Cars Kill Cities

http://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/cars-kill-cities/

by Jakob • 13 years ago

189 217 13 years ago

progressivetransit.wordpress.com

kyrra• 13 years ago

At this point for a lot of cities, it would require a large amount of infrastructure change. Mass transit in most cities sucks today, so people use cars. To do this right, the city needs to do a massive up-front investment in public transit. And there is no guarantee that this investment will ever pay off.

toomuchtodo2• 13 years ago

Yes, it would require a change in infrastructure. No, it is not necessary for the investment to be done upfront. You quickly ramp up cheap mass transit options (bus service segregated from regular vehicular traffic with dedicated lanes, MUCH cheaper than light rail construction) while using permitting/zoning to phase out car-friendly policies.

It won't happen overnight, but its a start.

chongli2• 13 years ago

Bus service does not work. People hate buses, no matter how well designed and efficient their routes are. Buses have an extreme social stigma attached to them.

jrs994• 13 years ago

that's why we should make new cities with the infrastructure to support a population with zero cars allowed. And make that city an awesome place to live.

conjecTech3• 13 years ago

As a small business owner who sells a physical good, statements like this scare the hell out of me. You have no idea the kind of monopolization and losses of freedom implementing ideas like this would entail. Cars are democratic. They are a cheap, scaleable way of solving the problem of transportation. Kill cars, and you will destroy a lot of entrepreneurship in things that really matter. You will also be hurting those that start with the least most of all.

asynchronous13• 13 years ago

I think you mean, "Mass transit in most American cities sucks today".

abduhl• 13 years ago

This post is a rant backed up with only anecdotal evidence and an enraged author with a penchant for catchy headlines.

No solutions are offered because no problem is properly presented.

marcosdumay2• 13 years ago

At the other side, the author presented the less fitting anedocte he came up with, saying "see, even if I try hard to refute the hypothesis, I can't". And it's not an extraordinary hypothesis.

CapitalistCartr• 13 years ago

I fond our cities profoundly ugly, but cars serve an essential service. I need a flexible, quick means of secure transport. I need to move a variable number of people from 1-4. I often need to bring tens of kilograms of stuff with me. What else can fill the bill around a large metro area (~3 million people)?

I would love an alternative, to live in beautiful cities, to walk around the way I can overseas.

jrs994• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City

rayiner5• 13 years ago

Walking + a cart.

tdees404• 13 years ago

This is easy enough to fix from a policy standpoint:

(1) make free parking a taxable benefit for companies

(2) tax the hell out of gas/car registration, or at the very least tax it enough to pay for infrastructure

(3) no mandated parking minimums in new construction in cities

(4) get rid of publicly paid for parking

But of course this requires transit alternatives and popular support, which does not exist in places like Atlanta. I live in Orange County, and I bike to work (we have perfect weather and mediocre bike infrastructure), but people love their cars here.

dublinben• 13 years ago

I think a better alternative for 2 would be congestion pricing for downtown areas. An across the board registration hike would be regressive, and disproportionately affect the rural poor.

tdees404• 13 years ago

Ah yes, even better. But that couldn't even fly in NYC, arguably the place with the least car friendly political environment in the US.

gress2• 13 years ago

The post is right, and even more so for developing world cities that emerged before cars were around.

However the post is also naive. Cars are usually much faster, provide much better shelter from the weather, and are much less tiring than trying to lug bags from one place to another on buses or other public transport. They also place far fewer constraints on when you can travel.

Of course it's possible to structure one's life so as to deal with all of the issues. I have lived half of my adult life without a car, including 4 years in the SF Bay Area, and I managed.

But let's stop pretending that there isn't a trade off. Cars are very very convenient. The key to reducing the need for cars is not just good public transport - it's services that reduce the reliance on traveling to get chores done. Things like grocery deliveries, laundry pickup, and amazon.com.

It would be a lot easier to rely solely on public transport if you never had to carry anything.

GuiA5• 13 years ago

Self driving electric cars that people pay for on a subscription model (rather than ownership) are the future I'd like to see. I hope it happens during my lifetime.

jowiar3• 13 years ago

Taxis are a reasonable "turking" of this concept.

lambda4• 13 years ago

Yep. I've used Zipcar in lieu of a car before (and now own a car that I use maybe once every two weeks), but there was just enough friction due to having to walk to the nearest available car (the closest location to us wasn't always available, so we'd have to walk a few blocks further for the closest available car), having to pay for the time when the car is just parked at your destination before you return it, and not being suitable for the kind of longer range, weekend or week long trips that are a lot of what we need a car for.

If the cars were self-driving, however, that would solve the majority of those problems. No need to hike to find the closest car, it would come to you. No need to pay for the time that it's parked while at your destination, it could be used by other people, and another car could come pick you up when you needed to leave. No need to return the car to where you picked it up, it would just go back to the closest available station and they'd rebalance themselves automatically.

nitrogen• 13 years ago

Subscriptions sure are convenient (and lucrative), but there's also something to be said for the certainty of an owned asset that will always be there, even if you run out of money later.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

when electric cars, or alternative fuels, become more prevalent and we have the ability for self driving cars the effect will become even more pronounced.

With self driving cars and dedicated roads or lanes for them; we already have special toll lanes in many cities; the distance one lives from work may become a non factor. Throw in better tools for telework and cities may simply become the home to two groups, those who can afford their secure enclaves and those trapped by government subsidies.

