Syt's Pictorial Collection of Stuff and Things (image heavy)

[Barrister]

That's the one time where cars fill a big need that it's hard to see being filled by something else, when buying big items like furniture.
Still, that's not exactly an every day thing. Not even an every year thing.

Spoken like a man who doesn't have three boys who play hockey. 

[garbon]

I get around in a palanquin.

[Valmy]

You checked poorly. Yes, Hausmann's Paris is a great example of how wide boulevards created to accommodate martial law and bourgeois sensibility could be repurposed without too much trouble for the car. So it was for most boulevards - large avenues created, often on the space formerly occupied by fortifications, and therefore, usually the  space of poor neighborhoods or squatters that were torn down without much opposition.

Many European towns however had the good fortune of having gone through a horrific world conflict that left their core devastated, ready to be rebuilt with the car in mind. It's not a coincidence that European cities that escaped relatively unscathed enjoy today high density and thick networks of public transportation. That is certainly not the case in the US. The core of most American cities has been gutted for the passage of highways. Scenic drives created for the purpose of leisurly strolls have become highspeed transitways; downtowns were fled en  masse once the states were fully committed to sustaining endless sprawl with considerable infrastructure.

The population of the US in 1890 was 63 million. The population today is 330 million. The population of Texas in 1890 was 2.2 million, today it is 29 million. Are you implying somehow we would have kept the same core and not built out anything without cars? Where would all these people live?

Downtowns have been emptied and revived multiple times as economics change. It is not like cities did not rot and decay away and get revivied before cars came along. Numerous boomtowns and cities were born and decayed all through the 19th century in the US.

Less shrill irony, please. Moving goods is certainly one use for motor vehicle but I thought we were discussing how they impacted city life.

I was not specifically discussing that actually but taking on the assertion that the only reason cars are useful in modern society was because we built society around them. I do agree that in urban areas cars are not particularly ideal. But, as I said, urban areas are only a small percentage of the land area of most countries. And these days they are crazy expensive, outside the means of many people. So I don't necessarily think it is the worst thing that one can live in a less expensive town or suburban area and be able to commute where the jobs are.

[Oexmelin]

The population of the US in 1890 was 63 million. The population today is 330 million. The population of Texas in 1890 was 2.2 million, today it is 29 million. Are you implying somehow we would have kept the same core and not built out anything without cars? Where would all these people live?

It's you who seem to be implying that the car is only reason why these numbers are sustainable. That seems like a strange assertion. There could have been many ways to organize cities without sacrificing so much to the car, the purpose of which, if it is to carry people from point A to point B, is remarkably inefficient. That this inefficient means of transportation has become necessary in modern societies is hardly a point in its favor, and indeed, points to the fact that we *made* it necessary, rather than answering some imperative of efficiency.

Now, you seem to want to twist this position into a caricature of luddism, that the car has no utility, and no superiority of any case over the horse and cart. This is clearly not the case. Motor vehicles clearly have a lot of technical advantages; and powerful trucks, farm equipments, bulldozers, etc. clearly are superiors to animal power. But the majority of motor vehicles are used a comparatively ridiculous amount of time, to ferry an increasingly small number of people, for quite a considerable cost to the environment. This was not foreordained by the superiority of the motor. It's a result of social pressures and social choices we are now constrained by, notably: that all of our infrastructure relies on this inefficient use of capital, space, and energy. i.e., that we are stuck in a situation where we desire a way of life that came about with cheap land and cheap car, heavily subsidized roads, bulk consumption and endless sprawl.

[Syt]

From a Twitter thread - prices for fruit/vegetable products in the Arctic (Nunavut), explaining why hunting is still an important means of survival. Prices are in Canadian Dollar.

https://twitter.com/KataraPiujuq/status/1313673898609774599

[Josquius]

Seems the smart people up there will be investing in grow lights and insulation.

[Grey Fox]

And some of those prices have built subsidies(like show on some price tags)

The arctic is far for a citrus to go to.

[Barrister]

There is no highway to Nunavut.  Other than a very short shipping season in the summer, every last thing has to be flown in.  So yes, fresh fruits and vegetables are hideously expensive.

Yukon for comparison, has a major highway (the Alaska Highway), so produce was only very slightly more expensive than down south, even though there are at comparable latitudes.

[Sheilbh]

Don't want to steal Syt's thread - but thought these may be of interest. Some Emil Mayer photos of pre-1914 Vienna:

[merithyn]

It's interesting watching a discussion about car usage between Europeans and Americans. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine who'd just moved to Chicago from London. He was being interviewed for a job and they asked if it was possible for him to come into the office for a face-to-face interview. (This was 25 years ago, so video conferencing wasn't really available.) He said sure! He was going to be in New York in the next couple of weeks and he would just "pop over" to Chicago for the interview. His plan was to drive there with a friend for a "couple of days" because that sounded fun anyway. Then he mapped it. Then he priced flights. Then he priced the train and looked at train schedules.

It never occurred to him that even though the map shows Chicago as only "this far" from New York, it would amount to 1000 miles (~1600km).

Distance in the US (and Canada, to an extent, though most of their cities are packed along the border) is not comparable to European distances. Even cities are spread out for the most part, compared to Paris, London, Rome.

So trying to say that the US wastes time/energy on cars is almost silly. Unless one stays completely within a city - and not all cities have good public transit - cars are essential. One can get by in some cities without a problem, but for most Americans, it's just not optional.

[Josquius]

Your conclusion doesn't match the rest of the post there.
American cities being so horribly spread out is not the natural way they must be. Pre war they were far more compact and along a similar scale to European cities. With public transport.
Instead of following this more efficient path America instead lead the pack in the disasterous mid 20th century trend of car focused urban design.

[Tamas]

Your conclusion doesn't match the rest of the post there.
American cities being so horribly spread out is not the natural way they must be. Pre war they were far more compact and along a similar scale to European cities. With public transport.
Instead of following this more efficient path America instead lead the pack in the disasterous mid 20th century trend of car focused urban design.

Yes let's get all close together, pile up tiny living spaces next to each other and leave tons of "green spaces" and above all golf courses. That is ought to restrict reliance on cars.

[Josquius]

I never said Britain had it right either. We are one of the worst in Europe, especially when you consider how much we threw away to get here.

[Valmy]

Your conclusion doesn't match the rest of the post there.
American cities being so horribly spread out is not the natural way they must be. Pre war they were far more compact and along a similar scale to European cities. With public transport.
Instead of following this more efficient path America instead lead the pack in the disasterous mid 20th century trend of car focused urban design.

We have much better housing at much lower prices than Europeans who seem to live in tiny shitholes for enormous prices. Also many European countries are just massive urban areas of dozens and dozens of interconnected cities and...hey...that is almost exactly the same as our spread out cities. You just label it differently.

[Valmy]

I never said Britain had it right either. We are one of the worst in Europe, especially when you consider how much we threw away to get here.

So we should aim for this:



So very compact.