6 ms·

Ever owned a car before? How about being able to hop in your vehicle and drive anywhere in the entire country whenever you want just because you feel like it? T

by bignaj 12y ago

Ever owned a car before? How about being able to hop in your vehicle and drive anywhere in the entire country whenever you want just because you feel like it? That's why cars are freedom. Ask any recently-turned 16-year-old what it's like actually being able to go places. You could also just step on the gas pedal, drive across the country and feel the freedom yourself. Your comment has some good side-points to add to the discussion of cars for sure but by far the biggest point has gone about 3,099 miles over your head (Boston to San Francisco). To add to the OP: I think the ideal mix would be traditional cities where walking/biking are the ideal (like older parts of Europe) and then something like the interstate system/cars to allow freedom and mobility across the entire country (USA). I live in a city and ride my bike anywhere downtown, but my car is absolutely essential to go anywhere else. Freedom!

icebraining 12y ago
Sounds like you have a crap public transportation system if the kids under 16 can't "go to places". EDIT: You don't need a car to allow cross-country mobility; trains are more than adequate. Here in Europe you can travel from Portugal to Finland on rail, and we can visit up to 30 countries for less than $500 with an InterRail pass.
- bignaj 12y ago
  I live downtown in a major city with relatively good public transport options now (Seattle), but before I lived in small-town New England where public transportation is essentially nonexistent. If you can't drive you're not going anywhere. Most of America doesn't have access to good public transport -- you either aren't American or you know this already and are just spoiled by living in a city. Hey, I am too! :)
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    >If you can't drive you're not going anywhere. Most of America doesn't have access to good public transport This is the problem. Would cars be worth their expense and inconvenience if there were decent public transportation, walkable cities, or people could generally live near where they worked?
    - mwfunk 12y ago
      Maybe, maybe not, but that doesn't really mean anything in the context of this discussion. Most of the world doesn't have decent public transportation, in part because it's difficult and expensive to create decent public transportation, and in part because public transportation isn't a great fit for where most of the people of the world live. Unless you're suggesting that everyone should be relocated to arcologies so we could all give up our cars, the fact of the matter is that public transport isn't always an option, and may not ever be an option for anyone who doesn't live in a hyperdense urban area, which most people would consider to be hell on earth (not me, but I have an affinity for big cities).
      - morsch 12y ago
        In the developed world, while there's ample examples for great public transport, I have a hard time saying what percentage of it has decent coverage (whatever that is). Maybe it's as simple as saying it's mostly shit in the US and mostly decent in Europe, with the rest of the developed world also split, so about 50/50. Most of the world doesn't have decent public transport because most of the world is -- rapidly -- developing. In the same vein, most of the world doesn't have decent internet access (I'm not saying the two are very similar in other regards). It's a bit early to say whether the developing world will end up with decent public transport. They're certainly trying with some success. They're also acquiring cars at an astounding rate, they're going to have to do major infrastructure works at enormous cost either way, hopefully they're smart about it. As for the rest; living without a car doesn't require anybody to live in an arcology or in a "hyperdense" urban area. Most of the world (ie >50%) already lives in an urban area. There are lots of medium-sized or even big cities that aren't hyperdense by any sensible definition of that word. I don't think most people consider it hell on earth.
  - jvm 12y ago
    > I live downtown in a major city with relatively good public transport options now (Seattle), Having lived in Seattle, Berlin, New York, Montreal, and San Francisco, I would say that Seattle's transit is unusably bad (as is SF's, the other 3 are rather good). I think the issue here isn't that cars aren't necessary in the States (obviously they are), rather that that's a result of insanely pro-car anti-anything-else public policy in the States, and not because driving is 'naturally' so empowering. It's hard to think of a wealthy country where a city as large as Seattle would have such terrible non-car transportation, yet Seattle is even above average by American standards.
- kiiski 12y ago
