[zaque1213]

> Driving is a choice, and provided that drivers pay all the costs associated with making that choice, there’s little reason to object to that.

I mean, kind of. I'm not sure where the author lives, but in Houston, I don't have much of a choice. I already pay tolls and taxes, gas prices and my car note. I live as close to work as is affordable, and still have to drive. There's no bus route from my apartment and I'm not about to ride my bike on I-10. I ask this next question in seriousness, because I'd love to change my habits without moving to a more expensive city with good public transportation: what are my options here? I'd rather not be "disinsentivized" from doing something I have no choice but to do.

[apsec112]

A good question, but in other situations, we don't object to middle-class people being required to pay the full cost of things they pretty much must buy. Food and water are mandatory to live, and in the 21st century US, electricity, phone, and Internet are all but mandatory to live a normal life. Yet nobody objects to ordinary citizens having to pay water or power or phone bills, rather than the bulk of the cost being subsidized from tax revenues.

[flukus]

We do subsidize those things to an extent though. Farmers get a lot of subsidies and the infrastructure (roads, rail) to deliver the food is part subsidized. Water, electricy and internet infrastructure are often built by government or with government funds (and that's not a bad thing). Are there any private dams?

[mathgeek]

> Yet nobody objects to ordinary citizens having to pay water or power or phone bills, rather than the bulk of the cost being subsidized from tax revenues.

All of those things are also subsidized, to some extent. Water is the classic example, but the government subsidizes both fossil-fuel and clean energy, as well as the companies proving phone/cable/internet. The difference here is that you're paying your taxes on your vehicle and the gas, the latter of which is essentially a use tax on driving.

[bobwaycott]

Certain kinds of food are insanely subsidized. As are utilities. We carve out many things that nobody pays a full cost for.

[vacri]

Roads are required for the 'last mile' delivery of food and other goods to shops. There is a clear benefit to the smooth running of society if government subsidises roads.

[frogpelt]

By your definition of subsidy, everything is subsidized.

Why don't we stop subsidizing education too?

[Clubber]

I live about 10 or so miles from work. I live in a hot state. If I rode a bike or walked to work, I would stink and everyone near me would forget about the planet while experiencing their olfactory assault. I'd probably get out of meetings, but I wouldn't make any friends.

[apsec112]

Very likely, the major reason you live so far from work is that it's illegal to build densely, and it's illegal to build houses, stores, and offices within reasonable walking distance of each other. Of course, most people don't realize that - they just look for houses near their work and don't find any, or the handful they do find are super-expensive, so they live far away and commute. But the underlying reason why these houses are super-expensive or nonexistent is that it's illegal to build more of them.

[Clubber]

My town is very spread out, I don't even work in the city. Companies commonly rent office space in the suburbs. Also, I consider 10 miles to be a very short commute and a huge perk. They've been trying to revitalize our downtown area for decades with moderate success.

If you don't live in a hot state, you don't won't know what that's like. It's funny though, shortly after rush hour, our area has packs of people riding bicycles for recreation. I'm pretty sure most of them shower before dinner.

[CalRobert]

"Also, I consider 10 miles to be a very short commute "

There's no arguing on opinions, but this shows the sheer distortion of perspective you get living in the US as opposed to most of the world.

10 miles is a ridiculously long commute if your job doesn't necessitate massive amounts of space (airport worker, etc.)

How much of that 10 miles is just asphalt? Parking, roads, garages, gas stations, slip roads, onramps, offramps, shoulders? How much of it is actual good stuff?

For what it's worth I used to live in hot places and I rode to work all the time. I changed at work when I didn't have a shower, and showered at work when I did. A few times it was over 110 F. Fortunately, my employer was supportive.

[Clubber]

It's the usual stuff: gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants, office parks.

When you had to drop your kids off to school, did you just throw them on the handlebars? What happened when you switched jobs? Did you restrict your prospective employers to a 2 mile radius, or did you just buy a new house and have two mortgages until your old house sold?

What you are saying is fine, but it only works for a select group of people (read: single). Trying to force everyone to do the same thing through punitive taxes is short sighted. There are much better ways to reduce the carbon footprint of vehicles than the just tax people who need them to get to work every day.

