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Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

I've said it before and I'll say it again: building the future around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable. We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in the developing world without mass catastrophe (raw materials/labor needed for construction and maintenance, raw materials/labor/space needed for roads and parking lots, literal tons of waste--batteries, tires, steel, plastic, foam--, energy needed--most cars are driven by a single driver, pollution generated by all of this--e.g. mining byproducts and tire burn off).

To be completely explicit:

- If we're serious about meeting the 2030 "halve our emissions" and 2050 "zero our emissions" goals, EVs will not get there. Banning gas/diesel cars gets there. The only way that's even remotely possible is to heavily subsidize EVs (probably honestly just providing free swaps) and start making it way way more easier to get by w/o a car.

- The only problem that self-driving cars will ever solve is where to put VC money in a zero interest rate world. We've had freight trains and mass transit for centuries.

I get that whole economies are built around producing/maintaining cars and related infra, but it was wildly disastrous. We're well into sunk cost fallacy territory here, like, on a species level.

View on HN

Fully agreed. And while everything you said is super important and true, one piece that really makes me pumped about this movement to ditch cars is more around quality of life.

If you have to get in a car and drive to a parking lot somewhere to get groceries, commute to work, go out with friends, get healthcare, etc. You will obviously live a less healthy life both physically but also mentally because of it. Walking is exercise, it's something we were all evolved to do and it keeps us healthy physically and mentally. It also encourages community when everyone isn't surrounded by a metal and plastic multi-ton machine. I recently moved to a walkable part of my city and it's actually amazing how much it's benefited my life. I say hi to neighbors and people who walk routes like I do, I get fresh air since not every street is filled to the brim with cars, but honestly one of the best effects is silence. Cars our LOUD. Even electric cars unfortunately, it really has little to do with the sound of the engine at speeds like 30mph, it's more about wind and tire noise. Meanwhile, people walking, biking, or on scooters are silent and it's brought me a lot of peace.

I totally agree about the noise and health benefits, but to me it's more a matter of respect and safety. In the U.S., we see too many pedestrians die each year. Our roads are built for cars only, with everything else as an afterthought. When I cross the street, drivers act like it's my responsibility to stay out of their way.

If some people need to use cars for mobility or business reasons, that is fine with me. But they need to have the utmost respect for me as a pedestrian/bicyclist. And the way to accomplish that is to make streets that force cars to slow down and watch out. If we make our cities safe for walking and biking, more people will do so!

> If some people need to use cars for mobility or business reasons, that is fine with me.

Definitely. For stuff like that, emergency services, delivery, trash collection, etc. larger vehicles on streets are totally fine and I think most would agree.

I don't even necessarily think we should ban all cars, but we should definitely stop incentivizing them by heavily subsidizing car infrastructure with city budgets funded by taxpayers. I think if we stop the incentives that were heavily lobbied for by car companies we'll find the _true_ most efficient ways to build cities which will most likely be heavily geared toward walkability and bike-ability, public transport, etc.

worth visiting an old city like Rome. I was shocked by how walkable it was. It was maybe the second night we were there, we causally strolled around after dinner and just happenstance managed to walk by all the major attractions. That's no mistake but honestly when you experience it's so magical. To create a tech analogy I remember the days before Google when search when would have 20 buttons and could take regex and what not. Most people had no idea how to use it and even pros questioned if they were correctly searching so to speak than Google came along and just gave us a box. All that complexity hidden away from us. That was kind of how I felt about Rome. Just wander, you'll get to where you want to go.

> I was shocked by how walkable it was.

I don't see why it would be shocking. It was a city for nearly 3,000 years before cars arrived.

People who grew up in a typical post-ww2 american suburb may not have ever stayed somewhere that doesn't depend entirely on cars to get around outside of manufactured spaces like theme parks.

The American suburbian hellscape is real. I live in one. As far as I can tell the only solution is to burn everything down and start over. I'm open to suggestions though.

Yep, there’s a great book on this topic called “The Geography of Nowhere”. There’s a reason Disney designs things to feel like real places (that don’t exist in America anymore).

Most pre-industrial cities were limited by how far you could walk in 30 minutes to the center of town where the markets and government would be.

Most people walked everywhere, especially in a city.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-29/the-commu...

i've never been in rome but i visited trieste - a very walkable city - a few weeks ago and i was shocked how cars were clogging up everything there. not necessarily cars driving, but parked cars. maybe trieste is a bit special because big parts of it are on a steep hill so it's not that well suited for cycling but none the less, i was very disappointed. not a pleasure with kids. i asked an italian friend about it and his answer was: "welcome to italy".

so, walkable - yes, maybe. but cities that get rid of cars are still on a completely different level when it comes to quality.

I’ve been to a good amount of Italian cities and would agree it’s the same mess of cars all over the place, like anywhere else. I also went to Rome for the first time half a year ago and it wasn’t the mess of cars and Vespas I imagined it was going to be, so hey, perhaps Rome is the anomaly.

> the same mess of cars all over the place, like anywhere else

there are first attempts to reduce the car mess in some cities, mostly by reducing public surface parking and making public transport and biking a viable alternative to car ownership.

The turistic center has big pedonal areas.

However, the rest of the city is as full of cars as it may get.

I have to say, it mostly remains walkable. It just would be so much nicer with more efficient public transportation and less private cars.

On another HN thread it was discussed that because road wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale to the fourth with vehicle weight, a few large delivery vehicles are far worse than many lighter ones. It is better for us all to use the lightest vehicle we can to go get groceries and take our garbage to the recycling facility (or landfill) than to have trahs trucks, delivery trucks, or busses move us about. Trains or other steel wheeled things are the best.

> road wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale to the fourth with vehicle weight,

(Emphasis mine) Do you have a source for this? I do not see how this specific claim could be true, and I am not sure how exactly that needs to be modified to make it true.

I mean, if you take a vehicle that weights one ton and double the number of wheels, that specific claim says that the road/tire wear would not change, as the vehicle weight stays the same. Further, doubling the wheels can't easily be distinguished from splitting the load to two vehicles with half the weight, which should reduce wear & tear of each vehicle to one sixteenth, totaling to one eighth. So there is kind of a contradiction.

And as a sanity check, a passenger car weights ~10^3 kg. A large truck weights ~10^4. So a truck would wear the road something like as much as 10 000 passenger cars. That's a bit hard to believe.

So the actual law might be something like tear & wear scales to the fourth of the weight on a single wheel. But even that leaves something to hope, as I think you need to assume similar wheels. So maybe the actual law has something to do with pressure on the road?

The original fourth power law relates to axle loads, which as you point out is not the same as what I said. So we should get rivian to add a lot more wheels on those amazon trucks. But even if they put as many on as they could fit, the capacity and load is so much higher than what each person getting a delivery would use, you are still in the hole vs a normal ev not to mention a trike just big enough to pop over to the warehouse at the train station to pick up your packages.

Edit: forgot to paste link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

>That's a bit hard to believe.

The way I heard it explained was imagine a toddler jumping up and down on your bed. They could do this indefinitely. Now imagine a rugby player doing the same. The bed wouldn’t last very long.

At the same time larger vehicles generally have a better engine size to capacity ratio, so if you don’t want to pillage the earth for raw earths, lithium, cobalt etc. then large vehicles are still good.

Those Amazon delivery trucks are pretty light weight.

It's not like they are hauling sand, the boxes are mostly empty.

A lot of that can be solved by law too. I know a lot of Americans would see this as an infringement of their freedoms but it’s quite common in other countries to place the order of responsibility to the most vulnerable to least vulnerable. What I mean by this is that cyclists need to give way to pedestrians, and cars need to give way to cyclists and pedestrians. I’ve never quite understood the logic behind jaywalking laws because it penalises the vulnerable rather than places greater responsibility on those who are least vulnerable.

It's useless to build a straight road, 4 wide lanes, then stick a sign on the side going "pls no speederino". The roads and the streets themselves need to be designed so that they do not allow unsafe use. Meaning any road/street shared by pedestrians needs to have narrow lanes, few lanes, sidewalks separated by e.g. a row of trees, speed bumps and raised crosswalks, bollards separating lanes, chicanes, etc.

That's already the norm in the UK. To be honest I'd forgotten many residential roads in the US were dual cartridge ways. That does make things more tricky.

In some Canadian cities, they build the residential streets with only one lane (there’s still traffic in two directions), and it solves both the speed problem and helps with the density problem. I hated it at first, but once I’ve parked my car (probably to take the bus, no less), I’ve thought, gee this is nice.

US pedestrians die at a higher rate than elsewhere but not because you have a lot more vehicle miles, it's down to the appalling quality of the roads (design construction, and maintenance), the shockingly casual attitude to drinking and driving, and the fact that so many US vehicles are pedestrian hostile.

But all of those things seem to be an expression of the US majority way of thinking. That is what needs changing; if you don't pedestrians will still be run over by drunk drivers, etc.

I would personally give way to vehicles of any kind when walking, rather than expect them to give way to me. I have better visibility and awareness, I am easily manueverable and I can stop faster.

I will not put my life in the hands of someone and just hope they see me in order to give way to me. I will take the initiative and be responsible for myself, not require others to be responsible for me... That is called "being a burden".

This is such an interesting comment to me because it gets so much right on how to motivate ditching cars. If you were funding a campaign to eliminate cars to reduce carbon emissions I think you would meet with widespread resistance. If you promote an idea of a higher quality life that is possible w/o cars and explore that - in the end I think you'd end up removing many more cars than the first approach.

I think the root cause is further up the chain of casuality. People need cars because they live in the suburbs, they live in the suburbs because they have children, they want to raise children in more square footage than the urban housing stock offers.

Notable exception being Tokyo

Ironically, if you look NYC in the 1910s, kids used to play baseball in the street because it wasn't yet overrun by cars, suddenly not enough space for kids, so move to the suburbs, which means more and more cars...

And suburbs are not built around public transit anymore, those old enough to have been have mostly shut it down.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

I live on a street that used to have a streetcar line on it! Now it's just a stroad and traffic monstrosity but I sometimes daydream of hopping on the streetcar and going to meet up with friends downtown.

I'm in the suburbs but like you an older one and more densely packed. I'm maybe a mile from a major highway that goes to the city center. It's dead straight and major thoroughfare. If they dedicated one line to rail, none of that mixed BS, and had stops say every mile into the city my god it would be amazing.

Are you sure it is more densely packed? Where I live the streetcar suburbs are slightly less dense than modern suburbs. In the 1950s lot sizes went up, but they have mostly come down again. (streetcar suburbs were built assuming you would get some food from your garden. 1950's suburbs were built by/for people who remembered the depression and wanted a large lot for a garden - or that is my theory.

Streetcar suburbs are not 1950s suburbs, they are 1900s-1930s suburbs. 1950s suburbs are car suburbs.

Right, we have all 3, and they have different forms. 1950s is the least dense.

You're leaving how a key part, at least in America which is racism. Whites ran to the suburbs to escape particular groups and quite frankly still do albeit now it's more in the form of urban sprawl.

