'My car is more convenient'

I’m getting a lot of ‘but my car is more convenient’ arguments lately, and I’m struggling to convey why that doesn’t make sense.

Specifically how to explain to people that: Sure, if you are able to drive, and can afford it, and your city is designed to, and subsidizes making it easy to drive and park, then it’s convenient. But if everyone does it then it quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons situation.

I thought of one analogy that is: It would be ‘more convenient’ if I just threw my trash out the window, but if we all started doing that then we’d quickly end up in a mess.

But I feel like that doesn’t quite get at the essence of it. Any other ideas?

max,

In my country I think it’s $40 and that’s it lol

WiseThat,

Cars are also REALLY not that convenient. I’m a dad to a four-month-old, and getting to appointments by bus/metro is SO much easier than using the car.

Car:

  • Have to get the fucking car seat in the back seat
  • Pack stroller in as well
  • Drive with potentially screaming kid who feels isolated and lonely, feel like I’m gonna crash at any moment
  • Parking lots SUCK to walk around in with a stroller,have to push kid out into the open before I can see around these tall cars and just hope nobody is speeding

Transit:

  • Push stroller right on to kneeling bus/level-boarding platform
  • can attend to my baby the whole time, no fussing.
  • don’t have to worry about parking AT ALL
jj4211,

It really depends on context.

If you have low population density, then there’s no escaping the reality that cars are convenient.

In high density environments, cars can’t be “the” convenient option.

Striving for the latter is admirable, but frequently mismanaged. For example around here there is one fantastic walkable development, with a rich amount of offices, stores, residential, and parks. However every other attempt is just appartments with crappy parking and no where to walk to (the commercial properties that get tossed into mixed use are largely vacant because the retail space want taken seriously, because the developers really just wanted to do apartments and the city mandates mixed use in a way that let’s them half ass it).

Iron_Lynx, (edited )

If you indeed systemically invest in x as a way of addressing a question while undressing alternatives to x over the course of 70-odd years, then you should not be surprised that your facilities for x are comparatively amazing while alternatives are trash. Imagine if instead of a Federal Highway Act, they passed a Federal High Speed Rail act? The US high speed railway network would have looked better than any European network and you could travel between any two even somewhat decent cities in the 48 contiguous by very fast train. Instead, the US high speed rail network right now is worse than Uzbekistan’s. The country with the highest GDP and they cannot figure out how to make a train without a combustion engine, or how to make one go faster than 130 km/h without importing French and/or Swiss experts.

Fact is that making cars the most convenient way of getting about was, and is, a deliberate policy decision. Cities don’t just make space for cars, it’s given to them. Look at any neighbourhood in Amsterdam built in the sixties and you see six lane dual carriageways. And also, their bicycle network is a separate transport layer and the most convenient way of getting about in most places built both before and after the sixties.

Point is: the car is as convenient as it is because someone with authority decreed it has to be. And someone else may very well have decreed something else.

dnick,

There is no way a US federal high speed rail would look anything nearly as successful as ones in europe or other highly populated locations. I think people fail to realize that for the most part the US is very sparsely populated. with the exception of maybe 2-3 ‘regions’ that might look close to the population density and public transportation feasibility of Europe, there just wouldn’t be enough people going between each individual point to make it profitable, even if subsidized. Imagine putting up 300 miles of high speed rail that cost many millions of dollars to build, millions of dollars a year to maintain, and thousands of dollars to run each round trip, and then finding out there are only a few dozen people that need to go between those particular terminals each hour. Trying to adjust by running less often just makes things worse because running less often means fewer people yet will find it convenient…running more often makes it less profitable…so you end up like the US and basically don’t bother making routes and stations without enough traffic.

Iron_Lynx,

Here’s a few problems with that take:

