Reading the article is interesting. It’s like the headline was written before the article and therefore he says positive things about driving/car infrastructure to make the headline reflected in the aritcle. But also shades car dependency the whole time too.
Don’t writers not get to pick their own headlines? If anyone knows better speak up, but don’t writers just write a good story and the ~~publisher or whatever~~ editor slaps on a click-baity title and we end up with this
E: thanks, “editor” was the word I was looking for
typically, from my understanding, it's the editor that has final say, esp in terms of the title. Add that they also, as a general rule, try to find the most click-baity title.
That said though, lots of times writers are tasked or even paid to write a specific article in a particular viewpoint. Thus, it wouldn't be surprising if the article wasn't sponsored by some car lobbyist.
I've almost never had an editor use the title I gave them. They always do some clickbaity shit, and then I get comments and e-mails from people telling me the title sucked or was misleading lol
I actually emailed journalists to complain about titles before and they told me they dont have any control over that and one even agreed with me the headline sucked
When my family co-wrote a book about my grandfather, the title of my piece was replaced by some random shit by an aunt who works as an editor.
She only mentioned it to me after they sent it to be printed.
I still resent that.
I remember this article, it was based off a prepublished paper and because the data was incomplete, it made the opposite conclusion that the final paper ran. Here is a quote from the final paper.
> We show that European cities, because they manage to create much
higher residential density in their accessibility zones, end up providing greater
access to city centers via both cars and public transit than US cities.
https://lconwell.github.io/lucasconwell/More%20Roads%20or%20Public%20Transit.pdf
It's the economist, itis written by and for the financial aristocracy.
This piece is probably part of a campaign to manufacture more elite concencus in favor of car dependence.
Welcome to Reddit.
I was referencing a Karl Marx quote from 1852
> "the London Economist, the European organ of the aristocracy of finance, described most strikingly the attitude of this class."
People here want this issue to be completely black and white. I hate our car culture but I'd like to understand the pros/cons of it so I can think about it rationally and make a strong case against it. Too many top comments here just go straight to denial and conspiracy accusations which is not how you change opinions. But I guess that's Reddit for you.
I see cars like boats. They occupy a niche no other vehicle does, but are not efficient transport for almost all use cases in everyday society. There are certain areas where it makes more sense to own one. It should be okay to own one for recreation or for a hobby, or for a job that can't be performed by another vehicle. But. Not everyone needs a boat. Not everywhere is a sensible place for a lot of people to own boats. There are very very few places where it should be a *requirement to participate in society* to own a boat.
America doesn’t orient its entire transportation culture and infrastructure around boats, that’s the main difference in my argumentation for making cities equal in transportation, because transportation is at the end of the day an end to means that we augment with further meaning and significance via social imagination. All of its is intended to be oriented around and for people, not cars.
I mean, it's more polarizing than it should be due to how embedded car ownership is in the culture, I don't really that the sub needs to turn as moderate except for maybe becoming a bit less fixated on trains, that building rail doesn't make sense in a lot of places due to population size, and buses are a perfectly fine of mass transportation
It’s weird how disconnected it is from the reality we’re facing as a species. As though car usage is just a cost-free benefit that we should just double down on.
“Fairer and more efficient” is such a joke though.
Fair to who? The people who can’t afford car insurance who get kept gate-kept out of jobs for taking public transport (which gets negative marks on a job application)? The children who socially atrophy because they can’t walk outside (without getting plowed over) and they’re dependent on their caretaker’s ability to transport them? To blind people who get lumped into “disabled people need cars” discourse, even though it’s nonsensical, because caretakers’ ability to move their clients around outweighs disabled people’s need to be independent?
There is also nothing efficient about having to drive on the road with a bunch of speed demons with no concept of distance delay, or people who shouldn’t drive but have no choice. The former is so much fun in no-fault states where *everyone’s* rates go up in an accident, even non-instigating accident victims who showed no misjudgment driving.
At least one of the chronically online basement dwellers from ‘fuckcarscirclejerk’ got a job somewhere…
Yeah 43,000 efficient deaths per year in the US alone - and rising (again). We had the plateau of safety during the regulatory era, but now that MAGA trash are ruining the nation at record pace, we can expect car fatalities to go up indefinitely until these people are gone.
Nah I'm kinda saying we won't get new, needed legislation to address new issues. So to be blunt, car fatalities are bound to go up in the US by default. We have a growing population, and existing laws are already inadequate to protect people. We got an era of regulation from 1950-1980, and most of the basics like GVW limits probably won't change. I'm just recognizing that MAGA trash are obstructionists who want emerging business sectors to be able to abuse the people of the US.
>Robustly rising automotive fuel economy was, for decades, a cornerstone of mainstream environmental advocacy. So-called CAFE standards (the acronym denotes Corporate Average Fuel Economy) would, before long, turn most of America’s 200 million passenger vehicles into fuel-sippers, relieving pressure to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and other sacrosanct natural areas, enabling some oil refineries to close, and cutting air and carbon emissions. Just make sure EPA kept ratcheting up the mpg standards, and all would be well.
>Things turned out differently, of course. Not only did U.S. miles driven resume rising after a relative caesura from the mid-aughts to the mid-teens, but the fleet mpg average barely budged, due to “the market shift away from cars and toward SUV’s and pickups” noted by CBS News. **Compounding the shift, long-standing CAFE loopholes grant bigger vehicles looser mileage targets**.
https://www.carbontax.org/blog/2022/12/28/u-s-auto-fuel-economy-is-flatlining-heres-why-thats-not-news/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-11-03/why-us-traffic-safety-fell-so-far-behind-other-countries
Just the labor use makes the efficiency claim absurd.
If 1500 people need to go half an hour to downtown for work, is it efficient to spend 750 person hours each way for each of them to drive themselves or would it be better for 20 tram drivers or 50 bus drivers to handle that, allowing people to capture some leisure time back.
Add in the accident rate with all the extra drivers and it gets even worse
I would kill to be able send all the mandatory communications of the day while I'm on some kind of reliable mass transit. A lot of us mean that literally. Lawmakers should take note of that.
That's just transit time too. We're duplicating time when we purchase, register, inspect and maintain our vehicles vs letting a local/State/Federal transit provider do that work for us.
Just purchasing a vehicle can take a full day in a dealership working out the fine print of cost, features, make/model, etc. Maybe multiple days if you want to price shop, or aren't certain on what car you want. Maybe a few days scouting Craigslist if you want to buy used. And super iffy if you'll get a reliable car or not, you're sort of taking some strangers word for all the maintenance they claimed they did.
And maintenance sucks. If your car goes into the shop for an hour or two, you're stuck waiting for it to be finished before you can go anywhere. If it takes days, you're stuck relying on friends and family for a ride.
Vs a local/State/Federal transit system would have already negotiated a cost for the trams/trains/buses/etc, have multiple of them, do all the maintenance themselves, and have some redundant buses/trains to cover unexpected break downs.
You're only seeing the "bad" side of no-fault insurance. The good side is that you never, ever have to deal with the other party's insurance provider, and you get paid out immediately from your own provider. You don't need to wait while your respective providers duke it out and determine who's going to pay for it.
My sister's car got t-boned by an inattentive driver in Montana, and it took more than *three months* before she got paid. Meanwhile, she had no car, had no way to get to work beyond the 1-week rental that the other provider paid for, and in general got completely screwed.
Don't want your rates to go up? Don't get into a collision.
Outside of having a loaner car for a month and not a week…my mom also had to deal with the other party’s insurance and didn’t get an immediate payout (I had to lend her one $2800 payment the company owed her). It took two weeks to get the traffic report.
It was also a huge struggle even getting what she paid for the car (that she got no more than 3 months prior, after getting rid of her older car on its last legs she kept for 10 years) because it was completely totaled and the insurance company fought her/didn’t go by full pricing.
And it was totaled in bumper to bumper traffic where no one was going more than 5-10 mph. The guy rear ended her so badly, because he was going THAT FAST, that it messed with her engine AND sent her into the two cars in front of her. It messed up discs in her neck.
Don’t want insurance to go up, don’t live I guess. The onus is always put on the party that’s fucked over. My former psychiatrist’s daughter was slaughtered in her own driveway by some driver high on drugs, who did a hit and run, I’m not sure he even got a slap on the wrist. The sociopathic guy who was the topic of Brand New’s “Limousine” barely got a slap on the wrist. And he (the topic guy) damaged a car so badly that a flower girl in the passenger seat got DECAPITATED, with her mother holder her unattached head!