Cars gave freedom to many people, freedom to move about as they want, freedom to shop where they want, and freedom to live where they want and still do work. Automation will increase all of those options. Cities will need to reinvent themselves to be relevant.

tdees404• 13 years ago

The odd thing to me about cars is that people pick the most unusual use cases and then buy their cars off of that. So my dad likes to haul plywood once in a while, so he bought a pick-up. But 99.99% of the time he could use a subcompact. Likewise everyone knows people who have two kids and buy a van/SUV because they want an extra seat or two. You can always rent a car if you get into these sorts of situations, and it would be much cheaper than buying a huge car that runs with one person in it 90%+ of the time.

dllthomas8• 13 years ago

It may not be unreasonable if the overhead to rent is high. It's coming down, though I have no idea what ranges are "too high" or where things currently stand relative to that.

sliverstorm6• 13 years ago

Is it really that odd? We do the exact same thing with computers. How often, exactly, are we max'ing all 16GB of RAM and pegging all eight cores of our workstations? Couldn't we "just" rent time on EC2 when we need more?

Yes, it's a pain in the butt to farm out most types of compute to EC2. Yes, it can quickly get expensive. Yes, you can save money buying a $40 Sempron. All these arguments and obstacles can be applied just as well to buying a 2-seater subcompact and renting other cars, so before we decry it as "weird" and "making no sense", maybe we should reflect on our own decisions?

rayiner5• 13 years ago

I lived car-dependent in Atlanta, without a car in Chicago and New York, and am car-dependent again in Wilmington, DE. The burden of carrying things never matched the hassle of circling around somewhere looking for a parking spot.

Indeed, living in the New York City suburbs with a baby and no car (but on a train line) was way more convenient than living in Wilmington with a car. Running down the block to the store and shoving some items in the stroller basket is infinitely easier than putting the baby in a car seat, folding the stroller into the trunk, driving 12 miles to the strip mall, taking the baby out of the car seat, unfolding the stroller out of the trunk, putting the baby back in the car seat, folding the stroller into the trunk, driving 12 miles back from the strip mall, then finally taking the baby back out of the car seat and unfolding the stroller out of the trunk.

It's as inconvenient and frustrating as it sounds.

People have preferences, sure, but I'm sick of subsidizing suburbanization with my tax dollars. The public sector spends about $150 billion per year building and maintaining highways: http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/120x.... That's not counting local roads and streets. Nobody blinks an eye at that. But they freak out that Amtrak has been given $13 billion in federal subsidies in the 40 years since 1972.

And don't get me started on the tax breaks for mortgages that disproportionately benefits suburbanites, etc. My wife and I have no problem with how much taxes we pay, but it drives us crazy that my parents pay a substantially lower rate despite making more money because they can deduct fully deduct the interest on their $1 million mortgage for their suburban McMansion. Meanwhile, my wife and I are phased out of student loan and childcare deductions despite making less money.

selmnoo• 13 years ago

People have preferences, sure, but I'm sick of subsidizing suburbanization with my tax dollars. The public sector spends about $150 billion per year building and maintaining highways: http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/120x.... That's not counting local roads and streets. Nobody blinks an eye at that. But they freak out that Amtrak has been given $13 billion in federal subsidies in the 40 years since 1972.

Wow, never thought about it like that. Thanks for the comment.

astrodust3• 13 years ago

Cars are usually much faster, provide much better shelter from the weather...

If only there was such a thing as a car that you could call on-demand, make use of when you wanted it, and then got rid of it when you were done.

Even better, what about one that comes with a driver?

A crazy idea, I know.

If you live in the right neighborhood, a car is a nuisance. I can go somewhere and just walk right in. I don't have to spend time finding a parking spot, paying for parking, dealing with parking tickets, and all that related nuisance. Having owned a car, I found it shapes your decisions a lot. Things are only convenient if they're convenient to get to in a car.

Considering how much money I'm not spending on a car, a cab is a bargain. If I need more than that, rent a van by the hour.

nilkn• 13 years ago

The following page estimates the true cost of car ownership at approximately $1.38/mile: http://commutesolutions.org/external/calc.html

That's still quite a bit cheaper than taxi fares or the minimum $2.75 that Uber charges. Assuming that you spend $20k on purchasing the car, you'd make up for the cost of the car in just under 15,000 miles driven compared to taking Uber at the quoted rate.

was_hellbanned3• 13 years ago

I'm an avid cyclist and motorcyclist. I've gone skydiving and SCUBA diving. Yet some of the most frightening moments in my life have been in the back of San Francisco taxis.

The sooner robots replace taxi drivers, the better. And the taxis will probably still feel gross inside.

dionidium2• 13 years ago

Everybody knows this is true, of course. I live three miles from work. To get here this morning I could have walked 3 blocks to the light rail station near my apartment, then another 4 or so blocks from the destination station to my office. This is pretty convenient, especially in St. Louis, where the vast, vast majority of residents don't have options nearly that good.

But I didn't do it. It was 16F degrees when I left the house this morning. I drove my car.

dionidium2• 13 years ago

I'll add that I'm a supporter of our transit system. I moved to my current apartment in part to be near it (and it plays a role in deciding where I'd like to work). But even after configuring my life about as much as is possible in this city to make the train an option, the car is still very often the most convenient, hassle-free option.

droob• 13 years ago

Ha! I was going to write almost this exact post -- I can travel from Maplewood to Washington Ave every day by bus in about an hour, or by car in about half an hour.

eru2• 13 years ago

Put on some proper clothing and take your bike?

phaer5• 13 years ago

Cars are convenient for an individual, but that is because you do out-source most of the negative aspects of them to the society around you. Just image how green, quiet and open streets (the space between buildings) could be without cars or with cars which deliver goods only, especially in bigger cities. The air would be a lot better too, roads need a lot of maintenance, cars need a lot of fuel, create a lot of pollution etc

ars_technician5• 13 years ago

How do you envision goods being delivered to people then?

seanmcdirmid2• 13 years ago

I lived the earlier part of my adult life with a car (15-30), and have now been car free for 8 years or so.

