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I think there's a bit of a "grass is always greener" problem on both sides of the equation. I understand where you're arguing from, and I don't disagree with you. But you didn't grow up in the midst of American car culture the way most of the anti-car people did. You never had the pleasure of sitting in a long line at a stoplight that stays red for ten minutes, turns green long enough to let three cars go, then turns red again. You've never been 500 feet from where you want to go, but the only way to get there is to get in your car, make a harrowing left turn onto a 4 lane highway, and follow that with another left turn across traffic into the parking lot. Conversely, you've never had the same problem but you can't make a left turn due to the highway divider so you have to make a right turn with the intention of making a u-turn at the end of the block (followed by another u-turn at the end of the next block), only to find that u-turns are prohibited and you have to take a long detour in heavy traffic to get to the store that was directly next door to the one you were just at. You've never been in a hurry to get somewhere and had a Cadillac abruptly pull out in front of you and not top 20 mph for the next 5 miles, with the invariably 87-year-old driver hitting his brakes frequently and arbitrarily. You've never sat in a 10 mile traffic backup caused by people's inability to not slow down and look at crashed cars and ambulances on the other side of the highway. You've never changed brake pads on the street. You've never paid significantly more for an apartment that had a garage. You've never paid $250/month for a parking lease at work. You've never spent 45 minutes at a dead standstill between the bend at Bates and the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, not once, but every. Fucking. Day. As part of your commute.
I'm not literally saying that you have never personally experienced any of these things, nor am I saying that everyone who lives in a car-centric country deals with them every day. I'm saying that if you grow up in places where the infrastructure revolves around cars, shit like this happens often enough that you wonder if everyone paying thousands of dollars per year to maintain his own car is really an optimal use of resources. Yes, I understand there are tradeoffs to being transit-based, and I think that most of these transit hounds don't understand that these massive lifestyle tradeoffs aren't worth it for most Americans. But I try to understand where they're coming from, especially when they're probably urban people who look at the way things are in Europe and wonder why they can't be similar here.
I've never driven, or owned, a car.
I hate "car culture" as it developed in the years after 1945 because of how ugly and unlivable it made nearly every American community. Six- or eight-lane arterial roads, lined with strip malls, fast-food places, Walmarts etc. (interspersed with car-related businesses such as gas stations, auto dealerships, tire stores, muffler shops, etc. which take up huge amounts of space), every one with an enormous parking lot that one has to walk through (I can't even count how many hours of my life have been wasted just walking through parking lots) while keeping an eye out that some distracted moron might run me down.
The sidewalks are invariably empty except for the homeless, the poorest of the immigrants, or once in a great while a dog-walker.
All that wasted space which could have been used for housing.
Bus stops, most without a shelter, for buses that run every half hour or even every hour (less than that if it's snowing or raining).
Neighborhoods with nothing but houses, on winding streets (many without sidewalks). For mile after mile after mile. No corner grocery stores, no corner pubs, nothing to walk to unless you're buddies with all your neighbors.
In the US, there is no such thing anymore as an affordable, safe, walkable urban neighborhood. There are smaller cities and towns with affordable housing - but with no jobs, very little shopping or cultural institutions, with a huge fraction of their population bombed out on opiates or meth.
If I want to visit any "outdoors" destination - beach, mountains, national parks - that's just out of the question because there are no trains or buses that go there.
Thanks a fucking heap, Henry Ford and postwar urban planners.
I agree. But in America, the car is the main method of insulation from the domestic underclass. If Los Angeles and San Francisco, let alone Chicago and Philadelphia, let alone St Louis and Baltimore and New Orleans, were as clean and safe as Hong Kong and Singapore, and had their quality of public transport, this debate would be unnecessary.
It's not even that Americans can't build public transport - Los Angeles has built out its subway and light rail network pretty vigorously since the late 1990s, and it has some of the worst imaginable 'natural conditions' for mass transit given its sprawl - it's that inevitably it is taken over by scum and governments do not appear willing to prevent them from ruining it. The only major exceptions are NYC, which is still pretty grotty but 'saved' by the sheer volume of regular passengers, and D.C., which is by far the cleanest system in the US because it's patrolled very heavily (particularly downtown) and was built largely by the federal government.
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For what reason would we want to tile the land with housing?
There's actually plenty of buses which go to such places. They're slow and inflexible, but such is the nature of public transit.
Yes. What good is paradise if there's no place to park? People want to go places, and not only do they want to go to different places, they're coming from different places and they want to go at different times. This makes the problem of mass transit difficult, and the usual solution of a 3-seat ride (low-speed collection, high-speed trunk, low-speed distribution) for more popular destinations (and worse for less popular ones) is terrible.
