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by ericmay 999 days ago
No - car dependency isn’t a problem in rural areas, it’s a problem in metro areas. Places like Columbus, Indianapolis, Tampa Bay, San Diego, etc. are all completely 100% reliant on cars for transit.

People already live in the cities, there isn’t anything to convince them of for that. Instead we have to build transit that allows people to not rely on a car for their daily needs. Not that you can’t have one, of course. But walking, biking, and rail infrastructure need much, much more funding and then we can reduce how we handicap society with car-only transit.
1 comments
asdff 999 days ago
What is interesting is that there are pockets of car free living even in these examples. E.g. in Columbus you have 45000 undergraduates at Ohio state, the bulk of whom live within a half hour walk of campus and all their friends from college, and might only use their car to shuttle themselves and all their roommates to the grocery store once a week.
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macNchz 999 days ago
I've heard it hypothesized that one of the underlying factors in why Americans romanticize the "college years" so much is that, for most, it's the only time they've ever lived in an environment (the campus) that's not designed primarily for cars.
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ericmay 999 days ago
Many of them have cars and pay for parking or if they live off campus they just park their car on the street. I would guess that 30% to 50% of those undergraduates have a car somewhere close by.

The best thing the university does is add a COTA (regional bus system) ticket as part of the tuition price to get students riding the bus locally instead of driving as they inevitably try to do.

Unfortunately, the bus service once you leave campus is comically bad so everyone just drives, catches a ride, or uses ride-sharing if you ever want to actually do anything not physically on campus. There are a lot of low-hanging fruit that the city and region refuse to take. We could run a tram from the southside all the way up to Old Worthington along the same street and you'd hit all the most dense spots in Columbus and you'd probably eliminate a lot of driving, traffic, and deaths but instead they're spending tens of millions of dollars adding new highways.

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