Don't Be Anti Car. Be Pro Something Else. | Hacker News Reader

Don't Be Anti Car. Be Pro Something Else.

eclogiselle.com

133 pointsDoreenMichele319 comments

This is a terrible strategy, it never got anyone anywhere. It's the result of a sort of bleeding heart learned helplessness. It's the attitude of people who have lost the ability to be confrontational in pursuit of goals.

Take smoking as an example. How did we reduce smoking? (arguably one of the most successful public health campaigns in recent history). Did we stop being anti-smoking and instead promoted something else? No! We banned smokers from bars, we told people that smoking sucked, we plastered ugly pictures of black lungs on boxes and we taxed the crap out of smokers.

Ironically, the big change is often easier than the small one. Cars are the problem, point it out. Haggling about bike lanes is a colossal waste of time. We need to completely revamp how we commute and how we life, communicate that clearly, and point out whoever stands in the way.

The difference is that people actually need to get around, and not in the "addicted to nicotine" kind of way either.

Being anti smoking worked because there was no need for a replacement, but we can't feasibly just remove cars workout replacing them with something, some other mode of transportation. Until that other mode exists, and is workable in the specific area, being anti-car doesn't make sense..

> we can't feasibly just remove cars workout replacing them with something

This isn't really true though.

Firstly just as "banning smoking" hasn't really meant banning smoking—people still smoke—being anti-car doesn't mean eliminating car ownership.

In a pro-car world, if I'm a developer building a shopping centre one of my primary considerations is parking. Immediately I need maybe over triple the area of land to build, or significant increase in investment if I'm going underground. Both of these options limit me severely in where I can build: I'll go for an area with cheaper land value, and larger land areas available. Access is further down my list of concerns.

In an anti-car world, I build my shopping centre where people live. Many can walk there. There's a greater array of existing public transport already servicing it (and density means such services are likely to be improved w/out the need for lobbying). Some cycle there. Proximity means visits are more likely to be shorter & more frequent: this increases turnover of parking spaces for the much-smaller number of people who do still need to drive.

There are countless other similar examples of problems that solve themselves when car infrastructure is removed from the equation. Yes we need other solutions in some cases, but just removing cars is enough of a "solution" in itself in many cases.

What people don't realise about cars is that car infrastructure already causes so many problems we've just internalised and accepted as norms. An anti-car approach benefits from those problems being solved implicitly.

While you largely have a point, I think you're perhaps a little too optimistic about the big picture, especially when factoring in timelines.

Simply saying no to cars doesn't solve the problem of transporting goods of any kind, e.g. a family load of food shopping for the week, furniture or building materials when doing a house renovation.

And while covid has nudged employment towards a more decentralised model, some countries (the US comes to mind, especially in rural areas or AFAIK cities like LA) don't really have a public transport alternative, for instance.

I think you're perhaps being slightly too absolutist about what opposing cars would mean: we will always need cars. We just don't need them for 90%+ of current personal journeys.

Even if we were wildly successful in opposing cars & reversing much of the car-focused infrastructure we have in place, many would still use cars for large weekly shops, furniture & building material movement... But:

- building materials is hardly "personal" & unlikely to be a regular need for most households. Car rental or professional builders' work vehicles fill most of the needs here.

- same goes for a lot of furniture movements: shop delivery services or moving company vehicles

- less road infrastructure and more localised urban planning drastically reduce the time-cost of low-volume grocery shopping. Couple that with the moves we're already seeing toward online grocery delivery and you get a massive reduction in the need for large weekly car-journey shopping

We'll always need cars: opposing isn't eliminating completely, it's just eliminating unnecessary use.

We, humanity, will always need cars. But we, as individuals, one-per-person, shouldn't. Having a car should be looked at the same way that we look at someone who says they have a horse, a jet, a tank, a yacht, a rocketship. Bemusement at that person's life choices. How ridiculous and ostentatious a life they must lead. Offended by the level of waste from a single person. (Privately, envious of their wealth.)

Like, why don't I have my own personal jet? There's the tiny detail of the cost (O($50mm) new, O($3mm) used, plus fuel and on-going maintenance. Unless you learn to fly yourself, the pilot/crew is an additional, non-trivial, ongoing expense.), but that aside, we don't see it as something remotely normal, and it's a disgusting waste. The necessary cultural shift involves moving all cars, but especially large truck/SUVs, into that same category.

That's the shift that's going to take generations, and only with monumental, concerted effort to rebuild our entire infrastructure along side it before that's even remotely possible. We can't even manage to spend the money to maintain our current infrastructure properly, so it looks impossible from where I'm standing. (But that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying.)(Electric self-driving cars don't change the calculus here, either.)

> opposing isn't eliminating completely, it's just eliminating unnecessary use.

Some opposing is for eliminating it completely on a long enough timescale. We've gotten extremely bad at talking about longterm goals and longterm outcomes in politics. If I say "Ban cars. Reforest Parking Lots." as my political slogan the opposition comes out in droves acting like I said "if elected King-Mayor with magic powers to actually enact legislation on day one, I will sign into law a ban on all cars and no one can legally drive them and everyone will be stuck with no transit options, good day" whether that is what I believe and whether or not any of them realize that "Reforest Parking Lots" is an ecologically slow process and don't expect that to happen overnight.

This lack of an ability to sell long term vision, because so many are willfully and obtusely taking the shortest term views on the world, on bumper stickers and in political slogans is just crippling to so many of our political narratives right now. It's especially crippling in our ability to truly compromise on a lot of issues. Instead of starting from a long term vision of "We believe we should ban cars because that could lead to a better society at some point in the future" we have to do all of this leg work to start with a "pre-compromise" of our vision, the smaller/simpler "pragmatic" option we think will "sell" to the public such as "let's build shops closer to people's homes" (which is great, but doesn't address the root problem it addresses a symptom/co-factor), and in so doing opponents don't have to meet us in the true middle ("well, let's not ban cars just yet, but what if we…") and instead arrive at an even weaker compromise of the compromise ("well moving shops closer to people's homes is an admirable goal, but it's a free market so let's just lazily incentivize that with tax write-offs and see if they take the bait" doesn't get us any closer to "let's get people to drive less", it's still a good idea, but it's definitely not anywhere on the radar of "meet me halfway on banning cars here").

>family load of food shopping for the week

I think that shopping for the week is a result of car ownership, not the other way. I grew up in a family without a car and buying fresh stuff from the local shop everyday was normal. I think I developed the habit of weekly shopping when I turned 25 and started more demanding job. In case of furniture/moving - that's something that could be done be services. Etc.

If you don't have car centric living then the way you buy groceries changes, for example. You don't load up on weekly groceries. You buy smaller amounts every few days on your way back from work. For one thing, grocery stores, etc. now locate themselves near public transport, as opposed to a 20-30 minute drive away from the closest place anyone lives.

And when it comes to moving furniture, etc. you rent a car. Or even better, since you don't have to buy a single car to use over many years to justify its expense, when you want to move furniture you can rent a van. When you want to take your kids for a camping adventure requiring offroading you can rent an AWD. If you need to go a 100 miles all on proper roads you can rent an EV and save on gas.

Most major US cities did not start out as car centric locations (even the south and west), but we made them all so within the span of 100 years. Doesn't seem unreasonable it could be undone as quickly

This is not as easy as YOU imagine.

It's at the level of deciding: "Hey, silicon is just like carbon so let's replace carbon in everything: living things, etc. with silicon!"

There are myriad of details that can't be ignored but always get brushed aside in ideological fervor and the network of interconnected things that gets disrupted will "fight back" because it's already in the lowest energy state - it's already optimal and the new big thing is not and will not be.

> Being anti smoking worked

Really? About 30% of adults still smoke where I live, and all the teens and 20-somethings use vape pens. What's the definition of "worked" in this context?

> What's the definition of "worked" in this context?

Back in the 80s you couldn't go out to anywhere (bars, pubs, restaurants, music clubs, pool houses, etc) without coming back with every piece of clothing stinking to smoke. The percentage of people smoking in public was so high that there was no way to avoid this, other than stay home.

Today (and for the last ~20 years or so) I haven't smelled cigarette smoke in ages and haven't seen anyone anywhere smoking. Public smoking has completely disappeared (California here). I see cigarettes are still for sale in convenience stores so someone must be buying them, but I guess they all smoke at home only now. So the anti-smoking campaign has worked exceedingly well.

This was definitely still the case in at least Vienna and Berlin as late as the '00s and early '10s (lived in vienna 2005-2012 and in Berlin 2013-current).

It's better now but not to the point that I haven't smelled cigarette smoke or haven't seen people smoking!

I wish it was as successful in Europe. People here smoke so much and almost anywhere. it’s banned indoors though, but smoking in a playground or while holding your baby in the other arm is perfectly fine and socially acceptable.

In the US, 14% of adults smoke. In California it’s under 12%. Among households with an income above $100k it’s 7% [0].

If you belong to a certain demographic that is prevalent in this forum (upper middle class in California), the above is pretty much true. I can’t think of any person I regularly interact with who smokes.

Globally, it’s a matter of time.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adul...

I looked up the official rate where I live (18.1%), but I find it hard to believe, since virtually everyone I know smokes, at least casually. And the few who don't smoke, vape.

Why do you care? Everyone knows the risks by now. It's never going away. You should find better things to do with your time than trying to control other people's behavior.

Also, I'm originally from Cali and I make over $100k a year, but I'm hardly a unicorn since all my California friends bum cigarettes from me whenever I see them, even though they all "quit" years ago. California is just a miserable habitat where you can't enjoy a beer and a smoke at the same time unless you belong to a private club. And they all lie on the surveys.

Why do I care? I grew up in Portugal with asthma at a time when indoor smoking was allowed and prevalent.

The progress in the past few decades has been amazing for my quality of life and that of all other people (specially children with smoking parents) who were regularly subjected to 2nd hand smoke from a young age through no fault of their own.

EDIT: also it’s unclear to me how you got the message that I was “trying to control other people’s behavior” from my first comment

I'm fine with bars banning smoking based on the owner's preference, but I think there is value in having places where people can congregate to smoke and drink, and I don't believe some people who don't like it have the right to ban other people from doing it everywhere. This is also in response to the other post above who said it had negative social and economic impacts. We pay extremely high taxes on tobacco to more than cover those costs. I personally don't smoke around children. But nothing is enough for some crusaders who want to prevent me from enjoying tobacco. It's the same impulse as people who want to ban alcohol or marijuana. Adults should have the right to do as they please so long as it isn't hurting others, and no, smelling diffused secondhand smoke outdoors is not giving you cancer any more than the exhaust from the cars or the fallout from Fukushima.

I care because 1. I don’t want to get cancer or damage my health as a result of smokers‘ poor life choices, 2. smokers diseases costs everyone a ton of money (universal healthcare or not, the premiums have to at least cover the costs), 3. there are many children who get to breath their parents second hand smoke who will develop health problems later or even a nicotine addiction as a result of their parents‘ poor life choices.

It’s not just a matter of life and let live. One smoker on a terrasse or park ruins it for the 20 others who don’t smoke but get to breathe in the stench and the carcinogens.

Smoking directly affects non-smokers; either secondhand smoke wafting in the direction of non-smokers, or discarded cigarette butts littered about. I remember being a child riding into town with my aunt and uncle who smoked in the car with the windows up and not being able to articulate that I couldn't breathe. Smoking should not exist.

Some time ago I spoke with a Norwegian, who told me that smoking is socially perceived as negative, to the point that it may happen that somebody ends a date because they find that the other person smokes.

They've told it's been due to successfull campaigning against smoking. I'm very surprised, but if it this is accurate, it shows that a cultural shift is possible.

Let's say you're not smoking. Wouldn't you end a date with a smoking person? Because as I see it smoking is a big deal if you're looking for a partner for more than one night.

And I'm personally not exactly anti-smoking person since I can smoke hookah few times a year. But I still can't imagine being together with a person that smoke daily. I can only imagine how bad this can be for a person who actually hate the smell.

I am in my mid 30s now, and even 15 years ago in big US coastal cities I grew up and worked in, smoking was very rare amongst my peers in the white collar office workforce, and absolutely a reason to not date someone.

I can smell cigarette smoke on people’s clothes and the tar lingers and sticks to the walls, so I would not even want them in my house.

Vaping and marijuana do not have the lingering smell problem though, probably because there is no tar or whatever else causes the odors to stick.

> About 30% of adults still smoke where I live

Where is that? In some places it's dropped precipitously since measures have been taken. The UK, USA, New Zealand and Australia have adult smoking figures of 13-14%. Continental Europe seems to have much higher rates, with the exception of Sweden, and the rest of the world still seems to have it pretty bad.

> all the teens and 20-somethings use vape pens

Which isn't smoking... It's not ideal, but it's not anywhere near as bad.

Sweden's lower rate can be explained by snus. Too bad that the rest of Europe bans sales of this product, which unlike cigarette smoke does not cause harm to anyone else but the user.

It's down to 14% in the UK, falling from 45% in the seventies.

> Being anti smoking worked because there was no need for a replacement

Assuming it is true, is vaping a part of "smoking", among other replacements such as nicotine gums and whatnot?

I read a couple of books on addiction. All of them say that you do need to find a replacement, a healthier one.

>replacing them with something

(costing hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars and 2-20 years to build)

NYC has the highest transit use of any city in the US and they would still have to nearly double capacity to get rid of cars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...

There's a well known effect, called induced demand, where building more roads cause traffic to increase. Doing the reverse will decrease traffic, then transit won't have to scale up nearly as much as we might assume.

Easy, get rid of cars. Makes room for more busses.

Can’t work, it has to be the other way around or there is no transition path: first convert a subset of car infrastructure to make alternatives more approachable / desirable, then iterate on that to reduce the space given to cars further.

That is essentially what the netherlands have been doing for decades.

Well, the first step IMO is to eliminate single family zoning in favour of mixed use zoning and legalize middle housing, that should cut down the need for cars substantially in most North American cities. Then anyone who still needs a car can be inconvenienced by stricter regulations.

This is one of those things that would meet the criteria of the article. Don't fight traffic, create opportunities for people to open stores and restaurants inside housing development.

Sure i was kinda assuming that anyway, but it’s nowhere near sufficient as demonstrated by… pretty much everywhere outside of NA.

> there was no need for a replacement

Spoken like someone who's never smoked!

> The difference is that people actually need to get around

This is really context-dependent. Some cities/countries do have efficient enough public transport, and/or they're flat enough to make bikes usable.

In such contexts, using a bike is a realistic choice (like mine). This goes even for families with children (in some countries, parents who don't want to depend on cars use cargo bikes).

