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Comment by JohnDotAwesome | Hacker News Reader

I live in Texas. Private car ownership definitely has a materialistic component. However, owning a car is almost a necessity in every city in Texas. You see a lot of big, decked-out pickup trucks here (vanity). I drive a Prius because there aren't good public transit options (necessity) and I like to visit family in Dallas (I'm in Austin). I end up driving _a lot_.

I understand that some governments have penalized car ownership by way of license plate restrictions and other tax situations (I've heard that license plates in China get auctioned for $12k USD because they're so rare). This turns owning a car into a vanity symbol for the wealthy. It may not even be an intentional symbol, but I'm sure that's the way it's perceived by those who don't own a car.

My point being that for some, car ownership isn't so bad. No need to go shaming people.

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Restricting license plates is stupid. Instead they should put extra taxes on cars with higher fuel consumption* and probably on bigger cars * * .

* Higher fuel consumption = some categories could be exempt, for example vans used by ONGs, firms and independent contractors.

* * Bigger cars = smaller cars are easier to park, take less space in traffic and make it overall more fluid, etc. I think exemptions could be made here for the categories I mentioned previously and for families with children, for example.

Wouldn't just tax on petrol solve that? In Europe petrol at the pump is twice the price of the refined barrel. If you look carefully, this has a complete impact on the way EU cities are architectured (way above history).

Plus, taxing per gallon is exactly proportional to the burden on society.

I think there should be an upfront tax. Taxes dilluted over time seem to be less visible, we're really bad at estimates, as every developer knows :)

An extra 50 cents per gallon is quite a bit, but it doesn't seem to discourage this behavior. 40% on the price of the car instead... could make a lot more people think twice about the purchase.

Petrol price at the pump does factor into it. For longer distances, I look at public transport and weigh travel time and ticket prices against fuel costs.

For shorter distances, great bicycling infrastructure helps a lot. Buses are nice but cycling is often as fast, with the benefit of being completely door to door and leaving exactly when you want to. But this benefit only works if people feel completely safe on the road, which means mostly seperate cycle paths, and removing cars from the busy city centers. Not having cars there makes shopping more attractive, because it's now easier to walk from store to the store across the road.

That same infrastructure then also helps make trains more attractive, because you can set up cheap bike hire at stations. This then means your journey can be bike-train-bike door to door, rather than walk-bus-train-bus-walk (or worse).

It's a complicated connected mesh of things.

Where I live, people drive gigantic gas hog trucks and SUV's. I like this idea. People with those types of vehicles might start to gravitate towards those who actually require their use, vs just thinking 'bigger and louder and faster is cooler.'

I think the idea is to penalize car ownership in places where you "shouldn't" need one.

If you're courageous, you could live in downtown Dallas without a car (can move around a bit with DART). Making it harder to own a car (combined with more "dense-city" developments) doesn't seem like the worst idea. Mainly because we could recover the huuuge parking lots.

And when you want to go to Austin for the weekend you can rent a car.

In any case, even if the entire state is still very much "car necessary", you can still try to incentivise pockets of the state to be less so.

In this spirit, some European cities have car-free zones, and narrow their inner streets.

If your goal is to have an significant impact on climate change, you'd more bang for your buck and just as likely a chance of banning red meat, especially with electric car ownership on the rise.

I've commuted by bike and public transportation for a number of years and I'd never want to ban vehicle ownership. A more workable solution would be to make driving tests less of a joke or to make dense areas of city centers car free zones. American cities are just too large and often times people drive without a destination in mind, like my Sunday drives down the California Public Highway along the beach.

I wonder which has a bigger impact on human consumption levels: a person that decides to save his time by driving a car instead of waiting for a bus, or Africa's population increasing from 250 million in 1960 to about 5 billion by 2100.

Let's focus on the selfish car guy, that's the big picture all right in “saving” the world.

Pour que no los dos?

The "selfish car guy" is why the American lifestyle consumes twice as much as the Japanese lifestyle. Everything gets built around it.

And of course there's the fact that the American lifestyle gets exported to other places as well.

Don't fool yourself driving a Prius is as much a vanity symbol as a decked out pickup you are just seeking status with a different crowd.

An affordable car with good gas mileage is a status symbol? A Prius was an environmental status symbol 10 years ago, but now it's just a practical choice for people who want a reliable and (relatively) cheap car.

The starting MSRP of a base model Prius is 27% more costly than the Corolla a similarly sized car w/ a standard gas engine.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I drive a fairly economical Jetta. Is that also a status symbol or did I just need a cheap, reliable car to get from point A to point B?

Is it wrong to reward good behavior with higher social status? I think not.

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