It's interesting how people's positions can be so different. As a European who has lived in two (european) countries with good and affordable transport, I've always been a happy public transport user... until a couple of years ago, that is. Much of the transport is now filled with unpleasant people, dirt, delays, etc which paired with the insane prices of housing in the "walkable" parts of cities, has made me 100% invested in the myth of motorized freedom.
nradov · 45m ago
European countries only have good and affordable transport in the first and second tier cities. I usually spend a few weeks per year in Europe, often in smaller cities or rural areas, and the only public transport you'll find is some occasional bus service at inconvenient times. In those places everyone drives everywhere. Or they just sit around and home and don't go anywhere.
mojuba · 31m ago
And then there are third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable and you again don't need a car.
My ideal city of the future is a small walkable town with everything within a 15-20 minute walk, possibly a part of a conglomerate of towns that run trains or buses between them.
I currently live in one such historical town in Southern Europe that's protected by Unesco. The streets are so narrow that not only there's no public transport, all non-resident and non-delivery traffic is prohibited and there's no Uber even. And yet you have everything you need for life and work within a 15-20 minute walk max. More for remote work, obviously.
An ideal city of the future doesn't need to be medieval but maybe we should go back to a city planning concept that is made for humans and not cars. And you know, narrow pedestrian streets are totally fine, they are cute!
AllegedAlec · 24m ago
> And then there are third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable and you again don't need a car.
Ah yeah sure I'll just find work in a place and then buy a house there. It's not like 3+ decades of mismanagement on migration and internal policies left even places 30+ minutes by car from work unafforable by mere mortals.
nradov · 4m ago
You only have everything you need for work in such a city if your "work" is limited to small offices, restaurants, and retail shops. So you're excluding everything related to manufacturing, agriculture, resource extraction, logistics, military, etc. You know, all of that stuff that keeps modern industrial civilization operating and allows quaint medieval towns to continue existing at all. If you like where you live that's great, but it's hardly ideal and certainly not scalable.
grues-dinner · 10m ago
> third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable
Very many people, including me, want to live in a glorious walkable bijou old-town stone apartment, except they can't afford to because they stopped building them like that in about 1756 and the only jobs within walking distance of the old town are in hospitality and those do not pay the salaries to buy one of the treasured old town apartments from under an AirBnB host.
ang_cire · 19m ago
It's interesting to me seeing the different ways that different people respond to our modern urban hellholes. I don't want to live in a city at all, I want to live in at most a village where people all have their own land, and the village 'center' is just the most convenient nexus of property lines, where people could set up the local market.
I always sort of assume people who are into de-urbanization are also de-dev, because I don't see how or why the large-scale industrial base would be needed or could be sustained with only smaller, distributed cities, but it's interesting to hear another perspective.
outime · 43m ago
Yeah, I agree. I've just happened to live in two capitals, so I've had access to top-tier public transport. But even in the capitals, a simple 10-minute drive can turn into a 50-minute journey on public transport (this is a literal common example of mine, not an exaggeration!). So even then, you have to consider how much your time is worth.
antonymoose · 3m ago
I lived in a lower-tier American city (Charleston, SC) for 15 years, and this was my experience with public transportation. I had commute options of a 7 mile drive @ 30 minutes due to congestion, a 7 mile bike ride @ 35 minutes no congestion thanks to bike lanes, or approximately 2 hours bus ride on an unreliable system with no good drop off points and no guarantees in a timely arrival or space for a bicycle to complete the 2 mile walk to my office. These numbers are also one way, not round trip.
In other words, I could not use the service in any honest sense.
