How the automobile shapes cities for the worse

[Crawford]

Freeways take massive space off the tax rolls. Geographies surrounding freeways are typically less desirable.

They produce more air pollution, which leads to more illness and death. Private vehicles produce far more injuries and death.

The U.S. spends over $200 billion annually on roads, the vast majority which goes to road maintenance. There are enormous public costs involved in maintaining the network.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

But how did cars improve cities?

Probably not but if you were to ask a random person in 1924 if access to a car would improve their lives, they'd probably say yes. It's how cities adapted to them that's the issue. Not the car itself. Same thing with smartphones. 15 years ago, most people would think they would vastly improve our lives but in actuality, they've made things worse in many ways.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by JManc

If you were to ask a random person in 1924 if access to a car would improve their lives, they'd probably say yes.

Which is why 90+% of Americans who could afford a car, got one.

Things went horrendously off the rails when cars became used for every single transportation trip, instead of just a nice to have convenience for occasional longer-distance travel, and eventually allowed individualism-oriented Americans to de-densify themselves into oblivion, such that walking, the foundational form of human transportation since the dawn of bipedalism, was completely cast aside.

There are still some happy middle grounds that are light years better, and I fortunately get to live in one, but they generally require people to live much more tightly with their fellow humans than the typical American desires.

[JManc]

Yes. Having a car but also access to mass transit nearby (such as the blue or brown lines) would be my preference over totally relying on one or the other.

[Innsertnamehere]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Which is why 90+% of Americans who could afford a car, got one.

Things went horrendously off the rails when cars became used for every single transportation trip, instead of just a nice to have convenience for occasional longer-distance travel, and eventually allowed individualism-oriented Americans to de-densify themselves into oblivion, such that walking, the foundational form of human transportation since the dawn of bipedalism, was completely cast aside.

There are still some happy middle grounds that are light years better, and I fortunately get to live in one, but they generally require people to live much more tightly with their fellow humans than the typical American desires.

Yes - the european model as a whole is closer to what you describe and really closer to I think what most people would want. There is a benefit to some level of walkability but I think many / most people would not want to go completely car-free.

I think a target of single-car households being more common is very achievable - expecting car trips to decrease to almost 0 or most households to go car-free is a much tougher proposition.

My postings on this thread aren't intended to indicate that transit is useless - but rather that people underestimate the economic benefits and utility of car infrastructure. Too often people disregard literally any piece of automotive infrastructure as useless but the reality is that we need a balanced approach to transportation, not one which is all in one category or another.

Part of the problem with US transportation planning is that most want a car regardless, so they don't view the cost of commuting as being $10,000 a year. They have an $8,000 a year base cost to own and maintain an automobile, which they want regardless.. and pay $2,000 extra to drive it to work every day.

Automotive transportation as a whole is unquestionably more expensive than transit all-in, but also in almost all situations wildly more efficient as well. There is a reason people pay for an automobile. In wealthy societies most households are more than willing to pay for it.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by JManc

Probably not but if you were to ask a random person in 1924 if access to a car would improve their lives, they'd probably say yes. It's how cities adapted to them that's the issue. Not the car itself. Same thing with smartphones. 15 years ago, most people would think they would vastly improve our lives but in actuality, they've made things worse in many ways.

I agree that the car itself isn't the issue, and I argued that when this thread began three years ago lol. But I'm having a hard time naming a way that cars actually improved cities. I can easily name how other forms of transportation which helped cities, but not cars.

A lot of cities in the modern era grew around cars, but I don't think most would say those places are objectively better than the places that were designed before the car. A city being described as "car centric" is often a critique, but describing a city as having "great transit" is a compliment.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by JManc

Probably not but if you were to ask a random person in 1924 if access to a car would improve their lives, they'd probably say yes. It's how cities adapted to them that's the issue. Not the car itself. Same thing with smartphones. 15 years ago, most people would think they would vastly improve our lives but in actuality, they've made things worse in many ways.

I'm not so sure about that first part. Back then, cars weren't very useful since cities were too congested for them and there was little suitable infrastructure - both within cities and outside them. So cars were considered the luxury play things for the wealthy with little practical appeal. As their numbers increased there was massive opposition to them since there were frequent deadly accidents and it wasn't until society was re-arranged around them by banning non-car users from all but the "side walk" part of roads, enacting and enforcing strict traffic rules, etc. that they became mainstream. But because of their cost and limited practicality, few regular people would have expected any major life improvement from them. Well, other than from having enough money to buy and operate one.

