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?”
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.
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.
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.
In American terms - it's probably one of the better ones.
"Throwing Good Money After Bad Car Infrastructure - Wonderland Road" - on the road widening project of Wonderland Road in Toronto.
Montana spends $1BN/year on roadways and receives another $3BN/year in federal funding and serves a population of 1M people.
The NYC subways system moves five times the population of Montana every day and costs half as much per capita.
Do go on about how subways are a waste of money.
P.S. you're also comparing apples and oranges; you're only looking at the MTA operating budget; not the operating + capital budget which the Montana numbers represent.
Ideally the increase in property value should be captured by the public who made the investment - self funding effectively. But that's just the old LVT argument.
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.
> (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.
About the externalities, you already pay a lot to cross the more popular bridges into SF by car, you probably pay for parking, gasoline is taxed heavily, and the police don't really protect your car from break-ins. Yet some people want to drive for one reason or another.
Disclaimer: Everything above based on pre-2020 SF cause I left for good.
Feel free to elaborate, because that's not a universal position.
Wiled away the hours as the bus chugs along circuitously to a point that is not quite at your destination?
Tried to carry heavy shopping on a bus?
Walked to a bus stop through bad weather?
Taken one mode of transport that was delayed, making you miss the next leg?
Waited forever for a bus that never comes?
Public transport sucks balls. In the world's densest, biggest cities, you can make it kind-of-tolerable by throwing a ton of tax money at it, but it will never hold a candle to the most basic of cars / bikes / mopeds.
The only part of your list that your transit agency shouldn't solve are the raving lunatic. This is easy to solve though as there are not many raving lunatics in the world and so the number of not lunatics riding great transit means they are rare (and there are plenty of others to help deal with them when they get on).
Running great transit costs a lot more $$$ than most transit agencies get though, so they make the best of what money they have. (not really - most waste a lot of money on things that do not make for great transit, but even if they spent everything perfect they don't have anywhere near enough money to run great transit)
Buses will always be open to the entire public. If "the public" includes raving lunatics, then they will find their way onto the buses.
To build a better network, you need to either throw a vast amount of money at it, or have a super-dense city. The public transit in London & NYC is merely OK. In other cities, it will always be prohibitively expensive.
And to say that "the bus should always come" is not exactly an argument in favour of transit. We all know the damn bus should come. But sometimes, it just doesn't.
A big reason that the bus doesn't come is that it's gotten stuck in traffic. As in, behind cars. Give the buses their own space so they don't get stuck behind cars and they can be a whole lot more reliable.
Of course, since we've handed over essentially all our street space to cars already, doing so involves taking some space away from them, and drivers will scream about that.
What also beats mass transit is walking, if a city is laid out such that you don't usually need to walk very far.
I wouldn't say everywhere, but wherever they were introduced they reduced travel time significantly, and traffic in those corridors didn't get any worse. The 38AX became redundant after the Geary bus lane because the 38R is just as fast.
> The only way driving ever ends up being less convenient is if there's constrained parking. It's just very hard to beat a car that can go directly from point A to B.
Or if everyone else also decides to drive. Traffic continues to get worse until alternative ways to travel become faster. If there are no alternative ways to travel, traffic becomes worse and worse without bounds beyond human patience. Paradoxically it also means that improving transit travel times also improves driving times.
> What also beats mass transit is walking, if a city is laid out such that you don't usually need to walk very far.
There Venn diagram of people that want walkable cities and better transit might as well be a circle.
This is part of what I'm saying. If mass transit is improved, more people use it, so driving is still faster.
> There Venn diagram of people that want walkable cities and better transit might as well be a circle.
Walkable city works well with public transit along longer and simpler routes, like between cities or cross-town express. I'm not interested in public transit that stops every 2 blocks.
And in cities there should be constrained parking, because parking takes up valuable space that could be used for lots of other things. If you have abundant parking, it's probably not a very walkable city, because the parking itself is dead space that pushes everything else farther apart.
Having a lunatic on the bus is hardly an excuse to force everyone to use cars and the systematic destruction of walkable human scale neighborhoods.
But sure. Let's abolish all public transit just because sometimes there are lunatics. US had a raving lunatic as a president, we definitely should abolish US.
But in Japan, Switzerland, Barcelona, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Sweden, or the Netherlands I've not experienced this much; in many of these cultures since the public bus also serves schools and the elderly, they solve these problems.
Ever been in a car driving next to a raving lunatic? Nearly get forced offroad at 60mph into a gully by a braindead 'passer'? 'Throwing tax money...' ... you mean, like building yet another $500M freeway that almost immediately becomes congested? (Heavy shopping: Did that recliner fit in the back of your BMW?)
I've ridden metro buses since I sold my Dodge van in 2006. Total raving lunatics: 1. Collisions/repairs,oil changes, tires, license fees: $0. Total buses that chugged: none. Grocery-shopped by bus? Always. Waiting for a bus that never came? 1.
Heavy shopping? delivered. (It's a thing now.) Bad weather: usually I wait until tomorrow.
Edit: 17 years * 10,000 mi/yr = 170,000 miles. @10 mpg = 17,000 gallons. @$3/gal ≈ $50 grand. P.P.S.
@Car engine efficiency 25% .... ≈ 12,700 gallons wud have gone directly to fumes and heat. ≈ $38K.
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.