I live in a dense city where you have to win a lottery to buy a car. So I take a taxi most places, which is just as convenient and environmentally probably the same impact (sans the need for parking, taxis are nice in that way).

Our city also has great delivery services, which my wife takes advantage of. She ordered some stuff one morning on Taobao and they were delivered that afternoon, no quadrocopter drone necessary.

It would be a lot easier to rely solely on public transport if you never had to carry anything.

Amen. American public transit advocates should start looking at this aspect: even if we get density to enable public transport, there are a bunch of other services that are necessary to make car-less practical (local grocery stores, deliveries, etc...)

saraid2164• 13 years ago

Eh, IMO, cars are killing democracy, too. I haven't lined up the studies to actually show the causal chain, though. It's something I need to get around to doing.

digitalsushi• 13 years ago

If most things could be delivered by drones to where you lived, do you think we would space out, or clump together, or stay the same?

I think, for me, I could use my car payment on taxi service if I didnt need to commute or do errands, and it would be about the same. Except I wouldnt have a car, something that breaks down.

elhector• 13 years ago

High correlation with another post in the board:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2013/12/10/why_cul_de_sac...

Can be a bit of a catch 22 in today's world, where new cities and developments are created assuming high volume / usage of cars.

You can see how dense cities can work very well with very few cars in places like Amsterdam, but there city setup and infrastructure eases walking / biking and is very unfriendly to cars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Amsterdam#Car

forrestthewoods2• 13 years ago

Self driving cars my pick for best solution. You can have fewer cars services more people with higher efficiency. It's all wins across the board.

I hope the bloggers solution ideas aren't "better public transportation". Public transportation sucks, even in Europe. A pre-requisite to good public transportation is poor infrastructure for private transportation. I view asking for better public transportation as asking for a faster horse. We can do way better than that.

tieTYT• 13 years ago

Public transportation sucks, even in Europe.

Although I've only visited, I thought the public transportation in France was very good. Those buses move super fast. In America it's common to have to ride a bus for over an hour to get to your destination that's not that far by car standards. Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say this?

Tiktaalik4• 13 years ago

Self driving cars doesn't change much.

Supposing that there would exist car sharing systems such that a single car may be used throughout the day by several people, then we could cut back on parking spots, but I'm sure there will be many that own their own self driving car and share it with no one.

During morning rush hour the only difference from now would be that commuters could do the crossword puzzle instead of focusing on traffic.

kjackson2012• 13 years ago

Incorrect. If you have self-driving cars, the entire flow of traffic could be much more efficient, virtually eliminating traffic jams.

You could drive at the speed limit with a lot smaller distance between cars, etc, packing in a greater density of people without sacrificing speed.

phaer5• 13 years ago

That's just not true, you can't say that about all european cities. Vienna has excellent public transport for example.

forrestthewoods2• 13 years ago

Public transportation sucks at a fundamental level. It's a graph with an extremely limited number of nodes on a completely fixed schedule. That's clearly inferior to free travel from any point to any point.

Given equal travel time I'd pick an autonomous car over train or bus 100% of the time. I'd pick a self driven car 100% of the time when not inebriated. For the most part faster travel time in a train or bus isn't a sign of their superiority but a sign of failure in proper infrastructure for cars. =I've been throughout Europe. Including two weeks in Vienna. I still think public transportation sucks and asking for more is asking for a faster horse.

In the United States I'd argue there isn't a single city with good public transportation. Not one. Some folks will list NYC as a good example. I don't consider a city with the single worst commute time in the entire country as a positive example. [1]

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/longest-...

Tiktaalik4• 13 years ago

Car oriented design is not efficient at all for most city trips and we need to dramatically increase funding for alternatives.

Alongside directing our infrastructure dollars toward supporting a more balanced mix of travelling options, the most sensible thing we can do is to expose more of the real cost of car oriented infrastructure to the end consumer via road fees, bridge tolls and ending free parking.

Anechoic• 13 years ago

FYI, the author of that post address self-driving cars in his next post: http://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/self-driv...

jstalin• 13 years ago

That betrays the basic attitude of these anti-car folks. It's not the cars, but the freedom to live where you want that they detest.

api2• 13 years ago

They also detest the democratization of wealth, which invariably results in some form of "sprawl." It's either the horizontal sprawl of endless little palaces of Versailles with their little lawns, or it's the vertical sprawl of monstrous energy-sucking megastructures full of luxury condominiums. But in either case the result of democratized wealth does not give fellatio to agrarian-utopian fantasies.

Tiktaalik4• 13 years ago

People can live where they want, but I'm critical of having to subsidize the excessive amount of infrastructure necessary for the lifestyle choice of unnecessarily travelling very large distances. For me it's even worse because I live in a region where the terrain requires a lot of bridges.

Groxx• 13 years ago

Same can be said in the opposite direction. All that parking space and all that road space wasted in cities means removing the freedom to live in the city for many, possibly more than the ones who are currently driving in.

marcosdumay2• 13 years ago

People living further away combined with the current car ownership means more cars on the streets. That's not explicitly stated at the article, but came-on, the author clearly sheers for the improved accessibility, but prefers the shared cars option.

caseyamcl• 13 years ago

I certainly don't detest the "freedom to live where you want." It's a lack of freedom that I detest. In my city (and most others), it is highly impractical or impossible to go anywhere without a car. There is no freedom I'm choosing how to transport yourself; you drive or you don't go.

