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Comment by SpaceL10n | Hacker News Reader

If you want America on board, get the people on board. Tell them why it's a good idea to stop driving their car. I'm not saying this to be snarky, but that's what it's going to take.

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I'm the perfect client for an electric car (I can charge at home, and 99% of my trips are less than 100km). I want one even.

I still use my old ICE though, because the price of vehicles went through the roof those last years, which means the money I saved to replace it only gets me 60% of a car.

My point is telling or convincing people is not enough. The desired outcome must be oviously practical and cheaper.

Not sure where you live, but in the US, used EV prices utterly crashed in the past 18-24 months or so, due to new Tesla price cuts destroying the resale value of used teslas, which kinda bubbled across the whole industry. I bought a “$80,000” car with 16k miles for under $35k with 0 interest (was gonna pay cash but who can say no to that rate).

On the other hand, I fully support the idea that you just wait till your car is actually ready to replace - that’s much more economical than going EV immediately with a car payment, just to check the EV box.

Stop driving their ICE vehicle. Anti car doesn’t fly in America. People want their big spaces, privacy and most don’t want to live in cooped up apartments and spend the majority of their life within walking and public transport distance.

I wonder how much is truly preference at this point rather than societal inertia. Actual walkable cities with good public transit are incredibly rare in the US and as a result tend to be very expensive (which itself should tell you something about demand). Most Americans have no choice but to live in an area that requires a car for daily life. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would choose the car dependent lifestyle even if given the choice not to, but the demand for alternatives is probably higher than you think.

I also think there's a very reasonable middle ground where people can still practically have and use a car but it's not required literally every time you leave your house. Personally I think giving up my car would be a bridge too far since I like road trips and drives out to hiking areas and things like that, but I also find it unfortunate that there are limited options of affordable places to live where I don't need a car to do everything.

I see you here - you make very good points. It just seems like economically it’s too hard to manifest more of those pleasant, walkable cities and neighborhoods into existence in a way that they aren’t just as costly to live in as the existing ones. You can’t just build Williamsburg on the next available spot of land next to the last suburb, because no one will want to live there without a car when there isn’t a subway right in the neighborhood to take them to Manhattan in 25 minutes.

So, they just aren’t making many net new walkable cities or converting previously car-dependent ones into walkable paradises. The only newly-built ones are built on insanely expensive land (because of the proximity to great transit and/or very high paying jobs), so they’re really only feasible for people with at least $250k annual incomes, which isn’t most people. I think a lot of people know all this instinctively and therefore are against even talking about it because they see it as an unsolvable problem.

Yeah I see your point. I think only NYC and Chicago are truly walkable cities that we have in the US and yes different people have different preferences. I find that a lot of people in the US do not want to live the walkable city lifestyle once they hit their mid late 30s but I’m sure they are plenty of people to do and it would be nice for them to have more options to move to in that case. I loved living in Manhattan for 10 years when I was in my 20s but now in my 30s, I would not want to go back and do that again. I really appreciate having a lot of property and the freedom that comes with having a car and being able to just go anywhere you want and not having to rely on fixed public transit routes. Usually when you say something like this people come back with you can just rent a car when you need one, but that added inconvenience of having to rent a car means you’re just not going to do it the vast majority of the time.

Really the two big reasons for not driving ice cars are temperature and sea level rise. Even then I think most of America and even Florida would regard losing Florida over the next century to be a reasonable price to pay for not having to get on a bus.

I think most people - even Floridians - know that our pretty small-population country swearing off all internal combustion transport will have zero impact on whether sea levels rise, because a ton of the coal burning and other massive pollution happens in countries that aren’t going to decarbonize (in fact, they think it’s fair game and morally right for them to use that cheap coal for 100 years since the Western countries got to do that).

There is one political party who believes the US should do degrowth and major carbon regulations, but they have been losing relevance even at the state level lately.

> because a ton of the coal burning and other massive pollution happens in countries that aren’t going to decarbonize

Everyone is moving away from burning coal, even when they have plenty of plants in which to do so, because of the very same logic which had us burning it in the first place:

Price.

> There is one political party who believes the US should do degrowth

Yes, and I dated one of their campaign managers. However, the Green Party isn't relevant.

America is not a small population country and is still per capital emitting more than China; while China is now on a downturn (admittedly from a very high absolute level of emissions)

IMO, that remains to be seen. China is still adding new coal capacity roughly equal to America's entire coal capacity, or about ~160+GW, just in 2025(74GW)/2026(90+GW expected) while retiring almost none.

Capacity is less relevant than usage. It's not like you drive a combustion car by putting your foot to the floor on the accelerator and only modulate your speed with the clutch and breaks.

Chinese coal *consumption* seems to be trending down, not up, regardless of capacity: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

Sure, but China isn't building new coal plants, just for decorative value, but because renewables aren't stable.

Sure, we've seen this rodeo before, circa 2015 -- when it dipped a few points, then it continued on its march toward coal supremacy since.

The problem is when the environment is already optimized for car use, when everything is massively spread out. Hard to get people to stop using cars when infra for walking is an afterthought.

Telling me that will do nothing.

You'll have to convince me!

I try. But then they point to the inevitable inconvenience of not driving. Chicken and the egg.

As an aside, your username reminds me it’s about time for another rewatch of cowboy bebop

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