Several of the most upvoted comments in this very thread are advocating banning vehicles.
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.
A lot of so-called "smart people" on this website seem to forget where all their food is grown.
It isn't in Times Square.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right, but they currently believe those things for reasons that are inexorably connected to those same policy choices.
However, there is no reason to assume that if those policies change, peoples impressions and preferences won't change too. Quite the opposite, actually - that's just how incentives (and the related PR) work.
Only in the chicken-and-egg sense that policy choices make suburbia prioritized, but I don't think it's enough to say that special policies are what wholly render suburbia quiet and safe (to the extent that if you were to enact the policy change you want, suburbia will still be regarded as such).
"Safety" perception though seems to largely be a social construction. By this I mean it seems pretty clear (US context) that a) most people have opinions, often strong ones, about safety that b) don't seem much related to any data or real science [1] and c) are quite often affected by softer things like political messaging and PR.
If I'm right about the above, there would be no reason to assume it would not change also. Of course it also implies that change could not be driven by reality either :)
[1] real science in this area seems inherently difficult, and available data of poor quality
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....
> unsustainable
The global population growth rate is going to stall, and by extension, cities will cease to grow. Sustainability is a moot point.
Which I never engaged in. Banning cars is nonsense and is counter productive.
> The global population growth rate is going to stall
If we give every person a car to drive every day, today - that's enough to make it unsustainable. That's the whole point. We don't even have to have any growth in population.
Leaving aside that we aren't, sustainability necessarily implies perpetual increase. This hypothetical doesn't make sense. If the demand were there to supply everyone with a vehicle, we would, the materials are there. That would of course result in environmental encroachment, but not indefinitely. Plus vehicles on the road will all be EV in the coming decades.
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.
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've been poor enough that i couldn't afford a car, so any "poor people need cars, not bikes and transit" argument feels a bit hollow to me.
and the immediate assumption that i'm talking from a place of privilege rather than experience is pretty rude, tbh.
It can go with the thread on Signal where $338k/year was not much money, but the cost of SMS messages and cellular phonecalls was outrageously expensive.
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.
Some people have weird ideas about cars being "for regular people" while any money spent on a bicycle is a luxury.
The utility I get out of the car, in absolute terms, is incomparable to my ~$1500 bicycle(that I purchased for utility and even commuted on for several years). I have slept in my car many times. My car has snacks, spare clothes and shoes, a blanket, a pillow, towels, pen and paper, bags for groceries, kick scooters, folding chairs, spare chargers and cables, amongst other things.
Regular people need to bring things they own with them and take them back home. Bikes are trash for that. When I’m on my bike, my credit card serves the function of space.
I use the ebike every day to commute, and for lots of groceries or coffee runs. I've ridden that (or my road bike) ~40k miles over the last 5 years. For the "emergencies" that I do need a 2nd car, I uber. I think I've done it 5 times in the last 5 years.
In terms of dollars saved, at this point an ebike almost costs me nothing. I just use miles traveled * .55 for cost savings over a car.
In terms of co2 saved, I don't know but I consider it a win.
In terms of life enjoyment, I'd MUCH rather be on my ebike than stuck in a box.
I regularly bring things with me on my ebike because it has plenty of room to strap stuff on, and baskets that are handy for throwing stuff into it. I have a cheap bike trailer for moving bigger things that would require, say, a trunk.
You were not the type of person who I am complaining about, but bikes are a great money saving device for most people, and should not be viewed as luxury items.
My Telluride can do that though.
Even if I could somehow fit all that shit onto an ebike, I wonder how long it and I would be able to make it before we give trying to go the 125 miles from Fort Worth to Possum Kingdom Lake...
This site infuriates me sometimes at the complete and utter lack of understanding of most of the United States.
My family of four gets around great on bicycles, including when two of those members could not yet cycle themselves.
You simply buy a bike that allows easy carrying of little people and all your baggage. Instead of some silly road bike or mountain bike that is meant for sport.
You don't see me making up complaints about the impossibility of transporting a finally by car because a Lotus can't fit them all.
Or how a car can't go from SF to Hawaii. Why would you ever buy a car if it can't support that vacation, right?
These are ridiculous complaints not connected to reality or towards actually looking at the high value that various modes of transport can provide.
Most of the US in what capacity? Square miles? Because the majority of the population lives in Cities.
I love reading comments like yours. All throughout this thread you've vehemently argued that your perspective is the right one.
It's a reminder to me that close minded people like you actually exist! You're not here to discuss, you're here to argue. That's pretty unfortunate.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If people can walk for some of their trips 50-80% of the year and ebike for most of the rest, that is a huge win even if not everyone can adapt to the 'unbearable' sacrifices that go along with that kind of change. "But not literally everyone can do it so it's a terrible suggestion and you are an elitist." Ok cool.
Let me just get on my eBike and cruise the streets in the 4+ months we have snow, and 6+ months it's cold.
We don't all live in California.
Why is my cheaper bike a "luxury" while it allows me to save tons of money in insurance and gas, while the elitist in a super expensive car considers a very practical piece of gear a luxury?
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.
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.
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.
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.
No it isn't. We just haven't figured it out yet. Those aren't the same thing.
A car isn't a helicopter, they require reasonably good roads with high costs of maintenance(and a lot of other infrastructure to support roads).
Also car dependent lifestyle means that population density drops, with less walkable places than ever.