  • A) This railway network being discussed is going to be built sixty odd years ago. That is enough time for areas of value to form around the nodes, turning the rail network into an investment into future cities.
  • B) What is the direct revenue of the US interstate highway network?
  • No seriously, how much money enters the US budget from the Interstate highways directly? I don’t care about facilitated development n stuff, I care only and purely about the direct revenue. If profitability is the point, or the measure of success of transportation system, then freeways - which are, by definition, free at the point of use - are a terrible return on investment and are better off never built.
  • Meanwhile, for one, railway is in this interesting position that as you go faster, it becomes more profitable. And for two, if the US were to invest in high speed rail at the level at which it has in highways, then they would probably run it in a way where, similarly to the highway network, availability and service are more important than profit.
  • C) Nobody commutes from Bumfuck, VA to Nowhere, OR. Even in the US, commuting is a regional affair.
  • A NYC - Chicago - LA high speed rail is not for those major cities exclusively. It is for all the city pairs of places between those cities. It would chain together decent city pairs with a continuing railway line. NY - Chicago would at least stop in Philly, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Fort Wayne. Many of those appear to be a good rail distance apart. In fact, Chicago and Cleveland are a great distance for HSR. Too far to comfortably drive to do anything in a day before returning, and so close that a flight would still be dominated by stuff on the ground. That is the sweet spot for high speed rail.
  • D) The US is quite literally built by the railways and bulldozed for the car. Many places in the western half of the contiguous 48 exist because the railroads bought out huge tracts of land to their west, developed some space into towns, and sold that land, now valuable thanks to the connections offered by the rails, to interested buyers. Then shit was torn down because facilitating parking for a small city centre requires about three quarters of the land being dedicated to storing cars. Houston, TX in the '20s had a great city centre. In the '70s, downtown was a parking lot and little has fundamentally changed since.
  • E) Speaking of land made valuable, the US manages valuable land terribly. Single family housing is notoriously expensive to run, yet it’s practically the only housing being built. Big box stores are fickle and could become worthless to city budgets at the whim if one business, while the same area of multiple small businesses is both more resilient and more financially productive.
  • Add to that the fact that if a big box store goes out of business, too many US places just leave it there to gather dust while building something new down the road. If land was used more productively, the store would be torn down and the new thing would be built in its place.
  • All of that is to say that “tHe UsA iS tOo BiG” is restating the problem. You cannot take the problem, put it into different words, and then say that as the gotcha as to why structural problems cannot be solved.
Iron_Lynx,

Re: commuting:

The average commute in the US is about 32 km, a distance decently doable by regional train.

However, if we include daily errands, the median distance of any trip is about 6 or 7 km, a distance perfectly manageably by bicycle.

Back to the national scale, it takes a lot of suspension of critical thought to insist that the USA is too big for a nationwide railway network, while never blinking an eye at the fact that a nationwide highway network does exist, despite highways being more expensive to maintain, more energy-intensive to use, slower, harder to electrify & more dependent on specific energy resources, offering much worse capacity in both number of people and tonnes of freight, and uniquely getting worse in experience if/when upgraded to address induced demand.

Shadywack,
@Shadywack@lemmy.world avatar

Stroads and shitty civil engineering for “muh freedom”. Fucking stroads. I hate almost anywhere I travel in the US because it’s all laid out so I almost HAVE to drive anywhere.

veganpizza69,
@veganpizza69@lemmy.world avatar

theverge.com/…/car-brain-motornormativity-study-i…

akilou,

How’s this for an analogy? Why should I bother walking around my house, and my office building, and the grocery store when I can simply install moving sidewalks everywhere? They’re so convenient! I mean, I’m definitely not going to pay to have them installed or maintain them. And I’m sure as hell not going to pay a fee to use them.

It’s a little convoluted, if anyone can tighten it up, I’d appreciate it.

BreakDecks,

Ask them to explain what is less convenient about the alternatives to a car. Usually when people make this argument, you can get them to admit that they’ve never even tried another way of getting around, and their belief that a personal automobile is more convenient is just held by default because they don’t know any better.

n2burns,

I think before you get to convincing people, I think you simply have to ask people more questions. What do they mean by “more convenient”? And then, how is their car more convenient? And remember, two people can both think, “my car is more convenient,” but have wildly different definitions of what “more convenient” means and how their car fits that definition.

In my experience, when most people say, “My car is more convenient” they mean, “That’s what I’m used to, that’s what I’ve always done,” as well as all the points you made in the 2nd paragraph. Other people mean that a bike can’t 100% replace a car, which is a little easier to argue against because it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Maybe they can commute to work or do chores by bike, and even if there’s a day where the weather doesn’t cooperate or they need to carry more stuff than they can fit on their bike

However, I think the biggest revelation you have is this is a tragedy of the commons situation. I would suggest you dig into that a bit more and how you can combat tragedies of the commons. In my honest opinion, I think this is a systemic problem and needs systemic solutions. Getting support for these changes is huge and resources like Strong Towns are a good place to start.

scytale, (edited )

It’s on a case-to-case basis and depends on the location and lifestyle of the person. I live in a city with a downtown area that is inconvenient for cars because of the scarcity of parking. So from that perspective, driving is actually more inconvenient than taking a bus or hailing a ride-share. On the other hand, there is little to no public transit outside of the downtown area, so having a car is more convenient (rather, a necessity) in that case.

jj4211,

I think this makes a lot of sense, at least in the US where we have a mix of super dense population centers for which mass transit is the only sane option, but also very very rural areas where mass transit just isn’t viable. Find your parking along the edge of the walkable area and take the mass transit to the walkable portion. The big city near me has at least somewhat embraced this and converted a couple of the big streets into ‘no cars allowed’ and it’s made for some good places, and I can go there from further away thanks to parking and taking a bus in. I could go for some more pedestrian bridges and maybe some trams rather than the bus, but at least I see the hint of a scenario where things can come together.

RagingHungryPanda,

Not just bikes made a video about that point. The gist: when you spend more than $100B on roads and next to nothing on rail and public transit, well no shit sherlock.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FwQp0xnFEE

Rentlar,

Taking your car would be even more convenient if you also had convenient alternatives to driving, to spread out the traffic load.

