saying otherwise.
The purpose was to show the effects that car over-reliance has on public safety and quality of life.
In the second scenario, everyone thinks the roads are too dangerous for kids (becuase they are, as evidenced by half of them getting killed) so they all drive their kids to school in oversized heavy vehicles making the roads even more dangerous.
Looks like they're still the leading cause of dead kids,
> While gun and motor vehicle deaths increased substantially in 2020, the latest year for which final numbers were available, claims that more children and teenagers die due to guns than motor vehicles only hold up when 18- to 19-year-olds are included, a group that accounts for nearly as many gun deaths as 1- to 17-year-olds combined do, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The gap between vehicular deaths and firearm deaths is narrowing among 1- to 17-year-olds, and may close entirely, according to the CDC’s provisional and incomplete 2021 data.
I'm not sure the word "kid" is legally defined anywhere, but for minors, it would appear that automobiles still are the leading cause of death
(or at least they were as of the time of that report, and from a quick search I'm not finding any more recent analyses. Traffic fatalities increased by a notably higher rate than homicide in 2021, and homicide decreased notably more than traffic fatalities in 2022. Would need to analyze the CDC's data to verify if the overall trends are present for minors too, but my guess is that they probably are.)
Not that which is #1 has much impact on resolving either of these issues, as cars were unquestionably the largest killer of kids for many years with politicians and even the general public seemingly unconcerned. The U.S. has an extraordinarily high traffic-fatality rate compared to other developed nations (higher than any other developed country in the world per capita [1]), with it being a leading cause of death in the U.S. for people ages 1–54 [2]. The U.S. has over 2x more traffic-related fatalities per 100k people than Canada, New Zealand, Poland, Greece, South Korea, Italy, Australia and France, over 3x more than Portugal, Germany, and the Netherlands, over 5x more than the UK, over 6x more than Spain, Japan and Sweden, and over 12x more than Norway. In other words, of the 42,915 people who died in motor vehicle fatalities in 2021 in the U.S., the overwhelming majority of them died unnecessarily.
The solutions aren't a mystery: passenger rail has exceedingly few passenger deaths, and rarely ever causes pedestrian deaths. More walkable and bikeable cities would also help as well, as obviously not every street is going to have rail on it. In the meantime, lower speed limits, enforced both by law and by design of the road, as well as lighter vehicles, would also help mitigate the issue.
Some say it's an unfeasible pipe dream to have good public transit and walkable cities in a country as geographically large and spread out as the US, but the US had excellent public transit and walkable cities 80-100 years ago. Many small towns from that time period had significantly better public transit and walkability than many major cities do today. One of my relatives grew up in a town of 25,000 people and her family had no car growing up, so she walked nearly every place she went. She tried saving up for a bike, but every time she could almost afford it, the price went up, so eventually she gave up and used the money she was saving to take a trip to New Orleans. Her town of 25k back then was more walkable than Columbus, Ohio — a city of 900k people — is today (it also had passenger rail, which Columbus does not have at all anymore, and has no plans of bringing back.)
I don't know what it is that makes people so insensitive to car deaths. I have a relative who lost her husband due to a car crash, and she herself suffered permanent injuries from being hit by a car as a pedestrian, but despite all of that when I talk to her the thing she always seems worried about is the crime and violence she hears on the news, despite the fact that you're far more likely to die in a car crash. I hear people complain about violence all the time (rightfully so, it's inexcusable) but I don't know that I've ever heard someone say they're worried about car crashes, despite being a far greater danger. I think people just think it's a natural part of life that is unpreventable, when it is neither natural nor unpreventable.
Thanks for that detail, it's helpful. It is absolutely insane to me that we literally run an asphalt ribbon of death outside (almost) everyone's door and people accept it as... normal. If my kid (who wiggles a LOT) squirms out of my grip she stands an unacceptably high risk of getting killed by a car. That's not OK.
Anyway it took 10 years but our plan to move somewhere better (Netherlands) is nearly done but you shouldn't need to move 6,000 miles to find one damn place that isn't completely given over to machines that crush kids.
It's not just kids dying, either. I want to be able to send my kid outside to play and not stress about it. That should be possible somewhere like Houten (which to be clear, still has cars! It's just much, much, much better designed). I don't know anywhere in the US I'd be ok with it, except -maybe- culdesac.com or one of the very few car-free or car-lite refuges like Catalina island.