Perhaps a nice future is a hybrid model of public transportation plus personal transport via bicycles and scooters, especially with battery powered options becoming so robust.
mattlondon · 32m ago
Even in large cities like London there are huge areas where public transport is a joke. Yes it's fine in the very tourist center, but get out further from the center where normal people with families actually live and what is a 5-8 minute drive to a large grocery store becomes a mammoth 50-60 minute journey each way. I personally don't want to spend 15% of my waking day going to and from the shops and paying huge prices for public transport (and also struggle back carrying heavy bags) when I can pay pennies in electricity to drive there and back in a small fraction of the time. I can leave, do my shop, drive back (with heavy bags being carried by the car not my fingers!) and unpack and be sat down again and half way through a TV episode before I'd even have got there by public transport. And this is London where we have "good" public transport.
dfxm12 · 4m ago
Look one layer deeper and likely the issues are classist. Of course you didn't mention where you were, but, in the places I've lived, it goes down like this: the people who are wealthy enough to not need to use use public transit have more sway in terms of voting/persuading politicians, and push for policies that directly benefit them, even if it's to the detriment of the city overall.
Thus: more resources go towards those places with insane house prices, leaving everyone and everything else behind. The problem isn't public transit, it's the wealthy.
dietr1ch · 46m ago
My motorized freedom dreams got stuck in increasingly worse traffic. Nowadays I dream of a "bikeable" commute and grocery shopping and whatever works best between public transport and driving on the weekends.
nradov · 11m ago
My area is fairly "bikeable" but I seldom ride my bike for errands because I can't be sure that it will still be there when I get out of the store. The local authorities do almost nothing to prevent bike theft.
Sure, cars can also be stolen. But modern cars are now fairly theft resistant and police at least take it seriously as a crime.
nialv7 · 4m ago
I don't get it. If you've been enjoying public transportation for so long, then why is your reaction to it getting worse not: OK, we need to fix it so it's as good as it was.
Instead you are just saying: OK, I have the resources to fix the problem for myself, so I don't give a F.
wouldbecouldbe · 51m ago
I have the same experience, but I wonder if I just got older and more spoiled or if non-car traffic really got worse
AllegedAlec · 20m ago
It has gotten significantly worse to the point where I stopped taking it. Prices on public transport are now also so high I'm better off taking the car on most trips.
Also it it me or are "just have walkable/bikeable cities people" more obnoxious than vegan speed cyclists
mattigames · 54m ago
And who do you think is most interested in such decay of public transportation?
outime · 50m ago
I'd say the decline is happening (in my experience) in most public services, not just transport.
But anyway, I'm purposely staying away from discussing politics here since it's pointless, so I'll just share my experience as a public transport end-user, and the rest can fill in the gaps with their perspectives.
ang_cire · 47m ago
No one is "interested" in making public transit worse, the issue is that people in power are not users of it and so are not invested in it, and civic and national pride is generally dead in the West, being replaced with vapid nationalism, so there's no drive (no pun intended) to invest in public works projects.
feurio · 14m ago
The London Mayor some years ago, Ken Livingstone, was a huge proponent of public trasport and used it extensively.
The current Mayor, whilst still a proponent, likely does not use it. A quick glance at the social media that he recieves will tell you why - it would not be safe. He needs to travel with close protection officers.
The reason? He is Muslim, and Britain has become a very racist country indeed. Well, maybe always was, but the likes of Farage and Musk have so emboldened them that there is no longer a stigma.
blargthorwars · 10m ago
Nobody is worrying about the native English. If they were, they wouldn't have immigrated there.
dkiebd · 44m ago
The way I understand your comment, it implies that a) users of public transportation should be invested in it, whilst it’s more likely that they use it because they have no alternative, and that b) civic and national pride results in higher demand for public transportation. I don’t think those are universal truths.
ang_cire · 31m ago
You don't think that people who use services care more about the service than non-users? Whether they're forced into using it or not, the fact they do absolutely makes them more invested in it being good.