I know that in some countries/cultures, people will use the car even to avoid a 5 minutes walk (I know it for a fact; I'm familiar with that), with the result of massive traffic and pollution.

Mass traffic isn't really the result of a 5-minute drive to McDonald's. It's the result of people only being able to afford single-family houses 1-2 hours away from their workplaces, and either having no commuter trains to get them there, or having city jobs that require driving in a car. For instance, in LA a lot of Uber drivers commute in from an hour away. Contractors, roofers, plumbers, all commute in. People who live in the city may actually get to work by biking or walking, but they aren't the vast majority stuck in traffic on the highways in and out every day. The problem really is the sprawling nature of the economy which necessitates spending hours in a car, not that people are so lazy they can't walk for five minutes.

> It's the result of people only being able to afford single-family houses 1-2 hours away from their workplaces

Idk how this works in the USA but shurely if you can afford a single family house you could easily rent an apartment near to where you actually work?

In the US, workers in the service industry in large cities generally can't afford rent within walking or biking distance of where they work. In most cities public transit to and from the outlying areas is slow and bad simply because of the size. The greater LA metro area is about 3/4 the size of the Netherlands, and many people need to commute all the way across it every day.

Contractors who need space for tools and equipment and make $100-200k per year can't live in an apartment with their kids and can't afford houses in the city. A family of four making $100k/year could barely get a small 2 bedroom apartment in near-ish suburbs and they would still need multiple vehicles for work. Once you get 90 minutes from the city center, you can afford a 3-bedroom house and two cars. It's the only rational choice. But once you're out there, you need a car even to get to the nearest train station.

To quickly disabuse you of that notion: it absolutely does not work like that.

That's not a valid comparison. Mobility and transportation is a necessity for a functioning society. Your food doesn't make it onto the table without being transported there. Are you going to fetch the eggs out at the farm on foot? No, seriously, I am asking you a direct question: how are you going to transport food if you are not going to use any cars or trucks anywhere along the process?

Cigarettes are not a necessity for a functioning society.

Stick also doesn't work as well as carrot. You could tax fuel to discourage "unwanted behavior", but it doesn't have the consequences you want. It drives up prices, which affects the population unevenly.

I can afford at least one doubling in fuel price without it affecting me. Perhaps even two. Do you think the guy who has to drive 2 hours to work from the middle of nowhere to work in an Amazon fulfilment center can afford this?

Electric cars becoming a viable option for more people is a positive change. That's how we solve problems: by creating better alternatives. And if they do not emerge easily: help these industries along by providing them tax breaks and help.

I live in a country that has some of the highest gas prices in the world. High taxation of gas did _nothing_ to reduce the use of cars. It might have made the needle shiver a bit, but it didn't move it. I also happen to live in the country that has the most electric cars per capita. Electric has 70% market share among new cars sold. In 20 years, you will not even be able to buy a new gas powered car here.

That's change. That's the all-important break between hydrocarbons and land-based transport. That's the hard part.

This didn't happen due to gas tax or any other disincentives. It _ONLY_ happened by providing a better alternative. By cutting tax on electric cars so the market could reach the critical point where electric is viable. Now that we're there, we can slowly start to roll off the tax cuts as prices on electric vehicles drop.

It is tempting to piss on the things you don't like. But just being against things and not providing viable alternatives is not a plan. It is also not a plan to have vague dreams of things you cannot execute on. (If you think this constitutes a plan, ask the Chinese about "the great leap forward" or the Russians why the Soviet industry didn't become the envy of the world).

It doesn't create any lasting change. Lasting change comes from providing people with better alternatives and the enthusiastic participation of the masses.

Mobility and transport by car aren't necessary for a functioning society. Trains, buses, bicycles and walking can build a perfectly functional society. It'd be disruptive, certainly.

Smoking was taking a group of people and telling that they can't do something they want to do. Banning cars would be similar. People don't really seem to be honest about how arbitrary the anti-smoking campaign is. I'd much rather people smoked than drank.

In your imagination this is true. In real life it is not. Sure, in theory it is possible to imagine a world where powered personal transportation doesn't exist. It might even be possible in a limited sense (for instance in densely populated, well funded cities it should be eminently possible. But not everyone lives in a well funded, densely populated city).

If you want to have adult conversations with people who feel you are taking the subject seriously, you must acknowledge reality and the non-trivial delta between it and what you suggest.

And I am serious about the "adult" part. By pretending you "know" your utopian view is possible, you expect other people to take you seriously despite not having made any effort to show your math. That's pretty disrespectful to other people. It also shows you learned nothing from past history where utopian political fantasies coupled with power ended up costing tens of millions of lives.

I've been hearing about the climate crisis since I was a kid in the 80s. I was also taught that an adult is someone who takes responsibility for their actions. So I've had my whole life to set my life up in a carbon conscious way. What have all the other uhh, 'adults' been doing this whole time?

Most people do live in large densely populated cities. That is the thing about large areas with high population density - it means there are a lot of people there.

> you must acknowledge ... the non-trivial delta between it and what you suggest.

Yeah, it would be radical change. People aren't give up their cars by choice. But people didn't give up smoking because of their personal health concerns.

If the argument is to get rid of cars then I'm with the thread ancestor - it is better to be direct about what you want. A cars-lite future is not only possible, it is reasonable and even likely. Electric cars are not cheap and it seems optimistic to say that the grid will support them any time soon. Maybe hydrogen will work out, but these alternatives are all fundamentally uncertain technologies.

Somewhere north of 4Bn people live in cities. The vast majority of which are nowhere near the utopia hinted at. Perhaps somewhere on the order of 100-200M people live in sufficiently dense and modern cities that are even capable of envisioning a path towards zero powered personal transportation.

In addition, roughly 4Bn people who do not live in cities. Densely populated and well funded or otherwise. So no, even if we are to consider only the first half of the population, your assertion does not hold in any meaningful sense.

If the goal is to get rid of powered personal transport then it begs the question "why?". Is this really a useful goal? What problem are we really trying to solve? For half the human population it makes very little sense, which means that adopting it as a sort of universal solution to all problems is a bit silly.

I can recommend reading Hans Rosling's "Factfulness" for some perspective. Because the book talks a lot about perspective and why most people in the richest part of the world tend to have a very hard time understanding what it means to be in the various wealth segments. In particular it bears thinking about what access to efficient transport means in terms of quality of life.

First you need to understand the numbers, then you need to focus on solutions. And then change can happen. The thread ancestor makes no effort to even look in this direction.

> ...it begs the question "why?"...

If roads were only for arterial traffic flows that would enable very high density areas without roads or parking, where people could walk to all the places they want to get to. It'd be cheaper for everyone, probably have better health outcomes and be a bit more communal. Plus safer for children because they can't be run over. Just look at how much space is wasted leaving it empty for light amounts of traffic.

And I'll also add that you are the only one who wants this to be utopian. It is transport policy. That is pretty mundane, mostly practical details and not all that exciting. The goal here would be maybe increase urban density by 20%-40%, and there are trade offs to the benefits. If you think that is a utopia then I admire how achievable your goals are.

> I can recommend reading Hans Rosling's "Factfulness"...

In which you will discover that most people can't even afford cars and nevertheless the globe keeps spinning.

>In real life it is not.

My grandparents never owned a car along with most of their generation.

I'd like to see you transport your mattress or ikea shelf via public transport.

Cars are a luxury that people have gotten used to, and to remove it is to remove quality of life.

You don't have to get rid of ALL cars. computer cars would be 99% enough. People somehow manage to get by without car in countries like Netherlands, and till have they furniture moved around when they move.

You are being dishonest here by implying people in the Netherlands do not have cars. Since you chose to make a claim without presenting any numbers I'll do it for you.

The Netherlands has about 499 motor vehicles per 1000 people. That's about 38% fewer cars per capita than the US, but it still in the top 30 countries in the world and it is about 12% lower than the european average.

Your statement is, at best, grossly misleading.

The comment is neither dishonest nor misleading. It is a fact that many people living in dense areas live a normal live without owning a car. GP was just responding to the problem of transporting large objects without owning a car and correctly stating that there is some amount of people getting by without car in the Netherlands. The solution is of course to just rent a transportation car for a few hours when you need it.

I live in a high density area (Berlin) myself with 1.4 Million cars on 3.6 Million cars. Obviously living in Berlin without a car is possible without much hassle for lots of people. Claiming that doesn't mean that nobody in Berlin needs a car. But because most of the 3.6 Million Berliners manage to move and transport furniture sometimes, we can conclude that they definitely do not need it to transport their Ikea purchase.

Ikea deliver.

Very few of the people on this forum are advocating for a complete removal of vehicles from society! Cars and trucks have a purpose and we should always use them when it’s the best choice for hauling goods. But we overuse cars because our infrastructure is designed for cars, causing a negative feedback loop.

Having to drive 2 hours to work from middle of nowhere does not sound like good base for functioning, SUSTAINABLE society. You want to live in the middle of nowhere, you have to factor in the costs of your choice.

Millions of people have decided that it sucks less than the alternatives so IDK what to tell you. Sustainable or not, until something better comes along society is just gonna keep doing it.

Off the top of your head, can you think of some reasons why people might end up living some distance from where they work?

They bought a house or apartment and can't sell it or rent it out fast enough when they had to take a new job?

Or perhaps they simply cannot afford to live where they work or earn a living wage where they live?

« Are you going to fetch the eggs out at the farm on foot? » (France) We used to, when I was a kid. But more and more gigantic supermarkets put the little farms out of business and now we can’t anymore.

So, to answer your question: yes. (Maybe on a bike though, it’s faster and I enjoy it more than walking)

OK, now go through the rest of your shopping needs and tally up the amount of time you are going to spend fetching these items. And no cheating by buying anything that had to be transported by truck or long haul.

I'm assuming you have a job. This provides you a basis for calculating the cost of having to spend more of your time bicycling these errands.

For my grandmother, maintaining the house, washing, running errands and cooking was more than a full time job. Meaning, she worked more than a 12 hour day and her daughter had to help her. This meant they couldn't have a job outside the household. Nor did they have much free time.

My wife has a full time job, which essentially doubles our income. The amount of time spent on baseline "errands" is approximately 2 hours per week in total (shared between the two of us). I spend on average 1-1.5 hours per day in the kitchen cooking.

The rest of the time is either income-generating work or it is spare time.

Are you willing to give up much of your spare time and cut back on your income?

I don’t own a car, don’t even have a licence. I bike everywhere. Yes I have a job.

Cars and private car ownership are not a problem. Cars using fossil fuels, and unnecessary private car traffic in large cities are. Electric vehicles solve the first problem, better public transport the second.

For the vast majority of people living in the countryside car ownership is a necessity, at least as long as city dwellers aren't willing to pay for government public transport to rural areas.

Thus, being anti-car is idiotic since cons of cars outweigh the pros only in certain contexts.

Electric cars still generate a massive amount of pollution. Brake pads and tire wear in particular are large sources for every type of car.

Tire wear yes, brake pads no. I drive a Leaf and use the friction brakes so infrequently that they get sticky if I don’t switch to neutral and do a hard stop now and then. Regen braking is amazing.

> at least as long as city dwellers aren't willing to pay for government public transport to rural areas

Why can't the rural population pay for that themselves? If each of them can afford a car shurely they could collectively fund public transport themselves?

Public transportation is more expensive for rural areas than urban areas because they are more spread out. At some point it becomes impractical, either because the service is unreliable/slow by necessity or because it's not practical for a bus to drive 10 extra miles down the road to get service to everybody.

On another note, I'm still waiting for the hardcore anti-car people (the ones who want to ban car ownership and think rural people don't need cars, which I recognize are a loud minority) to tell me how I'm supposed to go public land deer hunting without a car/truck.

The USA has a very poor public transport infrastructure, it's very difficult to live without a car, and in some areas it's plain impossible. Build the infrastructure first, then we can talk about reducing the number of cars.

That's somewhat putting the cart before the horse. In high-density areas, the existence of cars & car-supporting infrastructure are active barriers to public transport improvement.

If there's any genuine desire for improvement in public transport in the US, a holistic approach has to be on the table. Anything else is just an excuse not to bother.

I think it's important to emphasize that, in the US, it's not "some" areas that are just plain impossible to live in without driving; it's the overwhelming majority.

Time and time again I see Europeans and even some people who live in the US (but who have only lived in Cities) who completely underestimate the magnitude of this.

If people are encouraged to dump their net worth into vehicles then we will never solve the problem due to the fact that most people engage in sunk cost fallacy with their purchases, especially large ones.

It's impossible to build the infrastructure without taking away space from cars and/or drastically changing zoning.

> Cars are the problem, point it out.

Umm, no. In my case, cars are not the problem. They're the result. My city lacks decent and efficient transport from my home to places I go (office, university, etc.), and the lack of transportation is valid for many people, so we get cars.

If the same transportation infrastructure present in Barcelona, Amsterdam, Stockholm or London was present in my city, I'd just take the options and maximize my walk too. I may again have a car for trips, etc. but, it'd be used much less certainly.

So, I dislike the traffic, pollution, noise, parking problems and all, and I want to be a part of the solution, OTOH I have to live, have to show up for work, have to go to shopping and take all that stuff home.

> My city lacks decent and efficient transport from my home to places I go

Because cars.

Yes, cars are also the result. It’s a self-sustaining cycle that takes active intervention that appears suboptimal in short-term analysis to break out of.

Cars spread pollution in many mysterious ways, take the tires for example" According to a 2017 study, about 550 tons of airborne particles from tires are produced annually. Further a study released in July pointed to tires and brake pads as the source of about 550,000 tons of ocean microplastic emissions annually.5 Oct 2020 - Microplastic pollution has polluted the entire planet, from Arctic snow and Alpine soils to the deepest oceans. The particles can harbour toxic chemicals and harmful microbes and are known to harm some marine creatures. People are also known to consume them via food and water, and to breathe them, But the impact on human health is not yet known.

Earlier work suggested microplastic particles could be blown across the world, but the new study is the first to quantify the effect. The scientists concentrated on fine tyre and brake dust as there is better data on how these are produced than tiny microplastics from other sources, such as plastic bottles and packaging.https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/14/car-tyre...

> about 550 tons of airborne particles from tires are produced annually...

So busses, semis, trucks and other rubber tired vehicles are also a no go.

> tires and brake pads as the source of about 550,000 tons of ocean microplastic emissions annually.5 Oct 2020

This adds other wheeled vehicles which use friction based braking into the equation.

I intentionally exaggerate the tone of my comment, but it shows a much bigger problem: All kinds of transportation has some serious impact on the environment. So just taking ICEs or cars out of the equation doesn't solve the problems magically.

