csr

It's a 'last mile' problem.

Bruce_B

I think we are talking about the same thing, just not thinking about it in the same way. I'm talking about encouraging all these things above by making the alternative too expensive. Money makes the world go around and as long as we have cheap fuel we will never change what we're doing now. Necessity is the mother of invention. Communities will change and grow away from car dependence if there is a demand for it. More expensive fuel will create the demand. We've already seen it to a small degree, but it's not enough. As much as people complain about gas prices, it's actually still relatively cheap. Make it expensive and light rail, ample sidewalks, bike paths etc will start popping up everywhere because there will be a demand for those things. People will locate and relocate to areas that are not so car dependent. They will find another way.

All I'm saying is that you can't legislate it, you can't just ask people to move in this direction. There has to be an incentive for them to go that way. Money is the incentive that drives most people in the US. If people can't afford to live in a car centered suburbia with long every day commutes, they won't. They will probably start moving back in to the cities they have moved away from and improving the infrastructure that already exists there.

Sianelle 

Here in NZ the price of petrol has been creeping towards $2.00 a litre for some time now which makes running a car an expensive proposition. Already we're seeing an increased return to the use of public transport and bicycles as a means of getting around, commuting & etc. The owner operated business I purchased my electric hub kit from told me that every shipment he gets in is selling out so fast that he's out of stock long before the next shipment arrives.
The second hand market for SUVs is pretty much glutted and there's a definite trend towards buying smaller more fuel efficient cars and of course hybids. Local and central government are beginning to plan for alternative transport solutions to the private car, - so I guess if fuel continues to climb in price we'll see social change towards a non-car centred lifestyle which has to be a good thing.

Versa2nr

As far as discouraging people to drive cars I can sorta see the point the OP was trying to make however, my work location vs. school location requires access to a vehicle other than my bike on a weekly basis. For the cost of renting a vehicle every week it would just make more sense to own one.

Bruce_B

^^ An example of it in action in the real world. All I'm saying is instead of waiting for all this to happen naturally, and it eventually will unless something drastic interrupts it, lets cause it to happen. Add $1 per year to a fuel tax and you not only cause it, you give people enough time to handle it. Some people will still use cars when it's $10, $15, or $20 a gallon (or wherever we cap it), but there wouldn't be many and they would have very efficient cars that they didn't use much. In 20 years we would probably have a world that was very easy to live in and enjoy without a car.

Bruce_B

It does now, but what if you could get to work and school and everywhere else you wanted to go on a train?

Roody

"Your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins."

"Your right to drive a car ends where my breathing begins."

csr

I thought of another way to encourage public transportation: Give people a discount if they walk or cycle to the public transport. This would follow in the vein of 'transfers' that cheapen the transit from one public transport leg to another. I'm not sure how to prove one walked or cycled, however. It might be easy to fake.

This isn't the same as explicitly discouraging car ownership, however.

Newspaperguy

Kelowna, B.C. has tried something like that. In an effort to reduce air pollution, there was an initiative to give motorists cash if they traded a vehicle 10 years old or older for something much more recent. (I don't remember the particulars right now.) There were also incentives if someone was getting rid of a car. These included voucers for bicycles, running shoes, skateboards, inline skates or transit passes. This created awareness of pollution problems caused by vehicle exhaust.

JeffS

Sure, because people have chosen to live places without mass-transit, or chosen to live or work off the lines.

How many times have we heard the "I have to drive because I just bought a house 30 minutes outside of town" line... Let's stop the BS excuses. Everyone wants to drive. If they lived a block from work, they would still drive so they would have a car to drive down the street to buy lunch.

The infrastructure would be built if people actually wanted it. Gas would have to instantly go to $20/gal before the middle class would even consider giving them up.

ChipSeal

The object is to discourage car use, and to encourage alternative transportation, right?

There are more ways to tax than to send more cash to Government. (A proposition fraught with danger. We have few enough liberties left as it stands!)

End curbside parking. This will free up roadways for all of the publics use, not just one particular special interest group.

Reduce speed limits. This will discourage spontaneous trips, reduce pollution, reduce injuries, and encourage new cyclists.

