I’ve been without a car for about two and a half years now. Luckily I live in a downtown that has my work 3 blocks away, grocery stores, theaters, bars, restaurants, biking paths, museums, but I know that’s kind of a luxury situation that can allow me to do without.
The question though is, is it possible to ween the rest of urban USA off of the automobile? I understand that it’s not a possibility to have it at 0% because of emergency vehicles, visitors from rural areas etc. (nor am I suggesting we all go to amazon.com and reserve a Segway scooter), but is there a way to shift the weight of importance and dependence on the automobile in the larger metropolitan areas without doing a complete overhaul of a city’s infrastructure?
Sure, give us teleporters.
Nope. A complete overhaul of a city’s infrastructure is the key ingredient to weaning urban residents out of their cars.
As Azael pithily pointed out, people will still want to get from Point A to Point B, and will want to travel distances that preclude walking, or will want to carry items that preclude biking.
Ya gotta get them there somehow. Buses don’t (in most cases) carry sufficient numbers of persons efficiently.
So, you spend the fortune on a subway/light rail system, or you continue to choke in exhaust fumes.
Sua
I don’t think gas prices can stay cheap forever. Someday it will just cost too much to drive everywhere.
the problem is the suburban areas, which cannot exist without cars.
Visit the Los Angeles area and you will see that the answer is “No.”
I’m rereading the OP and found the one statement I made in there possible a bit too nebulous. The complete overhaul of the city’s infrastructure would just mean that everything would have to be redesigned as opposed to what I intended to say, which would be that the current infrastructure would have to be reasonably enhanced to ween a population off of the auto. One thought would be to start creating the next line of "skyscrapers with a portion mandated to have residential space.
Bosda, I totally concur with your statement, the suburban sprawl in the Twin Cities is so poorly controlled it’s embarrassing. We have one fairly new suburb, Woodbury, that is a good example of bad planning. The original idea is that they would only allow eastwardly building once every lot on the west side of the suburb is built. (it’s an eastern 'burb). The problem with this is that it doesn’t allow for the full picture to be viewed to create a sensible city. It also has created a large shopping center called Tamarack Village. This is designed as a conglomerate of strip malls set-up so that for each store one would visit, they would need to hop in the car to get to the next one. Check out Woodbury’s transportation plan and see how the city is setting itself up for a problematic future.
I don’t have a car in the downtown denver area. Some places have good transit to downtown jobs around here, but others only have intermittent bus service.
Light rail has resulted in a large number of people in Littleton and Englewood taking the light rail to jobs downtown. But some of them just leave their cars at the light rail station.
I’m not really an activist or anything, it just makes economic sense to me to not have a car. I don’t make enough for it to be practical.
But people in the further out suburbs or anywhere else in the state pretty much have to have a car. I grew up in a rural area where cars were pretty important, since most people lived quite a ways from town.
My mom, when she worked in downtown Denver, took the bus to the light rail station and the light rail station to downtown.
Of course, she hated working downtown in the first place because the commute was so annoying, so she was happy when she got a job 5 minutes away (by car) so she could walk that when the weather was nice.
But the ability to use mass transit is the exception, not the rule.
One of the things with cars in cities is that a lot of them (that’s all I can say without taking a survey) are from out of town. It’s not the urban dwellers that are choking the streets, it’s the visitors. There’s really nothing you can do about that besides promise good cheap parking on the outskirts and a shuttle in. That wouldn’t work for everyone, of course.
I think you already have a situation where a good many people who live in cities with good transit systems (close, frequent, clean, comfortable), whether train or bus, don’t own cars.
One thing NY does to discourage car ownership is to make parking such a hassle that it’s just not worth it. Monthly garage parking is hideously expensive and alternate side of the street parking is just a pain in the butt.
I live in a very small urban area (Santa Cruz, CA) without a car and I do pretty good for myself. Probably a quarter of the people I know (who are admittedly college students) don’t own cars.
The bus system here is great. I can get anywhere in town without switching busses more than once, and it never takes longer than an hour to get any one place. A bus comes by my front door every half hour, so I can always get where I need to go on time. I only run into problems if I need to get home past eleven at night.
Anywhere else I need to go is usually walkable. It only takes an hour to walk from one side of town to the other. A bike can cut that down to fifteen minutes.