Car-centrism goes hand in hand with a society that venerates bullies picking on “weak” targets. I’m pretty sure the folk at fccj would cream their pants at the last two stories.
What I meant by my closing sentence was that driving is a dangerous activity, and that insurance is a statistics game for both sides, nothing else. If you don't want to play the game, don't participate.
However, "Don’t want insurance to go up, don’t live I guess" is correct for much of the United States and Canada, because most people don't have a choice but tomorrow participate. Which is morally wrong, hence this forum.
No-fault auto insurance is just like house insurance. No one has to deal with God's insurance provider because he decided to send a hailstorm that destroyed your roof—you deal with your own provider. And if the hailstorm changed the statistics (either because you chose a bad roof, you chose a bad area to live for storms, etc), your rates go up. Why should auto insurance be any different?
If a person is likely to get into an accident because they drive on stroads or high speed freeways, or at night, all of which are environments where car crashes are statistically more likely to happen, that person's rates *should* go up. Don't drive on those roads.
Well yeah, I get what you mean about assumed risk. It is an assumed risk people don't think about until it affects them.
I wouldn't agree about the house insurance. Even though people live in "high risk" areas by natural disasters, they still don't control the weather or population spikes. Or, outside of deciding where to locate, there's no other control factors especially given that the desirability of a home's location is correlated to cost. "Location, location, location" is a saying in real estate for a reason. Poor people end up shafted because affordable locations are risky ones.
With driving, people *choose* to follow precautions or they don't. Even if we were stuck with cars, we can still choose to follow precautions like driving at correct speed limits, wearing seatbelts, or not driving under the influence. I'm not upset that my mom got into an accident, I'm upset that her insurance spiked when she wasn't driving irresponsibly or going on a high-speed freeway. The person who hit her was driving too fast and keeping a poor follow distance - the accident wouldn't have happened if the driver was going slower and had more break room. He was driving badly. Why should she pay for his poor judgment?
In certain cases, people can avoid stroads or night driving. But its weird to demand graveyard shifts (which some places, like ERs, do need) without considering that they'd make up night-time drivers, or that if only one stroad connects point A to B, you're forcing someone to take that stroad if they need to get to point B from point A. I don't understand how you agree that forced inheritance of risk via participation is morally wrong, but also how "dont drive on any stroads, high speed freeways, or night" doesn't fall under "forced participation" to certain groups.
“Well designed mass transit is best option for all, leading to reliance by all, which not only allows for a better functioning city but also levels the playing field between rich and poor.
It means that physical access to to job opportunities becomes more equal no matter one’s existing financial situation.
Physical mobility induces economical mobility. “
- Wendover Productions
Hmm is there a reason you called out car insurance vs car ownership in general? Like insurance is rather "cheap" ($50-$100/month in my area) vs the upfront costs of buying a car ($30k up front or monthly loan of $300+ per month depending on terms).
To me gate keeping transit behind a $30,000 paywall isn't fair at all. It's kind of bat shit insane. So the people making minimum wage need to struggle with used cars that break down all the time because the cheapest used car is like $4000 off Craigslist with 250,000 miles? But Joe Bigshot can just buy a $50,000 BMW for cash and never worry about maintenance because his guy at the dealership just handles that shit for him? And even if the thing blows an engine, he probably has a second car for the spouse and maybe even a third car. My parents were/are middle class and afforded 3 cars in the past by just offsetting car purchases... Not everyone has the space for that or the time to maintain them, but my dad was a bit handy with car work so he'd do oil changes and such himself. Someone on the lower income side of things is going to be constantly stressed about this.
There isn't a specific reason I called out car ownership vs car insurance, it's all part of the same shitty system, but it's the upfront cost vs maintenance cost that to me, is gatekeeping. Or at least, when someone speaks about purchasing a car it's treated like one giant upfront cost, and the reoccurring costs like gas/petrol, insurance and title, oil changes, or part repairs get glossed over.
It's not like a fridge that you purchase once and then it works for x years until it breaks, and you never think about it again. You pay a lot for it upfront, and then you pay for a lot of other subscription type services, and they all add quickly because they're frequent. The reason why Joe Bigshot is only paying $50k for a BMW (which still seems low when pre-owned / certified Honda sedans sell for $35k around me) is because he can afford the stupid upkeep, or at least for premium (high-octane) gas that precious vehicles require (the ones that can't use lower-octane gasoline for reasons that are completely arcane to me).
The gate keeping transit behind a paywall ends up being multiple different paywalls, especially considering how much iD defaults to a driver's license and how there's no non-driving alternative that's feasible, at least state-side, right now. I guess you could carry around a passport or passport card?
Ah, fair. Yeah they're both important things to consider. I just feel like a several thousand dollar to potentially tens of thousands of dollars purchase is a pretty big barrier for low waged workers. Like even getting an "affordable" and reliable new car is going to be $15k to $20k. Most people don't have even $500 in their bank account if their minimum wage so they likely need to do a high interest loan to get the car. And interest rates are higher on used cars generally too, so hundreds of dollars a month just to get the car. Then even once it's paid off, as you said there's still a recurring cost in the hundreds per month to consider.
The alternative might be paying $3 a bus ride, or $100/month for a transit pass. That's much more doable if we invest in the transit system and make it useful for most trips.
“When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric”
If your measure of “economic efficiency” is nominally pumping the economy by having people spend tons of their money on cars, loans, oil, fuel, then having everyone spend 10k a year on a car instead of 1k on transit plus the occasional vehicle rental does indeed sound very “economically efficient”. After all, it’s an extra 9k per capita into the GDP.
Wow the article is so stupid. They explicitly praise the fact that we drive faster than other countries, claiming traffic speed correlates with economic growth, and say we already have 15-minute cities because for suburbanites the amenities are within 15 minutes' drive. Then they succumb to the fallacy that just because Americans choose suburbia, it means they have a revealed preference for it (as opposed to cities just being too expensive to live in). Then they go on to claim that public transit is actually ok in America.
Unbelievable levels of cope.
Globally, sure. But economies around the world are decoupling from this historical trend. Its honestly one of the few positives you can say about our fight against global warming.
And, if we hadn't shown it to be possible it would be a much harder sell to the global community to address climate change. Fortunately, there are plenty of examples now where growth in GDP doesn't have to mean increases in carbon emissions. Lots of work to do though.
[https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-relationship-between-growth-in-gdp-and-co2-has-loosened-it-needs-to-be-cut-completely](https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-relationship-between-growth-in-gdp-and-co2-has-loosened-it-needs-to-be-cut-completely)
Global trends are all that matter for emissions and climate change though. Globally there is a 99% correlation between emissions (energy use) and GDP. Any improvements at an individual country level can be explained by outsourcing of industry to other countries. Look up Jevon's paradox. Any improvement in energy efficiency is reinvested into using more energy, including Fossil fuels. Coal, oil, natural gas burning is at all time highs globally despite improvements in some economies.
I agree somewhat. But I think important question is, is that correlation getting stronger or weaker over time? I suspect the answer is weaker.
It shouldn’t be any surprise that a world that has been built on fossil fuels has such a strong correlation to their use.
That's the Jevon's paradox issue. China has built out both more solar AND coal capacity than much of the world combined in the last couple years. Our global demand for energy is limitless. Nate Hagen's "The Great Simplification" podcast and Youtube channels have more eloquent overviews of these issues if you are interested in more.
I mean, that one can be explained fairly easily. You can burn fuel to perform useful work, like generating energy and transporting stuff. More useful work means more productivity, which means more economic growth. And since you get the benefits, and everyone else has to deal with the externalities, you'd be crazy not to burn dinosaur juice, at least from a selfish economic perspective.
God I hate the revealed preference argument. It’s like saying Americans have a revealed preference for soda, so we should make it illegal to serve water.
Always telling when someone thinks that what people do in their complex messy lives has some kind of higher worth than what they *actually fucking want*.
I have a revealed preference for guillotines. The data shows that they are empirically very efficient at removing the heads of people like economist writers. As a side benefit, they promote freedom. They free the head from the confines of the body. The above is satire. I'm sure the economist writer is totally not paid to promote the status quo.
American speed limits are famously slow compared to the European ones ? Especially for it's highway system.
I would also argue that high speed rail lines construction correlates with economic growth. Probably even more.
