[alerighi]

The problem that car solved years ago, is the following: you can develop a city without cars up to a point where the distance that you have to move to get to your work, or the supermarket, the hospital, etc is at max some km, let's say not more than 10/20.

That has the consequence that all people wants to live in the city center, and not in peripherals areas. This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it, while the salary that you get in the city rests more or less the same. Having a lot of people concentrated living in a small place produces also other unwanted effects, that lower the quality of living.

Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers of 20 floors but with nice houses where everyone can afford, for example, to have its own property, with its own garden, its own peace, without having being forced to share its living space with people he didn't choose.

To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way. Thanks to car we can think of reclaiming villages where all the population migrated to the cities in the past years.

Example in Italy, where I live, why should I go to live in Milan, where houses cost 10 times the rest of the country, while having a car and a job that allows me to remote work at least half the week I can live in a small village near Milan and reach it by car when needed?

To me a society without cars is a less free society, in fact the development of the USA to me is to take as an example, while where they didn't have cars is the Soviet Union, and look at it...

[eigenspace]

If you haven't discovered the problems with this model, then it's only because not enough of your neighbours have had the same idea.

Look around at places with very high car use (especially in North America) and you'll discover that this solution simply does not scale. Cars take up a gigantic amount of room on roads, and even gigantic highways like Onatrio's 401 [1] just have not been able to keep up with the level of sprawl that occurs when people move out of the city to surrounding suburbs and commute into the city by car.

Adding lanes to the highway does not help and just induces more traffic on it, and it also causes all the surrounding villages to sprawl outwards until they become indistinct blobs that merge into the nearby metropolitan city.

Trains are a much better solution to this problem because they have way better throughput, don't destroy cities with massive highways and parking garages, and encourage denser development that lets nearby villages retain their character and size.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_401

[probotect0r]

As the other user said, it doesn't scale. I'll give you my personal experience. I have been living in the greater Toronto area for 23 years, having moved here when I was 9. I live in one of the "cities" surrounding Toronto. This city was initially just a suburb of Toronto, that people moved to because houses were bigger and cheaper. Now it is a "city" of more than 700,000 people, in part because everyone moved here from Toronto, and in part due to high immigration in recent years. I put city in quotes because it's not really built like a city, it's still developed like a suburb with a large dependence on cars and poor public transport. All the good jobs are still in Toronto, so people still commute to Toronto for work. Before COVID and wfh, it used to take me 1.5 hours to commute to Toronto (one way), and I still had to drive to the train station. Forget driving to Toronto, it would take you just as long, if not longer, and parking costs are ridiculous. As this city grew, everyone wanted to move here for the same reason as you, bigger and cheaper houses. Now the houses are still bigger, but definitely not cheaper, and it takes forever to get anywhere. There are also less things to do because everything depends on cars.

I am writing this comment from a Italo Treno train, having been in Paris, Switzerland, Milan and Venice over the past week and half, so I have now seen the other side of this conversation.

The only freedom that cars bring is when travelling out of the city to remote places. Switzerland's inter-city rail service is so good I would never want to drive between cities if I lived there.

[sebstefan]

There's simply not enough space in a city to accommodate everyone's car. Houston is 70% roads+parking lots and they're still congested

Live remotely in low density villages in italy if you want, you can accommodate everybody's car just fine there - but when you need to visit Milan, don't complain that it won't let you bring a car in with you and they kindly ask you to leave it outside & take public transit to reach the center.

[chamomeal]

In America this concept is taken to the absolute extreme. Everywhere I go there are entire forests being razed to build developments of huge single-family homes and nothing else.

There is nowhere to go without driving. Kids who grow up in the suburbs are pretty much trapped on an island. There’s nowhere to explore because the surrounding 5 mile radius might be nothing but more developments

[gman83]

Nobody is seriously advocating for a society with zero cars. The goal is simply to have a more balanced system. It's about creating towns and cities where you have the freedom to walk, bike, or take reliable public transport, so you're not forced to use a car for every single trip.

