There is a reason why everyone in the dormitories knew who had a vehicle. And though you could get to some of the off campus areas by foot, it was far more likely that you would hitch a ride.
That being said, my 2nd cousin who lives in Copenhagen owns a car. It is convenient. She doesn't use it a lot since usually a bicycle or mass transit is also convenient but having the option is nice for certain trips or conditions. Copenhagen is a pretty nice city to drive in. Hundreds of bicycles at every intersection slows you down a lot less than hundreds of cars at every intersection.
That's the secret -- make your city convenient to use without a car, which significantly reduces the number of cars, which makes it much better for those using a car.
I agree that places should be made as convenient as they can be for walking, as well. I just get annoyed with so much of the discourse assuming you can design the cities so that a car is not more convenient. It is almost always a massive convenience. Obnoxiously so.
They also don’t need to make non-car options more convenient for all people, or even most people. The larger the share of non-car trips the better things get even for those who still drive, even if that share is going from 10% to 20%. Less congestion and pollution. Fewer traffic accidents. More density of housing in places that have high demand, reducing housing costs.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this. Essentially, my assertion is that you get more people out of cars by making them expensive than you do with city design. (Unless, of course, you consider parking costs part of city design?)
Absolutely. The amount of space taken up by parking, and its related cost, and things like congestion charges, are part of city planning.
And you can still significantly reduce the number of cars and car-trips without eliminating car ownership. A household with one car used occasionally when it’s convenient needs less parking and driving space than one with two cars driven daily.
Yes the financial component is part of it. Building dense walkable urban developments makes car ownership more expensive and non-car options cheaper and more convenient.
Some would argue that in many places car ownership is being subsidized by the way we develop and tax.
Some households will still have cars, but households are not the same as individual people.
And I think there are plenty of places where the majority of households don’t own cars. You can say they would if it was cheap and convenient enough, but that’s the whole point we’re discussing. Not dedicating so much development and infrastructure to cars will make them less convenient and more expensive options than the alternatives for at least some of the population.
This is related with the housing discussions. People have somewhat convinced themselves that cheap standalone houses are the goal. Which, I suppose there is no reason that can't be the goal. But compare average home size in pretty much any US city with some of these walkable cities you have in mind.
When I do that, I start asking how related those two things are. And I'm growing rather convinced that people have built up a mental idea that they can live with all of the benefits of both worlds, without contending with the contrast between them.
For example you could say that most people who live in Manhattan would choose to live in a 2000sqft+ detached home if it was financially feasible to do so.
But because there is limited space, high demand, and city policy allows high density, such a home is not financially feasible for almost anyone in Manhattan.
And of course that applies in sprawling metro areas like Houston as well. Forcing large swaths of single-family zoning despite the market forces means that housing supply can’t grow with demand, so cost of housing increases.
I'm pretty young now, and I could afford a car. I expect that I will probably buy one at some point in the future. But I can easily live my life without one for now, so I have decided to save that money instead. If I lived in Houston, I don't think that would be the case.
None of my friends that I know in NYC own cars. All of my friends that live in my hometown own cars.
All of which is to say, it amuses me to find myself defending that people will buy cars. I am not trying to push it as the correct answer. I personally think people should understand the expense of owning a car far better than it seems most people do. I just also can't deny that a car is far more convenient than not, if you can afford one.
Make a city that doesn't require a car, and people that aren't compelled to use one won't.
My anecdote is everyone I know from Chicago doesn't take transit. Not many people, and I'm certainly not in a young group of folks from there.
https://datausa.io/profile/geo/chicago-il/
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-s...
I am trying to be clear that I am not opposed to transit and such. As stated elsewhere, I went over a decade without a car in Atlanta, GA. And this is not including my time in college. So, I am all for it.
But I also remember a comedian saying "at least he was above the poverty line, I don't ride the bus." And my girlfriend at the time shot me a very nervous look because I did ride the bus. I happened to think the joke was hilarious. And it shaped a lot of what I paid attention to with regards to driving.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
As noted in another thread, I do take it as a prerequisite that you have to have transit.