  > ... Portugal to Finland ... Not without going through Russia. There is no longer any passenger train connection between Finland and Sweden, so that would require either going through Saint Petersburg or crossing the Baltic by ship. You can however do the trip by car; it's just going to cost _a lot_.
  - bergie 12y ago
    Has been a while since I made that trip, but IIRC the ferries between Finland and Sweden give discounts if you have an Interrail ticket. And they're not that expensivr to begin with, at least if you don't have a car with you. I'm now living in Berlin instead of Helsinki, and I take trains to go pretty much everywhere in Europe. When you factor in the time of getting from/to airport, security checks etc. it is often nearly as fast and much more comfortable. As I write this, I'm having lunch near the railway station before leaving for a conference in France. Usually I'd eat in the train but now I happened to have the time to spare...
chippy 12y ago
There is some confusion here because of conceptions of Liberty and feeling of liberation when using the word "freedom" - you are both correct.
rayiner 12y ago
My new apt is next to Balitmore Penn Station. I can be at BWI within 20 minutes of walking out my front door, and from there anywhere in the country. Yeah, the TSA is oppressive, but there's actually very little actual power other than not letting you board the plane. Cops have real power, and they exercise it over drivers. You know how much you hate getting bossed around by TSA agents? Car ownership is like that, except every day. Then there is the danger: I got hit by an oil truck merging into my lane. Nearly got run off the road by another truck going through Baltimore Harbor Tunnel (asshole didn't realize until the last minute one of the tunnels was closed). Nearly got killed by a tire falling off a big rig while on the highway. Nearly got killed fishtailing on an icy bridge in New York. That's just the last 18 months. On my commute to Philly I see some poor asshole crashed by the side of the road several times a month. In a year, I've never walked by a murder scene in "dangerous" Philly. I've almost certainly passed by more than one fatal accident in that time. Car ownership brings your average middle class white American into contact with two things they normally don't have to deal with: death and police oppression. PS: On the issue of 16 year olds having cars--that's absolutely terrifying. What blows my mind is that I seem alone in finding it terrifying. People worry about their kids in the city, but at least you can buy your way out of that danger. How often do you hear of an upper middle class white or asian kid getting shot in Chicago? Meanwhile, about a dozen teenagers die in car accidents every year in the upper middle class white/asian suburban county where I grew up.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  You seem to have a very very bad experience with cops. The majority of people are not afraid of driving any more than being ticketed for jay walking. And as you said, if you want to travel without cars you have to deal with the TSA and that nonsense. Cars are certainly dangerous. You have a very good point there. But people have so accepted the risk they aren't going to change their entire lifestyle to eliminate it. And in a few years self-driving cars will fix it.
  - enraged_camel 12y ago
    >>You seem to have a very very bad experience with cops. I don't know of anyone who would describe their experiences with cops as "pleasant."
michaelochurch 12y ago
Cars provide an illusion of freedom. Yes, you can get in the car and go "anywhere" on a very extensive and well-maintained road network. A good thing? Absolutely. On the other hand, a saccade in your attention (and those happen to everyone, albeit rarely) can have fatal consequences, you can be ticketed for driving at an objectively safe speed (posted speed limits can be well below design speeds, often by intention) and total costs, amortized, are somewhere near $20-30 per hour of driving. (Gas is only a small part of it.) Then there's parking, which is a fucking nightmare if you go anywhere interesting in a populated area. Having access to a car for a weekend trip is great; the car-dependent lifestyle is the absence of freedom. Suburbia was supposed to kill the urban "slum landlords" but, for the average "middle class" (actually upper-working class; true middle class starts around 85th percentile) American, the car is the new landlord. So many people work hard just to afford the car they need in order to get to work. It's a huge waste of resources. Also, I think that the suburban lifestyle is largely about control, especially when it comes to children. The suburban parent has to set up "play dates" and thus gets to control who the kids' friends are and make sure they're only exposed to the "right" social classes. The downside of this is that depriving children and adolescents of so much independence just makes parenting a monstrous, 18-year, chore. The "Calvin and Hobbes" childhood is