1,293 karma · joined April 15, 2022
The delinquencies are the ones you hear about. What doesn't get reported, statistically, is when people are balancing absolutely everything in their life on a knife's edge to fit the car in with all their other expenses when they are living on a meager salary (or unemployed).
And that is only on the private individual's side. Costing out car-dependent development in terms of building and maintaining roads, bridges, power lines, water pipes, trash collection, wastewater treatment, fire, police is all monstrously expensive, and it is one reason why when the roads get damaged from use and need repair, they get chronically backlogged and problems keep mounting for years and years.
One thing people notice about Japan and the Netherlands is how immaculately maintained the roads are. They are significantly more pleasant places to drive, specifically because they did not overbuild road infrastructure.
Are we? When you zoom in on things like road maintenance backlogs and auto loan delinquencies, it kind of seems like we are not rich enough but have been pretending to be.
Sure they do - if they live in a city. I am a young person who started my first FTE job last year and am WFH. I have an incredibly bountiful friend group that comes from hobbyist meetups, social bike rides and dating apps.
I would argue that the prices reflect at least an incredibly persistent demand to live in those cities.
Just for different reasons than before. For instance, since the pandemic many cities have invested heavily in bike infrastructure and pedestrianization. E-bikes have become extremely popular. And as the post-COVID reopening has progressed, people have been organizing local hobbyist meetups, many of them having acquired those hobbies during the depths of the pandemic.
There is a huge lifestyle appeal to living in cities, and it will not go away anytime soon. Cities need to recognize that both the massive increase in residential demand and the massive plunge in commercial demand are incredible opportunities to differentiate themselves by converting their dead-after-6pm business districts into thriving, walkable mixed-use hubs.
I live in DC, can easily bike anywhere, and it is to me about visiting friends at their homes, parks, going to museums, relaxing on the waterfront, going to the bike trails, hobbyist meetups, catching a train to visit Philly or NY, all within easy reach.
Really the issue, to me and most other people, is how hilariously unaffordable it is due to the incredibly high demand for housing in cities.
Or highway/pedestrian/cyclist safety, for that matter?
I think that might be our different mindsets at work here. I ride transit when I must, but when I need or want to go somewhere my first thought is, "I want to do this on a bike. Can I do this on a bike?"
I do use Citi Bike mainly as a transit replacement when I visit. I'd say I make about four major displacements a day when I visit and use Citi Bike for part or all of them where possible. Sometimes it saves me part of the fare, like, I will take Citi Bike to Grand Central to ride Metro North, or take Citi Bike to a PATH station to cross into NJ.
There are major use cases if you frequent/live in a neighborhood that is just outside the comfort zone for regularly using transit. A major portion of East Village is like that. From a purely "does this save me a lot of time and/or money" standpoint, Citi Bike does not always come out on top, but it does come out on top for quite a lot of people as you mentioned.
One major benefit to me though is that having the membership reduces the friction of deciding to use a bike, by a lot. It makes riding a bike into a very obvious, low-cost recreation/exercise option and inspires me to go out and be active when the weather is nice. And it makes me motivated to find excuses to get out and ride more, like crossing the major bridges, checking out the waterfront greenways, or getting involved in group rides or other meetups related to my hobbies. The fact that biking is just more fun and satisfying than taking public transit makes all the outings that it enables more fun and satisfying by extension too.
Facebook is not exactly at Microsoft scale on this, but it would still require an enormous about of human effort to reconstitute all the organizations, event planning infrastructure, relationships etc. that people currently manage via IG and Facebook.
One thing I do in DC is ride bikeshare to the bar (where the amortized cost of the ride, with my annual membership, is basically $0) and then take metro back ($2).
And of course this is all moot if you can just walk, since it is always free, which is one major benefit of denser mixed use walkable neighborhoods.
I want to add that in cities, social cycling is a real thing too, and a fantastic way to meet people and have fun. Many US cities have some combination of Critical Mass, bike party, queer bike rides, weekly evening social rides.
If going out with friends costs $20 a head instead of $45, more people will want to do it.
If you have a layover in a train station, e.g. with Amtrak, you can just leave the train station and go to a nearby shop if you need something.
Laws are supposed to protect people who don't have the resources to proactively hedge against stuff like this.
The motorist's insurance paid for that. For incidents where that doesn't happen, this is stuff I have my own insurance (including critical accident insurance) for. Also as I keep riding, my judgment gets better, my knowledge of the area gets better, and I can anticipate/avoid danger more easily. I can't really speak to motorcycles because, due to their higher weight and beefier motors (compared to, say, a scooter or e-bike), they are subject to significantly different rules and cannot use separated infrastructure like multi-use paths, cycletracks, protected bike lanes and sidewalks. My commute from Arlington to DC is about 90% covered by separated infrastructure. I have to deal with cars when running errands inside the city but typically speeds are much lower and there are usually low-stress routes available.
I mean ultimately there is a nonzero risk, both financial and bodily, much as there is when you are in a motor vehicle. I've had plenty of friends facing surprise three- or four-digit bills due to mechanical issues or damage with their car. In the DC area, motorists frequently crash into other cars while on highways or stroads, sometimes killing themselves or others. Vehicle manufacturers have superbly played the public by using the fatalities of their own vehicles as a marketing point to sell even larger and heavier vehicles under the guise of "safety" that cause even more fatalities in a collision scenario. It's an arms race and I have absolutely no desire to play a role in it.