My car is kind of a form of taxation in that regard; you can't get around safely without it. There are few sidewalks or bike facilities, so citizens must own a car whether they want to (or can afford to) or not.

Isn't the freedom to choose how to get around as important to you as the freedom to choose where to live?

cylinder• 13 years ago

They're free to live where they want. Just stop expecting the rest of us to pay for the ever-expanding roads and freeways that they feel entitled to reach them.

justinsb2• 13 years ago

If self-driving cars become a reality, it is interesting to think of what happens to all this space & infrastructure. If the model is that we don't own cars, but rather share them like taxis, then there is no need for parking: the car will just drop you and go to its next trip. If the model is that we own our self-driving cars, it may be that they can be parked at much greater distances (10+ miles) from where we spend time (in much denser structures than today). We can likely eliminate parking from inner cities, both garages and roadside parking.

If we can design roads and grids for computers and not humans, perhaps we can make them much efficient by trading off simplicity. Could we have a complex system of mostly one-way streets?

What interests me is that not just parking garages go away, but what today is a four-lane-width road (with two lanes dedicated to parking) may become a single-lane one-way street. The sidewalk - which used to be 20% of the space - is now 80% of the space. Looking around busy cities, and trying to imagine what it will look like post-self-driving car, is IMHO mind-blowing.

sliverstorm6• 13 years ago

- Self-driving cars will still need to park at off-peak times. Unless they just keep driving in circles.

- Having your car park 10 miles away from you after every trip adds some forty miles of travel per commute. That's forty miles of fuel and forty miles of maintenance, every day.

- I'm also not thrilled about the prospect of already-dense cities shrinking streets to one lane. We call them concrete jungles now- can you imagine if all the roads were only 15 feet across? Goodbye, sky.

justinsb2• 13 years ago

Definitely valid points! Personally, I hope that we end up with a shared-ownership model, and that the cars do park 10+ miles away if they are idle, but that this is amortized across a large number of commutes. I also hope that we use the liberated space for sidewalks and green spaces, not for more buildings. Small changes though (whether we own or share our cars, planning policies on urban parking & freed up lanes) will have a huge effect...

GuiA5• 13 years ago

- Self-driving cars will still need to park at off-peak times. Unless they just keep driving in circles.

"they can be parked at much greater distances (10+ miles) from where we spend time, in much denser structures than today"

- Having your car park 10 miles away from you after every trip adds some forty miles of travel per commute. That's forty miles of fuel and forty miles of maintenance, every day.

Only if we map 1 car to 1 person. Of course that'd be completely unoptimized - people wouldn't own car, but rather have a "subscription" where they can get a car dispatched at any time (à la Uber). Cars would only park 10 miles away at truly off peak hours; the rest of the time they'd go to service some other customer.

- I'm also not thrilled about the prospect of already-dense cities shrinking streets to one lane. We call them concrete jungles now- can you imagine if all the roads were only 15 feet across? Goodbye, sky.

As the previous poster said, the extra space would go to sidewalks. Outside patios, trees, grass, parks... the things we could do would be amazing. Some older European cities from pre-car eras are built like that, and it's wonderful.

mjmahone17• 13 years ago

Shrink the street to gain curb space. Look at Broadway in NYC: you have all kinds of events and public markets going on down just about the entire length. Gaining curb space encourages people to walk, which in turn spurs local businesses, which encourages more people to walk (because there are all these awesome storefronts to shop at).

rayiner5• 13 years ago

- I'm also not thrilled about the prospect of already-dense cities shrinking streets to one lane. We call them concrete jungles now- can you imagine if all the roads were only 15 feet across? Goodbye, sky.

Streets in downtown Philadelphia are effectively one lane in each direction (one lane is parking) and there is plenty of sky. You just need to manage the setback requirements. This is one of the densest neighborhoods in Philadelphia (~60k people per square mile): https://maps.google.com/maps?q=rittenhouse+square&hl=en&ll=3....

revelation• 13 years ago

I think what we need are exponential tolls based on distance to city center or density of pedestrian traffic around. I couldn't care less about cars on streets dedicated for them, but everywhere else they need to piss off and quickly. They are death machines.

api2• 13 years ago

I have lived in both car-dependent and transit-based places, and can see advantages to both. Given that the advantages of transit are commonly discussed these days, I thought I'd give some of the advantages of cars.

(1) Cars don't have schedules. You can just jump in your car and go any time of day or night. Cars also don't stop running at 2am, while most transit systems do.

(2) Cars permit sprawl. Sprawl has been bashed to hell and back for some justifiable reasons, but it has one big advantage: it breaks the backs of real estate markets. Sprawling car-dependent regions are much safer from the real estate hyperinflation that plagues cities that are either transit-based or geographically constrained. Bubbles of local real estate inflation surround transit hot spots, creating a two-tier society in which ease of transportation is exponentially (not linearly, as with cars) correlated to income. The poor get loooooong bus->train commutes while the wealthy get fast train->train commutes.

(3) Cars can haul stuff, which gets increasingly important when you have children. Pretty much everything about the suburbs seems idiotic until you have kids, then it seems reasonable.