We need a much bigger vision and a set of solutions which addresses these problems.

Except in cases where the transportation is highly specialized and optimized (e.g. a pipeline) you are going to have a hell of a time finding an example of human activity where the minimum environmental impact is not on the order of mass * distance.

OTOH, environmental impact, regardless of its distance to humans, never stays isolated to the place where it's happening.

It always affects distant places, human population or not.

> Because cars.

Again nope, much more complicated than that. My city is not flat. It's the opposite. Also bad city planning, wrong population projections and, wrong prioritization of city investments play a big role too.

We're late in building underground. Some of the most populated parts of the city has great elevation changes, so underground is not feasible, etc. etc.

You have not specified where your city is, but if it’s in the US then

> Also bad city planning, wrong population projections and, wrong prioritization of city investments play a big role too.

These are usually the consequence of a car-centric culture when it’s not racism (it’s commonly both, with the car centric culture and the racism making an alliance in the 40s and 50s).

The US destroyed many neighbourhoods and city centers to make room for cars and car infrastructures (e.g. huge through highways).

I live in Philadelphia, often times when the roads are in need of repair (read: all the time) parts of the subsurface get revealed. Often time there are old trolley tracks, that are still in the ground, which were simply paved over for a road and cars.

Cities were recreated over the course of the last 100 years to support car travel over any other means.

> We need to completely revamp how we commute...

Very interesting. What's this glorious post-car future you're PROposing? Please say more.

Maybe where you live.

Where I live, cars are a necessity. The planet belongs to all of us, rural people don't make that much pollution.

So I'm fine with car-bashing where it's not needed for decent living. Where cars are needed, they should be left alone or else we're legislating a lower standard of living for peer residents.

This is just a case of false equivalency. Smoking and car-usage are completely different phenomena and the one should not be used make judgements about the other.

You're going to have to do more than that to convince me & others why car usage is that bad, sorry.

Had there been more money to invest in vaping, it is likely more people would have stopped smoking earlier.

So I am not sure I get your point.

[delete]

Being inoffensive and avoiding confrontation aren't the same thing. You can politely engage with people who don't see eye to eye with you. It's done pretty often on HN.

If you delete your reply to this, I will try to delete mine and maybe the whole thing can disappear.

Agreed, I recognized this after a few seconds of more thought. Tried to delete my comment but it wasn't possible, since it looks like your reply caught me before I could!

All you got out of that anti-smoking campaign was empty bars and a dearth of social life. You can take your babies to a bar now, where no one wants to go be around your babies. I'll never understand some peoples' quest to infantilize the adult population just so they can claim victory.

In places you don't go, and don't know, and obviously aren't invited to, everyone still smokes.

Smokers rarely consider how their choices force the rest of us to deal with them. My partner shouldn't have to carry an inhaler, but public smoking forces her to. There shouldn't have been epidemics of children with diseases caused by secondhand exposure, but smoking made sure it happened. I have no problem with smokers lighting up in private airtight boxes, but don't force the waste products into everyone else's lungs by smoking in public.

Airtight boxes is punitive, which is what typical puritans enjoy imposing on any sort of pleasurable activity. Open air is sufficient for your comfort. You can move away down the street. Don't forget your inhaler, you'll need it as you walk past thousands of vehicles idling in traffic.

I didn't say the issue was necessarily on the street. My partner gets frustrated that she can't open the windows, because street smoke on evenings wafts straight into our living room and gives her coughing fits. Is your suggestion that we should never open the windows in our own house?

I have no idea where you live, but there are nuisances everywhere. I can't control what people do right outside my house, so I don't open my windows during certain hours. If it wasn't that, it would be loud noises or lawn mowers or burning leaves. Put a no smoking sign in front of your house. Open a different window. Get an air purifier. Move to the country. Your solution to ban everyone and anyone from doing something outside an "airtight box" is quite similar to the impossible demand that everyone permanently wear a mask after covid; it's not going to happen, and trying to control other people's behavior will only lead to aggravation.

Seriously curious, where do you live where you can take a baby to a bar? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

You can take a baby into most pubs in Britain.

You can (and pretty much always have been able to) take your babies to any pub in the UK and it's not exactly like pubs are unpopular as a result.

Sorry, no. Cars are the problem. The reason why other transit modes are a solution isn't because they in particular are the best option, generally it's because they aren't cars.

Cars aren't individual choices. They are a societal choice that costs a trillion dollars a year to make work. The issue is cars. No matter which way you slice it, we need to remove cars, and that will necessarily mean making driving a car worse.

I don't think that hiding your goals or intentions is politically a good option. Don't argue something you don't believe in. If you (correctly) identify that cars and car-supporting infrastructure is one of the biggest problems in North America, you have to call it like it is.

We don't actually want other options. We want better other options. The only way to get that is to de-incentivize cars. That's the reason why cars suck to begin with, the proliferation of cars makes every other mode of transport worse, except for inter-city rail, if only by sheer mass effect.

Now I agree that we shouldn't other people by putting them in categories and identifying them with the car. That doesn't mean that we stop opposing the real policies that make cars a good personal option and counter them with policies that make alternatives better, generally at their expense in some way or another. I agree that inter-personally the matter can be approached better, but that does not carry to changing your policy positions or goals, and that should never justify lying about what those are.

Not all car usage is a problem.

I’m from the Netherlands which is incredibly bicycle friendly. Small country, highly urban, great cycling infra, great public transport, nearly everyone walks or cycles whenever it makes sense.

Still, cars are everywhere. There are just tons of trips where the alternative doesn’t really make sense.

Municipalities try everything to make the life of car owners miserable to force them into using alternatives. The only outcome is miserable drivers. They are in the car for a reason and won’t just switch.

But your public transport is not great, really. It is pretty expensive, to the point that renting a car is cheaper than taking the train if you are 2 people. And trains are painfully slow too. Public transport inside cities is better (but still expensive), but less needed because biking infrastructure is really really good.

> Still, cars are everywhere.

I don't think cars will ever disappear, they're useful in many ways. But saying "cars are everywhere" in NL seems a bit of an overstatement, no? Cars are so much less dominant in NL than in other European countries (even Denmark).

> try everything to make the life of car owners miserable

Are they miserable because of inherent challenges of car ownership that other countries try to mitigate or is it really municipalities actively causing their misery?

> But saying "cars are everywhere" in NL seems a bit of an overstatement, no?

Except for cities with pedestrian only centers, cars are everywhere here. In some bigger cities there are certainly some people that go around without cars as they have everything they need close by and good public transport. But most of they (especially just outside of the city center) have at least one car in their household.

Car ownership is even growing faster than population: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2020/10/autopark-groeit-ster...

> Are they miserable because of inherent challenges of car ownership that other countries try to mitigate or is it really municipalities actively causing their misery?

Can't really talk for the NL, but for Paris, it really seems like the municipality is trying to make drivers miserable, while not improving the situation for everyone else

Can you expand on this? What are the municipality doing exactly that is causing misery?

If it's just removing an amenity that was previously taken for granted, then I really don't think that necessarily applies.

I agree that we will still have cars. At some point, yes, we will have to accept the level of car use we get to, and at that level making drivers miserable won't really help, I agree.

We're just very far from that level. Also, the Netherlands while amazing is not perfect, we can still do better, though it is great.

> Still, cars are everywhere. There are just tons of trips where the alternative doesn’t really make sense.

The obvious alternative is a car sharing platform. I've got a couple in my neighborhood and they work for the kind of trip you're describing.

There's one thing that car sharing proponents still seem to miss, even on HN, which is interesting, HN being a community where everyone apparently runs Arch with i3, vim and custom dotfiles on a Thinkpad.

My car is MY car. There is no more dust or dirt in it than in my living room. The cabin filter has been recently replaced and there is no mold in the condenser. I know the single other person who drives it an exactly how she drives it. The brake pads are okay. The steering is okay. The wishbone bushings are okay and the car won't pull anywhere even under heavy braking. I've driven this car for thousands of kilometers and hundreds of hours, fast and slow, in rain and snow. If I ever need to evade an obstacle doing 130 kph on a highway in a split second, just by muscle memory, without flipping the car over and hurting myself or my girlfriend, I want it to be in this car.

People die driving cars. Cars are heavy machinery (!) operated by mostly incompetent, distracted, sometimes aggressive clothed monkeys and as long as this is true, I simply refuse to drive a vehicle I know nothing about and can't rely on.

I'm not even going to mention covid, thank god for my own car.

(Btw I do use shared cars for short trips around the city and the cars, despite being almost brand new, are mostly dirty poor banged up things driven like fucking go karts by other people.)

I haven't had that experience. Maybe it's due to the fact that my platform of choice does not allow casual driving. It's a pretty high monthly fee. The cars have remained clean and in very good shape, lasting about four years.

I totally agree with you. If I had your experience, then I definitely would've outright owned a car. No way I'll put my kid in an unsafe car.

That's an alternative only if you don't need a car regularly. You still have to book a vehicle (availability can vary), get to the collection lot, get back home if you need to pick up someone for the trip, take the trip, deliver the passengers, clean up and fuel/charge the vehicle, deliver it back to the parking lot and get back home.

Yes, that's correct. I'd have to hedge my previous statement and say it's only viable for regular car usage if there are multiple shared cars within walking distance.

For instance in my street, there's one. And another two in the next street. I've got an 8 year old and it works fine and I book up to three trips per week.

But if they weren't within walking range (for a kid) then indeed, it wouldn't be an alternative to owning a car.

At least in the Netherlands, you guys have other options.

I live in Ireland. We also make life miserable for drivers, and basically unaffordable for young, or poor people. But here, about 50% of the population doesn't have access to any alternatives.

>Cars aren't individual choices. They are a societal choice that costs a trillion dollars a year to make work. The issue is cars. No matter which way you slice it, we need to remove cars, and that will necessarily mean making driving a car worse.

Where is the better option? Most of what I ever hear proposed or implemented are fair weather or inflexible solutions that don't replace my need for a car[0], and thereby only serve to make my transit experience worse.

[0]And this is having lived in a variety of minor to major urban centers in the States.

I can see replacing cars in major urban cities with high population density. And I'd love to see more options for long distance travel in the US (like fast trains).

However, arguments for getting rid of cars seem to ignore the fact that public transit just isn't economical in areas with low population density. And even in urban areas, there are situations where having a car is very beneficial, such as grocery shopping. If you're a single individual it's probably manageable without a car, but for a family of four, you probably can't carry enough food for more than two or three days. If there were no cars in the city, I have no idea how you would purchase larger items like furniture.

Every anti-car argument I've seen has assumed a particular lifestyle. If you really want to get rid of cars, you'll need replacements that can solve the problems of almost everyone.

Grocery and furniture delivery is a thing.

>Every anti-car argument I've seen has assumed a particular lifestyle.

Yes, a no car lifestyle.

> Grocery and furniture delivery is a thing.

But doesn't the delivery driver use a car?

Also, grocery delivery/pickup might work for some people, but my experience has not been good. For one thing, the store employee won't pick produce the same way I would. And if something is out of stock, I may want to change other items as well, rather than substitute it or omit it. Store employees often substitute differently than I would, which is especially problematic with a food allergy.

> Yes, a no car lifestyle.

I mean an urban lifestyle without kids.

>But doesn't the delivery driver use a car?

They use a van and drop off at a hundred other customers homes in your vicinity.

1. So you still need the infrastructure for cars 2. Again, that's only efficient in areas with high population density.

> Cars aren't individual choices.

But they are.

There are number of individualized transport options.

And yet, year after year people really, really like cars.

> There are number of individualized transport options.

That is not actually true. In almost all of the US, as well as in most of europe (outside of large urban centers with good public transport) there is no viable alternative to cars.

The netherlands is one of the few places where avoiding cars is an actual option, elsewhere it requires heavy compromission, and imposes significant restrictions on various life choices. If giving up cars means giving up living or having to seriously compromise on your ability to achieve things, it’s as much a choice as “cake or death”.

I’ve lived without owning a car for 20-odd years (with the odd rental / borrowing), it’s only an option because I’m a very non-social person and don’t have children (so my need to move around day-to-day are extremely limited), and I’ve selected my living locations largely around the ability to not have a car, which would leave about 90% of the area unlivable if everybody made the same choices, because there simply is not enough car-free infrastructure for that to be anywhere near a universal option.

> outside of large urban centers with good public transport

Maybe in Eastern Europe or something but most of Western Europe has no such problem, especially in the North.

> The netherlands is one of the few places where avoiding cars is an actual option, elsewhere it requires heavy compromission, and imposes significant restrictions on various life choices.

Not even close to true in Scandinavia, Belgium, Germany or even poor ass Portugal.

I'm not sure how you got to these conclusions. Maybe you're underestimating just how bad the US as a European is or maybe you've never lived in Europe.

> Not even close to true in Scandinavia, Belgium, Germany or even poor ass Portugal.

It’s absolutely true in Belgium (and france), of which I have first-hand experience.

Despite the overall populations density, the public transport network outside of cities is patchy at best and tends towards low frequency: outside of school transport hours buses might only run every 2 or 3 hours, or not at all. Some lines don’t even run outside of school days.

The general assumption is that adults have a car and don’t rely — let alone depend — on public transports.

> I'm not sure how you got to these conclusions.

By having lived them? They’re not conclusions, they’re observations or having lived for years without a car (by choice).

> Maybe you're underestimating just how bad the US as a European is or maybe you've never lived in Europe.

Or maybe you’re way over-estimating how good Europe is? Just because the US is bottom barrel garbage-tier does not mean rural europe is any good.

> Or maybe you’re way over-estimating how good Europe is? Just because the US is bottom barrel garbage-tier does not mean rural europe is any good.

Definitely not. No, I think what we have here in these comments is, on the one hand, a bunch of spoiled people complaining about great service (which I find very typical in Europe) and differing definitions of what's efficient and expected. In 20 years, I've never had a problem, but I also don't expect to be able to get to every single cow-milking farm by foot. If you live in way out in the woods, then you need need a car, but not if you live in most villages. For rarer buses, plan ahead. It's all possible and comfortable. In the US, it's literally not possible under any circumstances for most places.

> Maybe in Eastern Europe or something but most of Western Europe has no such problem, especially in the North.

I'm in Norway. It's absolutely a car society, and unless you live in a dense population center living carless is unfeasible.

Agree. I also live in Norway and have done for years.

I can get

- to work (bike or bus + train + 1km walk),

- to the shop (walk or bike),

- to many of my friends (walk or bike),

- to the town center (bus or bike)

quite comfortably alone, and I think at least except winter most (by number) of my trips is car free.