"What would become an ongoing part of the rest of my life’s work became clear, as I sought find out the real truth about lead in gasoline. The first result of my study, “The Secret History of Lead,” appeared in The Nation magazine in 2000, and made the case that some of America’s biggest corporations – DuPont, its longtime charge General Motors, and Standard Oil of New Jersey (today known as ExxonMobil,) – had put lead in gasoline for profit in the 1920s, ignored legitimate health warnings and covered up safer alternatives, which we use today."
A Brief History Of Gasoline: A Century And A Half Of Lies
Seems like the doubters were quite right - our ability to go anywhere is now dependent on forking out $25-50K for a car, hundreds of dollars in insurance payments, hundreds of dollars in gas payments, hundreds of dollars in parking, tickets/fines, tolls, registration, licensing.
Not to mention all the taxes paid for the road, interstates, etc. And the fact you now have a 1% lifetime risk of dying in a car accident in the US. Getting into a car is among the riskiest things you do on a daily basis.
Then, the way interstates tore apart communities and parking continues to ruin downtowns.
That's before we get to the impact on the planet.
At the time they had a wonderful network of intercity trains across the country (430,000mi by 1910), street cars and metros. A lot of which was torn up thanks to the car lobby.
It's not even about the car lobby. It's about individual vs. collective choice.
For an individual, it is better to have a car than to use public transit, but for society, it is worse that more public spending, resources and city design is geared towards accommodating more cars than public transit. However no one is going to sacrifice their personal well being via giving up their car.
> For an individual, it is better to have a car than to use public transit.
Respectfully I disagree. Not only is it significantly more expensive, you have a lot less freedom. Freedom isn't the ability to drive to the middle of the desert, it's to get to where you want to go without being beholden to a metal box that's liable to kill you. We had that, and we can have it again. Not having to deal with parking, not having to deal with traffic, gas, etc, is actually great. Not having to worry about whether I can risk a drink and therefore increase the risk of murdering a family is great. It doesn't work for everyone, obviously those living in remote areas, but for most people, transit is straight up better in every way.
We sacrificed our wellbeing when we bought into car culture.
Despite starting with "I disagree", you are clearly in agreement with the parent comment.
The fragment you quoted means it is better to each individual separately for themselves to have a car if it has no impact on what everybody else does. If everyone else already has cars, then it's better for you if you also have one because the infrastructure is geared up for that. If nobody has cars then your life is better if you (*only you*) have one – in fact it's great, there's no traffic!
That's reading my comment too literally. The details aren't important.
The point is, in practice, for an individual choosing whether to take public transport or use a car, it's very often better for them to choose the car - even though that makes things a little worse for everyone else. Recognising that is an important part of making public transport work.
Having done both, and living in a city with a supposedly functioning public transport system, not being beholden to a time table outweighs all of that so hard that it's not even funny.
I get what you're saying. But there are cities where you don't need to worry about a timetable, there's just a constant stream of trains coming through. I'm thinking of Tokyo, Shanghai, or Vienna for example.
The rate of trains coming in in these cities is such that I rarely have to worry about a timetable. I just need to know which trains connect where.
The problem is the cities in between, which is probably the majority, where public transit is not used enough to warrant such high number of trains. If the public transit system was used more, you could schedule more trains, if you had more trains it would be used more.
It's kind of a chicken and egg situation where you need a lot of political will, or such density that it becomes necessity, to push for this.
I remember hearing a news report about a study where they found that the critical limit for public transit schedules is 6 minutes. Once trains or buses come more often than that, people stop looking at timetables and just go to the platform whenever they are ready to depart.
This lines up with my own experience. On weekdays, trams go every 5 minutes at my stop. On weekends, they go every 7.5 minutes. And that's just enough over the edge for me that I'm tempted to check the schedule on my phone before leaving my home.
Which city are you talking about? I don't think there's a city like that in the US. However, living in Vienna, I can't imagine ever owning a car. There's a super dense network of subways and trams - the subway goes every 2 minutes at rush hour and I can be anywhere in the city within 25 minutes.
I find their point quite to the point. It's just that we seldom sit and think the effects furthers from the basic first-level 'I have car, I can go where I want'.
Freedom of yours, is not freedom of others. You don't get to define freedom for others. Freedom for others is to move to a newly built suburb an hour away from the city, and still work in the city.
What happens with most of these, is light rail goes to the city for a few surrounding suburbs with 50-100k people per town. To get to that train station every morning, you need a car. No, you cannot have a bus circle the suburb for an hour to pick everyone up. No you cannot have many buses purchased by the suburb and stand still during off times - the taxes from 50k people cannot pay for that. No, no one is going to wait at a chicago suburb busstop for a bus while it's raining in October, or baking in July, or blasting -15 temp at 20mph winds, while the bus is late.