I can't stress #2 enough. Compare the Los Angeles metro area to the San Francisco bay. The former is a largely car-based sprawling metropolis, while the latter is partly transit-based and also geographically constrained (which for the market does the same thing as transit-dependence). In the LA metro area there are many neighborhoods where poor and working class people can afford to live. In the Bay Area you're spending $3000/month for a crack den. Everyone but professionals and the rich are completely priced out of all but the absolute worst neighborhoods, or are pushed out to the fringes with the longest commutes.

It's funny that transit is often cited as good from an equality point of view as it gives everyone access to mobility without requiring car ownership, but the real estate inflation that it engenders negates this IMHO.

StaceyEC• 13 years ago

Great insight.

jseliger4• 13 years ago

If you're interested in this topic, Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City are both worth reading. The former explains how "free" parking isn't really free and how it distorts a lot of behavior, and the latter is about what cities are good for and how to build healthy cities in general.

Personally, I wonder why people would want to own a car if they can avoid it: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/why-would-you-want... , but that may be a minority viewpoint.

zalew4• 13 years ago

The High Cost of Free Parking

convince me that 800 pages is worth it (reviews so far haven't).

GuiA5• 13 years ago

They're not worth it. You should spend the time that it would take you to read this book doing some high yield activity instead, like trading stocks or growth hacking your startup. Anything less than that just isn't worth the trouble.

tedsanders6• 13 years ago

I read most of it, and I can say with mild confidence that it's probably not worth your time. A few years after reading it, I remember the thesis of the book but not much more.

WildUtah4• 13 years ago

Try the lead essay from Cato Unbound and see what you think. [0] There are a few more good short Shoup pieces linked at the bottom of that page.

I have some personal experience here. I have done training and volunteered as a community organizer and worked with my city council and planning department. I have organized neighborhood groups involved in planning. I have studied urban planning and urban form. Nothing helped me to understand American cities and why they work the way they do more than Dr. Shoup's work in the 1990s that is collected in The High Cost Of Free Parking.

Some of it is gritty and technical econometric research, but a lot of it is creative and insightful. It's not a single narrative, but a fun book to dip into in various places from time to time if you care about how cities work and how urban life can be made better for people.

This short 1997 paper introduced me to Dr. Shoup's work (I read it in 1998) and was like a shining blaze of insight for many readers like me when it first appeared. [1] One key insight is that free parking required by law costs the USA about three times as much as all the money drivers spend on cars and gas plus public subsidies for roads and highways. When you read it, you start to see that parking policy drives urban form much more than zoning or free markets or highway and transit construction or public preferences or anything else at all. A lot of the book is like that.

[0]http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/april-2011/there-aint-no-...

[1 pdf] http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf

edward• 13 years ago

Instead, you could read the 21 page paper with the same title and by the same author.

http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf

arjunnarayan• 13 years ago

I don't understand this sentiment. You can read as much of any book as you want. I seldom finish books that I start, my finish rate is under 25%. You can get the big picture from about the first 20% of most books, and decide whether you want the in depth followup. If I don't buy the premise, or I'm mostly convinced by the argument and don't care for the details, or just have better things to do with my time, I'll stop reading.

Adopting this approach is very freeing. I don't fear the booklist. I just start stuff, and freely give up on a whim. I can say that at least the first 50 pages of the High Cost of Free Parking is great. Then I got caught up in something else.

misterbwong• 13 years ago

This is a decent, short overview of Shoup's ideas. http://www.lamag.com/features/2011/12/01/between-the-lines

tedsanders6• 13 years ago

*Donald Shoup

jseliger4• 13 years ago

Thanks, fixed!

ctdonath3• 13 years ago

Why would you want to own a car if you could avoid it?

(correction applied)

Because I can go wherever I want, whenever I want, with my whole family (pets included), with a trunkful of cargo, as I see fit.

I keep a bunch of gear in my car which makes me pretty much independent. No way I'd be hauling "go camping on a moment's notice" stuff and other equipment everywhere on the bus. Nor would I have the basic equipment to fix the bus should it break down.

7 years ago, awaiting dinner sitting at the bar at Longhorns and halfway thru a margarita around 9PM, my wife suggested we go see a new litter of puppies from our dog's breeder. Called to ensure we could, and minutes later we were making the 1,000 mile drive there. Next morning little Crossley was part of the family.

Personal long-range transport is very freeing. Mass transit & communication devices may be convenient, but rely more on others than some of us are comfortable with.

jseliger4• 13 years ago

(correction applied)

Thanks, fixed!

Because I can go wherever I want, whenever I want, with my whole family (pets included), with a trunkful of cargo, as I see fit.

But at very high cost, per The High Cost of Free Parking, and at high time costs: I'm struck by the way that, when I lived in Tucson, it took seemingly 30 or 40 minutes to get anywhere. Now I live in New York City and it takes about the same, but the default transportation mode is different!

robomartin6• 13 years ago

Why would you want to own a car if you could avoid it?

I used to live approximately half a mile from the epicenter of the 6.7 magnitude Northridge earthquake. I was actually at my desk programming at 4:31AM when it hit. It was, by far, the most violent quake I have ever experienced. The vertical component was brutal. It actually shot me up off my chair when it compressed the height adjusting air cylinder and propelled me upwards. I have this vivid memory of being up in the air along with all the books in the bookcases surrounding my desk. The lights went out. We all came down. The shaking begun.

