Frankly, I don't care in the slightest how "most Americans 'chose' to live their lives," I only care how /I/ choose to live /my/ life. And since I detest the noise, filth, and crowding of cities, I choose to live my life in the midst of comfortable suburban sprawl and get from A to B in one of my several cars.

Communal, urban, lifestyles are for people with the mentality of ants.

Mr. Miller - thank you for that substantive, reasoned and engaging contribution to the discussion.

Apparently, anyone who is not EXACTLY like you is an insectile being beneath contempt.

Brilliant.

I'm all for Henry Miller living his life however he wants to... as long as he pays something closer to what his lifestyle actually costs in terms of inefficient infrastructure and increased energy waste. I always find it amusing when people in collar counties tell others that they're from [city name]; actually, people who live in the city pay for the cultural opportunities with their higher taxes, and the suburbanites mostly co-opt the increased sophistication and think that buying a mid-priced meal on their rare jaunts downtown is an adequate contribution to the local economy. Hangers-on.

A big problem with kids and mass transit is: (1) safety issues; and (2) making stops stroller accessible. Toddlers don't have the same fear of heights we do and tend to run off, which is a problem in a subway or on a Chicago EL platform. It's a major problem when you're carrying packages. I can't imagine taking my toddler shopping alone on the Chicago EL or the Metra (Chicago's train system). I couldn't hold all the packages without preventing her from running onto the tracks or off of a platform unless I strapped her into her stroller. Which makes for a second problem. Only one in three or four stops is handicap accessible, meaning its hard to bring a stroller into an EL stop. I know poor parents use public transportation with their young kids, but its a stressful experience which most people would only do as a last resort.

A car-free lifestyle is simply not practical for most people.

For example, doing the family grocery shopping does not lend itself to mass transit. Riding the bus/subway will six bags gets old real quick.

Better, I think, to embrace the Atrios suggestion of striving for improved mass transit so the standard becomes one car per family instead of one car per driving age person.

Cars are really, really useful.

A few notes:

My wife led a carless/childless lifestyle in Pittsburgh for a couple years before meeting me and my car. She had no intention of buying a car (although - this was 10 years ago - she wished for a carshare for occasional usage), and got along fine. She took the busway for her ~4 mile commute to Downtown and could walk to all of her other daily needs, not to mention amenities such as movie theaters.

We now have 2 children (1 and 5) and get by fine with just 1 station wagon; most days the car doesn't get used at all.

Riding the bus/subway will six bags gets old real quick.

Which is why carless people like to live within walking distance of grocery stores, and don't try to do all their shopping for the week in one massive go. We live a 5 minute walk or a 1 minute bike ride from 2 different supermarkets. We don't go to the store every day by any means, but when going to the store means taking the dog for a walk, it's not burdensome in the least (I might add that we don't live in a fancy neighborhood, nor was our large house, with a yard and a park down the block, expensive).

That said, zak is certainly correct that cars are useful, and I think that, for most urban families with kids, having 1 car is worth the trouble. But it's not a daily necessity, by any means, even in a city with moderate density and a fair-to-middling transit system.

Here is a link to a blog series on bike-centric, carfree family living in Portland, OR.

http://bikeportland.org/cats/family-biking/carfree-families-column/

I grew up in NYC and never learned to drive. For the past eight years I've been living carless in Long Branch on the Jersey shore, in a residential area a 10-minute walk from a small shopping center, including a supermarket. It's a bit of a hassle to get anywhere beyond that; there's one bus a block away, but other routes and the NJ Transit train stop are about a mile distant. I have to depend on taxis for many excursions. Bus routes go past malls and large shopping centers, but getting from the bus to the stores and vice-versa is problematic.

Fortunately we don't get much snow accumulation in winter, or I wouldn't even be able to get across the street to the local 7-Eleven, much less to the supermarket, because the residential sidewalks don't get shoveled (I'm 67, and hopping over the drifts thrown up by snowplows is increasingly difficult.)

I now have most of my groceries delivered by Peapod, which just began operating in the area and is a godsend. I shop for clothing, books, and many other items via the Web.

Being carless is a drag in many respects, but the view of the ocean out my window is worth it.

My family (2 adults, 3 kids) lives in D.C., and we could go most weekdays without using our cars at all if it weren't for daycare for the youngest. I need to drive my daughter about two miles to get her to daycare. I then drive back to our neighborhood school (an easy walk from our home) to drop off the other kids, park my car and take a bus to work. My wife walks to work. D.C.'s housing stock, zoning, and (perhaps) other regulatory hurdles makes finding convenient daycare very difficult, but I'm sure that no one conceptualizes this as a transportation issue. It is for us.

I live in Chicago, make a solid middle class living, and have raised my child without a car with no problems at all. We use the car share every 6 weeks or so to stock up on non-perishable staples and bulky items and occasionally rent one to visit relatives, but otherwise have no need for one at all. I'm thus pretty puzzled by the commenter above who claims that it's stressful to take a child on public transportation, or that doing so is only for poor people. Frankly I find it more stressful to put my child in a car, as when I do so I'm often trusting his life to lunatic drivers on the Kennedy.

I'll second JRoth's comments about public transportation in Pittsburgh being better than what most people might think. (That Golden Triangle looks great, but it is hard to park in downtown.) In all of the cities I've lived in (including Washington DC which I found very inconvenient), Pittsburgh was the easiest to manage without a car.

It's interesting that Joe perceives safety as a big issue in using mass transit with children. I don't suppose that he worries about the high risk of auto-related fatalities that are common to our communities. For some reason, it is a risk that most auto-dependent individuals are willing to take.

The real point of the NYT article, though, is about how we can design our suburbs so that car use is reduced. Of course most people can't get around without a car in our current suburban development pattern, but the article was about showing how there is an alternative and that it is viable.

I've lived in Seattle for about six years now. While it's not always convenient, I've managed to live without a car this entire time. I don't even have a license.

My SO had to get a car once she got a job that involved going to nature-y places. Public transportation probably wouldn't have gone to those places anyway, though.

The real point of the NYT article, though, is about how we can design our suburbs so that car use is reduced.

Which is why the piece about Levittown -- built on the premise that the family car would be driven by the man of the house to work and back each day -- is more interesting than Rybczynski's frankly wrong comments about the density required to support public transport.

Suburbs with footpaths and cycleways can be easily hooked up to local services and transit networks. Suburbs where the lawns are built out to the curb and every square foot is subdivided into lots can not.

You can look at European suburbs and see plenty of smart low-density development. Heck, you can look at British ones, where most families own a car, but there are plenty of non-drivers, and still see how it's possible to do shopping trips on Shanks's pony.

(Google Maps is a good way to see these kinds of layouts.)

You should check out some folks in Columbus taking the "Cota Challenge"

http://urbaninfill.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/cota-challenge-q1-2009-update/

How about the one car challenge...one family member rids themselves of a car so that the family can save up to 10K a year in costs.

I live in Austin, TX without a car, with a child (who's now 11). I lived here with a car from '09-'04, and since '04 (my son was then 7), I've relied almost exclusively on the bus system. If you live relatively close to downtown, or on one of the major north-south bus routes, this is actually a very easy place to live with a child without a car. I even have to go down to Kyle (an Austin suburb, about 30 minutes south of downtown) once a week, and I've managed to do that easily without driving.

Granted, this is no NYC, but I can get just about anywhere in town in about an hour, and I can even take buses until 3 am every night except Sunday night (Monday morning). The stops are frequent, the buses run on time for the most part, and the only time I wish I could drive is when I need to run to the gas station just down the street and have to walk.