This is BS. People go to suburbs because they want a nice house, not because they are trying to run away from race. I grew up in a mix-race suburb. I loved my houses and my friends houses. We had great times on our cul-de-sac since it didn't allow through traffic it was safe to play in the street. We loved our backyard pool. We loved our garage that had a radial saw and a large tool desk. We loved our large 30x20ft family room where we had large slumber parties and large family parties. It requires zero racism to want a house in the suburbs.

Historically, suburbs absolutely were motivated by racism - it's called "white flight".

Today, it usually isn't about racism, it's mostly just continuing status-quo trends without question. But it's important to not put the initial motivation of those trends up on a pedestal.

No need to be personally defensive. What the other comment says is entirely true. There was a mass migration, particularly during the civil rights movement. Here's just one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#/media/File:Gary,...

Plenty of other data shows the same thing. Racism is very much a part of what built suburban america in the large even if it doesn't apply to you or your family personally.

> I think the root cause is further up the chain of casuality. People need cars because they live in the suburbs, they live in the suburbs because they have children, they want to raise children in more square footage than the urban housing stock offers.

Modern suburbs were created by central policy in many ways; the FHA wouldn't underwrite loans for properties with small lots or in mixed-use areas.

Sure, but I'm not sure that's at the root either. Suburbs exist in part due to subsidy decisions on automotive infrastructure. And they're in a stress point in the return-to-office work remote debate now, because even with subsidies on highway infrastructure the commutes to get back to city centers are a major time waste. Offsetting 2-3 hours of family life with commute time is a major quality of life negative.

You've got it backwards. There are suburbs because car infrastructure subsidises many of the costs of that choice. Suburbs are a postwar, post-interstate phenomenon.

"suburbs" dont have to be the unwalkable disasters that we've made them. Brooklyn Heights was "america's first suburb." People moved there from Manhattan seeking everything you just mentioned.

Public school quality and levels of crime (or at least perception of crime) are also huge factors driving parents of small children out of dense cities and into suburbs. Somehow most city governments have been taken over by progressive idealogues who are intent on pushing their luxury beliefs regardless of the negative impact on education or middle-class quality of life. This is how we end up with schools run for the benefit of teacher's unions rather than students, fentanyl dealers in the neighborhood parks, homeless tents on the sidewalks, and organized shoplifting rings excused as reparations for the oppressed.

If we want to give people the option of living without cars then let's start by fixing our cities.

People want suburbia because crime is often lower. Why won't we accept this reality. I don't understand why so called progressives don't just face this issue head on. Increasing incarceration rates makes cities safer. It's true that some small number of people will be jailed. It's also true that more people would move to cities.

And before someone throws out some nonsense politics. I live in the inner city (less than a mile to downtown) in a west coast major city. I can count several neighbors on my block, people who've lived here decades, who are leaving due to crime / rampant drug use.

I'm in an east coast city. I've visited big west coast cities numerous times. I feel our problems are very different. You have policies that support the homeless and people with drug addictions so people facing those challenges flock to cities like yours from all over the country. The nations problems are then dumped on places like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. It's not fair and it's not right. We need better federal safety nets to prevent people from getting into these positions to begin with and if they do safety nets that allow them to stay in their hometown.

Incarceration rates in this country are sky-high compared to others with lower crime. Crime rates were decreasing well before incarceration boomed, too. The evidence is incredibly clear that incarceration is not an effective anti-crime measure, to anyone willing to look.

Obviously lower incarceration correlates with lower crime. When crime is low you need to lock fewer people up.

I would suggest people making this claim learn about the difference between correlation and causality.

And then look at El Salvador. It is incredibly clear that increased incarceration lowers crime.

"Notable exception being Tokyo"

The fact that the japanese in general have no children at all makes this notable exception not be one at all. Humans are not meant to live on top of one another. To me the correlation between fertility and urbanization is a clear sign that living on the burbs is a plus for quality of life and the perpetuation of the human race. Cars are just a necessary tool for being a human in 2023.

Heavily disagree with that humans aren’t meant to live on top of each other. We are a tribal species. We all slept together in caves, huddled under the same furs, building housing that expands to fit all our elderly and our young under the same roof. But we were also meant to roam, our toddlers literally run nonstop. We’re not built to yield to concrete paths bearing metal beasts. The issue is that our children cannot play tag wherever they please out in the open, under the watchful eye of a community to make sure Bob doesn’t pull Sally’s pigtails again. The community cannot keep an eye out for SUVs whose sightlines seemed design to hit children.

How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New (detacted single-family) Home (for about $300k in Tokyo Proper) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w

There's more urban dwelling options than just skyscraper.

Low Japanese fertility appears to be a product of their work culture; you don't have time to go on dates if you leave the office at 10pm.

Living in sky scrapers sucks and is not enjoyable. Same with living in suburbia. The sweet spot is densely packed urban areas that are built on the human scale.

living in skyscrapers is no different than living in any apartment building, except the larger number of apartments with nice views.

what modern skyscapers are doing wrong is putting in only large-footprint high-end retail (like department stores) on the street level, or nothing at all. A zoning change to require small retail stalls at the street level would go a long way to making cities more livable. And all those people living upstairs generate a lot of foot traffic to help all sorts of businesses thrive. (what I'm talking about overall is what makes midtown NY so unpleasant compared to other NYC neighborhoods)

It is different. if you are very high up there is too much wind for a balcony and you have no relationship with street life (people look like ants). 5-stories aka Paris-size is human scale, anything much taller isn't. The higher the floor, the less frequently people leave their building.

>what modern skyscapers are doing wrong is

...is not mandating proper insulation/noise-proofing.

> The sweet spot is densely packed urban areas that are built on the human scale.

Near the subway, and surrounded by historical buildings and nice architecture ... where an apartment usually costs an exorbitant price.

It's fascinating to me that folks see clear market signals like this and don't see it as an indication that we need to build more of it.

It's not that it's very expensive to build (well, it's not cheap either), it's that there's so little supply and so much demand.

4 floors high blocks of flats with shops on the ground floor are such a nice compromise in cities. Eastern Europe gets this right.

Different strokes for different folks. I enjoy living in suburbia very much and densely packed urban areas give me nightmares.

It's a positive vision of where society can go rather than having to sacrifice and buckle down.

Do people not remember riding bikes as kids? Riding a bike is _still_ fun. It never stopped being fun. Now you can do that and get to work.

It was fun until I got hit by a car when biking back from work. Now I just drive to work due to the risk of injury from distracted drivers and getting doored in bike lanes.

It's really unfortunate because I'd rather bike, but the infrastructure in the US even in relatively bike friendly cities here is dangerous.

That's so frustrating and I'm sorry.

The USA is the richest country in the world, but our biking infrastructure is worse than third-world countries. Not only is the bike infrastrcute inadequate and with many gaps, but what does exist is frequently designed to mix with a mode of transportation that is actively hostile to biking.

I hope you find a way to bike again. Biking alongside cars is so stressful and dangerous, but biking along a safe route is so enjoyable.

Luckily there are plenty of good places to bike here and it's enjoyable to do so on weekends.

It's just not practical for commuting to work since the "bike infrastructure" consists of painted bike lines next to rows of parked cars.

if you're not already, you should advocate for the infrastructure in your city. these things do not happen on their own, we must push for the future we desire.

This! Car drivers like to complain about the cost of building bike infrastructure. But if you look at the statistics, bike infrastructure is like 1/100th of the cost per mile as car infrastructure.

That's a good idea. What do you think is a good starting point for this?

Look to join neighborhood associations that influence city policy. Reach out to your council person or the mayor, depending on how big your city is. Talk to neighbors.

Strongtowns.org has good resources

Riding a bike is not fun if you're doing it to commute - having to do it in all weathers, in traffic that feels unsafe, even if you don't feel like it and got poor sleep etc. It's really fundamentally not the same.

> Riding a bike is not fun if you're doing it to commute - having to do it in all weathers, in traffic that feels unsafe, even if you don't feel like it and got poor sleep etc. It's really fundamentally not the same.

With good infrastructure, like PBLs, cycletracks and dedicated trails, it really is that fun. DC is an extremely good place to bike commute and I do it in all weather.

Anywho if you got poor sleep and decided to drive, everyone else is living at the mercy of your alertness. I'd rather you rode a bike.

> Driving a car is not fun if you're doing it to commute - having to do it in all weathers, in traffic that feels unsafe, even if you don't feel like it and got poor sleep etc. It's really fundamentally not the same

In a town that is minimally designed to facilitate the movement of people instead of cars there are multiple modes of transportation available to commuters, including but not limited to public transit for those days when you don't feel like walking or riding a bike.

I spent almost an entire year e-biking to work 7 miles and back 7 miles. I can tell you, all the issues you mentioned are correct.

I think, if we had dedicated bike lanes that were away from the main roads, at least we can address the safety issue. that would go a long way towards getting me back to commuting on an e-bike.

One more big issue for bikes is the cost of it. I've commuted almost 1100 miles on my ebike and already have had 3 flat tires! That's a cost of about 10 cents a mile which means that the cost of flat tires is twice as much as all my other bike commuting costs (depreciation and repairs). So, we also need to address the nails and screws on the paths issue. i think that would be greatly solved with increased bicycle adoption.

That's like 30 bucks per flat! But given your original tires will certainly wear out, start researching puncture resistant tires now. And a patch kit. ;-)

I'm able to fix the front flat tires much more cheaply: just the cost of the inner tube about 6$. but the flat tires happen most frequently in the rear.

the problem is I can't remove the rear wheel myself because the frame doesn't fit perfectly. so, it's nearly impossible to remove the rear wheel unless you're really talented mechanically.

Are you replacing the whole tire after every flat? In my experience, that's almost never necessary.

One of my two bicycles is a secondhand Schwinn Loop, a cheap folding bike with 20" tires and an extremely rearward weight distribution. After riding ~1,600 miles on it, I just recently replaced the rear tire because it wore thin. I had gotten 5 or 6 flats on that tire. I was able to keep using it, and tube, by removing the nail/staple/glass and patching the tube. I still have the same tube under the new tire. The patches seem to be permanent fixes.

(My other bike is a 700c hybrid bike from Bikes Direct, which I've put around 3,500 or 4,000 miles on. I've only gotten two flats, patched them both, and still haven't worn out the original tires.)

Most bikes come with the cheapest possible tires and inner tubes. If you're going to ride a lot then it's worth buying something more robust, even if they're a bit heavier. Continental Gatorskin tires are pretty good, and you can also get puncture resistant tubes with thicker walls and internal liquid sealant.

It also helps to carry a CO2 inflator with a few cartridges. Much faster than a hand pump.

I have thousands and thousands of miles on my bicycle tires. The cheap tires on my commuting bike kept wearing out, and I eventually switched to a high-quality replacement with a high latex content. I haven't had to replace the tires since, and the visible wear is minimal. I cannot recommend good tires strongly enough.

You could request your city council to attach a magnet to the ends of their sweep trucks. This would remove all nails and sharp ferromagnetic debris from the bike paths at no additional cost. They do this in certain countries to avoid flats in public buses.

Worth looking into solid tyres such as tannus tyres. I've had these for years and it means I don't need to worry about punctures.

