Nah, we should make life more liveable without cars. Cars in themselves aren’t bad, but our over-dependency on them is.
I literally had this conversation at lunch today. We were talking about EVs and someone said the batteries are bad for the environment and I said, “yup! We’d be better getting a nice electric transit system to replace roads and cars.” I feel like most people know we’d be better off with a good transit system but rich people 80 years ago solidified our lives.
Yeah it’s brutal. We used to have electric busses in my city that ran on power lines. They didn’t take them out until the 90s. They’d come off every now and then and the driver would have to get out and put them back on with a long stick, but whatever.
Those busses were the best. No battery, no gas. If the electricity source is clean we’re golden, baby.
Also the seats were super squishy benches, not the hard individual seats we get now. They’d be covered in graffiti and it was awesome. However, the weren’t wheelchair accessible, but I’m sure it could be done now.
"We should improve society somewhat"
"Have you considered that the improvment will have drawbacks? I am very smart"
I would argue that the rise of the car over transit has made life worse on average for people.
Define "good". Can it take People to a bespoke location at the time of their choosing, door to door, with sizable cargo? If so, sweet, but I haven't seen that
No you see, you have to have an extremist opinion that you haven't put any level of thought or attention into because it makes you feel like you belong.
Rationality and coverage of EVERY SITUATION WHERE CARS AND PERSONAL VEHICLES ARE USEFUL, is a waste of time and effort because uh duh - cars bad
Exactly. Every time I go out of my home I insist on carrying a range stove and a shed, just in case. And taking the bus is very inconvenient.
Thank you for the more practical take.
Carrot will likely work better than stick anyway. Instead of shaming people for using what seems to be the best and only way of getting to the city, show them what a nice pedestrian area looks like, remind them what it’s like to watch videos or play games while in transit, and get them to really consider the gargantuan size of classic American parking lots.
When finished, we’ll have people voluntarily voting at city council meetings to block cars from downtown, and revamp the long distance train station going to the next city.
Right, I only passed my test 5 years ago. I know how pleasant public transport is, I was on it every day for 30 years. live in a city that has a pedestrian center that I can walk to from my house. I still need to go to the tip, the supermarket, take my children to my grandparents. I'm going to Hampton court on Saturday, the south coast to pick up a boot full of my dead father in-laws belongings the weekend after and camping the weekend after that.
How is what you suggest helping me.
The reality is "dont do that stuff" is the real answer
Cars, in of themselves, are super-expensive luxury toys to be used on race tracks. They are bad.
The over-dependency is directly correlated with production and sale of cars, but it's not just a correlation.
You - Noooooo the invention of a machine to allow easier access across the nearly 3,000 mile long country is so terrible!!!! They should be limited like super yachts for the rich!!!! Don't innovate and make tools more efficient and safe!!!
Also you - fucking delusional
You - Noooooo the invention of a machine to allow easier access across the nearly 3,000 mile long country is so terrible!!! They should be limited like super yachts for the rich!!! Don’t innovate and make tools more efficient and safe!!!
Trains
Trains can't deliver me straight to my house 20+ miles away from the centralized depot. Nor can they allow me the freedom to visit my family if they live in a remote area. Not everyone wants to live in a shithole city because everything is 'in walking distance'. I'm content with life in a village, but cars are necessary for day to day. Instead of throwing a blanket on the entire industry and saying it needs to be torn down like some extremist weirdo, accept you can keep the design as intended and increase the overall friendliness of the tool.
Cars produce CO2 emissions that are ending life as we know it on earth. Cars also produce PM2.5 emissions that give little kids asthma. Cars are bad.
Cars don’t have to be bad. Cars can run on clean energy and make our lives incredibly convenient. However, we’ve crossed the line where convenience and sustainability find balance.
We shouldn’t ban cars, we should incentivize not using them. I drive, but I live in an area where I can take transit fairly easily so I do. My city has terrible transit, but I’m fortunate enough to live in an area where it’s one bus to downtown, so I never drive down town. By the time I find parking then walk to wherever I actually need to be, the bus would have been faster. I’m sure more people would do this if transit weren’t crap. I also ride my bike and walk when I can because I recognize this.
I got really drunk on night and got arrested for that. I don’t think I’m going to go for round 2.
Can confirm, the other night I saw a car holding a knife and approaching a child in a dark alley.
