My biggest thing? Just that cars are bloody expensive. Even a cheapo beater is several hundred to a grand, and that's the bare minimum, which'll need serious love and attention.
So, building a society where we need to either put a bunch of time into a crappy car, or spend several years paying off a $10,000+ thing just to get around well seems...kind of retarded.
You don't have to go in to debt to buy a new car. My car, and my wife's car, would paid for in cash, and no, we aren't rich. Just manage our money smart over the long term.
Well, that's the thing. You managed your money long term. Plus, while not rich, I imagine you make a good bit over minimum wage.
I work part time, for 8 dollars an hour. It would take me a good 2 months to have even a grand, which'd get me a basic car. And then I'd need to pay for insurance, gas, and maintenance, which it'd likely need a lot of, because for a grand, it's probably a beater.
That just doesn't make any genuine sense for my position, and it shouldn't be the end-all be-all default choice like it is.
The issue isn't even that the car pollutes, or that it's using up oil, or whatever, to me. It's that it's a fucking expensive 2 ton steel box that requires more money pumped into it to go anywhere.
On the traditional bus you spend your time hoping the guy that smells like piss wont sit next to you, saying no to panhandlers, listening to irritating kids who have nothing better to do than be little hooligans and trying to not vomit or get a headache because of the prop engine they have sitting 10 feet away that tears a fabric in space and time every time the thing accelerates.
Not relaxing.
...Have you ever, like, actually rode a bus?
I ride one twice a week, and used to ride one 7 days a week. I've seen buskers at the terminal during the summer, but no panhandlers (they're usually downtown near the banks & fast food places), and there's some hooligans maybe once every 10 trips. I either put my headphone in and ignore them or wait for the engine to start and drown them out. There's worse things than trash talking kids on the road:
On the traditional bus you spend your time hoping the guy that smells like piss wont sit next to you, saying no to panhandlers, listening to irritating kids who have nothing better to do than be little hooligans and trying to not vomit or get a headache because of the prop engine they have sitting 10 feet away that tears a fabric in space and time every time the thing accelerates.
Not relaxing.
...Have you ever, like, actually rode a bus?
I ride one twice a week, and used to ride one 7 days a week. I've seen buskers at the terminal during the summer, but no panhandlers (they're usually downtown near the banks & fast food places), and there's some hooligans maybe once every 10 trips. I either put my headphone in and ignore them or wait for the engine to start and drown them out. There's worse things than trash talking kids on the road:
Yup. I ride it too often for my taste. Perhaps you live in a nice area? I don't know what to tell you.
Go youtube "Epic Beard Man" and poke around. In the poorer areas of most places, public transit is not a nice way to travel. Lots of people looking for confrontation, typically there's someone on BART every day I take it roaming up and down the cars asking for money.
edit: As for the image... buses never crash, right?
I suspect that America would have a lot less automobile travel - and much denser cities and more public transport - if land zoning and rent control requirements were less stringent, allowing areas already built up to be steadily replaced by higher-rise housing, and if suburbia were taxed separately to account for their greater last-mile infrastructure requirements.
Cars are cheap to use in part because the infrastructure required for their use - road networks within the suburbs - are paid for in part by people staying further into cities.
There is also the longstanding issue of shoddy American local governance - dense cities implicitly require a government agile enough to resist local interest-grouping. Urban planning requires a wide variety of powers to control crime, restrict ambient noise, create safe parks, construct public transport networks, and so on. In the absence of urban good government people self-segregate into regional suburbs divided by class, and create their own neighborhood governments to provide public goods.
Since the intent is exclusionary (to keep 'those other people' away), you would generally see suburban developments advertise their privacy rather than accessibility to public transport: hence single-use zoning, cul-de-sacs, and few entrances and exits in suburban neighborhoods that connect directly to main traffic throughways, like those identified in the OP.
Yup. I ride it too often for my taste. Perhaps you live in a nice area? I don't know what to tell you.
Go youtube "Epic Beard Man" and poke around. In the poorer areas of most places, public transit is not a nice way to travel. Lots of people looking for confrontation, typically there's someone on BART every day I take it roaming up and down the cars asking for money.
edit: As for the image... buses never crash, right?
Yeah, riding AC Transit into Macarthur Blvd probably puts you in contact with all sorts of interesting characters.
I used to spend a lot of time walking to and from the Macarthur Blvd BART stop up and down MLK when I had a friend who lived down there. I know that area pretty well, and it's pretty ghetto.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Yup. I ride it too often for my taste. Perhaps you live in a nice area? I don't know what to tell you.
Go youtube "Epic Beard Man" and poke around. In the poorer areas of most places, public transit is not a nice way to travel. Lots of people looking for confrontation, typically there's someone on BART every day I take it roaming up and down the cars asking for money.
edit: As for the image... buses never crash, right?
No, buses do crash - I was actually going to post one of a public bus wreck, but then I saw that one. Had to share it.
My point was that there are worse things to deal with than loud-mouthed shmucks on a bus ride when you're on the road.
Honestly, though. "Buses are crowded" or "buses have homeless people on them" are not unavoidable universal aspects of public transit, they're circumstances that exist everywhere but are aggravated by American attitudes and implementation of public transit.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
0
Options
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
All this great talk about why Americans use cars, and our city planning. Great, interesting stuff....but a lot of it still misses the most basic mark, and why changing American car usage is gonna be a long haul: Americans drive cars because...we want to. We like it, it's ingrained in our culture beyond just bad city planning and suburban sprawl. I enjoy driving my automobile, it's fun (for the most part).
I suspect that America would have a lot less automobile travel - and much denser cities and more public transport - if land zoning and rent control requirements were less stringent, allowing areas already built up to be steadily replaced by higher-rise housing, and if suburbia were taxed separately to account for their greater last-mile infrastructure requirements.
Cars are cheap to use in part because the infrastructure required for their use - road networks within the suburbs - are paid for in part by people staying further into cities.
There is also the longstanding issue of shoddy American local governance - dense cities implicitly require a government agile enough to resist local interest-grouping. Urban planning requires a wide variety of powers to control crime, restrict ambient noise, create safe parks, construct public transport networks, and so on. In the absence of urban good government people self-segregate into regional suburbs divided by class, and create their own neighborhood governments to provide public goods.
Since the intent is exclusionary (to keep 'those other people' away), you would generally see suburban developments advertise their privacy rather than accessibility to public transport: hence single-use zoning, cul-de-sacs, and few entrances and exits in suburban neighborhoods that connect directly to main traffic throughways, like those identified in the OP.
I... You...
You've been reading Jacques's work too, haven't you?
It's systemic, but it's deeper than that. It's very, very deeply rooted in the American psyche: Nice car, nice house, acre of land, two kids, one dog, picket fence.