Or Kevlar. I had kevlar tyres for a long while and they did much better at keeping me from flats. Also, over time, I learned which blocks are inexplicably thorn filled or nail filled and just avoided them as a general rule.

Also practice changing the inner tube till you can do it at dusk while late for a school meeting and annoyed in general :)

Riding a bicycle as a primary form of transportation isn't for everyone. But it is for some people today. By building safer bicycle paths, cycling can work for more people tomorrow. And by advancing technologies and subsidies, e-bikes can open up cycling to more people still.

Even if cycling is a thing that some people only do in pleasant weather, individuals and society benefit from more people cycling and less people driving cars.

Hmm, at this point I have to be in the office 4 days a week thanks to ratcheting up RTO, but my bike commute is the best thing about that, sitting around during the pandemic just made me lose muscle and feel down. In the PNW, snow and ice aren't usually a problem, so it's just lots of cold rain, but with decent gear that isn't really a problem.

Same here. I commute 3 days per week, 15 km each way. It takes me 35-40 minutes, but I enjoy it and get great exercise. I spend the time thinking about my day, and am happier and more productive if I've gotten that exercise.

I do get the occasional flat, but I learned to change it myself, and can get a new 4$ tube on in about ten minutes.

I pack rain pants and a shell and just put them on if a bit of rain comes. I only give up when the roads are snowed in and haven't been cleared yet, which is only a few days per year.

Most complaints about weather and maintenance are easily dealt with with a few basic skills and simple preparation.

It might sound like year round commuting is extreme - but ive found it far easier and far more enjoyable than I expected.

With the exception of unsafe conditions, riding in all weather is a blast. Though I don't know if I'd think so, if the weather included 100+ degree heat. And I'm fortunate to have terraformed my riding conditions through years of refining my route. I'm of the opinion that route choice is the #1 safety factor for cycling.

Granted it's not for everybody, but the extremes and unpredictability are actually part of why I love the great outdoors.

A bike ride is much more invigorating than driving the car. I feel much better after even a short bike ride. No similar benefit from driving a car.

Driving a car if you have not slept is not just a danger to you, but to many other people.

On an average day my bike commute is the best part of my day

> in traffic that feels unsafe

I understand that's how it is in the US, but there's many places where that is not a problem.

It's still more joyous than driving in those same conditions. The wind against the cheek, the body warming up with exertion, the endorphins or whatever when you finish, the biker is much closer to these things than the driver.

I do this with my kids and it's still pretty fun. Though admittedly it's nicer when the weather is good (just like driving).

Then don't commute in bad weather and in unsafe conditions. Working from home and improving road infrastructure is totally an option.

Work from home is an option only for some office folks.

Would you be happy if your baker, barber, car mechanic will not commute to the workplace if it is raining?

I'd be happy if they have an easier and safer commute because everyone else is staying home.

This kind of argument goes both ways. See —- having a car is also an option only for a minority of people, so please stop having it.

This is exactly what you wrote, a vision. The first major obstacle is our urge to lower the effort one needs to get through the day doing all the chores, groceries, work etc. If you tell someone that now they need to move their lazy ass, and ride a bike for a some for kilometers, a couple of times a week and then some more for the so called „greater good”, I’d expect a lot of push back.

I remember riding a bike to go places as a kid/teen. I used to ride a couple miles to a CD store, convenience store, etc all of the time. If I had been aloud to drive a car I would have said fuck this piece of shit bike and thrown it immediately in the dumpster for the convenience of a car.

I just drove by a new giant highway overpass being built in Texas and I was wondering to myself "how many houses could have been built with all the money and resources sunk into this?"

All of Texas (30m) could live in a high density city the size of Tokyo. Which is huge, but not as huge as the rest of Texas.

> ”Cars our LOUD. Even electric cars unfortunately”

While it might be true that there isn’t a huge difference at highway speeds, EVs can make a massive difference to noise levels on city streets! When cars are crawling along in city traffic, engine noise dominates.

As electric vehicles have started to become dominant on central London streets, this has been really noticeable. Sometimes I’ll see queues of cars waiting at intersections but notice how remarkably quiet it is - because they’re all EVs or hybrids! Other times, there’ll be one or two old diesel taxis in the mix and it really stands out how noisy they are in comparison.

Electric cars are loud as well. Most of the car noise is due to tire friction. Start at 11m10s mark on https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8

Not at city speeds they’re not. City streets with EVs are much, much quieter than ones filled with roaring combustion engines. There’s a reason why regulations require EVs to have noise emitters when moving at low speeds (but they’re still much quieter than combustion cars!)

Not to mention the benefits of cleaner air, and far less waste heat being emitted.

Did you see the video I linked or are you just playing a game of repeating your beliefs?

Even electric cars at city speeds are above 75dbA, which may be of course less than a loud combustion motorcycle, but nonetheless already into "loud" territory.

Let me rephrase: in a real-world city environment, electric cars are very quiet compared to combustion cars. For one thing, unlike combustion cars, they are absolutely silent when stopped at intersections or in traffic!

Of course they do still emit some noise when moving, and this noise increases with speed. But not enough to annoy you when you’re trying to sleep at night, or have a conversation with a friend. It is always combustion vehicles which do that!

This isn’t my “beliefs”, but actual real-world experience of living in a busy, noisy city where there are large numbers of EVs.

This will go over like a lead brick in car infested suburbia.

I love a carless life in Berlin, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Seoul, but a carless life in Santa Clarita California? Carless like in Silicon Valley? Not gonna happen. LA, maybe a few can get buy without a car but they'd need to add Tokyo level of trains (40+ lines with express trains) before I could function without a car in a city like LA. I have friends I can generally see in 40-60 minutes that with current public transportation would take 3hrs one way.

I'm not saying we shouldn't start adding the public transportation back to LA. Of course we should. But it will be 100 years before it's anywhere close to where it needs to be for people to give up their cars.

And for suburbia, you'd have to get everyone to sell their 2-3 car tract houses so you can rebuild the cities to be more dense, and get all the stores to give up their parking lots, It's just not going to happen. :(

Too many cities have physically been designed around driving

Have you seen pictures of Atlanta from 1930ies and now?

There are two major interstates cutting thought the city. TWO!

And intentionally designed to destroy communities that were experiencing very high economic growth and an easy way to implement redlining and segregation.

I agree and live in an area where I only have to use my car a few times a week and walk/bike most of the time.

The problem is most people own homes in areas where it's not practical to create a 15 minute city.

Plus a lot of people are lazy. My neighbor drove his car 600 yards to pick up a pizza.

How do we address the people who live in areas where the grocery store is not within walking/biking distance.

Living car free in a city built for it can be bliss. But tons of people do not live in cities built for it. Do we rebuild those cities? Force them to move?

I’m not a architect, but I suspect building a bakery in a place people want to buy bread is more energy-efficient compared to driving 5 miles (uphill both ways) for every bread-enjoyer in a personal cars.

We change the zoning code so that it becomes legal to build a grocery store in those areas, then let the market do its work.

Yes, we rebuild those cities: but that need not be done by force. We can simply relax the draconian Euclidean zoning rules which prohibit traditional mixed-use city building.

And for those handi-capable folks, what do we do?

Building for pedestrians helps everyone.

https://streets.mn/2023/07/19/if-we-want-a-shift-to-walking-...

Well what do you do when your only option is a car but you can't drive?

Cycling infra helps: https://youtu.be/xSGx3HSjKDo?t=42

So does public transport: https://youtu.be/hK5r4dtFXGA?t=326, https://youtu.be/PgFVjCL21WI?t=178

Quote from a stranger: "I am a disabled individual. I literally cannot operate a motor vehicle in a legal capacity. I cannot live in most US cities because of the lack of public transport and inability to walk places. I WANT THIS TO CHANGE. I am visually impaired, but I want this to change not only for me, but others like me whose disability would not hinder their life nearly as much if the cities they lived in were walkable cities. This would also benefit the mental and physical health of future generations, granting younger people the opportunity to see more of their home town in a safer environment."

For anyone with any type of handicap, we should definitely still build our world with them in mind. Building our world more around walking, micro-mobility, and public transit would surely help those who might be in wheelchairs, scooters, etc.

And what happens when it is freezing or storming outside? Not everyone lives in LA.

If you need proof that HN is a bubble, look no further than this thread.

Is your point that all handicapped people need cars to get around in bad weather? I understand not everyone lives somewhere with good weather, but I'll point you to look at cities that get a ton of weather and still manage to have good transportation like Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Tokyo, etc. and many handicapped people make great use of the transportation in those cities.

Physical and mental ability exists in a spectrum for all of us. A small portion of people may physically need to be driven around in a vehicle. But a huge portion of those with disabilities are still fully able to get onto a lightrail, metro, etc. to get around.

So, and I guess I will belabor the point, not all disabilities work the way you think.

I am freely mobile. But ... I have an extreme photosensitivity disorder. (At this point someone is going to make sunscreen noises and I sigh) There's a lot of us out there and we basically need to be under something to get around without accumulating more damage. During the night, I am completely free. During the day, I am wrapped up like the Invisible Man, scampering from one shadow to another, with layers and layers of protection. If I didn't have a car (with a special film covering the windshield, technically illegal), I don't know how I would get around.

I loath walking more than any other activity. Your utopia sounds like hell of earth for me. I don't want any of those things you mentioned.

I don't want to waste tons of time just getting places, I want to live in an area that is not so congested that traffic is a problem, I want space to live. I do NOT want to be near other people just to get somewhere, or worse live very close to others.

I'm actually on board for this! If you want to live that way you should be able to. But, you should be held responsible for paying your share of the infrastructure required to support such living. As long as that is understood, I don't really think there's anything inherently bad with what you describe. But I doubt people who love living the suburban car-centric life would like to see their taxes for infrastructure double. Here's an infographic explaining those numbers https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...

Those costs aren't really all that high, and are easily outweighed by the dramatically lower costs in the suburbs. Everything is cheaper there, land, buildings, repairs, goods and services.

Cities might look good in this narrow measure, but costs are higher and wages are higher, which means cities consume far more goods.

Suburbs also tend to produce more thing in real (i.e. not monetary) terms. They have far more manufacturing, more farms, more backyard experimenters who go on to invent things.

You can't learn, on your own, to be a mechanic in a city, in a suburb you can simply get an old car and mess with it. Same with tons of other fields, in a suburb you can just try it out, in a city you don't have room for that.

Without suburbs cities would fall apart - but the cities don't really realize that. Cities have higher income so they suck in everything suburbs produce, but cities don't really produce anything of their own, it's all internal services.

> Those costs aren't really all that high, and are easily outweighed by the dramatically lower costs in the suburbs. Everything is cheaper there, land, buildings, repairs, goods and services.

He's talking about infrastructure cost (how much it costs your municipality to provide the services that you use, like the roads) while you are talking about cost of life (how much it costs you to pay for other things that you need, like food or getting your car serviced).

On the infrastructure front, suburbia simply cannot compete with cities. Infrastructure cost is bound to be more efficient where people live in more densely populated areas. The length of pipes that a municipality needs to lay down in order to serve a single family home in the suburbs is the same as a whole 6-story building in the city (the diameters of the pipes might differ). On a per-capita basis, there's no contest.