And what of people that live out in the country, far from a city? Not walkable or bikeable. Building public transport there is not viable. Cars with sustainable fuel sources are the far better solution.
Nearly every single small town was built on a backbone of rail. They could at the very least put back what was stolen.
Rail used for freight. Do you think people were taking the train to the grocery store or the doctor’s office? Not to mention, that’s still in the city. There are people that live many miles away from the nearest public infrastructure, outside of roads and electricity.
Then there’s the dilemma of being at the mercy of the train schedule. 1 to 2 stops a day. It’s not like public transport in metropolitan areas where there are many stops a day.
Back then, they were walking to the general store or the doctor's office if they lived in town, and they were riding their horse if they were a farmer living out in the fields. Today, we have such inventions as bicycles and paved roads to replace horses. The future is now!
Have you ever even been to a rural area? Based on your comments it seriously does not seem like it.
Yes, I have. And being an australian, our rural areas are a lot more rural than the rural areas most of these americans are from. Now I'll tell you a secret: There's a good reason australia was mostly empty before colonisation, and there's a very common sense reason why australia's environment has been dying ever since then.
Dude... Australia is still fucking empty. The majority of you live in cities, and not rural. The majority of you live on the coast. The majority of Americans do not live near a city, most of us a miles and miles from one.
Four out of five Americans (80%) live in an urbanized area according to the Census Bureau. Only 20% of us live in rural areas. That shifted slightly toward rural in the 2020 census (it was 80.7% urban in 2010), because the Bureau revised the cutoff for urban area upward from 2,500 to 5,000 people. A large proportion of that "rural" 20% live in towns of up to 5,000 residents. The number of people who truly live miles from anybody else is quite small.
It is estimated that 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas
Roughly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States
In 1790, only about one out of every twenty Americans (on average) lived in urban areas (cities), but this ratio had dramatically changed to one out of four by 1870, one out of two by 1920, two out of three in the 1960s, and four out of five in the 2000s.
Y'ALL ARE CITY FOLK.
There are people that live many miles away from the nearest public infrastructure, outside of roads and electricity.
Yes! And they should move away and be helped with that.
Rural places will never have city services. Never. There's only a tiny minority of professionals and artists who want to heroically settle into such places. What would be needed in this case, if you really wanted it, would be a military/authoritarian like regime to force people to work there. It happened in the past, I have lived in such times in my part of Europe. I don't see that happening in liberal capitalism.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but people travelled in the country before cars were invented
Really? You mean when people in rural areas had to stay overnight if they went to town for supplies because the trip there took so long? And that’s before a century of planning around the convenience of cars.
Yeah, I mean then. Some people got used to driving their SUV 200km into town to get a haircut and buy out of season fruit every saturday. And that lifestyle relies on unsustainable and dangerous technologies that we can't afford to keep running. It was never going to be permanent. If you want metropolitan conveniences, you're going to have to live in a metropolitan area. This isn't difficult logic.
Let’s say you need a plumber to come fix a leak. How does he get his tools and supplies there? On his mule and cart?
For this example I’ll use the US average commute of 27.6 miles (44.4 km) one way. Based on what I looked up, a donkey pulling a cart is ~4.5 mp/h (7.2 km/h). That’s 12 hours of travel time there and back. Help me understand how this is reasonable.
No, most traffic isn’t. A large portion of the population would be just as well off if they used public transport. However, there’s also a portion that the complete banning of road vehicles would be extremely detrimental to their livelihoods.
Again, sufficiency and resilience. If you live in a rural space, you learn to fix shit yourself. Famously: tractors.
If you believe that rural just means "own a house in a village or next to a town", that's not it, that's tourism. That's like owning a cabin in the woods or like the car-dependent suburbia. What makes you a rural dweller is participation in the rural economy or subsistence living. If you live like a guest, you are a guest.
Based on your replies to my comments, I agree with you a lot. I haven’t been saying that we shouldn’t transition away from car-focused infrastructure and living. Rather, OP’s pipe-dream of banning cars and solving the infrastructure/living issue in 5 years is ridiculous.
He loads up his hand cart with his tools, he walks 500m to the train station, he travels 43.4 km on the train, and then he walks 500m to my house.
Where’s all this rail infrastructure coming from? If cars are banned it will take exponentially longer to complete. What does the population do in the meantime?
I think 5 years is a reasonable span of time to transition out of cars if it's our top priority and we put all our resources into a green new deal.