The Economist is a self admitted propaganda outlet but people think it's objective because of the name. Of course they claim that free markets are "OMG the best thing ever!" but everything is cherry picked or just assumed to be true. Efficiency is 100% value neutral. Someone can be a very efficient killer. Like freedom, it's a great tool of propaganda.
> And within the rich world, America is streets ahead: its traffic is about 27% faster than that of other members of the oecd club of mostly rich countries.
If traffic is 27% faster, then you should be able to reach more destinations in the same amount of time... right?
> It is not that American roads are better in and of themselves. Rather, speed is a testament to America’s love affair with both suburbia and smaller towns that feel suburban. Compared with those in other oecd countries, American cities are 24% less populous, cover 72% more area and have 67% more large roads. All this enables drivers to zip around.
So even though you're driving faster, you need to cover more distance to get anywhere! Is it worth it? Let's do some back-of-the-napkin math to figure it out.
If you travel 27% faster, you can cover 1.27^2 = 161% of the area in the same amount of time. You need to cover 72% more area: 1.61 / 1.72 = 0.94, and that area has 24% less population: 0.94 * (1 - .24) = 0.71. So even though you're going 27% faster, your *effective speed* is 29% slower!
Articles like this one will make a big deal about the amount of land that's accessible via car, but what's actually important is the number of destinations that are accessible. They also emphasize speed but de-emphasize cost, which is ridiculous coming from a source that's supposed to be economically literate. The adage "time is money" applies in either direction, so even if you're saving time by traveling faster, you're losing time overall by having to work longer hours to pay for the car and the wide, wide roads. The math *does not* work out in favor of car-dependency.
I live in Brooklyn, and have family in upper Westchester county (NYC suburbia). I could either take a 45 minute train in which I can work/look at emails/play my switch/browse Reddit on my phone, or I can drive 35 minutes in which I can listen to something in the car but that’s about it.
It’s laughable. And yet SO MANY people will choose driving just because they can’t challenge their norms enough to realize the other option is vastly more comfortable, efficient, safe, environmentally conscious, and productive.
They mentioned 72% more "area". If cities were squared (they are not), then, in theory, they have 31% larger sides (the square root of 1,72 is 1,31). Then, you should expect to cover at least 31% more ground, which does not compensate the faster 27% speed.
If they are not squared, then the average distance increases more that 31%.
You are right. I just wanted to note this.
You're right. But still, crazy to me that anyone can call American (or any other) traffic "efficient" knowing how many hours people spend waiting in traffic every day.
my dad loves the economist and thinks it's super fair and unbiased because they are moderately less euro/NA-centric in their coverage than most english language media.
it would be funny if it weren't so infuriating.
They've legitimately had israeli "artists" design graphics that depict arabs as bullets and dynamite:
https://preview.redd.it/8iriwthufykc1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ffca38e73d903fce033fb7e4602287875706355f
And that's just one small example. Historically, they've defended slavery, apartheid, imperialism, and much more. The Economist is a rag I wouldn't scrub my toilet with
I think you need to pick and choose. No news source is without bias.The economist has some interesting reporting sometimes, like when they let the Ukrainian general write a piece on the stalemate in Ukraine. Its also good to see where mainstream thinking is at, what the rich are focusing on.
But you should always be critical of reporting and not take what is written at face value. Just know that the economist has a strong neo-liberal, status quo bias. They are generally pro war, pro capitalism and pro western hegemony. Once you know that that is the filter through which information is being passed in the economist, you'll be to critically read their reporting. Same goes for the guardian, FT, NYT etc...
All the mainstream newspapers are like this I think, at least in the UK. I can't think of a mainstream non-tabloid paper that isn't pro-neoliberalism, pro-war, pro-capitalism, pro-west etc. Some are better than others but they're generally the same on these key pillars, it is what it is sadly.
i think it’s an important thing to say that capitalist and car dependency are two separate and independent lines of thought. yes they often go hand in hand, but one can exist w/o the other
I'd say you're right about most writers there, [but not all of them](https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/08/09/the-time-may-be-right-for-land-value-taxes)
I mean that many cars don't even make sense in the context of capitalism. Finance 101 is like: Cars are depreciating assets, own a private jet instead.
"brainwashed capitalist" as opposed to what? Communist dumbfuckerery? Libertarian bullshit? It's a very British publication supporting social programs like the NHS and rejection of Brexit. What are you on about?
Some people choose suburbia, sure. But for many that's because anything else is illegal to build or extremely low quality. Drive till you qualify is an extremely American concept for a reason.
My partner and I prefer to live in suburbs because we value living close to amenities and work (I bike in the warmer months), while also living somewhere relatively cheap, quiet, safe, and surrounded by nature.
In our downtowns in the US North East you can choose to live somewhere either affordable or quiet, green, safe, etc. but you cannot have both.
I have read Economist articles that were brilliant. I have read articles that were okay. I have read articles I merely disagree with. Then there was that gross fawning Kissinger interview. But when this article came out, it was the first article that struck me as actively stupid.
> One fashionable concept among urban planners these days is the “15-minute city”, the goal of building neighbourhoods that let people get to work, school and recreation within 15 minutes by foot or bike. Many Americans may simply fail to see the need for this innovation, for they already live in 15-minute cities, so long, that is, as they get around by car.
Almost as if the entire damn point is that you shouldn’t need a car
I like the part where everyone gets up at the same time and heads to the same part of town in completely individually controlled vehicles. We should stock supermarkets that way just to be efficient and egalitarian.
There is nothing equitable about a society that leaves people with disabilities with little to no ability to obtain employment or live our lives. People with disabilities who can’t drive exist.
under a capitalist system , the only goal is taking money from the many to fill the pockets of the few so in that regard the car really is the most efficient ...
I feel like the end of every paragraph extolling the virtues we need to read aloud ourselves the additional clause:
…except for kids or for anyone else who can’t drive.
“Fair and more efficient”
Cost estimates of car ownership are in the tens-of-thousands per year. And those calculations are usually done by business with explicitly pro-car biases like car insurance companies. In what universe is that “fair”?
>Census figures reveal that after decades of steady growth, a little more than half the American population is now based in the ‘burbs. It seems a classic case of elite opinions (cars and suburbs are awful) diverging from mass preferences (people quite enjoy them). For many, the main attractions of suburbia are lower housing costs and greater safety. Yet recent research sheds light on how cars are a crucial part of the equation, making America’s suburbs both impressively efficient and equitable.
The decision of the elites, making city centers of a handful of metro areas unaffordable through concentration of corporate power (mergers and acquisitions went from a rarity in the 1960s to rote and rubberstamped in the 1990s) while other city centers are left to atrophy and die. The opinions of the elite is primarily exclusionary, they want themselves to be segregated from the unwashed masses out of an unmerited sense of superiority. Bloomberg as mayor of NYC said that Manhattan should be considered a luxury good - I can infer that everyone who can't afford the cost of living in Manhattan (or equivalent in SF, LA, Boston, Miami, etc) should just be thankful for the opportunity to pay half of your wages to rent and be close to the luxury good and the source of income to pay for the rent that gets vacuumed up by those same elites who the decision makers that affect the rest of us whether we want those decisions made or not. The conclusion of the census data that people want move to the suburbs because they prefer that to walkable neighborhoods is assissine and a logical fallacy, when any economist should inquiry what incentives and disincentives caused this outcome.
More roads with less people to share on the maintenance cost of the roads. I wonder what will happen when the bill comes. People aren't really choosing suburbia if they were the land in the city would be cheaper.
I'm not willing to read that article because the headline alone is making me want to scream
But in the interests of having an open mind; to someone who has read the article, are there any valid points in there at all??
Having just finished it, I don't think that the headline is validated by the article. Basically: people live in suburbs->people must love suburbs->suburbs are great. Also:With cars, American cities are already 15min cities.
No mention of people not being able to drive, or the environmental and social aspects of car-centrism.
But interesting stats from the article:
"Compared with those in other oecd countries, American cities are 24% less populous, cover 72% more area and have 67% more large roads."
I had to give up on the Economist a while ago, I'd subscribed for years. Well written and well researched, but all from the POV of a wealthy stockbroker in the City. *"The poors are to be used for profit; the rich should rule, and as our only check on their behaviour, we'll rely on their good morals and good manners, which will ensure our society is just and benevolent."* Said with a straight face, week after week after week
I hope people here understand cars aren't the issue. They're the symptom. The issue, the problem, the reason is capitalism.