A particular factor in the funding of suburban streets is that the initial paving is often subsidized by the federal government. Once the streets start crumbling down after ~20 years of usage, then the real cost hits. Here's an explanation by Not Just Bikes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0

I think you might be using a very narrow definition of "city". There are tons of small cities around the country where you can choose between a downtown apartment, a townhome in a development, separate small house on a half lot in a canopied neighborhood, or a big house with a half acre of land, all within easy biking distance of the city center. And even those 1000 sq ft houses on half lots can and do hold the old car that you want to be able to wrench on.

> I loath walking more than any other activity

This 'loathing' is going to severely impact your health in later years. Walking is a big part of keeping the body functioning well.

I think the hardest thing to get across is that _LIFE IS BETTER_ this way. Having 2,000 kgs of metal hurtling by at 80 kph half a meter from your six your old's head while you walk to school SUCKS. It's horrible. But hopping with my 4 year old in the cargo bike and my 6 year old on her own bike is sheer, utter, bliss. Little kids ringing their bells and chatting with new friends on the way to school is a joy that I feel privileged to be able to experience with them.

And when you don't surround every building with 3 acres of parking, everything is closer together. It's so much closer together that, for the most part, you don't even need to drive for much.

I didn't even _want_ to move to the Netherlands. I wanted to live somewhere I could be car-free and feel safe with my kids biking to school. It's ludicrous that cars have utterly conquered the entire damn planet, and all humans have is a desperate rearguard action in a tiny country largely below sea level. And even here, there's more cars than I'd like.

This morning a combination of sun in my eyes, a blind spot, and a dewy morning almost led me to run over two people legally crossing the street. My significant other had to scream at me to stop. I could have killed two people. All I was trying to do was get coffee. I need to get rid of this death machine fast.

I bumped a cyclist while I was edging out into a blind intersection (one of those that gets parked up all alongside it) because I was looking one way and he raced in front of me from the other. Like, neither of us really did anything wrong, but he was nearly severely injured and I nearly went to prison. Cars are dumb.

It indeed is. I don't even need to drive most of the time when living inside the city. The bike serves most of the needs and it's vastly cheaper.

We also moved to NL and we love it, even though yeah there are surprisingly still lots of cars here. It's definitely the case that walking/biking has a hugely good effect on individuals and society. Just seeing people on the street, congregating, going from dinner to after dinner drinks, everything is just more human.

You’re only comparing the upsides of walking to downsides of cars. Re: Security, I lived in a walkable city, well, guess what happens when you walk in those beautiful utopic cities with diversity, you get mugged. And I was luck to not hold my boyfriend’s hand at the train station, a gay couple died for that. And it’s so forbidden to talk about it that, when you have a discussion about rape, many girls will admit to it, “but don’t talk about it, it would make people racist.” And indeed people would compound on this experience, while always dodging the racism labels, but always very distinctly describing this exact toxic behavior of walkable cities.

I’ve moved to a car-centric city with gated communities. Much less stress. No need to deal with predatory people in the building. No need to deal with awful people defending the predatory people. I miss walking, but it’s a straight up better quality of life.

I'm sorry to hear that but it sounds like a separate issue from car dependency. Obviously personal safety is important regardless.

> The only way that's even remotely possible is to heavily subsidize EVs (probably honestly just providing free swaps)

I think that is in contradiction to your initial statement,

> building the future around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable. We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in the developing world without mass catastrophe…

Subsidizing car ownership will only make these goals harder to attain. Swapping the car out for free for an EV bike, that would be great. Subsidizing only the people who need a car, ok (ambulatory issues, etc), but we should not subsidize car ownership in general.

The other part of this that I’m becoming more aware of as it’s researched more, is that the Air Quality in an area is actually more effected by dust and particulate matter from tires, brakes, and roadways than greenhouse gases (this is different from Climate impacting Greenhouse gas effects). What this means is that EV cars won’t fix the Air Quality of an area, but EV bikes definitely would.

In short, I agree with your initial statement, but it’s how we get there that needs some adjustment. Leverage more transit and bikes as solutions rather than subsidizing car ownership.

>Air Quality

Adding to this, it also appears that even low levels of PM 2.5 air pollution has negative impacts on health over a long timeframe (including increased risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, death, and more).

WHO is now recommending average annual exposure targets should be set 2-3 times lower than current EPA levels and a whopping 5 times lower than EU standards. Serious health complications occur above this level. [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10097564/

Yeah, maybe. I just think politically a car buyback program will be somehow less popular than a gun buyback program, and outlawing ICEs even less so.

If you live in a suburban house, with a yard, and drive a car, its likely poster is part of the problem.

Its easy to externalize blame and point fingers to something/someone else, when the reality is that people need to look inward.

The uncomfortable truth is these macro policy desires, are very much a case of "Do as I say, not as I do"

I speak this as someone that does not own a car, or have a yard, and drive a moped everywhere.

Yet, I don't want to restrict anyone in the future from owning a car (gas, if cost is an issue for the poor), or living in the suburbs.

I have a suburban/rural house, with a yard, and drive a car.

I also put over 2000 miles a year on an ebike, which equates to about 30kWhr of electricity. That e-bike is designed to take a substantial amount of cargo, or two kids.

I can get to the post office, polling place, local deli, library, and a bar in about 5 minutes. The supermarket, pharmacy, pizza shops, restaurant, bank, hardware store etc in 15 minutes. A friend I visit regularly is 15 miles away which I consistently do in under 40 minutes versus about 25-30 in the car, even though the route I take to avoid a single-lane undivided highway is longer.

Yes, a lot of rural/suburban neighborhoods are isolated by wildly unsafe roads between them and services. But in many, it's very easy to get to many of the places you need to go, via bicycle.

I don't think you're wrong per se, but I hesitate to say that the problems we have are that everyone individually but also en masse decided to move to the suburbs and also drive big honkin' cars everywhere, all the time. I think it's more likely there were systems and incentives (both economic and cultural) that led to this. I think this is actually good news, because it means we can fix this with some (slow) cultural shifts and (less slow, hopefully) policy changes. If we really had to directly convince 10,000,000s of people to move into townhomes we'd have no hope.

(FWIW I've lived in lots of places, tiny apartments, townhomes, big apartments, single rooms, mcmansions, old houses. I've been lucky enough to more or less choose them--most people live wherever they can--and for the last ~10 years have chosen tiny apartment. I like the idea of living small, they're a lot more maintainable, cheaper, and I used to move a lot so having a ceiling on the amount of stuff I could have was real attractive)

I live in an apartment-style shared home, we have a shared front lawn (not our choice), and I do own a car. I think it's great that you live without a car, a yard, and drive a moped! I'm slowly transitioning to that life myself. I've talked with our landlord about getting rid of the grass and I rarely use my car now that I live in a walkable neighborhood. I'd love to get rid of it someday soon! I say all of this to let you know we're on the same "team".

I need to make myself clear though around this line "I don't want to restrict anyone in the future from owning a car".

I don't care if anyone owns a car, I don't think that's what really matters. What I do think is that we as a nation (I'm in the U.S.) need to stop cities from continuously _subsidizing_ car infrastructure through taxation. You mention cost issues for the poor. Please realize those poor people you speak of are forced through taxation to subsidize car infrastructure even though those same poorer people may not even own cars themselves. This is really where the system breaks down. Poor people who may live in city centers are paying a portion of their taxes for the rich people to have nice roads paved out to their spread-out suburbs. Those who choose to live in the suburbs should pay for the increased costs of infrastructure that they require. You should pay fewer taxes to live more efficiently in urban or shared housing.

A lot of the ideas I'm spouting off here are from organizations like StrongTowns. They and others like them have been doing a great job of putting words into action, but we need many more people to be in this movement and we shouldn't promote infighting on details. Individual change is great, but it will not change anything at scale. The same thing goes for climate and general social progress. We need to force change at the government level, and stopping the subsidization of car infrastructure is just one step in that long process.

Isn't it a bit audacious to assume the parent lives in a suburban home with a yard and drives a car? Many people don't. And it'd often a choice of values and principles. Of which the parent shared theirs.

Transportation spans a huge spectrum. From walking to hoverboards to bicycles, e-bikes, motorcycles, cars, trucks, semis, trains, planes, cargo ships, etc.

Gasoline/diesel vs electricity is orthogonal to most of that. So is "self-driving".

It is great to have progress in batteries and charging. It is great to have progress in bicycle wheels and in snowmobile treads. It's great to have advances in cheaper rail beds and rotary masts.

It would be amazing if we had serious innovation on creating safer separation of transportation modes that promoted more progress on multiple axes simultaneously.

That's very elitist. Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5. Even in large urban areas it's tricky to get around past a certain time. I remember working unexpected shifts and later staring at closed metro stations, having to walk in the rain to get home. No thanks. Also, some people like cars. Deal with it, i'm not ditching for an e-bike or whatever. An electric motorcycle actually sounds nice though, if not for the battery weight.

Globally, your stance is very elitist. Only about 18% of the world has a car.

https://www.pd.com.au/blogs/how-many-cars-in-the-world/

North America is already auto-dependent and EVs are an important piece of the puzzle for that region. Their point is that EVs won’t possibly work resource or cost-wise when that 82% inevitably gets richer and asks, “what about me?”

I wouldn’t say elitist. I think different environments have different needs.

The US, for example, has roughly 1/4th the population density of the E.U., 1/0th of India’s and Japan’s, 1/5th China’s.

Maybe Europe and Japan can urbanize and get connected via HSR, but, the US is much sparser. Suburban houses with yards make a lot more sense; cramming into the cities and relying on public transportation just feels stupid to a lot of people.

I haven't ever put "living in a city" together with "elitist". Living in the suburbs away from the cacophony of the city, a 5 minute drive away from all your favorite chain stores and malls seems much more elitist to me.

You've identified a problem: public transport in some places sucks. But then veered away from the obvious solution: invest in it to make it not suck.

throwing money at urban problems does not necessarily have a great track record, and NYCTA has had lots of issues with corruption when they do have money to spend. Id be pretty skeptical that giving them a lot of money would mean you can hop on a train in 5 minutes at 2 am, it wouldnt even be cost effective to run that many trains at odd hours. Cars are terrific for this use case, however.

NYC cops have like a billion dollar budget and while they are great at protecting businesses in wealthy areas they are not very popular in lower income areas as they are both blase and overly brutal at the same time, their huge budget not having helped that aspect very much.

NYC is one of the safest places in the US...

and even with fairly poor mass transit system - it's still is incredibly good by American standards.

I moved from NYC an hour north, to be more isolated than the "impersonal big cities". I barely know any of my neighbors - because there are no sidewalks and everyone is forced to drive for anything.

Car dependence kills people, kills communities and reduces your QoL.

Somehow the argument against more money for infrastructure is never levied against freeway expansions.

throwing money at the NYC subway seems to have a generally great track record (albeit one featuring less efficiency than throwing money at other global subway systems). NYC could not function without it.

Cops and public transport are two completely different things.

Public transit does not work in a place like Montana or Wyoming. Sorry. Too large, too sparsely populated.

Same reason it won't work for most of Texas either. It's fine in Dallas or Austin, parts of Fort Worth... it doesn't scale to Lubbock or New Braunfels.