Anyhow, after it stopped I was covered in a pile of books. I made sure everyone was OK, found my car keys and got out of the house. I threw some tools int the back of the car and immediately drove near CSUN where my girlfriend lived and picked her up. Her place was trashed. We helped a few of her neighbors. We gave a few of them rides to nearby friends and family. We also visited some of our friends in the neighborhood to make sure they were OK. Being the guy with a garage full of tools, I probably helped a dozen, if not two dozen, people with various issues from gas main shutoffs to broken water pipes and a whole range of other things that happen during a bad quake. In the days that followed we helped get water and supplies to those in need and generally made ourselves useful to the extent possible. Of course, we had our own issues to deal with, which required frequent trips to the hardware store to haul construction materials.

After that incident I never go to sleep without my gas tank at least half full and never leave my car keys on a table (because I had to dig them out of a pile of stuff when all of it went to the floor). My car was the single most valuable tool during that incident.

Many years later. Now married, living elsewhere, with a young child and a couple of dogs in tow our neighborhood was surrounded by fire. The hills around us just went up in flames. We were told evacuation was imminent. My wife, kid and dogs went into our two SUV's while I went in and out of the house prioritizing what to bring into the cars. We actually had to drive a block away from our home before we were told the situation had reversed and we could go back.

I realize these are extreme examples, but to say that public transportation is all you need is kind of unreasonable. It's almost like saying that the police force is all you need in order to keep you and your family safe. As a tourist I've always enjoyed public transport in Europe. Love it. If I lived there I would most certainly own a car or two. Public transport isn't going to be there when you need it most.

With the advent of electric cars a whole new set of possibilities starts to open up. Electrics with long range capabilities have something no liquid fuel vehicle can offer: easily convertible energy that --with the right equipment-- is compatible with the needs of any home. In the event of an emergency your electric SUV's could very well power your home and basic necessities such as lights, cooking and keeping food safe.

psychometry• 13 years ago

Giving your preference for buying puppies from a breeder, it's not surprising that your opinions about transportation also only revolve around what you want and not what is moral or best for society or your community.

devilshaircut• 13 years ago

Well - he made it easy for you because based on how he phrased it, you only had to come up with one reason cars are good. You picked some low-hanging fruit (not an ad hominem attack; your reasoning is sound). Cars are a clear solution to certain problems.

That said, I think that these reasons tend to diminish when contrasted with the downsides (not that it matters, but I do own a car, and am not just trying to shill the other side). Example: having a car also contributes to the degeneration of the city. This is a point well-illustrated in the original article. Is it worth owning a car when it is intrinsically tied to urban sprawl and the decay of cultural vibrance? Ownership comes at a cost.

pouetpouet3• 13 years ago

I, too, like to go wherever I want. But it doesn't mean that every active member of the society HAS TO own one. I adore the freedom it gives me on nights/week-ends. But we don't need 2/3 cars per family. Carshare has something to offer too. I am not against cars, but it's way too unbalanced towards cars. Drivers should bear the costs of their habits and not out-source them. City centers must be made more liveable for urban dwellers. That means less surface parking, reducing parking minimums, paid parking, more bike paths, street designs with lower deisgn speed... Some want to live in the suburbs, no one can oppose that, we are free to do so. But if you want to live in a liveable urban neighborhood, this choice needs to be catered too.

booyaa00• 13 years ago

Lots of people don't want to live in a city.

For me, living in a city is a horrible existence. So living in the unspoilt countryside a car is pretty useful to get around.

A car is freedom. Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden to some public transport system?

jseliger4• 13 years ago

A car is freedom. Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden to some public transport system?

Per the link, I view a car as slavery, and, per The High Cost of Free Parking, car infrastructure is much more expensive than is commonly realized. Owning a car is being a slave to car payments, to saving for the car, to the insurance company, to the repair shop, to the driveway or parking lot, to paying around $10,000 a year in TCO.

Lots of people don't want to live in a city.

Which is good! They shouldn't. The challenges come from the way we've structured an entire society to subsidize parking.

To some extent that's changing, with people like Glaeser, Shoup, and Yglesias in the intellectual vanguard. The issue is also getting more prominent in part because the startling cost of living in many cities and inner-ring suburbs is causing intellectually curious people to ask both why this is happening and how it can be alleviated. Both questions go back to politics.

im_a_lawyer• 13 years ago

That's great but you assume that there is a choice. I want to live in a nice city, but I can't. Trillions of dollars, decades of government policies and dozen of agencies with their "homeownership" programs destroyed our cities and permanently put them at a disadvantage. My city alone lost almost 1 million people so far, where blocks with only 2 or 3 houses left standing are plentiful(this isn't even Detroit!) yet the surrounding suburbs are thriving. This didn't happen out of choice. If people like you paid the full price of suburbia or if the situation was reversed and government rewarded city living instead of suburban living then your lifestyle would change really fast.

bguthrie• 13 years ago

I live close enough to my workplace and the basic necessities that I could walk to them if I so choose. Most people who own cars now live so far away from these things that they can no longer live without their four-wheeler. That doesn't seem all that free to me.

quatrevingts• 13 years ago

The unspoilt countryside can certainly be pleasant, at least for the few that are well-off retired, or don't need access to an urban center to make a decent living, and don't mind driving an hour to do anything.

Start putting McMansions and Applebees in the countryside, and it becomes spoiled rather quickly.

dingaling• 13 years ago

So living in the unspoilt countryside a car is pretty useful to get around.

Countryside is not 'unspoilt' if it features roads and cars, let alone houses and agriculture.

pouetpouet3• 13 years ago

If you live there, it's not unspoilt. If you love nature, stay away from it, you have a bigger footprint in the country than in an urban core.

If you have a partner, it's not about the freedom of owning a car. Many couples/families own multiple cars. You can still own a car for "freedom" but live your daily life with one car less.

