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Societies thinking around cars really shows just how "unnoticeable" the influence of something becomes once it is ubiquitous. In a car-based world everything takes the shape of cars, and the crazy thing is, that many people won't even see how unusual that is.

I once lived next to a busy inrush road in a city. Once a week I could wipe black grime from my balcony desk. Every second night I would wake up from people speeding or trucks rushing through. One day I spent on the balcony counting cars. 100% of the SUVs had only one person in it. But the worst thing was the noise. I didn't notice back then, and I am not a sensitive person (I play in a noise rock band), but when I moved and was in a silent new flat, it felt as if someone had lifted a rock from my chest. And let's not think about the black grime.

Cities and cars are not a good mix, unless you own a car and don't care about the people living there. I especially dislike how naturally we are expected to yield public space to ever-bigger cars for only minor fees.

What I find most striking is that people with very rudimentary training are allowed to use machinery of 1.5 tons and more, in public, in the vicinity of unprotected bystanders.

This leads to about 43,000 deaths per year in the US alone. And for some reason this is considered normal.

In the meantime you have safety trainings for how to use a ladder properly in your org.

Don't get me wrong, work accidents do happen with ladders, and training/inspection can prevent them, but the risk stemming from ladders doesn't compare to cars.

The way society accepts risks tells a lot about that society.

If cars weren’t so ubiquitous otherwise in society, it would probably require several months of training to be licensed to drive a car in the workplace. And then you wouldn’t be allowed to drive faster than 15 mph except in special fenced in areas.

I mean I got my driving license in a country where the fast way of doing it takes 6 months and includes driving on a test pad where multiple dangerous situations are simulated:

- a wet road and you drive over a "moveable" section of road and as soon as your front wheels are over it jerks the rear wheels randomly to either the left and the right ans you need to recover

- a course that you drive through and randomly a wall of water emerges from holes in the street and you need to safely stop or avoid the obstacle (this teaches you about the safe stopping distance and problems that can emerge when you suddenly try to avoid things) with and without ESP

- driving too fast around curves on purpose

- trying to do similar things while multitasking in the vehicle to demonstrate how bad that influences your performance

I don't know what the level needed is in the US (I grew up in Austria), but even with that training I still feel cars are taken not seriously enough.

> what the level needed is in the US

Collect 4 barcodes from boxes of cereal.

The level in the US is a written test on a subset of the rules, usually 6 months of mentored driving (need something like 50 hours with another licensed adult in the car), and a test that involves basically driving around the block and parallel parking. It sounds like a joke but it's true. Even most optional courses like driver's education generally don't put you on a skid pad or anything like you mention. I assume it's largely due to liability and lawyers - ironically they consider that type of training to be too dangerous even though you'll encounter more dangerous situations on the road and be unprepared for them.

The best thing I have found for this type of training is autocross (tire rack presents a special defensive driver course related to some autoX clubs too). Then snow/skid pad it's just finding a deserted parking lot cover in snow and ice for some low-speed recovery practice.

As someone that first learned to drive in the US, getting my license in Norway was pretty eye opening.

> Cities and cars are not a good mix, unless you own a car

Even if you own a car really. I've owned a car for the past 8 years because of how crap the public transport is. It's the only way of getting to many places. But I've never driven within my own town except for getting out of town. What I've always really wanted is an out of town car park I can cycle to with secure bike parking. That would completely eliminate the need to use a car in town. At that point I could probably do without actually owning the car and just grab one from a pool of rentals.

Unfortunately people don't know what they're capable of and insist on cars being parked right at their houses. So many people even get groceries delivered by someone else now. They are mostly just wheelchairs these days.

> even if you own a car really.

True.

I am lucky enough to live in a european city with very decent public transport, so for the 2 times a year I actually need a car or a transporter I just rent it. I don't need to think about my car, where it is parked, what it needs in terms of maintenance, etc. I see this as a value that easily outweighs the benefits of having a car.

But that choice is easier if you live somewhere where you can both get everywhere using subways, busses, light trains and hop on a night train and wake up in the capital of a different country. I guess you have to experience this before you realize that a life without car is truly possible, when you shape your world in the right way.

Before I had a car I lived in a city and used my bicycle to get around everywhere. I could get to most places in the inner city far more quickly than my friends who had opted in to a disability: they now required cars to move around and their bodies had regressed into a blob-like form.