A lot of people have no interest in living in your concrete jungle... myself included.

> urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population

> (as of 2018) 31% of the U.S. population lives in urban core counties

Improving public transportation in cities, makes those cities better for those who live and/or work in them. In downtown SF I counted the number of people in cars backed up in a single city block. The traffic looked miserable. It was ~30 people, less than a single bus' ridership that passed by. The only way reducing the supremacy of cars in cities affects people who don't live in "concrete jungles" is that they either have to pay for the externalities of their chosen transportation mode when they visit cities, or "park and ride" from the periphery into the the city proper.

No one wants someone in a Montana ranch to take the bus. That's either a misunderstanding or a purposeful straw man.

I though you are talking about a village with 200 residents, so I had to look it up and oops, it's quarter million city? You gotta be kidding.

No one is asking you to live there or not have a vehicle.

What makes it a problem is the financially unsustainable suburban sprawl(single family zoning laws or covenants with the same effect) and people's expectations of car owners being catered to primarily.

I mean... why else would high density cities like Atlanta and DFW have massive X+Y lane interstates cut through the city? In so many places in the US it's straight up impossible to walk 1000ft.

> Public transit does not work in a place like Montana or Wyoming. Sorry. Too large, too sparsely populated.

And individual car ownership only works in those places because of the massive federal welfare they receive in the form of multi-billion-dollar federal highway grants.

The federal government spends over $1800 per person per year on roadways in Montana.

Public transit would work in a lot more places than you give it credit for. Sure Wyoming isn't dense enough, but that is because nobody lives there. If your town has 10,000 or more people public transit could work and would be cheaper than cars. However it requires a large investment to make it work. (the town of 10,000 can't work alone - it needs all the other towns in an hour drive to also have transit and a network of transit between them)

It doesn't matter if everyone in lubbock drives cars, thats obviously not what this thread of discussion is about and you know it. It matters if everyone in Austin/Dallas/Houston is forced to drive cars. Quit being dense on purpose.

Unless you consider that most areas (urban and rural) in both Texas and Montana were founded before the car existed; that the ebike has higher speed, higher carrying capacity, and lower costs of ownership.

If you add that in with legacy residents complaining of population booms and losing "the old ways", or nostalgia for self reliance, then Montana fits in perfectly. (Ps I rode in the ~1 uber in Missoula in 2018, and the hotel I stayed in Bozeman in 2022 had free bikes - and many bike lanes, and a nice bike trail)

> Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5.

Have you been to the suburbs of Japan? Or France? Towns created before cars were invented. Lots of single family homes, and a smattering of small vehicles used for work.

It can work, but we've built huge car-required cities and towns and lifestyles and it's a sunk cost fallacy. And it feels "normal" to us, but it's not. It's bad for the environment, and it's bad for us.

Hours spent in a car is directly related to obesity. Exhaust fumes and tire particulate matter is directly related to asthma and cancer. Your car is killing you.

Right, I'm not sure exactly what it is, but car ownership in the US seems to have been subsidized. You should be allowed to have a car if you want and not be taxed unfairly for it, but it shouldn't be that almost every job basically requires one. And to get there, I don't think we have to ban things or restrict people's lives, just build new cities less around cars and let people choose that life if they want.

> just build new cities less around cars and let people choose that life if they want.

New cities aren't a good solution, they almost never work out. That's effectively ceding everything that's already been built to the automobile and telling people "if you don't like it, uproot your life and go somewhere else."

I would rather see the places that were originally built without cars in mind return to prioritizing walking, cycling, and transit. Let the exurbs be the exurbs, sure, but let's have our old cities and inner ring suburbs not cater to cars so much. They weren't built for cars in the first place.

> just build new cities less around cars and let people choose that life if they want

We should modify existing cities with better transit and make them hostile to cars, and then offer excellent car transfer points. If you want to use the city, use the train.

> No thanks. Also, some people like cars. Deal with it, i'm not ditching for an e-bike or whatever.

I don't think it's really about taking away peoples choices, just mostly about policy impacts.

Currently car ownership and sub/exurban housing are subsidized in various direct and indirect ways. If policies changed and other things were emphasized instead, you could still choose to live in the same way, it would just be more expensive.

> I don't think it's really about taking away peoples choices

OP of this comment tree is explicit that it is about taking away choice. But I think it should suffice to make the alternatives more attractive. People are open to renewables, but not a drastic reduction in their quality of life. We should not demand a reduction or stagnation in quality-of-life for developing countries either as it's inhumane. Ostensibly they would be just as interested in pursuing renewable tech if it can help them grow.

> is explicit that it is about taking away choice.

But it's a conversation and I am rejecting that framing. Suburbs/Exurbs as practiced in US today aren't some kind of quality of life maximizing end game. They are a natural result of a ton of policy interactions and subsidies, and the focus on it clearly has +ves and -ves. And of course it's always nice if you can get someone else to partially pay for your lifestyle, but that's inherently got downsides.

I think that it lacks imagination to think that we can't structure things differently and have equivalent or better quality of life overall. Will fewer people choose to live in suburbs? Sure - that's how incentives work.

I don't think "banning cars" makes any sense. But if we stop basing policy at multiple levels centered around them, and stop subsidizing car-centered living, I suspect we'll collectively do a lot less driving, which doesn't seem like a bad outcome, and more likely to have +ve impact than the fantasy that EVs are a drop in replacement for ICEs, no other changes needed.

> Suburbs/Exurbs as practiced in US today aren't some kind of quality of life maximizing end game

Notwithstanding that the middle-class overwhelmingly prefers living in the suburbs. "quiet", "safe", etc.

> I think that it lacks imagination to think that we can't structure things differently and have equivalent or better quality of life overall.

No one's saying that. I fully support zoning reform. If one's imagination leads to such bright ideas as "ban cars" however, it will have more detractors.

> if we stop basing policy at multiple levels centered around them, and stop subsidizing car-centered living, I suspect we'll collectively do a lot less driving

That is possible and I support it also.

Suburban sprawl is both ecologically and financially unsustainable, with city dwellers subsidizing suburban living.

This is a widely believed factoid on the internets but is not supported by the numbers. Roads have always been a relatively small percentage of government spending and has been going down over time. The big ticket items for local & state governments are criminal justice, education, health, and in many areas pensions for retirees.

This site has a good graph half way down showing the relative growth in spending by area:

https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative....

Which adds salt to the wound because car traffic in denser areas is largely caused by the surrounding suburbs, as the locals can get to places by walking and transit, and often don't even have a car.

nothing about living in a city or riding a bike instead of driving a car is "elitist".

elitism is using a vehicle that has an average annual ownership cost of $12000 and takes up a parking space everywhere you want to go.

> average annual ownership cost of $12000

Lots of people buy luxury cars, driving up that figure, so it hardly matters when we are talking about marginal utility for someone, shall we say, disadvantaged. Which I’m guessing you’ve never been?

My annual cost of ownership on my car is like $2500. I can sleep in my car too, and store clothes and food securely in it. Oh and get on demand heat & A/C access.

If you don’t have much, having a car is a lot.

I don't think GP claimed living in a city or riding a bike was elitist. I think the claim was that imposing solutions that only work in cities as if they work for everybody is elitist. And, speaking for myself now, it's important to remember that, in many contexts, living in the city is a luxury that many cannot afford without greatly diminishing their current standard of living. Outside the city, housing is cheap. You have to be very wealthy or else give up a lot to move into a city.

I also don't live in a city with useable mass transit either. Bus routes take far longer to get to a place than by car and there are no train or subway lines nearby. Every place I've ever lived you needed a car to get around.

That said, I would love it if I could get around this place without the need of a car. I would love it if my shopping centers were beautiful walkable areas with little shops I could get to on foot.

Traffic sucks, driving sucks and my shopping center is a bunch of big box retail and grocery stores that spread out around neverending road construction far away from where I live.

I don't think things will ever get better either but eventually this common design pattern will severely screw us all over.

The $20k car is not elitist but the $2k ebike is? Interesting.

It's always hilarious to me when people driving $60k vehicles ask me how much the ebike cost and say "that's expensive". The ebike costs less than they pay in insurance a year, much less maintenance, gas, etc.

Some people have weird ideas about cars being "for regular people" while any money spent on a bicycle is a luxury.

Over 80% of the US population lives in an densely populated area and RE-establishing public transit is not even remotely an insurmountable challenge logistically.

The only thing standing in the way of mass transit are congressional representatives from rural areas representing counties that have less population than one square mile of Los Angeles.

No it's just physics. Carrying around an extra several thousand pounds of steel will always be a burden on more than just the one doing it.

>Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5. Even in large urban areas it's tricky to get around past a certain time. I remember working unexpected shifts and later staring at closed metro stations, having to walk in the rain to get home.

These conversations are difficult to have here.

You get people from large metropolitan areas who have no clue how "the deplorables" live, making calls to "ban cars".

"I can walk around and talk to my neighbours and it's so quiet!". Yeah, I have all that where I live, and I own two cars.

Having grown up in a rural place, I’d say the way infrastructure is built in America arguably serves the rural poor the worst. Totally dependent on cars to go anywhere, with effectively no choice but to spend a large portion of your income on a likely old and and unreliable vehicle, to get to a job that will happily fire you for being late if you have a problem with it. Once upon a time even quite small rural towns had actual shops, trains, even trams, that people could live nearby to, but we’ve mostly gotten rid of those.

It's pretty elitist to make me pay for your parking in my city.

> That's very elitist.

No, it is a fact. That it doesn’t align with the choices you’ve made in your life doesn’t change that.

> Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5.

Tell me you’ve never been outside the US before without telling me you’ve never been outside the US before.

Joking aside (there are plenty of other countries with transit as bad as the US), plenty of other countries have figured out how to make public transit and alternative forms of transit (bikes, scooters) widely practical. Many places have optimized themselves for car travel, and if we want any chance of a livable world 100 years from now, we need to start optimizing for a different reality.

Yes, we will never get rid of cars entirely. But we must find a way to get rid of cars for the 95%+ of trips that are part of day to day life (groceries, errands, commuting).

A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable planet. Deal with it, my kids aren’t ditching for Mars or TRAPPIST-1 or whatever.

> A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable planet.

There's no reason to believe this.

Unsustainability is only ever a result of perpetually growing demand, or demand growing faster than technological innovation. Global population growth rate is projected to stagnate in 100 years, so it's a moot point, and from a purely engineering perspective, emissions are a solved problem. The real issue is that emission are poised to rise in the short-run because demand is growing so fast in east Asia (and to a lesser extent through immigration to the West).

This is a near-term problem, unsustainability doesn't belong in the conversaiton. The question is really whether we want to weather that strain with current trajectory, or spend and implement policies to mitigate the climate effects during that period.

> A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable planet.

No it isn't. We just haven't figured it out yet. Those aren't the same thing.

It sucks, but it doesn't have to be that way. Even small towns can be sufficiently served by viable public transit options.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

I think you need to check your math. There are 14 times more of these electric mopeds, etc than cars, but they only have 4x more impact than the EVs. So one EV displaces about 3.5x more carbon emissions than the mopeds.