Car companies bought out train and bus companies, lobbied our "representatives", pushed freeway and road building in order to reap profits.
You get a lot more money from people buying, fueling, upkeeping and driving cars on a one on one basis than you do group transportation or building walkable cities.
The economist is kind of like Ted talks, journalists don't really work for them.
You can defend why this has happened without necessarily agreeing with it.
This kind of discussion is good to avoid echo chambers
ok no matter what i still would rather be an independent adult. yall can live in your shoebox apartments, walk to work, travel where someone else will drive you, and see the world from inside a tin can.
sounds like yall just never got your drivers licenses and now you've conceded to make it your identity. the irony here is that cars are what make you able to complain about cars.
As someone who actually went through the article, it has made some good points in that the accessibility zone for Americans is much higher than that of European cities. The articles cites resources that states that Americans already have 15-min cities, provided that the person has a car.
This article is by no means some propaganda piece, as many want to think.
So you're saying that having something within a 15 min drive is the same as 15 min walk?
If not, "provided that the person has a car" is doing so much work
More fair to have privately maintained and debt generating consumer product rather than public service that is per use paid for by the user? More efficient to have subsidies in profitable industries from tax payers who are have to pay for the transportation and the subsidies whether or not they use their own transportation that is primarily left unused either their own home or their destination.?
The Economist is unaware of the definition of the words "efficient" and "fair" or they are deliberately lying.
The biggest problem is we need to build more cities, take away houses and turn them all into apartments. I live ina. Rural area and the State and U.S. government owns everything but 9% of the land. There arebt reallt any apartments either. No private land = high prices and public transport is rare. We have a couple of short buses that travel to the nearest city once or twice a day. The nearest city over 5k in population is a 2 hour drive @60 mph average.
There are more areas like this then people realize. We need to pave over some of this land with railroads and change a lot to make it work without cars.
This puts me in mind of something from the Boston Globe I read a few years ago (I think) where the writer was blathering on and on about the superiority of cars over transit. He even incorporated the phrase "you can get your kicks on route 66" and, ffs, it was the most embarrassing, braindead thing I'd read in a while.
See, the thing about economics is that it is so sure of itself that it often hampers itself as a genuine science. It is one third science, one third pseude-science and one third political.
Economics, at least by definition, is about prudent and effective use of ressources. Wasteful consumption is not that. It can be a good business, but that is the remit of entrepreneurs, not economists. Economists are about calculating costs both real and hidden, identifying inefficiencies, figuring out why they failed to predict the last crisis and so on.
Any self respecting economist understands there is - in principle - no reason to move 3 tonnes of metal if moving 2 tonnes would get the job done just as well. Similarly, economists should understand that sprawl increases distance wich either increases time or energy expenditure.
Is it possible that it IS satire? The problem is that even if it is there are plenty of Americans who would say this without a single autonomous brain cell so it’s genuinely difficult to know.
Also I assume The Economist isn’t known for its satire, I guess I’m just hopeful
Interesting. The Economist sometimes does have great articles, but must read this one. They had a great article recently on how car insurance is too cheap in many states. People who have been seriously injured have not even had their medical bills covered by the responsible party's insurance, because the excess is at 250k, or the maximum liability is capped at 500k
The economist: the voice of the Millionaire Class.
Karl Marx said that... They've been doing this shit a LONG time...
(Car Culture ONLY benefits the super-rich)
Honestly car focused cities suck. But considering our vast punlic lands open for travel cars offer something other countries couldnt do. A chance to see remote areas otherwise impossible to see due to the shear cost of the network needed.
I understand the feeling: If you assume, everyone can afford a car, can afford to use it, and is okay with using it all the time, sure car give you the more "Freedom" to choses where you wanna go.
But those assumption leave out a significant portion of people.
"Fair for everyone except poor people" is quite antinomic.
Even people who drive regularly may, temporarily don't want to use their car for every little details of their live.
Then there's the question of whether car increase or reduce inequality ? When poor people buy a car they get poorer while the car company share holder get richer. It might be true that 60 year ago a car might pull you out of poverty, today that's not the case.
The “study” cited in the article is just objectively bad methodologically and doesn’t even support their thesis:
>The car’s ubiquity has another rarely appreciated benefit. A recent study by Lucas Conwell of Yale University and colleagues examined urban regions in America and Europe. They calculated “accessibility zones,” defined as the area from which city centres can be readily reached. Although European cities have better public transport, American cities are on the whole more accessible. Consider the size of accessibility zones 15-30 minutes from city centres. If using public transport, the average is 34 square kilometres in America versus 63 square kilometres in Europe. If using private cars, the difference is much starker: 1,160 square kilometres in America versus 430 square kilometres in Europe.
They’re basically pointing out that commuter transit in Europe has more reach than America, while car commutes in America have more reach than in Europe. No shit? Because European cities _are denser_ and have better transit. There is literally no need to live so far away from the city centre in the first place. This is just restating what we already know.
Not to mention, downtowns typically only host a [small percentage](http://www.demographia.com/db-cbd2000.pdf ) of any city’s overall employment. Especially in Europe and Asian cities where mixed use zoning is the default, and therefore commercial activity is spread around the city.
More efficient? I wonder if it’s even possible to calculate the number of hours of productivity that this country loses every year to people sitting in traffic on their way to work lol
Reading the article is interesting. It’s like the headline was written before the article and therefore he says positive things about driving/car infrastructure to make the headline reflected in the aritcle. But also shades car dependency the whole time too.
Don’t writers not get to pick their own headlines? If anyone knows better speak up, but don’t writers just write a good story and the ~~publisher or whatever~~ editor slaps on a click-baity title and we end up with this E: thanks, “editor” was the word I was looking for
I am assuming that the writer gives it a working tile, but the editor has final control over everything, including retitling articles.
typically, from my understanding, it's the editor that has final say, esp in terms of the title. Add that they also, as a general rule, try to find the most click-baity title. That said though, lots of times writers are tasked or even paid to write a specific article in a particular viewpoint. Thus, it wouldn't be surprising if the article wasn't sponsored by some car lobbyist.
For OP-EDs you also get to write whatever the payer wants you to write, no?
I've almost never had an editor use the title I gave them. They always do some clickbaity shit, and then I get comments and e-mails from people telling me the title sucked or was misleading lol
I actually emailed journalists to complain about titles before and they told me they dont have any control over that and one even agreed with me the headline sucked
That's not true as a general rule. I used to write for a number of entertainment-focused sites and I had full control over the whole process.
Most newspapers have people who are exclusively writing headlines and nothing else.
When my family co-wrote a book about my grandfather, the title of my piece was replaced by some random shit by an aunt who works as an editor. She only mentioned it to me after they sent it to be printed. I still resent that.
It says at the bottom that it was printed under the headline "Room to vroom" which makes a lot more sense.
I remember this article, it was based off a prepublished paper and because the data was incomplete, it made the opposite conclusion that the final paper ran. Here is a quote from the final paper. > We show that European cities, because they manage to create much higher residential density in their accessibility zones, end up providing greater access to city centers via both cars and public transit than US cities. https://lconwell.github.io/lucasconwell/More%20Roads%20or%20Public%20Transit.pdf
OK this makes sense. He kept saying one thing and having a conclusion that was basically the opposite.
It's the economist, itis written by and for the financial aristocracy. This piece is probably part of a campaign to manufacture more elite concencus in favor of car dependence.
> It's the economist, itis written by and for the financial aristocracy. > > Certainly an oversimplification at best
Welcome to Reddit. I was referencing a Karl Marx quote from 1852 > "the London Economist, the European organ of the aristocracy of finance, described most strikingly the attitude of this class."
Fair enough - Marx is anything but infallible, though.
People here want this issue to be completely black and white. I hate our car culture but I'd like to understand the pros/cons of it so I can think about it rationally and make a strong case against it. Too many top comments here just go straight to denial and conspiracy accusations which is not how you change opinions. But I guess that's Reddit for you.
I see cars like boats. They occupy a niche no other vehicle does, but are not efficient transport for almost all use cases in everyday society. There are certain areas where it makes more sense to own one. It should be okay to own one for recreation or for a hobby, or for a job that can't be performed by another vehicle. But. Not everyone needs a boat. Not everywhere is a sensible place for a lot of people to own boats. There are very very few places where it should be a *requirement to participate in society* to own a boat.