FrostKing,

The fact of the matter is, in many places (I’m thinking of America mainly) using a car is far more convenient, if not the only option, and that’s the problem

maynarkh,

And speaking from a place where cars are not the most convenient option, they are in fact, not convenient. I don’t imagine it’s more convenient to use a car in the US than here, except that the US lacks the more convenient options.

Just a few simple examples.

I can also commute to my office job that’s an hour away by car. But if I take the train, I can unpack my laptop, and start my workday on the train, having it count towards my hours, essentially meaning my commute doesn’t count against my free time. Also, I don’t have car payments. One of the biggest monthly expenses most households would go through simply doesn’t exist for me, since I can afford not having a car.

If I had a car, I could do all the things yanks use their cars for. But I don’t need to. It’s also peace of mind. Check engine light on? Car making funny sounds? Never a problem for me! And I’m always better on time since I never get into traffic.

But what if I need a car for some reason? I rent one by the minute, and it’s still much, much cheaper than owning one. And I can do that. I have more options.

My point is that the US doesn’t make cars the “most convenient” option, they make it the “least inconvenient” one by eliminating or degrading all other more convenient options.

FrostKing,

My point is that the US doesn’t make cars the “most convenient” option, they make it the “least inconvenient”

That’s just semantic. The least convenient is the most convenient by definition. The question is what you want to be the most convenient. We agree that it shouldn’t be cars—you’re arguing for the sake of argument, not because we have an actual disagreement.

maynarkh,

My point is that the US does not really make cars more convenient than other countries make cars. So cars in the US are as convenient as cars anywhere, while alternatives are missing in the US.

So it’s

cars in the US = cars in eg. NL < public transport in eg. NL

not

cars in the US > cars in eg. NL < public transport in eg. NL

jj4211,

Depends on where you are.

At least in the touristy parts of Las Vegas, super walkable. Between places you want to go, bus stops, trams, monorail you won’t be walking more than half a mile, and any time spent waiting for public transit is like maybe 4 minutes. There are roads, but pedestrians can go all over the place without touching them. Several of the big cities are at least in the ball park, though some screw it up royally.

However, keep in mind in the US, there are 41 states each geographically larger than NL… But only 4 of those states have more people. Average US population density is 37 people per square kilometer, versus 522 per square kilometer average in NL. It’s really hard to make viable mass transit with that sort of density. A lot of internet participants are going to be in areas where there just isn’t even a possible plan that would work for them.

Now if you do live in a population hotspot in the US, you are likely to have every reason to say “fuck cars”, depending on the city. However, just be aware that with an average population density so much lower, for the average US person mass transit isn’t as feasible.

Hugh_Jeggs,

A really city-centric view mind you. Sounds like something Londoners would say

I live in a country with amazing public transport too, but out in the sticks. Public transport is two buses a day for me, fuck that, it’s car or nothing

Happy to drive about in a 1.2 litre shitbox though cos I don’t have a tiny penis

maynarkh, (edited )

The NL is decidedly a small country, but has decent public transport even in the middle of nowhere.

Eastern Europe used to be decent at availability, not so much at service, (if for nothing else, not many people had cars) but it is getting worse. There is a ton of rural cyclists though still.

That said, I’m fine with my view mostly being applicable to cities only, since cars are less of a problem in rural places. If you live in or near a city, you should be able to do without a car though. As in the country has the option to make you comfortable not owning a car.

Hugh_Jeggs,

Ha ha flat country opinions Vs Alps opinions 😂 They’re never going to match!

maynarkh,

I’ve got nothing against people buying cars to travel the Alps. I’ve got everything against people buying Dodge Rams just to not be able to park it in this whole country and block the road.

dnick,

I think you are stretching the semantics pretty far…the US is primarily rural geographically and urban only in very sparsely spaced cities…where Europe is urban in more condensed areas. The US doesn’t make everything ‘more inconvenient’ for the most part, most things are simple more inconvenient by nature.

On the other hand, within cities themselves, the US does shoot itself in the foot with it’s policies and what it subsidizes. Overall, though, most people don’t realize how really big the US is, space vs population-wise, compared to Europe or Japan.

Etterra,

When you live in the suburbs or country (America) the distances to go anywhere relevant get too large to be able to go without a car. Everything is designed around the need for one, has been since the post-WW2 era. Nobody then thought of the disaster they were creating, and the auto companies elbowing out mad transit were too greedy to care.

pHr34kY,

My car does about 5,000km a year, and almost all of it is with a passenger. Taking kids to school and sports. It’s also a 930kg car.

It’s faster, cheaper, and more convenient to catch a train to the office in the city in peak hour.

However, there’s no way I’m going to use PT to lug around a full trolley of shopping or multiple baseball bags with catcher’s gear and 3 kids.

Basically my point is - travel less, travel lighter.

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