The new generations in Europe bother less and less to get a driver’s license. Most of my friends don’t have one. Public transport is that good.
Somehow that seems to totally escape everyone here.
It is also common wisdom that gasoline demand growth (and more generally energy growth) is the most direct and reliable indicator of economic trouble, more so than any other (mostly because governments "change" (a cynic would say falsify) essentially all other indicators).
And lo an behold ! This matches the data in other sources:
https://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f...
https://www.google.com.au/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f...
(note that the last graph is without taking inflation into account, so the real "zero" level is somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5% at the moment and therfore hasn't seen a single year of real economic growth since 2000 or so, and has had a few years of double digit "real" declines)
So I think we can safely conclude that the real issue is that Italy has seen a very long an disastrous economic recession, and that they are in fact not buying a lot of electrical cars.
This is also very much not a positive evolution. This is going to have cost a LOT of Italians a LOT of quality of life.
But try living in Belgium, a bit more rural Germany or the Netherlands (perhaps with the exception of Amsterdam) and things are definitely less accessible if you want to get out of the city for a bit.
If you mainly use public transports, then you know what places are easily reached that way, when the last train, bus, etc. goes in the evening.
There is stuff that is hard to do with public transport (be in the middle of nowhere early in the morning) and there is stuff that is hard to do with a car (go out drinking in a city center).
But outside of it, many parts of London will have people drive all over the place. If you're in Havering or Barking and Dagenham or other areas on the perimeter of London, a car is basically seen as mandatory for anyone over 16 or so.
I suspect it's partly cultural too; a lot of the Hacker News/Reddit user/cosmopolitian 'liberal' mindset becomes a lot less common outside of tech hubs and densely populated urban areas.
I also disagree that anywhere in London requires a car. And doubly that anyone from the perimeter requires a car early on. I know many people who lived in these areas and did not learn to drive.
Smaller towns and rural areas in the UK do require having a car to live effectively in.
But in all seriousness, that does look pretty poorly connected, but it also looks like the only place. Some people I know from Slough, Kew, and Watford all don't know how to drive, and none seems to have suffered from it.
It's about £650 for a one-way helicopter trip from the airport to a City based helipad. I do it every day... XD
And then there are segregated bike routes all over the place, in addition to lots of on road accommodations.
Do you just not think anywhere there is "out of the city"?
You can always rent a car when you want one. Just checked some prices and in the off season here in Barcelona you can pick up a car for $1/day...
Feel free to add a source that is transparent about all non-fuel costs.
There's tons of false advertising, e.g. rent a car for 1 euro a day (service charge), but also pay a maintenance charge, an insurance charge, a monthly membership fee etc etc.
For example I have a 3 euro a day rental, but I also pay monthly.
Typically cars will cost about 30-35 euros or so per day, for the cheapest ones, with possibilities here and there to do 15-20 in certain seasons under limited conditions.
See here for numbers: https://dollarsandsense.sg/complete-guide-buying-car-singapo...
Their example car worth 50'000S$ (~36'000 USD) will end up costing 160'000S$ (116'000 USD) total.
Singapore is expensive because of the additional taxes that get added on to the base price. From what people (on HN in fact) have told me most Scandinavian countries levy significant extra taxes on car purchases.
So the $40k car might actually only be $15 to 20k in other countries such as Germany and Belgium?
The Netherlands: 36,500 Belgium: 35,000 Germany: 37,500 Sweden: 31,000
These may not be exactly comparable feature-wise, but those extra taxes don't seem to have a big impact.
The only decline in car ownership was in 2008, and that was because of the financial crisis, not because of great public transport (which has actually been getting worse in my city in the last few years). The story that people are giving up cars in masses is mostly a myth, even though it might look like that if you live in certain bubbles in the largest cities.
If enough families get additional cars that could also easily offset whatever young people are doing. It's more complex than "there are more cars, thus people giving up cars is not a trend"
True, but the embedded carbon cost of each additional vehicle is roughly equal to 10-12 years of driving that vehicle.