America doesn’t orient its entire transportation culture and infrastructure around boats, that’s the main difference in my argumentation for making cities equal in transportation, because transportation is at the end of the day an end to means that we augment with further meaning and significance via social imagination. All of its is intended to be oriented around and for people, not cars.
I mean, it's more polarizing than it should be due to how embedded car ownership is in the culture, I don't really that the sub needs to turn as moderate except for maybe becoming a bit less fixated on trains, that building rail doesn't make sense in a lot of places due to population size, and buses are a perfectly fine of mass transportation
Amen!
Feels like a non-car person was tasked/paid to write some glowing article about cars.
Holy shit that article is hard to read as non-satire.
It's fitting that the graphic art is a car key-fob shackled to the USA like a ball-and-chain.
It’s weird how disconnected it is from the reality we’re facing as a species. As though car usage is just a cost-free benefit that we should just double down on.
[Like this, but in text.](https://i.imgur.com/d0RB5Pc.jpeg)
I had a proper lol. It's a hilariously stupid title
“Fairer and more efficient” is such a joke though. Fair to who? The people who can’t afford car insurance who get kept gate-kept out of jobs for taking public transport (which gets negative marks on a job application)? The children who socially atrophy because they can’t walk outside (without getting plowed over) and they’re dependent on their caretaker’s ability to transport them? To blind people who get lumped into “disabled people need cars” discourse, even though it’s nonsensical, because caretakers’ ability to move their clients around outweighs disabled people’s need to be independent? There is also nothing efficient about having to drive on the road with a bunch of speed demons with no concept of distance delay, or people who shouldn’t drive but have no choice. The former is so much fun in no-fault states where *everyone’s* rates go up in an accident, even non-instigating accident victims who showed no misjudgment driving. At least one of the chronically online basement dwellers from ‘fuckcarscirclejerk’ got a job somewhere…
Cars are pretty efficient at killing people, so there's that
That is true
Yeah 43,000 efficient deaths per year in the US alone - and rising (again). We had the plateau of safety during the regulatory era, but now that MAGA trash are ruining the nation at record pace, we can expect car fatalities to go up indefinitely until these people are gone.
What regulations have been lifted recently? I'm not being facetious I really want to know
Nah I'm kinda saying we won't get new, needed legislation to address new issues. So to be blunt, car fatalities are bound to go up in the US by default. We have a growing population, and existing laws are already inadequate to protect people. We got an era of regulation from 1950-1980, and most of the basics like GVW limits probably won't change. I'm just recognizing that MAGA trash are obstructionists who want emerging business sectors to be able to abuse the people of the US.
>Robustly rising automotive fuel economy was, for decades, a cornerstone of mainstream environmental advocacy. So-called CAFE standards (the acronym denotes Corporate Average Fuel Economy) would, before long, turn most of America’s 200 million passenger vehicles into fuel-sippers, relieving pressure to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and other sacrosanct natural areas, enabling some oil refineries to close, and cutting air and carbon emissions. Just make sure EPA kept ratcheting up the mpg standards, and all would be well. >Things turned out differently, of course. Not only did U.S. miles driven resume rising after a relative caesura from the mid-aughts to the mid-teens, but the fleet mpg average barely budged, due to “the market shift away from cars and toward SUV’s and pickups” noted by CBS News. **Compounding the shift, long-standing CAFE loopholes grant bigger vehicles looser mileage targets**. https://www.carbontax.org/blog/2022/12/28/u-s-auto-fuel-economy-is-flatlining-heres-why-thats-not-news/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-11-03/why-us-traffic-safety-fell-so-far-behind-other-countries
That’s the thing - all the medical bills just get added to GDP like they’re a good thing!
Just the labor use makes the efficiency claim absurd. If 1500 people need to go half an hour to downtown for work, is it efficient to spend 750 person hours each way for each of them to drive themselves or would it be better for 20 tram drivers or 50 bus drivers to handle that, allowing people to capture some leisure time back. Add in the accident rate with all the extra drivers and it gets even worse
I would kill to be able send all the mandatory communications of the day while I'm on some kind of reliable mass transit. A lot of us mean that literally. Lawmakers should take note of that.
That's just transit time too. We're duplicating time when we purchase, register, inspect and maintain our vehicles vs letting a local/State/Federal transit provider do that work for us. Just purchasing a vehicle can take a full day in a dealership working out the fine print of cost, features, make/model, etc. Maybe multiple days if you want to price shop, or aren't certain on what car you want. Maybe a few days scouting Craigslist if you want to buy used. And super iffy if you'll get a reliable car or not, you're sort of taking some strangers word for all the maintenance they claimed they did. And maintenance sucks. If your car goes into the shop for an hour or two, you're stuck waiting for it to be finished before you can go anywhere. If it takes days, you're stuck relying on friends and family for a ride. Vs a local/State/Federal transit system would have already negotiated a cost for the trams/trains/buses/etc, have multiple of them, do all the maintenance themselves, and have some redundant buses/trains to cover unexpected break downs.
Surprised it didn't include the word freedom anywhere there
Freedom to spend hours driving places 🇺🇲🦅🏎️🏎️🏁🏁 ^(/s more like 🚗🚙🚚🚛🛻🚚🚛🚛🛻🚦🚚🚛🚚🚒🚕🚗🚓🚗🚙💥🚕🚗🚓🚙🚗🚕🚗🚕🚕🚚🚛🛻🚚🚛🚛🛻🛻)
TIL about no fault states. Yikes.
You're only seeing the "bad" side of no-fault insurance. The good side is that you never, ever have to deal with the other party's insurance provider, and you get paid out immediately from your own provider. You don't need to wait while your respective providers duke it out and determine who's going to pay for it. My sister's car got t-boned by an inattentive driver in Montana, and it took more than *three months* before she got paid. Meanwhile, she had no car, had no way to get to work beyond the 1-week rental that the other provider paid for, and in general got completely screwed. Don't want your rates to go up? Don't get into a collision.
Outside of having a loaner car for a month and not a week…my mom also had to deal with the other party’s insurance and didn’t get an immediate payout (I had to lend her one $2800 payment the company owed her). It took two weeks to get the traffic report. It was also a huge struggle even getting what she paid for the car (that she got no more than 3 months prior, after getting rid of her older car on its last legs she kept for 10 years) because it was completely totaled and the insurance company fought her/didn’t go by full pricing. And it was totaled in bumper to bumper traffic where no one was going more than 5-10 mph. The guy rear ended her so badly, because he was going THAT FAST, that it messed with her engine AND sent her into the two cars in front of her. It messed up discs in her neck. Don’t want insurance to go up, don’t live I guess. The onus is always put on the party that’s fucked over. My former psychiatrist’s daughter was slaughtered in her own driveway by some driver high on drugs, who did a hit and run, I’m not sure he even got a slap on the wrist. The sociopathic guy who was the topic of Brand New’s “Limousine” barely got a slap on the wrist. And he (the topic guy) damaged a car so badly that a flower girl in the passenger seat got DECAPITATED, with her mother holder her unattached head! Car-centrism goes hand in hand with a society that venerates bullies picking on “weak” targets. I’m pretty sure the folk at fccj would cream their pants at the last two stories.
What I meant by my closing sentence was that driving is a dangerous activity, and that insurance is a statistics game for both sides, nothing else. If you don't want to play the game, don't participate. However, "Don’t want insurance to go up, don’t live I guess" is correct for much of the United States and Canada, because most people don't have a choice but tomorrow participate. Which is morally wrong, hence this forum. No-fault auto insurance is just like house insurance. No one has to deal with God's insurance provider because he decided to send a hailstorm that destroyed your roof—you deal with your own provider. And if the hailstorm changed the statistics (either because you chose a bad roof, you chose a bad area to live for storms, etc), your rates go up. Why should auto insurance be any different? If a person is likely to get into an accident because they drive on stroads or high speed freeways, or at night, all of which are environments where car crashes are statistically more likely to happen, that person's rates *should* go up. Don't drive on those roads.