To make the 2030 halve our emissions deadline, and 2050 net zero deadline with just little city vehicles, we’ll need to abandon the suburbs, exurbs and rural buildings and infrastructure that we already have, and replace it without producing any additional emissions. Also, in the US, most cities that experienced significant growth after ~ 1950 need to have their new parts razed and rebuilt to accommodate public transit routes and add walkable amenities.

None of that can possibly happen at sufficient scale in the next 7 years, and it certainly would have massive environmental impact if it did.

Alternatively, we could switch all cars to EV’s, use existing construction and infrastructure, and get a > 75% reduction in transportation carbon, even without cleaning up the power grid.

In reality, we are already cleaning up the grid, and time of use subsidies are doing a good job of moving time-shiftable demand to high-production times, when the grid is cleaner.

EVs are currently one of the biggest, easy to time shift loads.

So, we can have a 90% solution to transportation carbon, or go for a 97.5% improvement (rounding the 3.5x improvement moving to mopeds would give up to 4x), but then emit way more carbon than total transportation emissions while we rebuild an unprecedented number of cities all at once.

I’m all for public transit, and think all new urban / suburban housing should be built along high capacity transit corridors, but doing that isn’t going to solve global warming in time.

Also I'd just like to add: everyone forgets that not everyone lives near an urban center. It'd be fine to get rid of 90-95% of the internal combustion cars/trucks and then move on to the next biggest target. We don't need to jump to 100% on everything.

This is harder than you'd think. There are something like 282 million cars in the US. Let's say we want to replace half of them with a zero emissions EV, so 140m, and those cost $25k. That's $3.5 trillion we're gonna burn, plus idk, dealing with 140m waste ICE cars. This is not a problem we're gonna solve with EVs any time soon.

Oh I understand the difficulties, I have designed a bunch of charge stations. (Civil Engineer) Most of the grid infrastructure I know of in my area is near capacity too and can't really accommodate new hookups.

My point is just that I see a lot of 100% goals and I'd really like to shift the narrative to 90-95%.

Hah! Yeah ok fair. I think along with the 90/95 thing I'd like to see us think more in terms of incentives, trajectories, and underlying causes. People are practically entirely the products of systems and cultures, and whenever we're try interventions at the exit of the function they're uniformly despised.

I basically agree. We can't rebuild our cities in 7 years, so we have to "patch" cars to be zero emissions. How do you get tens of millions of people to do that in 7 years though? Keep in mind average yearly income is something like $45k and most Americans have less than $500 in savings--not exactly a market ready to wholesale replace their cars.

I think it's clear that if you want to halve transportation emissions in 7 years you have to ban their current ICE car, and the only way you get away with that is to give them a comparable EV. We still have to build out mass transit and rezone everything, and also hit the mute button on NIMBYs everywhere, but short term you have to do a swap, like immediately. The money required for this is... astronomical, it's at least trillions for an ICE/EV swap, but you also need subsidies for auto manufacturers and developers, and you also need to weather the political storm of essentially stealing cars (a huge part of American culture) and putting grocery stores in the suburbs.

> I think you need to check your math. There are 14 times more of these electric mopeds, etc than cars, but they only have 4x more impact than the EVs. So one EV displaces about 3.5x more carbon emissions than the mopeds.

This is not the case. The cited 4x in oil demand is just a part of the main problem (CO2 emissions). E-car carbon emissions over the lifecycle are still ~50% of fossil fuel cars, due to their large manufacturing co2 footprint and impact of the 10-100x higher electricity usage to power them. The battery sizes body masses are O(100x) bigger than e-bikes and energy usage per km O(10x) bigger.

> I've said it before and I'll say it again

To the same effect. Perhaps a real study on this issue would be more elucidating?

> Banning gas/diesel cars gets there

You've effectively ended farming and rural life.

> is to heavily subsidize EVs

The only reason you have to subsidize them is because they are not adequate replacements for ICE cars. Perhaps if they just made EVs better, people would _want_ them, and they wouldn't be _forced_ into buying them.

> The only problem that self-driving cars will ever solve is where to put VC money in a zero interest rate world.

People value their own time. Perhaps you don't, but it should rightfully be part of this equation.

> I get that whole economies are built around producing/maintaining cars and related infra

Yea.. because they are a good utility and serve a real purpose. We didn't decide to build cars, the market demanded them.

It's always amazing to me that people will "say it over and over again" to no effect, yet walk past the fact that basic MPG fuel economy hasn't improved in 30 years.

> like, on a species level.

Or, take any account of exactly how bunker fuel oil shipping consumes.

I think that that’s not only incorrect, it’s exactly what we are going to do and it will be fine.

Also self-driving cars would help quite a bit if they actually work. It’s only been just a place to park money because they don’t yet. No technology is a solution to anything until it actually exists.

There is a little something that's missing from the analysis above: what people actually want. And what many people want, across many cultures once they reach a certain level of wealth, is the suburban home: low density living in isolated housing units set in a park like environment with ample greenery. Just look at almost any billionaire's mansion and you will see this pattern which becomes an aspiration for the middle class. Most people, given enough wealth, desire and choose the McMansion.

This choice, replicated across millions of families, has massive implications: urban sprawl and low density make transit unworkable, shops need large catchment areas that can't no longer be reached on foot or bike, and it all devolves into car dependency. These communities will need point to point transport for the foreseeable future.

So you either double down and hand-wave reality away "no, we'll just build high density housing along transit corridors", or you accept that people won't magically do what you think is right, and find real solutions. Electrifying cars is the low effort solution, but we could imagine making point to point transport more like public transit, for example, a Boring company Loop- type system where pods exit the tunnels and complete the last mile on the street level, of where self-driving taxis get you to a multi-modal terminal where you can catch a traditional train for the city center.

I agree with you that people should be allowed to live in the time of communities they prefer, and if hose are suburban mansions so be it. If they also want cars, so be it.

Where, perhaps, you and I disagree is that I think that people who buy these houses and cars should pay for the full cost, including all negative externalities, of their choices. Taxes should be imposed that should then try to reverse those negative externalities where possible. And I assure you, those taxes will easily double or triple the price of gasoline and those houses. Getting CO2 out of the atmosphere is really really difficult, and infrastructure costs of cities vs suburbia obey power laws.

I mean... You don't even need to impose new taxes. Just having people in suburbia actually pay the actual costs of maintenance of the existing infrastructure, would make them rethink their decisions.

There are plenty of dense cities around the world where I'm sure the owners of apartments in the (walkable) center would have enough money to buy a house/McMansion in a nice suburb.

And some do. But plenty don't. And building dense walkable cities with nice public transportation works very well and does not make these cities less attractive as far as I can tell.

Setting aside that your opinion is not data, this is how you mentally entrain the future of society in a terrible moment in an unsustainable industrialization ramp.

What people want is incredibly malleable. To behave otherwise at a policy level is to enslave yourself to the lowest common denominator.

Nonsense. What people want is a hard reality compared to the 4 year political cycle which ultimately drives policy.

You are, of course, free to devise strategies to win the public's hearts and minds. I will root for you in this endeavor. But what you aren't allowed to do (outside the comfort of your armchair) is to deny political reality. Your constituency simply won't stand for it, and will root you out like a bad tooth - and I say that as public policy practitioner, that was voted in and out of office.

It's for this very reason that moneyed interests that outlast the political cycle have an outsized policy impact: they can push their agenda for decades until they manage to change "what people want", forcing the politicians to follow suit or disappear. Car dependency is a good example.

You seem to be arguing for my point. Just because you couldn’t deal with what people want as an elected representative doesn’t mean it can’t be changed, isn’t being changed right now.

I wasn’t encouraging anyone to run for office.

If that were true, you'd expect suburban houses to be more expensive than those in the city, but in reality it is generally the opposite. Here in Seattle, we watch the urban population grow in lockstep with the availability of new housing, year after year, while the cost of that housing continues to rise - much faster than the general rate of inflation. Simple economics suggests that city life must be very desirable, and that the urban population would be growing even faster if more housing were being built: therefore, some fraction of those people who end up in the suburbs are moving there not because it is their preference, but because wealthier people have outbid them for the more desirable city life. This is what people mean when they complain about gentrification.

You cannot be sure Americans actually want to live in suburbs when that is all that most of them have to choose from, and that is the case because American zoning codes adopted in the mid 20th century made it difficult to build much of anything else. Car dependency was created, by law; do not mistake it for revealed preference.

It's possible to have both: bike stations near train stations. Ppl from suburbs/low density areas go with bike to train station, and to their destination with the train. You may say ppl don't want this and this may be true, it's about tradeoffs: do you optimise for medium-high density or for low. Nowadays us/canada&even some europe does for low density

And yet skinny houses in dense neighborhoods are always scooped up the moment they hit the market in my area.

> Just look at almost any billionaire's mansion and you will see this pattern which becomes an aspiration for the middle class. Most people, given enough wealth, desire and choose the McMansion.

Billionaires tend to have lots of houses, including condos in Manhattan and London. And probably a yacht too. Not sure if we can derive a lot about general housing preferences from that.

Suburban sprawl is literally a result of policy, not just "what people want". Most people would love to live in a gigantic castle in the Loire valley with a helicopter taking them to the office - should we subsidize that as well?

Enabling people's wants by subsidizing it from other people's pockets - makes for a very bad result.

Start removing tax breaks for home ownership, rationally spreading the burden of maintaining infrastructure and other fun things that are subsidized today - you'll quickly learn that most people will weigh their options and think twice about McMansions.

The reality is - many people would love to live in a small town, with a train station to take a reliable ride to work in the city. Look at what happened in England, when already subsidized train tickets from satellite towns rose in prices.

The 'we' subsidizing the middle class is the middle class. "We" are paying for it. What 'we' are also forced to subsidize is the everyone else on top of our choice of accommodations.

I can compare old houses at the edge of a city which cost four times as much to new builds at the far edges of that city's metro area which cost significantly less. The more expensive houses require significantly less infrastructure and cost the government less to support because of their location.

A huge undercurrent in urban planning discourse right now (e.g., Strong Towns), is that if all subsidies and taxes were removed both the poor and rich living closer to the city (or in older, denser suburbs) would have more money at the end of the day, while most living in significantly less dense housing would not be able to afford to pay for their lifestyle.

I'm certain this logic only applies to mega cities. The vast majority of smaller cities and towns are like one or two streets of high density and the rest is suburban or rural. There's not actually anyone in the 'city' to subsidize those around it.

In large part, people want what we are taught to want. A hundred billion humans lived and died without ever knowing about or wanting Coca Cola or a Ford F150s or a McMansion or a photo album of their children or a poster of Marilyn Monroe in primary colours or a Fabergé egg or a KFC bucket or a private jet or a luxury yacht. Such things didn't exist, and nobody suffered a moment for it. The things we want as animals are such things as warmth, shelter, calories, respect. Most everything else is a manufactured desire, and a lot of the remainder is "wanting nothing, seeing someone else have a thing, wanting that thing".