But good look getting 5 kids somewhere where there isn't a bus line (soccer, ice hockey, activities, church, in-laws house, frinds across town, fishing).

I live in 2nd largest city, and 11 km drive from work. If I want to take public transport, I first have to take a bus going once per hour, switch to another bus going into opposite direction, and then take a third bus to work. Bus can be a bit late so am not making the connection, or sometimes a connecting bus not showing up. Then you stand another 20 minutes in the rain (it usually rains here) on the shoulder of a motorway.

I could also cycle in theory; however my home is 88 meters over sea level and my work in 100+ on another hill. Did I also mention it rains a lot? Some people like the challenge and do it anyway (but virtually none does that every day). I can't be arsed to sweat out on my way to the office though.

And yes that's before you get to having kids. Or living outside a city: then you have a bus on one route going maybe 2-4 times a day.

Same for Germany and the UK, in my experience. Within or very close to major cities, it’s feasible albeit often slow and frustrating.

A bit further out, cars are close to vital, unless you specifically optimise for public transport when choosing your home and work locations, and accept major restrictions around social and hobby activities.

I live in germany and even in "structually weak" eastern regions you can get by ok without a car unless you live in a very tiny village or are physically impaired. Public transport could be way cheaper though.

Imo many people in germany have still to realize that it's not feasible to make big bucks in the city while hiding from the fruits of their labour in the countryside.

At least here in Finland public transportation absolutely does not work in most of the countryside. Maybe you count us as Eastern Europe, but I can tell that the situation is no different in Sweden for example.

The truth is that replacing private car ownership for people living in countryside in many countries would require large government spending to operate lines that are not commercially viable.

In practice, 'bus lines that are not commercially viable' actually means empty behemoths running at times where nobody needs them, wasting way more fossil fuels compared to just letting people own their own comparatively tiny cars.

> there is no viable alternative to cars

Well, there I agree. Mopeds, motorcycles, electric bikes...alternatives, but not viable for most people.

> But they are.

They are. Except for building highways. Gas subsidies. Gas stockpiling for security purposes. Road Maintenance. Signage. And then there's the opportunity cost of the space lost to parking.

Those above choices? Well they're collective and everyone has to pay for them, because without raising taxes they are much too expensive to fund privately. So even if you ride a bicycle to the train to work everyday, you still get to pay for the construction and maintenance of the highway that driving commuters drive their cars on that you can't ride your bicycle, or any smaller motorcycle, on.

> Except for building highways. Gas subsidies. Gas stockpiling for security purposes. Road Maintenance. Signage.

No need to even go that far. Just building so many roads (which are inimical to anything but cars by definition), stroads and parking space requirements: when 60% if a commercial lot has to be parking you reduce commercial density by 2/3rds, and increase the difficulty of alternate modes if transport because it becomes significantly more difficult to make rounds without a car.

And that’s if you can even reach the place to start with. The latest “not just bikes” video has a demo of a short walk through a houston suburb (where the author originally needed to go 800m to buy replacement luggage), and it’s terrifying.

I doubt Houston suburbs will ever replicate a European walkable city. Europe had a heatwave recently and thousands died. Houston deals with that sort of temperature every summer. Then there's the humidity.

Meanwhile business offices in Houston continue to be aggressively air-conditioned, filled with people wearing full suits and ties, in blind imitation of European culture.

That's rather missing the point.

People die in european heatwaves because they're not used to the heat and don't have the right habits, and the homes are not set up to handle them: AC is relatively rare (especially whole-house AC), homes are not set up for airflow, and almost none have ceiling fans. Unshaded southern / south-western windows are also rather common, as usually the goal has been to get the sun and heat in, not keep them out (in fact in the last few decades the building codes have drastically increased the required window surface).

Which of course doesn't mean you should follow a central or northern european set up for a city like Houston, you should rather look at southern-europe, or SEA. But overall it's probably going to look like favouring shade, greenery, and airflow.

Cars are the choice dictated by infrastructure and land use patterns optimized for cars. Strictly separate residential areas and commercial areas, connect the two with wide roads and offer free parking at each end and, surprise, people really like cars. Build neighborhoods where daily necessities are in walking distance and connect them using trains and, surprise, people really like walking and taking the train.

I adore how your moral position is more important than the opinion of those who believe the contraire.

The thing is, most of the cycling advocacy I see is pro solution yet the opposition response is largely anti problem. Those who want to ride safely typically propose infrastructure based solutions and rarely treat the automobile itself as the problem. For example: while you may see advocacy for protected lanes or traffic calming, almost no one is arguing that cars should be removed from the roads. Contrast that to the opposition response, which often seeks to have bikes removed from the roads and never supports accommodation for different modes of transportation.

I am one of the people who is totally for the removal of cars (in cities). I don't even think this is a radical position, cars are not a neutral mode of transportation and people with cars get much more of the cake than any other person moving through a city.

Cars were somewhat utopian: everybody can move whereever they want, with a luxurious safe space around them, all while having the world shaped in auch a way it accomodates them and their car. Reality has shown, that this idea has not only serious downsides, but that it is also extremely inefficient and might even be part of the destruction of our planet. The idea that somehow we can build a sustainable world around cars, no matter how fuel efficient and what technology looks (to me) extremely naive, because it is inefficient and even if you made it better, you still won't beat bicycles in terms of efficiency and space usage.

Note: I don't argue there aren't legitimate use cases for cars. I grew up on the countryside in the alps, without a car you would be lost there (yet for some reason I managed to do everything with a bicycle/public transport till I got my driving license). Also: if your work requires you to move stuff around, cars (or trucks) can make a lot of sense. I am not arguing against that, I argue against one person sitting alone in their own 7m² and using that to commute into a city that is filled with cars.

In order to make cycling a real alternative we will have to take space, comfort and money away from cars. Take one lane away from a 4 lane road, paint it red, make it a bicycle lane. Add trains/subways/busses where people can transport their biciclyes, all that stuff.

I also have lived long enough in different european cities to know it works perfectly fine. I mean there are cities without any cars in their center (because of historical reasons) and they don't die.

> for some reason I managed to do everything with a bicycle/public transport till I got my driving license

Reasons being: no job and no kids. I lived for years in the LA megalopolis without a car. Where going to the toilet is customary done at the wheel (1). We could possibly share stories about that one multi-hour bike ride to the box store and back. All that ended quite abruptly with the first job and especially the first kid.

(1) Not really, but I hope it helps getting the the point across.

Yet even an unemployed single parent gets around just fine in Europe.

Where I live, public transport is free for young kids and parents with strollers. The buses have separate "getting on/off with stroller" buttons that signals the driver to activate the hydraulics that tilt the whole bus just to make it easier to dis/mount with a baby.

Unless you want to visit parents in other, smaller city. Then half hour drive with car, changes to two hour struggle in a crowded bus.

Or your half an hour bicycle ride changes to one hour on a crowded street. Totally depends.

A lot of that has to do with the design of the city. In my neck of the woods (a moderately dense urban area in Canada) I see plenty of parents who either don't own a car or use their car as the exception rather than the rule.

I support banning cars specifically in certain neighborhoods in Manhattan. Probably not in any other borough or Jersey City but I want a ban on cars in Manhattan for exactly the same reason you are describing - building empathy toward people who need to use the subway with their babies in a stroller or backpack (not sure what the correct terminology is for this). If everyone has to use public transit, maybe we will be nicer to people who have to take their human infants to the doctor in a bus or a subway.

Quite. this is nice, but the idea that 'I think you can actively try to become the hot new thing in part by working on being inoffensive' is naive. That approach works great for networking with peers but not against aggressive opposition.

There are a lot of people in the world who thrive on seeing other people worse off, to a greater degree than being equivalently better off themselves. In game theory terms, they're willing to experience a loss in order to inflict a loss on others. Online they present as trolls.

I have no doubt that some people want to see others worse off. Some people seem to get angry about just about anything. Yet I suspect that most people respond negatively for other reasons. A common case is they perceive it as a loss to themselves, even when there is no justification to that perception.

To choose a concrete example from pedestrian safety: curb extensions are often proposed to make crossing pedestrians more visible and to slow turning traffic. A common criticism is a loss of parking. That criticism ignores that curb extensions rarely impact parking since people are not supposed to park within a certain distance of a crosswalk.

I personally think only about half of objections to any given proposal are sincere. Many people make arguments for strategic reasons rather than because of good faith belief. It's very noticeable on topics like climate change which yield many flame wars.

Some people make asinine dismissals that seem rooted in ignorance, and when rejected to schooled switch to ever more specific and obscure arguments, attempting to one-up the other person by displaying superior technical knowledge. They get huffy if someone asks why such an expert person would lead off with a demonstrably specious argument.

> A common case is they perceive it as a loss to themselves, even when there is no justification to that perception.

This is symptomatic of an oppositional mindset IMO.

It always befuddles me when people describe me as naive, especially if I know for a fact they know my backstory.

I was sexually abused as a child. I'm a former military wife who raised two special-needs kids pretty much alone while the husband was elsewhere. I spent years homeless. Etc.

Hacker News has proven to be a poor networking opportunity for me, which I've complained about quite a lot. It's not done kind of secret. Being charming here attracts romantic interest, not career success, and that's been a dead end for years for all inquiries because of my medical situation.

I'm no longer homeless but I remain dirt poor. As is often the case, I'm currently flat broke because it's late in the month and my ability to make the front page of HN still fails to result in some kind of adequate income.

I've not remotely had a sheltered life and I've been dealing with small town politics since not long after I moved here. I've already become acquainted with some of the local pain points.

I also appear to be the highest ranked openly female member of HN and I seem to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard. Twice now in fact as I did previously under a different handle.

For that and many other reasons, I think my approach works. Though it certainly at times resembles the wry observation about democracy being "the worst thing ever -- except for all the others."

I'm describing a specific sentence as naive, not the person who wrote it. I had no awareness it was your blog, so I'm sorry my comment hurt your feelings. Nonetheless, we hold different opinions on this.

My feelings aren't hurt. Befuddled means confused or perplexed, not upset.

You sound like you have experience with cycling advocacy. If you could point me in the direction of resources, I would appreciate it.

I've identified a need locally. It doesn't require government funding. But I still have a lot to learn about bike rack best practices and I haven't ridden in a lot of years. I pretty much walk everywhere.

It's more of a case of I notice it since I ride a bike daily.

What I see in my city is mostly geared towards safety, not so much bike racks. Some of it focuses upon infrastructure that makes life safer for cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists. Some of it is directed towards people who bike, such as road safety courses and bicycle lighting.

With respect to bike racks, the emphasis seems to be on gaining business support. Places are more welcoming if they depend upon pedestrians and cyclists, are high traffic, and have limited parking. Local businesses also seem to be more bike friendly than regional, national, or multinational ones.

On that note, how businesses differentiate themselves seem to reflect how welcoming they are to clients who use bikes. Cafe's are more welcoming than coffee shops, recreation centres are more welcoming than gyms.

Also, traditional bike racks are out of favour in my neck of the woods. It's more common to see posts where two bikes can be locked up parallel to the street, or placed three feet apart when bikes are parallel to each other. Even the simplest ones are painted so they are more visually appealing, some have a more artistic flare. Traditional racks tend to be used in bike corrals. Those are typically a barricaded off on-street parking space for bike parking, with the barricades being decorated to fit into the community (e.g. paintings, flowerbeds). The basic idea seems to be that bike racks are more appealing to everyone if they aren't a tangled mess of bikes.

Thank you.

I am still researching bicycle racks, among other things. I am fortunate to be in a historica, walkable, mixed-use downtown area with "scenic" highways running through it. In other words, old-fashioned highways where bikes are permitted, not limited-access freeways where bikes are Verboten.

So we already have cyclists coming through here in spite of the lack of bike racks. I talked to a group that began in Seattle and said they were heading up around the Olympic Peninsula and down to San Francisco. So they are traveling quite the distance because of existing infrastructure and interest.

I already take photos of the area and post them online in a forum I run, which is what sparked me to think up this project. I now have a new goal of documenting bike racks and potential bike rack sites. I will develop things from there.

As someone who rides a bike for errands and fun, I’m often locking it up.

My unsolicited opinion: I love the plain and simple single upside down U.

My unsolicited rant: I’ve seen and attempted to use many variations, and anything more or less than a single upside down U is always worse.

- usage of space: “racks” that are intended to be used for lots of bikes almost never work out. An upside down u fits two bikes. Simply installing more U’s will have a better outcome than a single “multi-bike” rack because the racks almost never work as advertised - inevitably someone has a kids seat attached to their bike, or a trailer, or a taller bike or shorter bike, or whatever, and then they just end up using the two sides, or going across the whole rack, so all the middle space is wasted space anyway.

- security (eg is it the right height/width/length that I can fit my lock, and lock up all the parts of my bike, not just the wheel). With the U rack, yes, otherwise, almost never as good, and often much worse.

ergonomics - can I easily get my lock around the rack and my bike, lean my bike against it)

I’ll grant that maybe you want to sacrifice utility for a particular “look” but please do so carefully and deliberately. Good luck!!

I am absolutely soliciting opinions. Thank you very much for this.

> For example: while you may see advocacy for protected lanes or traffic calming, almost no one is arguing that cars should be removed from the roads.

But those things are anti-car. They come at the cost of travel speed or congestion as a result of fewer lanes. They're thereby something you have to fight the masses in order to get, instead of finding a Pareto-optimal solution that can thereby actually be implemented.

Or at least figure out who it is you want to fight. For example, a lot of towns have a main drag that goes through the area with all the shops. One of the best ways to make that street more accessible to pedestrians is to build a limited access highway parallel to it to carry all the vehicle traffic which is only passing through.

The shop owners are going to fight you on that. They want those cars driving past their shops. But it puts the pedestrians and the drivers on the same side, because the drivers don't want to be stuck on a road full of crosswalks and stoplights when they could be driving around it at 70 MPH.

“congestion as a result of fewer lanes”

Removing a car lane for a bicycle lane doesn’t decrease the number of lanes (may even increase it if a car lane is replaced by two bicycle lanes). If the bicycle lane gets used by former car drivers, car density may even go down, and congestion with it (but that likely will induce demand)

“The shop owners are going to fight you on that. They want those cars driving past their shops”

I don’t think they get paid for ad impressions. Shop owners want people to enter their shop and buy things, not drive past it.

> Removing a car lane for a bicycle lane doesn’t decrease the number of lanes (may even increase it if a car lane is replaced by two bicycle lanes).

It reduces the number of lanes for cars which increases congestion for drivers.