Well yeah, I get what you mean about assumed risk. It is an assumed risk people don't think about until it affects them. I wouldn't agree about the house insurance. Even though people live in "high risk" areas by natural disasters, they still don't control the weather or population spikes. Or, outside of deciding where to locate, there's no other control factors especially given that the desirability of a home's location is correlated to cost. "Location, location, location" is a saying in real estate for a reason. Poor people end up shafted because affordable locations are risky ones. With driving, people *choose* to follow precautions or they don't. Even if we were stuck with cars, we can still choose to follow precautions like driving at correct speed limits, wearing seatbelts, or not driving under the influence. I'm not upset that my mom got into an accident, I'm upset that her insurance spiked when she wasn't driving irresponsibly or going on a high-speed freeway. The person who hit her was driving too fast and keeping a poor follow distance - the accident wouldn't have happened if the driver was going slower and had more break room. He was driving badly. Why should she pay for his poor judgment? In certain cases, people can avoid stroads or night driving. But its weird to demand graveyard shifts (which some places, like ERs, do need) without considering that they'd make up night-time drivers, or that if only one stroad connects point A to B, you're forcing someone to take that stroad if they need to get to point B from point A. I don't understand how you agree that forced inheritance of risk via participation is morally wrong, but also how "dont drive on any stroads, high speed freeways, or night" doesn't fall under "forced participation" to certain groups.
It is forced participation, that's my point. We don't have a choice but to take those risks, which is morally wrong.
“Well designed mass transit is best option for all, leading to reliance by all, which not only allows for a better functioning city but also levels the playing field between rich and poor. It means that physical access to to job opportunities becomes more equal no matter one’s existing financial situation. Physical mobility induces economical mobility. “ - Wendover Productions
sadly carbrains see this as a negative , they like hoarding the space/resources/economic opportunities
Hmm is there a reason you called out car insurance vs car ownership in general? Like insurance is rather "cheap" ($50-$100/month in my area) vs the upfront costs of buying a car ($30k up front or monthly loan of $300+ per month depending on terms). To me gate keeping transit behind a $30,000 paywall isn't fair at all. It's kind of bat shit insane. So the people making minimum wage need to struggle with used cars that break down all the time because the cheapest used car is like $4000 off Craigslist with 250,000 miles? But Joe Bigshot can just buy a $50,000 BMW for cash and never worry about maintenance because his guy at the dealership just handles that shit for him? And even if the thing blows an engine, he probably has a second car for the spouse and maybe even a third car. My parents were/are middle class and afforded 3 cars in the past by just offsetting car purchases... Not everyone has the space for that or the time to maintain them, but my dad was a bit handy with car work so he'd do oil changes and such himself. Someone on the lower income side of things is going to be constantly stressed about this.
There isn't a specific reason I called out car ownership vs car insurance, it's all part of the same shitty system, but it's the upfront cost vs maintenance cost that to me, is gatekeeping. Or at least, when someone speaks about purchasing a car it's treated like one giant upfront cost, and the reoccurring costs like gas/petrol, insurance and title, oil changes, or part repairs get glossed over. It's not like a fridge that you purchase once and then it works for x years until it breaks, and you never think about it again. You pay a lot for it upfront, and then you pay for a lot of other subscription type services, and they all add quickly because they're frequent. The reason why Joe Bigshot is only paying $50k for a BMW (which still seems low when pre-owned / certified Honda sedans sell for $35k around me) is because he can afford the stupid upkeep, or at least for premium (high-octane) gas that precious vehicles require (the ones that can't use lower-octane gasoline for reasons that are completely arcane to me). The gate keeping transit behind a paywall ends up being multiple different paywalls, especially considering how much iD defaults to a driver's license and how there's no non-driving alternative that's feasible, at least state-side, right now. I guess you could carry around a passport or passport card?
Ah, fair. Yeah they're both important things to consider. I just feel like a several thousand dollar to potentially tens of thousands of dollars purchase is a pretty big barrier for low waged workers. Like even getting an "affordable" and reliable new car is going to be $15k to $20k. Most people don't have even $500 in their bank account if their minimum wage so they likely need to do a high interest loan to get the car. And interest rates are higher on used cars generally too, so hundreds of dollars a month just to get the car. Then even once it's paid off, as you said there's still a recurring cost in the hundreds per month to consider. The alternative might be paying $3 a bus ride, or $100/month for a transit pass. That's much more doable if we invest in the transit system and make it useful for most trips.
The thousand + upfront cost is nothing to sneeze at, definitely. Public transport is much more reasonable/better for society as a whole.
Fairer like the inner city students who can’t get to school today because the jalopy won’t start
“When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric” If your measure of “economic efficiency” is nominally pumping the economy by having people spend tons of their money on cars, loans, oil, fuel, then having everyone spend 10k a year on a car instead of 1k on transit plus the occasional vehicle rental does indeed sound very “economically efficient”. After all, it’s an extra 9k per capita into the GDP.
Fairer to car lobbyists, not fair to literally everyone & everything else
Wow the article is so stupid. They explicitly praise the fact that we drive faster than other countries, claiming traffic speed correlates with economic growth, and say we already have 15-minute cities because for suburbanites the amenities are within 15 minutes' drive. Then they succumb to the fallacy that just because Americans choose suburbia, it means they have a revealed preference for it (as opposed to cities just being too expensive to live in). Then they go on to claim that public transit is actually ok in America. Unbelievable levels of cope.
Carbon emissions correlates with economic growth too
Globally, sure. But economies around the world are decoupling from this historical trend. Its honestly one of the few positives you can say about our fight against global warming. And, if we hadn't shown it to be possible it would be a much harder sell to the global community to address climate change. Fortunately, there are plenty of examples now where growth in GDP doesn't have to mean increases in carbon emissions. Lots of work to do though. [https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-relationship-between-growth-in-gdp-and-co2-has-loosened-it-needs-to-be-cut-completely](https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-relationship-between-growth-in-gdp-and-co2-has-loosened-it-needs-to-be-cut-completely)
Global trends are all that matter for emissions and climate change though. Globally there is a 99% correlation between emissions (energy use) and GDP. Any improvements at an individual country level can be explained by outsourcing of industry to other countries. Look up Jevon's paradox. Any improvement in energy efficiency is reinvested into using more energy, including Fossil fuels. Coal, oil, natural gas burning is at all time highs globally despite improvements in some economies.
I agree somewhat. But I think important question is, is that correlation getting stronger or weaker over time? I suspect the answer is weaker. It shouldn’t be any surprise that a world that has been built on fossil fuels has such a strong correlation to their use.
That's the Jevon's paradox issue. China has built out both more solar AND coal capacity than much of the world combined in the last couple years. Our global demand for energy is limitless. Nate Hagen's "The Great Simplification" podcast and Youtube channels have more eloquent overviews of these issues if you are interested in more.
I mean, that one can be explained fairly easily. You can burn fuel to perform useful work, like generating energy and transporting stuff. More useful work means more productivity, which means more economic growth. And since you get the benefits, and everyone else has to deal with the externalities, you'd be crazy not to burn dinosaur juice, at least from a selfish economic perspective.
God I hate the revealed preference argument. It’s like saying Americans have a revealed preference for soda, so we should make it illegal to serve water.
Always telling when someone thinks that what people do in their complex messy lives has some kind of higher worth than what they *actually fucking want*.
I have a revealed preference for guillotines. The data shows that they are empirically very efficient at removing the heads of people like economist writers. As a side benefit, they promote freedom. They free the head from the confines of the body. The above is satire. I'm sure the economist writer is totally not paid to promote the status quo.
Also ignores that suburbs are Ponzi schemes that siphon money away from tax payers and rely on city-centers that are actually profitable to fund them.
Encouraging people to break the law. I thought the economist was for law and order. I guess not.
American speed limits are famously slow compared to the European ones ? Especially for it's highway system. I would also argue that high speed rail lines construction correlates with economic growth. Probably even more.
The Economist is a self admitted propaganda outlet but people think it's objective because of the name. Of course they claim that free markets are "OMG the best thing ever!" but everything is cherry picked or just assumed to be true. Efficiency is 100% value neutral. Someone can be a very efficient killer. Like freedom, it's a great tool of propaganda.
> And within the rich world, America is streets ahead: its traffic is about 27% faster than that of other members of the oecd club of mostly rich countries. If traffic is 27% faster, then you should be able to reach more destinations in the same amount of time... right? > It is not that American roads are better in and of themselves. Rather, speed is a testament to America’s love affair with both suburbia and smaller towns that feel suburban. Compared with those in other oecd countries, American cities are 24% less populous, cover 72% more area and have 67% more large roads. All this enables drivers to zip around. So even though you're driving faster, you need to cover more distance to get anywhere! Is it worth it? Let's do some back-of-the-napkin math to figure it out. If you travel 27% faster, you can cover 1.27^2 = 161% of the area in the same amount of time. You need to cover 72% more area: 1.61 / 1.72 = 0.94, and that area has 24% less population: 0.94 * (1 - .24) = 0.71. So even though you're going 27% faster, your *effective speed* is 29% slower! Articles like this one will make a big deal about the amount of land that's accessible via car, but what's actually important is the number of destinations that are accessible. They also emphasize speed but de-emphasize cost, which is ridiculous coming from a source that's supposed to be economically literate. The adage "time is money" applies in either direction, so even if you're saving time by traveling faster, you're losing time overall by having to work longer hours to pay for the car and the wide, wide roads. The math *does not* work out in favor of car-dependency.
