Comment by _rrnv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _rrnv | Hacker News Reader

Haha what a cute title and argument, "the only". Now let me tell you why it's bullshit. If you think about it really well, "the only" group that needs a car as a necessity and not luxury are parents. Everyone else can pretty much take care of themselves using public or for-hire transport. But parents... they have kids. And especially the little ones, you never know when you need to move. And when you need, you need to do it like right now. And try fitting two or more car seats in these ultra-light vehicles. And then putting the screaming wiggling kid in it. And then a stroller and some bags to go. Good luck.

The narrow minded innovative hipsters who try to "disrupt" are cute, I remember being like that in my 20s. I'm almost 40 now, with small kids and let me tell you. I have no energy to even care about anything. I need a big car to fit all the family and our junk. I need to move from point A to B with the least disruption possible. Preferably with the kids asleep in the car seats. I really really don't care about anything else. And sure as hell I won't trade my sanity for hopping public transportation and extending my trip by a few hours to appease some eco friendly conscious 20-something hipsters who have all the time in the world to do their meaningless self-serving I-want-to-feel-good-about-myself-and-the-world bullshit. Especially when my kids are sick with fever screaming bloody murder.

So no, living in the city or in the suburbs, parents wont trade their SUV and Vans any time soon. But be my guest, you singles do it. Ultra-lights are not "the only" viable future. I rode a bike and subway all my teens and 20s. And you should too, so the parents can ride their tanks and not end up in mental hospitals. And our species can continue.

While I agree with you that I don't see a role for these ultra-lights, the rest of your argument makes absolutely no sense. I have never once had a problem fitting two kids and all our 'junk' into a perfectly normal sized sedan. Hell my sedan has more trunk space than some SUVs I've seen. Yes, lots of people need normal cars, and some people with lots of kids need vans. Basically no one "needs" an SUV.

Many people love to make rules for other people. Those who through no initiative of their own can afford to walk/bike everywhere they need to, or wait for public transportation because their schedules are flexible, won't be affected by rules making car ownership and use more onerous. They see only the broad or long-term or in-theory effects and not the impact on real living people right now. It's the exact same phenomenon as - possibly even a reaction to - older people who just happen to have lived in an era of stable jobs and cheap houses criticizing young people for not behaving "professionally" or saving enough. See also: non-drinkers happy to ban drinking, non-smokers happy to ban smoking, traditionalists happy to legislate others' sexual or reproductive lives. It all comes down to lack of empathy.

Here's the thing: good (to the extent that the concept has any meaning at all) lies in decisions requiring effort. Being born into a particular circumstance confers no virtue. Other people are born into different circumstances, facing different choices, and those should be respected. Someone born into a US suburb is in a different situation than someone born into a European or Japanese city. Millions of people who control politics in thousands of towns aren't suddenly going to act against their own economic self interest (as home owners) to turn modern suburbs into something better. That's going to take a lot of work, most of it incremental and having to do with incentives or power structures rather than specific issues.

Getting to a less car-centric culture would be absolutely fantastic, but people who dismiss the means of getting there with a hand-wave, or propose paths that are convenient for them but burdensome to others, aren't really engaged in problem solving. It's just idle musing at best, more often an old-fashioned display of group affiliation or (unearned/imaginary) dominance. The irony is that such anti-cooperative behavior is exactly what got us where we are now.

I'm a bit disappointing I didn't read this reply before replying to your other reply in earnest. Honestly, this comment reads as more as a personal projection about the kinds of people who want to have more transportation options, than anything actually constructive.

It's hilarious to actually _blame_ the anti-car stance as the thing that got us in to this situation in the first place. Like it wasn't a fight won in heartfelt debates, rather a systemic lobbying by the auto industry to fundamentally rebuild the post war US into one where automobiles are absolutely necessary for most people.

I've left a bunch of actionable advice in the other thread hopefully you'll read up on it, overall this kind of intellectual dead-ending is dreadfully sad to see on HN

Nowhere did I blame anti-car people for the current situation. That's a total strawman, and - as you say - sad to see on HN. But not surprising. I'm also well aware of strongtowns and missingmiddle and so on, and often draw my arguments from them. If you look back in my history, as you already seem to have done but only to cherry-pick and escalate, you should be able to see that.

I do want more transportation options. I grew up in a city where there were more (overseas) and have traveled to many more. But I also see a continuing role for cars, and better for them to be EV than ICE. And I'm sick to death of people who sit around and kibitz, as if we can quantum-leap from one state to another - whether it exists elsewhere or not - instead of doing the work to get there through the incremental paths still available to us. That's the real intellectual dead end. Intellect should be employed for understanding and planning and problem solving, not merely wishing problems away and throwing fallacies at anyone who disagrees with that approach.

This is a deeply strange way to complain about a group of people you don't like.

How does this argument translate to London or Tokyo, I wonder?