> If the bicycle lane gets used by former car drivers, car density may even go down, and congestion with it

This is wishful thinking. Everywhere you see a bus lane or a bike lane, it's underutilized. And that's true even when it's carrying all of the existing bicycle traffic that would have been there regardless.

Because the reason people don't ride bicycles isn't a lack of bike lanes. It's because they're traveling a longer distance than can covered in a reasonable amount of time on a bicycle.

> (but that likely will induce demand)

Induced demand is a farce. Congestion suppresses demand. If you relieve congestion in some way, the demand is no longer suppressed. But if we take as a given that we want to relieve congestion in some way, that's the amount of demand we have to deal with regardless of how we relieve the congestion.

> I don’t think they get paid for ad impressions. Shop owners want people to enter their shop and buy things, not drive past it.

If you're stuck at a stoplight at an intersection with a gas station, a pizzeria and a toy store and you need gas, food and a birthday gift for your nephew, you stop and buy those things. If you drive past that street on the new highway, you buy gas at a different gas station, order pizza from a different pizzeria and buy the toy on Amazon.

They're not the seller of advertising, they're the advertiser not wanting to lose the impressions they're currently getting without paying for them.

“Everywhere you see a bus lane or a bike lane, it's underutilized.”

Those can easily be underutilized and yet take more traffic than a lane filled with cars would take.

“If you're stuck at a stoplight at an intersection with a gas station, a pizzeria and a toy store and you need gas, food and a birthday gift for your nephew, you stop and buy those things.”

I don’t drive a car, but I doubt that because I don’t see how that would happen. It would take you minutes to find a spot to park your car and go shopping. The people I know purposefully decide to go into the town to do such shopping.

And who’s talking about a new highway? If car drivers become part-time cyclists, there’s no need for building new roads.

Also, it’s not a given that ease of access by car is good for shop owners. Some data points:

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2020/03/18/going-back-to-...:

“When the council proposed to take away some of the car parking spaces the local entrepreneurs stunned the council by demanding all the parking to be removed. That was novel at the time (and to be honest it still is exceptional) but could be explained because the pedestrianised area is so close to this location. The merchants simply saw that business is booming literally around the corner at locations without moving and parked cars.”

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen...:

“there was also fierce opposition, especially from businessmen and shopkeepers who were convinced it would mean the end of their business if cars could no longer cross the centre. We tried to explain that we wanted to create a pleasant urban environment that eventually would attract more people to the centre and to their shops. But they were convinced they would go bankrupt if customers would not be able reach their shop by car,” says Van den Berg. “In the end, it turned out they were wrong.”

> But those things are anti-car. They come at the cost of travel speed or congestion as a result of fewer lanes. They're thereby something you have to fight the masses in order to get, instead of finding a Pareto-optimal solution that can thereby actually be implemented.

At the cost of parking, possibly. At the cost of travel speed, possibly. At the cost of congestion, unlikely.

All of the proposals for bike lanes that I have seen have typically involved the removal of parking or the narrowing of lanes. The former typically happens where there is not enough space to use parked vehicles as a barrier between lanes for motor vehicles and bicycles. The latter is typically intentional, since narrow lanes are a mechanism for traffic calming.

Neither should be classified as anti-car. Bike lanes typically run along roads that are mixed use. They aren't found on side streets since they don't address the safety issues found on side streets. (Side streets may be designated a bike route, but I have never seen a separation of traffic.) They are rarely found on roads since roads are intended to serve high speed traffic travelling long distances. There are usually better solutions for cyclists in that case. The end result is that bike lanes are usually placed along business corridors (e.g. those main drags), where traffic calming benefits all users. Parking is often less of an issue in those cases since those businesses couldn't be sustained by the limited parking available to start with.

Cyclists are not out there battling against cars. It simply doesn't make sense. Many of the places that cars go are undesirable to cyclists. Many of the places that cyclists want to go are better served when accommodations are made for multiple modes of transportation. If you choose to interpret that as anti-car, well, there isn't much I can do about that aside from pointing out that it is not the intent and rarely the outcome.

Yeah, I read this more as a how-to guide to stall progress, just pretend your opponents are doing the opposite of these steps even if they aren't.

Pretty closely fits all the arguments you see about a variety of sensible ideas that would negatively affect powerful interests.

Like cut down on meat, you probably already eat more than doctors recomend, better health, cheaper, save the planet. But if you're connected to the meat industry it pays to pretend that "Joe Biden wants to ban cheeseburgers" or whatever and argue against some fake extreme.

I'm anti-car (cars as a regular transit method, parking lots, urban sprawl, burning up hydrocarbons, etc), but I love my car. I love working on it, I love driving it, I love the fact that I can go anywhere with it at any time without consulting a bus or train schedule.

I'm anti-smoking. I'd tell anyone not to smoke. But I love cigarettes.

I'm in favor of gun control. But I own guns.

See where I'm going with this?

I'm happy to have a conversation with anyone about the better alternative ways to live, but about 99% of the responses in this thread rub me the wrong way because they're sanctimonious, pompous and aggrieved, and want to explain the right and wrong way to live from the perspective of a child.

One major thing they fail to take into account is that people have grown accustomed to certain freedoms (like not asking permission to go somewhere, or waiting for a bus), and a naive attempt to start solving the world's problems by curtailing other people's freedoms is a non-starter.

Ultimately, you can convince people why these things are bad for society and why there are better alternatives (or why they should be given up completely), but there are major reasons why society adopted these things in the first place and when you come at it from the angle of "you're wrong, you're terrible and you suck and you need to quit smoking / stop working on your car / give your guns to the government", you're going to hit a huge amount of resistance compared with trying to make incremental changes and presenting a case for better lifestyle alternatives.

> One major thing they fail to take into account is that people have grown accustomed to certain freedoms (like not asking permission to go somewhere, or waiting for a bus), and a naive attempt to start solving the world's problems by curtailing other people's freedoms is a non-starter.

It's easy, people want flexibility, shorter and more comfortable commute. If you offer that, they'll ditch their cars.

I'm not certain bureaucrats can innovate to make it a reality, so instead you'll get endless committee on transportation and ever ballooning pension funds.

Smarter public transit would be wonderful. When I lived in Europe, I never owned a car. In the US I live in a small city with unusually good public transit that is not representative of the normal American sprawl. I only use my car when I want to get to a far away beach on a Sunday, or go visit friends outside of town. If you present people with options you will certainly find a majority of people who would love to stop making car payments, paying for gas and insurance. So long as the alternative isn't an enormous hardship that outweighs those costs, which unfortunately it is right now in most American cities that were designed for automobiles.

People have difficulties to accept change when innovations go from liberating to considered harmful in a decade. Cars, smartphones …

What feels weird is the « reaction »: as environmental concerns progress, cars (and smartphones) are still being manufactured and marketed as more powerful, faster, shinier, brighter, … production costs are still dwarfing the energy saved by new models efficiency, by a lot.

I like driving my roadster car. It has a rather humble 1.8l engine, I bought it second hand and I don’t commute with it.

This is true. I was always anti-smart phone and anti-social media. As well as being anti buying anything unnecessary. My car is 40 years old. But now my modest positions seem at odds with the holier than thou PC police, who indulge in all of the above and yet somehow feel morally superior enough to 'splain to me why no one should drive a car. This all goes back to not approaching people by telling them what you're against, because it makes even the most righteous person come off as a hypocrite.

You sound quite upset about these hypothetical people, but it's not clear to me why?

Are you angry that they are buying and driving wasteful, inefficient cars and causing pollution and global warming, because that sounds like it would make you the PC police, no?

Or are you angry that they correctly and factually think that cars/social media/whatever have negative impacts? You actually seem to agree that they do, which again would seem to place you in the ranks of the PC Police.

Are you angry that they do both of these things at the same time? I'm not quite sure how you're measuring this, but again, you seem to be in this same general category, thinking we should spend less money on flashy cars but also owning an old car, so you're not a RMS level refusnik when it comes to cars, you could probably be 'holier' than 80% of the US population on that topic but you're not at the absolute extreme.

Are you arguing that you're like 80% of this opinion, and feel it's okay to be say 50-90% of the way along this spectrum but people that are more than 90% along really, really annoy you? More so than people at the opposite side of the 50% mark?

I understand that people can be annoying, but it feels logical to separate out annoyance and correctness. But even if you don't, it feels like you are biased towards the status quo in terms of what you find annoying acts even if you yourself are mostly on the right side of the issue.

Possibly humans just don't like being reminded that they can do better, as it makes them feel bad about themselves. We should probably reframe it to areas where we can most easily improve at low cost.

Your last statement, I believe, is the point of the article.

> Possibly humans just don't like being reminded that they can do better

Humans don't like other humans who go around acting like they're better because they're doing Y and you're doing X.

"Don't be anti-Axis-powers. Be pro something else."

"Don't be anti-HIV. Be pro something else."

"Don't be anti-crime. Be pro something else."

"Don't be anti-(house|city|wild)-fire. Be pro something else."

"Don't be anti-discrimination. Be pro something else."

"Don't be anti-software-defect. Be pro something else."

Cheap and meaningless rhetorical techniques are best exposed by substituting in other terms.

It's useful to note that problem solving has a number of stages. That generally involves identification of a problem, a goal, a path-to-goal, and a mechanism for achieving said path. That said, which you focus on (problem, goal, path, mechanism) is best determined by where focus is most effectively attended. And that varies by the problem. Blanket prescriptions rarely work.

The automobile has created the modern urban landscape and its characteristics. That's the primary focus in reversing or correcting many of those faults.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarc...

> Cheap and meaningless rhetorical techniques are best exposed by substituting in other terms.

You're just making a list of things without any redeeming characteristics. Nobody is pro-HIV. Lots of people are pro-car.

But more importantly, it's missing the point.

If you try to eliminate cars and replace them with nothing, or replace them with something worse, everybody is going to fight you because you're making their lives worse.

If it's 20 miles from your house to your office and there exists no mass transit within walking distance of either one, expecting people to stop driving is a joke. You have to build a viable alternative before you can get rid of cars.

And it has to be better than cars or everybody is going to hate it. But if it is better than cars then you don't need to be anti-car, all you need to do is build a better alternative which people will then choose voluntarily because it's actually better.

Example: Build more housing near where people work, so they live within walking distance and don't need to commute in a car. It's not anti-car. It's just better, for everybody, than needing a car.

I've ... shifted my views a bit over the past hour or so (see follow-up comments). I still stand by some of my critiques, though Doreen's points on messaging over a strongly-held, identity-defining product relationship are well-taken.

After more thought, and an offline exchange and apology to Doreen (my comment is a lot harsher than necessary), some additional thoughts.

The main objection I and others seem to have is with the title. As Doreen noted offline, titles are hard. They're also highly influential in steering discussion on HN and elsewhere.

Given that the post is about communicating effectively, this is all the more ironic --- not a ding at the author but at showing just how difficult the task can be. And part of the problem may be that the title itself does what it cautions against: "don't be anti-automobile" is itself emphasizing the negative rather than positive in messaging.

As I noted in an earlier follow-up, many of the points of the post are well-taken. Full-frontal attack is often ineffective in politics. On the other hand, there are cases where nothing else seems to work and the only way to beat down an absolutely ossified and unyielding obstinance is a grinding war of attrition and repetitive messaging. (That's what mass advertising is.)

Explaining (but not excusing) my own response: I'm increasingly on the lookout for what I see as cheap rhetorical devices especially where used to undermine effective initiatives. I don't think Doreen's doing this at all (though I'd also not noted the author/submitter initially), but having tackled a few instances earlier today on may have been overly primed-for-battle.

The question of how to address urban / land-use issues, cost and availability of housing, and the absolute dependence on the automobile really are core, and thinking of how to wage that battle is time well-spent. My approach tends to involve digging through (far too much) history and background, trying to figure out how we got here, and what tactics were used in that approach. As several people brought up, automobile (and oil and tyre interests) did attack their competition and alternative land-uses directly, though it should also be noted not in their marketing selling the automobile itself, whcih focused largely on its benefits, pleasures, and with time, status and social perks. (The history of automobiles and mass advertising are very strongly coupled.)

Automobiles won, in addition to various dirty tricks, because almost anything involving urban travel is easier with a car than without. It's a path of least resistance. With sufficiently low cost, with alternatives removed (dirty tricks), with a land-use policy necessitating their use ... it's an easy, and positive, sell.

If I'd suggest a change to the title, it's that in messaging and campaigning about automobile alternatives, emphasizing the benefits and advantages of alternatives should be the principle focus. Even if strategy focuses on eliminating the car, messaging probably shouldn't. Be positive when advocating for behavioural change might be the key.

(I'm open to better suggested phrasing. Advertising copyrighting is not my strong suit.)

On the other hand, the title used was successful in attracting that fickle beast, attention...

> "Don't be anti-Axis-powers. Be pro something else."

Pro: Allies, peace.

> "Don't be anti-HIV. Be pro something else."

Pro: Science, research, vaccines, health equality, etc...

> "Don't be anti-crime. Be pro something else."

Pro: Social security/welfare, Mental Healthcare for all, drug legalization, rehabilitation, etc...

> "Don't be anti-(house|city|wild)-fire. Be pro something else."

Pro: Ecological Forest Management, Public Services, Firefighers & Funding, etc...

> "Don't be anti-discrimination. Be pro something else."

Pro: Social Justice, Black Lives Matter, Equality, etc...

> "Don't be anti-software-defect. Be pro something else."

Pro: Unit Tests, End-to-End Testing, User Testing, Fuzzing, Documentation, etc...

Sometimes, if your goal is to hit a specific target, the best advice is "aim for the bullseye", and not "don't aim at everything that isn't the bullseye". Worse yet, an enumerated list of non-bullseyes not to aim at.

I get Doreen's point. I can see the political logic in alliance-building. I understand that there are times when full-frontal assaults go poorly. I actually don't have a whole lot of issue with the suggestions. In this one case the advice might even be valid, for messaging purposes.

As a general rule, and in terms of devising strategy, it's ... ill-conceived.

I think the main issue is the current political discourse going for the “anti” approaches. Constantly calling for less consumption, less personal freedom, etc. All one hears is less less less in the name of illy and broadly defined causes such as “the environment”.

This even showed with the global response yo the corona crisis. Les freedom of movement, less outdoor activities, less hospital occupation instead of more. More treatments options, etc.

I'd agree with much of that.

"please dont present a united voice against the source of the problem. Balkanize yourselves into a dozen little groups so no change ever happens!"

Occupy Wall Street was a unified voice. Nothing was achieved because there was no clear goal.

