Extreme Eyeroll

"average user" (avgusr) 03/22/2019 at 20:02 • Filed to: rant, editorial

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Sometimes, I just want to eyeroll. But first something pretty for your trouble:

This piece smacks of privilege and limited thinking. Of course you don’t need a car. Almost no one in NYC needs a car. You can OWN a car, but ownership is deliberately expensive to encourage public transport usage. Buses, trains and subways are everywhere, not to mention the thousands of taxis and black cars. Of course you have access to ride sharing.

And of course electric cars and other “green” solutions makes sense in the city. Most of the time you are crawling along the street instead of going highway speeds. Most of the time your point A to point B is less than the average American commute. Of course chargers are everywhere. Of course the city is walk-able. If you want to be even more “green”, scooters and bikes are there, for free.

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Meanwhile, most of us do not live in dense, public transport-rich city. Some of us live dozens of miles away from where we work, shop, or entertain, where bus trip would take hours, train stations nowhere near where we want to go, and taxi are poorly regulated and expensive. Even if Uber and Lyft are options, they cost much more if you live anywhere in the suburbs away from downtown.

Then there is the economics. The poor can’t use ride share all the time, because it is cost-prohibitive, and with the current trend of rising prices in downtown areas, more and more of the urban poor are priced out of places with short commutes and relocating to suburbs or exurbs in metropolitan areas, effectively reversing the “white flight” that took place decades ago. There is virtually no political will among state and municipal governments to push for more public transport, which would need a rise in taxes and opponents can paint them as “socialist” or worse. In the face of insufficient public transport options, owning a car is a necessity, even if the car is older and less fuel efficient.

And then there is the fact that the US of A is HUGE. Outside of the Northeast corridor, communities are pretty damn far apart from each other. Compared to Europe, where people are much more densely packed and distances are short, similar transport infrastructure would take a magnitude more money to upgrade or develop, not to mention years.

Let’s take my area for example. I live in Southeast Florida, a large metro area that stretches from Palm Beach to Miami. We recently got a semi-highspeed train service between three major points, but otherwise the remaining options are taxis that specialize in gouging customers, ride shares that charges insane surge charges when customers need them the most, or buses that runs a limited map that would take hours to go from point A to B. The existing commuter rail and above ground subway (in Miami) are extremely limited. A streetcar project in Fort Lauderdale was cancelled due to costs. Electric scooter are blamed for increased accidents and fatalities, and might soon be cancelled. Bike lanes are non-existent on most major roads, even if you are willing and able to bike miles and miles to your destination. Charging infrastructures for electric cars are here, but not enough that we can all switch to electric. The entire area was designed and planned with the assumption that cars would be a fixture, and without them the entire metro area would stop functioning.

Then there is a culture thing. Car ownership is so ingrained in American culture, so central to the identity of being an American outside the city, that it would take ages to get to the point where we would be comfortable with using individual cars as shared property with anyone who is not family (hell, i had a hard time letting my husband use my Audi). The idea of a car is not just transport, it is also a personal cocoon of privacy. You can sing and no one would tell you to shut up, you can fart without offending anyone but yourself. Unless and until fully autonomous cars shows up and take you anywhere you wish, privately, the idea of ride sharing as a salve to not having a car is silly.

So yeah, the idea that owning a car is as quaint as owning a horse? Not happening.

Spanfeller is a twat > average user 03/22/2019 at 20:05

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“electric cars and other “green” solutions makes sense in the city.”

This is dead wrong. Private transportation in any sort of urban area doesn’t make sense. I know I’m being a bit of a hypocrate here because I use my car every day. But it’s not because I want to.

In Mexico there’s two mayor trends amongst architects and urban planners: Sprawl and verticalization. Neither realize the inherit issues of this system.

Which is why I live in a city with some very dense downtown areas with great access to public transportation (like Benito Juarez), and some areas virtually filled with houses after houses (Like Pedregal) that don’t have access to good transport.

Plus there’s other issues, like the fact that half of petty crime occurs in public transport, or that the government leased out many transportation routes to Microbuses and out-of-state companies that aren’t really regulated. Another problem is that around 50,000 students like me need to commute every day into areas like Santa Fe, which doesn’t have mass transit access. Just highways. Yes, there’s some busses, but again, half of petty crime occurs in busses.

We grew up with an American ideal of city planning, that’s why relatively new areas like Ciudad Satelite look like a suburb, and the reason why we have a twelve lane arterial road around the (old) perimeter of the city.

But then shit started to change and we got a Metro which was, for many years, probably the best system in the world. Granted, we didn’t have the many problems American urban planners have nowadays (Like actual laws, and respect for property).

Americans need to have a cultural shift around cars because it is becoming more evident with every passing day that cars aren’t the best way of moving about; specially as jobs move to city centers.

Perhaps popularizing park and rides around the suburbs or, like Monterrey did, prohibit the use of cars for a myriad of factory workers (their employers need to provide transporation)

Honeybunchesofgoats > average user 03/22/2019 at 20:10

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Some thoughts:

Growing up in New Jersey: public transportation and no  car: LOL

When I lived in Manhattan, I made okay money. I still felt like a goddamn KING when I hailed a cab to take me across the park.

Scooters are an insight to the hellscape that Silicon Valley libertarianism inevitably leads to, and a market crash can’t come soon enough.

Electric cars are made for cities, but require infrastructure cities cannot provide.

average user > Spanfeller is a twat 03/22/2019 at 20:10

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Please explain.

Spanfeller is a twat > average user 03/22/2019 at 20:15

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I edited, I pressed enter by accident.

