> For an individual, it is better to have a car than to use public transit.
Respectfully I disagree. Not only is it significantly more expensive, you have a lot less freedom. Freedom isn't the ability to drive to the middle of the desert, it's to get to where you want to go without being beholden to a metal box that's liable to kill you. We had that, and we can have it again. Not having to deal with parking, not having to deal with traffic, gas, etc, is actually great. Not having to worry about whether I can risk a drink and therefore increase the risk of murdering a family is great. It doesn't work for everyone, obviously those living in remote areas, but for most people, transit is straight up better in every way.
We sacrificed our wellbeing when we bought into car culture.
Despite starting with "I disagree", you are clearly in agreement with the parent comment.
The fragment you quoted means it is better to each individual separately for themselves to have a car if it has no impact on what everybody else does. If everyone else already has cars, then it's better for you if you also have one because the infrastructure is geared up for that. If nobody has cars then your life is better if you (*only you*) have one – in fact it's great, there's no traffic!
That's reading my comment too literally. The details aren't important.
The point is, in practice, for an individual choosing whether to take public transport or use a car, it's very often better for them to choose the car - even though that makes things a little worse for everyone else. Recognising that is an important part of making public transport work.
Having done both, and living in a city with a supposedly functioning public transport system, not being beholden to a time table outweighs all of that so hard that it's not even funny.
I get what you're saying. But there are cities where you don't need to worry about a timetable, there's just a constant stream of trains coming through. I'm thinking of Tokyo, Shanghai, or Vienna for example.
The rate of trains coming in in these cities is such that I rarely have to worry about a timetable. I just need to know which trains connect where.
The problem is the cities in between, which is probably the majority, where public transit is not used enough to warrant such high number of trains. If the public transit system was used more, you could schedule more trains, if you had more trains it would be used more.
It's kind of a chicken and egg situation where you need a lot of political will, or such density that it becomes necessity, to push for this.
I remember hearing a news report about a study where they found that the critical limit for public transit schedules is 6 minutes. Once trains or buses come more often than that, people stop looking at timetables and just go to the platform whenever they are ready to depart.
This lines up with my own experience. On weekdays, trams go every 5 minutes at my stop. On weekends, they go every 7.5 minutes. And that's just enough over the edge for me that I'm tempted to check the schedule on my phone before leaving my home.
Which city are you talking about? I don't think there's a city like that in the US. However, living in Vienna, I can't imagine ever owning a car. There's a super dense network of subways and trams - the subway goes every 2 minutes at rush hour and I can be anywhere in the city within 25 minutes.
I find their point quite to the point. It's just that we seldom sit and think the effects furthers from the basic first-level 'I have car, I can go where I want'.
Freedom of yours, is not freedom of others. You don't get to define freedom for others. Freedom for others is to move to a newly built suburb an hour away from the city, and still work in the city.
What happens with most of these, is light rail goes to the city for a few surrounding suburbs with 50-100k people per town. To get to that train station every morning, you need a car. No, you cannot have a bus circle the suburb for an hour to pick everyone up. No you cannot have many buses purchased by the suburb and stand still during off times - the taxes from 50k people cannot pay for that. No, no one is going to wait at a chicago suburb busstop for a bus while it's raining in October, or baking in July, or blasting -15 temp at 20mph winds, while the bus is late.
No one is driving cars to the desert. They are driving it to the mall, the restaurant, the rail stop.
They don't have to "deal" with parking. Towns have huge parking lots, and land is cheap.
What you did is make up a strawman, where people living in the dense city don't need a car. Guess what - most people there don't have one. I'm one of those people who has had cars in little towns, and no car while I live in the city.
Yes, there are two people who drive from the suburb to the city. Those are the minority. You see that traffic jam into the city in the morning? That's people's choice to drive. They can instead drive 10min to the rail or bus stop in or near their town. The option of which you speak, is already there. Selecting it or not, is the freedom.
No, I'm not talking about every city. Just most.
And no, we didn't have that which you describe. What we had is people having to work real close to where they lived. They are still free to do exactly that. I've tried that for over a decade, and don't own a car. As a consequence of that choice, I rent and sold the house. Maybe if you have a kid in school, you don't want to move too much. Maybe you get fired too and the next job's not that close. There was no fast subway or rail going all meshed between every town. Rail trips between towns were a thing you packed and dressed for. They were not a thing you took to work and back every morning. That thing, was the light rail to the city, is still there, and many people use it.
>Freedom of yours, is not freedom of others. You don't get to define freedom for others. Freedom for others is to move to a newly built suburb an hour away from the city, and still work in the city.
Well, if we want to have a society, we should very much define "freedom for others" too, considering the whole tradeoffs and issues or benefits of a practice (that's how we decided to have laws and ethics and other stuff, of course).
Not just leave it at "anything goes", and let everybody else get the consequences of individual choices, even if it's not their choice or to the detriment of the society at large (like, destroying public health or the environment).
Here's the problem with this logic. No personal attack, but I want you to think about how similar it is to the nazis and China.
>we should very much define
the people whose freedom of choice you are taking away for the good of society, are part of society, are part of "we," and the majority can't take their freedom just because it's overall good for that majority.
What you did is take a part of "we," made it "them," and made them the enemy. Don't do that.
> What happens with most of these, is light rail goes to the city for a few surrounding suburbs with 50-100k people per town. To get to that train station every morning, you need a car. No, you cannot have a bus circle the suburb for an hour to pick everyone up.
If the suburb is designed to be walkable then the bus is not needed in the first place:
Each individual community or neighbourhood can be fairly self-contained with regards to daily needs, and travel between them is done on rail or whatever. One could have all-day, frequent (e.g., every 5 minutes) service with trams (or buses) with-in an area, where you can travel with-in it, but also have connections to commuter rail to go to the Big City if the need arises:
This is how things were generally built post-railway, pre-WW2. (Pre-railroad things were generally all walkable, but long distances being done on horses or boats.)
I addressed this point. What you are proposing - replacing roads with rail and trams in a huge train grid of suburbs, costs an insane amount more than a road. You are talking about charging people 10x the property taxes they are paying now. Remember, suburbs do not have the density and hence tax revenue of cities. A highrise has 500 people in it paying for a little chunk of road in front of it. The same length of road in the suburbs is covered by 5 single family homes.
But you say (buses!). Again, I addressed that. A bus, at a bus stop, is not something you are going to be able to do half of the time in suboptimal climates in half the country. Even in the 1/4 of the time with bad climate in the other half of the country, you still need to get around 25% of the time when you can't be waiting at the bus stop in 120 degree heat to get to work. And for that, you'll still need a car. So if you already have a car for that 25% of time, why then can't you just use it all the time?
The walkable plans you reference completely ignores this issue, and pretends the climate is perfect every time you need to go somewhere. You don't need to design things to be walkable, if everyone already has a car for the times it's not "walkable" outside.
Those olden days you dream of weren't as rosy as you think. People would show up to work freezing, wet, uncomfortable, and get sick from being in the freezing wind for a half hour "walking." They were also a lot less mobile, and going between places was a thing, not a multiple times a day part of life.
Respectfully I disagree. Not only is it significantly more expensive, you have a lot less freedom. Freedom isn't the ability to drive to the middle of the desert, it's to get to where you want to go without being beholden to a metal box that's liable to kill you. We had that, and we can have it again. Not having to deal with parking, not having to deal with traffic, gas, etc, is actually great. Not having to worry about whether I can risk a drink and therefore increase the risk of murdering a family is great. It doesn't work for everyone, obviously those living in remote areas, but for most people, transit is straight up better in every way.
We sacrificed our wellbeing when we bought into car culture.