For me I say that a truck with a cab longer than its bed is not a truck, but an SUV with an overgrown bumper.
For the United States, I agree mass Transit should be a much more prominent thing than it is, but suburbs and mass transit is difficult to deal with. 50% of the U.S. lives in suburbs, 20% of the U.S. lives in rural areas.
I couldn’t live where I live without a car, and we literally have no mass transit. My nearest tiny grocery store is 3 miles away. I’m not putting a family of 4 on bicycles to make a run to the store to buy groceries, loading it on a bicycle, then hauling it home.
Part of the issue of mass transit, cities, and cars, is if I’m in a suburb 5 miles from a proper urban area with access to amenities, and I have no mass transit to get there, I have to take my car. And if I have my car when I get to the city, why would I park it to then take mass transit?
Mass transit actually has to become a realistic option for the 30% that live in a city before we even start to talk about mass transit for the other 70% of the U.S.
And realistically, those cities need major redesigns to support a mass transit-style system. The fight for public transportation starts with zoning and districting. Get mixed-use neighborhoods up and rolling, some medium-density housing developments with townhouses, duplexes, and triplexes. The fight for a bike system (Why do we need bike lines along car road? Screw bike lanes, I want bike networks.) and buses come shortly thereafter.
Yes, obviously with how things are currently it’s not always practical to live without a car, but I don’t think it means we should be defeatist about it and assume that that’s the way things have to be. Yes, change will have to be gradual, but I think it’s reasonable to look into changing zoning laws so suburbs don’t have to be barren wastelands without any nearby shops. Yes, biking to get groceries is a little less convenient, but realistically many people and families can manage this just fine (especially with a bike trailer), and a 3 mile bike ride is like… 10 or 15 minutes?
Obviously things need to improve for these to be more reliable options for more people, and there will be inconveniences along the way, but I kind of think it’s worth thinking about shifting things in this direction, instead of cementing things the way they are? Like, walkable neighbourhoods are great, and having good public transit and biking infrastructure makes a city more accessible and gives people more freedoms and makes it so not having a driver’s license or car (e.g., due to disability or finances) isn’t a death sentence… And it’s probably better for the environment and people’s happiness and safety too. I’m really just kind of tired by how much money and effort is spent on catering to cars, which in my opinion makes our public spaces so much worse.
And if I have my car when I get to the city, why would I park it to then take mass transit?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have to do this? From an individual perspective it’s obviously better to just be able to drive everywhere and park near your destination, I can totally empathize with you there… But there’s plenty of situations where you end up with sub-optimal solutions when everybody tries to follow their own self-interests. When everybody drives into the city all of the time that’s more carbon, more vehicles, more pollution, more noise, you need more infrastructure, more maintenance, and more parking… Things have to get further and further apart to support all of this infrastructure, and there’s more traffic and congestion which makes everything less efficient.
I mean, to be clear, I’m not saying this always makes sense… And I don’t want to see you suddenly have a 3 hour commute either. I want you to have good options for getting into the city… But I also don’t want you to be trapped in the suburb unable to come to work if you lose the ability to drive all of a sudden either, and I don’t want you to have to deal with finding parking or sitting in traffic either.
I get that these are unpopular opinions — people like their cars and they’re convenient for many things, and the thought of transitioning away from needing them as much seems scary because cars are basically people’s life blood at the moment… But I kind of feel like cars are killing us (often literally) with how expensive they are, how they limit access for people, how they shape our cities and make communities more isolated, and how they damage the environment.
Don’t mistake me, I would much prefer to just hop on public transit and get to where I want without having to drive. Whenever I travel I take great pleasure in being able to use public transit that actually just “works” and not having to rent a car or drive my own car around
That being said, I think bicycles and “walkable” cities are the stupidest pursuit people who want to change the system pursue. It’s easy to make a bike lane to point to and go “see! progress!” when no one will end up using the bike lane with any real consistency because the city is still laid out like garbage and getting from one end of even a small city to the other by bicycle lane is frustrating at best and dangerous/suicidal at worst.
I don’t think bicycles and walkable cities are a stupid pursuit at all, but I do agree that often times bicycie infrastructure isn’t given the care or respect it deserves! That said, I think sometimes these changes are incremental progress that can get better over time… Sometimes you end up with bike lanes that aren’t great to get to for instance, but they’ll eventually make more sense when the network expands (and each additional bike lane makes this exponentially better). Plus, I get the sense that drivers often don’t have a good sense of how much other transit infrastructure is used and relied upon by other people. I’ve often heard complaints about having to wait for trains at lights, for instance, and it’s a bit silly because the trains have hundreds of people on them, so they really should take priority, even if the traffic waiting at the light looks bigger because it’s so much less space efficient. I suspect in a similar way the usage of bike lanes is often underestimated because they’re quite efficient at getting people through in a small amount of space with little congestion. Bike lanes support some pretty serious throughput, so even if they get some pretty heavy use they might seem empty and unused… You just never really have a traffic jam or anything on them because they’re so effective at moving people through.