You're basically asking people to completely re-arrange what their idea of a comfortable existence is.
Yup.
And the only way to do that is to make their comfortable existence less comfortable (by, say, raising the price of gas) or by making the better way of living cheaper.
But even then, it's gonna require massive changes.
The words better and cheaper are important. Cheaper helps, but you have to convince people it's better.
For instance, I live in a three bedroom house, in a suburb, 17-20 miles from the center of my city (Houston). I work 20 minutes from my house. This is very comfortable for me, but does require car usage. Gas prices are actually dipping, not rising.
Given all that, without a drastic change in condition, tell me what about public transportation, riding a bike, moving in to an apartment in the city, or any number of "make life smaller" exercises are going to make my life better. Note, I am talking about my life. We all know the benefits to the planet, to grid lock, possible benefits to community strength, etc.
Not trying to sound selfish, but this is the exact question 200m middle class Americans are going to ask you when you tell them they have to move, or give up their car.
I can think of a few ways it might make your life better. Cars require maintenance and parking, public transit doesn't. Cars make it impossible to drink alcohol in a night out, unless you set up a designated driver before hand. If you can't afford a good car, people will look at your bad car and think less of you, public transit is a nice equalizer. public transit lets you read or work during your commute. You can ride together with a big group of people. And sometimes I just don't feel like driving, especially if I'm really tired.
On the whole I think I still like cars better, but public transit does have a lot of advantages, as long as its funded properly.
Public transportation - the underbelly of communism!
The simple fact is you'll never be able to abolish private transportation. Even if we hit peak oil and our batteries are terrible and all our power plants go defunct, people will bring out their horses and trot around like they own the place.
I love transportation networks...in Europe. Most American (as in "from North or South America" this time) transportation networks rely on buses, which really doesn't address the vast pollution and fuel problems. But American cities also tend to have low numbers of commuters, which is not conducive to a profitable, functioning tram or subway system in the US. Aside from some driver's irrational hate of buses' girth or dedicated parking spots or whatever, buses have significant disadvantages.
-Buses are loud.
-Buses have a reputation for being smelly (inside and out), while attracting undesirable elements (hobos looking for warmth, violent teenagers, crazy people, etc.).
-Bus routes can be tailored to transportation needs, but most smaller cities rely on radial networks that are incredibly inefficient for commuters (but you get to go downtown whenever you want to go anywhere!).
-Buses tend to have the highest maintenance cost of mass transportation vehicles (luckily the cost on infrastructure gets to blend in with the rest of urban traffic).
-Buses are also the least modular of transit systems (bunch of commuters? Let's add another trailer to the back of the bus...oh, wait...).
-Bus routes are not tourist or visitor friendly. You can easily follow a tram's rails to a nearby station; you can always dip into a subway station to find a map. If you're in the middle of a city with only bus networks...well, hopefully they have waiting booths or else you'll have to sight some sign with your eagle eyes.
-Bus stops tend to not have useful maps with the general location of other stops; they favor text timetables with foreign-sounding station locations and times.
...But the heavy focus on personal transporation in the US and Canada is not conducive to tram networks. People are unfamilar with driving in traffic with them (people still complain about roundabouts - imagine the backlash when 20 inattentive drivers get killed by trams in a short timeframe). They require dedicated, expensive infrastructure that most cities cannot pay for (and that private companies would have difficulty starting due to land requirements and traffic disruptions). Automobile traffic supercedes everything (which already forces trams to make too many stops and slows commutes too much).
TL;DR - I like public transit. Buses make Hulk angry! Trams are great but you won't see them in the US.
Honestly, though. "Buses are crowded" or "buses have homeless people on them" are not unavoidable universal aspects of public transit, they're circumstances that exist everywhere but are aggravated by American attitudes and implementation of public transit.
There's an interesting cycle here...
Buses have too many homeless people on them, so people don't take the buses.
Not enough people take the buses, so cities reduce the number of services.
There aren't enough services to this area, so the neighborhood has lower mobility and fewer jobs and becomes poorer.
The neighborhood becomes poorer and has more homeless people.
More homeless people take the buses.
Really the cycle will only break when the middle class finally runs out of land into which to flee urban decay - when all the land near city centers becomes developed and travel time from further away is unacceptable.
I suspect that America would have a lot less automobile travel - and much denser cities and more public transport - if land zoning and rent control requirements were less stringent, allowing areas already built up to be steadily replaced by higher-rise housing, and if suburbia were taxed separately to account for their greater last-mile infrastructure requirements.
Cars are cheap to use in part because the infrastructure required for their use - road networks within the suburbs - are paid for in part by people staying further into cities.
There is also the longstanding issue of shoddy American local governance - dense cities implicitly require a government agile enough to resist local interest-grouping. Urban planning requires a wide variety of powers to control crime, restrict ambient noise, create safe parks, construct public transport networks, and so on. In the absence of urban good government people self-segregate into regional suburbs divided by class, and create their own neighborhood governments to provide public goods.
Since the intent is exclusionary (to keep 'those other people' away), you would generally see suburban developments advertise their privacy rather than accessibility to public transport: hence single-use zoning, cul-de-sacs, and few entrances and exits in suburban neighborhoods that connect directly to main traffic throughways, like those identified in the OP.
I... You...
You've been reading Jacques's work too, haven't you?
... who?
I confess that I thought I was reproducing a fairly standard economic view.
Honestly, though. "Buses are crowded" or "buses have homeless people on them" are not unavoidable universal aspects of public transit, they're circumstances that exist everywhere but are aggravated by American attitudes and implementation of public transit.
I don't mind the act of taking the bus for the most part, in fact you can have some decent conversation. It's everything that goes with it. Standing in the rain, delays, cost, the times it runs.
If I had a small frame, was elderly, had a disability or were a woman there are certainly places I wouldn't want to hang out at night, and a bus stop down by Marcus Garvey park is probably one of them. The funding is pretty terrible (or funds poorly handled) and the bus drivers typically have no real incentive or inclination to throw people off who are causing a disturbance.
It's fixable, but would require a pretty dramatic shift in the general attitude by the people who manage the system as well as the people who use it.
dispatch.o on
0
Options
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Honestly, though. "Buses are crowded" or "buses have homeless people on them" are not unavoidable universal aspects of public transit, they're circumstances that exist everywhere but are aggravated by American attitudes and implementation of public transit.
There's an interesting cycle here...
Buses have too many homeless people on them, so people don't take the buses.
Not enough people take the buses, so cities reduce the number of services.
There aren't enough services to this area, so the neighborhood has lower mobility and fewer jobs and becomes poorer.
The neighborhood becomes poorer and has more homeless people.
More homeless people take the buses.
