Madrid announces new rules of the road in bid to banish traffic from center
elpais.com
elpais.com
No one wants to be anywhere near a 100km/hr road. It can sometimes be ok to walk next to a 50km/hr road but it's not nice and it's best to avoid it. 30 km/hr you can stroll or sit on a terrace and it's fine. But when it's 20km/hr or just closed everything changes.
When there's no chance your kid is going to get killed by a car, he can just go out and play. Your dog can sit off leash under your table while you eat. You can be absorbed in a conversation and not worry a misstep will result in serious injury or death.
We somehow just accept that the possibility of death or jury is just outside our door. Like live electric wires running down streets. When you take them away, everyone just relaxes a lot more.
http://mynorthwest.com/985398/seattles-next-homeless-encampm...?
I guess that this is circumstantial. That is USA's political system that is not working.
Because the headline is about a local government taking responsible actions to improve peoples lives while empowering public transportation as an efficient way of transport.
How different is "Metropolitan Transportation Authority" to "Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid" [0]?
There is a pretty big need for a stronger, faster transit system spanning the region from Olympia to Everett. Housing price madness could be mitigated by fixing the ridiculous commute times over reasonably short distances that occur during rush hour.
Light rail is being built in King County, and the bus system in King County is actually pretty good in my opinion, but those don't cover a wide enough area to truly be effective. Given the geography of the region, I think the greater Seattle region needs a mass transit system most similar to NYC (though smaller)
So I'm really glad to seem them take this even further.
It would also be great to upgrade all Taxi's and buses to fully electric as well.
New double deckers are hybrid, and all new single deckers are fully electric. Again, big backlog (8000) but give it 20 years. (I wish it could be done faster though)
The buses should be solved much earlier, the average age is about 4-5 years. (Older buses seem to end up in Northern England...)
https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/bus-fl...
So far, these rules aren't enforced against cars in England, only buses and heavy vehicles in London must comply. It's similar in some large cities in Germany and Sweden.
Example: http://urbanaccessregulations.eu/quick-guide-key-schemes?cit...
Anecdotally, however, I think there is a huge number of delivery/construction vehicles along with Black Cab/Uber taxis etc that seem to make up the majority of the car traffic in Zone 1 (Central area).
However, I work in downtown San Francisco and live in Oakland, and I would NEVER drive my car over the bridge into the city, because of congestion. Banning cars outright seems to be a heavy-handed move and overly restrictive of individual choice, and you should just "price in the externalities" as the economists say. High tolls or expensive city driving permits for non-residents seems a better move to ease the transition as well as fund public transit options. They have to build up really, really good public transit infrastructure if they're going to make it more attractive than driving.
To me the plethora of rules reads overwrought and complex, and "occasional visitors" seems ridiculous.
Two of my grandparents drove everywhere for decades, retired, still drove everywhere, then had huge trouble with their joints etc. When my grandmother lost her license (worsening eyesight), she was very isolated.
My other grandparents had nice cars, but also made good use of their pensioner's discount/free transport pass. My grandma would take the train across a large English city to visit her sister or friends. She's in her late 80s, and still very mobile, although no longer independent.
I prefer a ban, as it's fairer to everyone. There are externalities that are very difficult to price (pollution, accident risk), and just being rich doesn't give people extra rights to poison the air and kill/injure people. It also ensures rich people use public transport, so they have some incentive to make sure the service is good.
I feel that if people are used to moving around their lives, they can continue to do so even in old age, like taking stairs every day on a 4th story walk-up with bags of groceries and goods.
Anecdotally, I feel the rise of the automobile coincided with the fall of general health and mobility of senior citizens.
You need a system which has at least a rational level of support for people who are elderly, infirm, or otherwise physically disabled.
We already exempt them from various driving rules, such as parking restrictions. We already have special transport services just for them. No one is suggesting removing these.
That's a fair argument. I think a car-less future for urban centers is a good goal, but you need a huge transit infrastructure that I don't think most (any?) cities have right now to support it. Permitting is a transitional tool to enable a gradual phase out while letting the polluters/accident-causers etc. pay for the costs they're putting on the rest of us.
But turn around and do anything to take into account that SOVs are the most space-inefficient form of transit, and you are immediately labelled anti-car. Congestion charges or adding tolls? Anti-car. Parking restrictions? Anti-car (especially because people complain there's not enough parking spaces as is). Charge residents for parking permits? Anti-car. Add bus or HOV lanes? Anti-car. Spend a dime on improving public transit? Anti-car (why are you wasting money on public transit no one uses instead of the congested highways).
