If you're interested in this topic, Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City are both worth reading. The former explains how "free" parking isn't really free and how it distorts a lot of behavior, and the latter is about what cities are good for and how to build healthy cities in general.
Why would you want to own a car if you could avoid it?
(correction applied)
Because I can go wherever I want, whenever I want, with my whole family (pets included), with a trunkful of cargo, as I see fit.
I keep a bunch of gear in my car which makes me pretty much independent. No way I'd be hauling "go camping on a moment's notice" stuff and other equipment everywhere on the bus. Nor would I have the basic equipment to fix the bus should it break down.
7 years ago, awaiting dinner sitting at the bar at Longhorns and halfway thru a margarita around 9PM, my wife suggested we go see a new litter of puppies from our dog's breeder. Called to ensure we could, and minutes later we were making the 1,000 mile drive there. Next morning little Crossley was part of the family.
Personal long-range transport is very freeing. Mass transit & communication devices may be convenient, but rely more on others than some of us are comfortable with.
Because I can go wherever I want, whenever I want, with my whole family (pets included), with a trunkful of cargo, as I see fit.
But at very high cost, per The High Cost of Free Parking, and at high time costs: I'm struck by the way that, when I lived in Tucson, it took seemingly 30 or 40 minutes to get anywhere. Now I live in New York City and it takes about the same, but the default transportation mode is different!
In my own experience, if you're working outside peak commuting hours, public transport is horrible. Take a cold winter, services 20 minutes apart. One service is missed, cancelled, whatever, you're now there for 40 minutes waiting for your bus. Of course, you don't know that the service is missed, you're just waiting at a pole. And in my case, it was a connecting service, so repeat the process for the second leg of the journey. Sometimes it would have been just as fast to walk the 75 minutes home - though of course, there's no way of knowing from the outset.
My housemates were dyed-in-the-wool public transport users, the 'everything we need' variety, and then I went overseas for three months in which they had use of my car. On return, "we're getting our own car". Driving crosstown for a commute is faster than the 15-minute walk to the bus, the two-leg bus/train commute, and the 10-minute walk from the station.
Carrying your groceries on public transport sucks. Apart from a handful of cities, post-midnight travel sucks. Cancelled services suck. Being squished into someone else's armpit during peak commute sucks. Having to commute (walk) to your commute (bus) then commute again (walk) sucks when the weather is bad. Public transport with more than one leg in the trip sucks. Public transport that doesn't go where you want to go sucks.
Public transport is awesome and there should be much more investment in it, but there are a ton of reasons why personal cars are fantastic.
Bear in mind that you're comparing mostly-decent road transport to generally-awful public transport.
Buses, for example, suck - they're always going to be a worse experience than a car (walking 10+ minutes to the stop at each end + waiting, to be stuck in exactly the same traffic).
Now if public transport had the same investment as private, it'd be a different kettle of fish. Take a look at http://carfree.com/intro_cfc.html and http://carfree.com/topology.html as an example of what might be possible with rail and sufficient political will. <5 minutes to a train stop, <30 minutes to anywhere else, <5 minutes to your final destination == max 40 minute trip in a city of 1M people.
This. I live in Berlin, which invested heavily in public transportation over the decades, leading the majority of my friends to not even having a drivers license (me included).
You can get anywhere pretty much anytime, often considerably faster than taking a car, especially on day time when you easily spend 30min just looking for a spot.
Plus if you combine public transport with a decent bike - no car will ever beat you in this city.
Sure, cars suck for some scenarios. Bikes and public transport work much better there. Frankly, I don't like living in those conditions.
Bikes and public transport suck for other scenarios. Right now I'd spend more time just walking to & from bus stops than my entire commute, and biking the 15 miles to work would get me killed by the end of the week.
Live where it suits you. Ticks me off that the public transport crowd wants to actively deny me both my money and preferred mode of transport, when I wish to deny them nothing but my involvement.
I'm struck by the way that, when I lived in Tucson, it took seemingly 30 or 40 minutes to get anywhere.
I'm currently staying in Tucson for a brief spell, and I am struck by the very same thing! It's kinda crazy. I certainly don't live in a completely walkable city neighborhood back east, but I can be at the office in ~25 minutes on my bike, and most errands can be done on my bike or my scooter.