Really the cycle will only break when the middle class finally runs out of land into which to flee urban decay - when all the land near city centers becomes developed and travel time from further away is unacceptable.
The problem here is that this ignores the back flow of sprawl. Houston, for instance, is in the process of "re-claiming" (if that's the right word) some more run down areas, developing them, making them palatable to the younger section of the middle class and moving people in to those areas, which has actually moved people back in to the city, and raised the economic status of those areas considerably. Houston isn't a very progressive place, so I really doubt we are the only large city doing this.
Honestly, though. "Buses are crowded" or "buses have homeless people on them" are not unavoidable universal aspects of public transit, they're circumstances that exist everywhere but are aggravated by American attitudes and implementation of public transit.
There's an interesting cycle here...
Buses have too many homeless people on them, so people don't take the buses.
Not enough people take the buses, so cities reduce the number of services.
There aren't enough services to this area, so the neighborhood has lower mobility and fewer jobs and becomes poorer.
The neighborhood becomes poorer and has more homeless people.
More homeless people take the buses.
Really the cycle will only break when the middle class finally runs out of land into which to flee urban decay - when all the land near city centers becomes developed and travel time from further away is unacceptable.
The problem here is that this ignores the back flow of sprawl. Houston, for instance, is in the process of "re-claiming" (if that's the right word) some more run down areas, developing them, making them palatable to the younger section of the middle class and moving people in to those areas, which has actually moved people back in to the city, and raised the economic status of those areas considerably. Houston isn't a very progressive place, so I really doubt we are the only large city doing this.
Nashville is doing the same thing, the problem is that after hipsters and artists make an area trendy, rents go way way up and they end out moving away, back to the sprawl.
I don't foresee having "bus marshalls" and drivers already have a difficult time keeping people 'behind the yellow line". You get stuff like this (never mind the Fox News base - its the first google search with the story), which generally doesn't happen if your driver is encased in a box at the front of your transit vehicle (...i.e. tram or subway drivers).
Honestly, though. "Buses are crowded" or "buses have homeless people on them" are not unavoidable universal aspects of public transit, they're circumstances that exist everywhere but are aggravated by American attitudes and implementation of public transit.
There's an interesting cycle here...
Buses have too many homeless people on them, so people don't take the buses.
Not enough people take the buses, so cities reduce the number of services.
There aren't enough services to this area, so the neighborhood has lower mobility and fewer jobs and becomes poorer.
The neighborhood becomes poorer and has more homeless people.
More homeless people take the buses.
Really the cycle will only break when the middle class finally runs out of land into which to flee urban decay - when all the land near city centers becomes developed and travel time from further away is unacceptable.
The problem here is that this ignores the back flow of sprawl. Houston, for instance, is in the process of "re-claiming" (if that's the right word) some more run down areas, developing them, making them palatable to the younger section of the middle class and moving people in to those areas, which has actually moved people back in to the city, and raised the economic status of those areas considerably. Houston isn't a very progressive place, so I really doubt we are the only large city doing this.
Would I be right in guessing that Houston has run out of space in which to sprawl into? If the city is still growing, are there any large new developments? Are restrictions in its suburbs tight enough to prevent further would-be suburbians from increasing suburban density? Tight restrictions on remaining undeveloped land to prevent their development?
I mean, I look Houston up and I see it's the fourth-largest city in the US and the sixth-largest metropolitan area (thanks, Wikipedia!). Which does suggest that the mechanism I identified is in play.
I don't foresee having "bus marshalls" and drivers already have a difficult time keeping people 'behind the yellow line". You get stuff like this (never mind the Fox News base - its the first google search with the story), which generally doesn't happen if your driver is encased in a box at the front of your transit vehicle (...i.e. tram or subway drivers).
I thought for a period they tested a "call cops" button on a few buses in various places that would alert local law enforcement there was a disruption and they could be met at the next stop (or sooner if need be) with law enforcement?
I can't recall what came of it, but if people knew that by doing something stupid they'd both be on video and have cops on their ass at the next stop, it may become tolerable.
On BART you're always on camera and there are police at the stations and who sweep the trains regularly at transfer points. It's not nearly as bad as it could be, especially later at night when the real fruit starts falling off the tree and hopping on the train.
I don't foresee having "bus marshalls" and drivers already have a difficult time keeping people 'behind the yellow line". You get stuff like this (never mind the Fox News base - its the first google search with the story), which generally doesn't happen if your driver is encased in a box at the front of your transit vehicle (...i.e. tram or subway drivers).
Crime like this isn't a problem you can resolve by policing buses; it's resolved by nailing unemployment down at 3% and engineering away social stratification.
For reasons you point out and more, policing every area is unacceptably expensive.
I note that public buses in Europe do often encase their drivers in boxes at the front of the vehicle. This is the front of a bus in London, nicked off Wikipedia:
The prominent yellow circle is the electronic card reader, and that represents the height of interaction between most passengers and the driver.
I confess that I thought I was reproducing a fairly standard economic view.
Jacques Fresco. He's an engineer who used to be a prominent technocrat & Trotskyist... he's become a little, erm, 'eccentric' & unrealistically utopian in his viewpoints over time, but I really admire a lot of his urban planning concepts and they match, more or less, what you were saying spot on.
I'm pretty sure it's not exactly 'mainstream' to be advocating for the abandonment of the suburbia concept. People seem to love their little picket fence racist suburbs, for whatever reason.
Wait, we can't replace cars with buses because the buses would get in the cars' ways? Isn't that kind of not a problem, like worrying about how hard it would be to take the steam engine if we paved over the rails to make highways?
Well, the problem is replacing enough cars with buses to ensure that buses backing up car traffic is no longer a concern. You'll not replace "cars" as a whole with buses, because some people will always either live or work away from any feasible transit system (either geographically or schedule-wise)...even cities/countries with fantastic transit still have significant car ownership.
And Feral is correct, you don't need an entire bus lane. You simply need a short turnout at each location the bus will stop. It needs to be no longer than, well, the length of the bus.
How fast can a bus go from 0 to 45?
Fast enough that turnouts make a massive difference, from experience. Its frankly madness to even try for a bus network without them. Your scenario only becomes a slightly big deal on roads with one lane in either direction and/or where gridlock sets in for part of the day, though. If there's an extra lane and its not insanely busy, most of the traffic behind the bus can switch lanes and get around the bus easily while its accelerating or braking.
We've had some luck with dedicated busways added here and there even in very built up areas. It does require a little bit of property resumption, but you can minimise it with tunnelling and raised sections. I wanted to link what's going on in my city, but the google maps photos are too old >_<. Here's a diagram (PDF) of some of the bits currently under construction, though.
It's systemic, but it's deeper than that. It's very, very deeply rooted in the American psyche: Nice car, nice house, acre of land, two kids, one dog, picket fence.
