First, I had a similar feeling coming back to SimCity 4. Even a just a few years ago, I tried to optimize for maximum density and size - kinda like NYC where I lived.
Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids.
Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
This seems very different from the large anti-car movement in the Netherlands in the 1970s (which eventually led to massive investments in bike infrastructure and car restrictions in the cities).
There was significant parent involvement, touting the memorable slogan "Stop de Kindermoord" ("Stop the Child Murder").
There's a youtube channel named @NotJustBikes which mostly talks about how bike-friendly the Netherlands are and compares it to the USA. It's worth watching a couple of those videos.
And, unlike the grandparent-comment’s assertions, that channel references his family and kids in most videos (in that he and his partner moved to Amsterdam so his children could have the freedom to navigate safely without having to be driven around).
My mother lives in suburban Massachusetts. She always said that she never imagined how it was possible for me to live with two small kids without a car in Berlin.
She came to visit for one month. After the first week she was already comfortably going around with the Ubahn to pick up the kids at school. I have 4 supermarkets less than 150m away from me, so we would walk to do groceries every other day. I spend ~80€/month with taxi rides (for the occasional trip to meet someone in a less convenient place), which is less than what she pays in car insurance alone, not even counting the cost of gas.
At the end of the trip, she got it. Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury.
> Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury
It is unfortunately a necessity in many parts of America where public transportation is lacking or nonexistent.
And making it a "luxury" just further stratifies our society into different, non-interacting economic classes. When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others.
As someone who grew up in abject poverty in a very rural area and was homeless and on completely on my own by 16, I have already seen how this plays out. The trajectory of my life was majorly affected by a lack of a car or adequate public transportation. I have since had to make choices about where I live in order to minimize car use in order to align with my own philosophy around transportation, but it comes at great cost in America when such walkable cities are so desirable that cost of living shoots through the roof due to demand. And conversely, poorer areas often lack walkability or sufficient and accessible public transportation.
Berlin does not have the same problems as America, a sprawling empire in decline.
> When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others.
I'll never forget one of my last lectures from my high-school History class teacher. She said "People talk about societies in terms of two classes: the kings and the plebs, the haves and have-nots, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. I hope you managed to learn that throughout all of history, what we have is actually three different forces - priests or monks in Ancient times, or the merchants during the Renaissance, land owners in the US - and that it's this third class that is crucial in determining the course of History. Every time they aligned with the elites there was no change in the status quo, and every time a revolution happened was because they in the middle shifted their support to the other side."
I'm saying this for one simple reason: the way to fix this problem is not by pretending that car ownership isn't a luxury, but by de-stigmatizing public transport. I can bet you that if political forces shifted and started putting pressure against car-ownership, you would quickly see a swing from the middle class in support for better public transit, mixed-use zoning, YIMBY-ism, etc.
"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation"
I don't avoid it because of "stigma" but lived experience where it takes 2x as long to get anywhere and I'm far more likely to get assaulted by some rando while minding my own business or having to deal with someone else's bodily fluids or public intoxication.
But I loved public transport back in places and times where I felt safer.
Are you campaigning with your city council to favor more/better public transit options? Are you discussing with your neighbors about changing zoning laws so that small business and shops can be located closer to you?
> Are you campaigning with your city council to favor more/better public transit options?
Why would I do this? It's just not possible for public transit to provide equal quality of service to a private vehicle unless I lived in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, which I do not (though I do live in a major metropolitan area).
On top of that, my area has spent tens of billions to expand the subway system, to little effect and with many, many delays and cost increases that indicate that the local government is not capable of successfully managing a large scale infrastructure project.
> Are you discussing with your neighbors about changing zoning laws so that small business and shops can be located closer to you?
I already live in a pretty walkable area and things are already trending towards making things even more walkable, so no I'm not because it's not needed.
No, I did not. I understand that right now you might prefer to use car because you can not rely on public transit and you don't feel safe.
My question is the sense of "are you doing anything to change this reality, or are you just going to accept that now that you have a car you see no point in advocating better public transit for your community?"
I cited lived experience, not feelings, and it's hard to see how expanding transport more is going to fix that when they don't care for what we have now.
> it's hard to see how expanding transport more is going to fix that when they don't care for what we have now.
Improvements in public transport could be made simply by having more frequent buses on a route, for example. Or longer hours of operation. Or (in the cities that have them) getting streetcars to be properly isolated from the cars. Sometimes it can be as simple as having the bus stops properly illuminated so that people feel more safe waiting for the bus at night.
Any of these improvements can make a big difference in ridership numbers, and any increase in public transit adoption is better for everyone. More people using public transport means less cars on the road and less traffic for those who still depend on a car.
To go back to the original point: I'm hoping you realize that what I'm trying to do is that we are exactly part of the pendulum that my History teacher was talking about. If you wish to live in a less car-centric society and if you wish that more people had access to fair, safe and affordable public transit, then it's up to people like you to push for this change.
You're arguing with people talking about how things are currently by talking about how things could be or should be and how people should change how things are.
That can be a great topic on its own, but it's not the same topic others are discussing.
And unless I missed it, you didn't say "let's switch the topic", you just went off in your own direction.
I've never met an online public transit advocate who didn't come off as a zealot, lecturing the uninformed masses about the obvious benefits that will come from joining them while dismissing any criticism or skepticism as ignorance.
Unfortunately, I encounter many, many, many more public transit zealots online (and in person, though much less frequently) than I need to hear parrot the same talking points from fuckcars and NotJustBikes about the joys of living in an efficiency apartment and using a cargo bike to get my kids to and from their 3 different schools in the snow or blistering heat while ranting about vague "externalities" without ever providing actual numbers.
Whether a car is a luxury or not, really depends on where you live.
European cities started on a scale designed around the limitations of human walking. Even before they built out mass transit systems, living without a car was doable. Adding mass transit is icing on the cake. If you live in such an environment, it is easy to make the case that cars are a luxury. That's because other people's daily experience is that it is a luxury. As your mother discovered when she visited you.
Most American cities are built on a scale designed around human driving. Even where they built out mass transit systems, between scale and density they can't work as well as European ones. (Fun fact. Across the USA, busses are on average so underutilized that we'd save gas by making everyone drive instead.) Underinvestment in mass transit is icing on the cake.
This was your mother's daily experience in suburban Massachusetts. And even though she sees how you can live without a car, it's pretty safe to bet that she doesn't think that she can live where she does without a car.
Which means that, in America, saying that cars are luxuries is a poor argument. It directly contradicts everyone's personal experience. Yes, this is fixable. But fixing it literally requires tearing cities down, then rebuilding them on a scale where walking makes sense as a major mode of transportation. We can't even manage the political will to build enough housing to keep people off the streets. Any lifestyle change requiring this level of rebuilding is a nonstarter. No matter how many lectures we get from Europeans.
> Most American cities are built on a scale designed around human driving.
That's absolutely not true. It only became true in the post-war when there was a push for suburban sprawl, lobbied by GM and all the auto industry [0]
> it's pretty safe to bet that she doesn't think that she can live where she does without a car.
"Where there is a will, there is a way", right? The discussion is not even if she can go by without a car, but whether she would want it.
> We can't even manage the political will to build enough housing to keep people off the streets.
Ok, but then don't go around trying to rationalize your bad choices and poor capacity for civic organization. [1]
Don't go around saying "I lived in NYC and I thought I could live without a car, but after I had kids I realized they are not so bad", and please don't go around saying "it can't be done".
Amsterdam and Rotterdam were once also car-centric cities which managed to turn themselves around in less than a generation. There is no inherit limitation in the US that forbids this change to happen. There is no amount of American Exceptionalism that can prevent people from clamoring change. Maybe it won't be done in the US, because people are lazy and not willing to sacrifice their own convenience for some communal benefit, but it's super annoying to always get in these discussions when people try to hide their preferences on external circumstances. North American cities are they way they are by choice.
One of you is pointing out that cars are a necessity for some in the current reality. The other is pointing out that we could change that reality like other places have.
You are both right.
I am very against the continuation of car primacy in urban design, but I live in a place where that is the current reality, so for all practical reasons I need at least one car in my household. I advocate for the changes so that isn't true and see that it is possible to live otherwise, but it isn't reality right now, so I own a car. Me owning a car isn't to "rationalize [my] bad choices and poor capacity for civic organization." I do it because the housing that I can afford, in the country that I live in is in an area where that is necessary. In the meantime I advocate for better transit and other options, but I am not omnipotent, and even those with tremendous amounts of power cannot make these changes happen quickly given the 75+ years of infrastructure and urban design.
You are tremendously mean-spirited and un-empathetic in proclaiming that those that don't agree with you are 'lazy' and 'not willing to sacrifice their own convenience for some communal benefit'.
Try understanding where people are coming from. Many believe as strongly as you do, and can provide just as many backing youtube videos, that cars are an unalloyed good. If you come at them this aggressively telling them that the places they live are just plain wrong, you will not convince them of anything.
As an aside, the Dutch aren't nearly as car free as you are presenting. They are in the top 25% for per capita car ownership worldwide, and have higher rates of car ownership rates than Denmark, Sweden, Greece and Croatia which isn't even all of the countries in Europe with lower rates of car ownership. Hell, they have more than double the rate of car ownership of Saudi Arabia, a country that subsidizes fuel prices to encourage car use.
But I'm also pointing to the fact that this is easier to change in some places than others. It doesn't just take will to change. It takes more will in some places than others. Because you have to fight against the layout and built up infrastructure of the area.
Conversely, the other person is pointing to how friendly Amsterdam is to not having a car. The fact that lots of people there have cars doesn't take away from the fact that it is easy to live there and not have a car. Just like the number of TVs in America don't take away from the fact that it is easy to live in America and not own a TV. (Case in point. I live in America, and haven't owned a TV in 20 years.)
This means that you at least consider a possibility of living without a car. You at least understand that there is nothing about the US making it impossible to work towards car independence. I have no reason to argue with you or people who share this sentiment.
I do get upset at the people who think that this situation is static and that it can not be changed, ever. But I get more upset at the people who complain at the North American reality only when they are directly suffering from it, and act like when the systemic problem doesn't exist anymore just because they manage to "solve the issue" for themselves.
> As an aside, the Dutch aren't nearly as car free as you are presenting.
They have high rates of car ownership, but they are not car dependent. Even the people who have to drive for work use cars only for longer distance trips, and walk/bike/use public transport for shorter ones. In Greece, much like in the US, people assume that you have to have a car to do anything.
The Dutch have a lot of cars because they are rich.
The ugly truth (for public transit zealots like the parent poster) is that there is no amount of investment that can make a person with the ability to afford a car willingly choose public transit, unless they live and work in a place with extremely high population density.
They keep ranting about how cars are a luxury, and they are right, but basically want to change human nature to suit their preferences IMO.
I’m wealthy and live in the Netherlands. I find cars kind of annoying. I bike and take the train for 99% of trips, and use occasional hourly car rental otherwise.
Dutch person with a car here: Like many people, I own one because they can be very useful to transport heavy stuff, and there are several low density areas where it's a pain to get by train, like visiting family in nearby Belgium. But for most of my trips biking or public transport is just quicker. I drive maybe twice a month.
I know plenty of people who choose transit even though they own a car.
My in-laws live in Rotterdam, and cycle and transit for most day to day stuff. But they also own and use a car, when appropriate (they do have big box stores and suburbs in - gasp - bike crazy Rotterdam).
People will use transit if it is pleasant, fast, and affordable. When I lived in Vancouver, you would be nuts to commute by car if there was a train line near you. It was cheaper and faster to take transit, especially during the working hours.
But as you stated, most people who can afford a car do end up with one, even if it isn't their primary mode of transit.
I don't think so, but partially because the person I responded to is off the charts in the anti-car direction.
> I know plenty of people who choose transit even though they own a car.
Most people choose what makes sense for them, myself included. I drive most of the time, but have no problem taking public transit when it makes sense.
> People will use transit if it is pleasant, fast, and affordable. When I lived in Vancouver, you would be nuts to commute by car if there was a train line near you. It was cheaper and faster to take transit, especially during the working hours.
The issue is that there are very few places where it's cheaper and faster to take public transit.
The solutions most transit advocates come up with involve kneecapping car usage so public transit can compete or insisting people live at density levels most find unacceptable, neither of which are practically feasible.
> there is no amount of investment that can make a person with the ability to afford a car willingly choose public transit
But also:
> Most people choose what makes sense for them, myself included. I drive most of the time, but have no problem taking public transit when it makes sense.
I apologize for taking your word as literal. The first quote is what I was really responding to.
There is a middle ground, it just sounded like you didn't know it existed.
There is a major difference between Western Europe and the US: The former has a population density of 184 people per sq km, whereas in the continental US it's 43 per sq km. Moreover, the major cities in the US have more distance between them.
The result is that even if you increase the density in some US city, the people in the surrounding areas will still need cars, and then will come to the city in their cars because it's the only city within reasonable distance of them.
The subset of the US where that isn't the case is basically the New York Metro Area.
If you draw a 250 mile radius around Rotterdam, it contains Paris, London, Frankfurt and the entire countries of Belgium and Luxembourg. If you draw a 250 mile radius around Portland, Oregon, the only major city is Seattle some 175 miles away and mostly it contains a lot of trees. And then even though they're the sort of people who like mass transit and build it, the large majority of people there still don't use it.
You seem rather less informed on the topic than you think.
To start, as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_city will verify, the switch in the USA to car-centric cities began in the 1920s. By the 1930s, about half of American households had cars. And American cities were being reshaped by this. After the war, the automobile industry did conspire to remove public transit to improve profits. However this was on top of a giant car-centric housing boom, and already wide existing infrastructure changes. Which all contributed.
The American experience stands in stark contrast to Europe. In pre-war Europe, cars were only a luxury item for the rich. Germany's early success came in part because it was more mechanized than the rest of Europe. But even so, about 80% of all of Nazi German logistics was by horse. They were absolutely unprepared for what happened after the USA converted car manufacture over to tanks and airplanes. With the result that the USA quickly outproduced the rest of the planet combined. (Though, to correct a common American misconception, the most important military use of American equipment was by Soviet soldiers.)
After WW 2, Europe's manufacturing increased rapidly. And yes, cities did become more "car centric". Including Amsterdam. But even "car centric" Amsterdam was nowhere comparable to the average US city. By the time the 70s rolled around, car ownership was still well behind the USA. Yes, new construction was planned for cars, but there was a lot less of that than in the USA. And the core of various cities, including Amsterdam, was still built to the old scale.
The scale that the core of a city is built at, matters. Even in the USA it matters. The USA has many cities that were highly populated before cars. Particularly Manhattan. By and large, they remain walkable today.
But cities that were constructed almost entirely after cars, such as Los Angeles, are car-centric to an extent that simply never has existed anywhere in Europe. No, not even in the bad old days of "car centric" Amsterdam.
And so, I stand by my point. I'm someone who has visited multiple countries, and has lived in a variety of cities. I've lived both with and without a car for various stretches of my life.
Take any city in the world that is an example of a good place for living by mass transit and bicycling. At no point in its history was it anywhere near as car centric as the average US city. And that is true whether you compare to how car centric the US city is today, or to how car centric it was back when the other city had more cars.
So lay off on "car centric Amsterdam". It's an argument based on comparing apples and oranges. It was never even remotely comparable to the average US city.
I think we are talking about pretty much about the same phenomenon, but you are using the difference is the scale as a justification for its effects. I don't get why.
> And American cities were being reshaped by this.
It's one thing to have cities building infrastructure in their existing areas to make room for cars. It's another to have suburban sprawl of the post-war, where cities would grow exclusively by spreading to the outskirt and building single-zoning areas.
> The USA has many cities that were highly populated before cars. Particularly Manhattan.
And there were also many big, developed cities which had their downtowns destroyed in favor of highways. Manhattan being an island protected it from this fate, but lots of cities in the Midwest or Texas had walkable areas.
I see this attitude from far too many people who push for better cities. It’s not that it’s wrong, it’s that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how correct you are, and how good your reasoning is - being smug, self-righteous, and insulting does not convince people.
I badly want better urban design in the US, focused on walking, biking, and public transit - but we have to understand and deal with the fact that good people are raised in a very different environment, and that it truly is quite difficult in a great many places that people live to simply change your lifestyle to one without a car. You have to meet people where they are. Show them a better way, and be understanding when they resist and say it won’t work, because they have only known a different way.
I have seen many people who are receptive to these ideas, but have been so put off by the insulting attitude of many notable proponents (like NotJustBikes) that they are wary of engaging with it.
You are justified in your anger at the situation. I get angry all the time at the risk, pollution, expense, and lack of amenities that I must bear due to the car-centric design of America. Still, that does not make hostility an effective strategy. We will make change by showing a better way, not by denigrating and insulting.
I agree that the tone of arguments of many proponents is not helpful. That obscures the fact there are relatively easy things that can be copied from the Netherlands to make a city more walkable that are not expensive. Chiefly: start making a division between "streets" and "roads", where one is just for destination traffic with shops and houses, and the other is a through way to get from one neighborhood to another with as few traffic lights as possible.
People love to get rid of traffic along their house so it's easy to get buy-in from the public to convert their area to a neighborhood without through traffic, even when that means they have to navigate a few blocks to get in and out of their neighborhood. This results in more traffic pressure in the surrounding area, but that's not as bad as you think because you can remove a lot of traffic lights if there are fewer roads in and out of a neighborhood. Slowly build up to more and more of these areas.
If the only cars in a neighborhood street are from people who live there then traffic intensity is low enough that no bike lanes are needed there and kids can play in the street. Finally, if all that works, you can start stringing neighborhoods together with dedicated bike lanes, away from streets with cars. Bike lanes that are not part of a road are surprisingly cheap because road wear scales with the third power of vehicle weight so those rarely need resurfacing.
Whether having a car is necessary or not depends on where you live. Here in Northern Europe we literally can't reach my or my partner's parents with public transport, because they happen to live in the countryside. For us having a car is not a luxury, it's a necessity if our kids ever want to see their grandparents.
So yeah, making car ownership generally expensive is a bad idea, and would only make Europe's already expensive housing market worse. There are more fair and effective ways to make city centres car-free, and suburb-dwellers to pay their fair share for infrastructure.
Intercity buses would be nice, and perhaps a car pool among few friends could work. Renting a car however remains very impractical for any longer trip.
Still, I'm not sure what is so bad about owning a car in a small or medium-sized city like mine. Average age of a car in my country is almost 14 years, and rising. Very few people are buying new cars, and keeping the old ones around, using infrastructure already built isn't so bad. The population is barely growing and will soon fall, further reducing need for new car-centric infrastructure. I drive less than 8k kilometers a year.
It’s mind-boggling how quickly the “rent or buy” switches toward buying, especially if you’re willing to compare “rent car” with “buy a cheap used car.”
I just rented a car for a holiday. It was much more expensive then the cost of keeping my own car on the road, and took a whole lot of time to book including avoiding a number of ways any minor damage would cost thousands more.
That’s great for where you live, but why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? They don’t have four supermarkets in less than 150 meters. There are places where cars actually are a necessity.
> why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs?
My hostility is towards people who claim to prefer to live in the suburbs, but do not want to pay for the privilege.
Show me people that say "Yeah, I won't mind having higher property taxes, extra fees to keep my many cars in the garage and have to pay full price for the extended infrastructure (sewer, roads, water, electricity lines, etc) just so that I don't have to live among those poor city-dwellers" and I'll be totally fine with their choices.
Property tax eh? kind of depends on cost of the things that are paid for by property tax. Sometimes that'll be higher in urban and sometimes higher in rural.
I don't know why I should pay extra fees to keep my many cars on my property... that's why I have my property. I don't mind license fees, and I grumble but don't mind that they're higher for my PHEV even though I don't drive it much or plug it in. If I was parking on public right of way, it might make sense to charge me per car, but my cars don't use shared resources when they sit at home, and I can only drive one at a time.
Where can I live where I don't have to pay full price for extended infrastructure? That'd be great. Where I am, I have to pay my own way for my well and septic; if I wanted municipal of either, I'd have to pay for the build out to get it to my house, just like I did for muni fiber. The owners before me that had electricity hooked up must have paid the utility to extend it, and enhancements would be at my cost.
Is your lifestyle subsidized too? How do you know?
I suspect that even people with strong opinions have little understanding about infrastructure costs and who is subsidizing what. I’m unwilling to take this on faith - it seems like there need to be financial deep dives.
I live in the suburbs of NYC. All of NYC's drinking water is stored in our backyards. So much so that the NYPD patrols this area, 90 miles outside their geography.
The math has certainly not been done. There are no cities without suburbs. For food and water.
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell like this. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Your comment would be (mostly) fine without that bit.
> because of style of community they want to own their home in?