Do follow-up stings on folks that have had their driving privileges removed. Don't wait for their second accident to enforce the law.

wahoonc

Quite often the places don't exist or are priced out of the range of the common worker. I have also seen many, many instances where because of zoning the jobs ARE NOT in the same place as the housing. ie; RTP. I have an office in Apex, NC (I only stop through once a month) but there is little in the way of affordable housing with in a 10 mile radius of that office for someone making $10-$12 an hour. There is NO mass transit in Apex that I am aware of. You have to go where the jobs are. A person working in that retail hell at the juncture of 55 and US64 doesn't make enough to live in any of the surrounding neighborhoods. If you look back at a town built in the 1920's up until just prior to WWII you will find a more sustainable infrastructure. Grid streets, neighborhoods, separated from the industrial zones by rail lines, etc. Quite often the factories have been converted to lofts or razed, but it was a pattern that was repeated in many small and medium towns all over the country. The oil companies and the auto manufacturers colluded to kill that style of living all in the race for profits.


I think that it will be sorting its way out in the near future as the economy slowly collapses, the cost of basics escalates and the dollar continues it's decline. We will switch from a consumer based economy to something more sustainable. And hopefully learn some lessons in sustainability...but being humans, history has a way of repeating itself.

Aaron

Torrilin

Choice isn't always involved. The town Dad worked in was 20 000 people when I was born. It's now between 35 and 45 000 people. There is a continuous stretch of towns from that one to Philadelphia, over 100 miles away. As previously noted, there is no mass transit.

Why is there no transit? Because it's a "local political issue". That doesn't mean a county level political issue... that means township level. Welcome to Pennsylvania. Townships are unincorporated land. In other states, they'd be "rural". Most of the towns from where I grew up to Philadelphia are actually townships. That means there are minimal facilities for urban planning, since townships aren't supposed to have a real population. Townships are also able to dodge participating in many higher levels of local government. I'm not entirely sure they can levy taxes that would permit setting up mass transit.

Most of Pennsylvania's population lives in townships. This is *great* for developers, businesses, and industry, because a township can't regulate or require much. It is not great for the people who live there. For much of the state, local government is trying to manage a large population with few tools.

It is not sane to propose that the entire population of a state move elsewhere. It is not sane to propose magic public transit for these people, any more than it's sane for them to propose magic bike lanes to us. Try again, without the magic.

cerewa

It is sane to say individuals should not be claiming "I can't live without a car" but should instead be claiming "I don't want to live without a car". The fact that we can't all give up cars instantly does not mean that we as individuals shouldn't place a high value on choosing a home which is transit-accessible, such as the Philadephia house I live in.

Every day countless people start a new job, and while it's not reasonable to require all of them to pick a transit-accessible job it is reasonable to expect them to either try to find a job in a place with good public transit or to admit, they just don't care very much.

It is also reasonable for us to advocate that financial disincentives be placed on driving (like a carbon-emissions-tax on fossil fuels)... even though poor people will thereby be encouraged or forced by financial circumstances to choose jobs and homes near public transit and employers paying low wages will be forced to locate their businesses in places which are accessible by an inexpensive form of travel.

There is no magic in that, whatsoever.

Newspaperguy

So what happens when someone who has managed to find a transit-friendly work site and is happy there, but is transferred to a branch where transit does not run and where cycle commuting is not pracitcal because of the distance or road safety issues? If such a transfer was permanent, it might make sense to move, but some workers are transferred every few years.

Roody

Those are great plans to discourage driving. they would also (coincidentally ) make conditions a lot nicer for cycling.

Torrilin

Most of them probably *don't* care about it the way you do. Clearly, you see transportation issues as a major part of your life. Most people don't. If we only improve transit access for true believers like you and me, we haven't made a real change for most people in the USA (or the world). The people who don't care are the ones who cause the majority of the pollution and the majority of the traffic congestion.

Insisting that people should live or move to where there is transit is that that doesn't address the real problems. The average Pennsylvania resident is *not* living in a rural area, despite that township designation. They live in a small town or a genuine urban area, at a density that could support transit. The barriers to making mass transit useful *and* desirable to them are common barriers to transit in the eastern megalopolis. Traffic congestion is a serious problem there, and road expansion projects are very expensive (right of way is valuable, and mountains make road building expensive). So coming up with a way to make mass transit useful to people is a serious big deal, on many levels.

It's a big, tough problem. And it needs to be solved. It is ok if you don't have a solution. It is not ok to say it isn't a real problem, or that it can be solved by "well if you just moved". They can't all move. Los Angeles, New York, Chicago... they'd all *drown* in the people, cause in Pennsylvania alone you're calling for 8-12 million people to move away. I'm presuming Philadelphia and Pittsburgh get to stay, even tho their mass transit is kind of borderline.

The barriers to mass transit will not go away just due to higher gas prices or punitive taxation. And the people who would be most hurt by higher gas prices and punitive taxation are the poor, the disabled, and kids. In other words, people who are just as much victims of car culture as we are, and with less ability to cope. Not cool. A solution that helps them means everyone wins. A solution that hurts them is likely to cause us to lose too, even if we can't see how right now.