Honeybunchesofgoats > Spanfeller is a twat 03/22/2019 at 20:23

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I hate to say it, but I think that congestion charges are increasingly the way forward. I’m really opposed to systems where rich people can pay extra to have an advantage, but there’s really no reason for most people to drive into a city center.

That said, toll express lanes can eat shit and die. There’s no reason to reduce the number of lanes on the highway so some asshole with more money than sense can pay an extra $20 to not have cars around. 

wafflesnfalafel > average user 03/22/2019 at 20:24

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totally agree, we clearly should all drive pickups  instead - forget cars, they are so quaint.

Spanfeller is a twat > average user 03/22/2019 at 20:27

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To actually explain it (I went on a tangent on the edit)

When you have a densely populated area, sure, electric cars are less bad than ICE cars, but that’s only from an emission’s standpoint.

A car uses more space per passenger than a bus, it’s statistically less safe, and even a Tesla would pollute more than a bus filled to 70% capacity. Let alone metro rail and BRTs which pollute even less.

Traffic increases exponentially after road capacity is exceeded, which means that even if adding a Tesla to a traffic jam doesn’t increase it’s pollution, the fact it’s there increases the pollution from other cars as ICE cars are hilariously inneficient in bumper-to-bumper jams.

If a city relies on buses, cars also make their journeys slower, which means users might want to switch to a car anyway.

Then there’s other issues, like parking requirements, or the need for a traffic police, and gas stations, so on, and so forth.

I’m not saying people need to get rid of their cars, I’m just saying we should think of cars as a luxury rather than a necesity. Madrid has one of the highest car ownership rates in Spain, but no one I’ve ever met there commutes to their job. They use their cars for trips (redundant due to RENFE tho), maybe to go shopping, nights out, and maybe groceries.

But they use them two or three times a week, rather than five.

Spanfeller is a twat > Honeybunchesofgoats 03/22/2019 at 20:31

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I begged the candidates at the townhall my school hosted last year that they implemented congestion charges because I swear most car trips are redundant here. But I live in a city where half of the people own a car, and a third move by car every day. They form an increadibly powerful political coalition which my mayor is rather tied to.

Honeybunchesofgoats > Spanfeller is a twat 03/22/2019 at 20:34

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I can totally understand that. For the longest time, New Jersey had amongst the lowest gasoline tax in the country, because that was a political no-go in a commuter state. 

Spanfeller is a twat > Honeybunchesofgoats 03/22/2019 at 20:44

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It’s so annoying because it seems like we’re going the other way around. Eleven avenues got their speed limits raised more than 50%, many roads which were made narrower are being made wider again, and bikes are being increasingly more regulated than cars. The mayor actually got rid of speed cameras...

I live in a city where you don’t need to take a fucking test in order to get a driver’s license... that’s how bad it is. Even Estado de Mexico (which would be our New Jersey in this analogy) has tougher standards.

There's more and more pressure building up on Andres Lajous and Sheinbaum (Transport secretary and Mayor) to change this. It's so bad that a significant portion of the people want Lajous to resign.

facw > average user 03/22/2019 at 21:06

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I think car ownership is likely going to be quite quaint, but not because we’re suddenly going to have good enough public transport. What we will have are ubiquitous robot taxis, and using them will be vastly cheaper than owning a car that is only utilized for a small portion of the day.

Granted, that still won’t work everywhere, some places won’t be dense enough to support such a system, but by virtue of not being dense, only a very small percentage of the population will live in those areas.

atfsgeoff > average user 03/22/2019 at 21:22

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A car is a perfect representation of individual prosperity. People won’t give them up easily.

average user > Honeybunchesofgoats 03/23/2019 at 00:53

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Congestion charges would disproportionately affect the poor. Tradesmen, commercial drivers, taxi drivers and Uber/Lyft drivers would be saddled with the cost while the rich would not feel the impact.

average user > Spanfeller is a twat 03/23/2019 at 00:56

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While that is completely valid, it would require a change of cultural perspective.

People think of cars more than just an instrument from A to B, at least here in the US. They think of it as their property, their rolling castle, where they have a capsule of privacy around them to do what they want. That’s a very hard change from a bus where individuals have no privacy or expectation of such.

Electric cars, especially compact electric ones, can at least alleviate the pollution problem. It won’t solve congestion, but its a step in that direction.

average user > facw 03/23/2019 at 00:57

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I think thats a too optimistic of a solution (it will be at least a decade away, and we cannot tell the future). However, i think once the critical mass of electric vs ICE cars are reached, we are a couple model-generations away from making ICE cars a sporting/collectable item.

Spanfeller is a twat > average user 03/23/2019 at 01:08

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Well, yeah. But it has to happen. I understand if you feel insulted by the NYT article (I haven’t even opened it but I know it must’ve been written by some blogger in Manhattan making a triple digit salary yet can’t afford to have a car where they live) since it doesn’t reflect what most americans live.

But, as America becomes more urbanized, these changes will have to start happening. Plus, there’s a lot of benefits. Downsizing a highway to add sidewalk or trees in Los Angeles and turning some multistorey parking lots into affordable housing could really improve the lives of millions and it would take less than a decade to do. Getting rid of the mentality has to happen if Americans want to live in cities rather than the countryside, if statistics are to be belived, then it is the case.

functionoverfashion > average user 06/03/2019 at 09:55

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I just stumbled on this, but it hits a nerve in a way. Where I am, it’s not that the public transportation options are impractical or slow. They’re nonexistent. We barely have a taxi service and don’t have any ride sharing apps. There simply is no other way to get anywhere;  everyone has a car and needs it almost every day, simply to function. This isn’t going to change in a generation, at least in rural areas like this.