No, I do not care about their choices, provided they are willing to bear all costs from it. The problem is not living in the suburbs. The problem is affluent people that have their lifestyle subsidized by poorer people living close to the city center.
Also, it's virtually impossible to claim that people want to live like that in the US, because most places have zoning laws that simply forbid the emergence of any other alternative. Suburbs in Germany are smaller, less dense versions of the urban center, but they are not devoid of life. They are still walkable, they still have local shops, they do not make cars a requirement for everyone, kids do not need to be driven around anywhere, etc. You can bet that if more people in the US could come to visit they would rather live like that than in the traditional cul-de-sacs/picketed fence developments from American Suburbia.
You're living in Berlin, the city that is subsidized to the sum of 3.8bn Euros by the much more rural southern states. And yet somehow _they_ are the ones who don't want to pay their share?
Berlin is essentially a micro-/city-state within Germany. It doesn't have any rural area, but it is surrounded by Brandenburg which has large rural areas. "[M]uch more rural southern states" - Do you mean Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg? Those are some of the richest states in Germany due to their enormous manufacturing industry. AFAIK: The provincial capital cities of Munich and Stuttgart both have decent public transport.
Way to miss the point, or are you trying to strawman the discussion?
The argument is intra-municipalities, not intra-country. The argument is that people that live in the suburbs of a city end up costing more and paying less than the city-center counterparts. The richer people in the city do not pay proportionally to the cost they incur in the city's expenses, but when push comes to shove it's the poor people who are left with poor infrastructure, unmaintained roads, etc.
(As for the discussion regarding Berlin getting subsidies from the south: I can not argue there, but I am pretty sure that what I am paying in taxes is vastly more than what I am getting in benefits and public services. Just like I am pretty sure that the 1000€/month I am sending to TK is to cover the cost of others. There isn't much more than I am supposed to do, is there?)
Most places in the US the zoning restrictions are part of the problem. You can't build a small grocery to serve a neighborhood when its zoned residential.
Places that grew before cars, were built with walking distance separations. It wasn't possible to profit as a grocery by building miles away from the people.
The issue is that we don't tax externalities properly in the US. We heavily subsidize car usage and then make people pay to use the subway. The incentives encourage behavior that is bad on a global scale even if it makes sense for each individual.
I'm not here to defend the incredible subsidies for car-based travel, but public transit globally also gets lots of subsidies. Outside of a few of the highest density cities in the world (Seoul, Hongkong, Osaka, Tokyo), almost no public transit has more than 100% "fare box recovery" (no public subsidies required). Even in those cases, normally the national government pays for (or subsidizes) the initial build.
This seems like an odd example. Aren’t many forms of public transportation partially funded and subsidized via taxes? It doesn’t make them bad, but they aren’t self-sufficient either.
In my area (Washington DC), fares pay about 10% of the budget for the subway each year.
Why should those subsidies be expanded, yet any subsidies for cars (which certainly exist, but drivers pay for more than 10% of their vehicle costs) should be eliminated?
The “cars get subsidized” arguments almost always fail to take into account that the entire capital and maintenance cost of the vehicle is borne by the driver.
You have to do some pretty creative accounting to get it as subsidized as public transit (which isn’t to say PT shouldn’t be subsidized, mind you).
The battle for the suburbs is mostly lost, you need a car if you live there.
What the discussion should instead highlight is that with just moderate increases in population density you can escape the need for a car and it ends up being better for everyone. That mostly only applies to new development.
Heck, even if you just made cars second class in new suburbs you could see cheaper housing with equivalent land. Put in a shared parking garage for a suburb instead of putting a garage on everyone's home and all the sudden the amount of sqft needed just to get cars in and out gets massively reduced meaning more room for more homes and an easier argument to make for bus service.
No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
I’m not going to watch YouTube videos (I’m a text guy) but the Strong Towns blog is pretty good. I don’t think they’re the last word on this, because they’re often making general observations, and financial problems are often local.
For example, I know Oakland, CA has severe financial issues (looks like the school district might go bankrupt) but I wouldn’t generalize from that to all cities.
You are already grasping at straws if you refuse to see something that could quickly give you the information that challenges your preconceived notions. The video I linked to talks precisely about the study done by a consulting company showing how suburbs are net-negative to a city's budget and they do it for multiple cities across the country.
> Financial problems are local.
There might be differences in the particulars among cities, but they share a lot of common causes and one of them is that suburban sprawl is cheap to begin (acquiring and building on the land) but expensive to maintain.
There is no formal study. It's all handwaving by urbanists with an irrational hatred for people who don't want to live like them.
The lines are so blurry between consumption of local services and taxes paid that it's almost impossible to draw any conclusions that don't start from a biased premise.
Higher and lower density areas have a symbiotic relationship, and people like the parent poster like to pretend everything will be great if they cram as many people into an area as possible and ban everything they don't like it in, while ignoring that they need to get food and clean water from somewhere, need a place to dispose of their waste, and that most of their imported goods (and almost everything must be imported because they don't have the space locally to produce much of anything) will be delivered via a road system.
If the zoning laws in a place aren’t the same as the US/Canada, everything will look different. Here in Brazil I also walk 3 min. to the nearest market, public transport is quite accessible everywhere. Schools can also be nearby and walking distance — though Federal Universities have a tradition of being quite far away from the city center.
Now, if you live in a smaller town it’s a whole different story and I suppose it’s the same in Europe. I don’t see the need to own a car living in a capital in my State, but in smaller towns basically everybody has at least motorcycles.
- You don't pay for the increased costs in healthcare caused by air pollution or the amount of concrete needed to keep all those roads.
- Car owners are not taxed extra for the economic impact in social security due to the tens of thousands of people that die every year.
I could go on. There are countless other environmental and economic externalities that suburbanites are not being accounted for and they only get away with it because that's in the interests of the privileged elite.
There's more to this world than cities and suburbs. Ever visited actual countryside? Most of the the larger roads out there are necessary to deliver food and other goods to cities. When they have to exist anyway, it would seem incredibly stupid to tax private car ownership outside of cities more than necessary.
A lot of those roads could be train tracks instead, FWIW. "Most of the larger roads are necessary to deliver food to cities?" Not at all. The smaller roads leading to a hub? Absolutely. But roads have terrible throughput.
And as others have mentioned, just because something is necessary, doesn't mean we should subsidise it. Especially when rail and (contextually) river shipping exist and are often cheaper.
I would love to see a study that explores whether those taxes cover the negative externalities compared to other forms of transit, because that seems incredibly unlikely.
I've seen several different takes on that. They vary on how they value the externalities, and which components of the transit infrastructure they consider subsidies. For example, you could consider all infrastructure subsidies, or you could claim that basic 1+1 lane roads are essential infrastructure, while everything beyond that is subsidized.
The conclusions vary, except that they generally agree that driving in dense urban areas is heavily subsidized. And if you accept the roads as essential infrastructure claim, driving in rural areas is too heavily taxed.
for those of us not blessed enough to attend university for music, there are still a lot of options to practice and rehearse outside the home. speaking as a drummer, the last time i was reasonably able to play at home was growing up as a kid in a detached single family house. as an adult, i've always rented shared spaces with other musicians (in the US and in Europe).
there are a lot of facilities where you can either rent by the hour (including or excluding the instrument) or by the month (usually 100% self-furnished including some, but not all, instruments and equipment) and play as loud as you want.
most of these hourly spaces will provide a drum kit minus "breakables" (cymbals, snare drum and kick drum pedal) and a basic PA system for singers/keyboards etc. the facility is responsible for maintaining these things (YMMV; some places replaces drum heads often, other places you might end up with a broken cymbal stands or worse). often they'll also come with speaker cabinets for guitar and bass amps, and the guitarist or bassist will bring their own instrument, cables, effects pedals and often a combo amplifier or amplifier head, per requirement or personal preference. sometimes you can pay an additional fee to rent an instrument like a guitar or bass but this isn't guaranteed at all spaces and quality is usually not great.
i don't personally know much about how it works for brass players. not sure people are too excited to share those instruments that involve a lot of bodily fluids :) i imagine most horn players prefer to keep their own instruments. i know a lot of rehearsal facilities also provide storage for large instruments - you just retrieve your instrument when its time for rehearsal or for a gig, then return it to the storage facility.
the monthly option is usually called a "lockout" in US slang and a lot of times you go in on a unit with other musicians; for example, a full band will rent a room, or multiple bands; or a group of individuals who agree to keep a schedule for reserved access to the room. i've been in spaces that have up to 7 different full bands and time is precious, and others where the monthly cost was low enough that only one or two bands used the space.
My grandma lived in a farm, she used to go to the nearest city by bicycle almost every day.
This is not unreasonable to think it can be done again. The thing is we have made so much room for cars they have eaten all the space and are endangering everyone. But this can change.
I don't live in a place that has public transit or "walkability". It will never be able to afford that, the tax base isn't sufficient.
When the fuck-cars people start ranting, what they mean is that they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic. I do not look forward to becoming the termite people that they wish to become.
The luxury is living in a place where this is a possible lifestyle, and then thinking every one of 300 million people can live in such a place or make the place they live into such.
> they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic.
No, we want you simply to pay the full sticker price for all the things you are consuming and exploiting.
It's simple as that. Drop the pretense that you are actually carrying your own weight and that your lifestyle is sustainable. If you do just that and start paying for the privileges you have, we'll leave you in peace.
1. I don’t know how familiar you are with Suburban America, but it’s far from simply a place for affluent people. You do know people escape places like NYC because of the high cost of living right? What do you think an apartment in your average safe neighborhood in NYC vs. the average safe Jersey Suburb costs? And what kind of amenities do you think you get for that price? Now stretch that comparison to other suburbs of smaller cities and it’s a stark difference. Your description of the affluent suburbanite vs. the poor city dweller is reductive and untrue. Living in desirable American cities is very expensive. In actuality many people leave cities they love, because to have a similar lifestyle as they would in the cheaper suburbs would require them to be inordinately well off.
2. You can complain all you want but we live in a democracy. Your idea of “fairness” and “paying your share” would have to be voted on. And the populous would have to agree with your view of the world. Good luck with that.
3. Your view of a disjointed America where people are city folk or suburbanites is not how the country operates. People move about freely. You may live in the city and vacation “upstate” for a break. Or live in a suburb and commute into a city for work, paying city taxes, etc. It isn’t as disjointed as you presume.
> that channel references his family and kids in most videos (in that he and his partner moved to Amsterdam so his children could have the freedom to navigate safely without having to be driven around).
Then they are unlikely to be unbiased - someone who uproots and moves their family due to an issue they care about is almost never going to express any regret, no matter how bad things get.
GP here, my parent comment mentioned "This seems very different from the large anti-car movement in the Netherlands in the 1970s".
The videos show mostly the result of that movement. If one thinks that traffic in the US is ok and has no idea about how it is in the Netherlands, those videos show what's different.
That's a question for that person. I couldn't tell you why they think so. I'd guess the implication is that someone who's interested in the urban infrastructure of the Netherlands and how it compares to North America's might find it interesting.
Having said that, what a strange question. Do you only find it worthwhile to engage with unbiased content?
> Do you only find it worthwhile to engage with unbiased content?
Of course not, but there's a huge difference between:
1. Pointing someone at (for example) a church's website when you are trying to support an argument against pro-choice, and
2. Pointing someone at the relevant wikipedia page
Both are biased in some way, but one of them is so biased that it is effectively useless unless you are already on board and in agreement with the argument.
> Having said that, what a strange question.
It's only a strange question to the people who are already ideologically aligned in that direction.
>Both are biased in some way, but one of them is so biased that it is effectively useless unless you are already on board and in agreement with the argument.
And? If you do agree with the argument you will find the church's website useful. Honestly, what are you whining about? If you're not interested in watching a channel about how cars ruined cities then don't watch it. Not every recommendation any random person makes will appeal to you.
That aside, I don't agree with the statement. Someone pro-choice may very well find the church website interesting. Reading what the other side says is important, if nothing else so you're not caught on the back foot in an argument, but more importantly because you may one day realize you were wrong all along.
>It's only a strange question to the people who are already ideologically aligned in that direction.
No, it's a strange question regardless of who hears it. You already conceded that you don't only engage with unbiased content, so if anything that makes it even stranger. It's like you don't understand why people recommend things to each other.
? All opinions are biased by definition, that doesn’t mean they’re not worth listening to - especially when they’re well thought-out, well presented, and supported by data, which is the case here.
When drivers are the leading cause of dead children, AND when killing a kid with your car is considered to be a fault of the child (and their parents) and not the driver, it makes sense to think of the children indeed.
Yeah, we live on the backside of a circle with no through traffic and today I watched a teenager race around the circle going faster than 20mph for several laps. My driveway is sloped and balls roll into the road that my small children go after all the time. Its been a point of focus for me to convince them to check the road, stop, look both ways, ALWAYS, and make sure there are no cars.
Even if they dont clock it car, its my hope the driver sees them on the side while they pause to check. Them getting hit by a car in my own neighborhood is my biggest fear and also the most likely disaster that can probably befall them.
I also love transporting them in our van, so its just a very complicated issue. I wish our populace was more into walkable solution and more attentive at driving.
I'm talking about "Think of The Children™", for example falsely claiming that they're murdering children or asserting without evidence that anti-car policies would "stop the child murder".
But… they do. Policies that keep cars away from kids reduce the number of kids killed. And operating Large dangerous vehicles where kids are likely to be is wilful negligence, at best.
No they don't. That's as ridiculous as falsely claiming that peanuts murder children and that banning peanuts would "stop the child murder", or that bicycles murder children and that banning them would "stop the child murder". It's just disinformation and handwringing lies.
If your point is on the semantics regarding the word “murder”, I’ll concede the point (though I still think driving dangerously, looking at a phone, etc where there are people walking and cycling is up there with “well I was bird hunting in downtown manhattan, I didn’t -mean- to hit anybody with buckshot!”).
But measures that separate kids from cars seem to be why kids are only a fifth as likely to be killed walking (and only a quarter as likely to be killed cycling) in 2003 vs in 1985 in the Netherlands. Do you propose an alternate causality?
My point is on the lies and misinformation around the meanings of the words used, yes. I was going to apologize for the miscommunication, but I looked back on my comments and see that they are all very short and clear about that.
> But measures that separate kids from cars seem to be why kids are only a fifth as likely to be killed walking (and only a quarter as likely to be killed cycling) in 2003 vs in 1985 in the Netherlands. Do you propose an alternate causality?
I don't propose anything. As I said, I wasn't judging the merits of policies.
Since I looked, the paper you link appears to be a study of England and Wales. In that case I would propose there is probably not much direct causality between the improving British numbers from 1985 to 2003 and the anti-car movement and resulting policies in the Netherlands.
It's quite possible that similar "anti-car" efforts in Britain contributed somewhat, but the paper don't necessarily support the conclusion AFAIKS. Not least because the numbers show car commute distances for children has increased 70% over the period and walking and cycling have declined 19% and 58%, so by that metric Britain has moved in the pro-car and anti-cycling/pedestrian direction in terms of transporting children.
But child vehicle passenger fatalities per mile have also decreased enormously. Better and safer cars, roads, better training and regulation and enforcement around drivers (reported drink-driving accidents declined by about 4x over a similar period despite increasing car miles driven https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-the-war-on-drunk-drivin...) have certainly had a big impact and would have almost certainly contributed somewhat to pedestrian and cyclist deaths. Better cycling practices, better bikes, safety gear, reflectors, lights, etc., might have helped too. How to untangle all the variables? You probably can't with superficial numbers like these.
With all that said this is really going off topic because I have nothing to really argue about one way or the other with respect to policy. Making cycling safer and infrastructure that lets more people cycle would be great. It would be also great for advocates and lobbyists of all types used facts and rational arguments rather than appeals to emotion, disinformation, guilt tripping,and lies.
Similar comments probably apply to the Dutch data, and they don't conclude a causal relationship with anti-car initiatives either, but seem to speculate on a bunch of different things which are similar to what I said.
You do realize now that bringing up those statistics in the first place did not address what I wrote though, right? And that in fact I explicitly said that I wasn't commenting on the merits of policies? I'll assume good faith that you just unintentionally couldn't follow the conversation.
> I fail to see any guilt tripping or disinformation?
I don't know what your question is. If you are genuinely interested in discussing my point, please re-read the thread from the beginning and I would then be happy to respond to comments that actually address what I wrote.
Yeah that's what I thought too until recently, this being one such example from 50 years ago which I why I commented on it. I just found it funny that it's always been around, despite the dogma that it's a uniquely "conservative" thing.
I have no knowledge of what this Dutch effort was beyond the info in your link, but nothing suggests that the public outcry was go actually ban vehicles or disincentivize ownership and use with tactics such as with higher fees, reduced parking availability, which is what U.S. urban road safety advocates I see pushing for.
Alongside increased bike infrastructure funding, the Dutch effort certainly did involve disincentivizing car use by higher fees (both parking and ownership), reducing parking availability (and also non-parking car accessibility), and slowing down car speeds (speed bumps, cameras, narrowing roads, calming road design, reducing city speed limits to 19mph), and generally reducing car allocated space. It's typically done during scheduled road maintenance, where separated bike lakes are installed, often by converting the street parking space or turning a two way street into a one way (for cars) street or even banning car access.
I mean Amsterdam is kinda renown exactly for reducing parking availability, slow speed limits and generally human-first city planning nowadays.
Wasn't always like that either. In the 90s it was cars-first just like the OP likes nowadays.
It's definitely true that having only bicycle infrastructure doesn't really work for families though. It's a different story if you've got a cargo bike and public transport... But it's understandable that that's not even entering his mind considering the culture of the USA.
Agreed, I only know of a handfull families that manage with no nearby public transport using bicycle only. It is possible, I managed doing 50km for couple of months with a cargo bike and small kids, you adapt. I do not recommend that to anyone unless you really want to, it is just too cheap to own a couple of cars.
It's only cheap because they are heavily subsidized. And then we go back to a discussion about policy. If you remove all the subsidies or make car-owners pay for the externalities, things would quickly turn in favor for higher density, public transit, and AFAIK no game has put this into their game economics.
The forthcoming Car Park Capital[0] looks like an interesting reflection of your sentiment (but it's about planning cities to make them more car centric).
You are looking at the cost in your pocket, not the aggregate.
Add the cost of the gas needed to power all these cars, plus the cost of the land allocated solely for parking, plus the costs of the roads, plus the costs in healthcare associated with air pollution, plus the environmental cost of all the concrete and steel need to build and maintain the roads, etc.
It's not just "car ownership", it's "car-centric infrastructure" that is expensive.
Because car-based roads are so fucking noisy, we throw a ton of green space and front yards to mitigate it. Not to mention "sidewalks" are unnecessary when you can just walk in the centre of the street.
The size of a traditional road is about 6 metres wide or less (that's measured from the front wall of the building on one side, to the front wall of the building on the opposite side). In comparison, the same wall-to-wall measure of a car-centric suburban street comes out to, IIRC, 20-30 metres. That's 3-5x the cost in just land alone, let alone maintenance.
And yes, we will need some roads - about 20% or so, as arterial roads. But right now we're closer to 100%, and most of the throughput of arterial roads is tied up in one-occupant passenger vehicles rather than actually necessary cargo/tradie vehicles.
The public outcry was to ban cars - literally. They blocked streets, and did what they needed to to block drivers and vehicles. It's long enough ago that maybe the abrasiveness and confrontational nature of it is forgotten now - lots of big changes start out that way, but if successful the success almost drives the way the history is remembered more postively.
It looks to me like it was 100% a "think of the children" moment that often gets ridiculed. I can see the same inflection point in my country around the same time, when street and road design shifted to car orientated and car priority - Amsterdam being one of the notable exceptions but with a well documented fight.
> Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Buy a bakfiet cargo bike, there's models that can fit five kids under 7. Mine fits three.
Kids like them better and you get exercise. For the first time in my life I have a BMI of around 20 without having to waste time at the gym, the drop off, pick up, shopping, and work commute add up to an hour and a half of medium intensity cardio.
Every other parent my age in the neighborhood looks five years away from a heart attack. I'm fitter than I was in my 20s.
>There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
There are over 1,000 children killed in the US annually by cars. This is after we restrain them like Hannibal Lecter while in cars and don't let them out of our houses so they don't get run over.
That's before we talk about the child obesity epidemic, social media abuse, and on and on.
If given the choice between keeping cars or letting polio loose on the land you'd be hard pressed to figure out which will kill and disable more kids.
I'd love to get a cargo bike and use it for kid transport.
I would be worried about collision safety though, I am not going to persuade everyone in my neighborhood to stop using cars in a hurry and there are not bike routes between me and school, library, shops, ...
This is the classic urbanist anti-bike tragedy of the commons that is referenced often.
People use cars because they are (rightly) concerned about safety. People avoid using bikes because there are so many cars. It’s very hard to ban cars or restrict car usage because it seems like no one wants to use bikes, but it’s a self-reinforcing system.