But this lifestyle became worse and worse over time and it was all due to cars.

Over 10 years I saw the roads become more and more clogged with cars. I saw cars get bigger and bigger and more and more powerful with the drivers seemingly less and less capable. I'd been using the road since I was 12. They'd been using it since they were 18 or so and only knew it from behind a dashboard. I saw more and more public money get poured into the car subsidy: "reducing journey times", making roads better for cars and worse for everyone else. Meanwhile train tickets increased, bike parking got worse or stayed the same and cars just seemed to get more and more affordable. I'm probably as experienced a cyclist as you can get but I now consider cycling on the road to be too dangerous to be enjoyable. Not to mention I started to question whether breathing diesel fumes and tyre dust in deeply was good for my health.

To add to that, just living in the city became unbearable. Car noise had become horrendous. I never heard my neighbours who lived in adjoined apartments. The only noise pollution to enter my own abode was from cars: the engines, the tyres and the sound systems (and I'm not talking about boom-boom subwoofers, just standard car radios). This really hit home one winter when we had weather bad enough to stop people driving for a week. Noise pollution is insidious: you only know it's bad when it's already driving you crazy.

So I got a car to escape the cars. Sad but true.

> I'm probably as experienced a cyclist as you can get but I now consider cycling on the road to be too dangerous to be enjoyable

literally the only reason i got life insurance

Some cities have car-sharing schemes, where cars parked on the street (no particular place) are available to rent by the minute, hour or day. I use this in Copenhagen, though generally only a couple of times a year.

Green Mobility and Share-Now are the larger companies here.

Other than cars with mufflers cut out most car noise (above a certain speed) is the tire noise. At least that's how I understand it. Not to say it wouldn't be nice if cars would be otherwise silent, but i.e. highway noise wouldn't be significantly quieter with BEVs all around. Could you tell me what do you mean by technical capability to produce silent cars?

Tire noise is related to speed and (i'm guessing weight of car). Usually you don't live near highway, so urban street noice levels would be much lower when there would be no engine noise car would not weight 2+ tones and preferably would use low noise tires (quiet tires).

car tires are wide. Much wider than they need to be to do same speeds on normal roads. This is fashion driven and encourages drivers to go faster than they should. It also wastes fuel and makes more noise. We could tax car tires by width and gain a lot.

Not only fashion, when driving on icy roads, every square centimeter of contact surface counts.

It counts, but does it in a meaningful amount? We are not on a race track. There is no need to be faster by 0.01 second. If road conditions are averse, slow down. You are not expected to WIN morning commute.

> You are not expected to WIN morning commute.

This is my favourite bit about cycling. The commute is a race. It’s often with others, but the likes of Strava gamify it such that you are racing yourself too.

The type of tire and depth and pattern of the tread on the tires matter far more than the width of the tire. My sedan with high quality 'skinny' winter tires will easily cruise on past an SUV with wide summer tires going up a snowy hill.

This is also true for noise - tread design and compound are much bigger factors for noise than section width.

Also, what you describe is not necessarily in conflict with the parent. Skinny tires are good in the snow because there's less plowing effect and more pressure to grip into the snow. However, more width is generally better on icy roads.

100% agree

I think there's a perception too that before cars there were just horse and cart

When I look at old pictures of my local town there is a huge network of street trams, larger rail network than there is now

People used to have better public transport than they do now here and for much longer than most people assume

I appreciate your sentiment but go to Google maps and take a look at at any non-coastal state. There's just no way cars are going away. Short of a quintillion dollar restructuring of our country, it's a complete pipe dream. Id encourage you to be pro clean/public transportation rather than anti car. Zealotry gets us nowhere.

No, anti car.

There was recently a pro-car terrorist attack in London. I am not kidding - someome made a bomb and blew up a lamppost with cameras for reading number plates. Its hardly been reported.

Can you imagine the coverage if the climate protesters blew up a betrol station, or god forbid, if this was something to do with currst conflict in the middle east?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/08/bomb-att...

So why anti-wcar? So in inner London, like 40% of households have a car but 90% of public space is roads. When u suggest that maybe the 60% deserve at least 20% of space for walking and cycling, you get labeleled anti car.

