[bryanlarsen]

Yes, affluent people will pretty much always own cars. But with a pedestrian/cycle/transit friendly design, they'll use them much less.

I know affluent people in Copenhagen. They own cars. They are basically only used on the weekend, for travel outside of Copenhagen.

Amsterdam has 0.45 cars per household. So lots of households own cars, even in Amsterdam. But the miles driven per household per day is less than a quarter of what it is in the States.

[taeric]

I mean, cars per household is 2+ in large portions of the US.

Again, I'm largely inline with what you are speaking towards. The only change I'm making to the discourse is that, if you want fewer people owning cars, you pretty much have to make it more expensive. You can't just make the city more walkable. You have to make it expensive to own cars.

As I say downthread, this is inline with cheaper dense housing. If you want cheaper dense housing, you wind up with smaller living units. Often without dedicated parking allotments for all residents.

[bryanlarsen]

The goal isn't, or shouldn't be, fewer people owning cars. The goal should be fewer miles driven in urban areas. My cousin in Copenhagen basically only uses it for driving out to a rural area to visit her parents.

Owning a car in Denmark is incredibly expensive. That does significantly impact the ownership rate. And of course if fewer people own cars the miles driven by cars does go down. But lowering the ownership rate is a means to the end, not the end itself.

[taeric]

Fair, but largely to my point? If you want to lower the miles driven, you are going to be going through the same general steps along the way.

[bryanlarsen]

No, I disagree with your initial assertion.

> you get more people out of cars by making them expensive than you do with city design.

The city design is the prerequisite. If you don't have transit etc, people will own cars no matter how expensive the cars are (within reason, of course). Households in rural Denmark without access to transit own cars despite it being 2X as expensive as elsewhere.

Once you have transit, cranking the price becomes a much more effective mechanism.

[taeric]

Ok, I take it as an obvious prerequisite that you have to have transit for people to use it. Such that, yes, it isn't enough to just tax the heck out of cars to force them to start walking long distances.

But I point to Atlanta as easy evidence that having transit cover hot spots is clearly not enough. I used it daily for over a couple of decades to get to a job where I was among the only people that used transit. Amusingly, this was among a crowd of folks that loved preaching the virtues of transit. As soon as they made enough money to afford a car, they got one.

Even in Seattle, with what seems like nicer transit to me, I see plenty of people getting a car when they can afford it.

Tokyo, famously, has strict rules on if you can register a car. Despite that, it is amusing that the silly AI answer still ends with "though car ownership remains higher in some affluent neighborhoods." Which was somewhat obvious to see when touristing the place.

[queenkjuul]

Amsterdam has fewer cars because it is designed to be convenient without one, not because cars are that much more expensive there.

[taeric]

Just searching "cost of owning a car in Amsterdam" says it is expensive, though? Now, it does cite parking costs as a major driver of that. Which, again, if you are willing to specifically make parking/driving expensive, I fully agree that city design can get fewer drivers.

This can be seen easily in NYC. The new congestion tolls on roads has shifted people from driving to transit. Not by any new physical design of the city, but by making it cost more to drive.

[queenkjuul]

NYC already had one of the lowest rates of car ownership in the country due to its physical design though.

[taeric]

Right, and this is largely my point. NYC has a physical design that is good for less driving. Even with that, they still see increased driving without a specific policy to make driving more expensive.

As noted in another thread, I do take it as a prerequisite that you have to have transit.