Hacker News Reader

Comment by lijok | Hacker News Reader

People love their cars, what are you talking about

I am a car enthusiast so don't think I'm off the deep end here, but I would definitely argue that people love their cars as a tool to work in the society we built with cars in mind. Most people aren't car enthusiasts, they're just driving to get to work, and if they could get to work for a $1 fare in 20 minutes on a clean, safe train they would probably do that instead.

I am this person. I love the convenience of a car. I hate car ownership.

Right and I assume we will have BO police at the gates to these trains?

People love their cars not because they’re enthusiasts

That seems like a somewhat ridiculous objection. Should everybody start owning their own private planes to avoid people with BO at airplanes?

No, but if they could, they would. That’s what’s being debated here. Whether people would, not should.

Should we restructure society so that having a private airplane is easier and cheaper, but if you don't have one you'll have serious trouble in daily life?

Is this some culture or region or climate related thing? I’ve never heard of BO brought up as a reason to avoid public transport or flying commercial in northern parts of Europe. Nor have I experienced any olfactory disturbance, apart from the occasional young man or woman going a tad overboard with perfume on the weekends.

Of course they wouldn't, owning and operating a plane is -incredibly- inconvenient. That's what we are discussing, tradeoffs of convenience and discomfort, you can't just completely ignore one reality to criticise the other (admiting some hypocrisy here since that ideal train system mentioned earlier only exists in a few cities).

I guess that's one reason to not use public transport, but it seems many cities overcome that pretty readily.

Perhaps it depends on how smelly your society is.

Anyway I think we are in agreement, given a good system and a good society trains become quite attractive, otherwise cars are more preferred.

I love my car. And yet I really want to see all the cars eradicated from existence. At least from the public space.

No, people hate being trapped without a car in an environment built exclusively to serve cars. Our love of cars is largely just downstream of negative emotions like FOMO or indignation caused by the inability to imagine traveling by any other mode (because on most cases that's not even remotely feasible anymore).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com