[xibalba]

There is not faster to way to discredit oneself than to offer a pat, single variable explanation.

As others point out, Americans like and want to transport themselves by car. Let's accept this, work with it, and build around it instead of lusting after a minority defined Utopia.

[BrianHenryIE]

Wrong.

I tried to find the tweet, but it was succinctly put ~"it's said people in Los Angeles love their cars, but people in LA have no choice but to own a car, it's not love, it is necessity".

In every city that has made a concerted effort to accommodate all modes of transport, driving as a percentage has gone down. "build it and they will come" is better suited to transport than it ever was to SaaS.

It is easy to conclude that people don't "want" to drive.

[xibalba]

1 minute of Googling:

"81% of Americans agree with the sentiment that their car reflects who they are...59% consider themselves as someone who is passionate about cars, trucks, motorcycles, or other vehicles" [1]

78% of Americans personally enjoy driving moderately to greatly [2]

> Wrong.

> In every city that has made a concerted effort to accommodate all modes of transport

These are strong claims without citation. Your subsequent comments in this thread reveal a fairly extreme and inflexible viewpoint on cars which you advance through many logical fallacies (straw men, false dilemma, and hasty generalizations). In other words, I don't think you're evaluating this issue in good faith or rationally. So, I'm not going to engage beyond this comment.

The main point of my initial comment was to point out that this "walk-able utopia" goal is not shared by a great number of people and contravening both the will of the majority and the current state is an exercise in futility and thus a waste of a society's time and resources.

[1] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/american-attitudes-on...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/234416/driverless-cars-tough-se...

[dymk]

“It’s said that” is not the same as “polls show” and then linking to a source

LA is also cherry picked to be one of the worst places for cars. It’s legendary for its traffic.

Writing in from the PNW where I wouldn’t trade my car, and the freedom it gives me and my friends and my dogs to travel, for anything.

[BrianHenryIE]

I gotta hand it to you, in response I searched DuckDuckGo for:

"people in los angeles love their cars"

and the top result was

"People in Los Angeles Are Getting Rid Of Their Cars"

Hypothetically, if one person had to die every time you used your car (for your dogs to travel or whatever) would you stop using your car? How about if it were one person for every 1000 journeys. What if every single journey you made in your car had a very small and undeniable contribution to the deaths of people you live around, would you stop then?

[dymk]

"People in Los Angeles Are Getting Rid Of Their Cars" is a headline meant to generate clicks, posted with no context, statistics, or discussion.

Are you a vegan? Hypothetically, how many people have to die due to the greenhouse gasses emitted due to your meat consumption? Have you ever served somebody an egg that didn't have a fully cooked yolk? Do you consume any single-use plastics? Do you use a compost toilet?

We could go on and on.

[BrianHenryIE]

> it's said people in Los Angeles love their cars

doesn't need a survey or study. Are you disputing the perception that Los Angeles is a car-centric city?

> Are you a vegan?

Yes.

[dymk]

> I tried to find the tweet, but it was succinctly put ~"it's said people in Los Angeles love their cars, but people in LA have no choice but to own a car, it's not love, it is necessity".

This is the part that needs a study or survey to back it up.

If we're just throwing around anecdotes, I've both driven a car and taken the bus in a city that was known for its mass transit, and the mass transit sucked compared to being in a car.

> Yes.

And how about the rest? I'm just making sure we're being consistent, and that you optimize all your life choices to avoid any possibility of harming someone, no matter how remote or indirect.

[forgotmyoldname]

I lived in the PNW and loved that I could take a bus just about anywhere. It was a big draw for me.

If it was a hellscape dominated by 26 lane highways and hours of traffic to get anywhere like many parts of the US, I never would've bothered moving there.

[dymk]

The whole of the PNW is not a city or specially designated hiking trail, and 99% of where you could go in the region was not accessible by bus routes.

[jppope]

This may or may not be true, and it doesn't matter because single use zoning in most American cities makes it illegal to build walkable cities. It's pretty hard to establish what Americans prefer when the alternative what they have isn't allowed.

[inglor_cz]

Why should a neighbourhood consisting of single family homes not be walkable?

This is such a neighbourhood from the early 1920s not too far from where I grew up. Take a stroll through it with Street View. It is perfectly walkable.

https://goo.gl/maps/kKqhtNbKDy6oycSi9

The lots are smallish compared to the American standard, though. This is a crowded continent.

[nottorp]

It's not a single use zone if stores are allowed in it. The OP means that you need a car to get anything you need because the nearest store is 2 hours of walking away.

[inglor_cz]

Ah, this is something I did not know. A residential area that allows no stores is really a weird, weird concept.

[nottorp]

Oh, I'm also in Eastern Europe and it's similarly foreign to me. Even the new suburbs they're building here now with all identical houses, Edward Scissorhands style, have corner stores(tm) within walking distance everywhere.

[oblio]

Small stores draw criminals, you see?

[inglor_cz]

So does big business :)

[tptacek]

Single family zoning isn't simply a car thing. I live in a small, walkable, transit-friendly neighborhood full of crunch eco-liberals, and it is entirely hostile to upzoning for reasons having nothing at all to do with cars; it's a central tool of NIMBYism.