One car less.

grayarea• 13 years ago

Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden to some public transport system?

With a car you are dependent and beholden to a public transport system. They are called roads and highways.

WildUtah4• 13 years ago

While I love Shoup's work, I'm not enthusiastic about Glaeser's work.

In particular, I observe that Tokyo, Paris, Barcelona, and Mexico City organize people at adequate density to obtain all Glaeser's benefits without much of his beloved skyscrapers. Because of the shadows, streets, elevator columns, and infrastructure that skyscrapers need, they don't add much to urban life. A comfortable 15k/km^2 density (like Tokyo or Mexico City, half the density of Paris) is plenty enough to promote transit and network effects and build diverse and concentrated arts and business districts without concentrating them in only one part of town. That density is comfortably achieved with median two and three story buildings and plenty of open space in Mexico City and mostly short free standing homes in Tokyo.

JoeAltmaier• 13 years ago

Similarly when I lived in Silicon Valley (San Jose/Santa Clara/Sunnyvale anyway) it was all 3-storey buildings and some open space. They razed the last orchard while I lived there; immediately taller buildings started going up. I foresee skyscraper clusters in their future.

sien• 13 years ago

You make a good point but Tokyo should not be on your list of cities without many skyscrapers. It has the 5th most skyscrapers of any city in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_with_the_most_sk...

(Sorry, added the 'not', which interestingly people worked out)

pouetpouet3• 13 years ago

Tokyo has lots of high rise. But that's not the point. Lots of medium to big cities do it without high rise buildings. I have lived in a 7-8 thousand poeple/sq mi neighborhood. It's not NYC. It was only 5 levels/4stories high. It feels familiar, it doesn't blocks too much sunlight and it is perfectly livable.

aaronetz• 13 years ago

I agree. When my family and I lived in Vancouver BC, we didn't own a car for 3 years, and we have little children. It actually worked quite well. We rode buses / walked / biked to work, rode buses for weekend trips (Vancouver is great in that regard. You can even go to a lot of hiking/skiing spots by bus). And for the occasional out-of-city trip we used a Zipcar. I think that overall, the time you would spend taking care of your own car (repair/fuel/clean/etc), balances out with the time you spend walking/waiting for buses, etc. With the added advantage of physical activity when being forced to walk or bike instead of drive. It is hard to resist the temptation of using a car when you own one. Another advantage of the bus is that you get to do stuff while commuting. I used that time to read books. And I think I've read more books in those 3 years than what I had the 10 years before.

samatman• 13 years ago

In the East Bay, I ride a 3000w electric scooter. A kWh of power is a good days ride, commute, shopping and socializing (I tend to charge twice a day, because I can).

Please consider joining me: the more scooters there are the safer we all get to be. It's fun! When you get going fast, you can't even hear the motor, just the wind.

tootie• 13 years ago

New York City recently launched it's CitiBike program and set up bike racks in spots that used to be reserved for street parking and you should have seen people flipping out despite the fact that less than 50% of us actually own cars. And let's not forget about the amount of space we dedicate cars being able to move around.

conjecTech3• 13 years ago

As a life long ATLien, I want to know when Atlanta was walkable, and if it could have even been considered the same city as it is now. For those of you who don't know, the population of metro Atlanta more than doubled between 1990 and 2010.

Yes, all types of transportation suck in Atlanta, but roads and cars are an extensible, scaleable solution with most of the costs being marginal as opposed to fixed, meaning additional demand can be handled easily. Like others have noted, you offered no real solutions to that problem. MARTA is kind of a joke of a system for anyone that values their time. A trip on MARTA will take about twice the time it would take to drive in a car. At the average commuter distance, you recoup the cost of buying a $5,000 car in a year if you value your time at minimum wage. If you actually care about fixing the problem, fix the economics of alternatives. Don't just go about complaining about the fact that you don't like not being able to walk where you want to go, suggest solutions.

And please try to consider this problem outside of the perspective of being a student, because that honestly seems to be the only perspective you've given to this. A lot of the vehicles you see in Atlanta are work vehicles, and that mobility makes a lot of things possible that you probably are a fan of. You may want to consider the dynamics of the local economy further.

Honestly, I have to say this article isn't up to the standards I'd expect of a fellow Tech student, particularly a PhD candidate. You are very well intentioned and undoubtedly intelligent, but simply pointing out what everyone knows isn't very helpful. I'll be interested to see the future posts you promised.

bhavvik• 13 years ago

Before cars invaded Ahmedabad, India, two wheelers and rickshaws were primary modes of transportation for longer distances. Walking and bicycles were used for shorter distances.. Cars were used on occasions.. Traffic issues were non-existent. People starting using cars as primary mode of transportation because everyone else started doing it.. meaning using two wheelers became less safe, more car traffic, increased pollution effects, etc.

Idea is to go back to using cars as only ocassional mode of transportation and for that one option is govt helps reduce traffic for two wheelers/rickshaws/bicycles.. Dedicated lanes for these would help.

6d0debc071• 13 years ago

Do people actually want to live in cities, how many of them? - (and whatever for?)

One narrative here goes, there are lots of cars, so it creates an unfriendly environment, so people have to live outside the city and have cars.

But that narrative doesn't make sense for how the cars got there in the first place.

Another narrative goes: cars enabled people to move about quickly, they enjoyed this. One manifestation of this ability was to escape from cities and still get to work. Thus carparks and reasonably fast roads.

