Fuckcars is made up of people with little life experience who think they have all the answers, and people who fetishize city living and think it’s normal or healthy for humans to live at a density like NYC (and fuck you if you disagree). They’re oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness, and handwaving away the problems.
I feel like this point is missing the big picture: people create the demand, and companies supply what the market demands. Like or hate “the free market”, this is essentially what it is. If there were magically 1/10th the number of humans on the planet, we would expect those companies to have 90% less emissions. It’s not that some of these companies aren’t bad actors, and have actions that are at times immoral, it’s that they are amoral actors in a market economy that is only responsive to consumer demand.
The example I like to give is that companies’ race to the bottom on quality. They’re responding to human behavior, where if an item on Amazon is $6, and another very similar item is 10 cents cheaper, the cheaper item will sell 100x more. This is a brutal, cutthroat example of human behavior and market forces. It leads to shitty products because consumers are more responsive to price and find it hard to distinguish quality, so the market supplies superficially-passable junk at the lowest possible price and (with robust competition) the lowest possible profit margin.
Maybe you happen to be on a route that runs well from home to work without lots of stops and no need to change lines. Can you find a destination in your city that would require a change of bus or train and incur a larger time penalty? What if your job was located there instead?
I think most people buy sensible vehicles but there are certainly people who have a truck fetish that is not justified. Unfortunately it creates an arms race where all cars get larger because there are very real risks of a collision with a larger vehicle.
It’s hard to tell the intent of any poster, and there is a vehement anti-car movement here (and on Reddit) that allows for no exceptions to the idea that living should be done at high density, and without personal vehicles. It’s hard to read your intent and beliefs because the things you said before are very similar to what I’ve heard from the zealots.
I’m trying to make the point that public transit easily misses on serving every origin, destination, and timing efficiently. Usually it misses badly, and my average experience with specific commutes is a 3x time penalty for transit vs driving. The penalty gets worse if done at especially early or late hours. Maybe this is exacerbated by car infrastructure and lower density, but the anti car crowd would have you believe it’s intrinsic and not a function of history and preference. At any rate I usually disagree with them on almost every premise.
You’re off by a factor of 4 on the grocery distance for the last 3 places I’ve lived, and those stores were CLOSE. It’s like 100cc of petrol to go that far, 200cc round trip, in lieu of 40+ minutes of fast walking (in which you can only carry limited groceries). I know all about it because I’ve done the walk many times when I didn’t have a car, and it fucking sucks.
I’d say freaking out about 200ccs of petrol to get groceries is an insane degree of austerity, and the fact that people like you are proposing that is evidence of either an irrational need to control impact, or (if justified) evidence that the world is grotesquely overpopulated.
Nobody owns 3 ton cars around here. Mine isn’t even 2 tons. In fact it’s pretty close in weight to a Fiat 500, while being generally more useful in every way. Everything you’re presenting is a strawman/caricature of what you imagine typical suburban car owners to live like. And yes, we should all be driving electric cars, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
Edit: damn near nobody on earth would drive to get groceries if the store was 300m/1000ft away. Most people will never be able to live that close to the grocery store, work, or any other place that they routinely need to visit. That’s why your example is insane.
Are you going to be first in line to give up your computer? Your phone? Antibiotics? Vaccines? Electricity?
Innovation is real, even if you don’t personally like it. Motor vehicles are a legitimately good invention, arguably only becoming problematic due to increasing population and urbanization.
We’re very quickly moving to a place where the QUANTITY of people is so high, the QUALITY of their lifestyles have to be sacrificed to cut down on human impact. The impoverished/developing world has very low impact, at huge cost to their quality of life. Who wants to volunteer to live like sub-saharan Africans, or Indians in abject poverty to cut down on human impact? I’m certain they don’t want that life - and why should they? I’m sure they would like to travel on a jet to a beach vacation like those in more affluent countries do.
I’m calling this eco-austerity. Instead of publicizing overpopulation and promoting low birth rates, we’re expected to belt tighten and give up on quality of life. It’s bullshit. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants.
This is exactly the point I’ve been making to them. I think it’s a bunch of people who have never lived outside of a major city, or grew up in new-construction actual suburban hell like Phoenix, DFW, Vegas, most of FL etc. Try old Midwest small city suburbs by comparison. Maybe parts of the northeast.
They probably couldn’t afford a car after used car prices spiked sometime between 2000-2010, and never experienced the freedom and autonomy. They can’t imagine not being into a downtown club scene - it hasn’t dawned on them that they will probably grow up and hate living in a congested apartment world and might want to stretch out in a bigger house in a quiet neighborhood. It’s never occurred to them that not everyone works from home and their spouse may need to take a job 20 miles in the opposite direction.
Do you sell your house because your job changed? Get divorced because your partner’s job changed? You can’t have ALL of the employment in easy reach by public transit from your home. This ideal-city with perfect transit and no commute is a handwave. UNLESS you live in a sufficiently small town that has everything but hasn’t blown up yet - and those aren’t dense enough for transit, and require personal vehicles.
