The converse is how helpful cars are. It allows people to have the ability commute from areas they live at to where they work. It brings down the cost of living by expanding the commute availability circle, instead of driving up land values for the desirable areas.
I feel like its often people talking past each other.
I currently live in NYC and am very congestion pricing. Cars are a major negative to most people in the city.
But I have also lived in rural parts of America. Yes, it is annoying you can't walk to a corner store, but cars are not that big of a deal. You can bike or run in the streets without concern that cars will come by. And housing is so cheap it makes it so worth it.
If public transit even remotely resembled anything in China or Japan, Americans would ditch their cars in a heartbeat. But every train ride I've been on to Manhattan is like commuting through an open sewer while being harassed by strangers doing an obnoxious dance with a bluetooth speaker in my face, dodging puddles of urine, and wondering if today's the day I'll be thrown off the platform.
Of course people would rather commute in a gas guzzling SUV. I don't even know how it's controversial. It must be a form of Stockholm syndrome to think that this would be attractive to any normally adjusted human being.
I’ve taken the train a lot in and around NYC, including a ton of subway trips. While the experience you’re describing is certainly not so rare as to be nonexistent, it’s also far from the norm. The large, large majority of subway rides I’ve taken (99% at least) were complete non-events. Perhaps you’re unlucky?
1. A <1% risk of loss, if catastrophic (e.g. thrown off the platform into an oncoming train), is unacceptable to bear, when there exist alternatives.
1b. Of course, people get in car accidents all the time. However, rightly or wrongly, people feel more in control when they're driving compared to when they're using public transit (or similarly, taking a commercial flight), which makes them feel better about it. And there is some element of sense here: accidents do not occur evenly among the population, because some drivers are better and more alert than others.
2. If you're traveling with small children, the various (however rare it may be) unpleasantries of NYC public transit become an order of magnitude more unpleasant.
3. There certainly is an element of Stockholm syndrome among NYC transit users, in that other very large cities around the world with ridership comparable to NYC have very little antisocial dysfunction, but in NYC it often gets waved away as "part and parcel of living in a big city".
Not common. From what I've read, each year, 50-80 people are killed on the tracks (either by hitting trains or touching the third rail), with only a handful being caused by somebody else pushing them onto the tracks.
I didn't bring it up, a commenter above did. I was adding color in response to another commenter saying that unpleasantries experienced (of various levels) in the NYC transit system is an outlier.
You and everyone else of course has their own barometer of what is an acceptable tradeoff. I'm not trying to convince you in particular that NYC transit is a good or bad experience overall; I'm explaining why it is reasonable for someone to come to the latter conclusion.
Anyone claiming more concern about being thrown into an oncoming train than being in a serious car accident is either being disingenuous or deluded. The solution isn't to just excuse it because they feel in control. The solution is to solve their delusions.
That imagery isn't the norm, but there are dozens of annoying behaviors, smells and experiences on the subway that make the daily grind an RPG dice roll in terms of if it's not a new story you'll be telling.
Expanding the commute availability circle does not increase the supply of housing, because people build sparser neighborhoods with larger lawns. If you want to increase the supply of housing, you need higher density, not longer distance.
What longer distance does is make the closer areas more valuable, because people will pay $$$ for a shorter commute. And for those who can't afford the closer housing, they get to pay $$ on a car and gas instead.
Cars are only helpful in exactly two scenarios:
1. You live in a remote rural area where any sort of transit infrastructure is comically infeasible. 99% of the people posting here do not quality for this.
2. You live in a city so maliciously planned out that living without a car is unthinkable and that any other option to get to where you're going is not available.
I use the word "malicious" because the gutting of American cities' transit infrastructure was a deliberate act by American car companies giving their competition the mafia bust-out treatment.
> Expanding the commute availability circle does not increase the supply of housing, because people build sparser neighborhoods with larger lawns.
This is not true. It is true in some circumstances, but definitely not in all. The fact that it’s presented as absolute fact hurts the point you’re trying to make imo.
In my region of the world they enable having any sort of housing at all. Plenty of people don't have the credit score to buy anything livable within city limits, so they resort to buying apartments in the suburbs and small, adjacent cities.
Public transport hasn't caught up because these places developed too fast and even though their inhabitants live and pay taxes there, the businesses they work for don't, so the tax base is all the lower due to that.
Your point is valid, but the lack of affordable housing in your city is most likely due to the lifestyles that cars allow us to live. Single family homes and parking lots as far as the eye can see.
Nope. More like commie blocks as far as the eye can see, as it's in eastern EU.
I moved out BTW, because I figured that being able to afford at most a 1-bedroom, 55m2 apartment as a software engineer is a deal I'm not willing to take.
Real estate has been going up in price all over the world in the past decade and it doesn't matter if it's apartment blocks or detached homes.
My new place is a city 40% the size and far from there, but my friends by and large drove until they qualified. Typically less than 30km, but that's already a 1h commute by car.
Please, this is the absolute least intelligent response to anything I've read today. You do nothing to further the conversation in anything resembling an informative way.
It was not just Google. All of the search engines have an initial period of being good then when they get to a state of market domination or market penetration, the SEO and large companies with money show up. The SEO people game the system, while the people in companies with money, simply pay to be at the top of the chart or surreptitiously give money to be at the top of the chart. The surgeons are fine when they start getting market traction that the issue starts to pop up.
The internet died in 2016, when Google announced they would do more to influence elections.
After that, the powers that are in charge have engaged in social manipulation to try and steer the internet to provide only the ”approved” concepts.
Gemini’s results on blacks proliferating in the confederate army is an example of how far it has gone.
Wikipedia is not trustworthy on articles on notable people (watch when an election kicks off and how manipulated they are) and Google tries to openly manipulate search results because of the SEO decisions made years ago.
Our only hope is Web3 and an ability to host stuff on there.
If you are saying a better state would allow them on social media, something that has been shown to be detrimental to children under eighteen, how can it be a better state?
Google had a long running joke on their website where if you searched for idiot in the White House under the Bush 2 regime, the first response was Bush. People thought it was funny, others complained and nothing was done.
When the Obama regime came in, it was fixed within days.
That was the start of the google not being apolitical internally. Since then, it has been going downhill because they constantly break their algorithm for whatever they are into this week.
If you ever been poor, you don’t understand the stress that money puts on a relationship. And that’s just to start with. Poverty also increases stress which increases a likeliness to use drugs to combat the stress. Also, as other people pointed out, it’s most times more economic feasible for people in poverty not to get married because they would be penalized by getting married.
Poverty causes stress and stress causes aberrant behavior.
I might qualify this to say that poverty without spirituality causes fatherlessness.
Because most people who seem wealthy have a lot of money issues as well. And divorce is not only caused by poverty. For example, Christianity looks down on divorce and there are fewer Christians in the US.
But this proves the lead point that fatherlessness does not cause crime, poverty does.
Could not be a better example of how it leaned one way.