And the losers that neither (gross generalization here) the bike people or the car people care about are the pedestrians. We are lucky to live in an urban environment where our family of 5 usually walks everywhere. Crossing the street with children is an unwelcome adventure. But you are absolutely right I would ride an ebike with the kids if it did not seem so dangerous.
Yeah, I think I’ve seen a statistic that getting hit by a car going 30km/hr, you’re probably going to be fine. If you get hit by a car going 50km/hr, you are most likely going to die. I can’t think of any reason to allow cars to travel over 30km/hour in urbanized areas, outside of designated arterial roads.
I assume by "getting safer" you mean that they're getting safer than they used to be, which, I suppose I agree. I don't know what you therefore think is "happening already", though. I see no indication that autonomous cars will ever be safer than human drivers.
I have an Urban Arrow since the beginning of last February and live in Minneapolis. I’ve used it about 5 days a week for getting my pre-k kid and newborn to the places we need to be, since we bought it. Each day it’s between 6 and 26 miles. That upper end comes from busy days, probably once or twice a month I get above 20 miles in a single day. Definitely not doing that on the coldest days. Studded tires really help.
One unexpected benefit is that the muddy/wet boots don’t muss up the bike like they would if I was loading them into a car. Just drips out the bottom grate.
Lots of other small benefits but not so related to winter.
You think that people don't ride bikes in the winter in Finland or Sweden? Riding in the snow with "snow tyres" for your bike is normal. There are whole YouTube videos about the phenom.
It is quite good in comparison to many US cities. There is a fairly good distribution of segregated bike pathways through the city, and despite the skepticism in this thread - those pathways do get plowed quickly in the winter. There are fewer people on the paths in winter of course, but winter commuting comfort mostly comes down to wearing appropriate clothing.
Off topic, but my brain did a double take there. Didn't know that the Dutch word "bakfiets" (bike with a box) was anglicized to "bakfiet". Cool. Usually it's us who borrow foreign words from all over
They must have meant the brand Bakfiets. 'Cargo bike' is what they're known as, in my experience in the UK anyway, and 'bakfiets cargo bike' would be redundant if not meaning the brand.
At least here in my city in the US Midwest, I hear mostly bakfiets to refer to bikes with a front box, to distinguish from cargo bikes which have the rear rack that supports one or two kids on the back.
It's not anglicized, just misspelled. ;) And awkward to pluralize (bakfietsen? bakfietses?)
The fit parents and delighted kids I frequently see riding bakfeitsen in Amsterdam are always so happy and healthy and safe that I am envious I wasn't born here myself.
They effortlessly ride through busy city streets, wander through parks, and trek across the countryside, all with well maintained bike paths, and gather together to have picnics and play, which you can't do with an SUV. Also dogs love riding in them, and they're great for shopping and hauling too.
An electric bakfiets with an Enviolo continuous stepless automatic shifting hub is ideal and safe for kids, because you don't have to worry about shifting gears or even preemptively shift down before you stop at an intersection or unexpected obstacle.
It can shift when you're stopped and even while you're accelerating, and it automatically and smoothly shifts up as you accelerate. You just dial in your preferred cadence and it does the rest. So you can concentrate on the traffic and kids and scenery instead of your gears, even in stop-and-go city traffic.
I love the one on my normal eBike, it's a joy to ride, and I'll never go back. I have no affiliation, it's just a fantastic piece of technology. They're a Dutch company, so many Dutch brands of bike, bakfiets, and delivery bikes use them, but they're available worldwide.
They have special heavy duty bakfiets motors and hubs, and smooth quiet indestructible carbon fiber belt drives instead of clackety chains and derailleurs. Silent, reliable, maintenance free, and greaseless!
Enviolo fully automatic stepless transmission for e-bikes:
>Enviolo Automatic is a “set and forget” system that adjusts to you – set your preferred pace and you’re ready to go. Focus your journey in bustling cities, relaxed countryside rides, or when travelling with kids.
Spend 1 month with your kids in a place where cars are actually not needed, only then you can actually understand what you are denying your kids.
And if you want to know right away, think about who can drive your car, as supposed being able to walk or ride somewhere. You're limiting their own personal freedom by forcing them to have you always needed to go somewhere.
NYC is subpar too. The elevators never work, most stations don’t have escalators either, it’s filthy, taking your kids on the train will give them permanent hearing damage and large swaths of the city are completely unserviced.
Your feeling is the result of NYC and the entire USA being generally dysfunctional, not an inherent truth.
I don’t really want my kids have that much personal freedom because they’re kids. I live very suburban and my kids could walk to one of the neighborhood parks (2-3 minutes) or to a friends house but I don’t see them needing more than that.
"Americans love their cars" isn't so much about the cars as it is about the lack of good alternatives. Other countries have great public transportation and good bike lanes and all that... in addition to car ownership. So people can get the best of both worlds. It's only a zero sum game if you want it to be one.
As an NYC parent I strongly disagree. But I guess it depends what you optimize for.
I do wish the subway had more elevators. But once you move beyond those early days with a stroller… I have six playground within a twenty minute walk, a giant park a few minutes away. There’s a zoo nearby, the beach (and aquarium) is less than 45 mins on the subway, there are countless museums in the city… all in all its rich in child friendly activities and child-friendly methods of reaching them.
(I’m not there with my kids yet but from talking to older parents: an understated benefit of the city is that kids are able to exercise independence much more easily. They’ll be taking the subway to and from high school, if they want to meet a friend they can just… go. Rather than rely on a parent driving them everywhere)
In a well-designed city, you don't get onto the subway with a stroller during peak hour, because all amenities that your young children need are reachable in 15 minutes on foot (or <5 minutes by bike).
It certainly depends what you call child-hostile and I have no statistics on this.
What I do know though, is that one of the denser area in Europe is the famous triangle Rotterdam-Amsterdam-Utrecht, which can hardly be described as child-hostile.
I traveled with my kid when he was less than 1 year old in Tokyo. What is the issue with the stroller in the subway? There are always signs of how to get where you need to go using elevators.
While Tokyo has one of the worst fertility rates, it's not like the rest of Japan is doing particularly well. Also, I was staying in Azabujuban and I was surprised by the amount of kids I saw there.
> Nope. It's universal. The denser the city, the more child-hostile it is.
> Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
This is a glaring example of hunting for data that supports a preexisting belief, rather than basing beliefs on empirical data.
To point out how absurd this logic is, consider that it fails to consider the fertility rate of Japan as a whole outside urban areas, as well as failing to account for the many other extremely dense cities outside Japan that do have very high fertility rates.
Bigger the city, more expensive housing becomes. That is the real reason for low fertility rates in big cities. People who want children have to be either rich, or move further away.
Nope. I'm anti-urbanist, so I actually analyzed the data :)
The correlation is undeniable for any developed country, especially the US. Developing countries are a bit different they are only now starting the second demographic transition.
> To point out how absurd this logic is, consider that it fails to consider the fertility rate of Japan as a whole outside urban areas, as well as failing to account for the many other extremely dense cities outside Japan that do have very high fertility rates.
I love SimTower to death, but unfortunately being a Win16-based game, it's kind of hard to get working on modern computers. For some reason, trying to run it in Wine works for a couple of minutes before it causes my window manager to spaz out and crash, and I haven't decided what avenue I'd try to get it working well again.
On the other hand, with all the poking I've done at it over the years, I think I now have the most complete knowledge of the save file format for anyone who doesn't have access to the source code.
You're misreading those stats. The Census doesn't define "city", it defines "urban" vs. "rural".
My "city" of 5K is considered "urban" according to the 2020 census. There are nearly zero services in this "city", only a couple of restaurants, the largest employer is the school district, and it's surrounded by farms and mountain forests. It takes 15 minutes by car to get to the next town over on a two lane highway.
If you want to get to any real city, you're looking at a 30-45 minute drive at highway/freeway speeds.
So yes, there may be more individuals in "urban" areas, but not all "urban" areas are functionally urban. My "urban city" per the 2020 census is no LA, Austin, or Portland.
I mean 200 million people in the US live in the top 50 metro areas. Sure there's a lot of small cities out there but they don't account for much population.
Where I live the temperature swings from -40 to over 100F with very high humidity every year.
Bicycling with little kids is just not practical for a lot of it, and the nearest bus stop is a four hour walk (12 miles).
Do large cities and suburban neighborhoods deserve public transportation? Sure. Is that a universal answer? No. Not even close. There are farm fields out here larger than many towns. Roads, vehicles, and fast on demand transportation are a necessity for the geographic super majority of the US.
>Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars"
In other words: I was okay with demanding change when it didn't inconvenience me, but now that I get to benefit from economic policy that heavily subsidize my lifestyle I rather keep the status quo.
The sad thing is that you _CAN_ have a leafy suburb without the roar of internal combustion and 8 lane stroads everywhere. Planners in the US just refuse to build them.
This morning the four of us biked to the grocery store (we loaded the groceries in the bakfiets). The kids bike to their daycare. We bike to the train when we feel like a day out.
I can't fathom trying to raise kids somewhere we need to use a car to do anything.
My biggest fear about cars is that one might kill my kid. This leads to impossing all sorts of play and travel restrictions on her that I wouldn't have to if there were fewer cars and more bikes. (Bikes which kids can ride independently to their friends' houses from a single-digit age, by the way, which I would allow her to do if she weren't sharing the streets with cars.)
Maybe the problem is that the leafy suburb you moved to is car-dependent? It doesn't have to be built that way, that's a design choice. It's possible to build a low density suburb that kids can bike through safely, for example: https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w
Suburb doesn't mean car constrained. I grew up in the suburbs and rode my bike and skateboard just about everywhere from the time I was 13 to the time I could drive.
There usually aren't any meaningful destinations (like shops / a park / a mall) within a suburb you can reach in a reasonable amount of time, except a friend if the live close.
American suburbs feature poorly interconnected residential-only areas that sprawl endlessly. You can easily be a ten minute walk from a friend (through yards and across fences, not over a walking path) but a ten or fifteen minute drive away due to the Byzantine road layout.
Commercial zones that have groceries, restaurants, shops, and entertainment are almost always several kilometers away. You could technically bike there, but there are rarely bike lanes. And due to serving the needs of a large, low-density area, you’d have to bike on multi-lane high-speed thoroughfares which is far less safe than being able to use small local streets. Where there are sidewalks, they often end abruptly and don’t actually connect to anywhere or anything.
Not OP, but I think SimCity 2000 has a certain charm to it, but if I had to pick my favorite from the series, I'd say SimCity 4 is the way to go. It's available on GOG.
I live in a very suburban neighborhood in Arizona and we have 2 neighborhood parks within a 2-3 minute walk. There are 2-3 more parks in the 5-10 minute range.
There is a 10 minute walk to 3 grocery stores, a bar, many fast food restaurants, tons of medical offices, etc.
All of my friends and family who live in different suburbs have similar amounts of services with a short walk as well.
That's hardly universal. I recently moved from inside the city of Buffalo, NY to a suburb of Albany, NY. I'm now significantly closer to non-gas-station shops than I was in the city. There are a lot of very poorly planned cities in the US, many suburbs are newer & much less car-centric despite being lower density.
Addressing the hypothetical person you’re describing: car infrastructure may solve some needs, but it is in direct conflict with other needs. Give every adult a guaranteed parking space just at home and at work, and the physical space required for that alone is an unbelievable double-digit percentage of the city area. Cities are so valuable because they pack a lot of amenities and markets (including your family’s schools and workplaces) in a compact area. Place everything significantly further apart, add more concrete and noise, and you’ve lost on all fronts: safety, charm and efficiency.
> car infrastructure may solve some needs, but it is in direct conflict with other needs
True for all infrastructure choices
> the physical space required for that alone is an unbelievable double-digit percentage of the city area
True, and I do miss big city life, but all the major cities have been captured by anti-development fanatics of a particular political bent vehemently opposed to me, people like me, and our priorities.
Conclusion: double-garage areas work best for my mix of requirements.
You can have two SUVs, a heated garage, and also ride a bike or take the train to work. You can get a reasonable second hand bike for under $100 here and probably in most of the US, it's not like you need to sacrifice the garage heating to afford one.
I get that density and banning cars are hostile to driving an SUV everywhere, but bike infrastructure and public transport aren't. If anything they take traffic off the road and speed up the morning commute of drivers, so they enable a better experience for drivers too.
this comment cracks me up because i’m the suburban kid who moved to NYC, loved it, had a kid, and continue to tease my parents for “ruining” my childhood.
Being trapped in your suburban neighborhood without access to a car is a special kind of hell. During the week mom and dad were too tired to drive me anywhere after work, unless it was urgent. Long commutes. Weekends were fun - sometimes.
There were SOME really awesome things about suburbia though. Snow days were the best.
this sounds more like “i grew up in a horrible neighborhood”, which can happen easily in the suburbs too! Sometimes drug use is even more common amongst youngsters in suburbs - because there’s “nothing to do”.
I grew up in midtown manhattan and went to private school. I grew up in the best neighborhood. The point was the free roaming and access to mass transit gave me access to all of the "bad neighborhoods".
My opinion is that parenting is supposed to play a major role here. Educating your child on the dangers of _why_ we avoid certain neighborhoods, _why_ we don’t do drugs, and surrounding them with good role models early is so so important.
I guess what i’m saying is, if you parents locked you up in a safe cage (like I grew up - in a “safe” suburb without access to much), you might have grown up to be a naive 18 year old. And then you’d maybe go off to college and end up with the wrong crowd doing drugs and other stuff anyway. Completely isolating a teenager from the world doesn’t teach them how to navigate it.
The pedo’s following you home is creepy as hell though. No comment on that. Damn.
Again, just my opinion. We can agree to disagree. Have a great day. :)
FWIW, I’m not in NYC, but I’m in general a “ban the cars” type and have a wife and kid. We’re intentionally raising the kid in the city because we believe it’s a richer cultural environment than suburbs, and also because we both grew up in cities in our respective countries.
Do we really need to do this with each comment adding another rule and another reply from someone breaking it?
I live in Berlin with my wife and 2 kids (who were born lived their whole lives in Berlin). We all bike and take transit. Neither me nor my wife even have a driver's license. We're doing fine. We know plenty of other families with multiple kids in the same situation.
ok, if we’re hypothetically thinking of someone that wants to have lots of sex / kids, then yes! A larger home makes certain things _easier_ for sure. No denying that!
But it may not be much “better” long term because you’ll be buying mini van(s), paying for gas, car insurance, higher property taxes, etc. All that extra cost adds up and could easily be put toward upgrading to a larger apartment instead.
And remember, 3+ kids is FAR from the norm in 2025. It’s not 1970s…so this is a really pointless argument.
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
And I'm not sure how many folks are about banning cars (completely), as opposed to designing things so that (two) cars go from being mandatory to optional.
Yeah, it’s crazy the number of people who scream about taking their cars from their cold, dead hands when people talk about adding some bike lanes, rolling out more public transit, or removing small amounts of parking for more human-centered uses.
People somehow perceive all of these things as trying to ban cars instead of promoting other forms of transportation.
There's some sunk cost fallacy at play here. If you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a house in a remote suburb where your social activities are mostly playdates scheduled 3 months in advance, you don't want to be reminded that there was another path you could have taken.
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.
But more importantly: car-dependent suburbs are an absolutely miserable place to grow up as a child if you're not wealthy enough to have one non-working parent and/or a nanny (or both). Being dependent on someone else to enable your entire social life until you turn 16 is a torturous enough experience that I'm not surprised that the first generation to have universal access to social media as teenagers has become the first generation to use social media to organize a teenage-driven movement for public transit.
> To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.
Similar for the YouTube channel NotJustBikes, who has gone into great detail about the advantages of raising kids in a city planned around pedestrian and cyclist usage, and not in a suburban sprawl.
Well, duh. That's because I don't know any. And probably neither do you.
And sure, humans are extremely diverse and adaptable, so you'll be able to find examples of any physically and logistically possible behavior. Eventually.
But statistically? We both know that I'm right. The Netherlands (the bike heaven) has the total fertility rate of around 1.5 And even within the country itself, Amsterdam (North Holland province) is at the second-to-last place from the bottom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Netherland... And the highest fertility rates are in Flevoland and Zeeland that are about 3-4 times less dense.
Then how do you explain that Amsterdam, which is in Noord-Holland, is by far the largest city in Noord-Holland, and is far more dense and car hostile than the rest of Noord-Holland, actually has a higher TFR (1.43) than the rest of Noord-Holland (1.29 total, so lower for Noord-Holland ex-Amsterdam)?
I barely know them. Not because they don't like bikes, but because in my country fewer than 1 in 10 households with children had 3 children or more.
But my friend that has four children brings her kids to the school that's in front of my apartment, that promotes bike riding to school, and they even have a morning bike route that kids alone or with parents can join.
This is condescending and wildly inaccurate. My children are exactly the reason we live car-free and chose a town where you can bike safely - anything less is effectively condemning them to live in an outdoor prison until you can drive.
But, this is why we live in the Netherlands. If all you've seen is the US I can see how you might not understand that not being car-dependent is actually better for kids.
I live in a very walkable small town with lots of young families also biking and walking with their young children, as I am, and couldn’t disagree with you more about cars. It’s so nice to walk to the market instead of loading and unloading a car seat, to have the option of walking or taking a short bus ride to school, to walk to parks and playgrounds. I had the opposite reaction you did when I actually lived in a place that was kinda similar to what Europeans describe.
Actually, even for families with kids, the safer option is still bikes and low-car environments. Fewer cars means less air pollution, less noise, and less sedentary behavior for both kids and adults.
The data we have shows that the presence of cars is the main source of risk on the street, not the act of biking itself. Neighborhoods that design around walking and biking tend to have fewer serious accidents, not more.
If we're talking about optimizing for kids, then banning individual car use in residential neighborhoods would be the ideal. I know it’s not politically feasible in most of the US right now, but it’s worth keeping in mind that cars are the danger.
Just also as a note, you can create suburbs pretty easily where bikes use paths or whatever. I live in a suburb where I can ride 15 kms to work without riding on roads. The subsidy for bikes would actually be really low.
You should look at Cost benefit analysis, there was one made on Copenhagen. [1] Bicycle infrastructure usually gets you 6x-12x on the invested amount, getting a 1.2 CBA is ok, 2 is amazing.
Bicycle infrastructure is often destroyed by those other investments and that is usually not counted as a con. But it is just too cheap to build bicycle infrastructure to be interesting.
You can get quite a bit of advancements by having “one side” try to optimize for the other - if done honestly, you can get a “best of both worlds” as they learn what the others want (and need).
Interesting. To provide a different experience, I live in NYC with kids and I find it great here. Daycare/Kindergarten is at most 4 blocks away, grocery stores are less than a block away, it takes me 10 minutes to get to the office on the train (1/2/3). I still bike to the office often. If we need a car there is a rental less than a block away, but in practice we rent maybe once a year. Today there was an open street on Columbus Ave and it was lovely to meet co-workers with their kids and let them play there. To be fair, I wasn't born here even if I'm a citizen, so I guess I wouldn't be considered "American".
I wasn't born here either (but I am the person you are replying to)
I'll give you some examples of the kinds of things I easily did with my two bigger kids (5 and 3 years old)
- woke up on a nice Sunday morning and decided to go for a woodsy hike 20 min drive away.
- threw our kayak on the roof and drove out to paddle it on the south shore, on a whim.
- threw bikes into the bike rack for a long ride along a Greenway.
- dropped by Grandma's house easily.
- went to the Adirondacks for a week and brought our bikes and paddle board along with a bunch of other stuff.
And not directly care related but car enabled - I just opened the backyard door and they were playing there by themselves while I kept an eye from the kitchen.
Nice. Those activities remind me when I used to visit my dad countryside (he lived in Tuscany). He's legally blind though, and we managed anyway. Not sure why the last bit would be car enabled. I was in East Hamptons a few weeks ago and the kids would play outside while we stayed in the living room/kitchen. We just had to be careful about the pool.
I think you and I can both recognize that the east Hamptons are a car oriented place even if you got there from the city on the jitney.
The point I was making w that one is - lower density is what allows us a back yard while higher density is what supports walk-ability and transit. So maybe I can make the point in a cheekier way - your Hamptons weekend is closer to my every-day life than to your city life :)
> I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
It’s funny because as a parent there’s nothing I want less than living somewhere I have to drive everywhere. I can walk 5 minutes to the nearest park, take a bus or a tram to be in a different one in 10 minutes, and I can’t fathom having to take our car for that kind of daily activity.
I just had a kid and moved to DK from the US. I was so skeptical of the infant (and often mother!) in cart on front of bike that you see everywhere, but it's such a life-changer versus the ordeal of carseats etc. TLDR totally agreed.
