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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

Almost daily HN covers some aspect of why everybody driving around in their own personal automobile is stupid. Cars kills and main people. Cars release particulate matter that's bad for our lungs. Cars promote sedentarism, that bad for our physical health. Car rubber washed off roads releases microplastics into the ocean. Cars are noisy, they cause congestion, and make our cities stressful, hostile and dysfunctional. Cars promote inequality. Cars and their associated sprawl cost us insane amounts of money. Cars are destroying the planet.

There are reams of research to back this stuff up. There were massive reams of research to back it up 40 years ago. There are demonstrably better ways to do this. Why are we so fucking stupid?

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Because cars are often the fastest and most convenient, and sometimes only practical, way to get from A to B.

Even in places with excellent public transport, there will be trips where cars are necessary, either because that specific public transit connection is atrocious (e.g. 10 minutes by car turn into 40+ minutes public transit), or you need to transport more than you can carry.

I don't own a car, and I suffer from their effects, but I do recognize their usefulness.

Car infrastructure (parking lots, streets) and buffers to make being around car infrastructure less horrible (useless "green space" buffers which can be much wider than the road itself, medians, front lawns so you're set back from the road, et c.) are a big part of why it's so hard to get anywhere without a car.

I was skeptical but I've run the numbers and sure enough, once you also factor in the time I spend working to pay for my car & gas I'd save quite a bit of time commuting by bike if my city could be squished closer together by removing most of the car-only stuff (gotta still have a few arteries for goods and for when you need to travel further, but you could cut out like 90%, easy—parking lots are so big, out in the 'burbs). IOW widespread private car ownership actually makes my life worse than if they were outlawed, effectively, and I'm not in the city core.

[EDIT] and my family buys cheapish cars and we make way over the median household income for our city—the math's way worse for most people here than it is for me.

I'm not talking about the US suburbs, I'm talking about a highly walkable European city with excellent public transit. Once you get a bit further out, you will still find (combinations of) places where public transit connections just don't work well enough.

We're the dumbest animals that could possibly build a technical civilization, because if we'd been any smarter then we'd have built it earlier, when we were dumber.

It won't make you feel any better, but perhaps this was inevitable.

Because cars provide massive benefits that offset much of those downsides.

It’s kind of like asking, why do we take chemotherapy for cancer when it makes people so sick? Because it can sometimes cure cancer, that’s why!

True, but a lot of those marginal benefits (over say electric bikes) exist because our society ended up being designed around everyone having a car.

This manifests itself in several ways:

1. Low-density sprawl. Without the auto, density would be higher and it'd be possible to get to wherever you need to be on alternate forms of transit (biking and public transit are much more viable)

2. Prioritization: Already in an urban (or higher density suburban) environment, at commute times, biking is barely slower than driving (in part due to congestion and parking overhead) on city streets. It'd actually be faster than driving is today if it weren't for infrastructure explicitly prioritizing cars (long signals, freeways and expressways blocking the shortest path, etc.)

If you did a "do-over design", with high-capacity electric batteries and smartphones, you could probably achieve mostly car-less, higher density cities (barring delivery and emergency vehicles) around (e-)bikes and public transit, with cars more used for leisure/travel or folks lacking mobility. Population would also be a lot more physically fit.

I agree, cars are only more practical and efficient since we designed the infrastructure around them. We have immense highways, fairly available and relatively inexpensive parking, even in major cities. Without this infrastructure it would be extremely impractical to get around with a car, see for example some old European cities. For example, I remember being in Toledo, Spain and my rental car that I needed for the countryside was completely useless, I left it parked in an expensive lot the whole time and walked everywhere. Even the compact hatchback could barely fit down the narrow cobblestone streets and there was certainly no parking in the areas around the shops or restaurants. Compare that to Oakland, CA where I live now and there are massive freeways going right through the center of the city, in fact, I can use one for my 5mi commute to work when I drive, this is the only reason that its about 1-2min faster to drive than to bike.

Many people also claim its not safe to bike in the city but this is also a symptom of designing the system around cars. If we simply dedicated all the roads to biking and only a few sporadic car-lanes it would be much safer to bike.

>True, but a lot of those marginal benefits (over say electric bikes) exist because our society ended up being designed around everyone having a car.

I could say the most important benefit is fundamental: none of your propositions change the fact that a bike will not shelter its rider from the weather, which around here, by some standards, is at best lousy for approximately half of the year (cold, damp or both to various degree). When I look at homes, or offices, I see a pattern. Do you not?

I agree in areas with tough weather, cars make more sense.

But in moderate places, e.g. the entire West coast of the US, I find it a non-issue to bike nearly every day

Yes, because we love our cars. I mean literally, articles about autonomous driving always seem to have that one person who loves to drive and had a "you'll have to pry my dead hands off the steering wheel" mentality. And SNL wasn't making up a joke in the void when they made "The Mercury Mistress" sketch.

>Cars release particulate matter that's bad for our lungs.

...and our hearts!

https://now.tufts.edu/articles/big-road-blues-pollution-high...

couldn't agree more

Because all of those things are externalities to the car users.

To add insult to injury, they are no better than walking. After you factor in the time spent working to pay for the car you just break even.

(This factoid from "Energy and Civilization A History" by Vaclav Smil)

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