As for high costs, I think it's all a trade-off, right? We're a one car family (I've never actually driven to work in 15+ years), but we travel extensively in our VW van. So, the benefits we get from owning it out-weigh the costs. That said, I've applied the same analysis to owning a car for getting to work--it's far cheaper, and more enjoyable, for me to bike (and occasionally take the bus) rather than deal with another vehicle. I suspect most car-bound commuters (or suburbanites who must drive 15-30 minutes to get anywhere) have done similar math in their head (or on paper), and decided that the benefits of location and car ownership out-weight the costs. Of course, plenty of those folks also likely complain about gas prices and traffic, too!
There are so many different factors in those two situations that they're barely comparable.
Yes, there are many costs associated with car ownership, and I'm sure there are some in terms of behavior that that book may describe. But depending on where you live there are also costs to not owning a car, including the inability to get anywhere, either at all or in a timely manner.
I'm looking forward to living in a city (thought not in the US) and going without for a while, but the only reason I'll try it is because I know I'm going somewhere with vastly better public transportation and in proximity to the things I need and want to do.
Living without a car makes sense for some people, in some places, in some situations. Sometimes, though, expensive or not, it just doesn't.
Even in Japan if you only rely on Public Transportation (and you probably have heard its one of the best out there, worldwide), there are a number of situation where it just does not work. For example: you want to come back later than 11h30 pm ? Bad luck, most of the metro/train lines have stopped.
Or, there's usually always a way to get from point A to B with public transport, but unless you go to major stations or hubs you need to change several times, take an additional bus and walk an additional x minutes. It's very tiring and inefficient, and costly as well, because public transports aren't subsidized here as much as in Europe for example.
And of course, if you ever want to carry something large and heavy with you, welcome to hell, with a number of stations with no elevators and just stairs, and lack of space in trains to even put your stuff.
It's fairly obvious there are excellent use cases for having a car. Or at least renting one when you need it.
ANd that's not even considering : confort, risk of viral transmission (did you take this in account when considering the cost on society ?) and freedom aspects.
Yes, although owning, driving, and parking a car in Japan are not pleasant experiences, either. I remember one drive in particular when traffic was stalled so badly people were just leaving their cars idle to go pee on the side of the road.
I do think the most ideal setup would be public transport for most occasions combined with car rentals / delivery for large items.
Well - he made it easy for you because based on how he phrased it, you only had to come up with one reason cars are good. You picked some low-hanging fruit (not an ad hominem attack; your reasoning is sound). Cars are a clear solution to certain problems.
That said, I think that these reasons tend to diminish when contrasted with the downsides (not that it matters, but I do own a car, and am not just trying to shill the other side). Example: having a car also contributes to the degeneration of the city. This is a point well-illustrated in the original article. Is it worth owning a car when it is intrinsically tied to urban sprawl and the decay of cultural vibrance? Ownership comes at a cost.
I, too, like to go wherever I want. But it doesn't mean that every active member of the society HAS TO own one. I adore the freedom it gives me on nights/week-ends. But we don't need 2/3 cars per family. Carshare has something to offer too. I am not against cars, but it's way too unbalanced towards cars. Drivers should bear the costs of their habits and not out-source them. City centers must be made more liveable for urban dwellers. That means less surface parking, reducing parking minimums, paid parking, more bike paths, street designs with lower deisgn speed...
Some want to live in the suburbs, no one can oppose that, we are free to do so. But if you want to live in a liveable urban neighborhood, this choice needs to be catered too.
> Why would you want to own a car if you could avoid it?
I used to live approximately half a mile from the epicenter of the 6.7 magnitude Northridge earthquake. I was actually at my desk programming at 4:31AM when it hit. It was, by far, the most violent quake I have ever experienced. The vertical component was brutal. It actually shot me up off my chair when it compressed the height adjusting air cylinder and propelled me upwards. I have this vivid memory of being up in the air along with all the books in the bookcases surrounding my desk. The lights went out. We all came down. The shaking begun.