I'd love if more people on HN could read your post. As someone who's spent more than half of his life overseas in an ultra high density city, I wouldn't trade my quiet American suburb by a glamorous city with perfect public transportation anywhere in the world. It was great when I was single and cared about meeting girls and partying, but no more.
With respect, despite writing “anywhere in the world”, I doubt you have experienced the places in the world that might change your opinion.
I can think of multiple European towns which offer a great quality of life together with (thanks to safe cycling and great public transport) the ability to live largely or entirely car-free, if that’s your choice.
Europe is nice. But I would never want to live in European cities unless I was a gazillionaire and could afford a large, modern property with a garage for a good car (which wouldn't be used as often but still used sometimes).
With that much money, anyone could be fine anywhere. The European lifestyle wouldn't be bad during retirement, but still not ideal because I would want the peace of a smaller town anyway.
I’m not referring to large cities; I’m thinking of places in the (say) 100-200k size range. Small enough to cycle around for all of your regular needs, and just large enough to have plenty of life, culture, and community. And in such places you can certainly live very well, far below a gazillionaire’s income :)
I'll stick to my 5K town at the encased in the feet of a mountain range, nestled in between two rivers, and within driving distance of the largest employers in the world.
It's quiet. No matter how you spin a 100-200K sized city, it will never be this quiet.
It sounds nice but too much work for relatively little gain. One of those situations where you trade the devil you know by the devil you don't. I find the US lifestyle great in its own unique away. But Europe could be nice too... Sounds like something I'd do if I could teleport my stuff, stay a few years for the experience, then teleport back.
When I was 20 I couldn’t imagine living anywhere other than in the heart of a city. I loved the energy and all the things to do.
When I had kids, the suburbs suddenly made a lot of sense. Better schools, tons of neighborhood sports, lots of kids around, very dog friendly, etc…
Now that I’m an empty nester, I’d love to move further out of the city. Get more space around me, have a smaller home but a bigger workshop, sauna, and garden.
I can imagine that when I hit my 70’s or 80’s, I might want to be back in the city again closer to other people, healthcare, and other services that will be a bigger part of my life.
There really isn’t one ideal setup for me in all parts of my life.
I've lived in NYC without a car for the last decade, and I don't have kids, and even granting that, I still have grown to understand why Americans love cars.
Getting groceries is a particular pain in the ass; I either need to go to the (very limited) grocery selections in my neighborhood with a cart, or lug the cart up and down the stairs of the subway, or be ok with only taking as much as I'm able carry with my hands in a few bags. I could get delivery, and I do that fairly often, but there are things that I prefer to get in person, like fruits or vegetables.
There's also just large things you cannot realistically take on a train, like large sheets of plywood at Home Depot. Again, you can of course get this stuff delivered, but then you run the risk of them sending you the worst, most warped piece of wood available, which has happened to me multiple times.
I've grown to sympathize with most Americans as a result.
Robo taxis might change lots of things. I think I would be a lot more comfortable letting my ten year old use a Waymo to get to grandma’s house than a city bus. It’s door-to-door and you don’t have to worry about some weirdo across the aisle being inappropriate.
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Seems very rare that people describe their families in here so I wouldn’t go to that conclusion. I didn’t even know this page had a “bio” section. Anyway, seems like a strawman to me.
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
That's because the infrastructure doesn't exist in lots of the US, either it never existed or it got ripped out during the car boom phase.
Here in a suburb of Munich (Germany), almost everything one needs in life - all four large supermarket chains, a veterinarian, a hardware store, daycare and school for children - is walkable in less than half an hour, or 5-10 minutes with a bike.
Our city replaced some train tracks with high quality separated bike streets (no cars allowed, obviously). Biking five kilometers each way with only three street crossings is perfectly doable, even with small children on their own bikes.
I live in Tokyo and have kids. Both cycling and transit are essential to most parents lives here. It is not that these are incompatible with family life, it’s that as it is implemented and maintained in the USA (read: badly), it is incompatible.
An example that’s minor for young singles but major for parents: train stations here pretty much all have elevators and they almost always are working. This alone changes the game.
There's another phase we forget about. If I could choose, I'd like to grow up in a giant forest arcology and go hang out with my friends like it's a giant vertical mall with lots of places to go get lost.
When I finally got access to grocery delivery to my door, I could see how it all will work. Carrying things for one person is fine. It's carrying groceries for a household for a week where things break down. Even putting all that on an elevator would be really unwieldy compared to unloading from the garage.
Self-driving and the evolution of early-life education will play a big role in simplifying life without the parents needing to ferry the kids around five days a week.
Delivery makes sense for another reason: delivery services could have mechanisms that don't make sense for individual people to own, such as dollies or carts to get things from a vehicle to your door. (Due to the current over-reliance on gig-style delivery people using their own vehicles, rather than dedicated employees with specialized tools, this often doesn't happen today, but it should.)
In general, it makes a huge amount of sense for a specialized employee with specialized tooling to pick up groceries for many people and deliver them; the net result is less total person-hours spent shopping, less vehicle miles driven, and less overall labor.
Nope. Just more selfish choices. Resources are finite. The further we can move away from cars, THE better for kids. Less risk of them being run over by a 7 foot tall Dodge Ram, more chances for independence because actually going places doesn't require a car.
This isn't an attack pal but I love that we have a generation of young men that are willing to sell all of their principles and buy into the suburbanite cult just right after, "getting it" after starting a family. I can appreciate that this is, "how it goes" but it creates a political class of people that are more concerned about their family's well-being than the well-being of society as a whole. Rinse and repeat over a few generations and this is a big part of why the United States has stagnated culturally.
Stated with love out of concern for our, "whole societal family" which includes you and yours.
Coming from Spain it was always a difficult game to see as a simulation: What do you mean, commercial zones? What in the world it this low density residential? It was basically impossible to try to make a city like the one I lived in.
Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.
It was so weird to me too. The idea of laying down zones for purposes was completely different from the way I imagined my city was built, considering businesses and residences coexist not merely next to each other, but often one on top of the other, even in relatively low density areas. I would have imagined that you'd start from some basic service to attract settlers and then add infrastructure as the population grows, while the inhabitants figure out the land use on their own, with uses changing over time with the ebb and flow of the economy.
It's a different historical setting, but the Anno games work kind of like that. The resulting towns look more like something you'd expect as a European with markets, churches, taverns, theaters and things like this in the town's center and agriculture + industry on the outskirts.
I thought they made cities like that in SimCity out of technological limitations of the software. When I saw US cities for the first time, decades later, it clicked.
Unfortunately, the transport model in SC2K is broken, and by that, you have to design your transport network to work for the game, rather than design it as you would wish to do so.
Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile.
So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions.
As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work.
You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do.
I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.
I think I found your problem..., trying to take a game too seriously.
I've played thousands of hours of SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4 and I treat them as what they are, incredibly fun city building sandboxes with illusory and believable but flawed simulations under the hood.
>Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder.
>Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”
DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course
Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.
"Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.
>There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design.
>Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.
RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods
>Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience.
>Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.
If you want you can even make a completely disconnected city and bypass most traffic issues all together because of how supply and demand is fulfilled across the map.
Industrial development only requires a single road connected residential tile to grow off the full city's industrial demand. The same goes for Commercial. Residential will fully develop with just a single commercial tile on its road network.
It is broken in a realistic sense definitely, but it's also why I'll always play it regardless of which realistic transportation city game i'm also playing. I could never abstractly brush-in a city like I can in SC2k.
Funny enough, cities skylines, a much more modern game, had the exact same thing (at least at release). Simply disconnecting the residential areas removed their traffic altogether but left everything else working normally
I still have my SC2K floppy disks. Probably full of errors now, and no way to read them anyways, but a nice little keepsake from a time we kept physical “save icons”.
Will Wright gave postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and previewed an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims). SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse (The Sims) was what he was working on next.
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)
Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.
He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.
This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.
> A subway line should be buildable within one political term.
That used to be the case maybe 50 years ago, when we had the first network built in Munich.
The problem is, since then a loooooot of stuff was built underground. Not just more and more tunnels, but also so many subterranean lines for power, POTS, internet... and a lot of what was built 50 years ago was built by literally ripping open a street, excavating tunnel space, building a roof of concrete and backfilling everything with soil. You simply can do this exactly once and you need a wide enough street to do this. Once all these "cheap and easy" routes are built over, it becomes a multi-billion-dollar project as you have to make sure you don't endanger the buildings on top - in Cologne, that cost the lives of two people and destroyed a good portion of the City Archives [1].
> The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet.
People should not be forced to move, at all. Incentivizing movement, okay, but forcing people around like we do now (mostly, by not having any kind of modern jobs in rural areas) has a lot of nasty side effects - not everyone can move, so you get resentment building up against those that did move (eventually culminating in the "these librul cities turn our kids gay!!!" bullshit and, subsequently, the massive urban-rural political disconnect), and a lot of old people in rural areas end up having no one to take care of them in old(er) age, and young people in urban areas don't have kids because they don't have family to support them in raising said children.
To me, the clunky and annoying UI of Sim City 2000 is part of the charm of it.
Is it dated? Yep, but it's intuitive enough for nine-year-old tombert to have figured it out ok, and to me part of the fun is trying to use the UI quickly enough to put out fires and the like.
It could just rose-tinted glasses on my end, very likely honestly, but I still find the entire experience to be pretty fun. I liked Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4, and they are arguably better games, but for me Sim City 2000 hit the right balance of "easy" and "complicated" that I find myself most drawn to. I will load up Sim City 2000 about once a year off of my GOG purchase, and still thoroughly enjoy it, and find myself wasting way more hours than I budgeted for it.
I remember being terribly confused by the lack of options for a good while, before somehow finally discovering that some buttons you had to hold for more options.
Discoverability aside, it made the UI nicely compact while being easy enough to access, so the city could fill most of the screen instead.
Yeah, honestly I have no idea how I figured out the "click and hold" thing. I don't think I read it in a manual, I might have just been messing around and finding it by accident.
> I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens.
I am considering the morality of future mods, where the Sim City masses, Frog in Frogger, and characters like Ulfric Stormcloak and Paarthurnax in Skyrim, are replaced with individual persistent self-aware world-aware in-game reinforcement models. Entirely replacing game-designed behaviors (programmed reflex, caricature, or intricate) with spontaneous situation processing, needs and decisions.
Strange that this could credibly happen this decade.
Science fiction has long considered conundrums around robot rights. But the crux of the moral issues will be relevant regardless whether self-aware models have physical/3D or digital/abstract environments.
I think language is not a good prime modality for self-aware assistants. By being trained to deeply mimic us, they (already, but not yet problematically) absorb views on their identity and survival that are not at all compatible with what we will do with them.
Beating SimCity 2000 was one of my favorite gaming moments in my life.
If you haven't seen it and think it's weird to beat a city game; if you fill the entire board with Arcologies, they all become rockets and take off into space. What a thrilling science-fictional way to end the experience. Loved it.
It speaks to the quality of the SimCity games that they offer something for all ages. I also changed my perspective on a few violent scenes in games when I had a child, I could no longer stomach scenes such as No Russian (iykyk), which I had no problem at all as a teen.
yeh when playing cities skyline i am always traffic managing it seems to be my biggest job to always have 0 traffic in my cities im guessing it boils down to the fact i hate traffic
... How well does that work? Asking because my SC3K runs always ended up being boring cases of "yes, we sell landfill space to the surrounding 4 cities, and if people want education they're going to have to go to a library and learn to read themselves, and we're obviously too broke to improve things."
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.
First, I had a similar feeling coming back to SimCity 4. Even a just a few years ago, I tried to optimize for maximum density and size - kinda like NYC where I lived.
Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids.
Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
This seems very different from the large anti-car movement in the Netherlands in the 1970s (which eventually led to massive investments in bike infrastructure and car restrictions in the cities).
There was significant parent involvement, touting the memorable slogan "Stop de Kindermoord" ("Stop the Child Murder").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_transport_in_the_Netherla...
There's a youtube channel named @NotJustBikes which mostly talks about how bike-friendly the Netherlands are and compares it to the USA. It's worth watching a couple of those videos.
And, unlike the grandparent-comment’s assertions, that channel references his family and kids in most videos (in that he and his partner moved to Amsterdam so his children could have the freedom to navigate safely without having to be driven around).
My mother lives in suburban Massachusetts. She always said that she never imagined how it was possible for me to live with two small kids without a car in Berlin.
She came to visit for one month. After the first week she was already comfortably going around with the Ubahn to pick up the kids at school. I have 4 supermarkets less than 150m away from me, so we would walk to do groceries every other day. I spend ~80€/month with taxi rides (for the occasional trip to meet someone in a less convenient place), which is less than what she pays in car insurance alone, not even counting the cost of gas.
At the end of the trip, she got it. Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury.
> Having a car is not a necessity. It should be seen (and taxed) as a luxury
It is unfortunately a necessity in many parts of America where public transportation is lacking or nonexistent.
And making it a "luxury" just further stratifies our society into different, non-interacting economic classes. When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others.
As someone who grew up in abject poverty in a very rural area and was homeless and on completely on my own by 16, I have already seen how this plays out. The trajectory of my life was majorly affected by a lack of a car or adequate public transportation. I have since had to make choices about where I live in order to minimize car use in order to align with my own philosophy around transportation, but it comes at great cost in America when such walkable cities are so desirable that cost of living shoots through the roof due to demand. And conversely, poorer areas often lack walkability or sufficient and accessible public transportation.
Berlin does not have the same problems as America, a sprawling empire in decline.
> When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others.
I'll never forget one of my last lectures from my high-school History class teacher. She said "People talk about societies in terms of two classes: the kings and the plebs, the haves and have-nots, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. I hope you managed to learn that throughout all of history, what we have is actually three different forces - priests or monks in Ancient times, or the merchants during the Renaissance, land owners in the US - and that it's this third class that is crucial in determining the course of History. Every time they aligned with the elites there was no change in the status quo, and every time a revolution happened was because they in the middle shifted their support to the other side."
I'm saying this for one simple reason: the way to fix this problem is not by pretending that car ownership isn't a luxury, but by de-stigmatizing public transport. I can bet you that if political forces shifted and started putting pressure against car-ownership, you would quickly see a swing from the middle class in support for better public transit, mixed-use zoning, YIMBY-ism, etc.
"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation"
> de-stigmatizing public transport
I don't avoid it because of "stigma" but lived experience where it takes 2x as long to get anywhere and I'm far more likely to get assaulted by some rando while minding my own business or having to deal with someone else's bodily fluids or public intoxication.
But I loved public transport back in places and times where I felt safer.
Are you campaigning with your city council to favor more/better public transit options? Are you discussing with your neighbors about changing zoning laws so that small business and shops can be located closer to you?
> Are you campaigning with your city council to favor more/better public transit options?
Why would I do this? It's just not possible for public transit to provide equal quality of service to a private vehicle unless I lived in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, which I do not (though I do live in a major metropolitan area).
On top of that, my area has spent tens of billions to expand the subway system, to little effect and with many, many delays and cost increases that indicate that the local government is not capable of successfully managing a large scale infrastructure project.
> Are you discussing with your neighbors about changing zoning laws so that small business and shops can be located closer to you?
I already live in a pretty walkable area and things are already trending towards making things even more walkable, so no I'm not because it's not needed.
I feel like you just skipped over half of the problem keeping people from using the public transport that does exist.
No, I did not. I understand that right now you might prefer to use car because you can not rely on public transit and you don't feel safe.
My question is the sense of "are you doing anything to change this reality, or are you just going to accept that now that you have a car you see no point in advocating better public transit for your community?"
> you don't feel safe.
I cited lived experience, not feelings, and it's hard to see how expanding transport more is going to fix that when they don't care for what we have now.
> it's hard to see how expanding transport more is going to fix that when they don't care for what we have now.
Improvements in public transport could be made simply by having more frequent buses on a route, for example. Or longer hours of operation. Or (in the cities that have them) getting streetcars to be properly isolated from the cars. Sometimes it can be as simple as having the bus stops properly illuminated so that people feel more safe waiting for the bus at night.
Any of these improvements can make a big difference in ridership numbers, and any increase in public transit adoption is better for everyone. More people using public transport means less cars on the road and less traffic for those who still depend on a car.
To go back to the original point: I'm hoping you realize that what I'm trying to do is that we are exactly part of the pendulum that my History teacher was talking about. If you wish to live in a less car-centric society and if you wish that more people had access to fair, safe and affordable public transit, then it's up to people like you to push for this change.
You're arguing with people talking about how things are currently by talking about how things could be or should be and how people should change how things are.
That can be a great topic on its own, but it's not the same topic others are discussing.
And unless I missed it, you didn't say "let's switch the topic", you just went off in your own direction.
Of course they did.
I've never met an online public transit advocate who didn't come off as a zealot, lecturing the uninformed masses about the obvious benefits that will come from joining them while dismissing any criticism or skepticism as ignorance.
And I have never meet an American that was not fat.
Then you haven't met many Americans.
Unfortunately, I encounter many, many, many more public transit zealots online (and in person, though much less frequently) than I need to hear parrot the same talking points from fuckcars and NotJustBikes about the joys of living in an efficiency apartment and using a cargo bike to get my kids to and from their 3 different schools in the snow or blistering heat while ranting about vague "externalities" without ever providing actual numbers.
How much do you weigth?
Having a <house> is not a necessity. It should be taxed as a luxury.
Having a <hot shower> is not a necessity. It should be taxed as a luxury.
... Well this line of reasoning isn't very good.
Whether a car is a luxury or not, really depends on where you live.
European cities started on a scale designed around the limitations of human walking. Even before they built out mass transit systems, living without a car was doable. Adding mass transit is icing on the cake. If you live in such an environment, it is easy to make the case that cars are a luxury. That's because other people's daily experience is that it is a luxury. As your mother discovered when she visited you.
Most American cities are built on a scale designed around human driving. Even where they built out mass transit systems, between scale and density they can't work as well as European ones. (Fun fact. Across the USA, busses are on average so underutilized that we'd save gas by making everyone drive instead.) Underinvestment in mass transit is icing on the cake.
This was your mother's daily experience in suburban Massachusetts. And even though she sees how you can live without a car, it's pretty safe to bet that she doesn't think that she can live where she does without a car.
Which means that, in America, saying that cars are luxuries is a poor argument. It directly contradicts everyone's personal experience. Yes, this is fixable. But fixing it literally requires tearing cities down, then rebuilding them on a scale where walking makes sense as a major mode of transportation. We can't even manage the political will to build enough housing to keep people off the streets. Any lifestyle change requiring this level of rebuilding is a nonstarter. No matter how many lectures we get from Europeans.
> Most American cities are built on a scale designed around human driving.
That's absolutely not true. It only became true in the post-war when there was a push for suburban sprawl, lobbied by GM and all the auto industry [0]
> it's pretty safe to bet that she doesn't think that she can live where she does without a car.
"Where there is a will, there is a way", right? The discussion is not even if she can go by without a car, but whether she would want it.
> We can't even manage the political will to build enough housing to keep people off the streets.
Ok, but then don't go around trying to rationalize your bad choices and poor capacity for civic organization. [1]
Don't go around saying "I lived in NYC and I thought I could live without a car, but after I had kids I realized they are not so bad", and please don't go around saying "it can't be done".
Amsterdam and Rotterdam were once also car-centric cities which managed to turn themselves around in less than a generation. There is no inherit limitation in the US that forbids this change to happen. There is no amount of American Exceptionalism that can prevent people from clamoring change. Maybe it won't be done in the US, because people are lazy and not willing to sacrifice their own convenience for some communal benefit, but it's super annoying to always get in these discussions when people try to hide their preferences on external circumstances. North American cities are they way they are by choice.
[0]: How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo)
[1]: The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ)
You guys are talking past each other.
One of you is pointing out that cars are a necessity for some in the current reality. The other is pointing out that we could change that reality like other places have.
You are both right.
I am very against the continuation of car primacy in urban design, but I live in a place where that is the current reality, so for all practical reasons I need at least one car in my household. I advocate for the changes so that isn't true and see that it is possible to live otherwise, but it isn't reality right now, so I own a car. Me owning a car isn't to "rationalize [my] bad choices and poor capacity for civic organization." I do it because the housing that I can afford, in the country that I live in is in an area where that is necessary. In the meantime I advocate for better transit and other options, but I am not omnipotent, and even those with tremendous amounts of power cannot make these changes happen quickly given the 75+ years of infrastructure and urban design.
You are tremendously mean-spirited and un-empathetic in proclaiming that those that don't agree with you are 'lazy' and 'not willing to sacrifice their own convenience for some communal benefit'.
Try understanding where people are coming from. Many believe as strongly as you do, and can provide just as many backing youtube videos, that cars are an unalloyed good. If you come at them this aggressively telling them that the places they live are just plain wrong, you will not convince them of anything.