And Tiannamen was crushed, but one still has to try, as the watershed moment or breaking point can come in the blink of an eye.

It's my view that Occupy was dismantled by the vested interests it confronted, in the form of paid editorial hit jobs, much as anything that threatens large hegemonies of power. The goal was simple and achieved: awareness of how Wall Street gambling led to the global economic crisis of 2007 and 8 It was ahead of it's time, and will later be seen as such.

What is puzzling to me is how easily that anti-elite message was hijacked by Trumpkins and his elitest of silver-spooned back-scratching politics, which certainly goes against the spirit of Occupy. The takeaway is that there is a public for anti-elite messaging, but that it's now possible to weaponize that in order to innoculate that very same public against targeting you...Trumpkins public is rightfully socialist, just brainwashed by the very elites they think themselves against, lol

The conservative chant, as if space in a city is not an ultimate zero-sum game. Any "pro something else" eventually butts up against having 80% of space and 110% of government drone mindshare allocated to cars.

Sure, but I think people are generally more sympathetic to "here is something that people want and aren't getting; I'd like us to consider letting the people have some of that" (the pro-whatever angle, even if that is inevitably anti-car in implementation) than they are to "I think that cars are currently too convenient and should be made less convenient" (the anti-car angle).

It's the difference between "I want this thing I don't have" (understandable/evokes empathy) versus "I don't want others to have the thing they have" (much less understandable and evokes almost no empathy).

That just leads to the "oh yes that's a good idea, let's form a working group!" response but never leads to actual change because that would require taking space away from cars.

Taking space/utility away from a current use that's broadly viewed as beneficial (or at least necessary) and experienced by many as a net-positive will require some level of consensus-building [and why-explaining]. I (and the article) suggested a path that I think is more likely to succeed at that necessary (if annoying) step.

But if you think a more direct, anti-car strategy will work better, I'm not anti- your anti-car strategy. I'm pro "tell me what you want instead that would be better" because I think that's more likely to succeed.

As much as I agree with the strategy (it's just good marketing) I have to say that I've never met anyone who thinks that bikes (or any other mode of transport) can replace cars 100%. And I know a lot of cyclists. Every single one of them uses a mix of transportation modes, which include: cycling, walking, public transit, and sometimes even cars!

The only people I know that think we can build cities around a single mode of transport are (a subset of) car drivers.

And in my experience, the most successful way to talk to these people isn't to be "pro-bike", it's to be pro transit choice. But I always have to explain this very carefully, because most people assume that anyone who talks about bike lanes or trains is anti-car.

> I have to say that I've never met anyone who thinks that bikes (or any other mode of transport) can replace cars 100%.

Probably not, but it is certainly feasible to eliminated the need of owning a car.

This immediately makes me think of the role attacking pedestrians played in the rise of the automobile.

https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

The auto companies played dirty. Maybe it's time to make it clear that they're the source of so much illness in American people and cities.

See also 99% invisible’s “the modern moloch” about how much of a disruption cars proved to be, but managed to lobby the public to accept them (while being very victim-blamey by today’s standards)

> On the streets of early 20th-century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside and play in the streets,” all day.

> And then the automobile happened. And then automobiles began killing thousands of children, every year.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern...

Thousands of children. That's tragic. I've been lamenting children's loss of free range. I thought it was due to saliency bias around kidnapping, but it sounds like the auto companies may be at larger fault.

It's like saying: ~Don't attack the tobacco companies, talk about alternative forms of recreation.~

Sure, but also attack tobacco companies. Sometimes the solution to a plague is to attack the plague.

> Don't make it a moral argument that frames drivers as sinners and pedestrians, cyclists, etc as The Good Guys.

So much this.

I live in a US city that has an atypically large number of people who bicycle as their primary transportation. I do as well, but I also have a car and drive when that's more appropriate.

The years have taught me some things about the car vs bike divide: car drivers tend to be real jerks toward bicyclists, and bicyclists tend to be real jerks toward car drivers.

It's lose-lose, particularly because it's not rare that either the car or the bike (or both) navigate dangerously as a result, increasing the chances that someone's going to have an accident, and reaffirming the negative stereotypes each has toward the other.

I am anti-car and it has nothing to do with drivers - it has to do with infrastructure. Our cities are designed for cars, multi-ton machines the favored entity in a sea of squishy humans. I think this sets us all up to be in conflict, to force us to protect ourselves and it brings out the worst in us.

The paranoia required to just stay alive as a cyclist doesn't promote anything near to harmonious co-existence. I don't ride on roads because I can't stand the stress.

As a cyclist on the road you're inhabiting a very unbalanced risk vs reward equation.

I know the percentages are low, but one mistake from you, or more likely someone else, and BAM, life over or changed forever more. I've been involved in enough car accidents to distrust the average human's ability to drive.

I am fully on board with the notion that our infrastructure has to become less car-centric, but I wouldn't describe myself as anti-car. I'd describe myself as being in favor of appropriate transportation.

Cars, like bikes, are tools. And tools can be used appropriately or inappropriately. Having one tool to address all needs guarantees that it will be used in cases where a different tool would be much better. The US needs to have more than one transportation tool.

> Don't make it a moral argument that frames drivers as sinners and pedestrians, cyclists, etc as The Good Guys.

I agree with you, but as someone who's been vocally anti-car for a long time _without_ ever blaming drivers, I've also noticed that people make it enough a part of their identity that they will do this for you.

Most car owners are rationally responding to a powerful incentive system; many aren't on the margin where alternatives are feasible for them. But discussion of the negatives of car-oriented _systems_ is enough for most people

This isn't especially surprising. Most people aren't capable enough of processing high-dimensional concepts to separate participation in a harmful system from personal culpability for all of the harms of the system.

> I've also noticed that people make it enough a part of their identity that they will do this for you.

Yes, this is a problem. That we here in the US tend to think of cars as an expression of our identities is a deep-rooted issue. Like most social issues, this isn't one that can be resolved easily or quickly.

> That we here in the US tend to think of cars as an expression of our identities is a deep-rooted issue.

I actually don't mean it this way. The people that I'm thinking of aren't in a social class/subculture that takes pride in cars per se. Especially as my generation has urbanized so heavily, if anything having a car is coded lower-class. As an example, imagine a New Yorker/San Franciscan sniffing about how they've never owned a car and "barely even know how to drive". They're definitely not saying so in embarrassment (this caricature may or may not be closer to me than I'd like to admit...)

What I'm talking about is a broader inability to separate being stuck in a collective action problem from taking responsibility for the whole problem. Most people just don't have the moral reasoning ability to understand that "a car-oriented system is harmful" is different from "_you_ are harming people by participating in/being stuck in a car-oriented system".

Car drivers regularly kill bicyclists with little to no response from the law. The opposite isn't a thing.

Well because it's usually accidental. This idea that every death, including accidents or understandable mistake need to be met with criminal sanctions is just dumb. It's a good way to unnecessarily ruin more people's lives.

Bikers should realize they are driving a more dangerous vehicle. Bikes have no protective covering, no crash cage. Your body is exposed directly to the road...

If you want a safer bike, build a human powered car.

And yes I bike or walk most of my life so don't tell me I'm some evil driver. I'm just realistic and not vindictive.

> Bikers should realize they are driving a more dangerous vehicle. Bikes have no protective covering, no crash cage. Your body is exposed directly to the road...

These are only a problem if you build your society such that bikes are traveling physically next to fast cars.

But that does not mean biking is unsafe—it just means our current setup forces all traffic into a single unprotected road next to fast cars.

Okay and we can sit here and pontificate on how the way things should have been done or we can think about things we can do today based on what we have.

I accept that you want to look back and lament what we didn't do. I find that depressing, so I'd rather think about what we can do right now based on the infrastructure we have to encourage people to adopt people centric modes of transit.

Having a safer bicycle would get us there. It would keep people closer to homes, encourage the creation of smaller business centers instead of massive strip malls, and revitalize downtown streets as more people decide to opt for the convenience and enjoyment of the human powered methods.

> I accept that you want to look back and lament what we didn't do. I find that depressing, so I'd rather think about what we can do right now based on the infrastructure we have to encourage people to adopt people centric modes of transit.

This isn't revanchist thinking. This is simply the advocacy strategy used in the Netherlands to pivot from a car heavy society to a bicycle heavy one. It's used as a model of advocacy for many pro-mode-share groups throughout the Western world.

https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...

It's weird how your solution is to replace bikes with safer, human powered cars when there are so many simpler solutions.

We could stop building suburbs, stop building massive parking lots around big box stores, add more public transportation such as light rails, make some highway lanes dedicated to bus transportation (thereby reducing induced demand for cars which would actually reduce traffic), etc.

Is there any indication that the parent comment is opposed to all of these systemic solutions, especially given that he identifies himself as primarily a biker/pedestrian vs a driver? Some people are able to consider an issue on both the systemic and the local, agent-centered level.

I personally think that most of the effort put into making these minor improvements don't come close to addressing the massive systemic problems with urban planning today. It's a bit frustrating seeing people make the argument that the systemic solutions are too difficult so we shouldn't try them.

I'm not someone who'd ever engage in 'cycling advocacy', so you haven't lost anyone, believe me.

Thank you. I agree with the systemic critiques, I just don't see how they move us closer to a workable solution.

This is just more of the division that we do to make ourselves feel morally superior. It's the "I don't shop at Walmart like the poor's" mentality that seeks to elevate the status of the critic while ignoring the very real issues that make people want to shop at a giant big box Walmart store rather than their local downtown.

I can almost assure you that poor people would love to shop at their local downtown if they could but right now with the lack of accessible public transportation and cheap housing near downtowns, shopping at big box stores is the best they can get.

Cars are a requirement for living in modern cities if you're poor (with more money you can afford to live closer to work and public transportation). That fact alone is extremely hostile to poor people because it add 100s of dollars to their monthly bills in car payments, maintenance, and insurance.

None of those things are simple. They require immense top down effort whereas starting a company providing a safer bike is able to be done right now by a small group of individuals without any political approval or lobbying or legislation.

Like I said in an above comments we can sit around and think about what we should have done, or we can make suggestions based on what we have. One is more constructive than the other.

deference to a high speed armored vehicle always?

I will contend that "pedestrian" is the base state of a human who may also be a "driver" when seated in a vehicle. Cities are designed for whom?

We err in allowing cars and pedestrians or cyclists to intersect at all. Cars belong in tunnels or highway-like contained danger zones where high-velocity armored vehicles are the only objects moving there.

> Bikers should realize they are driving a more dangerous vehicle.

So you think bikers should care more about making themselves save isntead of car owners about making everyone save?

In general I think most people would be best served by focusing on their own behavior rather than complaining endlessly about the behavior of others while making no changes to themselves. This philosophy extends to all areas of life, whether transport, finances, happiness, etc.

All the "group dynamics" is the worst thing about humans. Drivers vs Riders vs Skaters vs Pedestrians vs etc.

I walk, skate, ride bicycles and motorcycles, drive a car. I choose my mode of transport by perceived benefit rather than tribal group.

I see people playing stupid games in each group too. I won't "choose a group" and be associated with them any closer than "being human" already does.

Edit:stick to one point.

I agree -- those are all examples of tribalism, and I am of the opinion that excessive tribalism is one of the largest social problems we have right now.

We already have cyclists coming through town and heading up to the Olympic Peninsula and the like, as is documented in the Project Bike Rack post. I think if businesses are informed that people want bike racks, they might be willing to supply them as a low cost means to attract more tourist dollars with less environmental burden.

Cataloging existing bike racks and "bike rack wanted" sites will take time. And then I need to figure out how to connect with businesses and there are no doubt many other details still to be uncovered.

This is a brand new project but it grows out of a lot of research. I think it holds promise for actually making a difference while being a lightweight solution.

I've also noticed that murderers tend to be real jerks to non-murderers, and non-murderers tend to be real jerks to murderers. There's a true moral equivalence there.

> car drivers tend to be real jerks toward bicyclists, and bicyclists tend to be real jerks toward car drivers

I wish you would be jerks to me, but nobody even thinks about us motorcyclists.

"Don't be anti X. Be pro something else" this mentality can and should be applied to all issues in my opinion. Being "pro solution" is far more productive than being "anti problem".

Sometimes the solution is to get rid of the problem. Take tobacco for instance.

May not be true of cars, but I'm pretty bitter about the unhealthy car-centric societies that 100 years of auto lobbying has left us with.

Arguably a safer alternative to smoking could be part of a solution too.

The issue that there is no single solution to cars, and the problem is indeed cars. So unless you mean "Don't be anti cars, instead be pro-everything-else in a way that is detrimental to car operation", I have to disagree.

Okay, I am for making most cities pedestrian and bike-only zones with exceptions for delivery vehicles and carefully isolated motor vehicle routes.

Do you think framing my position with a solution will really change the discussion?

Agreed. Anyone can point out a problem, some can be "pro solution", and very few actually solve problems. Unfortunate reality of the world.

I live in a dense city center where there is a severe shortage of space for dedicated infrastructure. As more people ride their bikes, the logical next step is to remove cars from the roads to ensure cyclists have ample space and cars can’t pass recklessly or otherwise discourage further uptake by newcomers. A four-lane street that has one lane for buses and taxis, two regular traffic, and a two way cycling lane separated by a low curb is perhaps the most dangerous place I’ve had to ride here, and that’s because cyclists are all packed into such tiny areas. Closing roads to further discourage commuting would go a long way to wrestle back control of the streets.

Being anti-car isn’t the best first step, but it is inevitable that we take up this position when viable alternatives — not just cycling — are available and convenient.

The real key to this post is how to message and advocate effectively for major social change. (I totally missed this on my first read as well.)

Cars, like much else in modern life, aren't purely functional objects and totems, but are very strongly linked with lifestyle, status, and identity. A campaign that directly attacks these ... probably won't go well.

There have been similar campaigns in the recent past, though, which have been highly effective. The campaign against smoking, begun in earnest in 1961, is probably among the more successful.

https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro...

That involved a lot of approaches. Education was one prong, but increasing costs, decreasing the opposition's abiity to propagandise (the tobacco firms), increasing costs, reducing the number of places where smoking was acceptable, changing attitudes toward whether or not smoking was "cool" or a status signal, etc., all contributed. It took literally decades. But it worked, with US rates now less than half their 1945 peak.

In Tokyo, some young people now tend to think that not to have car is cool (that's now concern for big car brands). Just curious is there similar thought in Europe or other urbans.

Suspected reasons: car isn't ecological, is obviously dangerous and takes responsibility, isn't so useful because there are great public transport (unless have children), or sour grapes because salary in japan is low compared to car price and parking in Tokyo.