Public transit is also more inconvenient than convenient even if you give it a maximum advantage in density and stipulate that the trains will run 24/7 and frequently (NYC).
It’s just inexperience with life or being an urban loving weirdo who can’t imagine that other perspectives exist. I want to spend all of my free time in places you couldn’t service with transit. They can’t even imagine it.
Get in, make as much as possible (with little to no regard for others), get out, retire early.
Arguably, this is what the American dream has become. It used to be we wanted middle class wealth, 2.1 kids, and a nice suburban house. But now all we want to do is sell out, retire, and never have to work again. I can relate, even if I lack the skills to play the game.
That’s where we got antiwork, FIRE, etc. It’s true: nobody wants to work anymore. I sure don’t. Maybe we never did.
You can’t fill up an EV at home if you rent, most of the time. Higher wattage charging requires a charger installation.
They really aren’t. I have a couple friends with them and they can go months without buying gas.
I’m one of those people, I guess, but I’m not such a Luddite that I don’t think electric is the way forward. Had to replace a very old car recently and low-end new was better than buying used. Bought a gas car that gets great fuel economy for a variety of very good reasons, but if I could have bought a Tesla made by Toyota/Honda, with huge range for economy car prices, I would probably have an EV.
Also worth noting: owning an EV is harder if you don’t own a house you can install charging hardware in.
I’m reluctant to litigate something unpopular on the internet for the purpose of collecting downvotes, and I think there’s low probability we’ll agree on the issue, but I’ll explain my rationale:
I lived in NYC. NYC is not exactly designed for walking or bikes, but there’s a strong case to be made that it has become a city in which cars are much less feasible than transit, walking, or biking. The sidewalks are all double-wide. If you order delivery, the delivery guy is on a bike. Nobody I knew owned a car, and none of us would have been able to afford the parking if we had. We walked to get groceries. It has subways, busses, and ferries that run very frequently. The subways run 24/7/365. In terms of density, NYC should be a best-case scenario for public transit.
The fact remains that if you wanted to LEAVE the city and go somewhere green with the ability to get away from people, it was 3x as long by public transit than it would have been by car. Minimum. And those places are far away. It’s a place designed to keep you there. And that’s just my point: I don’t want to feel like a sardine in a city packed with people, I want to get out into nature where I can be the only person for miles around.
This is probably impossible in the Netherlands, which is 92% urban and has an average population density of 1/2 NYC across the entire country. By comparison, the US is 0.6% as densely populated as the Netherlands.
Amsterdam is the city I see cited most often as being the model for a /c/fuckcars-approved world, but my basic thesis is that living in a place with 13,670 people per square mile, greatly diminished personal space (densified housing), and greatly diminished personal autonomy (the ability to leave), is approximately my definition of urban hell.
I submit that the population of the Northeast Megalopolis (containing NYC, DC, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore) is the stuff of dystopian hellscapes - FIFTY MILLION PEOPLE - and with an average population density of only 6.4% the density of the Netherlands (in other words, the same as Europe). It’s really hard there to find land in its natural state, which isn’t owned by someone - the best you can do is city parks or the equivalent. And while that’s a matter of personal preference, I see a feverish, unrelenting push by the younger generations, who didn’t grow up with cars-as-personal-freedom like the Boomers/GenX/Xennials did. In the US, young Millennials, gen Z, and beyond have decided that ultradense cities are great and cars are evil. I understand how they got to that conclusion, but to me it just looks like Eco-Austerity derived from urbanization, human overpopulation, and the lack of liberating personal-vehicular-experiences as a late teen and early adult.
Edit: When I was in high school, you could buy a well-used economy car that got 35mpg for $500-1k. Gas was a buck a gallon. Traveling 100+ miles to another state to explore rural areas with <1 person per SQ mile, for $3 in gas, all in a couple of hours was empowering. Being stuck in a manmade urban jungle is confining and I think people who lacked the opportunities I had will never understand.
Hell, I believe so much in personal vehicles and the autonomy they enable, I obtained a pilot’s license – something that is overwhelmingly difficult and expensive to do in overcrowded Europe, but for the time being still remains something you can achieve as a middle-class American in some places. I can go places far away without regard for transit schedules, routes, or finding hordes of people there when I arrive. It’s a very non-European experience, and I prefer it to being just another person in an ocean of continuous human habitation.
Single-family homes vs densified housing is an adjacent topic, and I don’t want to get too sidetracked, but suffice it to say that it was the yardstick of middle-class wealth in postwar America. To have your very own land and space, that was private, green, and notionally yours forever. And now thanks to perpetually ballooning city populations and demand for land in historically-occupied places forever outstripping supply, the younger generations are idolizing what amounts to apartment living. Personally, I couldn’t get away from apartments fast enough once my income allowed it. I still don’t know whether I’ll ever own a house, but if I never share a wall or floor with someone again, it will be too soon. I’m frustrated by this newfound need to do away with the tools of our personal independence, and at some level, I fundamentally can’t understand it. It frustrates me almost daily to run into anti-car, pro-urban zealots online, and I think they’re misguided. They’re all either mega extroverts, or don’t have a clue what they’re missing through lack of personal experience.