Yes, banning cars outright is one of the most extreme options. But the sheer sense of entitlement among drivers means that all the other options that have been suggested have been resisted with as much force. The only acceptable compromise is to cater specifically to their whims, and maybe in tandem help public transit at the same time. Of course, if there's any budget overrun on such a joint project, all of the transit improvements are the first things to get axed.
Even still, the extent to which our society has become subservient to automobiles simply blows my mind.
Nah, I'm not anti-car. I'm anti-car entitlement and think the expectation that others should bear the external costs of an automobile friendly society is silly.
Edit: I did, in fact, say "anti-car".
A tiny proportion of any US metro area's real estate supports this lifestyle. Usually either the most expensive, or the most hurt by gentrification and displacement. It's not a generalizable strategy without huge changes in zoning, public housing finance, and public transit infrastructure. I think we should make those changes, I vote for every pro-housing candidate and every transportation funding measure, but they are prerequisites. You can't turn off the old system before the new one is ready.
Somebody posting under your username did:
Lot of anti-car folks on here.
HOV - high occupancy vehicle
"Banning cars outright seems to be a heavy-handed move and overly restrictive of individual choice"
Allowing cars is overly restrictive of my individual choice to cycle safely, breath clean air and have my children grow up in a world without climate change.
There are obviously alternatives that do not involve banning cars outright - like barriers between cars and bikes, and electric vehicles.
Here are a few options that would restrict individual choice to reduce air pollution.
- banning air travel more than 3 times per year (turns out propelling giant hunks of metal through the sky releases a lot of CO2)
- insisting all new cars be electric
- banning cars in cities
- limiting the purchase of meat to a low amount per person per week
- a limit on consumptive spending (buying newly manufactured goods) annually
That's technically true but frames the conversation in a biased way.
Anyone that arrives at the argument without already drawn that conclusion is woefully misinformed.
If you'll accept that conclusion as granted, then we can begin to have an intelligent discussion about how the issue should be addressed. In the absence of that, getting greeted with hyperbole seems most likely.
Those are three of the major issues with cars and if you're happy with them, I mean ... yeah, lucky you.
Per your other posts, you don't support it because it "restricts individual choice", yet you support increasing prices as if that doesn't.
By increasing prices you do restrict individual choice, except that you do it in a discriminatory way. For example, in many countries instead of banning smoking, its price has been marked up and increased 10-50x. This does restrict individual choice for people who can no longer afford it.
I think in certain cases (such as smoking), it's fine because we want to discourage it, but banning it outright isn't worth it, and it's something that people can and should be able to live without.
Incidentally, I agree with your original assessment that banning cars outright is too much in the short term, and would have other negative consequences that most likely outweigh the positive. But increasing prices has overall similar effects for people who don't have alternatives available.
I think your "restriction of individual choice" rule is highly misguided. For one thing, because your freedom ends where others' begin, and it's becoming pretty clear that car usage today is in fact encroaching on other people's freedoms. But also because in the cases where individual freedom is a requirement, price should not be a factor. This is similar to why (in the US and some other countries) "if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you", for example.
Being discriminatorily restrictive is fine, in my opinion. If you can't afford to pay the costs for your action, you shouldn't do it. The smoking example is a tough one, because if it gives someone else cancer due to second-hand smoke I don't think you can put a price on that.
But let's say in the car case we are okay with a certain level of pollution (we must be), and we have a floating congestion and pollution tax that was assessed hourly (like surge pricing), based on both how many cars were on the road, and the global air quality level (just an impractical example). When roads are particularly busy, and a lot of CO2 has been released, let's say the cost of driving into the city that day spikes to $1000. In that case, if a rich guy wants to pay $1000 to drive into the city, that's just fine. That $1000 goes to building public transit infrastructure and environment cleanup or whatever else. Poor people will be restricted, but they're already restricted. They can't fly private jets, or helicopters, or drive Ferrari's that have 12 cylinder engines and 500 horsepower. Restricting the options down the level that everyone can afford is impractical in a market economy.
> for people who don't have alternatives available
Well, I've also said repeatedly that in order to restrict car usage you first have to build a robust (affordable) public transit infrastructure. My main opposition to an outright ban is most cities don't have sufficient transit to support it. A good way to fund such a project, in my opinion, is with the aforementioned taxes from rich people who want to drive private cars. However, I also think if the costs are appropriately priced, that everyone benefits from the individual who wants to drive a private car, as society gets the income to offset those costs, and he or she gets to drive a car. I may be in the minority here, but I don't see a future where there are no private cars as practical, or desirable.