I saw a telling cartoon in an Asian magazine a few years ago, that basically looked like this:

         Poor     Rich
   1960  bike     car
   2010  car      bike

Yeah, nowadays (expensive) bicycle riders thinks it's really smart sophisticated transport method and hobby.

One of the biggest factors driving reductions in car use (ownership, but also driving) has been expense. For all that basic economics gets many things wrong, increasing price is a highly effective way of reducing a specific behaviour.

Costs may be any of several factors. Purchase price is one, but that's relatively minor. Insurance, registration, parking, fuel, requirements to have (or have in the car) child-safety seats (an expense themselves, but also taking up room in the vehicle, possibly for little effective safety, see: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/car-seats/), smog and other inspections, etc., etc.

Eventually a tipping point is reached, and not using or even owning a car is the preferred option.

Given the role of land use, transit, and other private-ownership alternatives (including ride hailing services / taxies), that's not a simple matter of price. But a set of policies working in concert can effect that kind of change.

Unfortunately for many people increasing the expense will simply leave them without any alternatives, which isn't a good thing either.

Think of a low-paid European worker who commutes to work inthe countryside where public transport does not work. Increase cost of commute enough, and it will make more sense for that person to live off welfare than go to work, especially if the salary isn't sufficient to afford same quality of housing closer to workplace. Not good for the economy.

A future without cars works only if we either heavily subsidize public transport in rural areas, or force everyone to live in tightly-built cities full of tiny apartments where quality of life is always going to be inferior.

My point is that expense has been rising, and both use (passenger-miles driven) and ownership (vehicles owned percapita) have plateaued or fallen across much of the U.S. over the past 2+ decades. That's already shown in the statistics.

The effect isn't uniform by region, and is most pronounced in cities. New York has never had high car ownership, and IIRC it's fallen elsewhere, notably San Francisco.

You obviously don't want these increases to occurr suddenly, or without any compensatory changes --- improvements in transit, changes to land-use, alternatives such as bicycles (for the healthy) or paratransit or rideshare or deliveries (for the disabled). Sudden hikes give rise to protest (see the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests in France. But phased over the course of a few decades, and with the land-use and density changes that are needed to support this, as well as changes to basic wages/income, and pensions, the effects could be quite pronounced.

But in tandem, increase costs (both monetary and hassle) of private car ownership and enabling of alternative transport, would be far more effective than either side of that alone. In economics: raise prices, lower consumptive usage (in most cases).

That's a wonderful way to divide all of the people who are anti-car into thousands of different voices shouting for different things at once.

As an aside, pointing all those don'ts at the reader is awfully hypocritical.

A unified voice without solutions is unlikely to be more effective at fixing a problem than a divided voice with solutions. That's the crux of the pro-solution argument.

If anti-car folks don't want us driving cars, then we need solutions to address the various legitimate use cases of cars.

The article is really about messaging and strategy then caring about cars. Specifically the author says:

> But the project won't grow beyond my town if I can't attract other participants.

So basically, I think the author is saying don’t “other” people because they happen to live in a town that relies on cars, rather invite them into something cooler and hip

You get the "read the article and grokked it before commenting" award.

(I most decidedly do not.)

I think it’s just a function of how much cars trigger some folks here on HN.

There's a lot of people who live in suburbs and commute by car into cities. Most anti-car proposals are all downside and no upside for these people. We should look for proposals that give them appealing alternatives to cars, rather than just making their lives worse.

I am not sure what appealing alternative you could offer. I didn't have a car up until recently. I got one because I had a kid. Even though I live in a small European city [0] (400k inhabitants) with bus lines everywhere, taxi's that are dirt cheap etc.

It's impossible with a kid. I tried for the first few months. I don't have time to wait for the bus for 10 minutes with a screaming baby, neither do I want to stress that the entire bus or train needs to listen to my crying baby for the ride. Taking the kid to the doctor halfway across town is just a nightmare with any of the alternative modes of transport.

Give me a good alternative for taking a screaming baby to the doctor without pissing off everyone and I'll happily get rid of the car.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluj-Napoca

> Taking the kid to the doctor halfway across town

I live in a similar sized European city, and the one good thing the Soviets did here was to make sure services are available nearby to where people live.

I have a friend who has two toddlers, and when they need to go across the city they have no issues going by bus. If someone get pissed off because there is young human who is not mature at controlling (or more likely supressing) their emotions, that's their own problem.

Almost all of the services they need are nearby though. During the winter lockdowns they didn't need to leave their district for 4 months.

Even without a kid, a car is almost always the best way to travel. If we lived in an ideal world with unlimited space and resources, everybody would be driving a car. Only restrictions due to population density or political incentives may create situations where one might prefer traveling by some other mode.

There are such proposals, commuter rail and local public transport.

But ultimately, suburbs are built around the car. No matter what you do, suburbs will not be as functional without cars as they are with cars, because they were specifically built with the assumption in mind that everyone using them has a car. So yes, people in suburbs will lose out, it's unfortunate but it's not really anyone's fault.

The reality is that life in the suburbs is already full of negative externalities and is generally only sustainable because of subsidies from the cities and to some extent the rural sectors.

So the solution is going to be making the city a liveable place for many of them, which is much easier with cars reduced, as well as build suburbs that can be lived in without cars, but those will look very different from the North American suburbs of today.

Beyond that, every solution such as commuter train, suburban public transport options, etc... is inevitably going to be worse than the car, and that's the sad consequence of how these places were badly designed.

I have very fond memories of a quaint ~100k Netherlands city where most of the commuting happened by bike because everything was within a 20 minutes bike ride. Using a car was simply a hassle. By the time you walk to its parking spot, drive, park, walk to your destination, you are already there on bike.

I live in a North American city. The city is zoned the almost all of the jobs are in downtown, u district and maybe the port. Everywhere else is a job desert. To commute by bike to downtown from within the city limits, forget about the suburbs, is an hour each way. This is unfeasible, other than for young people, usually men, with no kids or other obligations. It's a luxury lifestyle, not the obvious choice.

The problem is not the suburbs. The problem is the downtown. The problem is the expectation that millions of people have to commute in/out the downtown every day.

Break down the downtown. Build small office parks all over the 'suburbs'. Spend real $$$ to help families solve the two-body problem.

Edit. Apparently I feel quite strongly about this. Here's a bit more. Suburbs are build around people wanting a decent living space for their families. The car helps, quite a lot, but it's not like suburbanites wake up on Sunday mornings, hop on their Cars and go to the CarTemple to sing praise and offer their first borns as sacrifice to the CarGod. There is simply a dearth of real alternatives, which mostly boils down to a simple question: Are the jobs anywhere near where people want to live?

What you're describing is not really a suburb, though. Suburbs are built around a city, it's in the name, sub-urban. Commuting downtown for your job is the core to the idea of the suburb.

You're describing a nice, low density, urban place.

You don't need to commute to downtown by bike. Really, you just need to commute to a metro station, somehow, either by bike, by bus, or by your own two feet.

When I was a kid, I had the chance of being able to go to school alone. That is the real solution for families - we need to make an environment where it is possible for kids to move themselves safely. Nowadays, even in my fairly walkable and nice city of Montréal, this isn't really possible anymore.

Anyways, I think you really underestimate what is possible using public transport. It takes around 40 minutes for me to commute from a low density borough of Montreal, Ville Saint Laurent, which is full of SFH, to an office downtown, without using a bike at all. That compares very well to 30 minutes in a car. And this can still be improved considerably. Thankfully, I don't work downtown, and instead it takes me around 25 minutes to get there without a car.

Before that, my family of 6 lived in a duplex, from which you could bike downtown in 30 minutes flat.

You can definitely build spaces where families can live and still get to work and to school in around half an hour. The key is to make it possible for children to get where they have to go by themselves, safely, as fast as possible, and to have enough public transit and bike accommodations for older people to get downtown - which is the worst case - in 30 minutes more or less.

Around 2 million people live in Montreal. Our public transit system is not great at all. 55% of people in the island commute to work every day. I know people that commute from the suburb of Laval all the way downtown in less than an hour using only public transit, and that's a family of five. We can do much better still. There are ways for people to live comfortably as a family without going to the North American suburb, while still having cities with more than a million people.

Also, simply building offices in the suburbs as they exist right now isn't going to be helpful - try commuting even within a normal suburb by bike for 30 minutes and you're going to see why. It's damn near suicidal.

If we define 'suburb' as a 'low density urban place without the jobs' then I suspect we are in agreement. Urbanistically speaking, the top 2 needs of the inhabitants are 'low density urban place' to live and jobs.

We happen to have both, alas in geographically different places. Let's shift the locus of the solution from vindictive disfunctional 'the cars are the problem [...] we need to make driving cars worse', to constructive and hopefully workable 'bring the jobs to the suburbs', which will have the byeffect we all seek: reducing the need for cars.

The issue is that this just can't be done. The structure of suburbs is actively hostile to public transport of any kind and to everything that's not a car. If this wasn't the case, we could just plop down a high-speed rail station directly into the middle of the town and then everyone could bike or take the bus there.

Try it, take your bike and do a 10km-straight-line-distance trip in an average north American suburb. It's either going to take a horrifying amount of time or be legitimately dangerous.

It's not true that we need low density housing. We need a mix of high density and medium density housing. I grew up in medium density housing in a family of 6, literally the only issue is that cars make it unsafe for kids to walk to school and parks alone.

I wish that it was possible to just convert suburban neighborhoods into nice small urban communities. They're just not designed for that. For those that can be converted, a train station going 150km/h straight into the city is a perfectly serviceable solution. But the basics is that what you're describing is just making suburbs into cities, and for the suburbs we're talking about that's almost impossible.

But beyond that I really don't understand the obsession for very low density housing. A duplex is a perfectly fine place to raise a large family.

Granted, American suburbs are in poor shape. Question is, what is a viable vision for the future? Hong Kong (17.3k people / sqmile) or s'Hertogenbosch (3.6k people / sqmile)?

Packing millions of jobs in a handful of downtown sq miles, and then expecting that all the millions of commuters and their dependents live in a circle with 30 minutes access to downtown by bike cannot be physically satisfied by duplexes. Only a high density setup akin to Hong Kong may work. I know of no one, especially no one with kids, who would rather live in Hong Kong than a low density urban environment like s'Hertogenbosch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_H...

Yeah single-family residential zoning is an intimate part of the car dependency trap in North America.

I don't speak Dutch, so I could not retrieve relevant statistical data. From my memories, the quaint ~100k Netherlands city was mostly townhouse rows and SFHs. I don't recall many 6+ floor megabuildings. Feel free to drop some StreetView pins around and see for yourself: https://www.google.com/maps/place/''s-Hertogenbosch,+Netherl...'

The #1 US problem is the centralization of jobs in the downtown. If we want to get to reduce car usage, we need to zone to geographically spread the jobs around.

Edit: Orthogonally: https://missingmiddlehousing.com

I don't disagree at all. My comment was perhaps just a tad too pithy.

We should reduce crime in our cities and end homelessness so our cities are appealing places to live.

As a conservative minded urbanist, it is disheartening to see people leave cities because many american cities are descending into chaos and many people are not as dedicated to urban living as I am.

Frankly if it weren't for my absolute hatred of car commiting, I would probably follow them. The suburbs offer a superior quality of life other than proximity of conveniences. That is all at this point. Covid destroyed culture. Homelessness and crime destroyed a true sense of community and shared ownership of public property.

> As a conservative minded urbanist, it is disheartening to see people leave cities because many american cities are descending into chaos and many people are not as dedicated to urban living as I am.

Total crime rates as well as violent crime rates have been declining almost continuously for about 30 years. In the early 90s, crime rates were more than double what they are today.

Rates of homelessness are harder to measure, but the most comprehensive statistics (as measured annually by the Department of Housing and Urban Development) show that the total number of unhoused individuals hasn't changed drastically since 2007 when reporting began.

While I do not deny that homelessness and crime are problems, American cities are not "descending into chaos" on the basis of rates of crime and homelessness.

Sure. I agree.

But crime is measured by individuals relatively. The cities were very safe until the summer riots and the defund the police nonsense. Now crime is very clearly increasing despite the initial persistent denial of this obvious fact by certain politicians.

Regardless of what the stats say, anyone with sense realizes this will drive people away from cities.

Yes they are descending into chaos in the only way that matters... Relatively.

Just today, my pregnant wife and daughter couldn't use our local public restroom because a junkie was shooting up. These sorts of interactions didn't even happen a year and a half ago. Now they're common. Surely you can see how this using to end if we keep up the denial that this is a problem by resting on our laurels.

But this isn't how people actually perceive crime: Pew has been polling Americans for decades about it [1], and Americans have consistently said that crime is rising even though that's almost never been the case. So as "measured by individuals relatively," nothing has changed.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about...

Okay, but crime is actually rising now in 2021 and late 2020, at least in my city of Portland. Again, I was not part of the people who have said over the last decade that crime is rising, because it's not. I'm just pointing out that it is right now, so these same people are going to become even more concerned, spooked, and make choices respecting that.

This is what I don't understand about most people, especially those who look to the government for solutions. Instead of accepting people as they are, the arguments are over whether those people are wrong. If you want to influence human behavior, first you have to understand how they behave, not tell them their behavior is wrong.

> So these same people are going to become even more concerned, spooked, and make choices respecting that.

That's exactly what I'm arguing against - where is the evidence that people are "more concerned"? The evidence suggests that people's concerns have no relationship to actual crime rates. Your statements about cities "descending into chaos" could have just as easily come from 1995, or 2005, or 2015.

> This is what I don't understand about most people, especially those who look to the government for solutions. Instead of accepting people as they are, the arguments are over whether those people are wrong. If you want to influence human behavior, first you have to understand how they behave, not tell them their behavior is wrong.

I'm not telling anyone their behavior is wrong. I'm saying that I don't think it's a good idea to base public policy primarily on peoples' perceptions of crime rates when those perceptions don't seem to have any bearing on reality. (Consider the counterfactual: if crime rates were continuously rising, and everyone thought they were decreasing, should we do nothing?) I think we should instead look at the actual facts on the ground before going crazy with the "cities decesnding into chaos" narrative: 1) violent crime rose 3% in 2020; 2) nonviolent crime actually fell in 2020; 3) the rise in violent crime was fueled by a rise in murder specifically - but murder rates have actually been rising since 2014 so this isn't a new phenomenon. This isn't a policy prescription and crime is not a simple subject, but I think if we want to solve issues (crime and homelessness) we have to be able to agree about a basic set of facts on the ground without resorting to hyperbole.

> The cities were very safe until the summer riots and the defund the police nonsense.

