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Comment by makerofspoons | Hacker News Reader

If our species is to survive this century we have to get out of our cars. There is no way to sustainably build billions of electric cars- we need to consider that our existing ICE fleet needs to simply be retired and not replaced. Cars are one of the ultimate symbols of the consumption that needs to end if we are to address climate change. Between the asphalt and concrete needed to build infrastructure for them to the plastics, rubber, and metals used to manufacture them cars are rolling ecological disasters.

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I'd love to have a shared car pool situation with an automatic driver booked via an app that takes me door to door with say 5 minutes notice for a short trip (say upto 5 miles), and half hour notice for a longer trip (say upto 50 miles), and maybe 5 hours notice for a 500 mile trip. One that's clean, reliable, has appropiate child seats.

That's not happening in the next 20 years. My country is still going down the protectionism route when it comes to the taxi industry.

The child seats is the problem though -- as an adult in a city I can easily hail an uber or whatever to get me where I want to go. With kids in tow I'm limited to mass transit, as I can't rely on getting a cab with 2 car seats that will fit. This itself limits the amount of stuff I can take and places I can go.

Perhaps if I had no need for local trips (like yesterday when we went to a canal-side pub 4 miles away for dinner) I could live with simply renting a car for the larger trips -- but to rent a car it involves a walk to the station, an hourly train into the large town, then walk to the car rental place -- all between 8AM and 6PM, then do the reverse on monday morning to drop it off.

You can't rent an uber XL?

Not one with two car seats.

So why not buy the car seats then rent an uber XL?

Then you have to lug the car seats round with you wherever you are.

Say I want to go to London for a weekend. It's a bit too far for the kids to walk to the local station (especially if it's raining), so we drive to the mainline station, leave the car, and the car seats, in the carpark.

With a taxi I'd have to 1) Hope the seats fit in the taxi 2) Take them on the train (store them where?) 3) lug them on the tube (including a change at Green Park or Bank or somewhere) 4) Go straight to the hotel and check in

Any solution which requires people to give up convenience in the name of saving the environment is dead on arrival. This is human nature, we have never before managed to conserve our way out of a problem, we innovate our way out of it or we will die trying.

I wonder if we can get people out of cars unless cities themselves are completely redesigned. We committed ourselves to a harmful design pattern but unfortunately everyone is heavily invested in it. Need to have a city design that will work, and then draw up a series of implementation steps to move existing cities to the new design. Would require a ton of central planning/control though, doubtful we could pull it off unless things got drastically worse to motivate people.

Well said! I'm glad someone understands humanity.

Public transit generally uses all the same materials, just less of them.

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