This is phrased rather argumentatively, but the points are good ones. I also believe that these micro-cars merely fill a small niche in the transport ecosystem. They are far from "the only".

Tradies. Various professionals and technicians that need to carry around equipment. Sales people. Families. People with large dogs. People who visit the outdoors frequently, e.g. for skiing. Those are just some groups who would not use a microcar.

The "need" for an SUV is a band-aid fix for American suburbs. The build environment really necessitates it, especially in sprawling suburbs. But again, people raise families without owning a car perfectly fine in modern European cities.

Cool observation. Also a common one. Now: how do we transition from the American model to the European one, in the face of perverse financial incentives and how government at all levels works? The detours we've already taken make that quite difficult. Pointing to a destination is not quite the same as providing a workable route to get there, let alone actually helping push the cart. It's really just kibitzing, which has always been a way to claim credit for right answers and quietly walk away from wrong ones. Risk free. A constructive approach would be to consider what role can be filled by EVs of various types, not just dump on them for not being perfect.

Sure, as you mentioned lobbying and money in politics is probably the biggest hurdle as it basically maligns most projects for social good with profits for the biggest lobbyists. Local governments have a lot of power in this regard, they're able to set parking minimums and potentially zoning for denser residential areas.

Regional support would be needed for a more comprehensive public transit options, railways, bus routes etc. Also at the regional / state level we would stop subsiding suburban communities. States often foot the initial bill for roads / water / sewage and suburbs are usually not able to self-fund for repairs needed in 10/20/30 years respectively, so they rely on denser areas taxes (mostly commercial tax) to make up for it. [1]

The financial incentives are there, denser urban areas already provide much of the tax income needed to make public services feasible and make up for the sprawl around a city that it's residents can't pay for. [2]

To your point about "detours" we've taken, sure it will be a multi-decade project but places like Amsterdam / London have a pretty good roadmap for regulating car-centric infrastructure. EVs really only exist to extend the life of an industry that's already extracted billions in profit by lobbying that car based transit was the only way to go. ICE vehicles are a massive liability in the face of an energy crisis, and the US heavily subsidies gasoline prices. In other countries this is already priced in, and that incentivizes alternative forms of transit and better designed cities.

[1] - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon... [2] - https://urbexsolutions.com/city-revenue-geographies-categori...

> EVs really only exist to extend the life of an industry

That's just silly, since EVs don't burn those fuels. They exist to prolong the life of a road and housing infrastructure, which has both positive and negative aspects to it but is in any case unavoidable during what is sure to be a long transition. Again, bashing them for not being the perfect quantum leap to an ideal state is not productive. Small improvements are still improvements.

>And try fitting two or more car seats in these ultra-light vehicles

If you don't mind rustling some upper middle class jimmies you can run older car seats. They're much more compact.

Car seats intentionally use designed obsolescence. The plastics get weaker over time and won't meet their ratings. You aren't suppose to use old ones at all.

I feel like a car seat wouldn't matter that much when an ultralight vehicle and an SUV are in a collision anyway, so you could probably just skip it.

That's a good argument! Could even argue the police fines for doing this are the costs of running the family ;)

Maybe not ultra-light but parents do not need SUVs.

Are you a parent of 2 or more kids saying this? If so, I applaud you. Otherwise, you have no clue.

What can a SUV do that a van, station wagon or sedan simply cannot?

Hide a lot of kids in the blind spots, mostly.

> Maybe not ultra-light but parents do not need SUVs.

True; I don't have an SUV, but my Volvo stationwagon is both longer and wider than most SUVs.

It's hard to argue that people don't need stationwagons.

> "the only" group that needs a car as a necessity and not luxury are parents.

I'm as pro-public-transit, pro-cycling as they come. But yes, there are plenty of reasons cars are needed:

- Parents (like you said)

- People without the ability to walk long distances (older/sick people, etc)

- Anyone who needs to go to Ikea / Costco / whatever and buy something big

- Delivery vehicles (not everything is suitable for cargo bike delivery)

- People who live outside urban areas

etc

And that's all fine. In a dense city, I think there is plenty of middle ground where everyone is happy and most people get along great most of the time without driving.

I agree that articles like this claiming absolutes are silly.

I feel like the use-case identified for ultra-light cars in this article is the worst argument for cars of any size. There are lots of cases where a small urban electric vehicle could be all you need, but a lot of those cases are also (or better!) covered by public transit or biking or something similar. In cases where you actually need a car, you're probably better off with a slightly larger vehicle. For a lot of the downsides of cars, like traffic, parking, etc, making cars smaller doesn't solve the problems nearly as well as getting them off the road entirely.

To put it another way, ultra tiny EVs you use for every trip seem like a much worse future than a future where you have a larger EV you don't have to use as often because there are good alternatives to driving that cover a lot of your needs.

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