Marketing turned women on to smoking, turned Americans onto sodas, turned Americans onto cars, onto basketball, onto Nike sneakers, onto fast food burgers, onto SUVs and are now turning Americans onto pickup trucks - it's not accidental, it costs billions and takes years. Billionaires don't want luxury yachts because they develop a mysterious desire to go boating, they want luxury yachts because they are useful tax vehicles.

Talking about "what people want" without taking into account that what people want is malleable and flexible, is missing something important.

This argument is overly general, allowing you to dismiss any expressed desires as "not real".

There is, in a sense, genuine suffering from not having a dishwasher or a bike or a basketball or a poster of the horsehead nebula even though we lived without them for millenia.

I'm not saying they aren't real desires, I'm saying that "the future can be whatever we want it to be" is hackable by advertisers and we should want some defense against that.

My work requires me to come to office on certain days. Not only are there no sidewalks to the office, the roads are egregiously unsafe even in a car. Even if a moped or bike were feasible, there’s nowhere to live within any reasonable distance. The office is isolated on the big acreage it purchased.

If I could, I would bike a half hour to work, easily. I can’t. It’s just not safe. Everything is built for big, fast cars.

It's an incredible crime that basically no american can live within 5 miles of their work. Car companies ad the government that capitulated to them fucked us so bad.

I’m not much farther, but there are no pedestrian routes to get there, just highways or roads with no shoulder at 55mph.

> only problem that self-driving cars will ever solve is where to put VC money in a zero interest rate world. We've had freight trains and mass transit for centuries.

Wouldn’t write these off so quickly. I know two people who ditched their cars in Phoenix, one of whom went car free, because of Waymo. (By analogy: without cabs and Ubers, many more New Yorkers would have a car parked in an outer borough.)

I will point out that getting around by cab is only really "solving" the problem of urban car storage and not....any other issues with cars in urban environments, like traffic or the portion of public space devoted to car travel lanes.

And in some cases they may actually make traffic worse with increased circling behaviors in the highest-demand (and often, most congested) parts of the city.

The trouble with trains is they are unresponsive to people’s needs. The #1 problem w/ trains in Europe is they are frequently two or three times the cost of air travel. So long as that is the case Europe has a carbon problem. I guess you could make air travel three times as expensive but isn’t the answer, if you don’t want far-right populist parties to take over, to get the cost of rail down?

In the U.S. we have almost forgotten the memory of resentment against railroads (eg. the word “railroading”) who would build tracks past your town but no station, instead they’d build the stationa few miles up the track where they owned all the land and could take all the profit of rising real estate values.

No wonder people were in such a hurry to tear up all the old railroad right of way as soon as they had the opportunity.

This sci-fi novel

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250883001/theterraformers

spins a scenario where people who can’t imagine they can afford to eat meat (kinda ridiculous when they can 3-d print organisms and have enough energy to spare to drive plate tectonics) reject the idea of building a planetary transit system based on rail because: doesn’t the current generation get to decide where they go and not have that decision forced on them?

To be completely explicit, you're telling anyone with any need or desire to pull a trailer or go off publicly planned and constructed roadways that their needs or desires are not even on the table for discussion. I don't believe it is in fact necessary to eliminate cars as a primary mode of transportation in the future in order to meet climate goals. But, even if it was, the argument just will not fly with many many many people. I could easily counter with the argument that we should keep cars but eliminate all air and boat transportation (and recreation) and eliminate the future production of computers. The path forward will not look like either of these proposals.

You don’t need to own a car to do this.

The simple fact is, public transport in most places sucks.

I’ve moved to Zürich, and there is no way I’ll drive a car willingly again. Taking the tram everywhere is extremely liberating.

I lived in New York City for 5 years. I loved it. I didn't own a car. I took the subway, cabs, trains, and planes everywhere. But, I didn't go camping or own a boat. I live in South Carolina now where I tow my catamaran to different regattas or just to the beach for fun. I go camping with an amount of gear that would be completely unreasonable to take on a train. Public transportation does not allow for the same activities as a car or truck. That's just obviously true. I'd be happy to give up my car. I would not give up sailing or the type of camping I do. People that hunt, should they give up hunting because they can't transport their game? How are contractors going to get equipment to the worksite? Cars/trucks/vehicles are not just for moving people.

I am not saying no one will never need a car again.

What I am saying, is that due to poor planning, a lot of people need to use cars when it shouldn’t be needed.

Most European cities that I have visited kind of get public transport 80% right.

Well obviously middle class people shouldn't be allowed to go sailing if that conflicts with urban planning and climate justice goals. Such activities should be restricted to the elites who can afford to keep their private yachts moored in the local marina. All for the greater good.

To be fair I'm not saying ban all cars, but otherwise you're right. Over the last ~100 years a lot of cultures and activities have grown up around super easy car ownership and use. Just like, teaching your kid to drive is a big cultural thing. It's a huge lift, but the downsides of car-centric societies are pretty well known at this point.

I don't for a second think the US will do this, FWIW. We'll probably over the next 10-30 years give the highways and interstates to AI (at insane expense) and never slough off the scourge of SUVs in the last mile. The US probably has enough natural resources to manage this, though as fewer and fewer Americans want to be miners and auto workers the burden will shift internationally, which is its own moral issue. We'll still have all the problems of noise, tire pollution, pedestrian/cyclist/motorist deaths, drunk driving, waste cars, super inefficient use of energy and labor, and an increasingly isolated and sedentary society, but IMO it's clear the US is fine with all of that.

What I think will actually chafe us is watching other societies do better. It's already happening. The wealthier among us travel to Asian or European countries see how they're not car-centric, and feel envy. They agitate for it in their communities, which puts them--even more--at odds with other US cultures that love cars, and political strife intensifies. The elite will force auto manufacturers to stop producing ICEs, car America will rebel, blah blah blah.

I think you are only telling the gloomy side of the story.

I think the answer might be nice if there's a better story.

Maybe not so much living without and riding bicycles and walking, but maybe more like:

- telecommuting - with government overriding 3-days-in-office ceo stuff

- goods delivery instead of shopping, maybe permits/regulations/etc to prevent 1000 delivery vehicles

- car rental, or fractional ownership, or something for exceptions

- rezoning/rebuilding so neighborhoods have some services within a short distance.

Not everyone lives in a perfect temperate coastal environment that doesn't get winter. And no, European winters are not really that cold and their use of bikes is not a good comparison. Especially since the distances involved are far smaller for them. Cars are vital in many regions.

I have lived in Toronto, Canada, for 15 years and never had a car. My family gets around all year by walking, public transit and cycling.

Most people live in urban centers where it is perfectly possible to live without a car. And as car use decreases, public transit availability will increase, together with other forms of transportation that don't have the externalities of private motor vehicles.

I did the same in Toronto.

Then I bought a car.

Night and day. Life became 10x easier. Suddenly Costco trips were possible. Weekend trips to cottage country. Visiting friends on the other side of town was a two-hour TTC (Toronto's public transit) ordeal; suddenly it became a 15-minute comfortable, safe, addict-free, warm car ride.

I have no doubt that driving a car would be very convenient, but how would that choice affect my neighbors? Because car traffic in the stroads around here make our homes noisy, our air polluted and our streets unsafe for children to play and be independent.

It's inconceivable to me that my kids can't bike to school because of all the car traffic around it... caused by parents dropping off their kids to school. Cars increase the safety of the people inside them at the detriment of everybody else.

We can thankfully begin to hear the death rattles of car-dependent urban planning and our cities will be much better once it's behind us.

People who think their will be this mass migration away from personal cars once buses, trains, and bike paths are everywhere are completely delusional.

In North America, the farther north you go - and thus the colder the winters - the more people bike year round. It is a small minority for sure, but cold is not a problem on a bike as they prove. (I haven't got the guts to bike when it is -20, but that is something some do)

Winters tend to be colder the further inland you go, e.g. daytime temperatures in Germany in the coldest parts of winter are typically lower than in Iceland.

Minneapolis is an inland climate colder than Germany in winter, yet Minneapolis is (for the US) a place known for the number of people who bike year round.

This has to include some thoughts on how to get vehicles to drastically lower their weights...

I really just don't think there's any benefit to trying to fix cars (I keep thinking "stop trying to make fetch/cars happen" from Mean Girls haha). My strong opinion is the way you fix the weight problem in EVs isn't to hope for better battery efficiency or w/e, it's to replace it w/ an ebike and a raincoat.

I largely agree, but it would still be a good problem to solve because it would make electric buses and the cars that can’t be replaced lighter.

I'm a little naive to the weight problem, is it really an issue for like, buses? Is this actually an area where trams (gasp!) are better?

An e-bike weighs orders of magnitude less than an electric car.

Buses and trains are extremely heavy

per passenger? trains also have less friction

This is exactly the right type of thinking and questions to be asking. We should be looking at cost (dollar and/or carbon) per unit of useful work (e.g. passenger-mile). On those terms commuter busses and trains often aren't a clear improvement over cars because of how often buses and trains are running at less than 25% capacity.

Singapore

One approach is to replicate Singapore massive taxation on vehicles, which disincentivizes ownership.

To own a vehicle in Singapore, it costs ~2.5x the normal cost due to taxes.

As such, it has one of the highest uses of public transit, bicycles and walking in the world.

Higher tax is not a must, one can have amazing public transportation infrastructure like in Tokyo or Hong Kong, but most US cities can't do that with all the roads and highways in place.

> start making it way way more easier to get by w/o a car.

How exactly could do this by 2030/2050?

So much of the existing infrastructure is built at a low density with the expectation of having a car to get around.

What do we have to do? Rebuild all our cities at Japan level densities so we can have reasonable tranit options? Ban living in those cities and force everyone to move to a few high density cities? Rebuild all our highways/roads with enough transit infrastructure and staff to let people travel their existing routes without a car?

"Make it way way more easier to get by w/o a car" sounds less feasible to me than scaling up EVs.

Starting with the areas that already have sufficient density but don't have safe bike infrastructure: build a network of safe bike infrastructure.

The area I live in is like this. Philly and its surrounding suburbs are absolutely already dense enough to make cycling a practical way to get around, but it's not particularly safe or pleasant to do so.

So there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in places that are already pretty dense. But in addition to that, upzone broadly and remove parking minimums. I think there's a good chance that leads to higher densities pretty quickly in areas with high demand.

> probably honestly just providing free swaps

There has to be a way to do the subsidizing thing that doesn't pay people who have a car to continue having a car, over people who haven't had a car and/or will stop having one...

I like this point, my mind immediately goes to "swap your ICE for an EV or an e-bike and $20k". I honestly think that deal is so good you'd see car theft spike. Maybe that's fine? We're in wild times haha.

Admittedly I drove a pretty worthless car, but when I moved to a denser city and stopped driving, something like "swap your car for a lifetime public transportation pass" would have been really, really tempting, too.

Damn that's a good idea

Some cities introducing low emissions zones have done exactly this for poorer residents with older ICE cars. They get cash bonuses plus mass transit passes, vouchers for car shares etc..

Annex 1 of this document lists and links to various things that are in place in various cities around the world:

https://cleancitiescampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/W...

Build efficient and affordable public transportation first, and without worrying about getting pushed onto the tracks. Japanese never banned cars, and people are predominantly using public transport. Switzerland never banned cars, and it pollutes far less than US. Also they accomplished that without letting >30mph e-bikers blasting through sidewalks.