[CalRobert]

This could also be phrased as "parking lots for gas stations, parking lots for grocery stores, parking lots for restaurants, parking lots for office parks". Most of those businesses, in the US, are a huge lot with one building in the middle of a sea of asphalt.

Children can walk, or can indeed ride on bikes with parents (I see this now and then where I live, and much more in more cycle-friendly places). They can ride their own bikes, even, in places where drivers aren't allowed to run over cyclists and walkers with something near impunity (which sadly is most of the world). The idea that children have to be ferried around in a car has the billions of people who raise families without a car as a counterexample.

I restrict prospective employers to those within about a 5-10 mile radius of my home, or a 20 minute walk or cycle from rail, but I also am a more competent cyclist than most. At one point my employer was 12 miles away, but that was fine because there was a surprisingly good bike route (shockingly, in LA of all places). I rode down the beach from Santa Monica to El Segundo - the only thing that really made that distance worthwhile. This does contradict what I said about ten mile commutes, I realize, but then most people think ten miles is an absurd distance to cycle.

I was also fortunate enough to be at an employer affected by California's Parking Cashout law, meaning I got the cost of the parking I wasn't using in my paycheck. Not wasting my life on 405 was another big incentive.

[djent]

If you think 10 miles is ridiculous, imagine for a second that many Americans frequently commute 1/3rd the width of your country.

[CalRobert]

I used to be one of them. It was horrible.

[gydfi]

Or people don't like living on top of one another.

Give me a nice half-acre and a self-driving car to get me where I need to go.

[dashundchen]

The fact is not everyone can live on a half acre. The tax revenue isn't dense enough to support the infrastructure people expect (ignoring the awful environmental and land use effects that would have).

The US is seeing fiscal and infrastructure problems across the country from municipalities who spread themselves too thin the past 60 years. They don't have the funds to maintain, much less improve, their infrastructure. We need to make it easier to build denser and start thinking about how to develop more sustainably going forward.

[osdiab]

Exactly! People don't take into account how expensive it is to maintain long roads, electrical lines, water pipes, and much more to remote places; higher cost of maintenance on said infrastructure; and how most of that area doesn't produce any revenue to fund itself. Like it or not, you're receiving enormous subsidies to live that way, and if you had to pay the true costs of your lifestyle, you might reconsider how idyllic it really is.

[Dagwoodie]

Buying my first house gave me a high similar to some pain killers. Well, not literally, but it was so awesome having more space, more privacy, generally better neighbors and the ability to play music as loud as I want. I can also customize the interior any way I see fit. The thought of moving back into an apartment or condo is very depressing indeed.

In the end, people will keep trying to sell others on their own preferences, which is very much a nurture thing. If you grew up in the city, you're going to prefer the city. If you didn't, you probably won't enjoy living in the middle of downtown without a car. In fact, that prospect is extremely depressing and I'd honestly rather be dead myself than not have a car.

[xtreme]

> If you grew up in the city, you're going to prefer the city. If you didn't, you probably won't enjoy living in the middle of downtown without a car.

I agree with you on everything except this one. Going by this thread, the trend seems to be opposite - a lot of HNers who grew up in "boring" suburbs and enjoy the city life, and a few (like me) who grew up in cities and now prefer more open spaces.

[pharrlax]

Great, fine, you can have that if you want it. But no one's trying to make that illegal. On the flip side, dense housing and tight residential-commercial zoning is illegal in most places.

[emiliobumachar]

No one is proposing forbidding your nice half-acre, just allowing the rest of us to live on top of one another if we so choose.

[ant6n]

More likely next to one another.

Also, it would be nice if those half-acre folks were forced to pay the true cost of their decadence. Right now there's a tendency that denser areas get extra-punished with taxes, even though services are theoretically cheaper to provide.

[emiliobumachar]

I think "living on top of one another" is a fair, if crude, description of life in multi-family apartment buildings. It's my current situation and I wouldn't trade it for a house, but it does have downsides.

"Decadence", on the other hand, really seems like name-calling. Let's not do that.

As for the tax situation, that seems interesting. Could you provide more detail? I'm in Brazil, here there's the rural area, that's taxed much more lightly but has less services, and everything in the urban area gets taxed the same percentage of assumed property value, regardless of density. How's it like where you live, and what would you propose to change?