Civic and national pride makes citizens (which includes politicians and the wealthy) more likely to care about the actual state of their country. That's what national pride means, as opposed to nationalism, where they are proud without reason. Is public transit guaranteed to be one of those reasons they feel pride or shame? Not at all, but support for it is certainly more likely to come from that than a bunch of nationalists who don't actually feel any shame at failings of the country, of which public transit is currently.
bluGill · 19m ago
When users of transit are few there is not enough people to care. often the only users are those least likely to be usefuly involved. so you can't get a useful advocate. Even when transit gets support it is from people wanting to feel good about helping the poor - but would never use it themselves and so they want something with no care for quality. They often make alliences with those whose intersts are not for good transit and don't care that the compromise is bad for transit.
m-schuetz · 27m ago
I've lost a lot of enthusiasm about close-range public transport. In Vienna, bicycles get you nearly every twice as fast as public transport, and mostly about as fast as cars, depending on your destination. Bikes are about four times cheaper as public transport too.
Public transport ist great to connect cities, and perhaps districts. Beyound that, it quickly hits diminishing returns. It's prohibitly expensive to connect at a city block level, and even more expensive to connect rural towns. And Austria recently started doing very odd things. We are now building train stations in the middle of nowhere, not connected to any town. They are not meant to become new city centers, they are meant to be accessed via cars. They are useless for car-free people, and people with cars almost exclusively continue to commute the entire way by car.
In any case, the Netherlands is where I really got a sense of true mobility-freedom. You can get absolutely everywhere cheaply, safely and comfortably by bicycle. I've never before experienced such relaxing commutes as cycling along rivers and through meadows to work, then taking a detour through woods and parks on the way back home.
whyenot · 2m ago
I think bicycles work very well in a dense and flat city where people respect traffic laws. I am highly skeptical that they are the answer everywhere. Take for example San Francisco with all of its steep hills, or Rio where you have both hills and low adherence to traffic laws. How about Mexico City with its at time horrendous air pollution. In the United States, where many cities didn't really mature until after the automobile, you have low density to deal with, for example in Houston or San Jose. How about for someone who is older? Bicycles may be great if you are in your 30s, but what about for someone in their 70s?
Bicycling is a great solution for some people in some cities, but it's not going to work as well everywhere or for everyone. Public transit, cars, walking, etc. will all have to continue being part of the mix.
TrackerFF · 45m ago
(I live in Norway)
When I lived in a major city, I went 10 years without owning a car. Should I for whatever reason need a car, I could rent one. But other than that, public transportation, walking, and biking for me. Hell, I often preferred public transportation over a car.
But as soon as I moved back home, a rural area, a car has more or less become a life necessity. I simply can't imagine living out in rural nowhere without a car, it would be such a hassle. Where I live a bus goes 3 times a day to the neighboring towns, that's it.
It really depends on where you live, and what your logistical situation looks like.
mitthrowaway2 · 3m ago
If the only road that goes past your house is a bicycle path, a bicycle will be the most convenient. If the only road that goes past your house is a railroad, then a train will be the most convenient. If the only road that goes past your house is a motorway, then a car will be the most convenient.
But the transport infrastructure isn't an immutable property of the land, it's collectively-planned-and-built infrastructure. So the most convenient mode of transportation will settle into an equilibrium as the initial investment begets convenience, begetting more people choosing that method, begetting more investment and planning of towns and cities to accommodate that transportation method.
jweir · 16m ago
I spent 17 years without a car - first Berkeley then Brooklyn. It was a huge boost in financial freedom and stability - nothing worse than a major repair on something you depend on.
But most of the US this is impossible by design. Where I grew up you might live right next to a grocery store- but it is a mile walk because of the wall and road design. Nuts.
jader201 · 34m ago
> In the early 2000s, sitting for a driver’s license was seen as a near-universal rite of passage. By 2020, Generation Z teens were significantly less likely to get their licenses and later, when they do, it's driven by necessity rather than aspiration.
I feel like this is a naive take, and making some assumptions that may not be true.
I feel like this has less to do with preferring other modes of transportation over driving, as much as it has to do with not wanting/needing to go anywhere, particularly outside of the city. You can do most things without even needing to leave home, especially when you’re young.
You don’t need to meet in person with your friends to socialize. You can text, use social media, play only games, etc.
