US cities and homogeneous mobility (the car)

I got into a Reddit argument with someone who cycle commutes, but uses a car.  While I have not much of a problem with this (especially as these days I am not particularly ambulatory), you don't get a pass on car usage because you ride a bike.  He took umbrage with this.  I can't remember if he has an electric car, but I said "electric cars are merely 'next generation asphalt nation.'  I still remember a guy being quoted in a Boston Globe article, likening his use of a car instead of biking in the rain, as "a motorized umbrella."

Ad published in 1953, Ford Motor Company's 50th anniversary.

That EVs are a marginally better treatment of the environment, they are not sustainable mobility--that is, walking, transit, and biking, and a car lite lifestyle (car sharing, rental cars, delivery--but not too much/e-commerce has definitely got out of control e.g., my neighbor buys a block of yeast from Amazon, while I get mine at the Latino grocery store).

Simon Kuper has a great column in the Financial Times, "Electric cars are not the future ," making the point that electric bikes are much better for city use than a car because a car is a car is a car--it takes up space, noisy (ICE) vehicles, and damages the environment even EVs because they are so heavy create more particulate detritus from tires than regular cars, plus they can be killing machines, etc.  From the article:

But an electric car doesn’t make sense for individual urbanites. Few of them drive enough. European car mileage has been falling since 2000. In Britain, 57 per cent of cars are driven less than 100 miles a week, calculates the consultancy Field Dynamics. Even in the US, about half of car journeys in the busiest cities are less than three miles. Many urbanites now probably drive a car because they have a car. But if they can find a way not to pay $50,000 for an EV (or in some places, to buy just one rather than two) they will slash their cost of living. 

... For a city-dweller ditching a petrol car, the calculation then becomes: instead of an EV, can I buy a much cheaper, health-giving e-bike that I can charge in my flat, and supplement with the odd taxi ride? That is the trend. European and US car sales peaked in 2019. About 5.5 million e-bikes were sold in the EU in 2022, against just two million electric cars. 

Many car-owners now use bikes for short trips. E-bikes are even making the self-preserving leap to status symbol, with Lamborghini and Maserati producing fancy models, and Porsche developing bike motors, batteries and software. Bikes are also becoming a cultural urban norm. 

I see this in Paris, where only one in three households now owns a car, and cycle paths are full even in January, something that I used to be told would never happen. Bikes move faster in Paris than cars, city hall’s statistics show. 

... Then there are all the other electrical options. Worldwide, according to Bloomberg, there are 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles and three-wheelers compared with just 20 million passenger EVs. Looking back in five years, we may conclude that electric cars were made for American suburbia and for almost nowhere else.

Interestingly, the Aventon e-bike company has been advertising on television ("Aventon TV Spot, 'Holidays: $300 off Aventure'," ispot.tv).

In the US, the car predominates.  More than 90% of all trips are by the car ("Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo: ‘A city’s creativity doesn’t depend on cars. That’s the 20th century’," FT).  

While this is partly because people hated the railroads during the period when the car industry started (Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century) the country's economy relies on car manufacturing, more so it is because the US is the world's largest oil producer ("U.S. oil production hit a record under Biden. He seldom mentions it," Washington Post and "Petro States of America," Businessweek).

Train station in Malaysia with a lot of scooters in the "bike parking" area.

Living in the city, I've wondered why in dense places people don't use motorized scooters, let alone walk, bike or use transit--although in many cities transit doesn't work particularly well, as cities and metropolitan areas are so spread out.

Granted weather is an issue.  And most of us lack the means to have multiple vehicles, and the ability to use one that works best for the particular trip, in a way that has fewer negative effects.

Or much smaller vehicles instead of trucks and SUVs ("SmartCar as a city car").

Then again, when I get into "arguments" about this, the issue isn't to make people in Montana or Wyoming, who often drive hundreds of miles on trips because of the distance between communities, bike instead, but to capture as many trips as possible by sustainable means in those places where sustainable mobility is particularly efficient.

The US developed a mobility paradigm focused on the car, killing passenger rail and local transit in the process, and mostly treats bikes as toys, not a mode of practical transportation, but the real way to think about is in terms of a homogeneous mobility paradigm overall. 

I have a map hard copy now with this promotional element on smooth asphalt roads, but I haven't scanned it yet.

Other countries, mostly in Europe, have a heterogeneous mobility paradigm.  

Germany is a great example.  Obviously very old cities there were built to optimize walking because they were built long before the car came on the scene.  Walking city urban form also works for biking and transit.

But Germany is also a major automobile manufacturer, just like the US. It sells lots of cars home and overseas, and has freeways that don't have speed limits At the same time it recognizes the car isn't that great for cities, and the major cities have dense transit networks.  The country has a great passenger train network at multiple scales. It also promotes biking quite heavily.

Britain always was a major car producer, which influenced its diminishment of transit in the 1960s.  When oil was discovered in the North Sea in the 1970s, that furthered their commitment to automobility (and tax cuts--instead of investing in Britain's infrastructure, Thatcher cut taxes).

When the University of California Davis was originally constructed, the first chancellor decided to reduce accommodation of the car, and prioritized biking.  

That made the campus and the city, and to some extent the county adopt biking as a primary mode, although according to the book Pedal Revolution over the decades the place of biking has diminished ("Better bike planning vis-a-vis Bike to work day and National Biking Month" 2013).

But I've wondered why the US can't accept the concept of heterogeneity in mobility.  

Let and help San Francisco be a streetcar city, NYC a transit city, not just subway, but also streets dedicated to the bus, other communities focused on biking and walking, massive promotion of Safe Routes to School ("Why isn't walking/biking to school programming an option in Suburban Omaha? | Inadequacies in school transportation planning"), focusing on walkable communities as opposed to "pedestrian planning" ("Planning for place/urban design/neighborhoods versus planning for transportation modes: new 17th Street NW bike lanes | Walkable community planning versus "pedestrian" planning"), etc.

This old piece outlines a hierarchy of mobility:

-- "Further Updates to the Sustainable Mobility Platform," 2018