> because your freedom ends where others' begin, and it's becoming pretty clear that car usage today is in fact encroaching on other people's freedoms
I don't know if that's that clear. Maybe we have a different understanding of freedom.
I'm not sure what the practical difference is between second-hand smoke and city pollution, in terms of how much it restricts rights and freedoms, to be honest.
Nicotine is literally an addiction for a lot of people. They are dependant on it. So taking it away entirely, without an appropriate alternative, is similarly bad as taking cars away entirely.
I think car-free zones are fine though, for the record. As I mentioned it just seems like you'd need a transitional period where you build up good alternatives. As an example, I ride BART daily, but I meet a lot of people who don't because they think it's dirty, smelly, and dangerous (in their perception). That has to be fixed before you ban cars entering San Francisco.
I bet this will be something interesting to read about on future history books...
I don't think most Americans - who grew up driving since age 16 - realize just how weird that is for most foreigners. I was surprised the first time I tried to walk into a strip mall and I had to walk 200 meters to find a pedestrian path. It was also weird walking around places like San Jose and Sacramento where you don't see people walking on the streets.
I don't see how it's odd. It's the biggest problem with solving climate change - how much do you restrict everyone, and how do you properly balance the conflicting individual choices with people's ability to live their lives? Collective choices aren't really a thing. We approximate it with democracy, but obviously not everyone gets what they want (see Trump being in office).
Also, almost 90% of Americans own cars, so I'm not sure who "everyone else" is, but what restrictions do you mean?
But "everyone else" doesn't necessarily exclude car owners. Car owners are also residents who need to breathe, sleep, play and walk. Owning a car isn't the same as using it all the time. And using a car occasionally doesn't mean you have to own it.
The restrictions are pretty obvious if you open your eyes, ears and nose. Large parts of our cities have become effectively and legally unusable for anything other than driving.
And that's not just because of polution levels that kill tens of thousands in the UK alone, it's also because of government enforced bans on using that space between buildings called roads for anything else.
If my choice were to do so much as walk on a road or use a bicycle on a motorway, I would be penalised and forcibly removed. Large swaths of the city are dedicated exclusively to road traffic in spite of a desperate lack of land for home building.
These government enforced rules and restrictions are what I call collective choice.
Really though, public transit is vastly better from a heath, independence, financial, and safety standpoint for the elderly than driving.
Given that won't work that well in a large city, but even then it's still better to be under people than sitting alone in your car.
A. Continue driving past the point they they are safely able to.
B. Become shut-ins due to lack of transportation, accelerating physical and mental decline.
People live in high density areas. The residents should have higher priority than folks from the suburbs who choose to drive rather than taking public transit. That means having usable and human-focused urban design.
I generally am very much for pricing in externalities, as you say. But when it comes to cars in very dense areas, there is a significant discontinuity in social cost between zero cars (pedestrians can freely use the streets, no traffic lights, etc) and a few cars (like in congestion pricing schemes). With even a few cars, walking becomes far more inconvenient, and there is much less public space.
In dense urban cores, a huge proportion of the land area is essentially vacant, only used by a small minority that choose to drive. It is really a bizarre way of doing things.
In my experience that's not quite the case. I lived in Barcelona's old town for about a year, and while it was technically legal to drive on many of the narrow, medieval-era streets, in practice it was enough of a pain that drivers rarely did.
Because of the high volume of pedestrians, the few cars that did come through were forced to travel very slowly and the burden was on them to avoid hitting anyone, not the other way around. So I don't think you have to go all the way down to 0 cars to get most of the safety benefits – there's a tipping point somewhere earlier.
Turning some areas into woonerfs might be a solution. It's also worth pointing out that many pedestrianized areas still allow delivery vehicles.
This is straight-up regressive: the dense areas are most premium, with transit-connected suburbs a close second, and car-oriented suburbs the only places affordable to the masses.
Banning cars from a city is a straight-up transfer of quality of life from the suburban masses to the richest in the center.
Drastically increasing high-rise housing supply in the center is a much more meaningful step.
What are you going to do with all those extra cars?
Traffic is irrelevant for trains
Not for trolleys!
Trolleys are just buses with fewer degrees of freedom.