My young adult children both have licenses, but they have found it hard to get their friends to want to hang out. They’d rather stay home and stay on their devices.
p_ing · 38m ago
I’m curious to see how the author would react when it is two miles one-way to the crappy grocery store and eight miles to the good one.
And there is a bus shows up about once every four hours.
While cities can do a lot to improve the non-car experience, there’s a whole world outside those cities which would become inaccessible without a car. These are generally the “affordable” places to live in order to work in the city.
Focus on improving where you live, I do, but when you live in a city, recognize that improvements need to take into account those who don’t live there. The city is where they work, go to school, shop, and often interact with government functions.
Getting rid of dumb laws I can totally get behind as someone who walks daily.
adrianN · 33m ago
Car dominance is cemented by decades of car centric planning which made cars indispensable in some areas. That is a well known fact, but planning can be changed. If you prioritize other forms of transport in a few decades cars can be a lot less important.
p_ing · 25m ago
The place I live in was founded in the 1880s and incorporated a few years before the Model T debuted. Prior to the 1880s, Native Americans resided here.
How is that car centric planning?
And exactly how can one afford to live in a city where rent is $2500+ for a two bedroom or $1m+ for a SFH? That’s not going to happen on a McSalary. Those folks instead commute 1+ hours from affordable urban or more likely rural areas.
adrianN · 7m ago
I’m pretty sure that in the 1880s it was less than eight miles to the nearest shop and people didn’t need to commute dozens of miles per day to get to work.
1over137 · 19m ago
Being founded in 1880s doesn’t mean that all the planning since hasn’t been all auto-centric.
p_ing · 14m ago
Except the dirt roads then were as wide as the paved roads are now with the same grid-style layout.
Feel free to keep arguing how things radically changed just for cars. But they didn't.
poisonborz · 36m ago
You only need to move a bit towards suburbia/countryside to create your deep disbelief in public transport. Cars are everywhere, for a reason.
Public transport is great in theory only. With actual human societies - maybe the western ones, that is, except China/Japan - it just doesn't work. Corruption, laziness, bureaucracy, lack of proper planning and security makes the creation and maintenance of these projects unsustainable and so much worse compared to personal transport. This only isn't true for million+ metropolises due to physical constrains.
You may frown at the traffic jams with SUVs having a single driver, but building additional highways is easily doable around the world, while any sort of mass transit infrastructure projects seem to take decades, billions, while still end up underwhelming - if not instantly, then after the machinery ages or maintainers change.
neuroelectron · 32m ago
Right, the personal drone is much faster.
dfxm12 · 11m ago
In addition to what we see in the article, we've started to see the enshittification with monthly subscriptions to unlock more power or heated seats. The more this happens, the less likely I am to buy a car. A car is not freedom. It's a requirement, a loan, a monthly payment, and increasingly, a subscription fee.
azlev · 39m ago
I still think the future is working from home.
poszlem · 9m ago
Your argument makes sense if you’re talking about dense urban centers, but it doesn’t reflect the reality of millions of people who live outside of them. If you had to walk 4 miles to school every day, you would understand why a car means freedom. If the closest grocery store was 15 miles away, you would understand why a car means freedom. If you ever had to drive through a snowstorm just to get to work, you would understand why a car means freedom. If you had to take your sick child or elderly parent to the hospital in the middle of the night, you would understand why a car means freedom. If you had to balance two jobs in towns unreachable by public transit, you would understand why a car means freedom.
For millions of people, a car isn’t a trap or a luxur. It’s survival, opportunity, and dignity. Cities may be able to rethink their dependence on cars, but for everyone else, the car is still the bridge to basic participation in life.
tengbretson · 53m ago
> In the early 20th century, streets were shared spaces: places where people walked, gathered, played.
That's an interesting way to look at compressed horse shit with streams of human waste running over the top of it.
Bear in mind the invention of sidewalks predates the automobile by thousands of years.
poszlem · 4m ago
Yeah, no offense to the author, but this feels like a textbook case of the 'noble savage' meme, just applied to the more primitive versions of western countries and it makes the whole piece sound really naive.
throwaway22032 · 50m ago
"That's just like, your opinion, man."
