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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

Not driving is not a solution.

The reason zoning in the US requires developments to take cars into account, is that people in the US want cars. And if someone builds a new residential or commercial development that doesn't recognize this reality, it creates problems for everyone as people have nowhere to put the cars that they definitely want to use.

Yes, there are some people who live in cities and are happy to have the entirety of their life limited to the region they can walk to, or the places where government-organized mass transportation can deliver them like cattle. But those people are the vast minority. Everyone else wants a car.

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Chicken and the egg. You can't really make people not want cars without better alternatives, which requires investments that aren't being made.

I want a car, because I need a car. But put in a few bullet trains and offshoots, a business model for vehicles that enables access to a $100/month consumer fleet of shared vehicles so I can grab a truck, minivan, whatever as needed, and I will happily skip ownership.

This is a fantasy. In general, people don't want a shared vehicle. If they did, everyone would own a 5-year-old Toyota Camry, and not luxury pickup trucks, sports cars, Mercedes and BMWs, etc.

The idea that these people are just sheep blinded by marketing is ludicrous. You might spend $5 on a beer instead of $4 because of marketing. You buy a $60,000 new vehicle over a $15,000 used one because it's a good product that you actually want.

in places where people don't need to buy neither a $15 or $60k private automobile, they don't buy any of them, they just ride the train or a bike like normal people do

visit tokyo, paris or any other transit oriented city and see for yourself

To contribute some rough anecdotal evidence, when I look out the window next to where I'm sitting this exact moment I see a mix of newer and older Honda Civics, Toyota Corollas, and some older SUVs. Judging from the age of those cars, I'm going to guess that most of their current owners bought them used and not new. I do not see a single pickup truck.

I'm not going to debate that the Ford F150 dominates new vehicle sales in north America, but that's only accounting for the preferences of people who are buying new vehicles and doesn't track what the used market would buy if given unlimited options.

As for the marketing argument, there's plenty of discourse surrounding it. Most new pickups are sold with short beds and extra features which make them impractical for use by many commercial trades that do use pickup trucks. There's a question of whether the F150s popularity is because of the truck's utility or because of the aesthetic desires of purchasers.

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