In short: public transit alternatives to the Bay Bridge are already too popular. Shifting SF<->Oakland car trips to public transport is physically impossible in the short and medium terms. BART does not have space to accomodate the 270,000 daily Bay Bridge drivers, and there's a 0% chance of making that space in the next decade.
Sounds reasonable.
I'm not in favor of the current system, but your idea is wrong. It creates a centralized monopolized transportation system that serves well only a very small minority of people and might easily became a nightmare. There are other ways we could follow that would make much more people happy, support the economy and wouldn't make sick people stuck at home and everyone late.
One such system could be a real time optimized network of self driving and self owning (limited AI) electric vehicles with various sizes and operation modes (on demand like taxi/bus-like/...) - and non-self driving vehicles wouldn't be allowed inside.
And your comfort comes at the cost of massive amounts of space, clean air and thousands of deaths each year.
Sure, perhaps we need more gradual change, particularly in the states. But in Europe, especially the UK, we should be rolling out pedestrianisation to our busiest city centre streets and aggressively aiming for minimal traffic in the heart of city centres.
Sure they do. Not always though. Getting a bus to a hospital is impossible from my current place. And it's not just about driving yourself, you need to drive things (e.g. food) as well. Yes, I drove my car the 600 meters it is to the store - I simply wasn't able to walk it, and the idea of carrying things on the way back was truly sickening. It's 800 to the bus stop, I simply wouldn't make it. Food poisoning is a bitch (thankfully that was only one of the three occasions, the other ones were much lighter).
> And your comfort comes at the cost of massive amounts of space, clean air and thousands of deaths each year.
If you read my comment properly, you'd know that I'm against that as well as you are. I'm not in favor of the current system. I'm just more in favor of individual transportation, but that doesn't imply the current system.
Since the system could be connected to street cameras, has faster reaction times, doesn't drive through red lights and so on, no, it definitely would not be as lethal. The number of vehicles required would be much smaller, so the assumption is absolutely baseless - the common solution to safer cycling is less cars, and that's exactly what would happen. Additionally, most parking spaces wouldn't be needed as the cars could park at a centralized garages (desirable because charging) and the new space could be used to create bike-only roads. Buses everywhere would be more lethal since a bus is a large and heavy vehicle and there'd be too many of them. I'm sure you don't feel good riding a bycicle up to a hill next to a bus - for a reason; at least I don't.
There should be a national registry of everyone who wants to ban cars, that every driver can check before anyone wants a ride, or anything delivered to their front door
In the US at least, we already massively subsidize road infrastructure and gasoline, I think it's fair to let people who actually live in cities enjoy them, rather than bend over backwards to accommodate suburbanites who only come in for work.
Also, cars aren't a magic ticket to mobility. Elderly people often can't drive and end up stuck in their homes. They have to be purchased or leased, and maintained, etc.
This is not true for almost every major EU city I've been in. Yeah, many routes yes, the common ones - of course. Once you need something more specific, it can take hours to get to the other side of the city.
> what about the comfort of bikers and pedestrians that cars disrupt
This is bad planning, not a side effect of having 4 wheel road vehicles. It'd be exactly the same with only public transit if you wouldn't change how you design roads.
> Also, cars aren't a magic ticket to mobility. Elderly people often can't drive and end up stuck in their homes. They have to be purchased or leased, and maintained, etc.
Not saying they are a magical solution to everything, I'm saying they help a lot - because they do. I was ill three times this year and having a car was literally a life saver, I wouldn't even be able to buy groceries without it. My grandmother wouldn't be able to get to her cottage without a car because public transport simply doesn't go there. My parents wouldn't be able to raise 2 kids with wildly different interests at the same time because they wouldn't get them to school and then themselves to work on time without cars - actually they wouldn't be able to work at all because of how much time they'd spent in a bus (we calculated it one time).
BTW with comfort I meant this: During summer I drive car exclusively (taxi or mine) because I physically can't go inside a bus - it's so hot, humid and smelling that I start throwing up and losing consciousness almost before I go inside. Yes, I'm a particularly sensitive person but I'm not the only one.
> They have to be purchased or leased, and maintained, etc.
That would be solved with the system I proposed above. When I'm saying cars, I mean four wheel vehicles for ~4 persons, not that I'd like to maintain the entire current system as it is. I'd like to see more much optimization and
Prioritizing car traffic is a trade off. For your individual situation, they offer you convenience and comfort. But that's at the expense of other people, especially people who actually live in the urban core and aren't just visiting or there for work.
