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..
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.
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 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.
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.
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").
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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
Bad analogy (or, rather, reasonable analogy, but it's not making the point you're trying to make). And smoking's a bigger concern for asthmatics; have you taken that into account?
> and I don't believe some people who don't like it have the right to ban other people from doing it everywhere
If you can smoke without polluting everybody's air, then sure, go ahead. Otherwise, please don't.
Nope, but I adjust my diet to minimise the impact of my farting, and it pollutes the air much less. Plus, my farts aren't responsible for respiratory illnesses.
Business owners don't get to decide that for their staff, is why it's banned in businesses too.
You don't pay taxes to cover the health effects you have on other people.
FYI - the harmful stuff in popcorn has been identified and removed too, because we don't let popcorn workers sign up to die either.
Also - it's only unethical if you don't know what you're signing up for. The whole point of disclosure and hazard pay is to let adults choose whether to do something dangerous. Humans can decide if they want to do something or not. This whole idea that no one has a choice and everyone is a victim of circumstances is ridiculous (not to mention lazy, whiny, and ultimately futile).
AFAIK deep fryers don't give you cancer just by working around them.
> This whole idea that no one has a choice
People on low incomes with families to feed don't. Hope that helps you have some empathy.
We, as a society, have chosen their health over your smoking.
Call them home. Why do you think other people should be subject to the dangerous conditions you're imposing on them? Not just patrons but also workers.
Once the city cracked down on it, a few mothers with babies showed up for awhile to show that they really had always wanted to go there. Then it was empty and it went out of business. So why can't you stand the idea of a place existing where you wouldn't want to go, but other people might want to go? I don't go to orgies or to burning man, but I don't feel the need to shut them down.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
It's better now but not to the point that I haven't smelled cigarette smoke or haven't seen people smoking!
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.
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.
(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_...
That is essentially what the netherlands have been doing for decades.
Spoken like someone who's never smoked!
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.
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?
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.