That is a very vague term and I don't think my job fits neatly into blue collar or white collar. If you're asking whether I do hands on work at jobsites, the answer is yes.
Yeah, you "went into town/city" rarely. Rural life meant a lot of local sufficiency.
Commuting was not a thing. Only trains started to make that an option.
It depends how far back you want to go, but it absolutely was true.
Ignoring that fact, everything is designed around car transportation. You can't just kill that off in any reasonable amount of time with a different solution. You're talking no less than 50+ years if that is the main focus, ignoring all of the other much more significant issues. Rails don't just pop-up. Rural living residents and small townships aren't just gonna up and leave. Cars are here to stay, the best you can hope for is better public transport, some functional rails, and realistically, more efficient vehicles. Welcome to reality.
Which is why it’s not the right solution to emitting less pollution. It would take far longer than we have until we’ve fucked the planet completely at the rate. That’s why switching to green vehicles is a far more achievable goal. Humans are selfish and they’ll burn the world if their short-term livelihood is at stake.
"Green" vehicles aren't doing to do it, though. They solve the problem of tailpipe emissions, yes, but not the resources needed to manufacture, operate, and dispose of them. I saw an infographic recently that pointed out than an electric car uses (generously speaking) only about 2/3 of the energy of an ICE car over its whole lifecycle. That's... good, but not enough. It also doesn't account for the direct CO2 emissions from the chemical process of curing concrete. EVs still need concrete to run on.
Also, CO2 emissions are not the whole story on how cars fuck the planet. There are the lifecycle resources, all of the plastic, glass, and metal, which still take fossil fuels to produce, either as a raw material, or as energy. There's ecological destruction to get those resources, to get the resources to build the roads, to clear the space for the roads, for the sprawl that they facilitate, in the fragmentation of habitat, and the heavy toll taken on wildlife directly by roadkill. There's also the pollution, like PM2.5 from tires, which causes asthma and heart disease in humans, and runs off into waterways and destroys zooplankton. There's groundwater, lakes and streams becoming saline from widespread use of road salt.
I mean, we're in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event on Earth, and it's only fractionally driven by climate change. Automobiles, even the "green" variety, contribute greatly to the problem.
Cars will be around for our entire lifetimes. I do think that having a modern rail system in place would be great, to complement cars. In cities it's easier and makes more sense, but there will never be a train that comes to my house, and if there is, I'm moving, because I sure as shit don't want to live next to a train. I'd love to be able to jump on a cross Continental, high speed rail to go on affordable trips, but that isn't possible and won't be. As long as I can pay roughly the same for a flight to my destination, and get there significantly faster, I will probably never opt for a slower option, and I'm definitely not in the minority by saying that.
With that said, assuming we spend the next 50 years eliminating cars and moving to rails, it still won't touch emissions, because cars are not the leader and are continuing to get better and more efficient. So starting now would be convenient and not a bad idea, but it won't change anything substantial from an emissions standpoint.
In 2021, transportation accounted for 28% of U.S. CO2 emissions, the largest source by economic sector. Absolutely, we need to address cars to reduce emissions; they're not getting that much better. Getting rid of them won't fix the problem, but conversely, fixing the problem requires getting rid of most of them. But why does it have to be rails? What if it was a café near your house? A doctor's practice? A bookstore? It's not foreordained that everything has to be so far apart that you need motorized transport (car or train) to get to it. The large majority of car trips Americans take are short distances, not cross-country journeys for which we need high-speed rail or airliners. Do away with single-use zoning, put the places people go every day close to where they live, and we eliminate the need for a huge number of daily car trips. No rails through your front yard needed.
We don't have 50 years. As Bill Nye said, the planet's on fucking fire. Emit less carbon, motherfuckers.
Cars aren't the main problem. They are a factor, yes, but not the big fish. Good thing EVs are become more mainstream and as technology progresses, they will be the dominant choice. Trying to get rid of all cars is quite frankly fucking stupid.
We need net zero by 2030. We need to turn that 100% of CO2 into 0%. Cars are 12.1%. Cars are our second priory behind manufacturing and construction, and we need to eliminate ALL of the priorities. No half measures.