Your system of only allowing AI-driven electric cars is a nice compromise, but it's just speculation - we're a very long way from anything like that being realized. This is about policy changes today that create a dramatically higher quality of life for millions of urban dwellers.
Why do you say that? Have you ever lived in a city with good public transportation?
You should consider visiting Tokyo, the largest metro area in the world, with 38M residents. Almost no one drives there, public transportation is what pretty much everyone uses and it works. It's a clean and quite city where everyone can easily get around. Walking and biking there are really nice too.
Honestly, I think this is kinda what drivers get for fighting tooth and nail against bikelanes and public transit for decades.
I have lived downtown for 2 years myself and oppose this ridiculous "environment"-protection move.
Its very anti-social to ban traffic from urban areas. Technology and evolution should create opportunities and positive changes for people, not take away their rights!
Get rid of all of them, enable adequate public transport, add a whole load of trees, calming and removal of signage and markings. Then give priority to the pedestrian, bike, and perhaps limited motorbike before car.
Cities could be a nice place to live once again rather than somewhere to avoid.
That said, I feel no cars at all is the ideal we should aim for, and build our roads for - with the necessary investment in public transport.
- ambulances and fire engines
- trucks that deliver goods to inner-city shops
- moving vans
- vans of craftsmen
- etc.
Also, there should still be some form of carsharing for when families go grocery-shopping, or when I buy a sofa and need to haul it home.
Sticking with cities, all of your points can be achieved designing roads for no cars and pedestrians everywhere. We already do it to a limited degree in the pedestrianised urban centres - which still permit emergency services. Deliveries to shops and tradesmen are often restricted to specific time ranges only. Barriers at the periphery enforce time or permit access. More space for pavement cafes, planting, but keep a single lane for the few trucks, emergency, even taxis in some places.
You can also see it with "shared space" becoming more common in residential areas. I think it was a Dutch idea, sometimes called "naked streets" depending where in the world you are. That's removal of all lights and markings from junctions and streets, sometimes combined with calming features to ruin line of sight, maybe by planting trees, or insert slaloms. That results in kids able to play out, or pedestrians walking in the middle of the street, and crossing wherever they like. The driver becomes no more important than the foot traffic, and they have to pay far more attention, especially at junctions. Still lets all traffic in, just vehicles no longer get to come first in a set lane that pedestrians feel excluded from.
Comes down to where we place priority. Seems pretty clear the 60s post-war ideal of Brutalism, walkways in the sky and expressways of cars, but no buses and trams, while gaining longer commuting distances everywhere was absurdly anti-human.
That's quite a generalisation. People in major cities like London and Paris would obviously like to clean up the pollution and reduce the noise and disruption, but the simple fact is that the existing public transport systems are not even close to having enough capacity to replace private motor transport entirely, and there zero chance of them having it any time soon. And those are the ideal cases, where there is enough demand to make a reasonably efficient and close-to-24/7 public transport network viable. Those in smaller cities have much worse options in terms of efficiency, availability and reliability, as do those travelling between or outside the bigger cities.
You can't just ban cars to fix this, or price them off the roads with congestion charging or the equivalent. It would take a huge programme of investment in developing new mass transit alternatives and redesigning large parts of the overall transport infrastructure within cities to make forcible elimination of cars in favour of public transport a viable option, and any such plan would probably have to be implemented over a 50-100 year timescale, with those footing much of the bill never living to see the benefits. That's a tough sell for any political administration.
I personally think that making private transport less intrusive and damaging has far more potential to improve the situation in the short to medium term. Infrastructure for electric vehicles is one obvious move in the right direction, but more generally, our road systems are still designed around the idea that one person making a journey with limited cargo needs a car-sized vehicle, which is horribly wasteful in road space, parking space, fuel consumption, etc. We have some very basic infrastructure in cities these days for bikes and we make some allowances for motorbikes, but these modes of transport have serious downsides for a lot of people. Crucially, the changes needed to improve those downsides would also allow, for example, smaller electric vehicles that are still fully enclosed and having space for carrying small loads in addition to their human occupant. Combine that with increasing automation over the next couple of decades for better safety and general efficiency, and most of us might at least still be alive to see the benefits.
It turns out that buses need effective interchanges to provide anything resembling useful connections. Those require a lot of space for the venue itself that typically is not available. They also require extremely high connectivity into and out of that venue, which is typically not how existing roads are configured.