You're basically asking people to completely re-arrange what their idea of a comfortable existence is.
How many people here can even afford a house on an acre, though? Like, an acre that's not in the fucking Ozarks. I mean, at some point you have to realise the dream is dead.
Also, I find it entertaining that you all mentally excise big cities in the US like New York from your minds when you're talking about the 'real America'...
I think trying to stop us using cars is stupid. We need to build cars that aren't so polluting.
25% of most urban areas are under asphalt. Firstly, roads are expensive to build and maintain (and then theres stuff like provisioning emergency services). Secondly, the density of the network slows it down - too many nodes and other design constraints mean that transport times quickly reach a point where people consider them a massive imposition and a source of stress (most of the research into travel habits indicates that people balk at taking more than an hour to get anywhere). Thirdly, all that paved-over land causes problems with water management, as mentioned earlier (water table and flood management issues). There's a few other aspects of road networks that could be better managed too, but the bottom line is that a lower-density road network is favourable for reasons that have nothing to do with what's driving on them.
I suspect that America would have a lot less automobile travel - and much denser cities and more public transport - if land zoning and rent control requirements were less stringent, allowing areas already built up to be steadily replaced by higher-rise housing, and if suburbia were taxed separately to account for their greater last-mile infrastructure requirements.
Cars are cheap to use in part because the infrastructure required for their use - road networks within the suburbs - are paid for in part by people staying further into cities.
There is also the longstanding issue of shoddy American local governance - dense cities implicitly require a government agile enough to resist local interest-grouping. Urban planning requires a wide variety of powers to control crime, restrict ambient noise, create safe parks, construct public transport networks, and so on. In the absence of urban good government people self-segregate into regional suburbs divided by class, and create their own neighborhood governments to provide public goods.
Since the intent is exclusionary (to keep 'those other people' away), you would generally see suburban developments advertise their privacy rather than accessibility to public transport: hence single-use zoning, cul-de-sacs, and few entrances and exits in suburban neighborhoods that connect directly to main traffic throughways, like those identified in the OP.
I... You...
You've been reading Jacques's work too, haven't you?
... who?
I confess that I thought I was reproducing a fairly standard economic view.
Jacques Fresco. He's an engineer who used to be a prominent technocrat & Trotskyist... he's become a little, erm, 'eccentric' & unrealistically utopian in his viewpoints over time, but I really admire a lot of his urban planning concepts and they match, more or less, what you were saying spot on.
I'm pretty sure it's not exactly 'mainstream' to be advocating for the abandonment of the suburbia concept. People seem to love their little picket fence racist suburbs, for whatever reason.
Edited to provide context.
Anyway. The mainstream has absorbed many formerly fringe concepts over the years. The current understanding goes something like this:
Public and common goods - that is, services that are non-excludable - exist and are often deeply desired
In the absence of the provision of such public and common goods by governments, people will attempt to create them by making them private - by creating barriers to make their provision excludable, even if these barriers are costly
An alternative in democratic systems is to agitate for the government to provide such goods, but in practice such agitation is itself difficult and public-choice problems are endemic.
Collective-action problems #2: in the absence of ways to enforce exclusion explicitly (i.e., as a gated community might), local quasi-governments can enforce exclusion anyway through other means, like using race or class as a proxy.
Advances in game theory: it is now understood that even a very small preference for avoiding other groups of people can lead to very high levels of self-segregation.
The existence of public goods has been grudgingly accepted since the (socialist) economist Paul Samuelson introduced the concept in the 60s, and is now very much mainstream. The point that voluntary associations can create exclusionary barriers to provide public goods privately comes from the right, however. Economic liberals nowadays hammer on the problems that exclusionary proxy mechanisms introduce - racism, segregation, stratification, guard labor - whilst economic libertarians instead either push for more gated communities or argue that the proxy mechanisms are not harmful on net relative to government.
This outline makes the issues involved clearer, I think - for instance, if urban government were better we could expect less exclusive suburban sprawls. Or less 'white flight' and sprawl. And, to link this back to the OP, less automobile dependency.
The US is particularly hard hit at multiple levels; unlike elsewhere it is too populist to give its government great amounts of respect (e.g., France) or pay (e.g., Hong Kong). Culturally it is both diverse enough to make customizing regional government necessary, but not diverse enough to make it obvious that what is seen as a right in some places may be excessively expensive in another. Both of these damage the quality of regional government. And the wide availability of cheap empty space makes flight much more attractive than staying to reform government.
It's systemic, but it's deeper than that. It's very, very deeply rooted in the American psyche: Nice car, nice house, acre of land, two kids, one dog, picket fence.
You're basically asking people to completely re-arrange what their idea of a comfortable existence is.
How many people here can even afford a house on an acre, though? Like, an acre that's not in the fucking Ozarks. I mean, at some point you have to realise the dream is dead.
Also, I find it entertaining that you all mentally excise big cities in the US like New York from your minds when you're talking about the 'real America'...
Well, the illusion will collapse soon - the area available for further suburbia is shrinking, and now the problems are starting to follow suburbians home.
An hour on public transit is an hour you can spend reading or watching a movie or working or studying or playing a video game or taking a nap.
20 minutes you spend driving is 20 minutes of your life wasted. It's dead time. All you've done is aged 20 minutes and depreciated the value of your car.
See, I basically have the reverse view. I currently spend 30 minutes a day on a combination of driving to the train station, and taking the train to work, and I'm thinking of switching to just driving straight there, which would cost more in parking but take 15 minutes. That's 30 minutes total I day I could end up not wasting on travel. You can say that you can do anything you want, but the main thing that I want to do is not be on the train, or travelling at all. 30 minutes in my apartment is exponentially better than 30 minutes spent on the train.
edit:: Also, in the car I can do my favorite thing to pass the time which I can't do on the train: sing
Jacques Fresco. He's an engineer who used to be a prominent technocrat & Trotskyist... he's become a little, erm, 'eccentric' & unrealistically utopian in his viewpoints over time, but I really admire a lot of his urban planning concepts and they match, more or less, what you were saying spot on.
Not really. Fresco is very radically economically. Ronya's position is more just a liberal reading of the more or less standard view.
Would I be right in guessing that Houston has run out of space in which to sprawl into? If the city is still growing, are there any large new developments? Are restrictions in its suburbs tight enough to prevent further would-be suburbians from increasing suburban density? Tight restrictions on remaining undeveloped land to prevent their development?
I mean, I look Houston up and I see it's the fourth-largest city in the US and the sixth-largest metropolitan area (thanks, Wikipedia!). Which does suggest that the mechanism I identified is in play.
To support and explain. "Out of space" does not mean physically unable to expand. it just means that you eventually reach the bounds of what reasonable transportation is.