impossible when the land is cut to pieces by roads. Since the current crop of kids is so controlled by their parents that they need a chaperone just to take a piss in the woods, the result for "middle class" parents is that having children means they no longer have a life. (The true middle class and upper-middle-class suffer less sacrifice; they can afford nannies and boarding schools and such.) It's not a way to live, IMO. That said, I'm not as much of a booster of the "traditional city" as the OP. You simply can't have a city like New York without a lot of public transit. The wealth generation that comes from large cities (2+ million) is that they allow extreme economic specialization, but you don't get that unless people have rapid access to a large number of people. Also, as ugly as the 20+ story apartment buildings may be, we're going to need them in order to make housing affordable... and that may just be a losing battle at this point. We also need to stop letting corrupt foreign officials buy real estate in New York and San Francisco, but that's another issue for another time.
shanusmagnus 12y ago
I'll add that freedom, or free-feeling, is more complex than it might seem at first. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, miles outside of a small town, so I've been the 16 year old you describe. I get that. Other people have taken the opposite point, talking about the freedom of not having to own a car to go about their daily lives. I've lived in a number of megacities with fantastic transit, so I get that, too. But common to both things is the assumption that there are things you want to get to in the first place. Where are those things? How much effort does it take to get to them? What's the opportunity cost, or additional utility, in making the journey? What circumstances causes those things to exist in the first place? One of the major lessons of my adolescence was that the ability to translocate from nothing to a much further away nothing is a dubious sort of freedom.
bigpeopleareold 12y ago
I grew up in NYC and after a number of years avoiding a driver's license, I did get one (but like in 2006). It was "freeing" to own a car, but the glamour of it faded. I moved to Staten Island for a few years, and there, you need to have a car. When I got a chance to move to Manhattan, the real weight of having a car starts to set in: a. You have to constantly move the car because of alternate side parking (the amount of times it was required, I thought, was overly-excessive in the neighborhood where I lived), b. The fact there is very little space to park which caused me to spend a lot of time just looking for parking (I'd give up and go to the only place I knew that had gobs of space - Riverside and 122nd, near Grant's Tomb :P), c. The cost of fueling the car, mostly used just to find parking, d. The fear of damage, from dings from careless people swinging taxi doors or the time when someone threw a brick through the passenger side window to see if they can find anything in my car, e. The insurance cost (glad I owned the car outright and that insurance was cheaper in Manhattan), f. The fact that parking garages in Manhattan are absurdly expensive ($400-$500/month around where I lived ... only the wealthy can eat that cost). All this, just to have a weekend drive to upstate NY. That was the only enjoyable part of having the car. Otherwise, the burden was never freedom to me. Whether it be NYC or where I live now, getting on a bus or train is freedom to me. It's freedom to know that this cost of modern living is off my budget and that when it comes down to it now, I really don't have to drive to get around. I will say though that this is all really dependent on where you live. It would get stifling if you lived in suburbia or rural areas and can't travel anywhere. My parents had a vacation place in a rural area outside the city. I'd go stir crazy if I couldn't drive to town (I sort of did when we vacationed at the place, when I was much younger.) The whole point is that this is really contextual. In the end, given cost of living and having to add budget items, I'd prefer things to be simpler. No insurance payments, no car payments, no fuel payments is a breath of fresh air to me.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  I think we can safely disregard your negative Manhattan car owning experience when deciding on whether to own a car. Anyone who bothers to keep a car while living there is automatically deemed insane.
  - 12y ago
pash 12y ago
> Ask any recently-turned 16-year-old what it's like actually being able to go places. ... That's a sentiment born of the suburban age. Cars are freedom from suburban isolation. In places where you can get around using your own two feet, cars offer only a marginal sort of liberation, and one that's bound up with all sorts of dangers and obligations. Cars are the sine qua non of suburbia. The problem is that they are also the non cum qua of cities—cars destroy cities.