You almost wonder if these opinions are a product of very clever propaganda. “You will own nothing and you will be happy”. No personal transportation, no public land, and rent an apartment forever to enrich corporate landlords. Stuck in the city, owning nothing of substance, with limited personal freedom because there are just too many people. Just more consumers for capitalism.
Part of using public transport is that you need to share it with the public, which is why I broadly detest it and cannot comprehend the fuck cars weirdos.
Couldn’t agree more. The anti car movement among young millennials and Gen Z is weird as hell to me. I’ve lived in a large city and taken well designed public transit for years. Compared to living in a small city and driving, it’s awful - so I left. There’s a literal loss of freedom and autonomy that comes with it, and I can’t fathom why the younger crowd wants to live in crowded apartments and post angry screeds to r/fuckcars. I like walking and hiking and biking too! I have no desire to do it in a city, so I have to drive somewhere uncrowded to do it. If public transit served those places, they would be crowded.
There’s a lot of land in North Dakota as well. It’s super flat, boring, and winters are ultra cold and windy as hell. There are very good reasons it has a low population. It’s further south than most of the places in Canada you’re talking about.
EDIT: I’d like to add that “we’re not overpopulated, there’s plenty of land!” isn’t really the whole story, either. Occupying every square mile that can be occupied should not be a goal. Leaving more places in a natural state without human impact is highly desirable, IMO.
Huge areas of Canada are at high latitudes and very dark, cold, and inhospitable in the winter. Something like 50% of Canada’s population lives south of the northern extent of the US (i.e. south of Seattle, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, half of MN, and almost all of MT/ND.
Huge areas of Australia are desert.
The population distribution of Canada and Australia is not an accident. The coasts and more temperate climates are much more hospitable.
It sounds like we generally agree that there are structural reasons quite aside from population growth, and agree that they desperately need to be addressed (i.e. regulatory). I’m arguing from the perspective that we should absolutely attempt to address these reasons, but that ANY population growth from any source is essentially adding fuel to the fire.
I think a lot of emphasis gets put on “supply-side” solutions that sound a lot like “just build more houses, NBD!”. From what I’ve observed we can’t get there with the existing land without (IMO) excessive densification and/or sprawl which has an easily-felt deleterious effect on livability. I’ve spent the last couple of decades living in very different places, and watched them change due to growth. In all cases growth has caused traffic that never existed before, MASSIVE crowding of local attractions that can’t be mitigated without restrictive permitting, and astronomical increases in the price of real estate. Without being hyperbolic at all, more population has quite literally been felt as less freedom. Some of this is due to the rise of the global middle class, but they have their hands in my home places at the expense of locals, and it’s gone from great to hellish in about 20-30 years.
The problems with new housing seem to be:
Like if you think you can find 10 million people to give up LA/Seattle/NY/etc and move to central Kansas, where there’s no ocean, no mountains, no lakes, no jobs, and nothing to do, more power to you. People live in interesting places for good reasons, and other places are cheap for good reasons.
An adjacent point: nature abhors a vacuum. If the QOL is better in the US and there are ~8 billion possible candidates for immigration, our population could easily double in a month. The demand is there. We could adopt a policy of open borders until QOL reaches equilibrium at some much lower level and immigration stops - we could also make immigration virtually impossible - or anything in-between. I’m of the opinion that lower influx means > QOL pretty close to 100% of the time.
EDIT: tl;dr - more individuals translates to reduced individual freedom. I’m not going to get weird and libertarian about it, but that’s the relationship I observe.
I appreciate the data-supported arguments but the comment on doubling was a stated goal of the Canadian national government. The Canadian population is presently projected to double in 26 years. Geographically constrained places with high immigration like Australia and Canada are shockingly unaffordable right now. These places are the canary in the coal mine for the US, which may have plenty of usable land on paper, but has the same issues with a self perpetuating cycle of the major metro areas having all the jobs and limited room to grow. The population is up 50% in my lifetime and I think that accurately reflects real estate becoming increasingly unattainable.
Edit: I guess what I’m saying is that housing-as-investment is wrong, but the basis for housing-as-investment (and indeed all investment) is the projection of increased future demand. In developed nations, this comes from immigration. If the population were shrinking indefinitely, housing certainly wouldn’t be increasing in value
What’s far less dense with better public transit than NYC? The most popular example of no-car city design I see is Amsterdam, which is 1/2 the density of NYC, but still 15x the density of where I’m from (not even close to a rural area). I think robust public transit at 1/15th the density of Amsterdam and 1/30th the density of NYC is a pipe dream.
In these lower density places, maybe you luck out and you’re walking or biking distance to work. If you change jobs do you have to move instead of hopping in the car and commuting a bit further? In circumstances like these, transit can’t possibly serve every origin and destination efficiently, and personal vehicles can offer efficient point to point.