this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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Living within 30 minutes of my job in the city costs $3,000/month in rent for a 800sf apartment. Living within walking distance would cost $4,000 if I could even find anything to rent.
Living an hour away costs $750/month in rent for a 1200sf trailer. My car note is $450/month and I spend about $300/month on gasoline on average. All in my rent, vehicle, and gas is half the cost of just the rent in the city.
Yeah - there's an extra hour lost every day to the drive, but the savings comes out to around $75/hr for that commute. And I have the freedom to travel anywhere I want with my vehicle on top of that.
So yeah, I live suburban and fuck anyone who criticizes me for making that sensible economic decision.
I don't criticize you at all.
But that is a urban planning problem. Because they didn't build enough housing and public transportation.
Nobody's saying 'fuck you' for being forced into suburbs. Were saying 'fuck you' to the people who built suburbs instead of high density housing and made housing near your job unaffordable.
And the people who genuinely had the choice (I might argue you didn't) and chose to pay extra for suburb.
I mean to be fair people might be more open to it if high density housing didn't suck ass. The exact same shitty template copy pasted a thousand times. It's honestly not even that it's the same that's the problem it's that the template sucks ass.
There is a middle ground between high-density housing and showing you into a tiny poorly put together space but nobody seems willing to build that. Give me a suburb house, a full two floors, with a standard layout. And turn that into high density housing and I'm willing to bet a lot more people would be fine with it.
It's not like that's even all that difficult to imagine, we build fucking skyscrapers 100 plus stories tall there's zero reason we couldn't just take a two-story suburb townhome and just stack 50 of them on top of each other. Then the only thing lost is a dedicated garage and your own private backyard which some people will still heavily want but it's a much easier pill to swallow versus the "shitty cramped poorly designed apartment layout"
Also it should be mandatory that high density housing has a minimum of one dedicated parking spot per unit, the first two floors of any high-density buildings should be dedicated to a parking garage. That is the other thing that makes people say fuck you to high density housing is it's always a shit ton of units crammed into not enough parking and it's a huge pita to deal with. Do we need better design the cities that are less reliant on cars for transport? Yes, but you should still expect at least one car per unit regardless it's just the reality of America
I agree we do dog shit architecture, especially residential.
We do not need more parking spaces though. We need trains. I'm sorry, but its too late to be putting more fucking cars on the road; even 'clean' electric ones.
Even if you got rid of all the bureaucracy bullshit and started building trains everywhere tomorrow that would not remove the need for people to have cars. And the idea that you should be able to build a building that does not have enough spaces for everyone that lives there to have one is unreasonable.
Even if I could literally walk outside and immediately outside of my door get onto a train there are still going to be times I would need a vehicle. Even if I only use it once a year I would still like to be able to own my own. I would like to live somewhere that I only need to use my vehicle a couple times a year but I still need to have somewhere to put it
You really don't ever need a car, with good public transit. You can use the delivery van or rent something twice a year, I'm sure.
Depending on geography, even delivery vans may be unnecessary; cargo bikes work pretty well on flat terrain.
I haven't ever had a car. Not in a hypothetical world where we built public transit, but here, in the present/past real world. Most of the times this has been a problem were caused by other people using cars, and I don't consider becoming part of the problem to be a solution there. It can be done.
I would be really annoyed having to rent something every time I wanted a new bed, tv, dresser, that sort of thing. It's nice having my own vehicle that can do it.
Like I said we should absolutely have good robust public transportation everywhere so that I only need to use it on those very specific occasions which will drastically cut down on the problems with so many cars but I should still be able to have one. Trying to outright remove cars from people will never lead to anything useful because they will fight you tooth and nail.
Make it so that I don't need it but can still have it if I want it and suddenly they will be on the road significantly less often, I'm glad that you have been able to get by without one and are happy but not everyone is going to be the same. I mean hell I regularly make trips between the states almost every other week for seeing friends and I would really hate to do that on public transportation because it would take what's already a 6-hour round trip and probably turn it into a 10 hour round trip.
Dude its not worth the space (and maintenance, insurance, etc) of an entire car for two deliveries a year, thats fuvking insane, get over yourself. And people can include rental/delivery in cost of the item or wherever. Or we can gave full communism and they just do it.
Plus, and I say this living in California; cargo bikes really do work fine most places. Even here (not all, but most) youre just being afraid of change, And it's cringe.
I'm sorry, but the earths carrying capacity does not have room for your pathological american bullshit.
And what if it's pouring down rain? Or snowing? And I just don't feel like becoming completely soaked just to go to the grocery store. There are lots of reasons someone might want a car over a bike. I actually have a bike and I do use it, fun fact I'm also a bus driver so I'm pretty fond of public transportation because it directly feeds my livelihood. However I have this neat little thing where I don't really sweat much even if I'm basically on the verge of heat stroke. So if it's anything more than like 60° F outside and sunny and I'm doing some type of cardio such as biking i will start to overheat.