Edit: for instance, Seattle, WA is probably slightly in this process. Commutes from the suburbs range from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours and any more large scale expansion just isn't feasible. Due to this, more rapid transit has been on the table for a long time and areas of the city are starting to be reclaimed(albeit slowly) for higher density living. Some of this is probably the green movement which is very strong there, but not all. Its just that the dream of the semi-suburban house doesn't exist anymore.
To compare. This is Capital Hill in Seattle(right next to downtown) in the 1970's
As you can see, much more built up. Now many of those houses still exist in roughly the same format. But good lord are they going to be out of most peoples ability to pay for.
Looking at those horrible subdivisions in the OP, I can't help but think how worthless they'll become once commuting (gas) costs go up to 2x or 3x the current level. I supposed that's what you get for dropping $100K+ on building a house in a neighborhood that's obviously, functionally useless.
All this great talk about why Americans use cars, and our city planning. Great, interesting stuff....but a lot of it still misses the most basic mark, and why changing American car usage is gonna be a long haul: Americans drive cars because...we want to. We like it, it's ingrained in our culture beyond just bad city planning and suburban sprawl. I enjoy driving my automobile, it's fun (for the most part).
I think this is a big part of it.
Personally I'm 33 now ... I lived downtown (Toronto) for 10 years and didn't even bother owning a car. Once wife and i moved to the burbs a few years ago we bought a car and now i don't think I could imagine life without it (even if we WERE to move back downtown). Life is just easier with a car from travel time to convienience of being able to go to Wal Mart and pack the car full of shit.
Nowadays I don't consider car driving time "wasted" time, I consider it time I'm relaxing listening to Sirius, or listening to a podcast. With the window down sometimes you get into a nice zen like state while driving too ... I'm sure you guys know what i'm talking about, beautiful sun drenched day, no traffic, window down, etc ....
Trade that for a packed smelly bus that I might not even get a seat in AND the trip will take double if not triple the time?
I always though American cities had good public transportation. Or is that only New York City (again)?
NYC, San Francisco, and Seattle all seemed (well, haven't been to NYC but it's a given) to have thoroughly decent public transit, particularly in downtown areas but even pretty far out into the suburbs.
Most cities do not. Outside the very central urban core, the public transit systems of most cities are nearly unusable. They run seldom, possibly not nights or weekends, and are often expensive to boot. When I lived in Phoenix (admittedly a while ago, I'll wager it's gotten better) the public transit system was absolutely godawful over about 75% of the metro area. Similar experiences in a few other cities, and word-of-mouth suggests this is typical.
Oh, and those three are not the only ones, I'm sure. I haven't been to Chicago, for instance, or Boston. I'm sure there are a handful that are decent.
Would I be right in guessing that Houston has run out of space in which to sprawl into? If the city is still growing, are there any large new developments? Are restrictions in its suburbs tight enough to prevent further would-be suburbians from increasing suburban density? Tight restrictions on remaining undeveloped land to prevent their development?
I mean, I look Houston up and I see it's the fourth-largest city in the US and the sixth-largest metropolitan area (thanks, Wikipedia!). Which does suggest that the mechanism I identified is in play.
Looking at a map I don't see any reason Houston has run out of space to sprawl to. Usually absent mountains or water US cities will just keep sprawling out forever.
My biggest thing? Just that cars are bloody expensive. Even a cheapo beater is several hundred to a grand, and that's the bare minimum, which'll need serious love and attention.
So, building a society where we need to either put a bunch of time into a crappy car, or spend several years paying off a $10,000+ thing just to get around well seems...kind of retarded.
Some company needs to build the ultimate commuter car. A radio, an air conditioner and good mileage and safety features, then not charge 18k for it. I don't need electronic ass-massaging warming seats or nine directional zone air conditioning.
Make a car that costs around 7k with the priority being a solid simple engine and reliability.
Also, in America your car makes your member grow. It's scientific fact that depending on your location the size of the engine and how many horses it can initiate sex with, or the height of the ladder you have to use to get in the fucker outside of a starbucks is directly proportional to your self worth and organ size.
edit:
On the traditional bus you spend your time hoping the guy that smells like piss wont sit next to you, saying no to panhandlers, listening to irritating kids who have nothing better to do than be little hooligans and trying to not vomit or get a headache because of the prop engine they have sitting 10 feet away that tears a fabric in space and time every time the thing accelerates.
Not relaxing.
Also, a lot of people can't read or play games without getting serious motion sickness at trying to focus on a close object while they ride in something that feels like it was purposely designed to simulate being an ocean in a storm.
I picked up a Cobalt that was less than two years old for $8K. Higher-than-average mileage, but I've yet to put a dime of non-routine (oil-change, etc) maintenance into it. The mileage could be better, but it's like 99% of what you're talking about in a "good commuter car."
And yes, in many/most cities I've been to the bus is hateful. Unless you enjoy the smell of piss they're best avoided.
Also, as mentioned but I'll second it, I definitely consider trading 30 minutes of "wasted" time in my car for 30 additional minutes at home (versus an hour on the bus playing a DS or something) to be worth it. Especially considering that I often listen to podcasts or audiobooks in my car, so it's not a complete "waste" anyway.
Snuggling the wife or playing my Xbox 360 on my couch beats the fuck out of reading a book next to a hobo.
Fast enough that turnouts make a massive difference, from experience. Its frankly madness to even try for a bus network without them. Your scenario only becomes a slightly big deal on roads with one lane in either direction and/or where gridlock sets in for part of the day, though. If there's an extra lane and its not insanely busy, most of the traffic behind the bus can switch lanes and get around the bus easily while its accelerating or braking.
.
In that same line of thought, in Seattle our buses go across the highways all the time and there are turn-outs for buses to pick up more people, then get right back onto the highway without any slowdown. It isn't like buses are all suddenly terrified of highways because they might get in someone's way, I mean, my bus has to get across 4 lanes of traffic just to get back to the city and people get out of a vehicle that large's way. I always look at it as: Cars should let buses into their lane, or give them a second to catch up if they're merging back in, if only because that bus is making 20-40 less cars have to fill up the road around them. One slightly slower bus beats 30 shitty drivers.
How many people here can even afford a house on an acre, though? Like, an acre that's not in the fucking Ozarks. I mean, at some point you have to realise the dream is dead.
Also, I find it entertaining that you all mentally excise big cities in the US like New York from your minds when you're talking about the 'real America'...
That, too, makes me laugh. Considering the cost of a car + insurance would literally become 45% of my paycheck as a lower income earner, living in the city and spending 5% of my income on a bus pass is infinitely more cost effective. If people want a yard and a garage, there's always room for an expensive apartment terrace and a building where you aren't making sure your car can fit in their parking garage. I can understand the dillema considering more rural cities like Denver feel way to spread out for proper public transportation when compared to Seattle, which has centralised as best as it can to make urban life easy for non-car commuters.