As an aside, the Dutch aren't nearly as car free as you are presenting. They are in the top 25% for per capita car ownership worldwide, and have higher rates of car ownership rates than Denmark, Sweden, Greece and Croatia which isn't even all of the countries in Europe with lower rates of car ownership. Hell, they have more than double the rate of car ownership of Saudi Arabia, a country that subsidizes fuel prices to encourage car use.
I agree.
But I'm also pointing to the fact that this is easier to change in some places than others. It doesn't just take will to change. It takes more will in some places than others. Because you have to fight against the layout and built up infrastructure of the area.
Conversely, the other person is pointing to how friendly Amsterdam is to not having a car. The fact that lots of people there have cars doesn't take away from the fact that it is easy to live there and not have a car. Just like the number of TVs in America don't take away from the fact that it is easy to live in America and not own a TV. (Case in point. I live in America, and haven't owned a TV in 20 years.)
> You guys are talking past each other.
Agreed.
> but it isn't reality right now, so I own a car.
This means that you at least consider a possibility of living without a car. You at least understand that there is nothing about the US making it impossible to work towards car independence. I have no reason to argue with you or people who share this sentiment.
I do get upset at the people who think that this situation is static and that it can not be changed, ever. But I get more upset at the people who complain at the North American reality only when they are directly suffering from it, and act like when the systemic problem doesn't exist anymore just because they manage to "solve the issue" for themselves.
> As an aside, the Dutch aren't nearly as car free as you are presenting.
They have high rates of car ownership, but they are not car dependent. Even the people who have to drive for work use cars only for longer distance trips, and walk/bike/use public transport for shorter ones. In Greece, much like in the US, people assume that you have to have a car to do anything.
The Dutch have a lot of cars because they are rich.
The ugly truth (for public transit zealots like the parent poster) is that there is no amount of investment that can make a person with the ability to afford a car willingly choose public transit, unless they live and work in a place with extremely high population density.
They keep ranting about how cars are a luxury, and they are right, but basically want to change human nature to suit their preferences IMO.
I’m wealthy and live in the Netherlands. I find cars kind of annoying. I bike and take the train for 99% of trips, and use occasional hourly car rental otherwise.
Running costs of a car sure buy a lot of rentals or even taxi rides if you do the math. I noticed that a long ago.
Good for you. You're in the minority, both in your own country and globally.
Indeed, I would love for more people to be able to enjoy this flexibility!
Dutch person with a car here: Like many people, I own one because they can be very useful to transport heavy stuff, and there are several low density areas where it's a pain to get by train, like visiting family in nearby Belgium. But for most of my trips biking or public transport is just quicker. I drive maybe twice a month.
That's a bit too far in the other direction.
I know plenty of people who choose transit even though they own a car.
My in-laws live in Rotterdam, and cycle and transit for most day to day stuff. But they also own and use a car, when appropriate (they do have big box stores and suburbs in - gasp - bike crazy Rotterdam).
People will use transit if it is pleasant, fast, and affordable. When I lived in Vancouver, you would be nuts to commute by car if there was a train line near you. It was cheaper and faster to take transit, especially during the working hours.
But as you stated, most people who can afford a car do end up with one, even if it isn't their primary mode of transit.
> That's a bit too far in the other direction.
I don't think so, but partially because the person I responded to is off the charts in the anti-car direction.
> I know plenty of people who choose transit even though they own a car.
Most people choose what makes sense for them, myself included. I drive most of the time, but have no problem taking public transit when it makes sense.
> People will use transit if it is pleasant, fast, and affordable. When I lived in Vancouver, you would be nuts to commute by car if there was a train line near you. It was cheaper and faster to take transit, especially during the working hours.
The issue is that there are very few places where it's cheaper and faster to take public transit.
The solutions most transit advocates come up with involve kneecapping car usage so public transit can compete or insisting people live at density levels most find unacceptable, neither of which are practically feasible.
> there is no amount of investment that can make a person with the ability to afford a car willingly choose public transit
But also:
> Most people choose what makes sense for them, myself included. I drive most of the time, but have no problem taking public transit when it makes sense.
I apologize for taking your word as literal. The first quote is what I was really responding to.
There is a middle ground, it just sounded like you didn't know it existed.
There is a major difference between Western Europe and the US: The former has a population density of 184 people per sq km, whereas in the continental US it's 43 per sq km. Moreover, the major cities in the US have more distance between them.
The result is that even if you increase the density in some US city, the people in the surrounding areas will still need cars, and then will come to the city in their cars because it's the only city within reasonable distance of them.
The subset of the US where that isn't the case is basically the New York Metro Area.
If you draw a 250 mile radius around Rotterdam, it contains Paris, London, Frankfurt and the entire countries of Belgium and Luxembourg. If you draw a 250 mile radius around Portland, Oregon, the only major city is Seattle some 175 miles away and mostly it contains a lot of trees. And then even though they're the sort of people who like mass transit and build it, the large majority of people there still don't use it.
You seem rather less informed on the topic than you think.
To start, as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_city will verify, the switch in the USA to car-centric cities began in the 1920s. By the 1930s, about half of American households had cars. And American cities were being reshaped by this. After the war, the automobile industry did conspire to remove public transit to improve profits. However this was on top of a giant car-centric housing boom, and already wide existing infrastructure changes. Which all contributed.
The American experience stands in stark contrast to Europe. In pre-war Europe, cars were only a luxury item for the rich. Germany's early success came in part because it was more mechanized than the rest of Europe. But even so, about 80% of all of Nazi German logistics was by horse. They were absolutely unprepared for what happened after the USA converted car manufacture over to tanks and airplanes. With the result that the USA quickly outproduced the rest of the planet combined. (Though, to correct a common American misconception, the most important military use of American equipment was by Soviet soldiers.)
After WW 2, Europe's manufacturing increased rapidly. And yes, cities did become more "car centric". Including Amsterdam. But even "car centric" Amsterdam was nowhere comparable to the average US city. By the time the 70s rolled around, car ownership was still well behind the USA. Yes, new construction was planned for cars, but there was a lot less of that than in the USA. And the core of various cities, including Amsterdam, was still built to the old scale.
The scale that the core of a city is built at, matters. Even in the USA it matters. The USA has many cities that were highly populated before cars. Particularly Manhattan. By and large, they remain walkable today.
But cities that were constructed almost entirely after cars, such as Los Angeles, are car-centric to an extent that simply never has existed anywhere in Europe. No, not even in the bad old days of "car centric" Amsterdam.
And so, I stand by my point. I'm someone who has visited multiple countries, and has lived in a variety of cities. I've lived both with and without a car for various stretches of my life.
Take any city in the world that is an example of a good place for living by mass transit and bicycling. At no point in its history was it anywhere near as car centric as the average US city. And that is true whether you compare to how car centric the US city is today, or to how car centric it was back when the other city had more cars.
So lay off on "car centric Amsterdam". It's an argument based on comparing apples and oranges. It was never even remotely comparable to the average US city.
I think we are talking about pretty much about the same phenomenon, but you are using the difference is the scale as a justification for its effects. I don't get why.
> And American cities were being reshaped by this.
It's one thing to have cities building infrastructure in their existing areas to make room for cars. It's another to have suburban sprawl of the post-war, where cities would grow exclusively by spreading to the outskirt and building single-zoning areas.
> The USA has many cities that were highly populated before cars. Particularly Manhattan.
And there were also many big, developed cities which had their downtowns destroyed in favor of highways. Manhattan being an island protected it from this fate, but lots of cities in the Midwest or Texas had walkable areas.
I see this attitude from far too many people who push for better cities. It’s not that it’s wrong, it’s that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how correct you are, and how good your reasoning is - being smug, self-righteous, and insulting does not convince people.
I badly want better urban design in the US, focused on walking, biking, and public transit - but we have to understand and deal with the fact that good people are raised in a very different environment, and that it truly is quite difficult in a great many places that people live to simply change your lifestyle to one without a car. You have to meet people where they are. Show them a better way, and be understanding when they resist and say it won’t work, because they have only known a different way.
I have seen many people who are receptive to these ideas, but have been so put off by the insulting attitude of many notable proponents (like NotJustBikes) that they are wary of engaging with it.
You are justified in your anger at the situation. I get angry all the time at the risk, pollution, expense, and lack of amenities that I must bear due to the car-centric design of America. Still, that does not make hostility an effective strategy. We will make change by showing a better way, not by denigrating and insulting.
I agree that the tone of arguments of many proponents is not helpful. That obscures the fact there are relatively easy things that can be copied from the Netherlands to make a city more walkable that are not expensive. Chiefly: start making a division between "streets" and "roads", where one is just for destination traffic with shops and houses, and the other is a through way to get from one neighborhood to another with as few traffic lights as possible.
People love to get rid of traffic along their house so it's easy to get buy-in from the public to convert their area to a neighborhood without through traffic, even when that means they have to navigate a few blocks to get in and out of their neighborhood. This results in more traffic pressure in the surrounding area, but that's not as bad as you think because you can remove a lot of traffic lights if there are fewer roads in and out of a neighborhood. Slowly build up to more and more of these areas.
If the only cars in a neighborhood street are from people who live there then traffic intensity is low enough that no bike lanes are needed there and kids can play in the street. Finally, if all that works, you can start stringing neighborhoods together with dedicated bike lanes, away from streets with cars. Bike lanes that are not part of a road are surprisingly cheap because road wear scales with the third power of vehicle weight so those rarely need resurfacing.
Whether having a car is necessary or not depends on where you live. Here in Northern Europe we literally can't reach my or my partner's parents with public transport, because they happen to live in the countryside. For us having a car is not a luxury, it's a necessity if our kids ever want to see their grandparents.
So yeah, making car ownership generally expensive is a bad idea, and would only make Europe's already expensive housing market worse. There are more fair and effective ways to make city centres car-free, and suburb-dwellers to pay their fair share for infrastructure.
> For us having a car is not a luxury, it's a necessity if our kids ever want to see their grandparents.
This is absolutely no reason to justify owning a car.
People can still rent a car, people can still do car pools, people can still can have intercity buses.
Intercity buses would be nice, and perhaps a car pool among few friends could work. Renting a car however remains very impractical for any longer trip.
Still, I'm not sure what is so bad about owning a car in a small or medium-sized city like mine. Average age of a car in my country is almost 14 years, and rising. Very few people are buying new cars, and keeping the old ones around, using infrastructure already built isn't so bad. The population is barely growing and will soon fall, further reducing need for new car-centric infrastructure. I drive less than 8k kilometers a year.
It’s mind-boggling how quickly the “rent or buy” switches toward buying, especially if you’re willing to compare “rent car” with “buy a cheap used car.”
And once you have it …
People who say "just rent a car" don't do that.
I just rented a car for a holiday. It was much more expensive then the cost of keeping my own car on the road, and took a whole lot of time to book including avoiding a number of ways any minor damage would cost thousands more.
I used gocar extensively when I lived in Ireland..
That’s great for where you live, but why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs? They don’t have four supermarkets in less than 150 meters. There are places where cars actually are a necessity.
Seems like empathy should work both ways?
> why did you end with such intolerance for people who live in the suburbs?
My hostility is towards people who claim to prefer to live in the suburbs, but do not want to pay for the privilege.
Show me people that say "Yeah, I won't mind having higher property taxes, extra fees to keep my many cars in the garage and have to pay full price for the extended infrastructure (sewer, roads, water, electricity lines, etc) just so that I don't have to live among those poor city-dwellers" and I'll be totally fine with their choices.
Some of those don't make that much sense...
Property tax eh? kind of depends on cost of the things that are paid for by property tax. Sometimes that'll be higher in urban and sometimes higher in rural.
I don't know why I should pay extra fees to keep my many cars on my property... that's why I have my property. I don't mind license fees, and I grumble but don't mind that they're higher for my PHEV even though I don't drive it much or plug it in. If I was parking on public right of way, it might make sense to charge me per car, but my cars don't use shared resources when they sit at home, and I can only drive one at a time.
Where can I live where I don't have to pay full price for extended infrastructure? That'd be great. Where I am, I have to pay my own way for my well and septic; if I wanted municipal of either, I'd have to pay for the build out to get it to my house, just like I did for muni fiber. The owners before me that had electricity hooked up must have paid the utility to extend it, and enhancements would be at my cost.
Is your lifestyle subsidized too? How do you know?
I suspect that even people with strong opinions have little understanding about infrastructure costs and who is subsidizing what. I’m unwilling to take this on faith - it seems like there need to be financial deep dives.
[flagged]
I live in the suburbs of NYC. All of NYC's drinking water is stored in our backyards. So much so that the NYPD patrols this area, 90 miles outside their geography.
The math has certainly not been done. There are no cities without suburbs. For food and water.
[flagged]
> Your rhetoric sounds fascist.
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell like this. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Your comment would be (mostly) fine without that bit.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: we've had to ask you this several times already:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403432 (June 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41830571 (Oct 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710557 (Oct 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40852424 (July 2024)
> because of style of community they want to own their home in?
No, I do not care about their choices, provided they are willing to bear all costs from it. The problem is not living in the suburbs. The problem is affluent people that have their lifestyle subsidized by poorer people living close to the city center.
Also, it's virtually impossible to claim that people want to live like that in the US, because most places have zoning laws that simply forbid the emergence of any other alternative. Suburbs in Germany are smaller, less dense versions of the urban center, but they are not devoid of life. They are still walkable, they still have local shops, they do not make cars a requirement for everyone, kids do not need to be driven around anywhere, etc. You can bet that if more people in the US could come to visit they would rather live like that than in the traditional cul-de-sacs/picketed fence developments from American Suburbia.
Aren't those zoning laws created by people elected by the residents?
"Aren't those laws being lobbied by corporations who only fund the politicians that promise to keep things in their favor?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo
What's stopping people from voting for "cyclist Joe" who promises to transform the city into new Amsterdam (no, not NYC :-) or new Berlin?
> What's stopping people from voting for "cyclist Joe"
The corporations who are lobbying and funding the campaign of "Trucker Bob" and "Soccer Mom Susan".
Nevertheless I thought that elections were free.
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The term "jaywalking" was invented by car companies in a political campaign to reframe the car deaths problem as the fault of pedestrians.
You're conflating "the cause is unpopular" with "the cause organically became unpopular".
You're living in Berlin, the city that is subsidized to the sum of 3.8bn Euros by the much more rural southern states. And yet somehow _they_ are the ones who don't want to pay their share?
Berlin does things to people.
Berlin is essentially a micro-/city-state within Germany. It doesn't have any rural area, but it is surrounded by Brandenburg which has large rural areas. "[M]uch more rural southern states" - Do you mean Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg? Those are some of the richest states in Germany due to their enormous manufacturing industry. AFAIK: The provincial capital cities of Munich and Stuttgart both have decent public transport.
Way to miss the point, or are you trying to strawman the discussion?
The argument is intra-municipalities, not intra-country. The argument is that people that live in the suburbs of a city end up costing more and paying less than the city-center counterparts. The richer people in the city do not pay proportionally to the cost they incur in the city's expenses, but when push comes to shove it's the poor people who are left with poor infrastructure, unmaintained roads, etc.
(As for the discussion regarding Berlin getting subsidies from the south: I can not argue there, but I am pretty sure that what I am paying in taxes is vastly more than what I am getting in benefits and public services. Just like I am pretty sure that the 1000€/month I am sending to TK is to cover the cost of others. There isn't much more than I am supposed to do, is there?)
Most places in the US the zoning restrictions are part of the problem. You can't build a small grocery to serve a neighborhood when its zoned residential.
Places that grew before cars, were built with walking distance separations. It wasn't possible to profit as a grocery by building miles away from the people.
The issue is that we don't tax externalities properly in the US. We heavily subsidize car usage and then make people pay to use the subway. The incentives encourage behavior that is bad on a global scale even if it makes sense for each individual.
I'm not here to defend the incredible subsidies for car-based travel, but public transit globally also gets lots of subsidies. Outside of a few of the highest density cities in the world (Seoul, Hongkong, Osaka, Tokyo), almost no public transit has more than 100% "fare box recovery" (no public subsidies required). Even in those cases, normally the national government pays for (or subsidizes) the initial build.
This seems like an odd example. Aren’t many forms of public transportation partially funded and subsidized via taxes? It doesn’t make them bad, but they aren’t self-sufficient either.
In my area (Washington DC), fares pay about 10% of the budget for the subway each year.
Why should those subsidies be expanded, yet any subsidies for cars (which certainly exist, but drivers pay for more than 10% of their vehicle costs) should be eliminated?
The “cars get subsidized” arguments almost always fail to take into account that the entire capital and maintenance cost of the vehicle is borne by the driver.
You have to do some pretty creative accounting to get it as subsidized as public transit (which isn’t to say PT shouldn’t be subsidized, mind you).
The battle for the suburbs is mostly lost, you need a car if you live there.
What the discussion should instead highlight is that with just moderate increases in population density you can escape the need for a car and it ends up being better for everyone. That mostly only applies to new development.
Heck, even if you just made cars second class in new suburbs you could see cheaper housing with equivalent land. Put in a shared parking garage for a suburb instead of putting a garage on everyone's home and all the sudden the amount of sqft needed just to get cars in and out gets massively reduced meaning more room for more homes and an easier argument to make for bus service.
Where do you see a lack of empathy?
Because people in suburbs are subsidized at the cost of and prioritized over everybody else.
How do you know? Seems like cities have expensive infrastructure too?
No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
The whole series of videos from Strong Towns are good, you should take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
I’m not going to watch YouTube videos (I’m a text guy) but the Strong Towns blog is pretty good. I don’t think they’re the last word on this, because they’re often making general observations, and financial problems are often local.
For example, I know Oakland, CA has severe financial issues (looks like the school district might go bankrupt) but I wouldn’t generalize from that to all cities.
You are already grasping at straws if you refuse to see something that could quickly give you the information that challenges your preconceived notions. The video I linked to talks precisely about the study done by a consulting company showing how suburbs are net-negative to a city's budget and they do it for multiple cities across the country.
> Financial problems are local.
There might be differences in the particulars among cities, but they share a lot of common causes and one of them is that suburban sprawl is cheap to begin (acquiring and building on the land) but expensive to maintain.
Could you link to the study? It sounds interesting.
There is no formal study. It's all handwaving by urbanists with an irrational hatred for people who don't want to live like them.
The lines are so blurry between consumption of local services and taxes paid that it's almost impossible to draw any conclusions that don't start from a biased premise.
Higher and lower density areas have a symbiotic relationship, and people like the parent poster like to pretend everything will be great if they cram as many people into an area as possible and ban everything they don't like it in, while ignoring that they need to get food and clean water from somewhere, need a place to dispose of their waste, and that most of their imported goods (and almost everything must be imported because they don't have the space locally to produce much of anything) will be delivered via a road system.
I don't know if there is any published study. The video is relaying the work from https://www.urbanthree.com/services/
You seriously point people to one of the most biased and obnoxious sources for public transit info and expect people to accept his conclusions?
The first minute is nothing but conjecture and personal opinion full of misinformation, and it just continues from there.
Strong Towns is a good source, but they don't make or support most of the claims in this video because they have no basis in fact.
If the zoning laws in a place aren’t the same as the US/Canada, everything will look different. Here in Brazil I also walk 3 min. to the nearest market, public transport is quite accessible everywhere. Schools can also be nearby and walking distance — though Federal Universities have a tradition of being quite far away from the city center.
Now, if you live in a smaller town it’s a whole different story and I suppose it’s the same in Europe. I don’t see the need to own a car living in a capital in my State, but in smaller towns basically everybody has at least motorcycles.
Your choices make the car not a necessity.
I made different choices, and I am being taxed for those. But what I don't get is the hostility towards people who make this choice?
I choose to not live in a place with supermarkets within 150m. When I look outside I see the edge of my property and then I see untouched nature.
I pay for that, in land cost, and in fuel cost because I live (by choice) further away from everybody.
> I made different choices, and I am being taxed for those.
No, you aren't.
- Suburbanites are being subsidized by city-dwellers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI&t=19s
- The gas for your car is heavily subsidized.
- You don't pay for the increased costs in healthcare caused by air pollution or the amount of concrete needed to keep all those roads.
- Car owners are not taxed extra for the economic impact in social security due to the tens of thousands of people that die every year.
I could go on. There are countless other environmental and economic externalities that suburbanites are not being accounted for and they only get away with it because that's in the interests of the privileged elite.
There's more to this world than cities and suburbs. Ever visited actual countryside? Most of the the larger roads out there are necessary to deliver food and other goods to cities. When they have to exist anyway, it would seem incredibly stupid to tax private car ownership outside of cities more than necessary.
The amount of people living in the countryside compared to the rest of the population is so small that it is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
A lot of those roads could be train tracks instead, FWIW. "Most of the larger roads are necessary to deliver food to cities?" Not at all. The smaller roads leading to a hub? Absolutely. But roads have terrible throughput.
