this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Betterment and Praxis
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I don't foresee cars ever becoming unnecessary, since that's the only feasible way to get to work without being severely limited in your choice of employers, and having little or no choice of employer would be feudalism in all but name.
That said, work isn't the only place you need to go. Neighborhoods ought to include shops, restaurants, and the like, too. Here in suburban Oregon, that is already the case, and it's quite convenient to be able to walk over to the nearby grocery store whenever I need something.
It may be true for US but in Europe lots of cities have functional public transport and are dense, so you aren't limited in any way. Lots of people use trains here to get to the city, where I currently live, to work. So their commute is about 50 km but with train it is 30 min.
Does that not limit you to only working at places that happen to be near a train station?
Well you could take the bus / tram / subway too.
Yes public transport is network not single lanes, when done right you get of the train and have already bus waiting for you. It is not easy to implement these connections but not impossible.
In cities with functional transit networks there are so many train stations that literally everything in the city is near a train station.
Well if transit network is robust enough to cover most kf the city instead of just a few routes, this is less of a problem.
I'd say that's a very USA take; not having a car can lead to longer commute times, but it won't severely curtail your job options. If the city has a decent public transportation network, many places will be within a 30 minute trip. If you extend that to 45 minutes, that can cover a significant amount of places.
The only person whose commute time I know off the top of my head right now commutes by car in 15~20 minutes, so 30~45 minutes is not great.
People spend far too much of their time working or commuting as it is. The last thing they need is even more commute time.
Well, its not like the six lane highways going in and out of cities like LA are void of traffic jams. Cars are not a real solution to lower commute time, especially since they take a lot of space, so cities need to be much wider, just holding streets for cars, instead of having the building closer together.
How do you deliver goods to and from a business inside a city, if not by truck? You still need streets for trucks.
Yeah, but for those trucks you can do with one or two lanes, where you would need 4 lanes otherwise to accomodate the car travel. In my country an average supermarket needs about 2 trucks a day to supply 5000 people. So thats 12 trucks a week or roughly 420 people supplied by a truckload. Assuming people to go to the supermarket once per week, and 2.5 people supplied per car, that is 168 cars for every truck. And a truck doesnt take more space on the road than maybe 4 cars.
So in our example, with favourable assumptions for cars (e.g. you'd expect grocery shopping a bit more often than once a week, and many household only have one or two people) you need 42 times the road space for the car traffic of the supermarket, compared to the truck traffic.
I live in an inner city in Europe. I have two supermarkets in 5 minutes walking distance, 4 supermarkets in 10 minutes walking distance, and another 3 just one trainstation away (also about 10 minutes door to door). There is no need for a car and the supermarkets do perfectly fine, with a small road connecting them.