Side note edit: Hobos generally sleep in because of their active night life, so a morning commute bus is rarely filled with any homeless at all, simply because they don't work 8-5 jobs and don't need to ride the bus then. Depends on your area, sure, but in my experience riding the bus for 2 years in Seattle, it's always the night ride to anywhere around town that brings me into contact.
Dyrwen66 on
Just an ancient PA person who doesn't leave the house much.
Slightly off topic but somebody brought up Houston:
I live in Toronto but I've travelled to alot of US cities. Houston has by far the scariest drivers in the world ... I'd never seen a downtown core made of highways before
You literally had to take a highway to get to another part of what would still be considered "downtown".
Also Houston drivers were insane. It was like being in New York City ... except instead of driving crazily at 15 - 25 mph everyone is driving crazily at 65 mph. I saw more cut offs, close calls, ridiculous amounts of traffic and middle fingers waved in 3 days in Houston than probably the last 10 years in Toronto.
As a pedestrian in Houston I saw very little jaywalkers. Because in Houston it became very obvious jaywalking = death. Those few jaywalkers I DID see booked it across the street. Because in Houston people don't slow down for jaywalkers.
Personally, I don't like driving, but I can see how it beats public transportation in the minds of some. Honestly, I don't think America's addiction to cars is the problem. It's the insane addiction to oil that is completely wierd to me.
Looking at a map I don't see any reason Houston has run out of space to sprawl to. Usually absent mountains or water US cities will just keep sprawling out forever.
Looking at a map Houstin seems to be wall to wall built up for about a 40 mile diameter. Which is to say that new suburbs are going to have between a 30 minute to 60 minute commute assuming no one else is on the road
To compare with Seattle, a vastly sprawled area(which doesn't have good public transit folks. Its only good within the immediate city really) is about 30 miles tall from Edmonds to De Moines. Seattle under this example would have two downtowns. One in Seattle and one next door in Bellevue. Another 30 miles south and you would run into Tacoma, which also has 200,000 people.
Driving to the middle of Houston from the edge would be like driving from downtown Seattle to Microsoft. Granted, Houston has a lot more side streets connecting the two because there isn't a lake in the way, but anyone who has driven on I-5, 405, 90, or 520 can rightly tell you that the commutes around Houston must be absolutely atrocious.
Really the cycle will only break when the middle class finally runs out of land into which to flee urban decay - when all the land near city centers becomes developed and travel time from further away is unacceptable.
Jacques Fresco. He's an engineer who used to be a prominent technocrat & Trotskyist... he's become a little, erm, 'eccentric' & unrealistically utopian in his viewpoints over time, but I really admire a lot of his urban planning concepts and they match, more or less, what you were saying spot on.
Not really. Fresco is very radically economically. Ronya's position is more just a liberal reading of the more or less standard view.
Really the cycle will only break when the middle class finally runs out of land into which to flee urban decay - when all the land near city centers becomes developed and travel time from further away is unacceptable.
Except that a lot of businesses are moving out of the city and into the suburbs as well. So now it's suburbs commuting to other suburbs. In theory such a fractal patterns could go on forever.
HamHamJ on
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Posts
Well, that's the thing. You managed your money long term. Plus, while not rich, I imagine you make a good bit over minimum wage.
I work part time, for 8 dollars an hour. It would take me a good 2 months to have even a grand, which'd get me a basic car. And then I'd need to pay for insurance, gas, and maintenance, which it'd likely need a lot of, because for a grand, it's probably a beater.
That just doesn't make any genuine sense for my position, and it shouldn't be the end-all be-all default choice like it is.
The issue isn't even that the car pollutes, or that it's using up oil, or whatever, to me. It's that it's a fucking expensive 2 ton steel box that requires more money pumped into it to go anywhere.
...Have you ever, like, actually rode a bus?
I ride one twice a week, and used to ride one 7 days a week. I've seen buskers at the terminal during the summer, but no panhandlers (they're usually downtown near the banks & fast food places), and there's some hooligans maybe once every 10 trips. I either put my headphone in and ignore them or wait for the engine to start and drown them out. There's worse things than trash talking kids on the road:
Yup. I ride it too often for my taste. Perhaps you live in a nice area? I don't know what to tell you.
Go youtube "Epic Beard Man" and poke around. In the poorer areas of most places, public transit is not a nice way to travel. Lots of people looking for confrontation, typically there's someone on BART every day I take it roaming up and down the cars asking for money.
edit: As for the image... buses never crash, right?
Cars are cheap to use in part because the infrastructure required for their use - road networks within the suburbs - are paid for in part by people staying further into cities.
There is also the longstanding issue of shoddy American local governance - dense cities implicitly require a government agile enough to resist local interest-grouping. Urban planning requires a wide variety of powers to control crime, restrict ambient noise, create safe parks, construct public transport networks, and so on. In the absence of urban good government people self-segregate into regional suburbs divided by class, and create their own neighborhood governments to provide public goods.
Since the intent is exclusionary (to keep 'those other people' away), you would generally see suburban developments advertise their privacy rather than accessibility to public transport: hence single-use zoning, cul-de-sacs, and few entrances and exits in suburban neighborhoods that connect directly to main traffic throughways, like those identified in the OP.
Yeah, riding AC Transit into Macarthur Blvd probably puts you in contact with all sorts of interesting characters.
I used to spend a lot of time walking to and from the Macarthur Blvd BART stop up and down MLK when I had a friend who lived down there. I know that area pretty well, and it's pretty ghetto.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
No, buses do crash - I was actually going to post one of a public bus wreck, but then I saw that one. Had to share it.
My point was that there are worse things to deal with than loud-mouthed shmucks on a bus ride when you're on the road.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I... You...
You've been reading Jacques's work too, haven't you?
Public transportation - the underbelly of communism!
The simple fact is you'll never be able to abolish private transportation. Even if we hit peak oil and our batteries are terrible and all our power plants go defunct, people will bring out their horses and trot around like they own the place.
I love transportation networks...in Europe. Most American (as in "from North or South America" this time) transportation networks rely on buses, which really doesn't address the vast pollution and fuel problems. But American cities also tend to have low numbers of commuters, which is not conducive to a profitable, functioning tram or subway system in the US. Aside from some driver's irrational hate of buses' girth or dedicated parking spots or whatever, buses have significant disadvantages.
-Buses are loud.
-Buses have a reputation for being smelly (inside and out), while attracting undesirable elements (hobos looking for warmth, violent teenagers, crazy people, etc.).
-Bus routes can be tailored to transportation needs, but most smaller cities rely on radial networks that are incredibly inefficient for commuters (but you get to go downtown whenever you want to go anywhere!).