The issue with the road infrastructure is also that it necessitates cars to begin with. With wide, sprawling networks of roads where motor traffic is too fast for people to comfortably walk and cycle, you end up with huge amounts of suburban sprawl. Things are located far apart; tons tons tons more infrastructure needs to be built to provide roads, water, electricity, gas, Internet, police, fire response, schooling and wastewater treatment to those people living in sprawling exurban developments. All the parking lots and strip malls and highways mean that it is simply impossible to make a trip by any way other than car, which triggers orders of magnitude more motor vehicle trips of orders of magnitude longer distance than in a mixed-use walkable neighborhood, so it's not even really useful to draw a comparison between the marginal emissions of four people in a Tesla vs. the amortized emissions of four people on a train.
> Technologies like automatic emergency braking that always watch out for pedestrians and bikers is now standard, and will continue to improve as cars become more autonomous.
I hope this will save lives, but it will never be enough to break the environment of fear and the lurking danger of death that comes with navigating cities with motor traffic, especially since you can never assume that a car is equipped with it (and that it will function correctly). You need to have an incredibly high level of trust, one that just doesn't exist when you are interacting with someone using a different means of spatial displacement. Bikes and scooters are light, slow, small, maneuverable, and offer such good visibility, both to and of the cyclist, that every single risk factor is extremely low.
Or to put another way: in the aggregate it will save lives, but will you always be able to count on it to save yours?
There are other considerations too: a person in any vehicle can, and (in my experience) many do, park or drive in bike lanes or fail to yield to bike lane traffic when making turns. Here you have not the physical threat of the car itself but the fact that by doing this the motorist can force other people to execute dangerous maneuvers, like merging into high-speed motor traffic, splitting the lane or hopping onto the sidewalk to avoid the car.
And as for noise - firstly the tire noise is still there and actually worse due to vehicle weight. The honk is still there, it is still loud enough to trigger a bystander's fight or flight response, and hoo boy is there a lot of it! The people driving in DC and NY seem endlessly upset about the fact that they are doing so.
> In the US, average weight of cars is basically the same as it was in 1975, and per-capita pedestrian deaths have halved over the same period.
There is a lot going on with these numbers. For one, the main cause of this trend was the mass adoption of cars: people are simply walking a lot less than they did half a century ago. For two, the downward trend has sharply reversed since 2009: pedestrians deaths are rising very quickly, rising 50% between 2009 and 2020[1], coinciding modestly with the rise in popularity of mass market pickup trucks and SUVs.
[1]https://www.statista.com/chart/17194/pedestrian-fatalities-i...
A lot to say here for why I think the number of people who can legitimately claim it is a morally neutral matter of priorities and trade-offs for them is small.
For one, there are stigmas around transit and biking. Funnily enough they are contradictory: that only the poor get around with transit and biking, and that only upper class elitists get around with transit and biking. It is extremely common for people to oppose new infrastructure or denser housing on the grounds that it will either A) cause "undesirables" to come to the neighborhood and destroy property values, or B) induce gentrification.
For two, for a lot of people, living car-centrically is an automatic habit because it was a deeply ingrained assumption all throughout their upbringing that you just need a car and that owning a car is an important rite of passage and social signifier in adulthood.
For three, lots of people who were steeped in driving growing up are intimidated by the thought of learning to navigate a transit system or learning to ride a bike.
The last and to me most important thing is that the politics of car dependency are destructive to everyone. It is a negative-sum game to widen all the highways, and increase all the parking minimums, and zone for low density, and block bike lanes. It is extremely wasteful in terms of public resources and environmental destruction and it harms everyone's quality of life.
A lot of people don't really grasp the danger and unpleasantness that their car imposes on others. Seeing, smelling, hearing, tiptoeing around motor vehicle traffic are all deeply unpleasant and you have to place an enormous amount of trust in motor vehicle operators not to kill you where you stand. This is one thing that makes me not sympathetic to the "different priorities and trade-offs" argument. The internal logic is about pros and cons to one's own self, not about the pros and cons to everyone else, and motor vehicles have many properties that put this in stark relief: they are getting bigger and heavier making them safer to the driver and more deadly to whoever they hit; their horns are loud enough to cause ear damage and cause a giant fright to bystanders but are muffled inside the cabin; and of course huge, huge tracts of even walkable cities like NY are dedicated to motor vehicle traffic with many lanes while people walking, biking, scootering, dining outdoors and so on are forced to fight for scraps of space at the margin.
For me living without a car is not just about the benefits it offers to me personally but also the full understanding of the harms to others I am refusing to inflict, or even run the risk of inflicting, by opting out.
The drawback, if you can call it that, is that I am radically anti-car, as a direct result of the lived experiences that that life gives me.
That has been my story at least. My bus is late and slow, because it's stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic from all these people driving motor vehicles with a single occupant. I need ear protection on my commute because the 14th Street Bridge into DC pairs pedestrians and cyclists side-by-side with 60mph motor traffic with no noise protections. I lost a day at work because I got hit on my bike by a truck driver who was on his phone, and had to go to the ER. I am shaken and my heart rate is pounding and I am pondering my own mortality because someone gunned their engine through a left turn while I was walking across the street with a pedestrian signal - they accelerated instead of stopping to yield and I had to jump out of the way to save my own life while they sped off.
If you recognize how awful cars are for the environment and how they make city life inconvenient, unpleasant and expensive, and so you make the personal decision to forgo them to be part of the solution rather than the problem, you are taking a step into a life that will nudge you more and more to truly despise motor vehicles because your daily life will be filled with only negative interactions with them.
He didn't just "pitch" it, he made a buyout offer with all the attendant SEC filings. Not the sort of thing you can accidentally do with a slip of the tongue!