People complain about having like 8 coherent cycleways across all of london taking up too much road space, compared to thousands of roads. People complain about not being allowed to drive ancient diesel vehicles that kills kids eith astma.

Fine then, I am anti-car.

same in berlin. Someone blew up repeatedly the same speed measuring tower for cars on a somewhat major road (https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/berlin-charlottenburg-e...)

I am also anti-car, not anti-car everywhere but they just don't belong in cities.

I'm pro practical and pro blow shit up if you have to, but I don't know what your point is.

Look at a map. Just zoom around the entire US, that isn't on the coast, and tell me how you're going to get rid of cars.

You identify the flat, dense, urban spaces fit for car-free living. You build public transit in and between them.

You decide on an inner-city answer to delivery and trash trucks, like maybe the robots that move pallets around in warehouses... You build easy ways for people to get in and out of their cars and trucks on the borders of those spaces... You stop letting cars and trucks on to main street. #bollards

> tell me how you're going to get rid of cars

Easy - make 'Light commercial' use of your house a constitutional right. There, all of USA fixed in one day. Now you can open a coffee shop in your garage, and it cannot be interfered with by zoning laws and mandatory parking minimums. And now your neighbours can sell pizza, and you can walk there and pick it up.

And if you have 2 days, allow apartments to be built withing 300 meters of any public transit.

You can't be serious. That's where people park their cars and put their lawnmowers, snowblowers, etc. Good luck getting a garage OKd to sell food by the health department. Not to mention literally no one is going to buy pizza out of someone's garage.

Where are you from that you think this is feasible?

You are so stuck in your mindset you cannot even imagine that life in different across the globe.

Britain people sell food from their house kitchen, on Deliveroo and Uber eats. Registration is really easy.

Obviously I meant that you build a real pizza oven in your garage, and park your car elsewhere

https://www.food.gov.uk/business-guidance/starting-a-food-bu...

But that's my point, I feel like you can't imagine life elsewhere in the US. Someone having a pizza place in suburbia, in their garage is:

A: Impractical. That's where your car goes. There's no where else to park it. Park it elsewhere, what?

B: Not suitable for serving food.

C: Completely ignoring the social norms of the area/culture.

D: It's not dense enough for that to make sense. People will have to drive there for the business to survive unless all 100 people living in that 1 mile radius eat pizza every day.

E: It's simply not big enough.

F: Therefore, weather. No one is walking to an outdoor garage pizza place with no seating in the winter. They're not driving either.

Look up Oshkosh, WI on Google maps and tell me where these customers are going to come from. There is enough commercial. There aren't enough people.

Most of the country is very sparsely populated. The 100k cities have kind of a city core, but they are spread out over 400 sq miles. The rest is nothingness.

Your idea requires completely resigning zoning laws against literally everyone's will, somehow adding parking for everyone's cars, and what, adding more busses that already don't get used?

> someome made a bomb and blew up a lamppost with cameras for reading number plates.

Good.

Brb, gonna set a petrochemical refinery on fire.

Surely we aren't going to be hypocrites about it and designate political attacks on infrastructure as terrorism?

A petrochemical refinery is infrastructure, speed cameras are just another way of stealing money from you under the guise of safety.

The petrochemical refinery is stealing clean air and years of life from me and thousands of others.

I recently heard cars described as "an insect-like exo-skeleton for people, who then feel free to act more like insects than citizens while they're inside of it"

> Instead of jus making a car unable (auto breaks) to hit a pedestrian, we are doing some silly workarounds

I have a car which auto-brakes when an obstacle is ahead. Usually helps when parking in tight spots, or when backing out — its systems have wider FOV than I do, and it warns of incoming cars of pedestrians a fraction of a second before I can see them, which is good.

Except when the weather conditions or something on the road trigger a false positive and I suddenly go from 45-50 km/h to full stop. It's also a lot of adrenaline fun for the drivers behind me. Happened twice last year.

So no. A speaker is more reliable and robust and simple a solution.

Separating your car from unprotected humans is the solution. Your right to drive a 2 tonne machine through residential streets where other people live and their kids play is a historical and cultural anomaly. Let’s not pretend the solution is speakers to get pedestrians jumping quicker.

I welcome you to design such a block of streets, though keep in mind that it still needs to be maintained. Also when you have a grocery shop, something needs to load and unload groceries. Also, you have fire trucks, ambulances, police cars that need to have access.

