[p_ing]

I’m curious to see how the author would react when it is two miles one-way to the crappy grocery store and eight miles to the good one.

And there is a bus shows up about once every four hours.

While cities can do a lot to improve the non-car experience, there’s a whole world outside those cities which would become inaccessible without a car. These are generally the “affordable” places to live in order to work in the city.

Focus on improving where you live, I do, but when you live in a city, recognize that improvements need to take into account those who don’t live there. The city is where they work, go to school, shop, and often interact with government functions.

Getting rid of dumb laws I can totally get behind as someone who walks daily.

[adrianN]

Car dominance is cemented by decades of car centric planning which made cars indispensable in some areas. That is a well known fact, but planning can be changed. If you prioritize other forms of transport in a few decades cars can be a lot less important.

[p_ing]

The place I live in was founded in the 1880s and incorporated a few years before the Model T debuted. Prior to the 1880s, Native Americans resided here. How is that car centric planning? And exactly how can one afford to live in a city where rent is $2500+ for a two bedroom or $1m+ for a SFH? That’s not going to happen on a McSalary. Those folks instead commute 1+ hours from affordable urban or more likely rural areas.

[1over137]

Being founded in 1880s doesn’t mean that all the planning since hasn’t been all auto-centric.

[p_ing]

Except the dirt roads then were as wide as the paved roads are now with the same grid-style layout.

Feel free to keep arguing how things radically changed just for cars. But they didn't.

[frosted-flakes]

It's not the width of the roads. It's about

- parking mandates that push everything very far apart because parking takes up a lot of space

- zoning restrictions that necessitate distant travel because your home is in a different sector of the city as your place of work, the grocery store, and places of leisure

- the disassembly of public transport systems after the war

- street design that makes it simply dangerous to travel on foot or on a bicycle, and extremely slow, because cars receive priority at all junctions

etc. etc.

[p_ing]

No parking mandates here. It's rural. Zoning restrictions are everywhere (except Huston where you have oil refineries next to housing), it's almost all residential. No real public transportation to speak of around that time frame. In-town speed limit is 25Mph and there is about 90-95% coverage for sidewalks. I walk daily anywhere from 3 - 5 miles around this town, I don't feel unsafe.

etc. etc.

You and others in this thread are arguing about _where I live_. Don't you find that a tad silly? I haven't even named the town, you have no ability to research it, and the historical docs are all located at the local library and history museum.

This is a great place to be a ped and driving is a requirement. Maybe this is the golden holy land of mixed-use roads, or something.

[amanaplanacanal]

If your city is like every other in the US, they changed drastically. Find a city map from pre WWII and compare it to today.

[adrianN]

I’m pretty sure that in the 1880s it was less than eight miles to the nearest shop and people didn’t need to commute dozens of miles per day to get to work.

[p_ing]

You'd be correct on both accounts. There was a small general store which supported a few hundred people just fine (along with farms and fishing) and a gold mine which employed most people -- of course a small general store doesn't support 5K individuals and the gold mine is closed.

It's a bedroom community, there are approximately 1000 jobs in total most of which reside within the school district. The purpose of the town as it stands is to raise kids and retire. Commuting to work is a requirement.

Times change, requirements change, and needs change. This isn't the 1880s, but the physical layout of the town is largely the same with the same roads. There was no "planning" for the Model T [cars] as you're attempting to argue -- it was already laid out like it is for the horse, cart, and carriage.

[mitthrowaway2]

There's a lot that can be done outside of cities too. The main thing that makes it scary and inconvenient to take an e-bike eight miles to buy groceries is... sharing a road with cars! A bike path is much cheaper to build and maintain than a motorway, and especially cheap in rural areas where the rights-of-way can be purchased more cheaply.

It's also possible to have rural areas accessible by transit. If you ever visit Japan or Switzerland, you'll find a robust and convenient bus and train network that will take you all the way into very small towns.

The world outside cities is inaccessible without a car only because we've built it that way. It doesn't have to be built that way! It's not a law of nature. There are other ways to build it!

[wakawaka28]

>The main thing that makes it scary and inconvenient to take an e-bike eight miles to buy groceries is... sharing a road with cars!

If the cars weren't there, gangs of bandits would be. Bandits were a common threat to people living outside cities. If you didn't carry a gun or a sword out in the country, you were practically on your own against a possibly large number of criminals.

[mitthrowaway2]

I see bandits with Toyota trucks in Africa, but no bandits on bicycles in the Netherlands. What you're describing is entirely orthogonal to modes of travel.

[wakawaka28]

It is not orthogonal to modes of travel. A person in a car is much less vulnerable to attack than a person on foot, on a bicycle, etc. Also it's funny that you pick a low trust country and a high trust country to confound the issue. To be clear, the vulnerability is roughly the same no matter where you are located. The frequency of crime is a separate issue, and one that evolves according to opportunity. If more people are vulnerable to attack, that may be enough to inspire a crime wave even in a country we consider safe (compared to Africa).

[mitthrowaway2]

I'm not really confounding the issue. Banditry is entirely a function of social trust and how well the state maintains its monopoly on the use of violence. It's not a question of having armed escorts, bulletproof glass, a sidearm, a kevlar vest, and a faster transport than the bandits.

In a lower trust country, cars are the preferred target of bandit attack. Check out Russian dashcam videos to see how it's done.

And when push comes to shove, a good bandit worth their salt will disable cars in the wilderness by using spike strips.

[wakawaka28]

>Banditry is entirely a function of social trust and how well the state maintains its monopoly on the use of violence.

The fact you claim that opportunity does not matter shows that you don't understand the issue. No state on the planet is able to 100% guarantee your safety. Choosing to make yourself more vulnerable by traveling on foot is asking for trouble.

>In a lower trust country, cars are the preferred target of bandit attack. Check out Russian dashcam videos to see how it's done.

Cars are prevalent in Russia. The Russians live in a harsh environment and live more or less distributed, rather than packed like sardines. If you live in a city, motorcycles are the preferred vehicle for bandits. Two guys on a beat up motorcycle should make you take notice.

>And when push comes to shove, a good bandit worth their salt will disable cars in the wilderness by using spike strips.

If you live in such a place, you'll travel in a convoy and arm yourself to the teeth. This is not common anywhere in the West (thankfully). Bandits tend to not be well-equipped, especially in Western countries where that kind of advanced tier organized crime is not tolerated. If you live in a place where such crime is common, your home will also have to be built like a fortress and constantly monitored.

What I'm saying is that travelling by bicycle or on foot exposes you to even the least capable bandits. Have you never had to walk through a bad neighborhood? Wouldn't driving through it be more appealing and obviously safer? For some reason you've chosen to ignore this obvious reality, throwing out weird contingencies to muddle the issue.

[tim333]

I think the author is arguing for less cars, not no cars.