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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Fuck Cars
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that's an argument to talk about electric cars at least some of the time, not to exclusively talk about them at the expense of any other transportation option. According to US government statistics, people in rural areas make up about 15% of the population, why is their situation dictating the national conversation around clean transportation?
A great majority of people do live in cities or suburbs, which are great places for electric vehicles and autonomous railway systems.
And how are cars and roadways immune to this?
Reading about New Orleans, it looks like a lack of willingness from administration to actually support the system after Katrina, including not enough funding to replace busses, wrong schedules, making the streetcar share the road with personal vehicles. Same old North American city making the same old excuses.
What I read: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/11/20/new-orleans-public-transportation-000796/
As the other people mentioned. In North America, the percentage of urban populations is 85%, Latin America 81%, Europe 75%
Yes, rural areas are probably in need of private vehicles, but not everyone out of those 85-75% of people need a car. We've become too reliant on them.
Those stats are a bit misleading. For example, I live in a "urban" environnement, aka a town, but the closest anything is still 15km away.
Fair point, but I still think it holds true for > 50% of people. That is still a huge percentage and the rest of the people that would need vehicles wouldn't need such destructive infrastructure in the middle of cities. Cities could be a lot more compact, walkable and without 15 lane highways running through the middle. The vast majority of traffic in cities is caused by people who could replace that with public transport or walking in a better planned city.
Now America is a lot more problematic there because of suburbanisation, idk how you fix that at this point, but I hope that it's possible.
I don't think you do "fix" suburbanization because people who live in suburbs probably want to live in suburbs. Not everyone wants to be in a dense city, for me that sounds like hell.
What is an anything in your mind
What we do have at a walking/biking distance is a bakery, a pharmacy, a coffee shop, an antique store, two art galleries.
Anything else such as food, school, work, train station, doctor, veterinary, you name it, is 15k away.
It sounds like your town needs a tram station
Not really, trams are only good if you need more capacity than a bus can provide on a fixed line which is not the case. What we need is exactly the opposite, a small capacity and a flexible route.
The thing that has the most chance to work in the near future, from a practicality and cost point of view is, imho, a fleet of on demand self driving electric minibus that can serve all the township around.
Note, we already have on-demand minibus, it's basically a bus with fixed stop in all the local towns that only come if requested and available, It's just not very available due to a shortage of drivers.
However, those who do live in those circumstances would find such things useful. It's okay for something to benefit less than 100% of the population.
Why does everyone think cars are practical for 100.00000% of commuters? My friend is a blind amputee that lives under the Indian Ocean in an air bubble. Ever tried navigating by car through 1000 feet of sea water with no arms when you can’t see the road?
Thus, let’s get rid of all cars. They’ll never work.
But the vast majority do, and solving the problem for them is good enough. Who gives a shit about the exceptions? They aren't relevant.
"But muh rural special snowflake" is nothing but a bullshit derailment tactic and you know it.
I'm not rural - hell, I live in a suburb of DC - but I couldn't survive without a car where I live. I'm 5 minutes from a grocery store by car, but 30-45 by bus, not counting waiting time for the bus to arrive.
Should cars be phased out or otherwise forced to downsize? IMO, yes - over time. But do we also need to drastically overhaul our public transit and walk/bike infrastructure? Absolutely, and this should happen first.
That would be difficult. High speed transportation infrastructure such as roads for cars and public transit is expencive to operate. If you try to add high quality public transit to a place where lots of money is spent on roads for cars, you need to pay to maintain two expensive infrastruture systems at the same time. Cities cannot afford to do this while maintaining the quality of both.
I think we should stop subsidizing car ownership and use this money for more ethical forms of transportation. This will cause people to decide to use public transit where possible, the increased use of public transit will lead to more funding for public transit which will improve the quality.
This change to subsidies will be painful for people who have been benifiting from the subsidies. For example, drivers will have to pay for parking, and property taxes in low density suburbs will go up, car insurence rates will increase, and you would probably need to pay a tax for miles traveled by car. But I think its worth it, becasue it will be highly benificial for users of public transit, which tend to have lower wealth, and a net positive for society.
I agree that inexpencive low speed infrastructure like bike lanes should be implemented as soon as possible.
The subsidies for cars is quite high, and it ought to be low because it is a destructive form of transportation. The subsidies for transit is quite low and should be high because it is the superior solution to the problem of moving people around.
Car roads having fares to cover costs isn't even a part of the discussion in the US. User fees (mostly gas tax) account for ~1/3 of the cost of roads, and this percentage is declining ^source^. That means people who make the ethical choice of not using a car are paying for those who make the unethical choice of using a car.
In general. I think it is good for the tax code to encourage prosocial behavior. Right now it does the opposite.
This does not match with my experience. Where I live, and almost everywhere I have been, curb parking is usually free. And when its not free, it is highly discounted from the price of the land if you were to use the land for any other purpose.
Also, there are a lot of private lots. This is usually due to the strict parking mandates, where the government forces developers to build parking lots. This leads to a parking abundance where drivers refuse to pay reasonable fees for parking.
I recommend Henry Grabar's recent book, Paved Paradise on the topic of parking.
That's not how it works. The presence of cars ruins the viability of everything else because the parking lots physically force destinations to be too far apart. In order for the change to be effective, you've got to demolish the parking and wide roads first and thereby drive an increase in other transportation modes due to necessity.
So nobody lived on that mountain before cars were invented?
They should return to premodern life if it's the only way to avoid climate collapse and the end of human civilization. Going back to the industrial age is better than being sent back to the stone age.
Fortunately, we don't have to do either, because there are safe, clean, modern solutions to transit.
EVERYONE is going to DIE if the climate collapses.