-Buses tend to have the highest maintenance cost of mass transportation vehicles (luckily the cost on infrastructure gets to blend in with the rest of urban traffic).
-Buses are also the least modular of transit systems (bunch of commuters? Let's add another trailer to the back of the bus...oh, wait...).
-Bus routes are not tourist or visitor friendly. You can easily follow a tram's rails to a nearby station; you can always dip into a subway station to find a map. If you're in the middle of a city with only bus networks...well, hopefully they have waiting booths or else you'll have to sight some sign with your eagle eyes.
-Bus stops tend to not have useful maps with the general location of other stops; they favor text timetables with foreign-sounding station locations and times.
...But the heavy focus on personal transporation in the US and Canada is not conducive to tram networks. People are unfamilar with driving in traffic with them (people still complain about roundabouts - imagine the backlash when 20 inattentive drivers get killed by trams in a short timeframe). They require dedicated, expensive infrastructure that most cities cannot pay for (and that private companies would have difficulty starting due to land requirements and traffic disruptions). Automobile traffic supercedes everything (which already forces trams to make too many stops and slows commutes too much).
TL;DR - I like public transit. Buses make Hulk angry! Trams are great but you won't see them in the US.
There's an interesting cycle here...
Buses have too many homeless people on them, so people don't take the buses.
Not enough people take the buses, so cities reduce the number of services.
There aren't enough services to this area, so the neighborhood has lower mobility and fewer jobs and becomes poorer.
The neighborhood becomes poorer and has more homeless people.
More homeless people take the buses.
Really the cycle will only break when the middle class finally runs out of land into which to flee urban decay - when all the land near city centers becomes developed and travel time from further away is unacceptable.
... who?
I confess that I thought I was reproducing a fairly standard economic view.
I don't mind the act of taking the bus for the most part, in fact you can have some decent conversation. It's everything that goes with it. Standing in the rain, delays, cost, the times it runs.
If I had a small frame, was elderly, had a disability or were a woman there are certainly places I wouldn't want to hang out at night, and a bus stop down by Marcus Garvey park is probably one of them. The funding is pretty terrible (or funds poorly handled) and the bus drivers typically have no real incentive or inclination to throw people off who are causing a disturbance.
It's fixable, but would require a pretty dramatic shift in the general attitude by the people who manage the system as well as the people who use it.
The problem here is that this ignores the back flow of sprawl. Houston, for instance, is in the process of "re-claiming" (if that's the right word) some more run down areas, developing them, making them palatable to the younger section of the middle class and moving people in to those areas, which has actually moved people back in to the city, and raised the economic status of those areas considerably. Houston isn't a very progressive place, so I really doubt we are the only large city doing this.
Nashville is doing the same thing, the problem is that after hipsters and artists make an area trendy, rents go way way up and they end out moving away, back to the sprawl.
Would I be right in guessing that Houston has run out of space in which to sprawl into? If the city is still growing, are there any large new developments? Are restrictions in its suburbs tight enough to prevent further would-be suburbians from increasing suburban density? Tight restrictions on remaining undeveloped land to prevent their development?
I mean, I look Houston up and I see it's the fourth-largest city in the US and the sixth-largest metropolitan area (thanks, Wikipedia!). Which does suggest that the mechanism I identified is in play.
I thought for a period they tested a "call cops" button on a few buses in various places that would alert local law enforcement there was a disruption and they could be met at the next stop (or sooner if need be) with law enforcement?
I can't recall what came of it, but if people knew that by doing something stupid they'd both be on video and have cops on their ass at the next stop, it may become tolerable.
On BART you're always on camera and there are police at the stations and who sweep the trains regularly at transfer points. It's not nearly as bad as it could be, especially later at night when the real fruit starts falling off the tree and hopping on the train.
Crime like this isn't a problem you can resolve by policing buses; it's resolved by nailing unemployment down at 3% and engineering away social stratification.
For reasons you point out and more, policing every area is unacceptably expensive.
I note that public buses in Europe do often encase their drivers in boxes at the front of the vehicle. This is the front of a bus in London, nicked off Wikipedia:
The prominent yellow circle is the electronic card reader, and that represents the height of interaction between most passengers and the driver.
Jacques Fresco. He's an engineer who used to be a prominent technocrat & Trotskyist... he's become a little, erm, 'eccentric' & unrealistically utopian in his viewpoints over time, but I really admire a lot of his urban planning concepts and they match, more or less, what you were saying spot on.
I'm pretty sure it's not exactly 'mainstream' to be advocating for the abandonment of the suburbia concept. People seem to love their little picket fence racist suburbs, for whatever reason.
Fast enough that turnouts make a massive difference, from experience. Its frankly madness to even try for a bus network without them. Your scenario only becomes a slightly big deal on roads with one lane in either direction and/or where gridlock sets in for part of the day, though. If there's an extra lane and its not insanely busy, most of the traffic behind the bus can switch lanes and get around the bus easily while its accelerating or braking.
We've had some luck with dedicated busways added here and there even in very built up areas. It does require a little bit of property resumption, but you can minimise it with tunnelling and raised sections. I wanted to link what's going on in my city, but the google maps photos are too old >_<. Here's a diagram (PDF) of some of the bits currently under construction, though.
How many people here can even afford a house on an acre, though? Like, an acre that's not in the fucking Ozarks. I mean, at some point you have to realise the dream is dead.
Also, I find it entertaining that you all mentally excise big cities in the US like New York from your minds when you're talking about the 'real America'...
25% of most urban areas are under asphalt. Firstly, roads are expensive to build and maintain (and then theres stuff like provisioning emergency services). Secondly, the density of the network slows it down - too many nodes and other design constraints mean that transport times quickly reach a point where people consider them a massive imposition and a source of stress (most of the research into travel habits indicates that people balk at taking more than an hour to get anywhere). Thirdly, all that paved-over land causes problems with water management, as mentioned earlier (water table and flood management issues). There's a few other aspects of road networks that could be better managed too, but the bottom line is that a lower-density road network is favourable for reasons that have nothing to do with what's driving on them.
Edited to provide context.
Anyway. The mainstream has absorbed many formerly fringe concepts over the years. The current understanding goes something like this:
The existence of public goods has been grudgingly accepted since the (socialist) economist Paul Samuelson introduced the concept in the 60s, and is now very much mainstream. The point that voluntary associations can create exclusionary barriers to provide public goods privately comes from the right, however. Economic liberals nowadays hammer on the problems that exclusionary proxy mechanisms introduce - racism, segregation, stratification, guard labor - whilst economic libertarians instead either push for more gated communities or argue that the proxy mechanisms are not harmful on net relative to government.
