Why? It is not just about the cost. It is about over a million people dying every year. It is about pollution. It is about noise. It is about ugly roads taking up huge amounts of space. It is about entire cities messed up because of urban sprawl.
It's about people getting to work in a reasonable amount of time and comfort from housing they can afford.
Rich urbanites having ugly roads in their field of vision is not remotely comparable to middle and working class people having to move in with roommates or triple their commute times.
It works much better in European cities. Cars are not necessary to have affordable housing that is close to offices. You "just" need denser cities, saner zoning and decent public transport. In my office for example the large majority arrives via bike or public transport. There isn't enough parking space to accomodate even half of the workers.
I live about five kilometers from the office and ride my bike. I pay about twelve Euros per square meter rent. My apartment even has a big yard, I just have to share it with the other tenants. A grocery store is right across the street. The next one is ten minutes walk away.
Live can be pretty nice if city planning isn't completely screwed up.
The grocery store they were going to build next door to me was killed because the entire walkable radius around my apartment is the ancestral land of an Indian tribe, and their descendents would rather this site remain the parking lot of a restaurant than 150+ apartments and a bunch of retail. My nearest grocery store remains 2+ miles uphill.
Mountain View looks like a small town in order to protect the habitat of a burrowing owl.
There's always some reason not to densify where people have already settled. We sprawl because it's the only thing we can get away with.
And is definitely easy biking distance. If transit isn't an option, maybe residents could lobby for bike and pedestrian infrastructure as an alternative.
When density is so low outside a city's relatively tiny core, like in most American cities, it's no surprise areas with short commute times are so expensive. Maybe if we densified our cities prices wouldn't be so out of whack.
It doesn't have to be Manhattan like densities either. Many German cities, for example, are full of 4, 5, 6 story buildings. Dense enough to support frequent transit and common enough to not have astronomical rents.
Much of Manhattan is not that dense either. I mean, it's denser than most places, but a decent chunk of it is the exact type of thing you're describing -- five to six story buildings.
In principle, if you can make a 1:1 atomic swap between driving subsidies and a Manhattan-level subway system, you should do it.
In practice, I think you're likely to eliminate people's current perfectly good option just to lift public transit from abysmal to mediocre. It would depend on the proposal.
This is exactly it - people are so used to thousands of road deaths a year, funding unpleasant oil-supplying regimes, polluting their neighbourhoods and traffic that they don't realise they are avoidable. As mentioned before, it's a lack of imagination.
Poor exurbanites driving unreliable cars an hour or more to get to work is not remotely comparable to rich suburbanites crowing them out of employment-accessible housing.
Everyone uses roads. Those things you buy in supermarkets come by lorries and trucks; buses - public transport - also use roads; everything built and delivered to a city is largely delivered there by trucks (yes, there's also trains and planes and ships, but I wager majority of transport in most areas is generally roads). So I don't like the argument of me paying for the roads as a driver because I'm the one using it.
If you think about it, if someone drives to another city to do his work, he is likely building a service that others then use. Users of the service / product thus benefit from the road, indirectly. We accept that the cost of this transportation and whole service by the employee/worker is covered by the client of the product service - isn't driving and costs associated to it the same?
My point it - it's all very connected with EVERYTHING that we consume in modern world. It's not like someone who never owned a car is not benefiting from roads (and thus shouldn't pay for their use) in a myriad ways.
> Those things you buy in supermarkets come by lorries and trucks
And yet roads are not packed just with lorries and trucks. So without people driving around in their huge personal vehicles maybe there would be little less roads required?
You're taking a very city centric view. Many interstate freeways are absolutely full of trucks. Just because you don't see them in your urban center doesn't mean they're not a part of everyday life for millions of Americans.
You don't get to just pretend driving is some kind of vice, like smoking, that we just need to discourage people from.
I mean, i'm all for having humans no longer drive asap, but that doesn't mean we'll be done with roads and travel. Also people need to remember that these "trucks" come in many shapes and sizes, and a big truck will move the inventory most of the way on interstates, and then vans / smaller trucks actually deliver in many cases. Especially within cities where traffic and space would make driving a fullsized haul impossible.
Imo, people shouldn't be driving - but people should be traveling still. The world wide delivery system cannot be moved into city limits.
Inter and intra city travel are very different stories though.
The acres of parking, sprawl and mega roads within cities are gobbling up productive land, generating pollution and driving up commuting and real estate costs, all while sucking down massive amounts infrastructure dollars and subsidizes.
Because other forms of transport never get people killed, right? Because only passenger vehicles need roads?
Here in the Finnish capital Helsinki we had all of 2 traffic fatalities last year. A low anomaly for sure, but because the first only occurred half way in the year, it was widely reported and I still remember the cause: an elderly pedestrian getting hit by a tram.
Now this is, of course, just a single case, but you can't possibly claim that the only form of transport that causes casualties is driving – because it's not true. (Actually, the conditions here are pretty treacherous as I'm writing this: much harder to fall down and injure yourself while sitting in a car, don't you think?)
For me, driving a car instead of using public transport is making my one-way commute in 15 minutes instead of an hour. How much would you value 1.5 hours of your time every single day – not to even mention to comfort?
