I really wish people would stop claiming that the solution to cars is walking or public transport. I don't have a car either but claiming that people should "stop driving" is not a serious approach.
Cars are extremely useful and are not going anywhere. They have problems like carbon emissions and being extremely dangerous but those will have to be solved while preserving the fundamental utility of a cars: They are individual vehicles that can go nearly anywhere and carry considerable cargo.
I don't think anybody is suggesting that. But if public transport is better, if there are safe paved roads for cyclists, and if city center become safer for pedestrians, then maybe people will buy less cars and drive less miles...
1.) Public transportation in the US is at best, tolerable. Usually far worse. Not just in terms of coverage and utility, but in terms of cleanliness and safety. People use it because they have no other choice that is affordable. Get it to a level of quality like Tokyo or Seoul and more people would use it because they actually like it. I doubt that will happen anytime soon due to cultural issues, unless people are willing to tolerate draconian levels of enforcement.
2.) Bicycles are awesome, but you have to contend with precipitation, sweat, and theft. E-bikes help somewhat with the sweat, but then you have "traditionalists" that are trying to fight tooth and nail to ban them, and they are even more inviting theft targets. And you can still work up quite a sweat on an e-bike. Rain is still a problem.
3.) Living close to city centers is abominably expensive. People can drive in, or take public transportation in. But then go back to #1 in regards to public transportation.
> Public transportation in the US is at best, tolerable.
I think this is very dependent on where you live, in both DC and the Bay I think public transportation is good, but expensive. To me, the problem more appears to be an American cultural aversion to intermingling the working class and the "professional" class of people.
> 2.) Bicycles are awesome, but you have to contend with precipitation, sweat, and theft.
Every mode of transportation has some downsides. You could say 'Cars are awesome, but you have to contend with about ~40k people dying in crashes every year.'
> 3.) Living close to city centers is abominably expensive
Hm, maybe if we could densify cities by removing some of these large paved spaces that people are supposed to stay away from.
Regarding your first point, it's to a degree, subjective. But I would classify Bay Area transit to be pretty bad. Have not been to DC, but I live in NYC, where Newyorkers are often fanatically proud of the subway system. But I think the NYC subways are disgusting and horrible compared to say, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, etc. which while still imperfect, are the shining examples of what good, proper, public transit systems should be like. Various European cities also have far better subways.
Then again, many Newyorkers think the subways in those cities are horrible and unusable just because they don't operate between ~1-5AM.
I agree, but I also think this is part of the problem.
Choosing to use public transportation for longer distances is a significant personal cost, while the benefit of lower costs in externalities is almost invisible.
Conversely, driving a car has a comparatively lower personal cost, essentially negative, since it increase freedom of movement. But the externalities are conveniently hidden by our economic and political systems.
Public transportation is synchronous by necessity. Private transportation is asynchronous. There are tremendous economic benefits to asynchronous transport. The truth is a robust system would have a healthy mix of both.
I absolutely agree, the synchronous/asynchronous description is both absolutely apt and correct.
But the choice for the individual is muddled by the very concept of externalities.
It’s cheaper to pollute our planet, than enduring the inconvenience of public transport.
But the only reason that is true, is the terrible economic systems we all live under.
Cars are extremely useful for traveling long distances, traveling between cities, and for those rare times when you need to haul a lot of stuff, but they are terrible as daily transportation. They are the solution to a made-up problem that they alone exacerbate, which is that our cities are too spread out. There's no particular reason your immediate neighborhood doesn't have a small grocery store and all the other amenities you require for daily living. (That's how we built cities before the automobile, obviously.)
That's a design choice and it's a particularly bad one that's making your life less convenient, your body less healthy, your streets less safe, and your environment more polluted. When everybody drives you get congestion, which forces people to spread out more, which increases the reliance on cars...and so it goes.
Cars are extremely useful and are not going anywhere. They have problems like carbon emissions and being extremely dangerous but those will have to be solved while preserving the fundamental utility of a cars: They are individual vehicles that can go nearly anywhere and carry considerable cargo.