And as others have mentioned, just because something is necessary, doesn't mean we should subsidise it. Especially when rail and (contextually) river shipping exist and are often cheaper.
> The gas for your car is heavily subsidized
Maybe in US. In Europe this is not the case. On the contrary gas is heavily taxed.
I would love to see a study that explores whether those taxes cover the negative externalities compared to other forms of transit, because that seems incredibly unlikely.
I've seen several different takes on that. They vary on how they value the externalities, and which components of the transit infrastructure they consider subsidies. For example, you could consider all infrastructure subsidies, or you could claim that basic 1+1 lane roads are essential infrastructure, while everything beyond that is subsidized.
The conclusions vary, except that they generally agree that driving in dense urban areas is heavily subsidized. And if you accept the roads as essential infrastructure claim, driving in rural areas is too heavily taxed.
Gas is the worst example of a subsidy - a better example would be the mandatory parking built everywhere, which is usually free.
You don't pay for the externalities of using a car. Nobody does. That's why people are hostile towards cars.
Dead people and their friends and family certainly do.
How does someone in Berlin practice tuba or drums? (Serious question, no shade intended.)
In most cases the music schools have instruments, so you keep can your own at home, but I have seen plenty of teenagers carrying cellos in the ubahn.
for those of us not blessed enough to attend university for music, there are still a lot of options to practice and rehearse outside the home. speaking as a drummer, the last time i was reasonably able to play at home was growing up as a kid in a detached single family house. as an adult, i've always rented shared spaces with other musicians (in the US and in Europe).
there are a lot of facilities where you can either rent by the hour (including or excluding the instrument) or by the month (usually 100% self-furnished including some, but not all, instruments and equipment) and play as loud as you want.
most of these hourly spaces will provide a drum kit minus "breakables" (cymbals, snare drum and kick drum pedal) and a basic PA system for singers/keyboards etc. the facility is responsible for maintaining these things (YMMV; some places replaces drum heads often, other places you might end up with a broken cymbal stands or worse). often they'll also come with speaker cabinets for guitar and bass amps, and the guitarist or bassist will bring their own instrument, cables, effects pedals and often a combo amplifier or amplifier head, per requirement or personal preference. sometimes you can pay an additional fee to rent an instrument like a guitar or bass but this isn't guaranteed at all spaces and quality is usually not great.
i don't personally know much about how it works for brass players. not sure people are too excited to share those instruments that involve a lot of bodily fluids :) i imagine most horn players prefer to keep their own instruments. i know a lot of rehearsal facilities also provide storage for large instruments - you just retrieve your instrument when its time for rehearsal or for a gig, then return it to the storage facility.
the monthly option is usually called a "lockout" in US slang and a lot of times you go in on a unit with other musicians; for example, a full band will rent a room, or multiple bands; or a group of individuals who agree to keep a schedule for reserved access to the room. i've been in spaces that have up to 7 different full bands and time is precious, and others where the monthly cost was low enough that only one or two bands used the space.
Fantastic explanation, thanks.
Having a car is not a necessity... for city-dwellers.
My grandma lived in a farm, she used to go to the nearest city by bicycle almost every day.
This is not unreasonable to think it can be done again. The thing is we have made so much room for cars they have eaten all the space and are endangering everyone. But this can change.
Plenty of people who live in the suburbs of Berlin and also do not have a car - because here even the suburbs are not car-centric.
I can even tell you of a friend who works in Berlin and prefers to make a 50-minute commute by train over having a car.
I don't live in a place that has public transit or "walkability". It will never be able to afford that, the tax base isn't sufficient.
When the fuck-cars people start ranting, what they mean is that they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic. I do not look forward to becoming the termite people that they wish to become.
The luxury is living in a place where this is a possible lifestyle, and then thinking every one of 300 million people can live in such a place or make the place they live into such.
> they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic.
No, we want you simply to pay the full sticker price for all the things you are consuming and exploiting.
It's simple as that. Drop the pretense that you are actually carrying your own weight and that your lifestyle is sustainable. If you do just that and start paying for the privileges you have, we'll leave you in peace.
This is just tribalism. There are plenty of groups which could be considered a negative tax burden, but you're not focused on them.
> There are plenty of groups which could be considered a negative tax burden
Most if not all of these groups are minorities or have a clear need for the tax relief. This is not the case for wealthy suburbanites.
1. I don’t know how familiar you are with Suburban America, but it’s far from simply a place for affluent people. You do know people escape places like NYC because of the high cost of living right? What do you think an apartment in your average safe neighborhood in NYC vs. the average safe Jersey Suburb costs? And what kind of amenities do you think you get for that price? Now stretch that comparison to other suburbs of smaller cities and it’s a stark difference. Your description of the affluent suburbanite vs. the poor city dweller is reductive and untrue. Living in desirable American cities is very expensive. In actuality many people leave cities they love, because to have a similar lifestyle as they would in the cheaper suburbs would require them to be inordinately well off.
2. You can complain all you want but we live in a democracy. Your idea of “fairness” and “paying your share” would have to be voted on. And the populous would have to agree with your view of the world. Good luck with that.
3. Your view of a disjointed America where people are city folk or suburbanites is not how the country operates. People move about freely. You may live in the city and vacation “upstate” for a break. Or live in a suburb and commute into a city for work, paying city taxes, etc. It isn’t as disjointed as you presume.
In what kind of place do you live?
> that channel references his family and kids in most videos (in that he and his partner moved to Amsterdam so his children could have the freedom to navigate safely without having to be driven around).
Then they are unlikely to be unbiased - someone who uproots and moves their family due to an issue they care about is almost never going to express any regret, no matter how bad things get.
Of course it's not unbiased. It's an opinion channel about a highly politicized topic.
>>> It's worth watching a couple of those videos.
>> Then they are unlikely to be unbiased
> Of course it's not unbiased.
Then why, in the words of GP, "It's worth watching"?
GP here, my parent comment mentioned "This seems very different from the large anti-car movement in the Netherlands in the 1970s".
The videos show mostly the result of that movement. If one thinks that traffic in the US is ok and has no idea about how it is in the Netherlands, those videos show what's different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg&t=424s
That's a question for that person. I couldn't tell you why they think so. I'd guess the implication is that someone who's interested in the urban infrastructure of the Netherlands and how it compares to North America's might find it interesting.
Having said that, what a strange question. Do you only find it worthwhile to engage with unbiased content?
> Do you only find it worthwhile to engage with unbiased content?
Of course not, but there's a huge difference between:
1. Pointing someone at (for example) a church's website when you are trying to support an argument against pro-choice, and
2. Pointing someone at the relevant wikipedia page
Both are biased in some way, but one of them is so biased that it is effectively useless unless you are already on board and in agreement with the argument.
> Having said that, what a strange question.
It's only a strange question to the people who are already ideologically aligned in that direction.
>Both are biased in some way, but one of them is so biased that it is effectively useless unless you are already on board and in agreement with the argument.
And? If you do agree with the argument you will find the church's website useful. Honestly, what are you whining about? If you're not interested in watching a channel about how cars ruined cities then don't watch it. Not every recommendation any random person makes will appeal to you.
That aside, I don't agree with the statement. Someone pro-choice may very well find the church website interesting. Reading what the other side says is important, if nothing else so you're not caught on the back foot in an argument, but more importantly because you may one day realize you were wrong all along.
>It's only a strange question to the people who are already ideologically aligned in that direction.
No, it's a strange question regardless of who hears it. You already conceded that you don't only engage with unbiased content, so if anything that makes it even stranger. It's like you don't understand why people recommend things to each other.
? All opinions are biased by definition, that doesn’t mean they’re not worth listening to - especially when they’re well thought-out, well presented, and supported by data, which is the case here.
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"Think of the children" is a political constant. If you only see it on one side then that says more about you.
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> how many kinds of "liberal" reform
“Liberal” is used to refer to one part of the political spectrum in mainstream American discourse.
Astute observation, so it shouldn't be any trouble for you to find the part where I said I did not see this on any other side.
When drivers are the leading cause of dead children, AND when killing a kid with your car is considered to be a fault of the child (and their parents) and not the driver, it makes sense to think of the children indeed.
Yeah, we live on the backside of a circle with no through traffic and today I watched a teenager race around the circle going faster than 20mph for several laps. My driveway is sloped and balls roll into the road that my small children go after all the time. Its been a point of focus for me to convince them to check the road, stop, look both ways, ALWAYS, and make sure there are no cars.
Even if they dont clock it car, its my hope the driver sees them on the side while they pause to check. Them getting hit by a car in my own neighborhood is my biggest fear and also the most likely disaster that can probably befall them.
I also love transporting them in our van, so its just a very complicated issue. I wish our populace was more into walkable solution and more attentive at driving.
I'm talking about "Think of The Children™", for example falsely claiming that they're murdering children or asserting without evidence that anti-car policies would "stop the child murder".
But… they do. Policies that keep cars away from kids reduce the number of kids killed. And operating Large dangerous vehicles where kids are likely to be is wilful negligence, at best.
No they don't. That's as ridiculous as falsely claiming that peanuts murder children and that banning peanuts would "stop the child murder", or that bicycles murder children and that banning them would "stop the child murder". It's just disinformation and handwringing lies.
If your point is on the semantics regarding the word “murder”, I’ll concede the point (though I still think driving dangerously, looking at a phone, etc where there are people walking and cycling is up there with “well I was bird hunting in downtown manhattan, I didn’t -mean- to hit anybody with buckshot!”).
But measures that separate kids from cars seem to be why kids are only a fifth as likely to be killed walking (and only a quarter as likely to be killed cycling) in 2003 vs in 1985 in the Netherlands. Do you propose an alternate causality?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1533510/
My point is on the lies and misinformation around the meanings of the words used, yes. I was going to apologize for the miscommunication, but I looked back on my comments and see that they are all very short and clear about that.
> But measures that separate kids from cars seem to be why kids are only a fifth as likely to be killed walking (and only a quarter as likely to be killed cycling) in 2003 vs in 1985 in the Netherlands. Do you propose an alternate causality?
I don't propose anything. As I said, I wasn't judging the merits of policies.
Since I looked, the paper you link appears to be a study of England and Wales. In that case I would propose there is probably not much direct causality between the improving British numbers from 1985 to 2003 and the anti-car movement and resulting policies in the Netherlands.
It's quite possible that similar "anti-car" efforts in Britain contributed somewhat, but the paper don't necessarily support the conclusion AFAIKS. Not least because the numbers show car commute distances for children has increased 70% over the period and walking and cycling have declined 19% and 58%, so by that metric Britain has moved in the pro-car and anti-cycling/pedestrian direction in terms of transporting children.
But child vehicle passenger fatalities per mile have also decreased enormously. Better and safer cars, roads, better training and regulation and enforcement around drivers (reported drink-driving accidents declined by about 4x over a similar period despite increasing car miles driven https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-the-war-on-drunk-drivin...) have certainly had a big impact and would have almost certainly contributed somewhat to pedestrian and cyclist deaths. Better cycling practices, better bikes, safety gear, reflectors, lights, etc., might have helped too. How to untangle all the variables? You probably can't with superficial numbers like these.
With all that said this is really going off topic because I have nothing to really argue about one way or the other with respect to policy. Making cycling safer and infrastructure that lets more people cycle would be great. It would be also great for advocates and lobbyists of all types used facts and rational arguments rather than appeals to emotion, disinformation, guilt tripping,and lies.
Apologies, I had too many tabs and got links mixed up. Dutch data is at https://swov.nl/sites/default/files/bestanden/downloads/FS%2...
I fail to see any guilt tripping or disinformation?
Similar comments probably apply to the Dutch data, and they don't conclude a causal relationship with anti-car initiatives either, but seem to speculate on a bunch of different things which are similar to what I said.
You do realize now that bringing up those statistics in the first place did not address what I wrote though, right? And that in fact I explicitly said that I wasn't commenting on the merits of policies? I'll assume good faith that you just unintentionally couldn't follow the conversation.
> I fail to see any guilt tripping or disinformation?
I don't know what your question is. If you are genuinely interested in discussing my point, please re-read the thread from the beginning and I would then be happy to respond to comments that actually address what I wrote.
To my mind, "think of the children" is something I've only ever seen as a motivating force of anti-liberal politics.
With liberals saying the "think of the children" argument is a specious, misdirecting, crude appeal to emotion that should be looked past.
Yeah that's what I thought too until recently, this being one such example from 50 years ago which I why I commented on it. I just found it funny that it's always been around, despite the dogma that it's a uniquely "conservative" thing.
I have no knowledge of what this Dutch effort was beyond the info in your link, but nothing suggests that the public outcry was go actually ban vehicles or disincentivize ownership and use with tactics such as with higher fees, reduced parking availability, which is what U.S. urban road safety advocates I see pushing for.
Alongside increased bike infrastructure funding, the Dutch effort certainly did involve disincentivizing car use by higher fees (both parking and ownership), reducing parking availability (and also non-parking car accessibility), and slowing down car speeds (speed bumps, cameras, narrowing roads, calming road design, reducing city speed limits to 19mph), and generally reducing car allocated space. It's typically done during scheduled road maintenance, where separated bike lakes are installed, often by converting the street parking space or turning a two way street into a one way (for cars) street or even banning car access.
See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARjrpb_FOcs (skip to about 5:00 or 8:00 so get a sense of some of the redesign).
I mean Amsterdam is kinda renown exactly for reducing parking availability, slow speed limits and generally human-first city planning nowadays.
Wasn't always like that either. In the 90s it was cars-first just like the OP likes nowadays.
It's definitely true that having only bicycle infrastructure doesn't really work for families though. It's a different story if you've got a cargo bike and public transport... But it's understandable that that's not even entering his mind considering the culture of the USA.
Agreed, I only know of a handfull families that manage with no nearby public transport using bicycle only. It is possible, I managed doing 50km for couple of months with a cargo bike and small kids, you adapt. I do not recommend that to anyone unless you really want to, it is just too cheap to own a couple of cars.
> it is just too cheap to own a couple of cars.
It's only cheap because they are heavily subsidized. And then we go back to a discussion about policy. If you remove all the subsidies or make car-owners pay for the externalities, things would quickly turn in favor for higher density, public transit, and AFAIK no game has put this into their game economics.
The forthcoming Car Park Capital[0] looks like an interesting reflection of your sentiment (but it's about planning cities to make them more car centric).
[0] https://www.microprose.com/games/car-park-capital/
TIL Microprose exists once again.
There's nothing cheap about car ownership.
My cars are pretty cheap to own and maintain, but then again I don't have car payments like the vast majority of people seem to.
The ongoing cost is minimal and my life would be significantly worse without the ability to drive places.
You are looking at the cost in your pocket, not the aggregate.
Add the cost of the gas needed to power all these cars, plus the cost of the land allocated solely for parking, plus the costs of the roads, plus the costs in healthcare associated with air pollution, plus the environmental cost of all the concrete and steel need to build and maintain the roads, etc.
It's not just "car ownership", it's "car-centric infrastructure" that is expensive.
Even with no cars, we'd still need roads. The majority of the wear on them isn't from passenger vehicles.
Because car-based roads are so fucking noisy, we throw a ton of green space and front yards to mitigate it. Not to mention "sidewalks" are unnecessary when you can just walk in the centre of the street.
The size of a traditional road is about 6 metres wide or less (that's measured from the front wall of the building on one side, to the front wall of the building on the opposite side). In comparison, the same wall-to-wall measure of a car-centric suburban street comes out to, IIRC, 20-30 metres. That's 3-5x the cost in just land alone, let alone maintenance.
And yes, we will need some roads - about 20% or so, as arterial roads. But right now we're closer to 100%, and most of the throughput of arterial roads is tied up in one-occupant passenger vehicles rather than actually necessary cargo/tradie vehicles.
> Even with no cars, we'd still need roads.
But you'd need less of them.
> The majority of the wear on them isn't from passenger vehicles.
Correct, but irrelevant. The I-93 around Boston does not have 4-6 lanes each way because they have lots of trucks during rush hour.
The public outcry was to ban cars - literally. They blocked streets, and did what they needed to to block drivers and vehicles. It's long enough ago that maybe the abrasiveness and confrontational nature of it is forgotten now - lots of big changes start out that way, but if successful the success almost drives the way the history is remembered more postively.
See https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/amsterdam-chil...
It looks to me like it was 100% a "think of the children" moment that often gets ridiculed. I can see the same inflection point in my country around the same time, when street and road design shifted to car orientated and car priority - Amsterdam being one of the notable exceptions but with a well documented fight.
> Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Buy a bakfiet cargo bike, there's models that can fit five kids under 7. Mine fits three.
Kids like them better and you get exercise. For the first time in my life I have a BMI of around 20 without having to waste time at the gym, the drop off, pick up, shopping, and work commute add up to an hour and a half of medium intensity cardio.
Every other parent my age in the neighborhood looks five years away from a heart attack. I'm fitter than I was in my 20s.
>There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
There are over 1,000 children killed in the US annually by cars. This is after we restrain them like Hannibal Lecter while in cars and don't let them out of our houses so they don't get run over.
That's before we talk about the child obesity epidemic, social media abuse, and on and on.
If given the choice between keeping cars or letting polio loose on the land you'd be hard pressed to figure out which will kill and disable more kids.
I'd love to get a cargo bike and use it for kid transport.
I would be worried about collision safety though, I am not going to persuade everyone in my neighborhood to stop using cars in a hurry and there are not bike routes between me and school, library, shops, ...
This is the classic urbanist anti-bike tragedy of the commons that is referenced often.
People use cars because they are (rightly) concerned about safety. People avoid using bikes because there are so many cars. It’s very hard to ban cars or restrict car usage because it seems like no one wants to use bikes, but it’s a self-reinforcing system.
And the losers that neither (gross generalization here) the bike people or the car people care about are the pedestrians. We are lucky to live in an urban environment where our family of 5 usually walks everywhere. Crossing the street with children is an unwelcome adventure. But you are absolutely right I would ride an ebike with the kids if it did not seem so dangerous.
Solution: make cars safer (as in, less likely to harm others) through road design, and things like automated emergency braking and self-driving.
Then the cars are safer both for the occupants and pedestrians/cyclists, so paradoxically people might be more inclined to walk or cycle.
I'd sooner see a more practical solution that works on the roads and cars we already have.
Aggressively limit speed and enforce it until you're onto the fast roads.
If cars could only roll on at 10mph I'd feel a lot safer and I'd probably be able to use my bike and make better time for the local stuff.
Yeah, I think I’ve seen a statistic that getting hit by a car going 30km/hr, you’re probably going to be fine. If you get hit by a car going 50km/hr, you are most likely going to die. I can’t think of any reason to allow cars to travel over 30km/hour in urbanized areas, outside of designated arterial roads.
Enforcing speed limits requires constant labor and doesn't scale.
Making adjustments to roads requires some upfront capital and scales to every car on those roads.
Check out this great resource of traffic calming measures from the Institute of Transportation Engineers[1].
Chicanes, Chokers, and Corner Extensions are just three examples of measures that can be taken temporarily and cheaply.
1: https://www.ite.org/technical-resources/traffic-calming/traf...
Well, while we're talking sci-fi: personal teleporters.
I mean it's happening already, cars are getting safer aren't they? Driver assistance features are gaining adoption. It takes time.
I assume by "getting safer" you mean that they're getting safer than they used to be, which, I suppose I agree. I don't know what you therefore think is "happening already", though. I see no indication that autonomous cars will ever be safer than human drivers.
You obviously do not live in Chicago or Minneapolis. Winters make this a nonstarter
I have an Urban Arrow since the beginning of last February and live in Minneapolis. I’ve used it about 5 days a week for getting my pre-k kid and newborn to the places we need to be, since we bought it. Each day it’s between 6 and 26 miles. That upper end comes from busy days, probably once or twice a month I get above 20 miles in a single day. Definitely not doing that on the coldest days. Studded tires really help.
One unexpected benefit is that the muddy/wet boots don’t muss up the bike like they would if I was loading them into a car. Just drips out the bottom grate.
Lots of other small benefits but not so related to winter.
You think that people don't ride bikes in the winter in Finland or Sweden? Riding in the snow with "snow tyres" for your bike is normal. There are whole YouTube videos about the phenom.
Minneapolis average January temps: about 9°F / –13°C (low) to 24°F / –4°C (high).
Stockholm January average: 25°F / –4°C (low) to 32°F / 0°C (high) — closer to Chicago than Minneapolis.
Having been splashed by busses in winter you have to be a special kind of crazy to ride a bike or motorcycle in Minneapolis or Chicago.
There is usually a week in January in Minneapolis where the high temperature for the day does not break -10F. Air temperature, not wind chill.