Anyhow, after it stopped I was covered in a pile of books. I made sure everyone was OK, found my car keys and got out of the house. I threw some tools int the back of the car and immediately drove near CSUN where my girlfriend lived and picked her up. Her place was trashed. We helped a few of her neighbors. We gave a few of them rides to nearby friends and family. We also visited some of our friends in the neighborhood to make sure they were OK. Being the guy with a garage full of tools, I probably helped a dozen, if not two dozen, people with various issues from gas main shutoffs to broken water pipes and a whole range of other things that happen during a bad quake. In the days that followed we helped get water and supplies to those in need and generally made ourselves useful to the extent possible. Of course, we had our own issues to deal with, which required frequent trips to the hardware store to haul construction materials.
After that incident I never go to sleep without my gas tank at least half full and never leave my car keys on a table (because I had to dig them out of a pile of stuff when all of it went to the floor). My car was the single most valuable tool during that incident.
Many years later. Now married, living elsewhere, with a young child and a couple of dogs in tow our neighborhood was surrounded by fire. The hills around us just went up in flames. We were told evacuation was imminent. My wife, kid and dogs went into our two SUV's while I went in and out of the house prioritizing what to bring into the cars. We actually had to drive a block away from our home before we were told the situation had reversed and we could go back.
I realize these are extreme examples, but to say that public transportation is all you need is kind of unreasonable. It's almost like saying that the police force is all you need in order to keep you and your family safe. As a tourist I've always enjoyed public transport in Europe. Love it. If I lived there I would most certainly own a car or two. Public transport isn't going to be there when you need it most.
With the advent of electric cars a whole new set of possibilities starts to open up. Electrics with long range capabilities have something no liquid fuel vehicle can offer: easily convertible energy that --with the right equipment-- is compatible with the needs of any home. In the event of an emergency your electric SUV's could very well power your home and basic necessities such as lights, cooking and keeping food safe.
What if you didn't had your car? Would you have lost any property, or have anyone harmed?
Assuming not having your care would have been bad, what is the frequency of such events? Are they, say, more frequent than serious car crashes?
Not to mention the sheer costs of having most people owning their own car, compared to a decent public transportation system (which doesn't exist, I know). Even if cars save more lives than they crush, this money could go to more efficient life-saving effort, such as medical research, or existential risks mitigation.
It's all cost and benefit. Don't let your personal experience get in the way of numbers. They may be abstract, but at that scale, they matter more than your own family.
The problem with decent public transportation in the US is that our cities were not designed for it.
Just one look at a megalopolis like Los Angeles and it becomes clear there's almost no way to exist without your own car outside of a narrow set of locations and life styles.
If you are a single guy or gal living and working in Santa Monica and can bike to work, well, life is good.
The minute you move away from those areas, turn into a family with multiple kids things change. Work might no longer be a bike ride away.
Work for many is anywhere from thirty to sixty miles away from home. Each adult in the family is likely to work at a very different location. Schools are not centralized. You have separate elementary, middle and high schools. Many families have kids in all three at the same time. This means potentially driving and picking-up kids from three different schools at three different locations every day.
Look at Silicon Valley and their commute scenarios.
In general terms, yes, I agree, good mass transportation would be good for many reasons. In practical terms this dream is not really attainable without major structural, cultural and labor changes in most US cities. This, for all intents and purposes, probably means this is a pipe dream.
The original article explains it well. It's okay to own a car, maybe even one per adult in the household (though I would advocate greater car sharing). The original article's point is using the right tool for the job. In your cases the car was the right tool. For many people, especially city dwellers, you can leave your car at home and ride a bicycle for your daily city commutes. If everyone physically able followed this rule.. We'll, we'd probably look a lot like Sweden or those other uber bike friendly European places.
> For many people, especially city dwellers, you can leave your car at home
I do one better: I work from home now. When I had an outside office it was less than five miles away. Now I try to concatenate as many trips as possible into a single loop. Works out well most of the time.
If Tesla hadn't screwed-up the electric SUV design I would have bought in. I'll have to wait for another company to get it right. That's what's missing in my life right now, an honest electric powered SUV. Short of doing a conversion on something like a Suburban I'll have to wait for something like that to become commercially available. Shame that Tesla decided to go for a Gucci-bat-mobile instead of building a true sports-utility vehicle. I have a horrible feeling their SUV is going to be a failure. I hope I am wrong.
