It requires much less maintenance overhead, no license at all to drive, and you can technically take it cross country if you want.
Its fuel and thereby range is not determined by your financial status, only your health.
The car instead has a negative effect on our health and the infrastructure is much more costly and require much more maintenance, the pollution it creates has negative effects on our health too.
Big assumption that health is more easily procured than gas or electricity. The quest for good health is expensive in time and money too and for many people is limited by genetics or bad luck. You can't trade labor for health either and health declines with age limiting mobility.
It’s larger than a transportation issue
While I generally agree with you, surely this is not an egalitarian property of cycling.
Next to cars, bicycles are miles more egalitarian. Don't blame bicycles for the poor health of Americans.
Round where I'm from you see everyone from 7 to 70 cycling. And some very old people get three wheeled bikes so they don't have to worry about losing balance.
I can drift back in time just 20 years and point out that an automobile is the only reason I was able to pursue the career opportunities I did at that time. A bicycle is not fast enough to cover the distances. Mass transit didn't exist or was not available in times that matched those opportunities. Walking didn't work. Etc.
The other big thing to examine is the degree to which the lack of transit is a policy choice. If we took the billions of dollars spent subsidizing private car ownership and spent it on transit, the results would look a lot more like Europe, Asia, South America, or our own country a century ago. There’d be trade offs, of course, but those are important to consider as possibilities as we head into an era where climate change is going to cause many large problems and cars are around a quarter of our total emissions and EVs cut that number in half at best.
It is true that transit policy is a choice but it is one largely driven by economics. There is also an element of personal preference. Public transit is not pleasant or flexible.
Believing that the US would become eurplope or Asia if not for transportation policy is simply untrue. There are some regions that could adapt but the ones most likely to benefit from and use mass transit already have it and barely use it. The simple truth is our cities and geographies are different.
The tradeoffs you gloss over are likely to be much lore significant. They start with the tremendous investment required to add these where they don't exist and end with the mix of economic and quality or life impacts inherent in this type of travel.
EV do not drop total emissions out of the gate. Most start with a higher carbon footprint (and environmental impact) than ice vehicles and do not break even until more than half way through the expected life cycle. You do get some gains after break even but those benefits are mostly on relocation rather than reduction and are reset when the car hits battery replacement. I like EV's but they aren't the panacea they're presented as and come with their own problems.
The bottom line is that the automobile for all of its flaws represents complete freedom of movement not offered by any other means available to the average citizen. And you want to do away with it.
You were referring to your next sentence, it appears:
> It is true that transit policy is a choice but it is one largely driven by economics. There is also an element of personal preference. Public transit is not pleasant or flexible.
It is driven by economics, which is driven by the policy decisions I mentioned. When private car usage is as heavily subsidized as it's been in the United States for the last century, it's not surprising that it can be cheaper for many people but that's just saying that the core principle of economics (people respond to incentives) is still true.
Similarly, your aesthetic preferences are not only not universal but in large part cultural. Sitting in traffic is not pleasant, nor is getting hefty repair bills at inconvenient times, etc. but you've been encultured to think of that as the natural order of things and having spent so much money on cars and car-centric living discourages contemplation on that point.
> Believing that the US would become eurplope or Asia if not for transportation policy is simply untrue. There are some regions that could adapt but the ones most likely to benefit from and use mass transit already have it and barely use it. The simple truth is our cities and geographies are different.
Continuing your trend, this is untrue on all counts. The United States has more land but 80% of the population is urban. In areas where transit is good, people use it heavily. The primary reason people do not use transit is that driving has been massively subsidized and transit systems are typically treated as a last resort for poor people, but that doesn't say people wouldn't use it if we made different decisions. Car centric sprawl has shaped a lot of what Americans who don't travel think of as natural but that's a choice, not a natural law.
The lived experience of the vast majority of US citizens is an illegitimate viewpoint? Whose viewpoints deserve a seat at the table?
You 'could' take it cross country but that depends on your health and financial status...which means you won't because it's incredibly impractical for the vast majority of people.
a car, as bad and costly as it is, shields you from that.
end of femto nitpick
> you can technically take it cross country
And "technically" anyone could take mass transit, yet he shows that (at least in the US) they do not. In the end what matters for public policy is what people and up actually doing, not what they theoretically could do.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/hycbb0/olivi...
> fat
2. See 1, up to a point. For morbidly obese people, see 1. so you don't become morbidly obese.
> physically disabled people
See 1. For serious disability, most of those people can't drive, either. More than that, cars still have their uses, so I agree. Let's promote cars PRIMARILY for seriously disabled people. Abled bodied people, public transit, bikes, foot/electric scooters.
> OTOH they can't drive a bicycle. That's not very egalitarian.
Entire countries can.
China was initially built on bikes. As was Vietnam. As is the Netherlands.
Countries which are some of the most egalitarian in the world.
Let's not pretend cars are not the middle and upper class comfortable transportation devices. Cars are very, very convenient. Convenience is amazing, but it's also a slow poison.
You can't really be morbidly obese, for example, if you don't have access to a car. I mean, you probably can, but the odds of that happening are so low it's not worth taking about that scenario.
Micromobility overall is more egalitarian than the car will ever be, and better in lots of other ways too.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=mobility+scooter
I guess this is the same old ignorance of the right.
I can also throw meaningless insults, sigh...
Some get three wheeled bikes if they have balance problems.