I find a lot of benefits to taking public transportation. I save thousands of dollars a year from not maintaining a car. This allows me to live in a decent place in town. I seriously reduce my risk of getting in a car crash (which is a pretty signifigant thing- just about everyone knows someone that has died in a crash). I am able to read the newspaper, do homework and socialize during my commute. I feel less isolated and meet more people. I enjoy the freedom of being able to go anywhere in town, whatever state I am in, without having to lug a half ton of steel everywhere I go. I never have to worry about parking. Cars are not freedom- they are dangerous and expensive burdens.
Santa Cruz is a bit of an exception. It is very small and very affluent. It can afford to have a supurb transit system. But even when I lived in a remote suburb of sprawling Sacramento, I still managed to get around.
So yes, I believe that public transportation is completely viable, especially in urban situations. The big problem is that our culture promotes isolation and isularity. People have forgotten how to interact with each other after years of going from their air-conditioned houses to their air-conditioned cars to their air-conditioned workplaces and back without ever having to step outside. Sprawling suburbs and the nuclear family have made it so that working and shopping and watching TV is the only thing we know how to do anymore. Public transportation is the opposite of all of that.
I think things will change soon enough. Our car-culture is pretty bad at producing happy people, and eventually we’ll catch on. There are already a few American cities where owning a car is more trouble than it’s worth. People rent parking spaces in San Francisco that cost more than most people’s rents.
I don’t think it would be possible, and not solely because of logistic problems, either.
There are people like me, who love their cars, who wouldn’t give them up. I despise public transportation because it doesn’t conform to my schedule, I can’t stand how loud, dirty, crowded, smelly and inconvenient it is, it doesn’t go everywhere I want to go, and quite frankly, I just enjoy taking a drive.
I hate trying to haul groceries or anything else from a shopping trip on public transportation. My car has a trunk. I put the stuff in there, I drive to my house, I carry my stuff 15 or 20 feet, not three or four blocks from the bus stop. My car is heated and air conditioned to my tastes. The music playing is something I chose. If I want a cigarette and Doritos in my car, nobody tells me I can’t have them. Nobody elbows me in the ribs trying to read a newspaper in my car, and nobody’s kid throws up on me in my car.
And my car is out there, right now, waiting for me beside my house if I happen to feel like hopping in it and driving away for the weekend. I can’t think of anything that’d make me give up having a car, especially not public transportation. I’m not the only person who feels that way, either.
Yup,
Just raise the price of gas $1 per year plus inflation. Do this every year. In 50 years…virtually no cars.
Of course, it may not work because the black market would be huge.
Hypothetical question though, right? 
Another non-car-owner checking in: always (since college, at least) lived in or around cities in the densely populated Northeast, never owned a car. Definitely a smart move financially! As catsix says, some people will always just prefer their cars, but I think sven is right that more people than before are finding that they prefer not having them.
Biggest potential influence on this trend in urban areas, IMHO: the ZipCar, or dedicated subscription car rental fleet for a particular locality. Most of us car-free folks could really use a car from time to time, but find it a hassle to get one through a car rental agency. If more urban car owners knew that they could count on being able to use a car when they needed one, for a reasonable fee, and could forget about the ownership, parking, insurance, maintenance hassles the rest of the time—I bet we’d see a huge increase in the non-car-owning segment of the urban population.
It actually costs me less to have my car than it did to rely on public transportation, especially considering the time issues involved.
A trip that takes me 20 minutes if I drive myself used to take me over an hour on public transportation. It was awful.
Assuming that there is no progress in automobile locomotive technology you might be correct. I’m looking to buy a new car right now and I’m seriously considering a Toyota Prius which is a hybrid gas/electric vechile. I should be able to drive roughly 500 miles on one tank of fuel. Then there’s automobiles being run on fuel cells which several automakers are currently working on.
Marc
Don’t hold your breath. Unfortunately they just keep finding more oil.
You are correct in asserting that the only thing that will change this is an oil shortage though. And it will have to happen someday. Right now oil and LNG is just too cheap to make an investment in developing alternative energy resources economically sound. These hybrids are a promising sign, but there are many more hurdles to jump.
An electric car may still be powered by fossil fuels, it’s just a matter of where that fuel is converted into energy (in the car or at the power station).
Tell you what. Find the absolute best public transit system in the world. See how many cars they have. That’s probably the maximum extent to which people can be “weaned” off cars. Probably less than that, because Americans view auto ownership as an extension of their indivduality, to greater extent than citizens of most other nations, and thus are more likely to want to drive, even with efficient public transport as an option.
Jeff
It doesn’t help that many of the cities of the U.S. were built with cars in mind, making it nearly impossible to get anywhere any other way.
This is especially the case here in Houston.