I don't understand your last paragraph at all. Inverters aren't all that expensive and will run all those basic necessities you mention from a normal gas-powered car.
Something like a Tesla has some 80+kW available at 500V. This is very different from running an inverter off a 12V lead acid battery. This is power at an entirely different scale. As battery technology evolves I can easily see cars, and particularly trucks, having far more than 80 kW available. A household with a couple of cars would, effectively, have a roving UPS that could provide lots of power during any time of need.
Heck, even a camping trip could change radically if surplus electrical power is available from your electric vehicle. I don't know about you, but I'd rather cook my food with electric power at the campsite than burn wood or charcoal. Over the last year or so I've convinced myself there's very little you can do with a BBQ that you can't do with a skillet and an oven. I am actually considering getting rid of my outdoor BBQ.
The Tesla has a 60 or 85kWh battery. The h is important; it's capacity, not power output. The power output is actually much higher, up to 310kW. But of course that means that if you run it at full bore, you'll only get about 16 minutes out of it. In any case, that kind of power output is vast overkill. A typical house only needs a few hundred watts, and that's easily provided with an inverter on a normal car. So again, I don't really see the advantage here, since both can do the job fine. One major difference is that when your electric car runs out of electricity you are screwed until the power comes back on, while a gas car can potentially be refilled. Even if the gas stations are down, you can stockpile gasoline, while you can't really stockpile electricity.
Don't know where you live but "a few hundred Watts" would only power my computers.
I keep a couple of deep cycle 12V batteries fully charged in the garage. We typically use them as power sources for chargin LiPo's for electric model aircraft at the field or to power the glider launch winch. A nice side effect is that the are available for emergency power if ever needed. I still have a 4 kW propane generator because the 12V batteries are simply not enough. I say this from experience not conjecture.
The refrigerator seems like the only real substantial load. I looked that up, and while it'll draw over 1kW when starting, the continuous load is something like 200W for a modern one. Nothing else is in my house is going to approach that. I'm not going to be running desktop computers during an extended outage, and laptops will add a negligible impact. In colder weather I'd want enough power to run the gas furnace, which I imagine is not a ton. Lights can be kept to a reasonable minimum, and you'd want LED bulbs available for all the lights you'd use during an extended outage anyway, and so also won't be a whole lot. Thus: a few hundred watts.
But let's say you need 2kW. (That's not quite double what a normal car can put out, from my quick research. Typical car systems seem to top out around 1200W, give or take.) The Tesla would be able to provide that no problem, of course, but! It'll only do so for about 22 hours before you run the battery all the way down, at which point you have no electricity and no transportation and no way to remedy either until the power comes back on. If you really do need 4kW then your Tesla will last you half a day, which is just about useless. If your needs are low enough that the Tesla battery could last for a couple of days, then you can run off a regular car too.
Giving your preference for buying puppies from a breeder, it's not surprising that your opinions about transportation also only revolve around what you want and not what is moral or best for society or your community.
A "rescue" bit my daughter in the face and very nearly destroyed her eye. I'll stick with pets of known social and medical histories, thank you very much. BTW: having a car meant I could race her to medical help without having to wait for public transportation (aka ambulance).
I agree. When my family and I lived in Vancouver BC, we didn't own a car for 3 years, and we have little children. It actually worked quite well. We rode buses / walked / biked to work, rode buses for weekend trips (Vancouver is great in that regard. You can even go to a lot of hiking/skiing spots by bus). And for the occasional out-of-city trip we used a Zipcar. I think that overall, the time you would spend taking care of your own car (repair/fuel/clean/etc), balances out with the time you spend walking/waiting for buses, etc. With the added advantage of physical activity when being forced to walk or bike instead of drive. It is hard to resist the temptation of using a car when you own one. Another advantage of the bus is that you get to do stuff while commuting. I used that time to read books. And I think I've read more books in those 3 years than what I had the 10 years before.
A car is freedom. Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden to some public transport system?