Quick reminder, there isn't any clear correlation between police defunding and the recent increase in crime. Cities that never defunded the police, cities that even increased police funding -- they've still seen increases in crime. And even in cities that did reduce police funding, many of the trends we're seeing now started before funding was cut, so the timing doesn't make sense.

People have a perception that police budgets across the entire country were all slashed because that's just how the cultural conversation happened, but the rhetoric is not the reality.

----

My take: anyone who tells you they know for certain why crime is increasing is either overconfident or lying.

I am personally of the opinion that COVID is a very probable explanation. 600,000 people have died, a large number of businesses have gone under, schooling was disrupted, industries and income were disrupted, homeless shelters became dangerous and behaviors on streets were adjusted accordingly. Not to mention that there was a pretty decent chunk of time where a lot less people were going outside and traveling through certain districts. To me, the timing lines up really well and it was a consistent event across the entire country that helps explain why crime might be spiking in multiple otherwise unrelated cities.

BUT even I am not going to claim with complete certainty that COVID is the cause, we don't have enough data for that. If I tried to tell you COVID was the obvious cause, I would be lying too. It could be related to economics, it could be a cultural shift, it could be some other cause that hasn't even been proposed. We don't know. I am reasonably certain though that defunding the police was not the cause. The data just doesn't line up well enough for that theory to make sense to me.

I believe that the rhetoric around defunding the police causes crime.

If you accuse your own society of being evil, then it should come as no surprise that some take that as license to stop following its precepts.

It's like how many left the church after the truth about the child abuse coverups came out.

You cannot simultaneously say the justice system is biased and unfair, and then expect people to act justly. Doesn't matter how much you fund or don't fund your police. The most important kind of policing is that which every individual exercises over himself, based on his/her internalization of society's norms.

If you undercut the internalized voice of society by calling people to question it unnecessarily, then you ought to expect poor behavior.

So I'll say it again, the rhetoric around defunding the police/ACAB/etc is terrible. This has been studied over and over again, and shown to be correlated with a crime increase.

As an aside, I think this is just another form of gaslighting. Take my city of Portland, for example. Although technically police funding hasn't been reduced very drastically, the city disbanded the gun violence reduction team, which was doing the on the ground work necessary to keep people safe. While the force wasn't defunded, they were castrated essentially. This team was formed to combat exactly the kinds of crimes we're seeing now, by charging the would-be perpetrators with the lesser crimes they commit before they kill people.

> I believe that the rhetoric around defunding the police causes crime.

> As an aside, I think this is just another form of gaslighting.

Do you have an explanation for why homicide rates starting trending upwards before George Floyd's death?

I'm not trying to subtly gaslight you, I'm sure your subjective experience is your real subjective experience, but your subjective experience is not the full picture. The perspective you're giving me is that everything was fine until the protests, and the data doesn't hold that out. Portland's murder rate has been rising since at least 2015. Clearly the 2020 protests did not start that trend. And this isn't just Portland, we're talking about areas where police funding increased. We're talking about areas where crime rates spiked before bills were signed into law.

On the subject that rhetoric is the cause, I consider the argument that crime increases are due to "loss of morale/respect" to be even more tenuous than the funding argument, and far less scientific. I have not seen data to back that argument up, and if you believe that social attitudes influence crime rates, then the psychological effects of lockdown are a far more obvious influencer of social attitudes. They also line up far better with the actual recorded crime trends. I think it requires a pretty big jump in logic to argue that a loss of an entire year of schooling, jobs, and a failure of social institutions to protect vulnerable people during a pandemic would have less effect on public morale and respect for institutions and laws than approximately two weeks of protest would.

And again we run into the timing problems. Even when talking about people's subjective experiences, the timing of media campaigns and public outcry against police officers still seems to be offset from we started noticing crime increases. You want to talk about gaslighting, people are out here trying to tell me that the data I'm looking at from early 2020 either doesn't exist or that it's not relevant because they didn't personally notice the trend at that time.

This is a kind of weird shift I've noticed where police-reform critics are jumping away from the mid-2020 argument that BLM is misrepresenting how prevalent police abuse is, over to an argument that unnuanced, reactive reporting about crime stats is good actually and people who are looking at the data just don't understand how everyone on the ground feels. To me, it all just feels like a lot of projection and inconsistent cherry picking. If you really genuinely believe that crime is caused by a lack of trust in social institutions, I can think of a half dozen plausible causes for that mistrust off the top of my head (including the very narratives that cities are lawless and crime isn't being punished) before I ever get to BLM coverage in the media -- and many of those potential causes will line up better with the reported stats we see from cities. But I'm supposed to just take it as a given that none of the other events of 2020/2021 matter and of course this is specifically BLM's fault.

> We should reduce crime in our cities and end homelessness so our cities are appealing places to live.

The thing that would make my [Australian] city more appealing to live would be removing most of the cars from it. One of my big dislikes of inner city living is the noise, fumes and congestion from vehicles.

Well you live in Australia.

In Portland where I live, murders have spiked and many of my local businesses have armed security now due to the decline in social cohesion due to the proliferation of false narratives.

Seriously. The bicycle gang needs to realize that posting pictures of urban bike lanes does nothing to convince the family w/ 3 children that they can possibly get a family of 5 around in a day without a minivan.

The "family w/ 3 children" gang also needs to realize that they should stop voting down local transit measures, otherwise they will have to resign themselves to spending hours in traffic in narrow streets while cyclists zip by.

A two stop park-n-ride shopping trip with three young children sounds substantially worse than chilling in traffic.

With different transit measures, there will be more livable communities available, freeing up that family of 5 to move somewhere where they don't need to take such long winded trips in the first place.

Maybe? But like... you'd basically have to live within a very short walk of a grocery store, b/c hauling groceries for 5 people w/ 3 children is uh... ambitious. So you're living in an apartment building, or townhouse at best. So I guess no yard, not urban enough.

And since the best you're going to get is a corner store or very small grocer, I hope you're not looking for any bulk items or specialty stuff. God forbid you ever need to go to a hardware store.

Maybe you're rich, and can afford delivery groceries?

And I guess you're never really going out for a hike or anything outside the city proper, because taking a 3-stop transit to get to a hiking trail becomes a full-day affair, aka impossible.

I think at the end of the day, nobody is _actually_ going to do this, which plays out by the low-fertility stats of European cities. You've got 1-2 kids at most. I think we need to be honest in these discussions and admit that dense urban communities do not practically support anything other than small families. Which isn't something everyone is happy with.

Yards are great, but in well designed urban environments you have access to parks, a lot of the problem here is that people want to have their own private spaces for everything.

Groceries are actually far better if you’re not forced to buy in bulk, how many people end up throwing out spoiled produce because they bought too much at once and don’t use it all? The car based grocery shopping model really isn’t great for your health. Further, you end up with _far_ more diverse grocery options in a dense environment, because your neighborhood ends up supporting far more stores.

This isn't true for everyone of course, but young families of five are typically going to be heavily dependent upon family for a while and are generally going to move (or stay) where the family is.

Plus, there are perfectly livable communities available today, ones with generally lower crime, lower pollution, lower costs, less traffic, more green space and better public schools than urban areas (in the US at least). The downside is you generally need a car to navigate them.

What about the old cycling elitists who are anti car and anti ebike?

I remember when I was still surprised by the amount of old cyclist dudes who hate the existence of ebikes. Now it feels commonplace when interacting with that community

I don't think that lasted very long. E-Bikes are so common now that I don't think other cyclists give them a second thought.

Offense beats defense.

This OC's advice is completely, utterly, logically, emotionally, psychologically, economically, and in all other ways thoroughly correct. Any one who disagrees has obviously not done any policy work.

Other perks when advocating for progress:

Messaging is generally easier. If you're explaining, you're losing.

Focus! Avoid getting dragged into pedantic slap fights, distracting side quests, arguing about details and semantics.

It's hard to win fights on enemy turf.

Everyone is already complaining about everything. Be the one who has a plan, something positive to say. Honey vs vinegar.

What mirrors my visceral full-body negative reaction to large swathes of asphalt and often extremely noisy and apparently aggressive (look at modern autos front-ends and tell me they are not designed to look like predators) swarms of vehicles speeding by as quickly as they possibly can, most emitting vast clouds of bad-smelling exhaust gasses that are carcinogenic and contributing to climate change as well as general poor air quality for the unfortunate humans nearby, anyway, I was saying: what mirrors my revulsion at the inelegance of cars and their road support system is a love of treelined paths. A love of trees. A love of well designed botanical gardens. A love of 100 year old walnut trees, or mango trees large enough to provide shade for an entire housing block.

We can have a paradise on earth here, as soon as it stops being "cool" and "normal" to turn this planet into a wasteland.

We can design our transport around a sensible way of life that doesn't involve all the human ants having to shuffle themselves 100km from their dwellings each day, in pursuit of informatic careers of deep personal meaning.

etc.

I will also propose separating transport planes. There is no excuse for mixing cars and pedestrians in an inner city. I see no viable excuse for traffic lights and forcing petrol-burning vehicles to idle. All car traffic that crosses with living spaces should be in tunnels etc, and all flow controlled as in highway entrance/exits and roundabouts, etc.

Public traffic space is limited (and in major cities exhausted) supply. Being "pro something else" is automatically anti-something. If do not make the latter part explicit it will just hurt the weakest group (typically reducing space for pedestrians).

I think this only works if it isnt opinionated and finger-wagging prescriptive to masses. I'll provide an example, I'm pro-cylcing. I rarely drive and mostly cycle to work, or use mass transit during rain/snow.

...but, some of the anti-car pro-cycling rhetoric I hear in my hometown of NYC is insane -- there are calls to ban cars on large sections of the city and have people bicycle. I say insane because it suggests people have never been around elderly folks. What are the disabled supposed to do? What about those with infants? What happens if you are carrying groceries? What about those with bad knees? What happens on the day when all the bikes have been borrowed and there are no options but a cab?

> What are the disabled supposed to do?

Golf carts. Electric wheelchairs.

> What about those with infants?

Definitely don't put them in cars. They're the leading killer of children, nationwide. If you care about your baby's safety, you'll put it in the car as little as possible, only when there are no other options.

> What happens if you are carrying groceries?

If you have children, then under the stroller. Or in a bike trailer/stroller combo. Or foldable personal shopping carts - I always see little old ladies with those. Or a rucksack.

> What about those with bad knees?

E-bikes with throttles. Or trikes. Or golf carts.

> What happens on the day when all the bikes have been borrowed and there are no options but a cab?

How likely is that?

> How likely is that?

Well, having been in Paris: There are many times and places when all the shared bikes are borrowed.

It's fine to be anti car, I think the "concession" you do need to make is that the context is really important, I live in the middle of a busy city that really suffers from traffic problems

When I'm talking about pedestrianising or bike lanes or e-scooters etc it's from the perspective of a busy city that does not have enough room for cars

It's important to acknowledge that most car alternatives are not an option for people like farmers or people who live out in the sticks and so people in the country are typically not who I'm talking about when talking about anti car ideas

This is a good advice but on gov level. Governments don't need to be anti car, they just need to stop being pro car and incentivise their use. Stop subsidies, stop tax benefits for both users/producers, stop building new roads, stop turning free spaces into parking lots etc. and be pro something else.

Just make 99% of the car traffic infeasible (slow, expensive...) and market will come up with alternative ways to make 99% of activities that today require a car feasible without them.

A big part of the problem is that all existing alternatives are objectively inferior on an individual level.

Cars provide long or short distance uninterrupted point-to-point transportation in a private environment with climate control and a large cargo capacity. Every alternative is worse in some or all of these ways, and the few advantages they do offer are usually only worth those drawbacks in rather niche circumstances.

I'm pro working from home.

What I'd love is changing the road safety rules in favor of bikes (because bikes lanes can't do everything, sometimes they are terrible or not existing)

  1. High priority vehicles firemen/police/amulance    
  2. Shared transports (bus/tram)  
  3. Bikes  
  4. Other motorized vehicles - cars

Also reducing drastically driving speed to reduce risks

I love cars. Not only how they look and work, but because it can bring me to places where other people don't usually go. It gives me the ultimate freedom feeling. Going far in car to some remote country/region is such a nice thing to do. I don't want to live in a city from where I rarely leave. I need my cars.

How "just ban" won't work: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/world/europe/france-fuel-...

The car-dependent are so exceptionally good at spinning every pro-something into anti-car (unless it's pro car) that any attempted distinction between pro-something and anti-car is futile. Embrace the antagonism they force on you, be anti-car.

You should give Howard Kunstler‘s The Geography of Nowhere and Duany, et al.‘s Suburban Nation a read. (There are other good ones, too).

These will contextual like what an overhaul of the planning and codes process should look like.

I don't understand the emotion, or even the idea that I have to feel something about cars or roads. What is it to do with me, why should I care? Its not as if I can do anything about it.

The governance structure provided us with road infrastructure in the past. We were sold this idea and developed our lives around it.

Now the governance structure wants us to live in smart cities, with no cars. This allows for greater control and tighter management of the tax paying stock.

No one gets to vote for this stuff. It is not a way of life I would choose - I don't like being manipulated. I'm not going to stand at the sidelines and clap these changes on. It is communitarianism - but its not a good thing.

Plenty of people are pro cycling, public transport, infrastructure etc.

Designing cities mostly around the need for cars is a disease and a blight on urban landscapes.

Don't simp for them.

I'm not anti-car. I'm pro car users following the road rules and acknowledging the existence of other road users.

anti-car? people need to quit social media. It is rotting your brain.

So... IDK.

Intellectually, I agree with this. Applied to the personal sphere, a company, family or whatever... being pro something else is probably the way to go. As a macro-political goal... perhaps not.

For a big, hairy example, look at revolutions, or politics generally. Take the American, French or other republican revolution. They were anti-King. Democratic republics were an afterthought, something to fill the void. The Communist Manifesto is notably light on communism. Half of it is anti capitalism. The other half is anti other versions of socialism. Most independence movements of the last century+ were nationalist by default, the actual motivating sentiment was anti imperialism. The hole in the ozone layer was reverse by being anti-cfl, not pro-replacements. Meanwhile, solution-focused movements like the overfishing haven't been very effective.

It's not a pleasant thought, but I think people are just easier to rally against something than for something.

I’ve found that when it comes to their cars, people seem to get offended very easily (at least in my part of the U.S.). Case in point: I suggested physical traffic-calming solutions for my neighborhood in order to combat excessive speeding, and a community member said, “We don’t live in communist China.”

I am pro cars with petrol engines.

I am anti 5+ seat cars with 1 occupant in them.

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