No one is driving cars to the desert. They are driving it to the mall, the restaurant, the rail stop.
They don't have to "deal" with parking. Towns have huge parking lots, and land is cheap.
What you did is make up a strawman, where people living in the dense city don't need a car. Guess what - most people there don't have one. I'm one of those people who has had cars in little towns, and no car while I live in the city.
Yes, there are two people who drive from the suburb to the city. Those are the minority. You see that traffic jam into the city in the morning? That's people's choice to drive. They can instead drive 10min to the rail or bus stop in or near their town. The option of which you speak, is already there. Selecting it or not, is the freedom.
No, I'm not talking about every city. Just most.
And no, we didn't have that which you describe. What we had is people having to work real close to where they lived. They are still free to do exactly that. I've tried that for over a decade, and don't own a car. As a consequence of that choice, I rent and sold the house. Maybe if you have a kid in school, you don't want to move too much. Maybe you get fired too and the next job's not that close. There was no fast subway or rail going all meshed between every town. Rail trips between towns were a thing you packed and dressed for. They were not a thing you took to work and back every morning. That thing, was the light rail to the city, is still there, and many people use it.
>Freedom of yours, is not freedom of others. You don't get to define freedom for others. Freedom for others is to move to a newly built suburb an hour away from the city, and still work in the city.
Well, if we want to have a society, we should very much define "freedom for others" too, considering the whole tradeoffs and issues or benefits of a practice (that's how we decided to have laws and ethics and other stuff, of course).
Not just leave it at "anything goes", and let everybody else get the consequences of individual choices, even if it's not their choice or to the detriment of the society at large (like, destroying public health or the environment).
Here's the problem with this logic. No personal attack, but I want you to think about how similar it is to the nazis and China.
>we should very much define
the people whose freedom of choice you are taking away for the good of society, are part of society, are part of "we," and the majority can't take their freedom just because it's overall good for that majority.
What you did is take a part of "we," made it "them," and made them the enemy. Don't do that.
> What happens with most of these, is light rail goes to the city for a few surrounding suburbs with 50-100k people per town. To get to that train station every morning, you need a car. No, you cannot have a bus circle the suburb for an hour to pick everyone up.
If the suburb is designed to be walkable then the bus is not needed in the first place:
Each individual community or neighbourhood can be fairly self-contained with regards to daily needs, and travel between them is done on rail or whatever. One could have all-day, frequent (e.g., every 5 minutes) service with trams (or buses) with-in an area, where you can travel with-in it, but also have connections to commuter rail to go to the Big City if the need arises:
This is how things were generally built post-railway, pre-WW2. (Pre-railroad things were generally all walkable, but long distances being done on horses or boats.)
I addressed this point. What you are proposing - replacing roads with rail and trams in a huge train grid of suburbs, costs an insane amount more than a road. You are talking about charging people 10x the property taxes they are paying now. Remember, suburbs do not have the density and hence tax revenue of cities. A highrise has 500 people in it paying for a little chunk of road in front of it. The same length of road in the suburbs is covered by 5 single family homes.
But you say (buses!). Again, I addressed that. A bus, at a bus stop, is not something you are going to be able to do half of the time in suboptimal climates in half the country. Even in the 1/4 of the time with bad climate in the other half of the country, you still need to get around 25% of the time when you can't be waiting at the bus stop in 120 degree heat to get to work. And for that, you'll still need a car. So if you already have a car for that 25% of time, why then can't you just use it all the time?
The walkable plans you reference completely ignores this issue, and pretends the climate is perfect every time you need to go somewhere. You don't need to design things to be walkable, if everyone already has a car for the times it's not "walkable" outside.
Those olden days you dream of weren't as rosy as you think. People would show up to work freezing, wet, uncomfortable, and get sick from being in the freezing wind for a half hour "walking." They were also a lot less mobile, and going between places was a thing, not a multiple times a day part of life.
The solution, IMHO, is to tax car use, based on its areal footprint, its weight, and how much time it spends on roads. That directly addresses the dangers and costs cars pose and incur, respectively, and counteracts the negative sum arms race whereby people buy increasingly large cars to make themselves safer from other people's increasingly large cars.
Damage to the road scales with weight to the fourth power. Fuel use does not go up that fast with weight. Also, it does nothing for the incredibly large and heavy electric vehicles coming out like Rivian and Hummer.
