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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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As a Swede, I think the reason this baffles you has a lot to do with the fact that the U.K. is comparatively tiny, with 67 mil inhabitants on 244 sqkm. Sweden for example has 10.5mil inhabitants on 450 sqkm.
What happens is that densely populated areas will have access to these services, perhaps not for free, but they're at least there. Less sparsely populated areas have less service coverage, and so you get more car dependant. Here in Sweden at least we have a decent public transport network so even in my old village of 600 people you could make do without a car, you just couldn't be particularly spontaneous about things.
The U.S. is very much structured around owning cars. Massive roads, poor pedestrian/cycling infrastructure, and a general lack of public transit. I visited Massachusetts back in 2019 and got a completely different perspective on things. Until then I didn't understand why my friend just didn't bike everywhere, but having been there it's easy to see that it's not viable. Even the cul-de-sac they lived on wasn't very pedestrian friendly.
That's not to say that the U.S. could have more sensible sizes on their cars, they definitely could. I think the sizes of cars growing has to do with manufacturers wanting increased profit. We're seeing an increase in the average car size here in Europe as well, with a lot of the more compact cars being taken off the market.
The problem with your logic is that top 5 most popular vehicles in the New York City are:
Tell me more about how these guys live in a sparsely populated area and need hauling hay and lumber all day long.
Unfortunately a lot of people buy these to haul kids. They act like you can't put car seats in a sedan and put strollers in the trunk. We had 5 people in my dad's 1972 Mercury Capri when I was growing up. The back seat was small. Of course we weren't as fat as typical Americans are today.
When I had two kids in car seats I upgraded to a bigger car. It was a VW Jetta wagon/estate. Plenty of space for both kids and all our stuff to go on week long vacations. And since it was a diesel it got like 40mpg highway.
I mean there's status tied to car culture as well. It's a common problem with consumerism, and why people build these tribes around brand loyalty and whatnot. The fact that massive vehicles are popular in NYC isn't incompatible with the notion that delivery services and public transport is available there. According to this... Powerpoint (??) on nyc.gov, about 53% of households in NYC have access to a car (page 53), which is significantly lower than the national average.
Yes, unfortunately in the US it's two parts 1) rural areas are not very well-serviced as you say, there is a lot of land in the US (~8,000,000 sqkm) much of which is empty, so being able to do more yourself is always the better option 2) there's always been kind of mythos around self-reliance in this country that has become kind of exaggerated with certain political demographics, so that leads to people in cities owning these giant vehicles as kind of a political status thing "Look at me, I'm a self-reliant manly man who doesn't need help from any community or collective." Which us a ridiculous attitude to have when living in a city, but that's the political climate undortunately. Also plays into why so many of our services suck arse.
It doesn't even have to be that rural, honestly. My friend lived in a town in MA with about 70k inhabitants. To me this is a fairly large town, my current town is about 20k, and my previous town was about 30k. Honestly I didn't even have any idea that the town they lived in was so populous until now (as I just looked it up), because it didn't feel like it. In terms of services and population I got the impression that it was smaller than my hometown at the time. It's just spread out over a much larger area and very little is made to be accessible by walking.
My friend had a ~30 minute walking distance from their house to the nearest grocery store. In my current town I have 2 grocers within 9 minutes of walking distance. Both are easily accessible with bicycle as well.
There's also the general consumption attitude. My friend went shopping once every 7-14 days. Nowadays I order in groceries in bulk every 7 days, but in the past going for groceries was a more spontaneous thing. I know plenty of people who pick up groceries more or less daily on their way home from work. From what I observed, a lot of consumer goods is available in larger bulk quantities in the U.S. compared to what you see here. You generally also don't buy drinking water here, but in the U.S. that's sometimes required.
There's a lot of nuances. I live quite comfortably as a pedestrian/cyclist over here in Sweden. I don't think I could do that if I'd lived where my friend did.
Sure, no individual is like to force you to live in the middle of nowhere, but circumstances might.
I'm not saying that cars should be a thing, but rather talking about (some) reasons they are. The biggest determining factor really is just car culture. The car and oil industry has done a great job at manufacturing demand for cars, and I'd wager that's the main determining factor.
If you want to see a reduction in cars on the roads, the best way to do so is simply to make other means of transport more feasible. You don't fix traffic by widening roads, that just induces further demand. Instead, set up bus lines, mark certain lanes as bus only. Heck, convert some lanes to bicycle only lanes.
It's been easy for me to take that kind of infrastructure for granted. Where I live for example, there's a pedestrian/bicycle path all the way from my town, to the nearby larger town ~35km away. It's fully possible to bike over there if you're prepared for a 1-1½ hour ish ride.
Because US "cities" are sparsely populated suburban wastelands that take hours to drive across. The model of exclusively cars and suburbs just doesn't scale.