It is sad a lot of western progressive totally forget about how western civilization was built. And resorting to “macro “ control strategies that never really worked.

People are selfish and DGAF. They will continue to buy the latest and biggest Range Rovers and Ford trucks (pedestrian death machines) to take their kids to school because they desperately need to signal how well off they are. Cars are a disgustingly polluting outlet for people to show off. IMO we should be banning big cars, possibly even legislating new cars are no bigger than a Japanese "Kei" car. Speed restrictions to go with it of course.

We should also be putting effort into reducing traffic to reduce emissions. If a road needs to come to a halt every 2 minutes for pedestrians, that adds up on a busy road. Building overpasses/underpasses in urban areas could improve traffic flow significantly.

So we need to invent an alternative visible and expensive status symbol. Back to gold watches?

Gold plated rims for ebikes

Electric palanquins.

You have to solve housing and/or transportation.

Nobody wants to commute 50 miles by electric scooter; if that's their only viable option other than a car, car it will be.

> EVs will not get there. Banning gas/diesel cars gets there.

So we can have EVs as long as we ban petrol/diesel cars?

It doesn’t work in the developed world either. We all hate pollution, sitting in traffic, lack of green space, obesity, lack of childhood autonomy … and yet society seems incapable of coordinating on solving it.

Well, except for the Netherlands.

Most of Europe is small, walkable cities. There are of course still highways and city roads, but most things here function as you're describing. Come on over, the water's warm ;)

> The only problem that self-driving cars will ever solve is where to put VC money in a zero interest rate world. We've had freight trains and mass transit for centuries.

They solve stress from a 30 minute daily commute.

Public transport is never door to door and there are always changeovers and cancellations, while self driving cars on demand can be door to door and is far less dependant on whether there's a labour dispute or leaves on the tracks.

They save thousands of hours per person over a working life.

(Also, before you comment: remote work doesn't suit everyone or every job and being able to work in a job that doesn't have to be within a few miles of your home and your partner's job is a huge flexibility, efficiency and career boost)

In my walkable neighborhood you know how this problem is solved?

The same way it was solved for centuries, high foot traffic incentivized a small grocer to pop up within walking distance. People in the neighborhood generally take jobs in the neighborhood, because there is high foot traffic, so there are jobs. Even doctors and nurses can get in on that, because it’s dense enough that a hospital is easy walking or biking distance, and their jobs are 100% not remote-friendly.

Let's say I work in reinsurance. How many reinsurance companies do you think are within walking distance?

It's an odd fact of life that as countries get more developed the people in them more heavily specialise. This is one of the reasons cities have much higher wealth production per capita than towns.

If everyone is very unspecialized (e.g. "general practitioner" rather than "expert in non-hodgkins limphomas") then walking and biking could work okay, there should be a couple of jobs in range (having alternative employment options is vital for healthy employee-employer relations). But that's just not how an advanced global economy works.

> Public transport is never door to door and there are always changeovers and cancellations, while self driving cars on demand can be door to door and is far less dependant on whether there's a labour dispute or leaves on the tracks.

My city's automated metro comes every 90 seconds at rush hour, and every 3 minutes the rest of the day. The commute from my old neighborhood was 25 minutes including walking, and now that I moved to the suburbs I added a 10 minute bus ride to get to the station.

My parents recently gave me their old car, and it's fun to have it for weekend adventures. (I'm not an anti-car extremist!) But for commuting to work it isn't much better to be sitting in traffic while the train zips past.

This infrastructure wasn't all that expensive to build and your city could have it too. The only special requirement to make it succeed is to rezone the areas around stations for high density housing, so they'll have lots of built-in demand.

Zoning reform is a necessity but it won't resolve infrastructure problems extending to transport so quickly. Climate change (exacerbated through growing emissions) is a near-term problem.

That's fine and dandy, but that will still produce the core problem - increased traffic... which would make your 30min commute, a 2 hour commute. And "build more roads" has been proven to not ease traffic at all.

Meanwhile, even with issues with public transit - a 30 minute commute is still on average a 30 minute commute.

> whether there's a labour dispute

Crazy thought: if they strike and you can't get to work then don't go but put pressure on those who are at fault for the strike: stingy businesses.

I like my lifestyle around car, and driving. I lived in Europe without car and woth car in US. Much better in US. And I suspect the world can support 1000× cars easily.

Remember when 20 years ago if anybody had doubts with the way things were heading we were told "there's no war on cars you conspiracy theorist, nobody's going to come for your cars you conspiracy theorist"? After 20 years they've made enough progress shaping the narrative that they no longer need to lie and hide their agenda they can just put it in the open.

The thing that continues to happen is that people living in rural towns think that cities changing their mobility priorities to decenter cars is a personal affront.

People asking to properly account for the negative externalities of car ownership can be construed as a war on cars through taxation, or as a removal of a subsidy. The only difference is framing.

> The thing that continues to happen is that people living in rural towns think that cities changing their mobility priorities to decenter cars is a personal affront.

Look at the context, OP at the top of the comment tree. They are explicit in asking for a ban, not merely making alternatives more attractive.

A big factor is that the urban population is much larger and tends to vote for things that make sense in their context, but any laws would also apply outside it.

So those in the countryside might be badly effected by a car ban imposed by urbanites.

It's a similar effect to the way policies tend to get made that are good for the middle class but bad for the poor.

This is exactly reversed, people in cities bend over backwards to adapt laws to work for people in rural areas, fund massive infrastructure efforts for rural areas, etc.

Why do we have such good and extensive roads in rural areas with such tiny tax bases? Because cities pay for it. Telephone services, electricity, broadband... all these are hugely expensive and inefficient in rural areas and need to be funded by the productivity of cities, which we gladly do.

Meanwhile rural areas have outsize weight in legislative bodies, and often make explicit laws banning cities from running in that they want to.

That problem goes both ways and it is wrong headed whenever a single solution is imposed on the whole.

I've seen for example NY politics around transportation, where people that live in the city predominantly use public transport, but any attempt at traffic calming or providing more space for people "at the expense of cars" is an uphill battle because people from surrounding areas predominantly drive into the city. The irony being that following a "park and ride" model would make the city more appealing, including for those that must drive.

Having a bus coming every 5 to 10 minutes in some random place in Nebraska is never gonna happen, but not having that in a city like Seattle, San Francisco or even Los Angeles is ridiculous.

The thing that continues to happen is urban residents with limited understanding of the world outside their bubble think a future without cars is anything but a laughably naive fantasy driven by an entirely imaginary utopian ideal.

A future with significantly reduced car traffic in cities? It's perfectly possible. Cars will never completely disappear, only someone that hasn't thought about the problem or that is building a straw man would say that.

Car ownership in the US is ~90% (more than one per adult). In The Netherlands it is ~50%. They still have a car per family for longer trips, but they don't need them for every trip, so they use them significantly less.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_S...

That bubble is 80% of the country.

Getting around without a car is perfectly enjoyable if you live in the right neighborhood in the city.

The war on cars is mostly about building more neighborhoods like that.

Remember n years ago when people thought their lifestyles would have no consequences for the future of industrial civilisation? Anyway building more and good public transport so cars don't have to be used nearly as much is an incredibly good thing.

Better yet, make it so I can just walk to the thing that I want to do

If even discussing that some people may begin to prefer alternatives to cars in some situations is equivalent to a declaring war on cars, then I really underestimated how insecure the pro-car argument is.

My man, the post explicitly says "Banning gas/diesel cars gets there".

But my man, there's a thing called an electric car and you said a "war on cars". Be more specific if you're actually saying there's a "war on GAS cars".

I remember 20 years ago when they would say,"They hate our way of life" and think it had to do with religion or something, but I've recently come to realize that they meant the sentiment that GGP poster is talking about.

You have to solve housing. Nobody wants to commute 50 miles by electric scooter.

- If we're serious about meeting the 2030 "halve our emissions

"We¹" are not serious about it. Biden talks pretty but has increased the production of fossil fuels, beyond what even Trump did and we are now exporting more LNG than any other country. (That changes, we are at the top, the nr 1 spot might change between competitors now and again)

Yet we are all so happy with Biden cause he -says- the right words.

Same with Norway. So many people saying the right things at the right places with the right photo ops.

Yet we are not producing more fossile fuels than ever before. The state has decided that we will increase production until 2026, and -then- we will really cut back.

Yeah right.

Then we saw last winter many countries opening up coal powerplants again to have enough energy. You cannot be serious about 2030 and the climate in general, when you restart that kind of power plant.

¹ Those who run countries and have been elected to do so.

> building the future around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable

But it's potentially profitable in our highly financialized economy, and nothing else is.

> If we're serious about meeting the 2030 "halve our emissions" and 2050 "zero our emissions" goals, EVs will not get there

Their purpose is merely to rescue the coastal urban California real estate prices by displacing the pollution to a less wealthy geographical area. The rest is just marketing.

> I get that whole economies are built around producing/maintaining cars and related infra, but it was wildly disastrous.

Wrong. Whole economies are built around profit and that is what's disasterous.

> We're well into sunk cost fallacy territory here, like, on a species level.

You're wrong again to think we had a choice. Capitalism pits everyone against each other in ruthless pursuits of profit for the sake of survival and life meaning. It's more than economic gridlock; it's social gridlock.

Extremist nonsense. Why not restrict access to electronics, heating and cooling and lighting in the developing world? Meanwhile, here on earth, there are and will be micro EVs, trucks and busses and material advancements for batteries and recycling. Just take a look at the chinese market, there are many affordable options for the everyman. Also, if you don't think self driving cars will solve any problems you haven't driven anything with level 2/3 cruise control. Transport modernization in the developing world will be analogous to mobile phone proliferation in the developing world (in place of having a POTS), it doesn't have to mirror Norway

1st point will never happen in democracies

2nd point is also debatable in western democracies.

What you proscribe is only possible (currently) in dictatorships. It may be possible in 20 years after many more weather and climate disasters

> We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in the developing world without mass catastrophe

That's incredible! Now show us some evidence.

Evidence like total cost of car infra vs taxes that ppl pay? Evidence that low density areas are subsidized by high density? All this info is freely available online. Difference is US can afford to be in debt, other countries - not so much

Don't forget the bit where many cities are running in the red (existing infra costs more to maintain than it nets in taxes), but they "make it up on growth" by continually expanding

Those may be serious problems, but nothing about that says that "mass catastrophe" necessarily follows. Language like that is implying something approaching apocalyptic.

> All this info is freely available online.

Given that the internet is full of conflicting information, and that you seem to know far more about this issue than I do, perhaps you could share a link to some of this information from a source you find credible? I would like to trust you over whatever is at the top of search engine results.

With the risk of sounding like a broken record, it's what Strong Towns bases their advocacy around: https://www.strongtowns.org/

There's also a overview of their stuff from Not Just Bikes, but these videos are somewhat hit or miss since his works have a tone which can come off as being condescending: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...

I don’t think, that we’re getting back to the tech level of 1960s in Soviet Union. There were cars for important people and government. The rest lived in the big buildings around factories.

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