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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

No, the joke is taxing poor people (and everyone, frankly) with mandatory car purchases.

If you can't walk or bike to work, your society has failed to build affordable housing relative to low to moderate incomes, or it has failed in urban planning. It's certainly one of those two.

Obviously there exclusings for people such as farmers or if you actively choose to live far away from your job, but in doing so you should directly feel that cost with high purchase prices for a vehicle (which means you'll also repair it, right to repair and all right?), high fuel tax, and extreme inconvenience if you are driving to a city.

Ultimately economic physics will dictate this reality, no new technology will "save us" in time before costs become too extreme for this car-centric lifestyle to continue. I'm just hoping there isn't too much damage done to human civilization via resource conflicts and that we survive our stupidity.

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And the irony here is that you're complaining about taxing the poor while living in an affluent suburb. Unless you still live with your parents, you chose to live in a part of the city with expensive housing and no public transportation.

Move to Franklinton and you'll have buses and scooters and no need to own a car. Most of my neighbors have cars but they don't use them most days. I bike to the gym and all of downtown. I do take my car grocery shopping (carry bags on bus or scooter sucks) and to work (when I go) but that's it. I enjoy cars but I avoid driving out of obligation.

The lifestyle you chose is car-centric but you chose it, and I think that's a very important detail.

> And the irony here is that you're complaining about taxing the poor while living in an affluent suburb.

I'm not sure how this is ironic. Maybe you mean how poor voters tend to vote against their own self-interest?

> The lifestyle you chose is car-centric but you chose it, and I think that's a very important detail.

We're moving to GV next month specifically to move away from this lifestyle and we only have one car that we share. Economic freedom dictates what decisions you make at different points in time.

FWIW you can criticize something that you yourself are doing, especially when you are fighting against all societal incentives at the same time. A trivial example is an overweight physician suggesting that you need to lose weight.

If we're still talking Columbus, almost all incentives for housing are geared only toward a car-centric lifestyle. I'm not going to criticize people for choosing that. I am going to raise awareness that continuing to push those incentives is a bad idea and highlight the continued unnecessary costs for doing so.

You are arguing for the perfect over the good. Transitioning from gas to electric fuel in cars is hard but achievable in 15 years. Reconfiguring the built environment for the entire country is unachievable.

You can do all of those at once. For example, you can just transition ICE to EV. Set that aside.

Reconfiguring the built environment is not only achievable but has been done in the past. You can take a look at Amsterdam as an example. Look at pictures from the 70s or so and then look at it today.

You also don't have to "reconfigure" the environment. We could just stop building new highways and eliminate minimum parking spot requirements. We can change our zoning laws to allow for more medium-density. In Columbus, where I live we have a street called High Street that runs north/south and connects all of the walkable areas of the city and Ohio State University. It's relatively easy to just run a tram right down the road there and displace car traffic. There are low-hanging fruit. It's way cheaper than rebuilding highways which we do all the time, and if we can do that we can reconfigure whatever we want.

There are a lot of things we can do.

Starting from a point of defeatism is not something that's compatible with how I personally operate.

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