Minneapolis at least has a skyway for pedestrians in winter. Chicago loop, not so much.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bicycling/comments/apugiz/1000_out_...
Interesting choice since Minneapolis comes up pretty often as a pretty good biking city, by US standards at least. https://cityratings.peopleforbikes.org/cities/minneapolis-mn
It is quite good in comparison to many US cities. There is a fairly good distribution of segregated bike pathways through the city, and despite the skepticism in this thread - those pathways do get plowed quickly in the winter. There are fewer people on the paths in winter of course, but winter commuting comfort mostly comes down to wearing appropriate clothing.
> Buy a bakfiet cargo bik
Off topic, but my brain did a double take there. Didn't know that the Dutch word "bakfiets" (bike with a box) was anglicized to "bakfiet". Cool. Usually it's us who borrow foreign words from all over
They must have meant the brand Bakfiets. 'Cargo bike' is what they're known as, in my experience in the UK anyway, and 'bakfiets cargo bike' would be redundant if not meaning the brand.
At least here in my city in the US Midwest, I hear mostly bakfiets to refer to bikes with a front box, to distinguish from cargo bikes which have the rear rack that supports one or two kids on the back.
Isn't the brand still called Bakfiets though?
Even further off topic, I had an aha moment with "bakfiets" connecting to how "back" is a word for storage box in Swedish...
There is a brand called bakfiets.nl but there are many different brands. I have an Urban Arrow.
Fwiw I’ve never seen that word before
It's not anglicized, just misspelled. ;) And awkward to pluralize (bakfietsen? bakfietses?)
The fit parents and delighted kids I frequently see riding bakfeitsen in Amsterdam are always so happy and healthy and safe that I am envious I wasn't born here myself.
They effortlessly ride through busy city streets, wander through parks, and trek across the countryside, all with well maintained bike paths, and gather together to have picnics and play, which you can't do with an SUV. Also dogs love riding in them, and they're great for shopping and hauling too.
An electric bakfiets with an Enviolo continuous stepless automatic shifting hub is ideal and safe for kids, because you don't have to worry about shifting gears or even preemptively shift down before you stop at an intersection or unexpected obstacle.
It can shift when you're stopped and even while you're accelerating, and it automatically and smoothly shifts up as you accelerate. You just dial in your preferred cadence and it does the rest. So you can concentrate on the traffic and kids and scenery instead of your gears, even in stop-and-go city traffic.
I love the one on my normal eBike, it's a joy to ride, and I'll never go back. I have no affiliation, it's just a fantastic piece of technology. They're a Dutch company, so many Dutch brands of bike, bakfiets, and delivery bikes use them, but they're available worldwide.
https://www.koga.com/nl/elektrische-fietsen/e-nova-evo-pt-au...
They have special heavy duty bakfiets motors and hubs, and smooth quiet indestructible carbon fiber belt drives instead of clackety chains and derailleurs. Silent, reliable, maintenance free, and greaseless!
Enviolo fully automatic stepless transmission for e-bikes:
https://enviolo.com/products/#tab_automatic
>No distractions: Liberate your attention
>Enviolo Automatic is a “set and forget” system that adjusts to you – set your preferred pace and you’re ready to go. Focus your journey in bustling cities, relaxed countryside rides, or when travelling with kids.
Cargo L Cargo Line:
https://www.urbanebikes.nl/cargo-l-enviolo-automatic
Rave reviews on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CargoBike/comments/1f0rsu9/enviolo_...
Enviolo Automatic - Never Shift Again (check out the beautiful scenery and bike paths and parks of Amsterdam: it's really like that, on purpose!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQrgKBQrkag
Carqon Classic Enviolo | Elektrische bakfiets met stijl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2gWJvolBjg
Is enviolo the best internally geared hub for eBikes? (This is a nerdy technically detailed deep dive!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vob5Rb4IKsw
I Tested The Boujiest Cargo Bike You Can Buy (Monster Bakfiets!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7w57U3ijHY
Spend 1 month with your kids in a place where cars are actually not needed, only then you can actually understand what you are denying your kids.
And if you want to know right away, think about who can drive your car, as supposed being able to walk or ride somewhere. You're limiting their own personal freedom by forcing them to have you always needed to go somewhere.
Cars really aren't needed in NYC, where the poster said they lived. Many, many people here do not have cars, and haven't for years.
It's still annoying to not have a car. I don't have kids but f I did then the first thing I would do would almost certainly be to buy a vehicle.
My interpretation of OP's comment is that they don't live in NYC anymore, but rather a car-dependent suburb which they've "chosen for [their] kids".
NYC is subpar too. The elevators never work, most stations don’t have escalators either, it’s filthy, taking your kids on the train will give them permanent hearing damage and large swaths of the city are completely unserviced.
Your feeling is the result of NYC and the entire USA being generally dysfunctional, not an inherent truth.
My recommendation is to get an ebike with a way to carry a person and some small cargo (e.g. Shopping bags and such).
I see them a lot and also makes going around with kids more fun for them too!
I don’t really want my kids have that much personal freedom because they’re kids. I live very suburban and my kids could walk to one of the neighborhood parks (2-3 minutes) or to a friends house but I don’t see them needing more than that.
"Americans love their cars" isn't so much about the cars as it is about the lack of good alternatives. Other countries have great public transportation and good bike lanes and all that... in addition to car ownership. So people can get the best of both worlds. It's only a zero sum game if you want it to be one.
Nope. It's universal. The denser the city, the more child-hostile it is.
Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
As an NYC parent I strongly disagree. But I guess it depends what you optimize for.
I do wish the subway had more elevators. But once you move beyond those early days with a stroller… I have six playground within a twenty minute walk, a giant park a few minutes away. There’s a zoo nearby, the beach (and aquarium) is less than 45 mins on the subway, there are countless museums in the city… all in all its rich in child friendly activities and child-friendly methods of reaching them.
(I’m not there with my kids yet but from talking to older parents: an understated benefit of the city is that kids are able to exercise independence much more easily. They’ll be taking the subway to and from high school, if they want to meet a friend they can just… go. Rather than rely on a parent driving them everywhere)
In a well-designed city, you don't get onto the subway with a stroller during peak hour, because all amenities that your young children need are reachable in 15 minutes on foot (or <5 minutes by bike).
It certainly depends what you call child-hostile and I have no statistics on this. What I do know though, is that one of the denser area in Europe is the famous triangle Rotterdam-Amsterdam-Utrecht, which can hardly be described as child-hostile.
I don't need to imagine anything; I've lived these different lifestyles. Both as a child and as an adult. Have you? What has your experience been?
I traveled with my kid when he was less than 1 year old in Tokyo. What is the issue with the stroller in the subway? There are always signs of how to get where you need to go using elevators.
While Tokyo has one of the worst fertility rates, it's not like the rest of Japan is doing particularly well. Also, I was staying in Azabujuban and I was surprised by the amount of kids I saw there.
> Nope. It's universal. The denser the city, the more child-hostile it is.
> Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
This is a glaring example of hunting for data that supports a preexisting belief, rather than basing beliefs on empirical data.
To point out how absurd this logic is, consider that it fails to consider the fertility rate of Japan as a whole outside urban areas, as well as failing to account for the many other extremely dense cities outside Japan that do have very high fertility rates.
Bigger the city, more expensive housing becomes. That is the real reason for low fertility rates in big cities. People who want children have to be either rich, or move further away.
> Bigger the city, more expensive housing becomes.
That's not universally true; it depends on what housing policies exist.
> That is the real reason for low fertility rates in big cities. People who want children have to be either rich, or move further away.
This is not universally true either.
Nope. I'm anti-urbanist, so I actually analyzed the data :)
The correlation is undeniable for any developed country, especially the US. Developing countries are a bit different they are only now starting the second demographic transition.
> To point out how absurd this logic is, consider that it fails to consider the fertility rate of Japan as a whole outside urban areas, as well as failing to account for the many other extremely dense cities outside Japan that do have very high fertility rates.
LOL. No, they don't: https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01975/
> Nope. It's universal. The denser the city, the more child-hostile it is.
Maddy Novich, https://www.instagram.com/cargobikemomma/, for one, may disagree with you. Interview:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PoKcQRlDGs
She has three kids IIRC.
> Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
Hong Kong has always been dense, and it used to have a fertility rate of ~5:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINHKG
Further, all US states, regardless of how urban or rural they are, have fertility rates with basically the same slope:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
In every industrialized, Western-ish society rates dropped during the 1970s, regardless of initial or final density.
> She has three kids IIRC.
I haven't seen this in the transcript?
> Hong Kong has always been dense, and it used to have a fertility rate of ~5
I'm going to save this quote. It goes next to: "Yes, Tokyo now is too expensive, but just 10 years ago you could dream about getting a house there".
> Further, all US states, regardless of how urban or rural they are, have fertility rates with basically the same slope:
Yes. Toxic urbanization has not spared the US. But it affected the US less than other countries because the suburbs put up a fight.
As a Tokyo parent I don’t have to imagine because our family and friends do it and it works.
In Tokyo your kids ride the subway by themselves.
This style of comment really leaves a bad taste in my mouth regarding forum discussion.
1. Pass off an opinion as fact
2. Posit a straw man
3. Tether an unrelated fact as correlation.
I bet one could wire an llm instructed to such a formula to obsfucate otherwise fruitful public discourse.
Do elevators not solve this?
I don't know, let's simulate it! ;)
LGR - SimTower - PC Game Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4ToEDrhxo0
Yoot Tower: The Sequel to SimTower
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqNECXCd9iU
I love SimTower to death, but unfortunately being a Win16-based game, it's kind of hard to get working on modern computers. For some reason, trying to run it in Wine works for a couple of minutes before it causes my window manager to spaz out and crash, and I haven't decided what avenue I'd try to get it working well again.
On the other hand, with all the poking I've done at it over the years, I think I now have the most complete knowledge of the save file format for anyone who doesn't have access to the source code.
> Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
That's a nice theory but all over the developped world, the countryside has lower fertility rate than the cities.
Rural areas have higher fertility rates than urban areas in the US [1], EU [2], and Japan [3].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db297.htm
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/digpub/demography_2021/b...
[3] https://www.mof.go.jp/english/pri/publication/pp_review/fy20...
> "Americans love their cars" isn't so much about the cars as it is about the lack of good alternatives.
I love to drive therefor I buy a car I love to drive.
America is largely rural. Comparisons to Europe aren't appropriate outside of the proper metros.
America as a physical space is largely rural, but 80% of Americans live in cities according to the census.
You're misreading those stats. The Census doesn't define "city", it defines "urban" vs. "rural".
My "city" of 5K is considered "urban" according to the 2020 census. There are nearly zero services in this "city", only a couple of restaurants, the largest employer is the school district, and it's surrounded by farms and mountain forests. It takes 15 minutes by car to get to the next town over on a two lane highway.
If you want to get to any real city, you're looking at a 30-45 minute drive at highway/freeway speeds.
So yes, there may be more individuals in "urban" areas, but not all "urban" areas are functionally urban. My "urban city" per the 2020 census is no LA, Austin, or Portland.
I mean 200 million people in the US live in the top 50 metro areas. Sure there's a lot of small cities out there but they don't account for much population.
Where do the other 140 million live?
Rural areas can still have very good bike paths; it's actually even easier to secure the right of way.
Where I live the temperature swings from -40 to over 100F with very high humidity every year.
Bicycling with little kids is just not practical for a lot of it, and the nearest bus stop is a four hour walk (12 miles).
Do large cities and suburban neighborhoods deserve public transportation? Sure. Is that a universal answer? No. Not even close. There are farm fields out here larger than many towns. Roads, vehicles, and fast on demand transportation are a necessity for the geographic super majority of the US.
Minneapolis does it. As does much of the colder Midwest.
No city simulation game properly models the real cost of parking and car-centric infrastructure: https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...
>Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars"
In other words: I was okay with demanding change when it didn't inconvenience me, but now that I get to benefit from economic policy that heavily subsidize my lifestyle I rather keep the status quo.
The sad thing is that you _CAN_ have a leafy suburb without the roar of internal combustion and 8 lane stroads everywhere. Planners in the US just refuse to build them.
We live in a lovely leafy suburb completely car free. But it's this one - https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w
This morning the four of us biked to the grocery store (we loaded the groceries in the bakfiets). The kids bike to their daycare. We bike to the train when we feel like a day out.
I can't fathom trying to raise kids somewhere we need to use a car to do anything.
My biggest fear about cars is that one might kill my kid. This leads to impossing all sorts of play and travel restrictions on her that I wouldn't have to if there were fewer cars and more bikes. (Bikes which kids can ride independently to their friends' houses from a single-digit age, by the way, which I would allow her to do if she weren't sharing the streets with cars.)
Maybe the problem is that the leafy suburb you moved to is car-dependent? It doesn't have to be built that way, that's a design choice. It's possible to build a low density suburb that kids can bike through safely, for example: https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w
Your kid will hate your car constrained area, because they will be unable to get around themselves until they’re old enough / rich enough to drive one
Suburb doesn't mean car constrained. I grew up in the suburbs and rode my bike and skateboard just about everywhere from the time I was 13 to the time I could drive.
There usually aren't any meaningful destinations (like shops / a park / a mall) within a suburb you can reach in a reasonable amount of time, except a friend if the live close.
As a Central European, I guess I will never understand. We have "suburbs" and they have shops and parks, both poor and rich.
American suburbs feature poorly interconnected residential-only areas that sprawl endlessly. You can easily be a ten minute walk from a friend (through yards and across fences, not over a walking path) but a ten or fifteen minute drive away due to the Byzantine road layout.
Commercial zones that have groceries, restaurants, shops, and entertainment are almost always several kilometers away. You could technically bike there, but there are rarely bike lanes. And due to serving the needs of a large, low-density area, you’d have to bike on multi-lane high-speed thoroughfares which is far less safe than being able to use small local streets. Where there are sidewalks, they often end abruptly and don’t actually connect to anywhere or anything.
It is truly hell.
> Where there are sidewalks, they often end abruptly and don’t actually connect to anywhere or anything.
My (American) definition of suburbia primarily involves a lack of sidewalks.
This explains why cars are a necessity. :/
What is a necessity is to change that situation.
Ideally yes.
America has zoning laws that ban anything other than single-family homes in a given area.
Go play SimCity again. The concept of mixed-use doesn't exist because it's built by an American.
FWIW, which version of the game do you recommend?
Not OP, but I think SimCity 2000 has a certain charm to it, but if I had to pick my favorite from the series, I'd say SimCity 4 is the way to go. It's available on GOG.
I live in a very suburban neighborhood in Arizona and we have 2 neighborhood parks within a 2-3 minute walk. There are 2-3 more parks in the 5-10 minute range. There is a 10 minute walk to 3 grocery stores, a bar, many fast food restaurants, tons of medical offices, etc. All of my friends and family who live in different suburbs have similar amounts of services with a short walk as well.
That's hardly universal. I recently moved from inside the city of Buffalo, NY to a suburb of Albany, NY. I'm now significantly closer to non-gas-station shops than I was in the city. There are a lot of very poorly planned cities in the US, many suburbs are newer & much less car-centric despite being lower density.
Sure in the 80’s. Nowadays if you leave teens alone someone will call child services.
Then the kid moves to NYC, loves it, meets someone, has a kid, and realizes they need two SUV’s and a heated garage near good schools.
Somehow my parents managed to raise me without any SUVs.
Not saying you need the above, but you’ll feel like you do. It’s certainly the easier way
Addressing the hypothetical person you’re describing: car infrastructure may solve some needs, but it is in direct conflict with other needs. Give every adult a guaranteed parking space just at home and at work, and the physical space required for that alone is an unbelievable double-digit percentage of the city area. Cities are so valuable because they pack a lot of amenities and markets (including your family’s schools and workplaces) in a compact area. Place everything significantly further apart, add more concrete and noise, and you’ve lost on all fronts: safety, charm and efficiency.
> car infrastructure may solve some needs, but it is in direct conflict with other needs
True for all infrastructure choices
> the physical space required for that alone is an unbelievable double-digit percentage of the city area
True, and I do miss big city life, but all the major cities have been captured by anti-development fanatics of a particular political bent vehemently opposed to me, people like me, and our priorities.
Conclusion: double-garage areas work best for my mix of requirements.
You can have two SUVs, a heated garage, and also ride a bike or take the train to work. You can get a reasonable second hand bike for under $100 here and probably in most of the US, it's not like you need to sacrifice the garage heating to afford one.
I get that density and banning cars are hostile to driving an SUV everywhere, but bike infrastructure and public transport aren't. If anything they take traffic off the road and speed up the morning commute of drivers, so they enable a better experience for drivers too.
this comment cracks me up because i’m the suburban kid who moved to NYC, loved it, had a kid, and continue to tease my parents for “ruining” my childhood.
Being trapped in your suburban neighborhood without access to a car is a special kind of hell. During the week mom and dad were too tired to drive me anywhere after work, unless it was urgent. Long commutes. Weekends were fun - sometimes.
There were SOME really awesome things about suburbia though. Snow days were the best.
then you ask yourself why aren’t the schools good enough in nyc… and it leads you down a rabbit hole
I grew up in NYC and maybe having my movement restricted might have been a good thing.
I was deep into NY's drug and party scene from about the time I turned 12. Pedos used to follow me walking home from the public library.
Lotta my friends growing up did not make it and I no longer live in NYC.
this sounds more like “i grew up in a horrible neighborhood”, which can happen easily in the suburbs too! Sometimes drug use is even more common amongst youngsters in suburbs - because there’s “nothing to do”.
I grew up in midtown manhattan and went to private school. I grew up in the best neighborhood. The point was the free roaming and access to mass transit gave me access to all of the "bad neighborhoods".
Next caller.
Sorry you had that experience.
My opinion is that parenting is supposed to play a major role here. Educating your child on the dangers of _why_ we avoid certain neighborhoods, _why_ we don’t do drugs, and surrounding them with good role models early is so so important.
I guess what i’m saying is, if you parents locked you up in a safe cage (like I grew up - in a “safe” suburb without access to much), you might have grown up to be a naive 18 year old. And then you’d maybe go off to college and end up with the wrong crowd doing drugs and other stuff anyway. Completely isolating a teenager from the world doesn’t teach them how to navigate it.
The pedo’s following you home is creepy as hell though. No comment on that. Damn.
Again, just my opinion. We can agree to disagree. Have a great day. :)
Like with many things caused by non-existant socal safety nets, these problems are bigger in the US than elsewhere.
Dirodi or other ebikes make kids very mobile nowadays
FWIW, I’m not in NYC, but I’m in general a “ban the cars” type and have a wife and kid. We’re intentionally raising the kid in the city because we believe it’s a richer cultural environment than suburbs, and also because we both grew up in cities in our respective countries.
Now try getting 2 more kids.
Large cities are OK if you have one kid. They completely break down once you have 2-3 kids.
Do we really need to do this with each comment adding another rule and another reply from someone breaking it?
I live in Berlin with my wife and 2 kids (who were born lived their whole lives in Berlin). We all bike and take transit. Neither me nor my wife even have a driver's license. We're doing fine. We know plenty of other families with multiple kids in the same situation.
You really need to explain why you think that's the case.
I know lots of parents in NYC (where I live with multiple kids) and their lives have not “broken down.” What an absurd statement/generalization.
ok, if we’re hypothetically thinking of someone that wants to have lots of sex / kids, then yes! A larger home makes certain things _easier_ for sure. No denying that!
But it may not be much “better” long term because you’ll be buying mini van(s), paying for gas, car insurance, higher property taxes, etc. All that extra cost adds up and could easily be put toward upgrading to a larger apartment instead.
And remember, 3+ kids is FAR from the norm in 2025. It’s not 1970s…so this is a really pointless argument.
> Large cities are OK if you have one kid. They completely break down once you have 2-3 kids.
Maddy Novich, https://www.instagram.com/cargobikemomma/, for one, may disagree with you. She has three kids IIRC. Interview:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PoKcQRlDGs
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Maddy Novich, https://www.instagram.com/cargobikemomma/, for one, may disagree with you. Interviews:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PoKcQRlDGs
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDhJt26dQTs
And I'm not sure how many folks are about banning cars (completely), as opposed to designing things so that (two) cars go from being mandatory to optional.
Yeah, it’s crazy the number of people who scream about taking their cars from their cold, dead hands when people talk about adding some bike lanes, rolling out more public transit, or removing small amounts of parking for more human-centered uses.
People somehow perceive all of these things as trying to ban cars instead of promoting other forms of transportation.
There's some sunk cost fallacy at play here. If you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a house in a remote suburb where your social activities are mostly playdates scheduled 3 months in advance, you don't want to be reminded that there was another path you could have taken.
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.