It also turns out that buses block up normal-width two-lane roads every time they stop. The amount of interference between just the buses themselves grows far faster than the number of buses on the road, because it is very difficult for them to pass each other when one is at a stop. They similarly cause obstructions to other road users in large motorised vehicles, including delivery vehicles and emergency services. And they force smaller, less visible and more vulnerable road users like cyclists, motorcyclists and crossing pedestrians into relatively dangerous situations when passing or crossing near them.
Buses are efficient in terms of fuel/environmental considerations only in situations where there is a critical mass of passengers wanting to travel on the same route at the same time, which you do have in big cities like London and Paris, but don't in smaller ones. That leads to either having little or no service where there is less demand or running large vehicles that are actually less efficient than smaller private transport on a lot of routes outside of peak times.
Bus journeys are inevitably very slow compared to private transport, because of the circuitous routes, frequent stops, large and slow vehicles, and often some extra time walking to and from the stop at each end of the journey. A typical journey by bus can easily take 2-4x as long as it would by car and may be little faster than walking and much slower than cycling at congested times.
Buses lack flexibility, particularly for passengers carrying large amounts of baggage, unwieldy items like pushchairs, or themselves disabled and travelling with equipment like wheelchairs. Often there is not enough space on the bus if more than one or two people with extra things with them want to travel at once, and stories of people having to wait two or even three buses before they could get on are not unusual.
Buses are horribly unhygienic compared to any form of private transportation, particularly in colder months when often there is little ventilation and lots of passengers generously sharing all of their bugs with everyone else aboard.
Buses are less comfortable than almost any form of private transportation.
Basically, buses suck. They may be somewhat more space and fuel efficient under ideal conditions, which often do not exist, and what advantages they do have in those respects are often mitigated or cancelled out by their numerous downsides. Almost any imaginable transport system, public or private, from simple walking and cycling to high-tech underground metro systems, is better than buses. Buses are awful.
Paris is currently building more than 200km of subway (between now and 2030), a new suburban train line (RER E), 4 new tramway lines...
The reasons why existing public transport systems don't have enough capacity to serve everyone is that (1) under the dominant hypercapitalistic ideology, public transport is often seen as something that has to be economically profitable, or at least break even, and not as a right (as you can always take your car); and (2) it is hard for it to be economically profitable, or at least break even, when it has to compete with the convenience of the car (which is effectively subsidized), apart from competing for space.
If cars were banned, public transport would improve by leaps and bounds by simple market force. There would be much more demand and it would be much easier to make it profitable (and there would be a case to run it with taxpayer money even where it weren't profitable. With the savings on buying cars and gas, we could very well pay that).
In the 1920s, my city had about 80K people and there was a tram line to a town about 15 km away, which had 7K people. It was operated by a private company, and was profitable. It was removed when cars became popular. Now, my city has around 250K people, the other town has 15K people, more proportion of people work and thus need to commute, my country and area are much richer and prosperous than back then, but no one would even dream of building a tram line like that. It would be considered pharaonic, unprofitable, etc. Why something that was possible almost 100 years ago, with less resources and worse technology, cannot be done now? Because there are cars.
I do agree with you that it would require a radical change in the funding model for public transport to successfully replace cars with a much larger-scale version of existing public transport infrastructure, but as I noted before, that would probably be prohibitively difficult politically in most places today. I think there are much more realistic alternatives, as discussed in some of my other comments here, that we could work towards over perhaps a 10-20 year time frame instead of more like 50-100.
I live in the US, in a state famous for requiring a car. I genuinely miss when I could take the train to work, and my family visits me less now that they have to drive into the city rather than park at a train terminal and ride transit in.
Land, utilities and the environment aren't like human-made resources. They're finite. So there's some inevitable decision-making there. This may limit your absolute freedom, but no one promised you that anyways.
It seems to me like having a majority of residents and workers supporting an initiative for local civic planning has a lot more legitimate authority than, say, a national vote on the same subject. At some point, you have to accept being an outlier.
And in addition I would propose that approximately forty thousand people a year would be killed directly in vehicle collisions and that your children would be put in danger by you and your neighbors.
It is possible that you are talking about one of the very rare (and ever decreasing) rural areas which simply does not have enough population density to make public transport viable. But, we will worry about that after the dense suburbs, exurbs and downtowns have a modern transport system.
Spot on - and societies obsessed with cars effectively deny that right to people who cannot drive or cannot afford a car.