Because there's a severe shortage of affordable housing in every city in the US and Canada which is worth living in.
Somebody needs to build the walkable equivalent of a thousand Levittowns, starter housing which can be easily paid for on the salary of a single working-class adult - and not a highly-paid one, either.
There's plenty of housing available in the existing "levittowns". The problem is that there are a small number of cities in US and Canada that you and many others consider "worth living in", and a relatively small amount of housing within those cities, hence high prices. Eliminating commercial development in the suburbs and building housing there only makes nearby suburbs less desirable (because people need places to buy things); it does nothing about the cost of housing in the places you consider "worth living in".
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Without onerous zoning regulations, the office buildings could simply be built outside those cities, making the cities superfluous.
Dense, expensive urban centers are dead. The true vision of the future is an unending low-density sprawl of cheap single-family houses interspersed with office-building complexes.
Well, no, the evidence is clear. The richest people in the world, who could live and conduct business from anywhere, choose to live disproportionately in expensive urban centers rather than in sprawling suburban or exurban estates. They would rather a five bedroom penthouse over central park than a hundred-room gilded age mansion on Long Island or in Westchester. When they ski, they have chalets in dense, walkable, chocolate-box little towns like Gstaad and Courchevel. Even many of the most 'elite' warm destinations, like St Barths and Monaco and Cannes and even parts of Miami, are pretty dense. One of the great innovations of the American upper class - in Newport in the late 19th century - was building their mansions close together, not because they had to but because it seemed to make more sense.
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I get this is a well-intentioned comment, but I assure you that most of the experiences you mention are hardly foreign to me.
Have I had to suffer through traffic? Yes. Bad stoplights? Yes. Cross an inconvenient highway to get to the other side? Yes. And while dodging cows while I'm at. Annoying u-turn restrictions? There's one walking distance from my door. Geriatric Cadillac driver? Well, I've never encountered a Cadillac, but rest assured I've been tempted to misuse my license to double check theirs.
Discounting the obvious Americanisms, I've been in traffic delayed by rubbernecking at accidents. I've fortunately never had to change brake pads at all. Apartments with guaranteed and reserved parking do cost more. Thankfully my hospital doesn't nickel and dime me with parking, but that'll change in the NHS.
No really, I am well aware of the difficulties that car ownership entails, and I would wager it's even worse here with the quality of the roads, the cows, people who consider the laws of the road more akin to flexible guidelines, and no end of other issues. About the only thing I'm certain I'm better off without is the risk of someone pulling a gun out of road rage.
And I still prefer widespread car-ownership. It's a pretty sweet deal the moment you remember you have (or plan to have) a large family, carry a bunch of crap like groceries, travel to places outside a city that don't fall on convenient rail or bus routes and so on. Even in the UK, it's expected that a doctor should have a car, I had to sign a waiver for my training application where I indemnify the NHS against paying for any expenses incurred if I'm urgently forced to rent a cab or take public transport.
Much like democracy, having a car is the worst possible option barring all the others.
Having a car and needing a car to the extent that residents of much of America do are two very different things. Even in most walkable European cities with excellent public transport, many people own cars - a clear majority when you restrict 'people' to parents, for example. Owning a car is normal and fine. But owning one doesn't mean you need to use it to get everywhere.
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I'm a car driver. I've lived in various states driving my car to work, etc. None of those describe my experiences with cars.
I once had a commute where sometimes the freeway would get really congested. That's certainly annoying.
A single digit number of times in my life I've gotten trapped on one of those streets that have no U turn at every light. Then you have to make some weird series of turns for seemingly no good reason.
My typical driving experience is positive. Very rarely it is some frustrating bullshit. Some anti-car people act like car drivers are suffering greatly. That's at least partially true in San Jose. And just wrong almost everywhere else almost all the time.
I've had pretty much all of them, adjusted for geography (replace the bend at Squirrel Hill with the Conshohocken Curve on the Schyulkill Expressway, for instance) and obedience (a no-U-turn sign means "here's a practical place to take a U-turn if there's no cops around"). I've also spent hours standing around Penn Station New York with no trains running. Not hours total, hours on more than one occasion. I've spent time standing in the cold and rain at bus stops with no bus coming (or at least, not stopping). I've taken crazy circuitous routes (that were the shortest possible) turning an hour trip by car into a 3 hour saga (with 30 minutes still by car). I've taken long standing-room-only commutes by bus and train, some of them so packed so you could barely breathe.
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