There's more about the history below:

https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/755187...alking-history

One quote:

"Automobiles were often seen as frivolous playthings, akin to the way we think of yachts today (they were often called “pleasure cars”). And on the streets, they were considered violent intruders."

So other than the option of getting money from selling it, having a car would probably not have appealed to most people.

[Steely Dan]

^ US household car ownership rates over time;

1929: 60%
1960: 80%
2010: 90%

Source: Google AI


Mass adoption in the US was already well underway 100 years ago thanks the Henry Ford's model T.

Take out the poor and working classes who couldn't yet afford one, and it becomes apparent that, even back then, the vast majority of US households who could afford to own a car, did so.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Yes - the european model as a whole is closer to what you describe and really closer to I think what most people would want. There is a benefit to some level of walkability but I think many / most people would not want to go completely car-free.

I think a target of single-car households being more common is very achievable - expecting car trips to decrease to almost 0 or most households to go car-free is a much tougher proposition.

My postings on this thread aren't intended to indicate that transit is useless - but rather that people underestimate the economic benefits and utility of car infrastructure. Too often people disregard literally any piece of automotive infrastructure as useless but the reality is that we need a balanced approach to transportation, not one which is all in one category or another.

Part of the problem with US transportation planning is that most want a car regardless, so they don't view the cost of commuting as being $10,000 a year. They have an $8,000 a year base cost to own and maintain an automobile, which they want regardless.. and pay $2,000 extra to drive it to work every day.

Automotive transportation as a whole is unquestionably more expensive than transit all-in, but also in almost all situations wildly more efficient as well. There is a reason people pay for an automobile. In wealthy societies most households are more than willing to pay for it.

Actually, automotive transportation is almost always less efficient which is why it's so much more expensive. It takes more energy, materials, and space per person while creating more negative externalities, all of which cost more. And even the potential time savings evaporate when you consider the labour time most people need to devote to afford it. And most certainly when you consider the extra taxes for the infrastructure.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^ US household car ownership rates over time;

1929: 60%
1960: 80%
2010: 90%

Source: Google AI


Mass adoption in the US was already well underway 100 years ago thanks the Henry Ford's model T.

Take out the poor and working classes who couldn't yet afford one, and it becomes apparent that, even back then, the vast majority of US households who could afford to own a car, did so.

The 20s was in the period of mass adoption when a short time can make a difference. According to the link below, in 1920, only 20% of households had one, while in 1929 it had increased to 60%. But as the article I linked to explained, this was only made possible by all the changes being pushed by the auto lobby in that time frame. So it wasn't at 60% 100 years ago, but was in the process of increasing to that level.

Also keep in mind that the population was much more rural then so much of that 60% wouldn't have been in cities.

https://coolidgefoundation.org/blog/...0%20households

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^ US household car ownership rates over time;

1929: 60%
1960: 80%
2010: 90%

Source: Google AI


Mass adoption in the US was already well underway 100 years ago thanks the Henry Ford's model T.

Take out the poor and working classes who couldn't yet afford one, and it becomes apparent that, even back then, the vast majority of US households who could afford to own a car, did so.

I bet a lot of that percentage of ownership in 1929 was from people living in rural areas. As Nouvellecosse pointed out, car ownership jumped from 20% of households in 1920 to 60% in 1920. About 45% of the U.S. population still lived in rural areas in 1929, so a lot of that increase was likely the rural households switching from horse powered transportation to ICE powered transporation.

[Steely Dan]

In 1929, the US poverty rate was 42%, with an annual household income of $1,500 or less.

A base model car in 1929 cost roughly $400, out of reach of the poor for the most part.

The vast majority of American households, everywhere, who could afford to own a car at the time, did so by 1929.

[SIGSEGV]

just visited my grandpa in Bucharest. His street is definitely far worse off with cars, given that there's nowhere to park them: https://www.google.com/maps/@44.4373...oASAFQAw%3D%3D

and parking lots are great use of public space, no? https://www.google.com/maps/@44.4523...oASAFQAw%3D%3D

(Bucharest has ~2 million people and also ~2 million transits trips per day between the metro and the bus/tram/trolleybus, so it could be a lot worse... though probably some combined metro/bus trips are double counted there since the two agencies are separate)

[iheartthed]

Car ownership in the U.S. was driven by households in small towns and rural areas in the 1920s. This chart from 1921 shows that big cities accounted for less than 10% of registered cars:


source: https://www.railsandtrails.com/AutoF...1p16-100-8.jpg

[Steely Dan]

^ given that the US went from 20% in 1920 to 60% in 1929, it'd be good to know what specific year's data that graph is based on.

