In the future most vehicles will be man-sized and powered by electrical motors. "Cars" will exist only for hauling freight, and probably only ever occasionally rented, not owned.
Cars keep you much better protected from temperature, weather and traffic; it seems very unlikely to me that people will just forgo these comforts to rent electric rollers in the future.
Keeping a similar total number of privately owned cars, but almost all electric, sounds MUCH more likely to me.
Cars are a massive waste of energy and resources compared to other transport options we have now.
Societis/cultures who ignore efficiency will be eventually forced to adapt against their will. It's just market economics.
(E.g., you can be obstinate and waste a significant chunk of your income just for the perceived comfort of a car, but over a few generations these people will lose in economic competition to people who act rationally.)
As PV goes down its experience curve, the cost of operating an electric vehicle will fall. As batteries go down their curves, the cost of the vehicles themselves will fall. This will naturally push the equilibrium tradeoff point to larger, more energy intensive vehicles.
Cargo bikes can be a great option, though.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru...
The question is about convenience. Cars and parking, parking lots, moving through them, being stuck behind one or two cars traveling into and out of a parking lot. Even if there is ample parking, you generally have to walk longer distances from that than you do when you bike. That is why biking can be more convenient than driving. It’s not that you have to search for parking for 30-40 minutes at both ends of you trip, it’s that driving has all sorts of annoyances, like random traffic from crashes, lots of waiting at signals, lots of waiting for others to get their cars out of the way in parking lots. That’s always been my experience driving, and that includes the very rural place where my parents live. When you travel into town for groceries, you still have to deal with moving a car through all of those situations. If I’m closer than 2 or 3 miles to where I’m going, my preference is definitely not driving, because overall it’s more annoying than biking.
This must be why European cars are generally smaller than American cars. It has nothing to do with the lack of tax breaks on large vehicles, historically higher gas prices, and notoriously smaller parking spots. Nothing at all. Europeans just like smaller cars, right?
And let’s not get into why half of Asia seems to ride around on tiny little 50cc vespas/scooters. I’m sure that’s just more comfortable there what with all the extremely hot weather and monsoon rains.
For example: Going bonkers crazy on insulation is a common thing to do in Europe. We had TV ads for triple-pane windows back in the 1990s in a country (Slovenia) where re-doing your windows costs an annual wage or more. Because over N years it comes out cheaper than paying for energy.
Energy is so cheap in USA, at least in CA where I am, that even in 2024 seeing double-pane windows on a house is rare. Let alone triple or quadruple pane, which have become the norm back home.
In 2017, 59% of homes in the US had double paned windows.
https://dwmmag.com/survey-multi-pane-windows-now-on-59-perce...
> Cars are a massive waste of energy and resources compared to other transport options we have now.
Comfort is something we spend energy and resources on. This is a good thing.
You could potentially argue its too much energy/resources but that's not a determination you can make, not having access to people's internal emotional states. Some people really like giant fuzzy toys, some like nothing more than flying and some like fancy VR.
We should let people spend the energy/resources they earn on what gives them the most comfort/enjoyment or we'll be Typical Mind Fallacying our way to collective unhappiness.
(The above assumes that the externalities of cars are correctly priced in in the form of car insurance, road tax, congestion charge and fuel duty)
The low rung was the scooter/bicycle and the expense and convenience went up from there.
The streets are absolutely clogged with every level of transportation and everyone was busy and going fast.
Quite a contrast to rural New England but obviously the future. I see a college professor riding a one wheel about 2 miles from campus going up an incline that stretches for 2 miles. The road turns to dirt as it crosses state lines to Vermont. I dislike the ride on my bicycle. I stopped him once and I think he said he had 40 mile range!?
I think you mean car traffic. Cars create most of the dangerous traffic conditions that exist in our cities and neighborhoods.
While the GP’s post is idealistic, so many places are working to make non-car travel safer, it’s not hard to imagine a future where people choose more convenient modes of transportation as they feel safer doing so. Bikes as an example, tend to be easier to park, avoid most traffic issues (never really get stuck in traffic) and generally don’t have to look for parking at your destination. The only downside is their utility is generally mostly for local travel (last mile) of about 2 miles.
My guess is that for people that live within 2 miles of their work, school, and other needs, you’ll start seeing most households drop to a single car, with electric bikes making up most of the utility needs. It’s hard to predict a timeline here, and is highly dependent on a communities attention to making roads safer for non-car users. But for communities that do make those safety improvements you see big upticks in bike usage for things like taking kids to school, daily food shopping, and travel to work.
No; I mean that a car protects reliably in case of an accident. When on a bike, roller or on foot you are MUCH more likely to bleed or break bones. Bike-on-bike crashes can be fatal, even if there were zero cars or trucks around.
Living within 2 miles of work for the majority sounds just improbable to me without falling back on short-term renting (maybe even then). Outside urban centers- impossible.
My motorcycle in the garage would disagree
There's a simple test - can you put it on your porch or in a hallway?
If the building has ramps for handicapped and elevators you can put your motorcycle everywhere, even on floor 10 or 100 or even 1000.
Like it or not, cars aren't going anywhere. A scooter lifestyle might work for you but it doesn't work for a large enough portion of the population that your wishes for society will never come to pass.