Per the link, I view a car as slavery, and, per The High Cost of Free Parking, car infrastructure is much more expensive than is commonly realized. Owning a car is being a slave to car payments, to saving for the car, to the insurance company, to the repair shop, to the driveway or parking lot, to paying around $10,000 a year in TCO.
Lots of people don't want to live in a city.
Which is good! They shouldn't. The challenges come from the way we've structured an entire society to subsidize parking.
To some extent that's changing, with people like Glaeser, Shoup, and Yglesias in the intellectual vanguard. The issue is also getting more prominent in part because the startling cost of living in many cities and inner-ring suburbs is causing intellectually curious people to ask both why this is happening and how it can be alleviated. Both questions go back to politics.
meh, 'freedom' has never had a good, solid meaning. Kings have been using that word for centuries.
Slavery, until fairly recently has meant 'owning another human' - I mean, hell, I'll buy the use of slavery to mean 'having a choice between doing what another human wants and dying'
My problem here is expanding it to mean 'having to pay a small fee or suffer discomfort'
Slavery was turned into "owning another human" by abolitionists who wanted to play up its squick factor. It was previously just a state of submission and would be interchangeable with "servant".
The sense jseliger is using it is in the sense attested from the 1550s: that a car owner has lost resistance to a habit or vice; in this case, the "habit or vice" is the acceptance of car infrastructure in city design and the habit of looking at the world through the needs of one's car, namely to find parking, to calculate finances based on a car's needs.
Thanks. I was not aware of that etymology resource. Interesting that it started out as a racial slur, then became something much less serious, then again became something more serious.
It's not really accurate to call it a racial slur. The concept of race was extremely weak before the 1800s, when eugenics took off, and slackened after WW2 (because Hitler). There were geographical prejudices (you come from a Slavic country) and "civilized" prejudices (you silly barbarians with your shaggy hair), but skin color was rarely, if ever, a factor.
Because, keep in mind: Slavic peoples were and are white.
In this sense, it's more accurate to compare it to jokes about how Polish people are stupid, how the British are always stuffy, how the French don't know how to shower, how Americans only care about money, how women are emotional, etc. A germ of truth, but mainly the kind of overgeneralization we call "stereotype" today.
>In this sense, it's more accurate to compare it to jokes about how Polish people are stupid, how the British are always stuffy, how the French don't know how to shower, how Americans only care about money
Huh. I would have called those examples racism. Maybe "European racism" if I wanted to make a racist statement myself. The joke is that Europeans are just as racist as Americans; they are just more refined about it. The implication, if you tell the joke properly, is that the Americans aren't as educated or refined as the Europeans, and thus can only handle the five colors.
But certainly, from the time of the rise of nationalism onward there has certainly been discrimination and violence along ethnic lines. (and perhaps before? I'm actually really interested in racism before the advent of nationalism, and I don't have much any information.)
But is that proper? calling it racism even when it's not based on Blumenbach's white/black/red/yellow/brown categories? I mean, dividing people into the aryans/poles/slavs and treating them differently based on that classification looks like the same thing to me, save for the fact that the classification takes more effort than Blumenbach's method does.
Yeah, but this breed of joke is basically timeless and global. Read old folklore of any culture and it's full of these backhanded compliments and unsubtle digs at neighboring villages and provinces. Tribalistic derogation (yeah, I just made that term up) basically happens anytime you have two sets of people who can be distinguished at all. Here in Seattle, it's Huskies and Cougars because football teams.
A lot of people can't tell the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant, for instance, but they've cheerfully gone to war over the distinction quite a few times. Is that a race war? It seems less than useful to do so.
Actually, it now occurs to me to look up the etymology of "race": http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=race&allowed_in_fra... I'm not sure what the Arabic ra's has to do with anything, but the earliest attestation there is 1520s. Interesting that the root similarity with other meanings is due to the way a river branches; that would never have occurred to me.
Nationalism, as I countenance it, is a 20th century phenomenon, which leaves a period of 1.5 to 4 centuries for your interest if you agree. I group nationalism, racism, sexism, etc. under the larger umbrella of tribalism, though, which may or may not be academically sane. Nationalism doesn't seem to become a thing until nation-building became a thing as a retrospective reaction to colonialism; you could call some ancient prejudices nationalism but... that doesn't feel right to me.