As much as I love college campuses, I think they often miss out on having interesting amenities within the walkability of the campus itself. Still, going to school in Cambridge I never wanted a car and the few times I rented one for a longer trip or a move I wished that I didn't have to.
I think cars are and probably should be convenient for certain things (mainly moving, buying furniture or other big stuff, and to a lesser extent getting into nature). But for day-to-day life, it is a sign of failure (and wasted potential!) when cars are convenient.
I say this as someone that enjoys the long slow walks. They are amazing. But if the goal is to get to the store/office and back, on foot is not as convenient as in a car.
The only times this is not the case, is when something has made the car not possible. Usually this boils down to "it can be prohibitively expensive to park a car at your destination."
I do think anecdotes are effective here, so: from my old SF apartment I could bike or ride Muni to the office. I generally chose to bike, but both options were more convenient than driving. The speed of driving and biking were both limited mostly by traffic and traffic lights, so biking was just as fast as driving. Both the traffic and the traffic lights are necessary because other people also want to live and work in a similar place as I do. But since my office was downtown in an urban, popular area where land value is high enough that parking is not a good use of land, if I drove I would have had to park a few blocks away (for a high price) and walk. Since bike parking is so much more space efficient than car parking, I could easily park my bike in my office. Taking the train was faster than either option; if it rained I would simply take the train.
I think you are not correct that a car is a strictly better option for all tasks. I think the convenience of not having to deal with all the things that make driving difficult is extremely valuable, and I think the things that make driving difficult are unavoidable because driving scales extremely poorly.
However, I couldn't ignore that I was virtually alone in my office for having taken transit in Atlanta. In Seattle, I'm assuming more of my colleagues were using it, but as you went up the pay ladder, cars became the norm. Overwhelmingly so. And yes, traffic was bad in both places, but if I wanted to be home to office in the least time, I left early in a car.
And I want to be clear that I don't think they are strictly superior. Certainly not for single people. But the biggest question I have to ask about taking a car somewhere is if I have the money for the gas. To get there by transit takes considerably more thought. (Or luck, if you are on a main transit point at both locations, I suppose?)
I enjoy having a car for when i want to go on road trips or move something big or go to some specialty shop of the clear other side of town, but it is not at all convenient for ~90% of the places I go.
Back when I was in Seattle proper, I can agree. As I say elsewhere, I'm actually a major fan/proponent of transit and walking. Thought it was amazing that the elementary school would walk the kids to the science center for field trips. But I couldn't not see that as you get people that can afford a car and home to park it, they used their car more.
My point: cars are not always convenient, you just live in a place specifically designed to make them so, whereas i don't.
Edit to add: 5 mile radius is what like 75 sq mi? That's half the entire area of the city. A full one half of the entire city i can access quickly and easily without touching a car. And i can still take trains to the other half while anyone driving that far will be making a terrifying trip on the expressway.
For the kinds of people that want space, though, it is a very short radius. For families with kids that they want to do activities, it can be crippling.
I think it is fair to argue that many of the things that make me support that statement are themselves very problematic. I largely agree. But that is also largely against the point I was intending.
My point is only that you will get more and more people actively driving as long as you don't take steps to keep it specifically expensive to do so. NYC is the poster child example for what I mean, here. Has good transit by US standards. Still saw measurable increases in use from congestion pricing for tolls.
Being more clear, here. My point is not that you can replace design considerations with pricing strategy. My assertion is that you can't ignore pricing strategy with design considerations. And the opportunity/convenience cost of vehicles is such that you have to be somewhat aggressive on that control, as you have to cut into the natural benefits of a modern car.
My template for this thought is largely NYC's congestion pricing success. And knowing that Tokyo does a pretty aggressive policy of not letting you register a car if you don't have off street parking. Which is very expensive.
But I think asking for the kinds of development that reduce the need for and length of car trips, as a choice of place to live, is reasonable.
There’s also a vast gulf between a car-free household and the current situation where many suburban households have 3+ cars due to two working adults plus children in high school or college, each of which needs their own car every day.