There is a significant population of folks who are car-hostile here on HN. Most will tell you that they aren't actually anti-car and they don't hate them - just everything about them.
Your easy solution would be...?
It’s all about priorities.
Maybe I’ll take the bus…oh wait…the nearest stop is 4 miles from my door.
However, since my comment was about the need for automobiles in rural areas because the distances between services are not supportive of mass transit and reasonable walkable distances. Folks that live in urban areas seem to forget that the bulk of this earth doesn’t have the luxury of a bus stop or train station a block away from their home and place of employment.
Obviously farmland is not the right place to put power plants (unless their emissions can be used to benefit crops - think reusing clean CO2 to feed crops in greenhouses) or waste treatment facilities (unless they produce fertilizers that can be used to increase crop yield).
Nobody is proposing to ban cars where they are actually needed - and there are a lot of good use cases for cars, but densely populated cities ARE NOT one of them. Also, banning cars from rural areas would probably not make a dent in avoidable pedestrian deaths, as most of them happen in more densely populated areas (such as suburbs, which are kind of in the middle between rural and urban). I'd be totally fine with banning manual driving in suburban areas as soon as self-driving cars prove safer than humans.
Furthermore, we could extend the mass-transit system with self-driving cars and trucks - no need to walk to the bus stop if you can have one pick you up by your door upon request. And, since it's per request, it doesn't even need to be a bus. Many short-term car-rental companies are looking for self-driving cars to remove the issue of having to pick up and return the car at a specified spot.
For a long time I didn't have a bus stop near my door - what I did was drive (a 15-minute drive) to the subway station parking building and use my tax-deducted park+ride year-long pass to get to my office.
My point was, originally, that arguing for solutions that might work in a high density urban environment doesn’t work in rural communities. Mass transit needs “mass”, by definition rural communities don’t provide that.
BTW, when self driving cars are an actual thing, feel free to propose them as a solution. I suspect jet packs would also be a great way to get to the bus stop as well.
And there's a significant population of folks who are bike-hostile here on HN.
In fact, there's probably a significant population of folks who are X-hostile, for any value of X you can conceive of, given the size of the HN userbase.
What's your point?
Contrary to OP's assertions, I actually do enjoy cars, but I don't think they work well at all in the city. I think there are better solutions out there (Japan is a leading example.)
The GP mentioned that people here are bike-hostile, but you don't see dozens of submissions from StrongRoads about how terrible bicycles are and how they're responsible for toxic individualism.
I think the reason we don't see dozens of submissions about how terrible bicycles are is because they don't kill car drivers to even remotely the same degree. I mean, come on.
Does your little observation, here, have any bearing on the article? Does it make the facts less factual? Does it make the numbers less number-y?
Hell, I tried to go back to the top-level comment to figure out what might've triggered you, but your original comment is a non sequitur as far as I can tell.
>"Does your little observation, here, have any bearing on the article?"
>"what might've triggered you"
My "little observation", is pretty condescending. So does the triggering comment. Again, illustrates my experience when having a dialogue with car-hostile people. You want to engage me on facts and numbers but you're using rhetorical swipes to try and discredit me.
This is not a valid reason to disagree about the article. The feelings the tone caused may also cause you to misjudge the rest of the evidence provided and may limit your ability to form a judgement based strictly on the facts presented.