I think that "nationalism" is generally thought to have really gained traction in the 18th century; Napoleon's France is often described as a nationalist state, and Herder (the dude credited with naming nationalism) was alive around that time. Germany started thinking about becoming Germany not that long afterwards, and did so, incidentally in France, in the 19th century.
Some people suggest that one of the reasons Napoleon was able to do so well militarily in the earlier years was this "Levée en masse" - most other countries at the time being a little hesitant to arm and train the peasantry, for fear they might demand rights. Civilization says that it's the Republic, not Nationalism that is the prerequisite for conscription, but eh.
On racism, yeah, what you are calling Tribalistic derogation - when it is based on inherited characteristics and actually ends in discrimination, functionally sounds a lot like racism, even if it happened before the term was coined.
How did that work in, say, the 16th century? I mean I'm sure that an Italian in France would face some discrimination, but would that be true of his kids? or would his kids or grand-kids be considered French even though they looked a little different?
Some words have multiple definitions. Here's one of the definitions of the word "slave"... someone entirely dominated by some influence or person; "a slave to fashion"; "a slave to cocaine"; "his mother was his abject slave"
The unspoilt countryside can certainly be pleasant, at least for the few that are well-off retired, or don't need access to an urban center to make a decent living, and don't mind driving an hour to do anything.
Start putting McMansions and Applebees in the countryside, and it becomes spoiled rather quickly.
I live close enough to my workplace and the basic necessities that I could walk to them if I so choose. Most people who own cars now live so far away from these things that they can no longer live without their four-wheeler. That doesn't seem all that free to me.
If you live there, it's not unspoilt.
If you love nature, stay away from it, you have a bigger footprint in the country than in an urban core.
If you have a partner, it's not about the freedom of owning a car. Many couples/families own multiple cars. You can still own a car for "freedom" but live your daily life with one car less.
That's great but you assume that there is a choice. I want to live in a nice city, but I can't. Trillions of dollars, decades of government policies and dozen of agencies with their "homeownership" programs destroyed our cities and permanently put them at a disadvantage. My city alone lost almost 1 million people so far, where blocks with only 2 or 3 houses left standing are plentiful(this isn't even Detroit!) yet the surrounding suburbs are thriving. This didn't happen out of choice.
If people like you paid the full price of suburbia or if the situation was reversed and government rewarded city living instead of suburban living then your lifestyle would change really fast.
While I love Shoup's work, I'm not enthusiastic about Glaeser's work.
In particular, I observe that Tokyo, Paris, Barcelona, and Mexico City organize people at adequate density to obtain all Glaeser's benefits without much of his beloved skyscrapers. Because of the shadows, streets, elevator columns, and infrastructure that skyscrapers need, they don't add much to urban life. A comfortable 15k/km^2 density (like Tokyo or Mexico City, half the density of Paris) is plenty enough to promote transit and network effects and build diverse and concentrated arts and business districts without concentrating them in only one part of town. That density is comfortably achieved with median two and three story buildings and plenty of open space in Mexico City and mostly short free standing homes in Tokyo.
You make a good point but Tokyo should not be on your list of cities without many skyscrapers. It has the 5th most skyscrapers of any city in the world.
That's mostly just because Tokyo is so immense: Greater Tokyo is the world's largest city on most measures. However, the skyscrapers are concentrated in a couple of districts, and the vast majority of the city is indeed low-rise (under 10 stories or so even in the immediate city center, under 5 outside it).
Incidentally, most urban planners figure that Tokyo should be more dense instead of forcing people to endure multi-hour commutes, but strict sunlight laws make it very difficult to build tall buildings outside a few designated areas.
Tokyo has lots of high rise. But that's not the point.
Lots of medium to big cities do it without high rise buildings. I have lived in a 7-8 thousand poeple/sq mi neighborhood. It's not NYC. It was only 5 levels/4stories high. It feels familiar, it doesn't blocks too much sunlight and it is perfectly livable.