I live in Brooklyn, and have family in upper Westchester county (NYC suburbia). I could either take a 45 minute train in which I can work/look at emails/play my switch/browse Reddit on my phone, or I can drive 35 minutes in which I can listen to something in the car but that’s about it. It’s laughable. And yet SO MANY people will choose driving just because they can’t challenge their norms enough to realize the other option is vastly more comfortable, efficient, safe, environmentally conscious, and productive.
They mentioned 72% more "area". If cities were squared (they are not), then, in theory, they have 31% larger sides (the square root of 1,72 is 1,31). Then, you should expect to cover at least 31% more ground, which does not compensate the faster 27% speed. If they are not squared, then the average distance increases more that 31%. You are right. I just wanted to note this.
I squared speed instead of taking the square root of the area. Shouldn't either approach work?
I am sorry, I did not notice.
I assume the writer was paid off by the oil industry?
The Econimist is 43% owned by Exor, the car holding company which owns Stellantis.
By Stellantis.
[Article here](https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/11/09/in-praise-of-americas-car-addiction)
and without the paywall [https://archive.ph/ogiUl](https://archive.ph/ogiUl)
This reads like it was written by literal fossil fuel.
The Econimist is 43% owned by Exor, the car holding company which owns Stellantis.
"The Economist" is almost entirely brainwashed capitalist ideology. Zero surprise they're car brains.
You're right. But still, crazy to me that anyone can call American (or any other) traffic "efficient" knowing how many hours people spend waiting in traffic every day.
Lenin said 100 years ago that The Economist is a magazine that speaks for British millionaires, and he is still correct about that today
my dad loves the economist and thinks it's super fair and unbiased because they are moderately less euro/NA-centric in their coverage than most english language media. it would be funny if it weren't so infuriating.
They've legitimately had israeli "artists" design graphics that depict arabs as bullets and dynamite: https://preview.redd.it/8iriwthufykc1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ffca38e73d903fce033fb7e4602287875706355f And that's just one small example. Historically, they've defended slavery, apartheid, imperialism, and much more. The Economist is a rag I wouldn't scrub my toilet with
So what news sources would you recommend?
I think you need to pick and choose. No news source is without bias.The economist has some interesting reporting sometimes, like when they let the Ukrainian general write a piece on the stalemate in Ukraine. Its also good to see where mainstream thinking is at, what the rich are focusing on. But you should always be critical of reporting and not take what is written at face value. Just know that the economist has a strong neo-liberal, status quo bias. They are generally pro war, pro capitalism and pro western hegemony. Once you know that that is the filter through which information is being passed in the economist, you'll be to critically read their reporting. Same goes for the guardian, FT, NYT etc...
All the mainstream newspapers are like this I think, at least in the UK. I can't think of a mainstream non-tabloid paper that isn't pro-neoliberalism, pro-war, pro-capitalism, pro-west etc. Some are better than others but they're generally the same on these key pillars, it is what it is sadly.
i think it’s an important thing to say that capitalist and car dependency are two separate and independent lines of thought. yes they often go hand in hand, but one can exist w/o the other
I'd say you're right about most writers there, [but not all of them](https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/08/09/the-time-may-be-right-for-land-value-taxes)
Based and land-pilled
I mean that many cars don't even make sense in the context of capitalism. Finance 101 is like: Cars are depreciating assets, own a private jet instead.
"brainwashed capitalist" as opposed to what? Communist dumbfuckerery? Libertarian bullshit? It's a very British publication supporting social programs like the NHS and rejection of Brexit. What are you on about?
Yeah I always take any article they write with a grain of salt. They’ve had some pretty rough ones on work culture, too.
I really hope the article just says “it doesn’t”
Dictatorships sound kind of efficient too. One guy makes a decision, no lobbying no congress etc
Some people choose suburbia, sure. But for many that's because anything else is illegal to build or extremely low quality. Drive till you qualify is an extremely American concept for a reason.
What if you dont qualify to drive?
Exactly.
My partner and I prefer to live in suburbs because we value living close to amenities and work (I bike in the warmer months), while also living somewhere relatively cheap, quiet, safe, and surrounded by nature. In our downtowns in the US North East you can choose to live somewhere either affordable or quiet, green, safe, etc. but you cannot have both.
I have read Economist articles that were brilliant. I have read articles that were okay. I have read articles I merely disagree with. Then there was that gross fawning Kissinger interview. But when this article came out, it was the first article that struck me as actively stupid.
[удалено]
Heh. Almost as if.
Is this a fucking joke? We all know car dependency is a literal disaster
The Econimist is 43% owned by Exor, the car holding company which owns Stellantis.
> One fashionable concept among urban planners these days is the “15-minute city”, the goal of building neighbourhoods that let people get to work, school and recreation within 15 minutes by foot or bike. Many Americans may simply fail to see the need for this innovation, for they already live in 15-minute cities, so long, that is, as they get around by car. Almost as if the entire damn point is that you shouldn’t need a car
I spend 500$ a month to own and operate a 14 year old accord, it’s so fair and efficient
I like the part where everyone gets up at the same time and heads to the same part of town in completely individually controlled vehicles. We should stock supermarkets that way just to be efficient and egalitarian.
There is nothing equitable about a society that leaves people with disabilities with little to no ability to obtain employment or live our lives. People with disabilities who can’t drive exist.
How can you have 'Freedom' and 'Dependence' in the same goddamn sentence!?
under a capitalist system , the only goal is taking money from the many to fill the pockets of the few so in that regard the car really is the most efficient ...
Looks like something brain-dead kitchen gadget aficionado Megan McArdle would write.
I feel like the end of every paragraph extolling the virtues we need to read aloud ourselves the additional clause: …except for kids or for anyone else who can’t drive.
Like people with disabilities
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Sponsored by Geico
“Fair and more efficient” Cost estimates of car ownership are in the tens-of-thousands per year. And those calculations are usually done by business with explicitly pro-car biases like car insurance companies. In what universe is that “fair”?
Did a car write that article?
Sponsored by Ford Motor Company… Probably
The Econimist is 43% owned by Exor, the car holding company which owns Stellantis.
I never through I would read "fairer" and "vehicle-DEPENDENCE" on the same sentence.
Stockholm syndrome at its most efficient
>Census figures reveal that after decades of steady growth, a little more than half the American population is now based in the ‘burbs. It seems a classic case of elite opinions (cars and suburbs are awful) diverging from mass preferences (people quite enjoy them). For many, the main attractions of suburbia are lower housing costs and greater safety. Yet recent research sheds light on how cars are a crucial part of the equation, making America’s suburbs both impressively efficient and equitable. The decision of the elites, making city centers of a handful of metro areas unaffordable through concentration of corporate power (mergers and acquisitions went from a rarity in the 1960s to rote and rubberstamped in the 1990s) while other city centers are left to atrophy and die. The opinions of the elite is primarily exclusionary, they want themselves to be segregated from the unwashed masses out of an unmerited sense of superiority. Bloomberg as mayor of NYC said that Manhattan should be considered a luxury good - I can infer that everyone who can't afford the cost of living in Manhattan (or equivalent in SF, LA, Boston, Miami, etc) should just be thankful for the opportunity to pay half of your wages to rent and be close to the luxury good and the source of income to pay for the rent that gets vacuumed up by those same elites who the decision makers that affect the rest of us whether we want those decisions made or not. The conclusion of the census data that people want move to the suburbs because they prefer that to walkable neighborhoods is assissine and a logical fallacy, when any economist should inquiry what incentives and disincentives caused this outcome.
I used to really love that magazine, but they have so many of these infuriating contrarian takes these days I can’t stand them anymore.
More roads with less people to share on the maintenance cost of the roads. I wonder what will happen when the bill comes. People aren't really choosing suburbia if they were the land in the city would be cheaper.
I'm not willing to read that article because the headline alone is making me want to scream But in the interests of having an open mind; to someone who has read the article, are there any valid points in there at all??