[whatevaa]

Plenty of lunatics advocating zero cars. They are actually damaging less holistic approaches.

[unglaublich]

That's fine. If you don't care about life and culture in a city, and are satisfied with your townhouse in some arbitrary quiet town, then that's fine? Just don't expect that you can just go into the city with a car whenever you feel like it.

[thawawaycold]

Not the best counterpoint to the argument IMHO, especially considering there are tens/hundred of thousand of people that do the same as you, and that has only driven rent cost up in the extended Milan metropolitan area, even 30-40 km further away from the city, and with roads that are not nearly capable enough to carry commuters' traffic, it just transforms the underlying issues into massive, daily traffic jams anywhere in the immediate area

[Workaccount2]

While you are not totally wrong, it's very true that car centric society has enabled the sprawling suburbs iconic of America (a large home and yard for everyone), from a sustainability standpoint, freely developed heavily packed cities win hands down. It's so much easier and more efficient to take care of everyone in one spot rather than sprawled out all over the place.

[shinecantbeseen]

Sustainability and efficiency, sure - you're definitely right on that. I'm going to take a bit of a devil's advocate role here though:

There are negative impacts to dense packing of humans too, though. Think about the local ecosystem of plants and animals that was irreparably destroyed and will never be recovered in the construction of X densely packed city you can think of. Think about the huge scale of resource shifting in the geographic region (water, food, electricity generation) that has to occur in the surrounding area which negatively impacts not only the city but the environments it pulls those resources out of.

Sprawl leaves room to interweave humans with the rest of the natural world in a way in which densely packed cities do not. It leaves room for trees to grow, critters to roam, rain water to be reclaimed into aquifers. It also spreads the strain of resource extraction and reduces the impact from hot spots at the most granular level.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Car focussed development destroys far more land (e.g. parking) than similar size developments that enable walking/cycling/public transport.

Look at London - most people don't bother driving into the center of London andit's technically counted as a forest due to all the greenery. When you design for cars, all other travel modes are made impractical as cars take up so much room that all the facilities end up being miles away from people.

[miltonlost]

??? Sprawl is actually environmentally friendly? What in the world? Densely packed cities by definition take up less space than suburbs.

[anthk]

Funny enough the USSR and tons of the developed western Europe (Barcelona) had and still have "superblocks" which are far better than car polutting everywhere. Yours, sustainable? Keep dreaming.

[zozbot234]

You can live in the small suburban village and reach the downtown by rail or bike. And people will always want to live and congregate in the city center, because that's the most productive part of the city. But unless your city center literally looks like Manhattan, it can still fit plenty more people.

[panick21_]

What nonsense.

> This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it

Except that in some of the largest cities in the world rents aren't that high.

> Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers

Go to Switzerland, it look like that before cars and still does. You can get affordable houses and apartments on rail lines where you can be in the city in 15min.

You don't need to own a car to live in a house with a garden if you have proper public transport.

And you can live in the city and have plenty of access to nature as well. And cites don't need to be ugly and ful of skyscrapers.

> To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way.

People living remotely with cars are the opposite of sustainable, in fact, literally every study on the subject shows the opposite. Not communing makes it better, but its still nowhere near as good as a city.

[Saline9515]

> Except that in some of the largest cities in the world rents aren't that high.

Citation is really needed for this one. Especially if you consider Swiss real estate "affordable."

[panick21_]

I was talking about large cities like Tokyo, not in Switzerland. Most of Europe has terrible housing polices.

In Switzerland you have to move out of the city center but because the S-Bahn you can be in the city very fast. In Luzern for exmaple, places like Ebikon or Emmenbrück, Horw.

[serial_dev]

> You can get affordable houses and apartments on rail lines where you can be in the city in 15min. [1]

[1] Trust me. Blindly. Please?

[1718627440]

When this is the only reason, trains are far superior. Show me the country where I can drive 120km/h / 75mph through the city center.

[wffurr]

Interesting use of the word “sustainable”.

[randunel]

There are other means of in-city transportation, you know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Railway