Similarly when I lived in Silicon Valley (San Jose/Santa Clara/Sunnyvale anyway) it was all 3-storey buildings and some open space. They razed the last orchard while I lived there; immediately taller buildings started going up. I foresee skyscraper clusters in their future.
Try the lead essay from Cato Unbound and see what you think. [0] There are a few more good short Shoup pieces linked at the bottom of that page.
I have some personal experience here. I have done training and volunteered as a community organizer and worked with my city council and planning department. I have organized neighborhood groups involved in planning. I have studied urban planning and urban form. Nothing helped me to understand American cities and why they work the way they do more than Dr. Shoup's work in the 1990s that is collected in The High Cost Of Free Parking.
Some of it is gritty and technical econometric research, but a lot of it is creative and insightful. It's not a single narrative, but a fun book to dip into in various places from time to time if you care about how cities work and how urban life can be made better for people.
This short 1997 paper introduced me to Dr. Shoup's work (I read it in 1998) and was like a shining blaze of insight for many readers like me when it first appeared. [1] One key insight is that free parking required by law costs the USA about three times as much as all the money drivers spend on cars and gas plus public subsidies for roads and highways. When you read it, you start to see that parking policy drives urban form much more than zoning or free markets or highway and transit construction or public preferences or anything else at all. A lot of the book is like that.
Thanks, I'll check that. While I got interested in urban design recently, TBH I fail to grasp all of the anti-automotive concepts that seem to get in fashion recently. Especially when I live in a place where I witness how it may go wrong. On a related note, tomorrow I'm going to "Brasilia, a day in February" as part of a doc festival we have going on around here, if you've studied urban planning you've probably heard a lot about this city, so just dropping in this title here in case you're interested (not that well known as, say, Urbanized and such).
Most of the anti-automotive concepts are rooted in the incompatibility of traditional cities and walkable urbanism with accommodating comfortable motoring. Unless you have infinite resources to build highways and parking deep underground, one or the other has to go.
Brasilia is famous for being extensively and carefully planned according to a mistaken theory that favored motor navigation over pedestrians and uniformity over creativity. I'd be fascinated someday to see what the benefits and drawbacks of that combination would be on the ground. I hope you enjoy it.
From what I've heard from people who have been there (obviously subjective), is that although it has Niemeyer's eye candies, the overal feeling of the whole place to a newcommer is that it's creepy.
I don't understand this sentiment. You can read as much of any book as you want. I seldom finish books that I start, my finish rate is under 25%. You can get the big picture from about the first 20% of most books, and decide whether you want the in depth followup. If I don't buy the premise, or I'm mostly convinced by the argument and don't care for the details, or just have better things to do with my time, I'll stop reading.
Adopting this approach is very freeing. I don't fear the booklist. I just start stuff, and freely give up on a whim. I can say that at least the first 50 pages of the High Cost of Free Parking is great. Then I got caught up in something else.
They're not worth it. You should spend the time that it would take you to read this book doing some high yield activity instead, like trading stocks or growth hacking your startup. Anything less than that just isn't worth the trouble.
Your sarcasm implies that he doesn't want to put effort into reading what appears to be a bad book because it doesn't have a return, which is a crappy assumption.
People have a limited amount of time, and there are far more good books than any one person could read, let alone bad books.
At least one person who is not the author seems to have liked this book, so I challenge the assumption that it "appears to be a bad book".
And... it's a book, dude. You can check it out from the library or buy it used for ten bucks and stop reading it if you don't like it; that's not going to ruin your life. If you have enough time to reply to my dumb comments on HN, you must certainly have the time to start reading the book for 30 minutes and decide if it's worth continuing or not :)
>At least one person who is not the author seems to have liked this book, so I challenge the assumption that it "appears to be a bad book".
Do you know why user reviews exist?
>If you have enough time to reply to my dumb comments on HN, you must certainly have the time to start reading the book for 30 minutes and decide if it's worth continuing or not :)
That would be valid if it were me considering reading the book and if it took me 30 minutes to reply to the comment.
I read most of it, and I can say with mild confidence that it's probably not worth your time. A few years after reading it, I remember the thesis of the book but not much more.
Personally, I wonder why people would want to own a car if they can avoid it: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/why-would-you-want... , but that may be a minority viewpoint.