by bignaj 12y ago

icebraining 12y ago

Sounds like you have a crap public transportation system if the kids under 16 can't "go to places". EDIT: You don't need a car to allow cross-country mobility; trains are more than adequate. Here in Europe you can travel from Portugal to Finland on rail, and we can visit up to 30 countries for less than $500 with an InterRail pass.

bignaj 12y ago
I live downtown in a major city with relatively good public transport options now (Seattle), but before I lived in small-town New England where public transportation is essentially nonexistent. If you can't drive you're not going anywhere. Most of America doesn't have access to good public transport -- you either aren't American or you know this already and are just spoiled by living in a city. Hey, I am too! :)
- pessimizer 12y ago
  >If you can't drive you're not going anywhere. Most of America doesn't have access to good public transport This is the problem. Would cars be worth their expense and inconvenience if there were decent public transportation, walkable cities, or people could generally live near where they worked?
  - mwfunk 12y ago
    Maybe, maybe not, but that doesn't really mean anything in the context of this discussion. Most of the world doesn't have decent public transportation, in part because it's difficult and expensive to create decent public transportation, and in part because public transportation isn't a great fit for where most of the people of the world live. Unless you're suggesting that everyone should be relocated to arcologies so we could all give up our cars, the fact of the matter is that public transport isn't always an option, and may not ever be an option for anyone who doesn't live in a hyperdense urban area, which most people would consider to be hell on earth (not me, but I have an affinity for big cities).
    - morsch 12y ago
      In the developed world, while there's ample examples for great public transport, I have a hard time saying what percentage of it has decent coverage (whatever that is). Maybe it's as simple as saying it's mostly shit in the US and mostly decent in Europe, with the rest of the developed world also split, so about 50/50. Most of the world doesn't have decent public transport because most of the world is -- rapidly -- developing. In the same vein, most of the world doesn't have decent internet access (I'm not saying the two are very similar in other regards). It's a bit early to say whether the developing world will end up with decent public transport. They're certainly trying with some success. They're also acquiring cars at an astounding rate, they're going to have to do major infrastructure works at enormous cost either way, hopefully they're smart about it. As for the rest; living without a car doesn't require anybody to live in an arcology or in a "hyperdense" urban area. Most of the world (ie >50%) already lives in an urban area. There are lots of medium-sized or even big cities that aren't hyperdense by any sensible definition of that word. I don't think most people consider it hell on earth.
- jvm 12y ago
  > I live downtown in a major city with relatively good public transport options now (Seattle), Having lived in Seattle, Berlin, New York, Montreal, and San Francisco, I would say that Seattle's transit is unusably bad (as is SF's, the other 3 are rather good). I think the issue here isn't that cars aren't necessary in the States (obviously they are), rather that that's a result of insanely pro-car anti-anything-else public policy in the States, and not because driving is 'naturally' so empowering. It's hard to think of a wealthy country where a city as large as Seattle would have such terrible non-car transportation, yet Seattle is even above average by American standards.
kiiski 12y ago
> ... Portugal to Finland ... Not without going through Russia. There is no longer any passenger train connection between Finland and Sweden, so that would require either going through Saint Petersburg or crossing the Baltic by ship. You can however do the trip by car; it's just going to cost _a lot_.
- bergie 12y ago
  Has been a while since I made that trip, but IIRC the ferries between Finland and Sweden give discounts if you have an Interrail ticket. And they're not that expensivr to begin with, at least if you don't have a car with you. I'm now living in Berlin instead of Helsinki, and I take trains to go pretty much everywhere in Europe. When you factor in the time of getting from/to airport, security checks etc. it is often nearly as fast and much more comfortable. As I write this, I'm having lunch near the railway station before leaving for a conference in France. Usually I'd eat in the train but now I happened to have the time to spare...

chippy 12y ago

There is some confusion here because of conceptions of Liberty and feeling of liberation when using the word "freedom" - you are both correct.

rayiner 12y ago

My new apt is next to Balitmore Penn Station. I can be at BWI within 20 minutes of walking out my front door, and from there anywhere in the country. Yeah, the TSA is oppressive, but there's actually very little actual power other than not letting you board the plane. Cops have real power, and they exercise it over drivers. You know how much you hate getting bossed around by TSA agents? Car ownership is like that, except every day. Then there is the danger: I got hit by an oil truck merging into my lane. Nearly got run off the road by another truck going through Baltimore Harbor Tunnel (asshole didn't realize until the last minute one of the tunnels was closed). Nearly got killed by a tire falling off a big rig while on the highway. Nearly got killed fishtailing on an icy bridge in New York. That's just the last 18 months. On my commute to Philly I see some poor asshole crashed by the side of the road several times a month. In a year, I've never walked by a murder scene in "dangerous" Philly. I've almost certainly passed by more than one fatal accident in that time. Car ownership brings your average middle class white American into contact with two things they normally don't have to deal with: death and police oppression. PS: On the issue of 16 year olds having cars--that's absolutely terrifying. What blows my mind is that I seem alone in finding it terrifying. People worry about their kids in the city, but at least you can buy your way out of that danger. How often do you hear of an upper middle class white or asian kid getting shot in Chicago? Meanwhile, about a dozen teenagers die in car accidents every year in the upper middle class white/asian suburban county where I grew up.

Houshalter 12y ago
You seem to have a very very bad experience with cops. The majority of people are not afraid of driving any more than being ticketed for jay walking. And as you said, if you want to travel without cars you have to deal with the TSA and that nonsense. Cars are certainly dangerous. You have a very good point there. But people have so accepted the risk they aren't going to change their entire lifestyle to eliminate it. And in a few years self-driving cars will fix it.
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  >>You seem to have a very very bad experience with cops. I don't know of anyone who would describe their experiences with cops as "pleasant."