Or maybe people just enjoyed moving about quickly even over relatively small distances and it snowballed

For example, I live about five miles away from where I used to work. I could spend 10 minutes walking to the nearest busstop, 15 minutes waiting for that bus, another 10-15 minutes getting to the busstop in town, another 10-15 minutes waiting for the next bus to work, another half hour or so while the bus drives there (takes longer because of stops).

Or I could just get in the car and be there in 16-20 minutes.

An hour and a half vs 16-20 minutes. And this isn't a bad place for public transport. Buses, on average, every 10-15 minutes is pretty good. It just adds up. Heck, given a couple of hours I could probably walk there.

It's far from clear that it makes sense, even under generalised utility, to agree with the author's desire to make cities better places to live at the potential cost to people who may prefer to live elsewhere and drive.

seanmcdirmid2• 13 years ago

You could also bike there in 30 minutes and get some excercise as a bonus.

Xylakant2• 13 years ago

I'm genuinely curious: Here in germany we have car-sharing offers that allow you to pick up a car on the street, ride it to where you want to go and then leave it parked there in the larger cities. The fee is usually about half of the fee of a cab. Then there's the same for bicycles. The combination of public transport and car-sharing in berlin is awesome, at least in the city center: I go most ways by public transport and then grab a car or bike if I need to. If I really need to travel long distance by car, I get a rental and I'm coming out ahead financially, even if I throw in the occasional taxi ride because it's late and I'm lazy. From the posts here I get the impression that this doesn't exist in the US - and I can't imagine that.

dustcoin• 13 years ago

What you are describing sounds like https://www.car2go.com, which is available in some US cities.

gregl• 13 years ago

Which just happens to be a German company :)

We have it in Toronto and it's super useful sometimes to quickly get somewhere within the downtown when transit would be slower and cabs more expensive.

jes5199• 13 years ago

A handful of cities in the US have in the last few years gotten a service called car2go, which is exactly what you describe. It's not available in the biggest cities, though. A few cities are also starting to have bicycle-sharing services. It's just not very common, yet.

was_hellbanned3• 13 years ago

I walked around Tokyo marveling at the infrastructure. Fully enclosed (or perhaps 3/4 enclosed) freeways that explode out of the ground, split off to surface streets, and arch up through the sky and around corners. Well-engineered, rubberized mounting systems and the enclosure mean you only heard the faintest hint of cars rocketing by at speed. Highways branching to high-capacity, multi-lane surface streets, which further branch into narrow neighborhood streets (similar to an alley in the US) meant that pedestrian traffic was quite safe, and generally well-respected.

By contrast, American cities have a couple of arterial freeways, a massive grid of wide-yet-low-capacity surface streets, and neighborhood streets that people speed through in an effort to shave seconds off their commute. And when they get to work, they park in huge parking lots, instead of stacked parking structures (ideally under the target building itself).

American transportation infrastructure is terrible.

deegles• 13 years ago

I think the road infrastructure pales in comparison to the subway/rail system. The volume of people it moves is incredible. Also remember that it's all built in an earthquake-prone area!

was_hellbanned3• 13 years ago

I didn't even bother getting into the rail system, since I assume everyone realizes how advanced it is. I really wanted to put this in though: I've watched Shinkansen pull into the switchyard at night to "go to bed". It's quiet. Here's a bullet train, cruising into a rail yard pretty much in the middle of a neighborhood, idling along after midnight, and you only hear a very muffled motor as it glides by. Compare that to America, where our trains seem to be built solely to meet basic load requirements, and where they honk four times (as long or short as they want) before every crossing that's not guarded with quad-gates.

lovemenot2• 13 years ago

Quite so. Furthermore, the preponderance of bicycle-riding and perhaps the best public transport network in the world makes Tokyo, in some ways, a role model for urban design. Outside of the big cities　in Japan though, you see the same infrastructure that characterises the US: strip malls and the like. Population density seems to be the major driver and, perhaps contentiously, willingness to subsume one's own freedoms to the common good is a secondary one.

jpb0104• 13 years ago

Did you guys see this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882352

glomph• 13 years ago

David Byrne's book Bicycle Diaries has some fantastic analysis of the effects of cars on cities (particularly American ones). I would highly recommend it!

x0054• 13 years ago

Cars kill density, but they don't kill cities. I live in San Diego, a very car friendly city. I can get to almost any store, restaurant, or shop in 15 minutes or less. The key is medium density city with lot's of freeways. High density is not all that it's cracked up to be.

andrewliebchen• 13 years ago

For a forum that spends a lot of time talking about disruption with members who I'm sure pride themselves on their rationality, there is a surprising amount of "damn the torpedoes" defense of the status quo here.

kimonos• 13 years ago

We can use solar powered vehicles instead..

kator• 13 years ago

I lived most of my life in Los Angeles, having a car was a right of passage. I moved three years ago to New York City and I sold my car (finally) last year. It's amazing how liberating it is, no insurance, parking, gas, maintenance. These things eat into your life and you really don't see it until it's gone.. I'd be glad to never own another car, but if I move again to a place that doesn't support it I guess I'll buy another chunk of metal and watch the quarters fly out the tail pipe..

alexeisadeski3• 13 years ago

Wonder when the liberals will wake up and smell the coffee: Private busses are the miracle solution to public transport.

wh-uws• 13 years ago

Trying to be as non promotional as possible here.

With my startup I'm working on this problem aiming to make easily setting up private transport a reality.

You can check out my vision here.

http://www.driveless.co/about.html

My contact if is in my profile if you have any comments or criticism.

yetanotherphd• 13 years ago

But they bring in undesirable male nerds.

Cars Kill Cities

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