This. Is a very out of touch opinion. I could write 20 paragraphs disagreeing, but I doubt it is worth my time to write or anyone else’s to read.
Not every person is able-bodied enough to walk and bike. Also, people happen to need to get from A to B when it is cold, dark, raining, extremely hot, snowing, or just some kind of shitty outside. People need to drive to a store for food or supplies that cannot be carried or biked back to the destination. People have multiple children that simply cannot walk or bike. Old people cannot simply walk or bike.
This concept of a car-less world is just so completely out of touch with reality, saying it louder isn’t going to change anything.
As for cold, dark, raining. Boo fucking hoo. If you had to go somewhere you'd deal with it. Cars have made people into weak, incapable little creatures. It's honestly pathetic.
I cycle with food and supplies in my panniers all the time. What exactly are you buying every week that can't be transported back without fossil fuel assistance?
You don't think children can walk or bike? Are you crazy? A healthy child doesn't want to sit still. They're capable of locomotion from about age 3.
Old people can get around too. Sure there are some who can't but it's not a majority. Again, cars have taught us this helplessness.
I just wish I could take car people outside of their reality for just a week or so. Once you see it from the outside it's so apparent. But I guess some people aren't ready to leave the Matrix. And some will fight to protect it.
You clearly have no respect for Mother Nature if this is your stance. Take care.
Maybe your issue is reading comprehension. I never suggested anything about anyone getting fucking stranded, stop putting words in my mouth.
This is true, but it also true that not every person is able to drive a car. In fact the inability to drive is way more common than the inability to walk.
>Not every person is able-bodied enough to walk and bike
And the same goes for cars, except kids can ride bikes, so car accessibility is actually just worse.
>Also, people happen to need to get from A to B when it is cold, dark, raining, extremely hot, snowing, or just some kind of shitty outside
You can walk or cycle in all of those conditions. In fact, I have walked or cycled in all of those conditions in the past 6 months.
>People need to drive to a store for food or supplies that cannot be carried or biked back to the destination
There's very little that can't be carried on a bike or public transport, but you can always rent a car for a couple hours if needed. Let's be real, that's not why 99.9% of people are driving cars.
>People have multiple children that simply cannot walk or bike
Where I live it's common to see mothers cycle with their kids on child seats in their bikes.
>Old people cannot simply walk or bike.
And a lot of them can't drive either.
YOU can do that, sure. You need to look past your own nose to objectively weigh in on these topics.
Weather is not a good enough reason for why we need cars in cities.
If you can't even figure out how to look up _anything_ about how to implement your plan, how the fuck do you expect it to ever become a reality?
This is nonsense. It will not happen.
Car culture is not a foregone conclusion. Claiming 100% of the world has to be converted to Tokyo and if that is not possible then we should give up is hilarious. What an illogical, sad and pitiful argument/attitude. Cities are being changed every day, and those ongoing investments can be made to make cities more car dependent or not.
Not to mention there are A Lot of cities more dependent on cars than lots of other cities many with nearly identical climates. Tokyo isn’t the only one lol. It’s not some magical unicorn.
Someone else said this. This isn't possible. Stop.
I think it means "The vast majority of trips are taken by foot or bicycle where I am." Which was, from another (very) nearby comment, Tokyo.
> Your anecdote of 1 does not a statistic make.
No, but the vast majority of trips in Tokyo does.
Second,I live in Tokyo, where the summer has been miserable with average temperatures of 32C, with regular highs of 36+ with 80% humidity. And yet I walked and biked everywhere and was just fine, and that's true for most of the 40M people that live here as well.
Third, it sounds like you live in a place that's not suitable for humans, you should probably move instead of making the planet even hotter for everyone else by living in your steel boxes with AC.
And this is where you need to remember that the rest of the world is not Tokyo. I have faith you’ll get there.
I dunno about 3 months exactly, but some areas of India are pretty close. And Delhi has 15-30 million people, depending on how you count
And would you mind not being a condescending prick? If you had taken a second to google you would know Tokyo had highs of 40+ this summer.
Sounds like you're just trying to make excuses for your awful city.
In cities that aren't completely car-centric and have mixed-use development, you don't need a car to get groceries, because everything is close enough to walk. Again, plenty of countries do this just fine, proving it is not impossible.
It’s not the reality that we live in. Most of the world is not a town or city of temperate climate where everything is within a half hour walk or bike ride.
I will never understand how this point is just glossed over and excused away. Ignoring the boundaries of reality doesn’t make said boundaries magically go away.
But the US has very few cities proper (mostly those which grew big before that advent of the car), and even those have uneven density and thus efficiency of walking or taking a bus.
A ton of what the US taste call cities is sprawling low-density almost-suburbia surrounding a few high-density "downtown" areas. See Houston, TX for an impressive example. Biking in such places is possible but tiring, walking is mostly pointless unless you visit your neighbor or a park, and running a subway is uneconomical.
Hence, they resort to cars.
Cycling simply isn’t viable to large swaths of the US. There isn’t an easy answer to this either, given that you’d probably need to tear down entire neighborhoods and rebuild a more dense town
It is not the responsibility of the citizens of the central city to accommodate suburban drivers.
Driving in and around the suburbs is what I was talking about.
Often times in HN you get the impression like americans are the only ones using cars to get around, but at least where I live (Finland) families generally own at least one car even if good public transportation is available. In 2021, 89% of adult men and 76% of women had a drivers license and I would say that commuting to work with a car is more common than with public transport. Despite having decent public transportation, it is just seen more convenient to use the car.
Going to a grocery store a few times a week is not a lot of effort. Urban grocery stores are nearby, they are optimized for quick visits, and you can often buy groceries when returning from somewhere else.
You should have emergency food at home, but many kinds of fresh foods are best eaten within a day or two. If you only go to a grocery store once a week, the quality of the food you eat is worse.
In bags, duh.
(Or a backpack.)
The only people who live in Cities that should be allowed to use cars are the ones with very real health issues and businesses that transport real physical products to heavy or large to carry.
Plus, no Trucks with trailers should be allowed in any city.