Roody

So I think we all need to get on the bandwagon to push our governments to build better infrastructure, especially mass transit, as well as bike-friendly and ped-friendly streets. I can't think of any better way to both discourage cars and encourage alternatives to them.

jeffremer

How to discourage car ownership:

Hold more races closer to where I live!

The fact that races are so far away is probably the primary reason we have a car. That and having the ability to easily visit my family who lives in a rural area of Marin. Otherwise we are completely car free during the week. The number of miles you need to drive just to go race a bike borders on irony. Though I do have some idea of what it takes to put on a race, I just wish there were more of those awesome people who put on races out there.

BarracksSi

Right. They can levy higher taxes and license fees all they want, but unless people can actually get to transit of some kind, they're just getting screwed.

As it is now in DC, there's a LOT of public transit in use -- it's even been noted that we have among the highest percentage of commuters who travel by foot, bike, rail, or bus. I see people walking through my neighborhood to get to work on the Hill every morning, too.

The thing is, housing that's transit- and workplace-accessible is hardly ever affordable. I was telling this to a friend the other day: if you can put "Metro accessible" in your apartment rental ad, you can probably justify rent that's 25% higher than the same kind of apartment that's not close to a Metro rail stop. The difference is almost enough to eat up the savings of not owning a vehicle, believe it or not.

If public transit becomes even more desirable because of higher vehicle costs, yet it isn't expanded correspondingly, the few properties that are near public transit will become even more expensive. You'll still have people who can't afford to live closer to transit stops, and they'll still be paying more to drive their cars. Nobody wins like that.

It's like Field Of Dreams -- "Build it, and they will come." They're not gonna ride the bus or train if they can't get to it.

dr. nate

I agree with you, we need to get them to spend more money on mass transit. In Houston, we spend money on some really stupid things like building individual stadiums for our football team, baseball team, and basket ball team. Now they want to build a soccer stadium. If we would have built one stadium and taken the nearly $600 million from the other two stadiums we would have a pretty good jump start on improving our mass transit system.

-Nate

Roody

Here in Lansing, we have the "best bus line in the US", according to their trade organization. But the voters just turned down a small (1.25 mill, I believe) millage for the buses.

The sad thing is, I didn't even know about this millage proposal until about 2 weeks before the election, even though I'm a pretty well informed voter. The bus line did a very poor job of getting out the vote.

I think that what they need is a "Friends of the Bus" group to help them get out the word and secure better funding for the system. For example, we also recently approved a much larger millages for the public library. The Friends of the Library did a great job of getting out the vote on this issue.

dr. nate

What got them the title, if you don't want to ***** up the thread you can pm me. I'm curious as the bus and a single train route are the only forms of mass transit for us here in Houston.

-Nate

El Julioso

I am reminded of an old adage:

The best way to herd sheep is make them think that they choose their own path.

Overtly discouraging car use will only get you so far. You have to guide others into accepting that minimal or no car use is the best solution. Yelling "STOP DRIVING YOUR SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES YOU FAT-ASSED CAPITALIST EARTH-RAPING PIGS", while it feels good, will just put car drivers on the defensive side of their cars. What you want is to put them on the defensive side of their wallets, the environment, safety (how many bike-to-bike collisions cause deaths each year?), space (no need for a garage, and public bike parking takes up a LOT less room than car parking), pacifism (oil demand = war), and so on.

Someone who comes to the conclusion that cars are detrimental to society on their own (or who think that they came to the conclusion on their own) will be far more adamant about car-free living than one who was forced into accepting a car-free condition by financial or legislative necessity. After all, the forbidden fruit tastes much sweeter.

FriendlyFred

This is dead on right. I would personally LOVE to not have a car or have to depend on a car. But I live in Connecticut where it snows and gets freezing cold and there's virtually no public transportation. I HAVE to drive to and from work no matter what the price of gas might be. If the public transportation is there, I'd use it in a minute.

It's great when people dream about how all the rest of us should live. Try looking at the reality of the situation. Amerca isn't Europe. This is a country of sprawled out communities and towns, very little public transportation, much less GOOD public transportation, and a entire society built on the premise of free travel (meaning unhindered travel, meaning you need a car). If some dreamer can show me how to get from Simsbury CT to Bristol CT (22 miles) every day at odd times no matter what the weather, I'll be happy to listen. There's no bus, no car pool, no train, and that leaves my car. If you think I'm trying to commute 44 miles round trip through or after an ice storm (like we had this week) on my bike, you're nuts.