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Comment by sublimefire | Hacker News Reader

Multiple years ago it was something to us - something new. There are too many people who do not care about it (similar services) these days, people are born with the internet and just take it for granted.

Another analogy could be the gas car industry. We just look at it differently nowadays, we prioritize pollution and do not think much of the fact that you could easily travel around the world in any of these gas guzzlers. You could not do it in a Tesla or any other electric car, yet many want to just kill it off.

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> yet many want to just kill it off.

That's not because we take what cars can do for granted, it's because individual traffic is a major contributor to the mechanism that is actively killing our habitat. That isn't an opinion, it's a proven, peer reviewed, often-challenged-never-falsified fact.

And no, EVs will not make that better. They are just a different instance of the same problem.

So yes, we do want to "kill off" cars. Not because we take them for granted, but because they suck as an idea, have always sucked as an idea, and will always suck as an idea, no matter how they are powered.

What do you think of the argument that EVs actually do make this better, albeit not entirely, due to the efficiency difference between[0] (coal-fired) power plants and internal combustion engines in gasoline powered vehicles?

[0] https://blog.ucsusa.org/jimmy-odea/electric-vs-diesel-vs-nat...

There are many more ways that cars cause problems to our habitat much beyond carbon emission, they include: requiring roads which pave over local ecosystems and create heat islands and exasperates drainage, requiring large open parking lots which make a city less traversable in any form of transportation beside cars (but parking structures are better I suppose), creating noise pollution (a bit part of it is tire noise, EVs aren't silent at medium to high speeds), causing eutrophication and health issues when ablated tire particles get collected into runoff, also that cars are much deadlier per capita than most other forms of transportation like walking, biking, subway, airplane, (but safer than motorcycles if I remember correctly)

> What do you think of the argument...

I think that a single train can hold over 1000 people, and requires much less energy, not to mention space, materials, infrastructure and maintenance, than hundreds of individual cars in which these 1000 people sit in 1s or maybe 2s.

Again, it doesn't matter how they are powered; cars suck as an idea; simply because of how horribly they scale. They require tons of resources to build, they require tons of resources to maintain. They eat up tons of space. They kill hundreds of thousands of people per year. They are energy inefficienct compared to trains.

Oh, and railway-based public transport systems would be trivially easy to automate, compared to cars.

If we invested even a sizeable fraction of the resources into public transport that we waste on building ever more lanes and ever bigger parking lot hells right through our cities (aka. our livingspace), barely anyone outside of actual rural areas, would even need a car.

And this isn't a pipe dream. This is how actual people in actual cities live, today. Many european and asian cities are completely accessible by public transport.

It sounds like you’re more interested in trains than solutions to global warming.

> This is how actual people in actual cities live, today. Many european and asian cities are completely accessible by public transport.

And many people hate it too. Look at the popularity of cabs/ubers/limos in those cities.

Scaling up packing as many people as possible into cities is not a desirable goal to significant chunks of people.

> It sounds like you’re more interested in trains than solutions to global warming.

No, it really doesn't sound like that.

Trains, and other public transport vehicles, in comparison to the damage that individual traffic does, ARE a contributing solution to global warming.

> Scaling up packing as many people as possible into cities is not a desirable goal to significant chunks of people.

Oh really? Then how did cities come to be in the first place?

But you know what really makes cities a hell to live in? Covering them with multi-lane roads and giant parking lots for those flotillas of pointless metal boxes with rubber wheels.

> Oh really? Then how did cities come to be in the first place?

Because it was and is the only way to escape poverty for many people.

I grew up in a small city and the majority of my classmates had to go to larger city to get a good job.

This effect was very extreme during the early 1900s especially when the Great Depression hit. Either starve on the farm or move to filthy city. Cities being desirable for anyone but the rich is a very recent phenomenon.

Honest question: doesn’t the factor of individual freedom to move anywhere you want any time you want have any weight in this matter for you? You’ve got good points and I live in a rich European country for 7 years without a car, but there are other aspects of this kind of forced communal life that depress me quite a lot. In fact the problem here for me is exactly that you don’t need a car because even if you have, there is nothing interesting to do with it.

> Honest question: doesn’t the factor of individual freedom to move anywhere you want any time you want have any weight in this matter for you?

Let's get the obvious out of the way first:

Does it matter more than keeping our habitat viable to support the continuous exstence of our species? No. No it does not.

With that out of the way: I don't see why individual freedom to move would be impacted by this. Imagine a world where we invest as much into public transport as we now do into cars. Imagine how spacious, frequent and comfortable the public transport is in that world.

Additionally, focusing on PublicTransport doesn't mean cars need to be abolished completely. Need a car for a day? Where I live I can rent one (and a nice one at that) within minutes on my phone, and get it from a public garage where it is stored.

We will need to have street infrastructure in the future as well anyway: Local delivery, emergency vehicles, construction, etc. That's fine. That can stay. And so can rentable cars for those in-between times when people actually need a car.

I disagree that they suck as an idea, they're just a misapplied one. Cars and combustion engines have done a lot for humanity. The bad ideas were: making excuses to sell as many cars as possible, investing in car infrastructure over mass transit, deceiving the public about the dangers of global warming once discovered, and for 50 years afterwards, ignoring/downplaying other externalities of fossil fuel extraction and use... Cars aren't really the villains in this story. It's just people being foolish and greedy, which they'll still be for the foreseeable future.

I think that's a very important and true argument, and something I have thought about for a while.

The thing is that these places only have value if people put in an effort, which is more likely to be the case when the platform and/or technology is new and only known by people who a priori have put in an effort to access it at all. When you mostly accessed web sites from desktop computers, you would be limited to use online platforms in the relatively small time window where you had free time at home, so the personal cost of using the platform was higher because you had to choose to take that time from other tasks that also required your computer.

Now everyone have a smartphone in their pockets and can access any online service at any time of the day, so the required effort to use them is a small fraction of what it used to be. As a result, the average user is not motivated to actually put in any effort, and because of this the quality suffers tremendously.

Maybe we should raise that lower bound on effort by requiring users to solve CAPTPTYCs - Completely Automated Programs To Prove That You Care - before you were allowed to interact with anyone online. A sort of proof-of-work for people to ensure that they have spent at least as much time on the content as they have on solving the puzzle that allowed them to publicize it.

> we prioritize pollution and do not think much of the fact that you could easily travel around the world in any of these gas guzzlers

This example supports your point, but not in the way you think.

Back when Bertha Benz (wife of Karl Benz, the founder of Mercedes-Benz) took the first ‘road trip’ to another part of Germany, she had to fill up the tank at a local chemist, had to cool the engine with water from ditches and streams, and had to have her brakes repaired by a local cobbler. [1]

Nowadays, people take it for granted that cars are reliable and that there are gas stations everywhere.

[1] https://www.hotcars.com/the-story-of-bertha-benz-and-the-fir...

when the planet is dead we can't go anywhere

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