michaelochurch 12y ago

Cars provide an illusion of freedom. Yes, you can get in the car and go "anywhere" on a very extensive and well-maintained road network. A good thing? Absolutely. On the other hand, a saccade in your attention (and those happen to everyone, albeit rarely) can have fatal consequences, you can be ticketed for driving at an objectively safe speed (posted speed limits can be well below design speeds, often by intention) and total costs, amortized, are somewhere near $20-30 per hour of driving. (Gas is only a small part of it.) Then there's parking, which is a fucking nightmare if you go anywhere interesting in a populated area. Having access to a car for a weekend trip is great; the car-dependent lifestyle is the absence of freedom. Suburbia was supposed to kill the urban "slum landlords" but, for the average "middle class" (actually upper-working class; true middle class starts around 85th percentile) American, the car is the new landlord. So many people work hard just to afford the car they need in order to get to work. It's a huge waste of resources. Also, I think that the suburban lifestyle is largely about control, especially when it comes to children. The suburban parent has to set up "play dates" and thus gets to control who the kids' friends are and make sure they're only exposed to the "right" social classes. The downside of this is that depriving children and adolescents of so much independence just makes parenting a monstrous, 18-year, chore. The "Calvin and Hobbes" childhood is impossible when the land is cut to pieces by roads. Since the current crop of kids is so controlled by their parents that they need a chaperone just to take a piss in the woods, the result for "middle class" parents is that having children means they no longer have a life. (The true middle class and upper-middle-class suffer less sacrifice; they can afford nannies and boarding schools and such.) It's not a way to live, IMO. That said, I'm not as much of a booster of the "traditional city" as the OP. You simply can't have a city like New York without a lot of public transit. The wealth generation that comes from large cities (2+ million) is that they allow extreme economic specialization, but you don't get that unless people have rapid access to a large number of people. Also, as ugly as the 20+ story apartment buildings may be, we're going to need them in order to make housing affordable... and that may just be a losing battle at this point. We also need to stop letting corrupt foreign officials buy real estate in New York and San Francisco, but that's another issue for another time.

shanusmagnus 12y ago

I'll add that freedom, or free-feeling, is more complex than it might seem at first. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, miles outside of a small town, so I've been the 16 year old you describe. I get that. Other people have taken the opposite point, talking about the freedom of not having to own a car to go about their daily lives. I've lived in a number of megacities with fantastic transit, so I get that, too. But common to both things is the assumption that there are things you want to get to in the first place. Where are those things? How much effort does it take to get to them? What's the opportunity cost, or additional utility, in making the journey? What circumstances causes those things to exist in the first place? One of the major lessons of my adolescence was that the ability to translocate from nothing to a much further away nothing is a dubious sort of freedom.

bigpeopleareold 12y ago

I grew up in NYC and after a number of years avoiding a driver's license, I did get one (but like in 2006). It was "freeing" to own a car, but the glamour of it faded. I moved to Staten Island for a few years, and there, you need to have a car. When I got a chance to move to Manhattan, the real weight of having a car starts to set in: a. You have to constantly move the car because of alternate side parking (the amount of times it was required, I thought, was overly-excessive in the neighborhood where I lived), b. The fact there is very little space to park which caused me to spend a lot of time just looking for parking (I'd give up and go to the only place I knew that had gobs of space - Riverside and 122nd, near Grant's Tomb :P), c. The cost of fueling the car, mostly used just to find parking, d. The fear of damage, from dings from careless people swinging taxi doors or the time when someone threw a brick through the passenger side window to see if they can find anything in my car, e. The insurance cost (glad I owned the car outright and that insurance was cheaper in Manhattan), f. The fact that parking garages in Manhattan are absurdly expensive ($400-$500/month around where I lived ... only the wealthy can eat that cost). All this, just to have a weekend drive to upstate NY. That was the only enjoyable part of having the car. Otherwise, the burden was never freedom to me. Whether it be NYC or where I live now, getting on a bus or train is freedom to me. It's freedom to know that this cost of modern living is off my budget and that when it comes down to it now, I really don't have to drive to get around. I will say though that this is all really dependent on where you live. It would get stifling if you lived in suburbia or rural areas and can't travel anywhere. My parents had a vacation place in a rural area outside the city. I'd go stir crazy if I couldn't drive to town (I sort of did when we vacationed at the place, when I was much younger.) The whole point is that this is really contextual. In the end, given cost of living and having to add budget items, I'd prefer things to be simpler. No insurance payments, no car payments, no fuel payments is a breath of fresh air to me.

sjtrny 12y ago
I think we can safely disregard your negative Manhattan car owning experience when deciding on whether to own a car. Anyone who bothers to keep a car while living there is automatically deemed insane.
- 12y ago

pash 12y ago

> Ask any recently-turned 16-year-old what it's like actually being able to go places. ... That's a sentiment born of the suburban age. Cars are freedom from suburban isolation. In places where you can get around using your own two feet, cars offer only a marginal sort of liberation, and one that's bound up with all sorts of dangers and obligations. Cars are the sine qua non of suburbia. The problem is that they are also the non cum qua of cities—cars destroy cities.