This outline makes the issues involved clearer, I think - for instance, if urban government were better we could expect less exclusive suburban sprawls. Or less 'white flight' and sprawl. And, to link this back to the OP, less automobile dependency.
The US is particularly hard hit at multiple levels; unlike elsewhere it is too populist to give its government great amounts of respect (e.g., France) or pay (e.g., Hong Kong). Culturally it is both diverse enough to make customizing regional government necessary, but not diverse enough to make it obvious that what is seen as a right in some places may be excessively expensive in another. Both of these damage the quality of regional government. And the wide availability of cheap empty space makes flight much more attractive than staying to reform government.
Well, the illusion will collapse soon - the area available for further suburbia is shrinking, and now the problems are starting to follow suburbians home.
See, I basically have the reverse view. I currently spend 30 minutes a day on a combination of driving to the train station, and taking the train to work, and I'm thinking of switching to just driving straight there, which would cost more in parking but take 15 minutes. That's 30 minutes total I day I could end up not wasting on travel. You can say that you can do anything you want, but the main thing that I want to do is not be on the train, or travelling at all. 30 minutes in my apartment is exponentially better than 30 minutes spent on the train.
edit:: Also, in the car I can do my favorite thing to pass the time which I can't do on the train: sing
Not really. Fresco is very radically economically. Ronya's position is more just a liberal reading of the more or less standard view.
Pretty much anything you might see in the media that's positive about the US is a fabrication or exaggeration, or is narrowly applicable.
Edit: for instance, Seattle, WA is probably slightly in this process. Commutes from the suburbs range from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours and any more large scale expansion just isn't feasible. Due to this, more rapid transit has been on the table for a long time and areas of the city are starting to be reclaimed(albeit slowly) for higher density living. Some of this is probably the green movement which is very strong there, but not all. Its just that the dream of the semi-suburban house doesn't exist anymore.
To compare. This is Capital Hill in Seattle(right next to downtown) in the 1970's
And here is an image from now
As you can see, much more built up. Now many of those houses still exist in roughly the same format. But good lord are they going to be out of most peoples ability to pay for.
I think this is a big part of it.
Personally I'm 33 now ... I lived downtown (Toronto) for 10 years and didn't even bother owning a car. Once wife and i moved to the burbs a few years ago we bought a car and now i don't think I could imagine life without it (even if we WERE to move back downtown). Life is just easier with a car from travel time to convienience of being able to go to Wal Mart and pack the car full of shit.
Nowadays I don't consider car driving time "wasted" time, I consider it time I'm relaxing listening to Sirius, or listening to a podcast. With the window down sometimes you get into a nice zen like state while driving too ... I'm sure you guys know what i'm talking about, beautiful sun drenched day, no traffic, window down, etc ....
Trade that for a packed smelly bus that I might not even get a seat in AND the trip will take double if not triple the time?
No thanks ...
NYC, San Francisco, and Seattle all seemed (well, haven't been to NYC but it's a given) to have thoroughly decent public transit, particularly in downtown areas but even pretty far out into the suburbs.
Most cities do not. Outside the very central urban core, the public transit systems of most cities are nearly unusable. They run seldom, possibly not nights or weekends, and are often expensive to boot. When I lived in Phoenix (admittedly a while ago, I'll wager it's gotten better) the public transit system was absolutely godawful over about 75% of the metro area. Similar experiences in a few other cities, and word-of-mouth suggests this is typical.
Oh, and those three are not the only ones, I'm sure. I haven't been to Chicago, for instance, or Boston. I'm sure there are a handful that are decent.
Looking at a map I don't see any reason Houston has run out of space to sprawl to. Usually absent mountains or water US cities will just keep sprawling out forever.
I picked up a Cobalt that was less than two years old for $8K. Higher-than-average mileage, but I've yet to put a dime of non-routine (oil-change, etc) maintenance into it. The mileage could be better, but it's like 99% of what you're talking about in a "good commuter car."
And yes, in many/most cities I've been to the bus is hateful. Unless you enjoy the smell of piss they're best avoided.
Also, as mentioned but I'll second it, I definitely consider trading 30 minutes of "wasted" time in my car for 30 additional minutes at home (versus an hour on the bus playing a DS or something) to be worth it. Especially considering that I often listen to podcasts or audiobooks in my car, so it's not a complete "waste" anyway.
Snuggling the wife or playing my Xbox 360 on my couch beats the fuck out of reading a book next to a hobo.
That, too, makes me laugh. Considering the cost of a car + insurance would literally become 45% of my paycheck as a lower income earner, living in the city and spending 5% of my income on a bus pass is infinitely more cost effective. If people want a yard and a garage, there's always room for an expensive apartment terrace and a building where you aren't making sure your car can fit in their parking garage. I can understand the dillema considering more rural cities like Denver feel way to spread out for proper public transportation when compared to Seattle, which has centralised as best as it can to make urban life easy for non-car commuters.
Side note edit: Hobos generally sleep in because of their active night life, so a morning commute bus is rarely filled with any homeless at all, simply because they don't work 8-5 jobs and don't need to ride the bus then. Depends on your area, sure, but in my experience riding the bus for 2 years in Seattle, it's always the night ride to anywhere around town that brings me into contact.
I live in Toronto but I've travelled to alot of US cities. Houston has by far the scariest drivers in the world ... I'd never seen a downtown core made of highways before
You literally had to take a highway to get to another part of what would still be considered "downtown".
Also Houston drivers were insane. It was like being in New York City ... except instead of driving crazily at 15 - 25 mph everyone is driving crazily at 65 mph. I saw more cut offs, close calls, ridiculous amounts of traffic and middle fingers waved in 3 days in Houston than probably the last 10 years in Toronto.
As a pedestrian in Houston I saw very little jaywalkers. Because in Houston it became very obvious jaywalking = death. Those few jaywalkers I DID see booked it across the street. Because in Houston people don't slow down for jaywalkers.
They run you over.
To compare with Seattle, a vastly sprawled area(which doesn't have good public transit folks. Its only good within the immediate city really) is about 30 miles tall from Edmonds to De Moines. Seattle under this example would have two downtowns. One in Seattle and one next door in Bellevue. Another 30 miles south and you would run into Tacoma, which also has 200,000 people.
Driving to the middle of Houston from the edge would be like driving from downtown Seattle to Microsoft. Granted, Houston has a lot more side streets connecting the two because there isn't a lake in the way, but anyone who has driven on I-5, 405, 90, or 520 can rightly tell you that the commutes around Houston must be absolutely atrocious.
What's Fresco's view?
e: for that matter, what's yours? :P
Except that a lot of businesses are moving out of the city and into the suburbs as well. So now it's suburbs commuting to other suburbs. In theory such a fractal patterns could go on forever.