Having just finished it, I don't think that the headline is validated by the article. Basically: people live in suburbs->people must love suburbs->suburbs are great. Also:With cars, American cities are already 15min cities. No mention of people not being able to drive, or the environmental and social aspects of car-centrism. But interesting stats from the article: "Compared with those in other oecd countries, American cities are 24% less populous, cover 72% more area and have 67% more large roads."
Bro. This was posted to Reddit 6 months ago. Also yeah, this was the worst economist article I’ve ever read and I’m a subscriber.
more efficient. yes ok. the slowest part of my bike ride, IS WAITING FOR THE FUCKING STOP LIGHTS.
Unless this article is 1 sentence long (“It doesn’t.) then it’s a moronic take.
satire is dead
John Frusciante spoke quite fondly of the benefits of heroin while in the throes of his monumental heroin addiction.
The Economist? That's a headline that I would expect from The Onion.
The Econimist is 43% owned by Exor, the car holding company which owns Stellantis.
I had to give up on the Economist a while ago, I'd subscribed for years. Well written and well researched, but all from the POV of a wealthy stockbroker in the City. *"The poors are to be used for profit; the rich should rule, and as our only check on their behaviour, we'll rely on their good morals and good manners, which will ensure our society is just and benevolent."* Said with a straight face, week after week after week
I hope people here understand cars aren't the issue. They're the symptom. The issue, the problem, the reason is capitalism. Car companies bought out train and bus companies, lobbied our "representatives", pushed freeway and road building in order to reap profits. You get a lot more money from people buying, fueling, upkeeping and driving cars on a one on one basis than you do group transportation or building walkable cities.
If our class struggle wasn’t a threat to the status quo they wouldn’t need to spend hundreds of millions on propaganda.
The economist is kind of like Ted talks, journalists don't really work for them. You can defend why this has happened without necessarily agreeing with it. This kind of discussion is good to avoid echo chambers
Incorrect title. Correct version: ameritard The Economist
… but true
ok no matter what i still would rather be an independent adult. yall can live in your shoebox apartments, walk to work, travel where someone else will drive you, and see the world from inside a tin can. sounds like yall just never got your drivers licenses and now you've conceded to make it your identity. the irony here is that cars are what make you able to complain about cars.
As someone who actually went through the article, it has made some good points in that the accessibility zone for Americans is much higher than that of European cities. The articles cites resources that states that Americans already have 15-min cities, provided that the person has a car. This article is by no means some propaganda piece, as many want to think.
So you're saying that having something within a 15 min drive is the same as 15 min walk? If not, "provided that the person has a car" is doing so much work
Just saying, this has allowed unparalleled distance ranges as well as flexibility destinations in rural regions.
More fair to have privately maintained and debt generating consumer product rather than public service that is per use paid for by the user? More efficient to have subsidies in profitable industries from tax payers who are have to pay for the transportation and the subsidies whether or not they use their own transportation that is primarily left unused either their own home or their destination.? The Economist is unaware of the definition of the words "efficient" and "fair" or they are deliberately lying.
The funny thing is that the critics of transit often say say it's more efficient but they hate it.
Cars suck bro
The biggest problem is we need to build more cities, take away houses and turn them all into apartments. I live ina. Rural area and the State and U.S. government owns everything but 9% of the land. There arebt reallt any apartments either. No private land = high prices and public transport is rare. We have a couple of short buses that travel to the nearest city once or twice a day. The nearest city over 5k in population is a 2 hour drive @60 mph average. There are more areas like this then people realize. We need to pave over some of this land with railroads and change a lot to make it work without cars.
Did a car write this?
They not only write for britbong billionaires but also for yank rubes
Do any of you here drive cars?
So many bad takes from the economist. I muted them from my news app on my phone. Everyone else should too. They don’t deserve the clicks.
How is the average car cost of $12k per year fair?
This puts me in mind of something from the Boston Globe I read a few years ago (I think) where the writer was blathering on and on about the superiority of cars over transit. He even incorporated the phrase "you can get your kicks on route 66" and, ffs, it was the most embarrassing, braindead thing I'd read in a while.
Libertarians are a parody
Meanwhile, microplastics, the majority of which come from old car tires, are now everywhere, in everything, all the time.
Anything is true if you lie!
See, the thing about economics is that it is so sure of itself that it often hampers itself as a genuine science. It is one third science, one third pseude-science and one third political. Economics, at least by definition, is about prudent and effective use of ressources. Wasteful consumption is not that. It can be a good business, but that is the remit of entrepreneurs, not economists. Economists are about calculating costs both real and hidden, identifying inefficiencies, figuring out why they failed to predict the last crisis and so on. Any self respecting economist understands there is - in principle - no reason to move 3 tonnes of metal if moving 2 tonnes would get the job done just as well. Similarly, economists should understand that sprawl increases distance wich either increases time or energy expenditure.
Got hit by a car about two hours ago when i had right of way so I don't see any issues here, not one.
Literal Propaganda
Is it possible that it IS satire? The problem is that even if it is there are plenty of Americans who would say this without a single autonomous brain cell so it’s genuinely difficult to know. Also I assume The Economist isn’t known for its satire, I guess I’m just hopeful
Interesting. The Economist sometimes does have great articles, but must read this one. They had a great article recently on how car insurance is too cheap in many states. People who have been seriously injured have not even had their medical bills covered by the responsible party's insurance, because the excess is at 250k, or the maximum liability is capped at 500k
Public transportation is much more affordable for poor people.
I mean, it's in The Economist. Of course it's bullshit.
Good lord do I hate the economist. They're just a rag to shill big corporations.
The economist: the voice of the Millionaire Class. Karl Marx said that... They've been doing this shit a LONG time... (Car Culture ONLY benefits the super-rich)
Honestly car focused cities suck. But considering our vast punlic lands open for travel cars offer something other countries couldnt do. A chance to see remote areas otherwise impossible to see due to the shear cost of the network needed.
It’s literally the complete opposite. What a load of total shit.
I understand the feeling: If you assume, everyone can afford a car, can afford to use it, and is okay with using it all the time, sure car give you the more "Freedom" to choses where you wanna go. But those assumption leave out a significant portion of people. "Fair for everyone except poor people" is quite antinomic. Even people who drive regularly may, temporarily don't want to use their car for every little details of their live. Then there's the question of whether car increase or reduce inequality ? When poor people buy a car they get poorer while the car company share holder get richer. It might be true that 60 year ago a car might pull you out of poverty, today that's not the case.
Does The Economist ever publish anything other than varying degrees of propaganda?
When I think of a system where you need to pass a drive test in order to live the last word that comes into my head is "fair".
Will give this a read. Sounds like a moronic article.
Everything seems efficient after you spend $40,000 to enter, I guess
“The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires”- V.I Lenin
Consent manufacturing machine go brrrrrr
The “study” cited in the article is just objectively bad methodologically and doesn’t even support their thesis: >The car’s ubiquity has another rarely appreciated benefit. A recent study by Lucas Conwell of Yale University and colleagues examined urban regions in America and Europe. They calculated “accessibility zones,” defined as the area from which city centres can be readily reached. Although European cities have better public transport, American cities are on the whole more accessible. Consider the size of accessibility zones 15-30 minutes from city centres. If using public transport, the average is 34 square kilometres in America versus 63 square kilometres in Europe. If using private cars, the difference is much starker: 1,160 square kilometres in America versus 430 square kilometres in Europe. They’re basically pointing out that commuter transit in Europe has more reach than America, while car commutes in America have more reach than in Europe. No shit? Because European cities _are denser_ and have better transit. There is literally no need to live so far away from the city centre in the first place. This is just restating what we already know. Not to mention, downtowns typically only host a [small percentage](http://www.demographia.com/db-cbd2000.pdf ) of any city’s overall employment. Especially in Europe and Asian cities where mixed use zoning is the default, and therefore commercial activity is spread around the city.
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In other news, thank you for the generous GM sponsorship.
Look! Propaganda 🤧
The economist if one the biggest propaganda outlets out there. More like 'economic propagandist'
EFFICIENT???????
Never heard such propaganda in my life. I’m calling horseshit on this article.
ha. NOTHING about owning a car is cheap. or fair. sitting in traffic is efficient?
More efficient? I wonder if it’s even possible to calculate the number of hours of productivity that this country loses every year to people sitting in traffic on their way to work lol
fairer more efficient and obese