[couchand]

Oh my yes: whatever height is currently built is perfect, every currently vacant lot is a prize, etc. etc.

But the GP spoke of single-use zoning, a slightly different cudgel. I understand the abstract appeal of dividing up a map into neatly-separated areas, a la SimCity, but that just doesn't accomodate real life.

[pjlegato]

San Francisco and New York, the most walkable and densely built urban areas in America, are famous for their extremely high rents. This is a function of extremely high demand for housing there.

Apparently a whole lot of Americans _don't_ want to transport themselves by car.

[ironman1478]

You need a car in SF depending on the area you live in. On the west side, SF has very poor public transit

[brailsafe]

The U.S already did this, starting in the 40s-50s up till now, and it's horrific. The idea of building infrastructure around everyone having a massively expensive and wasteful machine to get anywhere they want as fast as possible all the time (and without any energy expenditure) makes for a hellscape. It's fine to like and own cars, but cars should be de-prioritized in planning and infrastructure considerations because it makes everything worse for everyone, including car owners. Might as well design cities around providing everyone with personal planes at this point.

[addicted]

I am not sure if we can tell whether Americans like cars or not considering they don’t really have a choice.

[Kim_Bruning]

Right. It's not just car dependency, and ... it's Not Just Bikes either.

It's almost a tautology to say that if you want to have a particular kind of nice neighborhood you'll have to include those uses in your planning.

I think that most people want to be able to get from A to B in comfort, and are not necessarily married to one particular mode of transport.

If the only way to get anywhere is by car, then of course people want to transport themselves by car. If you offer other competitive options, people will sometimes take those options instead.

[frankus]

It’s worth remembering that for a lot of “A to B” trips the change in location is kind of incidental to the actual goal of shopping, socializing, dining out, etc. In other words you if locate a lot of “B”s close to your “A” (or vice versa) people will tend to be satisfied with slower modes like walking and biking (that also reduce the energy needed by a couple of orders of magnitude).

[vagrantJin]

> Americans like and want to transport themselves by car.

I think the minority are questioning the strangeness of this supposition. Least of all because the government has a hand in it.

Neighbourhoods are where people live, yet built for and around cars?

It may be single variable but I think a reasonable person might want to question that at least on some way.

[cscurmudgeon]

Well said. Another angle is the race angle. Most people advocating for lesser cars are young, healthy, rich and white. Healthy enough to not use cars and rich enough to live near work.

https://theconversation.com/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-cycl...

The group that talks about systemic racism is perpetuating it.

[yodelshady]

That is an incredibly poor take on top of a serious allegation, and sorry-not-sorry, it's clear you don't really care about poverty, racial disparities or ill health.

It takes very little empathy to realise that driving a car is a huge technical barrier compared to a wheelchair/scooter/just walking slower. There is no reason you need to be healthy to avoid car use... except one. That motorists will kill you if you don't quickly get of out their way. I've seen large parts of my local area become completely inaccessible to the less-abled because of fast roads, so can it with the "I'm thinking or the sick!". You're not.

Or to just go look at which cities are not color-coded into mansions and slums, and notice those cities are ones where the poor do not need to maintain their own expensive machinery for basic tasks. Because ... again, I don't believe I need to explain that. It's a deliberate choice you're making to not understand it.

[kspacewalk2]

"Healthy enough not to use cars" - man, that's a good one. I'll remember it next time my half-senile father in law has no other choice but to drive somewhere because there's no way around his car dependent neighbourhood - oh wait, that's every day.

[short12]

If he is senile he should not be driving anywhere

[kspacewalk2]

The city around him is only built for driving, doubly so his completely car-dependent neighbourhood. He'll be doing this until he either cannot possibly pull it off, or gets in a serious accident. This is a fact of life for millions of seniors in North America, and saying "oh no they shouldn't" won't change squat.

[short12]

That's your job to take the keys away and get rid of the car. It's a sad situation but hardly unique

[eggsmediumrare]

It's a sad situation made worse by stupid urban planning that prioritizes cars.

[kspacewalk2]

No it's not "my job". It'll be his kids' job when he's fully senile, but until then he's an adult human being with rights, and he wants to be independent and "age in place". At some point he'll cross the threshold into having his decision-making powers taken away. Let's hope no one gets hurt in the meantime.

[BrianHenryIE]

That's exactly what kspacewalk2 is saying. He _should_ not.

[phonypc]

That article is about cycling as a sport. I'd bet if you look at cycling as a method of regular transportation, it would skew heavily non-white and lower income. Owning a car is expensive.

[BrianHenryIE]

Take a hypothetical scenario (not dissimilar to war breaking out in WW2, and not dissimilar to the 2020 global pandemic upending our lives) – where the private motor vehicle is gone.

Society (cities) would quickly re-orientate themselves so work wasn't so far away from home. So shops weren't on the outskirts of town.

Your argument is predicated on cars existing. On cars causing the problem you suggest they solve.

[vanilla_nut]

Cars are expensive. The old, the unhealthy, the poor -- all of these people can benefit from infrastructure that allows people to get around without using a car. Because cars are expensive.

[oblio]

You do know that poor countries overwhelmingly don't use cars, right?

The standard social hierarchy is: walk everywhere -> bike everywhere -> go by motorbike everywhere -> drive a car everywhere.