So the majority of my bike riding is in the fall and winter months, but I do very much enjoy during those months when I can take the bike to work thankfully I don't have to go very far and I get to ride the local transit for free as a bus driver.
The carrying capacity of Earth is already handling the majority of Americans owning multiple cars, I'm literally only asking for enough parking for one car for each individual in the design of a building. Which is literally just a couple floors of a parking garage and you're over here asking like I want the end of the world. If you ever want to see Improvement in public transportation you need to stop being so extremist because it pushes people away from the idea entirely
Dude, youve never seen a good transit system have you? You shouldn't be walking more than a couple blocks
Or get shit delivered
Or, hey, what if we stop driving cars so we can stop global warming getting worse? And more people don't have this fucking problem?
No its fucking not and if we keep going like this literally everyone dies. I dunno about you, but I can think of much more pleasant ways to go out than climate apocalypse.
What I'm hearing here is "I fucking hate public transit and enjoy fucking my car! witness me!
re: interstate public transit:
Have you ever taken a train? Amtrak is a fucking joy.
Like genuinely a pleasant experience, and I don't just mean the joy of not getting dry fucked by sandpaper and barbed wire. Its really comfy, the scenery is often quite nice, there's decent WiFi and a bar, you can wander the train and fuck off to the bar if you get bored reading or whatever-not a great bar; beer and wine only no coctails, but we could fix that too.
And if we actually cared about rail, especially passenger rail, the speed caps on that are so much fucking higher than you could possibly get with individual cars. Trips would be more frequent, too.
Yes I'm familiar with riding trains, both in and out of the us. It is enjoyable but it is much slower than just hopping in my car and going straight to where I'm going. For the sake of those trips where I'm hopping around between states and coming back in a single day I would not want to have to do it by train. When I'm going out of state and staying out of state for a couple days train is perfectly fine and as long as the Amtrak lines up with my schedule I generally will
Do you want those states to have living things in them in fifty years? Do you want exterior temperatures under 105f/40c most days?
Because you can't have both that and cars. This isnt me being your mom, this is me telling you youre the reason I don't bother with savings, because I have an inkling what the world is gonna be in twenty years if we don't fix shit now, and I'm not eager to see that shit.
Have you actually looked at any of the studies the majority of our greenhouse gases are coming from? Transportation is only a small piece of it. If your goal is to stop climate change then there are significantly more important things you could be targeting. Fuels used for generating electricity, as byproducts in the manufacturing of goods, and the clear cutting of forests all contribute significantly more to Greenhouse production than Transportation does.
That's not to say we shouldn't reduce Transportation emissions still, which you seem to think I'm not advocating for but I clearly am because I am saying I want better public transportation and I want to be able to use my car less often I just don't want it taken away from me entirely. But using it as an argument for the removal of cars is weak because it's not even one of the largest contributors
Wow you really want to fuck your car, don't you?
Like I'm for reducing agriculture emissions(going vegan), I'm for increasing rail to the point flying feels absurd (and getting rid of it, mostly), and I'm for not burning fossil fuels for any reason. But the future where we just switched to electric cars abd everything else is the same? We (or our grandparents) walked past that door, carter admin or Chevy volt at the latest. Its underwater now.
The ecological cost of cars (break and tire dust in our lungs and water-thats where most of your microplastics come from) producing and moving tons of material for every 1-5 hundred pound human, black pavement that won't let water through, and just the sheer wasted space, we can't afford it anymore. Its not worth it.
But its not all bad! Trains are cool as fuck, and crazy efficient per joule-a filthy diesel train belching clouds of smoke is cleaner and greener than an electric car running on clean nuclear/wind power, so imagine what we could do with overhead wire/third rail?
And yeah you might have to walk a block or two to the train station, once robust transit gets put in, but you'd get your steps in, and honestly in Los Angeles most people walk at least that far to their cars anyway.
Who pays extra for suburbs? Suburbs are significantly cheaper than the city.
Because they're subsidized to Fuck and city costs are inflated. Suburbs are ecological nightmares, and cannot continue to exist if you want a green earth in 80 years.
How are suburbs subsidized and how are city costs inflated?
City costs are inflated by exploitative landlords.
Suburb costs are subsidized by basically all the infrastructure for them; none of it pays for itself. Not the roads not the wiring not the water and sewer. Yes I know everywhere has roads, but suburbs demand a high standard of them and don't produce anything with them.
Youre not being space efficient like a city, or (whatever degree of) self sufficient like the country, so everything is just car trips, any time you leave the house. Like in OP.
I did the same math and my results came out the opposite way - in a much cheaper country however. I had a rent free situation over an hour away, but ended up renting an apartment near work. My time alone was worth it, being able to pay the month's rent using one week's commute time for freelancing after work. And the monthly fuel cost itself would've been 2/3 of my month's rent.
Everyone's circumstances are different. I made what I believe was the most sensible economic decision - paying to get out of commuting. For you, the opposite was sensible, commuting to reduce rent. Can't really judge you for doing what's best for your wallet in these tough times we're living.