Yet if everyone drove a car like you I'm guessing your 15 minute commute would be a lot longer. In London whenever there is a tube strike and people drive instead of taking the tube journeys take multiple hours to complete.
Great, but then we are going to stop subsidizing cities as well. No more state or federal aid dollars. No more Federal Highway Trust Fund dollars for mass transit projects in cities.
It's generally the suburbs and rural areas that get subsidized, not the cities. Cities get more spending but they have so much more economic activity that they end up paying even more in taxes.
Which is almost vacuously true -- the question is whether people will be better off overall and whether the value the subsidy is worth more than the cost. Surely someone must have thought so at some point since it currently exists.
It seems extremely plausible that American society fell in love with the automobile and went on a nation-wide car-friendly infrastructure building binge after WW2 before many of the downsides were well understood. Were the people selling suburban homes to people with G.I. Bill loans doing environmental impact assessments, calculating emergency services response times, and giving their customers projections for what the commute times would be in 10 years after all the houses were built and occupied? We didn't even know the right questions to be asking back then, let alone have quality data to answer them.
It's also about a choice and personal freedom.You might lean to communist like state where the government is telling you what to do, say, hear and think.
Oh please. The road network is one the most socialist things in America. A huge amount of land is controlled by the state for some idea of the "common good". And a vast amount of land dedicated to free parking. With a few exceptions the system completely ignores the basics of a market. You pay the same at rush hour in a congested city as an empty rural road. Everyone is a socialist when they get in their car. In a lot of the world the public transport system is far more capitalist than the system that supports cars.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but there are lots of non communist states with great public transit. Japan, Korea, Singapore, most of Europe, and Hong Kong up until China (which is only a communist system by name) are all examples. American transit is a joke.
A million people dying... from driving? That is an astonishing claim that would likely get the discoverer a nobel prize. Please provide the citation to the peer reviewed paper in a major publication.
What's with the tone? Think about the people you know who "died too young." They probably died in a car accident. Vehicular crashes are the number 1 cause of death in the US among people 15-45 (or thereabouts).
>Road injuries occurred in about 54 million people in 2013.[1] This resulted in 1.4 million deaths in 2013, up from 1.1 million deaths in 1990.[2]
The citation: GBD 2013 Mortality and Causes of Death, Collaborators (17 December 2014). "Global, regional, and national age-sex specific all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 240 causes of death, 1990-2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013.". Lancet. 385: 117–71. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(14)61682-2. PMC 4340604 . PMID 25530442.
The OP is right, and actually understating it if anything. Here's a report from the WHO [1] where they cite 1.25 million from 2013. If anything, that number has probably increased significantly since then given the rapid industrialization (and automobilization) of developing countries, especially China.
Isn't it 50,000 in the US alone? A million worldwide doesn't sound too exaggerated. And that's directly killed, not taking into account pollution and climate change.
If you're going to point to environmental stress, let's not forget that a stuffy, smelly subway car at rush hour pressed up against hundreds of strangers' bodies is also a less than ideal environment.
Stuffy and smell does correlate to disease spread. How many people die from the flu or other disease as a result of being pressed upon during their commute?
Use of Metropolitan public transport is not associated with the flu (and considering the way it's transmitted it's a very good candidate for a disease that would spread in that environment).
I don't want to get into the whole driving debate. Just wanted this fact out there.
The average American commuting by car is already spending an hour a day doing it.
Even if the commuter has to spend the same time on transit, they have time to relax, read, work etc.
This is ignoring the strides we can make with bike infrastructure which provides excercise along with the commute, even in low density suburban areas. Or encouraging remote work, which eliminates the commute entirely and frees up much more time.
So if you can't afford to live downtown, you should be disconnected from the city altogether, rather than having a reasonable way to get to it?
Sprawl exists because people want to be connected to cities without paying downtown luxury condo rents, and it's the only viable option (considering public school quality, neighborhood safety, etc.) we're being given.
The ridiculous prices in many urban cores is driven by the same supply constraints that cause urban sprawl.
When the only place where zoning and planning boards allow density is a relatively tiny downtown, surrounded by low density development, it's no surprise prices shoot through the roof.
> Sprawl exists because people want to be connected to cities without paying downtown luxury condo rents, and it's the only viable option (considering public school quality, neighborhood safety, etc.) we're being given.
So we already moved the discussion from subway cars being uncomfortable because you have to stand and being smelly (or something) to it taking a lot of time.
Well it turns out driving takes a long time too, but you're really just being a moving couch potato.
I wasn't trying to compare the stress of public transit to driving, just "stuffy and smelly" to "not stuffy and smelly". Arjie's government-funded study notwithstanding, it's common sense that you're more likely to get sick when being around sick people. Someone in the office gets sick? It spreads like wildfire, after that one borderline day that they decide to come in anyhow. How could it possibly be better, having much closer contact with many more people?
> Personally, I find public transit much less stressful than driving in a large city.
I'll agree with that, with the added asterisk that I try to avoid high-traffic times in both cases (and actually large cities in general).