[oftenwrong]

The idiom "on top of one another" means very crowded or close. Not actually on top of one another, although in this case it could be meant literally.

[utnick]

I commuted by bike 8 miles in Texas for a while to an office that didn't have a shower

Its not too big of a deal, i just packed a change of clothes, wiped off using baby wipes, and took a sponge bath in the bathroom sink .

Also I didn't get that sweaty in the morning cause it was still somewhat cool, going home is another story though :)

[dmm]

I commute daily 5-10mi each way in a climate that has hot and humid summers. You could probably make a bike commute work if you really wanted to. Humans are ingenious creatures. I bet you could find a way. Maybe it's not important to you or it's too much trouble but those are very different things than not possible.

Whenever I'm asked why I do something, I find that I often spontaneously make up a reason for why I do that thing, even when the real reason is because that's just they way it's always been done.

[fulafel]

Good reason to have a shower at the office.

[lmm]

What if your workplace built over one or two parking spots and replaced them with a shower and a row of lockers?

[dripton]

I live 11 miles from work. I live in a hot state. I bike to work. I take a shower when I get there. It's not a problem.

I know not every office has a shower, but many do. And requiring the others to have one would be a pretty small thing.

[TulliusCicero]

It's a chicken and egg problem. People drive because they have to. And because they have to drive, they support policies that favor driving at the expense of other modes, even in major urban areas where that makes no sense.

The problem is not in how most people make their individual transportation choices; people are generally pretty rational and predictable there, with good policy you can alter behavior. The problem is that our policies and regulations generally favor cars, and there's so much cultural momentum there that it's very hard to change.

[7952]

Whe you make driving essential walking and cycling become a luxiury.

[TulliusCicero]

Yes, exactly. Which is probably part of why Americans are so overweight, on average. It's a lot easier to get people to exercise if they just do it as part of their normal daily errands; relatively few people have the self-discipline to go to the gym consistently all their lives.

[prodigal_erik]

Weight is lost in the kitchen rather than the gym. It takes nearly an hour on a bike to burn off one big mac, so it's very easy to overeat so much that you can't make up for it.

[TulliusCicero]

Diet is more important, but exercise is still very useful, and not solely for weight loss, it improves general health too.

[bagacrap]

Carpool? Drive a smaller, more fuel efficient vehicle? I grew up in Houston so I know it is one of the tougher places to survive without a car, but this is part of the author's point. If it's too expensive for the common man to use cars then city organizers or your employer might be forced to take steps to make it possible not to drive.

[Pamar]

I wonder if a building over a given size (e.g, 8 apartments) couldn't include one or two "pooled" cars as part of the provided services.

Cars will be parked inside the building when not in use, people living in the building will get an app to book car usage and to open it, landlord will take care of car maintenance, collective insurance, etc. The app could also assist in sharing the "renting" cost if, for example, I take it to drive to my office but I also make a little detour to drop a fellow tenant to his or her workplace (and maybe take them back, too).

Sort like the corporate car pool offered by alphabet but restricted to tenants.

Would this work out economically? How low should the hourly/rate be to make this convenient for the landlord and the tenants?

[zaque1213]

I like the idea of carpooling and would be happy to if / when I find someone who works near me. We moved recently and I don't know the neighbors well enough yet to ask.

I drive a fairly fuel efficient car. Only fill up every week and a half. That's pretty good I think in my situation.

I'd be happy if Houston made it easier not to drive! Maybe I'll try to find activists working toward that end.

[obstinate]

I'm curious about your situation. There's almost no place you can work in Houston where there isn't a $1000 or less 2br rental within a couple of miles. This is just from checking zillow.

[zaque1213]

You may be correct.If we felt that renting was the best option for us we would rent. But it's not necessarily the best option when you are trying to start a family. Also in our situation we are currently paying less on a house note than we were when we rented.

[obstinate]

I would guess the issue is more about how much living space you want than the desire to rent or buy. Buying is almost never more expensive than renting the equivalent dwelling, so if I can find $1000/mo rentals in an area, I can almost certainly find condos that could be bought for an equivalent monthly cost. Unless you plan to move about frequently, but then that would also argue for renting.