This is not really true, though you can adopt certain extreme assumptions that would support such a claim.
Using statistically average assumptions (12 tonnes of embedded carbon/"average" car, 180 g CO2/km, 14,000 km/year) results in DIRECT CO2 emissions from burning the fuel alone to be roughly equal to 5 years of use.
But to get a like for like comparison, you should add the embedded emissions in producing the fuel, car service and maintenance, accidents, infrastructure costs etc... under such considerations the embedded carbon cost of the vehicle will roughly equal to 2-3 years of use.
FWIW.
On the other hand, if there was a way for me to get to work with public means, I’d do it (28 miles/day commute) I’d still keep my car and still flirt with the idea of having an extra beater (I.e an extra car for the wife) lying around for weekends [1]
I wor the day that I loose my ICE car though. The ICE car, if terrible, is one of the most important tools for the maintenance d liberty (with no AI, of course). As an example, the pentagon papers would not have been published (and therefore hasten the end of the Vietnam war) if not for the mighty station wagon.
[1] when you have kids having either parent able to take the kid out to an event and maintain the other’s ability to go to stores quickly is a massive increase in flexibility.
Nobody suggested this. The point is that when public transit is effective, it becomes more attractive because of the cost savings relative to owning a car. In the absence of effective public transit, commuters will still tend to buy cars regardless of the expense because they don’t have a good alternative.
it's half an hour wasted vs an hour doing something productive.
greetings, eMBee.
How do your french friends in the rural countryside manage without cars?
And yeah, it's very common for someone who lives in the city themselves to have all of their friends also live in the city. Not many young adults out in the boonies, plus how would you ever meet and become friends with them in the first place if you couldn't get there?
Even the regional railway lines often get you faster where you need to go than a car would, especially during rush hours.
There's also the rarely mentioned factor of parking space becoming increasingly harder to find and more expensive in city centers. In my region, this is being solved by building affordable, or even free, parking decks near subway stations on the fringes of the city.
But even with that the parking situation still remains tense.
One (there are many pros and cons) slightly positive side effect is that efficency have to increase. It’s unavoidable as humans in general seems to have a will to survive.
What seems to slow it down is mainly an unbridled capitalism, which is why for example China in a weird and somewhat unexpected fashion leads the way.
EV’s are not only more energy efficient, they also have a positive impact when it comes to proximity pollution.
Do you think nobody lives in the countryside any more? Do you think the next generation will permanently live in cities? Who do you think will grow your food and look after your open spaces?
My point was the author of my parent comment probably has a very skewed view of the need for cars, if all their friends are young metropolitan professionals.
They have a blind spot to the needs of a lot of other people.
Less and less people. Pretty much all of my extended family moved out two decades ago, for example, and several no longer live in the countryside because their region is no longer countryside.
And AFAIR France at least a few years ago had a problem with farmer solitude stemming from this, and ultimately from farm automation.
In the context of the thread and with my own situation in mind I’m not surprised that the demand for oil to support public transport is decreasing.
I’m with you that the car is going nowhere!
I think we just missunderstood each other a little bit.
Robots, i hope.
Funny, I have the opposite dream for technology where it alleviates the need to pack in as tightly as possible into cities for no particular purpose other than a job. While some people do truly love the city for the density and variety of amenities (I did when I was young), many people are forced to go there because that's where the good jobs are. This is made obvious by the number of people willing to commute an hour in from suburbs.
Ideally the only people living in high density are people who want that, which could easily be enabled by technology (remote working).
We can't all move into the cities and leave the countryside as a wasteland. Many people want to live there, and we need people to live there to keep the spaces living and working.
I worry that many people in tech have never spent any time outdoors and have no appreciation of nature at all.
I guess I'll become an agricultural robot repairman like the guy in Interstellar when I grow older.