The car is clearly not the best way to navigate a dense city. It is impractical to have, say, tower block apartments and also have a car for each resident. It is unreasonable to build enough parking for peak time around every destination that anyone might want to go to.
On the flip side - not everyone wants to live in a dense city, and people's opinions on this change throughout their lives. It was profit maximising and also a lot of fun for me to live in the inner city in my early to mid 20's. Now that I can afford to not maximally push my career I prefer the outer parts of the city / more rural areas, and that's where the car shines.
tonyedgecombe · 30m ago
> On the flip side - not everyone wants to live in a dense city, and people's opinions on this change throughout their lives.
If you look at the cost of living in an urban area it’s clear there is a lot of demand. Rural is cheaper because most people don’t want a long commute.
bluGill · 16m ago
Urban living isn't even possiple without a high cost of living. Building a single story builing is massively cheaper than going up - unless land costs are extreemely high.
My ideal city of the future is a small walkable town with everything within a 15-20 minute walk, possibly a part of a conglomerate of towns that run trains or buses between them.
I currently live in one such historical town in Southern Europe that's protected by Unesco. The streets are so narrow that not only there's no public transport, all non-resident and non-delivery traffic is prohibited and there's no Uber even. And yet you have everything you need for life and work within a 15-20 minute walk max. More for remote work, obviously.
An ideal city of the future doesn't need to be medieval but maybe we should go back to a city planning concept that is made for humans and not cars. And you know, narrow pedestrian streets are totally fine, they are cute!
Ah yeah sure I'll just find work in a place and then buy a house there. It's not like 3+ decades of mismanagement on migration and internal policies left even places 30+ minutes by car from work unafforable by mere mortals.
Very many people, including me, want to live in a glorious walkable bijou old-town stone apartment, except they can't afford to because they stopped building them like that in about 1756 and the only jobs within walking distance of the old town are in hospitality and those do not pay the salaries to buy one of the treasured old town apartments from under an AirBnB host.
I always sort of assume people who are into de-urbanization are also de-dev, because I don't see how or why the large-scale industrial base would be needed or could be sustained with only smaller, distributed cities, but it's interesting to hear another perspective.
In other words, I could not use the service in any honest sense.
Perhaps a nice future is a hybrid model of public transportation plus personal transport via bicycles and scooters, especially with battery powered options becoming so robust.
Thus: more resources go towards those places with insane house prices, leaving everyone and everything else behind. The problem isn't public transit, it's the wealthy.
Sure, cars can also be stolen. But modern cars are now fairly theft resistant and police at least take it seriously as a crime.
Instead you are just saying: OK, I have the resources to fix the problem for myself, so I don't give a F.
Also it it me or are "just have walkable/bikeable cities people" more obnoxious than vegan speed cyclists
But anyway, I'm purposely staying away from discussing politics here since it's pointless, so I'll just share my experience as a public transport end-user, and the rest can fill in the gaps with their perspectives.
The current Mayor, whilst still a proponent, likely does not use it. A quick glance at the social media that he recieves will tell you why - it would not be safe. He needs to travel with close protection officers.
The reason? He is Muslim, and Britain has become a very racist country indeed. Well, maybe always was, but the likes of Farage and Musk have so emboldened them that there is no longer a stigma.
Civic and national pride makes citizens (which includes politicians and the wealthy) more likely to care about the actual state of their country. That's what national pride means, as opposed to nationalism, where they are proud without reason. Is public transit guaranteed to be one of those reasons they feel pride or shame? Not at all, but support for it is certainly more likely to come from that than a bunch of nationalists who don't actually feel any shame at failings of the country, of which public transit is currently.
Public transport ist great to connect cities, and perhaps districts. Beyound that, it quickly hits diminishing returns. It's prohibitly expensive to connect at a city block level, and even more expensive to connect rural towns. And Austria recently started doing very odd things. We are now building train stations in the middle of nowhere, not connected to any town. They are not meant to become new city centers, they are meant to be accessed via cars. They are useless for car-free people, and people with cars almost exclusively continue to commute the entire way by car.