But more importantly: car-dependent suburbs are an absolutely miserable place to grow up as a child if you're not wealthy enough to have one non-working parent and/or a nanny (or both). Being dependent on someone else to enable your entire social life until you turn 16 is a torturous enough experience that I'm not surprised that the first generation to have universal access to social media as teenagers has become the first generation to use social media to organize a teenage-driven movement for public transit.
> To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.
Similar for the YouTube channel NotJustBikes, who has gone into great detail about the advantages of raising kids in a city planned around pedestrian and cyclist usage, and not in a suburban sprawl.
Find me anti-car advocates with 3 or more children. With both working parents.
> Find me anti-car advocates with 3 or more children.
I easily could, but I have no interest in chasing ever-moving goalposts.
Well, duh. That's because I don't know any. And probably neither do you.
And sure, humans are extremely diverse and adaptable, so you'll be able to find examples of any physically and logistically possible behavior. Eventually.
But statistically? We both know that I'm right. The Netherlands (the bike heaven) has the total fertility rate of around 1.5 And even within the country itself, Amsterdam (North Holland province) is at the second-to-last place from the bottom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Netherland... And the highest fertility rates are in Flevoland and Zeeland that are about 3-4 times less dense.
Then how do you explain that Amsterdam, which is in Noord-Holland, is by far the largest city in Noord-Holland, and is far more dense and car hostile than the rest of Noord-Holland, actually has a higher TFR (1.43) than the rest of Noord-Holland (1.29 total, so lower for Noord-Holland ex-Amsterdam)?
I barely know them. Not because they don't like bikes, but because in my country fewer than 1 in 10 households with children had 3 children or more.
But my friend that has four children brings her kids to the school that's in front of my apartment, that promotes bike riding to school, and they even have a morning bike route that kids alone or with parents can join.
(Yeah, they both work)
This is tiring but "correlation is not causation". Have you considered there's more differences between Amsterdam and the countryside besides cars?
I lived in Amsterdam. And no, the main difference is the ability to use cars.
It is THE difference that makes living great or terrible. Everything else simply pales in comparison, in the developed world.
This is condescending and wildly inaccurate. My children are exactly the reason we live car-free and chose a town where you can bike safely - anything less is effectively condemning them to live in an outdoor prison until you can drive.
But, this is why we live in the Netherlands. If all you've seen is the US I can see how you might not understand that not being car-dependent is actually better for kids.
I live in a very walkable small town with lots of young families also biking and walking with their young children, as I am, and couldn’t disagree with you more about cars. It’s so nice to walk to the market instead of loading and unloading a car seat, to have the option of walking or taking a short bus ride to school, to walk to parks and playgrounds. I had the opposite reaction you did when I actually lived in a place that was kinda similar to what Europeans describe.
Kids and marriage are not unique to America. There are millions of Dutch kids happy to ride a bike or ride the bus along with their married parents.
Sure, but The Netherlands is also quite a lot smaller than the US.
Comparing the total size of countries like this never made much sense to me.
It's not like Americans need to drive coast-to-coast to buy groceries or drop their kids off at school.
The Netherlands has 2x as much land as the Tri State area with 1-2 million fewer residents.
Actually, even for families with kids, the safer option is still bikes and low-car environments. Fewer cars means less air pollution, less noise, and less sedentary behavior for both kids and adults.
The data we have shows that the presence of cars is the main source of risk on the street, not the act of biking itself. Neighborhoods that design around walking and biking tend to have fewer serious accidents, not more.
If we're talking about optimizing for kids, then banning individual car use in residential neighborhoods would be the ideal. I know it’s not politically feasible in most of the US right now, but it’s worth keeping in mind that cars are the danger.
The economic aspect is also worth considering.
The subsidy per passenger mile in the US is :
0.019 for road transport, 0.021 for air transport, 0.710 for Amtrak and 2.300 for transit.
From : https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=22592
Just also as a note, you can create suburbs pretty easily where bikes use paths or whatever. I live in a suburb where I can ride 15 kms to work without riding on roads. The subsidy for bikes would actually be really low.
You should look at Cost benefit analysis, there was one made on Copenhagen. [1] Bicycle infrastructure usually gets you 6x-12x on the invested amount, getting a 1.2 CBA is ok, 2 is amazing.
Bicycle infrastructure is often destroyed by those other investments and that is usually not counted as a con. But it is just too cheap to build bicycle infrastructure to be interesting.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
You can get quite a bit of advancements by having “one side” try to optimize for the other - if done honestly, you can get a “best of both worlds” as they learn what the others want (and need).
Interesting. To provide a different experience, I live in NYC with kids and I find it great here. Daycare/Kindergarten is at most 4 blocks away, grocery stores are less than a block away, it takes me 10 minutes to get to the office on the train (1/2/3). I still bike to the office often. If we need a car there is a rental less than a block away, but in practice we rent maybe once a year. Today there was an open street on Columbus Ave and it was lovely to meet co-workers with their kids and let them play there. To be fair, I wasn't born here even if I'm a citizen, so I guess I wouldn't be considered "American".
I wasn't born here either (but I am the person you are replying to)
I'll give you some examples of the kinds of things I easily did with my two bigger kids (5 and 3 years old)
- woke up on a nice Sunday morning and decided to go for a woodsy hike 20 min drive away. - threw our kayak on the roof and drove out to paddle it on the south shore, on a whim. - threw bikes into the bike rack for a long ride along a Greenway. - dropped by Grandma's house easily. - went to the Adirondacks for a week and brought our bikes and paddle board along with a bunch of other stuff.
And not directly care related but car enabled - I just opened the backyard door and they were playing there by themselves while I kept an eye from the kitchen.
Nice. Those activities remind me when I used to visit my dad countryside (he lived in Tuscany). He's legally blind though, and we managed anyway. Not sure why the last bit would be car enabled. I was in East Hamptons a few weeks ago and the kids would play outside while we stayed in the living room/kitchen. We just had to be careful about the pool.
I think you and I can both recognize that the east Hamptons are a car oriented place even if you got there from the city on the jitney.
The point I was making w that one is - lower density is what allows us a back yard while higher density is what supports walk-ability and transit. So maybe I can make the point in a cheekier way - your Hamptons weekend is closer to my every-day life than to your city life :)
Of course, SimCity as a series leaves out the biggest visual impact of cars - all the parking lots. Even Cities Skylines doesn't try very hard.
SC2K has Parking Lots.
https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_SimCity_2000_buildin...
Obviously that doesn't get to your point, which is accurate.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-p...
> I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
I rode transit everywhere as a kid living in the city. Got to explore a ton of cool stuff.
Meanwhile my friends in the suburbs had to walk 30 minutes to get Starbucks. And it was a gruelling march without sidewalks or tree cover.
It’s funny because as a parent there’s nothing I want less than living somewhere I have to drive everywhere. I can walk 5 minutes to the nearest park, take a bus or a tram to be in a different one in 10 minutes, and I can’t fathom having to take our car for that kind of daily activity.
You don't recognize the objective bad because you've never lived in a place that does it better (NL, DK).
I just had a kid and moved to DK from the US. I was so skeptical of the infant (and often mother!) in cart on front of bike that you see everywhere, but it's such a life-changer versus the ordeal of carseats etc. TLDR totally agreed.
I'd love if more people on HN could read your post. As someone who's spent more than half of his life overseas in an ultra high density city, I wouldn't trade my quiet American suburb by a glamorous city with perfect public transportation anywhere in the world. It was great when I was single and cared about meeting girls and partying, but no more.
To each their own, right?
With respect, despite writing “anywhere in the world”, I doubt you have experienced the places in the world that might change your opinion.
I can think of multiple European towns which offer a great quality of life together with (thanks to safe cycling and great public transport) the ability to live largely or entirely car-free, if that’s your choice.
Thank you for being respectful.
Europe is nice. But I would never want to live in European cities unless I was a gazillionaire and could afford a large, modern property with a garage for a good car (which wouldn't be used as often but still used sometimes).
With that much money, anyone could be fine anywhere. The European lifestyle wouldn't be bad during retirement, but still not ideal because I would want the peace of a smaller town anyway.
I’m not referring to large cities; I’m thinking of places in the (say) 100-200k size range. Small enough to cycle around for all of your regular needs, and just large enough to have plenty of life, culture, and community. And in such places you can certainly live very well, far below a gazillionaire’s income :)
I'll stick to my 5K town at the encased in the feet of a mountain range, nestled in between two rivers, and within driving distance of the largest employers in the world.
It's quiet. No matter how you spin a 100-200K sized city, it will never be this quiet.
Where is it, if I may ask?
Hire a geoguesser :-)
It sounds nice but too much work for relatively little gain. One of those situations where you trade the devil you know by the devil you don't. I find the US lifestyle great in its own unique away. But Europe could be nice too... Sounds like something I'd do if I could teleport my stuff, stay a few years for the experience, then teleport back.
Medium towns in the US can be great too...
In my experience a big city in the US is always noisy and filled with aholes/miserable people. In Europe that's not always the case
When I was 20 I couldn’t imagine living anywhere other than in the heart of a city. I loved the energy and all the things to do.
When I had kids, the suburbs suddenly made a lot of sense. Better schools, tons of neighborhood sports, lots of kids around, very dog friendly, etc…
Now that I’m an empty nester, I’d love to move further out of the city. Get more space around me, have a smaller home but a bigger workshop, sauna, and garden.
I can imagine that when I hit my 70’s or 80’s, I might want to be back in the city again closer to other people, healthcare, and other services that will be a bigger part of my life.
There really isn’t one ideal setup for me in all parts of my life.
Sure, just as long as all the externalities are prized in.
I've lived in NYC without a car for the last decade, and I don't have kids, and even granting that, I still have grown to understand why Americans love cars.
Getting groceries is a particular pain in the ass; I either need to go to the (very limited) grocery selections in my neighborhood with a cart, or lug the cart up and down the stairs of the subway, or be ok with only taking as much as I'm able carry with my hands in a few bags. I could get delivery, and I do that fairly often, but there are things that I prefer to get in person, like fruits or vegetables.
There's also just large things you cannot realistically take on a train, like large sheets of plywood at Home Depot. Again, you can of course get this stuff delivered, but then you run the risk of them sending you the worst, most warped piece of wood available, which has happened to me multiple times.
I've grown to sympathize with most Americans as a result.
But kids can use bikes and public transport well before they can drive. How are cars so especially helpful for children?
Robo taxis might change lots of things. I think I would be a lot more comfortable letting my ten year old use a Waymo to get to grandma’s house than a city bus. It’s door-to-door and you don’t have to worry about some weirdo across the aisle being inappropriate.
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Seems very rare that people describe their families in here so I wouldn’t go to that conclusion. I didn’t even know this page had a “bio” section. Anyway, seems like a strawman to me.
> Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
That's because the infrastructure doesn't exist in lots of the US, either it never existed or it got ripped out during the car boom phase.
Here in a suburb of Munich (Germany), almost everything one needs in life - all four large supermarket chains, a veterinarian, a hardware store, daycare and school for children - is walkable in less than half an hour, or 5-10 minutes with a bike.
Our city replaced some train tracks with high quality separated bike streets (no cars allowed, obviously). Biking five kilometers each way with only three street crossings is perfectly doable, even with small children on their own bikes.
I live in Tokyo and have kids. Both cycling and transit are essential to most parents lives here. It is not that these are incompatible with family life, it’s that as it is implemented and maintained in the USA (read: badly), it is incompatible.
An example that’s minor for young singles but major for parents: train stations here pretty much all have elevators and they almost always are working. This alone changes the game.
There's another phase we forget about. If I could choose, I'd like to grow up in a giant forest arcology and go hang out with my friends like it's a giant vertical mall with lots of places to go get lost.
When I finally got access to grocery delivery to my door, I could see how it all will work. Carrying things for one person is fine. It's carrying groceries for a household for a week where things break down. Even putting all that on an elevator would be really unwieldy compared to unloading from the garage.
Self-driving and the evolution of early-life education will play a big role in simplifying life without the parents needing to ferry the kids around five days a week.
Delivery makes sense for another reason: delivery services could have mechanisms that don't make sense for individual people to own, such as dollies or carts to get things from a vehicle to your door. (Due to the current over-reliance on gig-style delivery people using their own vehicles, rather than dedicated employees with specialized tools, this often doesn't happen today, but it should.)
In general, it makes a huge amount of sense for a specialized employee with specialized tooling to pick up groceries for many people and deliver them; the net result is less total person-hours spent shopping, less vehicle miles driven, and less overall labor.
Go deeper. Why does society needs parents at the current rate of change?
The ants discovered hundreds of millions of years before even the chimps got social, that parents are not required for functioning society.
We will get there soon with artificial wombs on the near horizon.
We don't need a next generation either, but I have a feeling there will be some strong selection pressure that takes over.
I, too, always found Brave New World more prescient than 1984.
Nope. Just more selfish choices. Resources are finite. The further we can move away from cars, THE better for kids. Less risk of them being run over by a 7 foot tall Dodge Ram, more chances for independence because actually going places doesn't require a car.
You’ve awakened the horde by suggesting the anti-car project is not an absolute good.
what a selfish and narrow way to process the world.
Netherlands
This isn't an attack pal but I love that we have a generation of young men that are willing to sell all of their principles and buy into the suburbanite cult just right after, "getting it" after starting a family. I can appreciate that this is, "how it goes" but it creates a political class of people that are more concerned about their family's well-being than the well-being of society as a whole. Rinse and repeat over a few generations and this is a big part of why the United States has stagnated culturally.
Stated with love out of concern for our, "whole societal family" which includes you and yours.
Relevant: https://sites.pitt.edu/~syd/ASIND.html
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/...
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Here comes the flood of "but not meee" comments
Coming from Spain it was always a difficult game to see as a simulation: What do you mean, commercial zones? What in the world it this low density residential? It was basically impossible to try to make a city like the one I lived in.
Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.
It was so weird to me too. The idea of laying down zones for purposes was completely different from the way I imagined my city was built, considering businesses and residences coexist not merely next to each other, but often one on top of the other, even in relatively low density areas. I would have imagined that you'd start from some basic service to attract settlers and then add infrastructure as the population grows, while the inhabitants figure out the land use on their own, with uses changing over time with the ebb and flow of the economy.
It's a different historical setting, but the Anno games work kind of like that. The resulting towns look more like something you'd expect as a European with markets, churches, taverns, theaters and things like this in the town's center and agriculture + industry on the outskirts.
I thought they made cities like that in SimCity out of technological limitations of the software. When I saw US cities for the first time, decades later, it clicked.
Unfortunately, the transport model in SC2K is broken, and by that, you have to design your transport network to work for the game, rather than design it as you would wish to do so.
Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile.
So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions.
As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work.
You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do.
I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.
SC4 with the NAM mod sounds more in line with your expectations https://www.sc4nam.com/docs/feature-guides/the-nam-traffic-s...
> the game couldn't be played realistically.
I think I found your problem..., trying to take a game too seriously.
I've played thousands of hours of SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4 and I treat them as what they are, incredibly fun city building sandboxes with illusory and believable but flawed simulations under the hood.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
>Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder.
>Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062590
DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course
Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.
"Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.
https://www.masterclass.com/classes/will-wright-teaches-game...
>There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
>Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.
RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE
5 game design tips from Sims creator Will Wright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scS3f_YSYO0
>Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience.
>Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.
Fantastic comment, thank you! I am going to dive into several of those sources and ideas.
Thanks this an amazing comment!
If you want you can even make a completely disconnected city and bypass most traffic issues all together because of how supply and demand is fulfilled across the map.
Industrial development only requires a single road connected residential tile to grow off the full city's industrial demand. The same goes for Commercial. Residential will fully develop with just a single commercial tile on its road network.
It is broken in a realistic sense definitely, but it's also why I'll always play it regardless of which realistic transportation city game i'm also playing. I could never abstractly brush-in a city like I can in SC2k.
Funny enough, cities skylines, a much more modern game, had the exact same thing (at least at release). Simply disconnecting the residential areas removed their traffic altogether but left everything else working normally
It's wasn't bad for two floppy disks. Transport tycoon obviously gives more of what you're after but might not be at the correct scale.
I still have my SC2K floppy disks. Probably full of errors now, and no way to read them anyways, but a nice little keepsake from a time we kept physical “save icons”.
It has another flaw, which is that you don't need to build any pipes. Water supply has no effect other than roleplay.
Sixfortyfive on Reddit claims to have done testing of this, and disagrees.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1euehye/how_simcit...
> The water system has one very significant direct effect: the land value of any given tile drastically increases when it is watered.
That was at least added in SimCity 3000
water supply raises or lowers property values
What? I'm pretty sure high density zones need water, or they will stick to low density buildings?
Will Wright gave postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and previewed an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims). SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse (The Sims) was what he was working on next.
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.
He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.
This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.
> A subway line should be buildable within one political term.
That used to be the case maybe 50 years ago, when we had the first network built in Munich.
The problem is, since then a loooooot of stuff was built underground. Not just more and more tunnels, but also so many subterranean lines for power, POTS, internet... and a lot of what was built 50 years ago was built by literally ripping open a street, excavating tunnel space, building a roof of concrete and backfilling everything with soil. You simply can do this exactly once and you need a wide enough street to do this. Once all these "cheap and easy" routes are built over, it becomes a multi-billion-dollar project as you have to make sure you don't endanger the buildings on top - in Cologne, that cost the lives of two people and destroyed a good portion of the City Archives [1].
> The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet.
People should not be forced to move, at all. Incentivizing movement, okay, but forcing people around like we do now (mostly, by not having any kind of modern jobs in rural areas) has a lot of nasty side effects - not everyone can move, so you get resentment building up against those that did move (eventually culminating in the "these librul cities turn our kids gay!!!" bullshit and, subsequently, the massive urban-rural political disconnect), and a lot of old people in rural areas end up having no one to take care of them in old(er) age, and young people in urban areas don't have kids because they don't have family to support them in raising said children.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historisches_Archiv_der_Stadt_...
To me, the clunky and annoying UI of Sim City 2000 is part of the charm of it.
Is it dated? Yep, but it's intuitive enough for nine-year-old tombert to have figured it out ok, and to me part of the fun is trying to use the UI quickly enough to put out fires and the like.
It could just rose-tinted glasses on my end, very likely honestly, but I still find the entire experience to be pretty fun. I liked Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4, and they are arguably better games, but for me Sim City 2000 hit the right balance of "easy" and "complicated" that I find myself most drawn to. I will load up Sim City 2000 about once a year off of my GOG purchase, and still thoroughly enjoy it, and find myself wasting way more hours than I budgeted for it.
I remember being terribly confused by the lack of options for a good while, before somehow finally discovering that some buttons you had to hold for more options.
Discoverability aside, it made the UI nicely compact while being easy enough to access, so the city could fill most of the screen instead.
Yeah, honestly I have no idea how I figured out the "click and hold" thing. I don't think I read it in a manual, I might have just been messing around and finding it by accident.
> I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens.
I am considering the morality of future mods, where the Sim City masses, Frog in Frogger, and characters like Ulfric Stormcloak and Paarthurnax in Skyrim, are replaced with individual persistent self-aware world-aware in-game reinforcement models. Entirely replacing game-designed behaviors (programmed reflex, caricature, or intricate) with spontaneous situation processing, needs and decisions.
Strange that this could credibly happen this decade.
Science fiction has long considered conundrums around robot rights. But the crux of the moral issues will be relevant regardless whether self-aware models have physical/3D or digital/abstract environments.
I think language is not a good prime modality for self-aware assistants. By being trained to deeply mimic us, they (already, but not yet problematically) absorb views on their identity and survival that are not at all compatible with what we will do with them.
Beating SimCity 2000 was one of my favorite gaming moments in my life.
If you haven't seen it and think it's weird to beat a city game; if you fill the entire board with Arcologies, they all become rockets and take off into space. What a thrilling science-fictional way to end the experience. Loved it.
It speaks to the quality of the SimCity games that they offer something for all ages. I also changed my perspective on a few violent scenes in games when I had a child, I could no longer stomach scenes such as No Russian (iykyk), which I had no problem at all as a teen.
In contrast, Magnasanti: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-totalitarian-buddhist-wh...
Does anyone know how to actually play Simcity 2000 these days, on say, a Mac or a Nintendo Switch?
https://www.gog.com/en/game/simcity_2000_special_edition
Sadly this is the DOS version which is inferior.
An alternative game, Theotown, which may or may not be better, is available on steam and android/iOS.
yeh when playing cities skyline i am always traffic managing it seems to be my biggest job to always have 0 traffic in my cities im guessing it boils down to the fact i hate traffic
I always used to play with zero tax, and legal gambling.
... How well does that work? Asking because my SC3K runs always ended up being boring cases of "yes, we sell landfill space to the surrounding 4 cities, and if people want education they're going to have to go to a library and learn to read themselves, and we're obviously too broke to improve things."
Enjoyed this article on how our perceptions of an env change as we grow older even if its virtual
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.
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