Yeah you really need a weight-mile tax to pay for roads. This opens a bit of a can of worms: people don’t want the government tracking where they go, but you kind of need that info to collect the tax. Or at least enough info to know how many driven miles were in which taxing jurisdiction.
Besides being able to tax electric cars, road use taxes can also tax use of more congested routes, creating incentives for road use that encourage more efficient use of the road network.
You're talking in a city centric way so you need to make sure your solutions are targeted. Plenty of people don't live in cities and their whole way of life is enabled by the automobile in a way that isn't experienced by city dwellers.
Let them choose their way of life for themselves then. People in the city shouldn’t have their built form dictated to them by the people in rural or suburban area’s transport needs.
There's geography at play too. USA and very large countries have longer average distances. In dense areas you can go by foot or bike. But above 10 miles it gets tiresome too often.
The housing crisis is exactly how densification starts. It will happen when market forces are allowed to work despite the god awful amount of regulations.
> Not to mention all the taxes paid for the road, interstates, etc.
Though it should be noted that roads had existed before cars (and were paved with the help of cycling advocates), and interstates/highways between cities are useful for commerce.
It is the extreme focus on making everything car-centric for personal transportation that is the problem. Having cars as an option isn't a bad thing; having them as a necessity is where most of the issues come from.
This seems quite one-sided. What's the steelman argument in favor of the car? I've heard that it increases labor mobility. I imagine being able to conveniently and independently relocate from remote job markets without substantial transportation infrastructure connecting them to the larger national job market would give workers in remote sites more leverage. Are there any other arguments in favor of cars that you're aware of?
I'd at least have time for the argument that they enable exploration of areas that are impossible to serve with transport, but that's why I don't actually hate cars, just car dependency. They also saved New York from mountains of horse poop.
That's what I'm arguing against also. The default should be 'you don't need a car' - if you insist on having one that's fine, but it shouldn't be subsidized by taxpayers and instead billed at the point of use. Basically all roads should be toll roads. If you want to leave town to a place that isn't served by transit, you can rent one.
Most importantly though, cities should not be designed around them but instead around people, bikes and transit.
> They also saved New York from mountains of horse poop.
Wedding's over, we don't really need the priest anymore ;)
Low density housing. It's being attacked the most in such threads as this because it's likely the main reason of the car adoption. People do love living in detached houses with their own plot of land.
Mobility for labor and commerce is also a big plus: any retail business can draw customers from much wider area just as well as employees. Large plants and factories can be built far away from the cities with cheap land and energy.
> Seems like the doubters were quite right - our ability to go anywhere is now dependent on forking out $25-50K for a car, hundreds of dollars in insurance payments, hundreds of dollars in gas payments, hundreds of dollars in parking, tickets/fines, tolls, registration, licensing.
As opposed to what? Horse and buggy? They required constant work and had very limited range. Automobiles were the first innovation that allowed people to truly go anywhere, and conveniently.
But most people don't go to most places. Streetcars and trains are more efficient at bringing people to places that most people want to go. You can still have a car, but having the option to drive isn't the same as having to drive everywhere.
> Streetcars and trains are more efficient at bringing people to places that most people want to go.
They rarely are. Between walking to the stop, waiting for train/bus, time on train/bus, then walking from the stop - car is almost always faster. Not to mention, all that walking outside in foul weather and sitting in enclosed places with lots of strangers will get you sick regularly. That's my experience, from European cities with good public transport systems.
>Not to mention, all that walking outside in foul weather and sitting in enclosed places with lots of strangers will get you sick regularly.
In my experience your immune system adapts. If you switch you will be a bit more sick for a year, but then you get a stronger immune system and it goes back to normal again.
> Between walking to the stop, waiting for train/bus, time on train/bus, then walking from the stop - car is almost always faster.
Until 100 people want to do the same thing as you, each in their own car. Traffic congestion and parking are painful. Mass transit exists for a reason.
They do an OK job moving at serving capitalism (moving people between sparser residential areas and super dense commercial areas). But for any kind of social gathering (where you'd want to move residential-residential) the system becomes far more complex, and you lose any hope of having a direct connection.
(And that's also ignoring how miserable the last mile problem is.)
Alexander Winton sounds like a fascinating person! It’s a shame he doesn’t seem to have written an autobiography.
Aside from this Saturday Evening Post contribution, and the biography “Famous but forgotten: The story of Alexander Winton, automotive pioneer and industrialist”, there doesn’t seem to be much else to read about the man.
[0]: Et land på fire hjul, by Ulrik Eriksen