Emergency vehicles do have these things called sirens. I'm not against them. Thats an emergency after all.

I wasn't talking about sirens at all. You make vehicle-friendly neighborhoods if you want emergency vehicles to be able to get there. The moment there are vehicle-friendly neighborhoods, the locals will inevitably come with reasons and excuses to have their cars parked as close to their house entrances as it gets.

You don't win against human nature.

There are lots of lowering bollards in the UK. That allows you to do things like slow emergency vehicles, or allow motor traffic only at designated times.

It's going to take a long time to change our built envrinoment and habits, but it's not inevitably human nature to want cars whipping through the places our kids play. In fact, given a choice rich people rarely allow this in their neighbourhoods. If you want to see what spaces look like when cars are deprioritised, NL and other European countries are leading the way. And you don't have to ban them entirely. Just stop through traffic, and limit to local residents. Also reduce speed limits and make public transport a viable alternative for people.

Drink driving also used to be normal and "inevitable". It's possible to change.

Perhaps if we're going to continue to have highways through cities, containing their noise and emissions should be a priority rather than shifting externalities as various kinds of pollution onto neighbors and visitors.

Build residences that are each bunkers with massive walls, airlocks, and HEPA filtration is probably not going to scale to all demographics very well.

I think (the US) needs more public transportation that gets people out of single-occupant vehicles without imposing time, money, or practicality costs onto them.

Yeah, but also, nah. You can regulate cars and get 90% to a level society can deal with happily. But then you get a hoon in a performance vehicle doing a burnout in suburbia, and the police twin engine helicopter thrumming overhead tracking them down.

Or the neighbours who enjoy Vietnamese karaoke, or the neighbours having a domestic on the street.

These aren't the most fun aspects of living in a community (unless you get invited for the karaoke!); but they benefit from ambient noise cancellation.

I feel like you're underestimating how loud cars in regular use are. On my walk over to the supermarket I basically have to shout if I want to have a conversation. No one is driving especially loudly and in fact the problem is mostly tire noise.

Where do you live? When I was still living in the city we could talk outside at a slightly raised voice when walking or biking. You had to speak in the direction of the other person obviously. Only sometimes at something like a gas station you have to really raise your voice.

> Where do you live?

The Netherlands

> When I was still living in the city we could talk outside at a slightly raised voice when walking or biking.

True for most parts of the city I live in too, but that's mostly because in most parts of the city there's either no cars or very slow cars or only one car within hearing distance at a time. As soon as you're walking along a busy road where the speed limit is 50km/h it starts getting loud.

It's quite possible there's some cultural influence here too. Dutch people don't tend to speak especially loudly when compared to e.g. Americans.

are you walking along a high-speed interstate?

I live in LA and the vehicle noise is negligible on any walk to anywhere compared to the low roar of the sounds of living otherwise -- unless you happen to get some muffler-less asshole driving his shitbox next to you; but that same rule applies just about anywhere.

I guess it could be a benefit of the low speed LA traffic?

Personally anytime i'm near traffic the stuff that bugs me is exhaust and brake/clutch dust. Nothing like a hot semi truck parking next to you in traffic after a long downhill stretch to cool his brakes and douse you in friction-material fumes while he waits for the light to turn green.

> are you walking along a high-speed interstate?

No, and in fact doing that here WILL get you picked up by the cops.

> I guess it could be a benefit of the low speed LA traffic?

Oh yeah lower speed traffic is much less bad for sure. But I'm still talking about a slowish speed limit here: 50km/h

> Personally anytime i'm near traffic the stuff that bugs me is exhaust and brake/clutch dust. Nothing like a hot semi truck parking next to you in traffic after a long downhill stretch to cool his brakes

I am blessed to not live near any hills and have cars subjected to frequent emissions checks. Still, can't tell you enough how much more I like the electric buses they use nowadays over the diesel monsters they had previously.

Appealing to the slippery slope is such a cop-out. Screw that. All most people want is common sense regulations on the top 0.5% loudest vehicles which produce incredible amounts of noise pollution and disrupt normal life.

Unless you have a souped up engine/exhaust, most of the sound of a car comes from the tires rolling (at highway speed).

How about the neighbor's music? Silent cars won't fix that.