Btw, electric scooters are possibly the most idiotic form of personal electric transport; electric bicycles are much safer. The geometry of a scooter, small wheels far below the center of mass of the rider, makes them fundamentally unstable at any speed. Considering bicycles exist, scooters are completely senseless and should probably be banned outright. You are far more likely to crash a scooter by yourself, simply by losing control of it, than to crash a bicycle. Scooters really are for young people who still think they're invincible; which explains why most riders don't even wear helmets.
Having the wheels far below the center of mass of the whole system (rider + scooter) makes them MORE stable, a bit similar to reversing a car with a long trailer instead of a short one. Compare to something like a racing recumbent bicycle, where the center of mass is really low. Those are very hard to balance at lower speeds.
You're so high above the wheels on en e-scooter (or just a regular kick scooter) that you can easily swerve (i.e. laterally displace the wheels, but not your torso) around a pothole or a puddle without changing the direction of travel. That's the opposite of instability.
Bicycles naturally stay upright. You can push one without a rider and it will roll alone until it loses speed. Try the same with a scooter and it will immediately fall.
The fact that you can push a bicycle without a rider and it will roll, while most small-wheeled kick-scooters will fall, is not caused by a higher center of mass, but by the geometry of the front wheel, mainly the steering angle, fork offset and trail. Without a rider, a) the center of mass isn't even that different and b) it doesn't really matter how they behave without one, because the rider is part of the system.
This is a "once a week" situation. As time goes on it will become increasingly hard to justify the cost of something you use once a week, especially when other options (groceries delivery) are cheaper and more convenient.
P.S. Scooters are popular because they don't need skill to ride, despite being worse in other respects. As time goes on this, too, will change; learning to ride some sort of PEV will be normal.
This is already happening where I live, because it makes economic sense. (They can sell upscale and more varied groceries without paying for upscale real estate.)
Americans will continue driving to Costco. There is no conceivable future where this minor transportation cost becomes hard to justify, especially when you factor in the cost savings of buying in bulk.
What was replaced were dense cities and compact towns, along with more distributed rural living, though the traditional form of that, still found in some places in Europe and elsewhere, is of small towns from which farmers travel to their (nearby, but not immediately proximate) fields.
In the city/town example, where the total urbanisation rarely extended more than a few kilometers or miles (as in low single digits), one would walk to shops or the market square, and purchases were carried, occasionally pulled in carts or wagons, or later delivery by the merchant was arranged.
Some goods, particularly fresh / readily spoiling ones (milk, eggs, ice) were delivered by cart door-to-door.
I'm not saying that we necessarily are returning to a similar circumstance, though it's a possibility you and others on this thread seem not to even consider. I'd suggest that this is an error. What a post-carbon world will entail is much more expensive private vehicle costs, where EVs seem to runs 2--4x the cost of an equivalent ICE vehicle, which would make ownership more challenging and various alternatives, including smaller transport options (bicycles, electric bikes and scooters, "city cars", and the like) more viable. I'm going to suggest that the Uber/Lyft ride-hailing revolution has proved a failure with many of the purported benefits (less traffic & congestion, universal availability, lower cost, less demand for parking) falling well short of advertised potential.
And I'm not claiming that the transformation will be instantaneous. Mass-market automobiles first appeared in 1901 (Ford's Model T and equivalent General Motors offerings), whilst tract suburban development didn't gain significant momentum until the late 1940s (Levittown, PA), and weren't fully mature until the 1970s, a lag of a half to three quarters of a century. De-suburbanisation may well follow a similar timescale. And yes, it's worth noting that there were a few minor road-bumps on the path to suburbanisation (the Great Depression, World War II).
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39005696>
<https://www.newsweek.com/americans-can-no-longer-afford-thei...>
Scooters can be quite convenient due to smaller size.
In general, banning things that are too risky for an individual's taste seems wrong. Individuals should be allowed to take risks with their own bodies as long as they are fully informed of those risks. Skiing or having children might be too risky for me but imposing that preference on others isn't showing empathy.
Many single people exist who shop using a backpack, in the peer comments there is an example of a Japanese small car of the year that suits people of a different country.
Big cars are a US lifestyle choice.
Even if you are talking only about Light Trucks and SUVs as an exclusively American choice, most customers in the BRICs and the most affluent developing countries now prefer a SUV if they can afford one. The only reason light-trucks and SUVs don't outsell light cars in those countries as much as in the USA is the income differential.
Cars per-capita? Well, the US has more cars per-capita than almost anyone, but not by a so big factor, it only has 2x the number of cars per-capita then, let's say, Brazil.
So, no, for what is worth, people seem to prefer to have a personal car as soon as they can afford one, and as soon as their income increases they also seem to have the same american stupid desire for trucks and SUVs.
Nonetheless, large families throughout time and space have somehow managed to survive without a yank tank, this suggests that while they may be desirable they are hardly neccessary.
We use our car to travel longer distances, like soccer tournaments over 5 miles away, or on the very rare case I need to haul something really big (which is such a rare need it’s worth just renting a truck).
Earliest cars were essentially horseless carriages. I think the norm of multiple people travelling together (as a family) has been set.
A vehicle which isn't moving is not performing its job as transport; and is instead wasting space. Your scenario is better served by public transit, which doesn't require any parking (outside of official maintenance depots, etc.). It also scales to groups of several hundred, whilst a car can only take around 5 individuals (perhaps a few more in a minivan, but that just makes the inefficiency of moving it around and wasting space on parking even worse for the entire rest of its lifetime!)