Things were changing lighting fast over the course of that decade, and by the end of it, the vast majority of American households that could afford a car, had one.

[craigs]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Yes for sure. The one exception I would say is LA, which is just simply too large to function as a single market area. I doubt there are many people in San Bernandino working in Thousand Oaks.

That is a 94-mile trip from one outer edge of the metropolis to another, which would be an unusual commute for anyone in the US by any mode. However, that doesn't mean that commute would be impossible. Unpleasant? Wasteful? Time-consuming? You bet. But it's a straight east-west shot on the 210/101, and as of this writing, that trip would take an hour and 49 minutes. When I got my first office job in San Francisco, I had a two-hour commute entirely on transit before I moved closer to work. I've never had a commute that long since.

Transit in a way is the only way to scale a city beyond that 7-10 million mark though as automotive mobility starts to break down (though Texas is trying to buck that trend right now..). Large commuter rail lines feeding into a massive, central core seems to be the best function for cities that size. It's a big reason LA is considered so hard to traverse, because it simply outgrew what a car can handle.

Los Angeles is not really hard to traverse by car for the vast majority of us doing it. The average commute time in LA is 30.9 minutes. A two-hour one-way commute is an extreme outlier even here. And unlike most cities I have lived in, LA has a true network of freeways that enables more than one viable route to a destination. If one route is unusually congested you just take another. Cities with the hub-spokes-ring road model don't always afford drivers multiple viable routes like LA's network usually does.

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Car ownership in the U.S. was driven by households in small towns and rural areas in the 1920s. This chart from 1921 shows that big cities accounted for less than 10% of registered cars:


source: https://www.railsandtrails.com/AutoF...1p16-100-8.jpg

Big city dwellers (and especially New Yorkers) no doubt owned fewer cars per capita in the 1920s, but remember that only 12 US cities had populations over 500,000 at that time. Combined, they would have contained a minority share of the population. It stands to reason that there would be more car owners in the places where most Americans lived at the time.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^ given that the US went from 20% in 1920 to 60% in 1929, it'd be good to know what specific year's data that graph is based on.

Things were changing lighting fast over the course of that decade, and by the end of it, the vast majority of American households that could afford a car, had one.

The chart is from 1921 but I doubt the distribution of car ownership was level between urban and rural by 1929 either. If by 1929 rural areas had 100% of households with a car then that means only 28% of households in cities would have had cars. If 80% of rural areas had cars, then only 44% or urban areas would've had cars. Even 100 years later less than half of NYC households have cars, and we all know that's not driven by incomes.

Farmers were the target audience for cars in the 1920s, particularly Henry Ford's Model T which famously came with 1 option for a color: black. As the market for farmers and rural households began to saturate the auto companies turned their attention to cities, but that was something that took root in the 1930s.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by craigs

Big city dwellers (and especially New Yorkers) no doubt owned fewer cars per capita in the 1920s, but remember that only 12 US cities had populations over 500,000 at that time. Combined, they would have contained a minority share of the population. It stands to reason that there would be more car owners in the places where most Americans lived at the time.

Some of the distribution was population skew, but cities over 500k in population accounted for over 15% of the U.S. population in 1920. There was a very clear lag of car adoption in cities. And the apprehension to cars in American cities was also well documented.

[craigs]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Some of the distribution was population skew, but cities over 500k in population accounted for over 15% of the U.S. population in 1920. There was a very clear lag of car adoption in cities. And the apprehension to cars in American cities was also well documented.

So 15% of the population and 9% of the car ownership in cities over 500,000.

[Crawford]

There's a big difference between vehicle ownership and living a purely auto-oriented lifestyle. All my German relatives have vehicles. None live a North American-type autocentric lifestyle.

Until maybe 1970 or so, vehicles were often marketed and utilized as leisure vehicles. You had the sexy styling, the archetypical weekend family drives, etc. Even Robert Moses viewed his ever-expanding parkways as arteries for leisure uses. Even today, the parkways haven't been altered to accommodate trucks or other large work vehicles.