In any case, the Netherlands is where I really got a sense of true mobility-freedom. You can get absolutely everywhere cheaply, safely and comfortably by bicycle. I've never before experienced such relaxing commutes as cycling along rivers and through meadows to work, then taking a detour through woods and parks on the way back home.
Bicycling is a great solution for some people in some cities, but it's not going to work as well everywhere or for everyone. Public transit, cars, walking, etc. will all have to continue being part of the mix.
When I lived in a major city, I went 10 years without owning a car. Should I for whatever reason need a car, I could rent one. But other than that, public transportation, walking, and biking for me. Hell, I often preferred public transportation over a car.
But as soon as I moved back home, a rural area, a car has more or less become a life necessity. I simply can't imagine living out in rural nowhere without a car, it would be such a hassle. Where I live a bus goes 3 times a day to the neighboring towns, that's it.
It really depends on where you live, and what your logistical situation looks like.
But the transport infrastructure isn't an immutable property of the land, it's collectively-planned-and-built infrastructure. So the most convenient mode of transportation will settle into an equilibrium as the initial investment begets convenience, begetting more people choosing that method, begetting more investment and planning of towns and cities to accommodate that transportation method.
But most of the US this is impossible by design. Where I grew up you might live right next to a grocery store- but it is a mile walk because of the wall and road design. Nuts.
I feel like this is a naive take, and making some assumptions that may not be true.
I feel like this has less to do with preferring other modes of transportation over driving, as much as it has to do with not wanting/needing to go anywhere, particularly outside of the city. You can do most things without even needing to leave home, especially when you’re young.
You don’t need to meet in person with your friends to socialize. You can text, use social media, play only games, etc.
My young adult children both have licenses, but they have found it hard to get their friends to want to hang out. They’d rather stay home and stay on their devices.
And there is a bus shows up about once every four hours.
While cities can do a lot to improve the non-car experience, there’s a whole world outside those cities which would become inaccessible without a car. These are generally the “affordable” places to live in order to work in the city.
Focus on improving where you live, I do, but when you live in a city, recognize that improvements need to take into account those who don’t live there. The city is where they work, go to school, shop, and often interact with government functions.
Getting rid of dumb laws I can totally get behind as someone who walks daily.
Feel free to keep arguing how things radically changed just for cars. But they didn't.
Public transport is great in theory only. With actual human societies - maybe the western ones, that is, except China/Japan - it just doesn't work. Corruption, laziness, bureaucracy, lack of proper planning and security makes the creation and maintenance of these projects unsustainable and so much worse compared to personal transport. This only isn't true for million+ metropolises due to physical constrains.
You may frown at the traffic jams with SUVs having a single driver, but building additional highways is easily doable around the world, while any sort of mass transit infrastructure projects seem to take decades, billions, while still end up underwhelming - if not instantly, then after the machinery ages or maintainers change.
For millions of people, a car isn’t a trap or a luxur. It’s survival, opportunity, and dignity. Cities may be able to rethink their dependence on cars, but for everyone else, the car is still the bridge to basic participation in life.
That's an interesting way to look at compressed horse shit with streams of human waste running over the top of it.
Bear in mind the invention of sidewalks predates the automobile by thousands of years.
The car is clearly not the best way to navigate a dense city. It is impractical to have, say, tower block apartments and also have a car for each resident. It is unreasonable to build enough parking for peak time around every destination that anyone might want to go to.
On the flip side - not everyone wants to live in a dense city, and people's opinions on this change throughout their lives. It was profit maximising and also a lot of fun for me to live in the inner city in my early to mid 20's. Now that I can afford to not maximally push my career I prefer the outer parts of the city / more rural areas, and that's where the car shines.
If you look at the cost of living in an urban area it’s clear there is a lot of demand. Rural is cheaper because most people don’t want a long commute.