Eh. I don’t hate cars. I just want better infrastructure for all street users. Everyone is capable of acting like a complete asshole using the public right of way. Think of the worst shithead that cut you off on the freeway. Now imagine that same shithead doing the same to a pedestrian or cyclist? It’s really fucking dangerous. All you have to do is google ‘pedestrian hit and run’ to see that we have a huge fucking problem on our hands. Ban all cars? No! Ban private vehicles where pedestrians, cyclists , and transit riders are? Yes! That way people don’t need to fucking die. Some people don’t need to drive. I’m sure we’ve all mumbled that under our breath after nearly getting wrecked by some dipshit that had no business driving to begin with.
Personally, I’m not a fan of government policies that ban things, because a ban is a blunt instrument that often leads to perverse results. Instead, I think that government should internalize economic extenalities, and let the individual incentives work. People who live out in the countryside get massive tax subsidies in the form of all those roads on which only they drive, for the most part.
So, fine, if cars are the only practical transportation, then the people who want to live out there need to pay for their roads with their own money.
(That is the long way to say that I don’t think personal cars out in the countryside are all that practical.)
Do you think only private cars are using those roads? Oh dear, how do you think all the food gets to the cities?
Indeed, the topic was people living in the countryside, and (I hope) not about Soylent Green. As for the farms producing food in the countryside, they need to pay directly for the road infrastructure they use, too. That way, the true cost of transportation gets priced into the product, which lets the market allocate resources more efficiently. Government subsidy distorts the supply and demand curves, it leads to what I believe economists call deadweight loss. For example, with subsidized road transport, the cost to the farmer of locating a farm far from the city is reduced. That lowers demand for land near the city, which makes it more attractive to build housing on big lots on the land instead. That kind of sprawl means more driving, more pollution, more environmental damage. Plus, the local government has to subsidize even more pavement, which is becoming a major issue as the burden of maintenance costs is overwhelming them in many places. (Incidentally, lots of farms and food processors at least in Wisconsin face labor shortages, because the workers can't find affordable housing out in the middle of nowhere.) We might benefit from cheaper food prices, but the cost to society is a lot higher than the benefit, hence the "loss" in deadweight loss.
I'm suggesting that we remove the subsidies which are harming us, and let individual incentives (a.k.a. "the market") sort it out. That probably would mean more food production closer to where people live.
Fun fact: The Segoe typeface that Microsoft uses extensively was named after Segoe Road in Madison, WI. I mention it because it's a good example: The street is a boulevard almost 2.5 miles from end-to-end, with an enormously-wide right-of-way. If we were to take just the median strip, about 20 feet wide, that's about 6 acres of land, or enough to feed 12 people for a year. If we took half of the ROW, that's 18 acres of land, or enough to feed 36 people. And if we took 2/3rds, leaving a very adequate 40-foot-wide street, that's 60 people fed.
And that's just one boulevard in a whole city. There are plenty more wide streets that don't need to be. Add in land from parking lots. Repeal the grass lawn ordinance and let people grow food in their front yards. Grow food on commercial building roofs, as some grocery stores have started to do. Wisconsin also has a successful hydroponic grow operation, Superior Fresh, that produces a lot of food in a relatively small footprint, and provides fresh, local produce even in January, so that's a possibility. Add all of that up, there's plenty of land in the city, not even counting the handful of farms that still exist within city limits.
A private car is owned by a corporation. For example, a CEO's limosine would be a private car. Or a plumbing company's van. A personal car is owned by an individual.
So, how do you propose workers get to farms etc? Buy every single labourer a company vehicle? How do people who live on their farm get into town to go shopping etc?
I think farming is one of the few applications where horseless carriages make sense, but they obviously have to be 100% electric in order to stop climate collapse.
I don't think you realize how much of rural America is a random exit off the interstate. Which is mostly not local traffic and paid for those who travel it.
We have more than 4,100,000 million miles of highway in the United States, but only 48,756 miles of Interstate highway. That doesn't sound like most places are just off of a random exit, and with one glance of the map, one can see vast swathes of land nowhere near an Interstate highway. However, the system does carry about 1/4 of all highway miles in the country, so that's a lot of lightly-traveled non-Interstate pavement. Furthermore, revenues from highway users does not cover the cost of the Interstate system. The Highway Trust Fund has been shrinking, because the $0.184 per gallon tax hasn't changed since 1993, and the fund is projected to be depleted by 2028. The Federal government has shored it up multiple times with transfers from the general fund. Wisconsin has done the same, I know, and likely quite a few other states that I'm not familiar with, as well.
In short, the massive subsidy to automobile travel, especially in rural areas, is not practical, because it is not sustainable.
Yes. One of the problems is the USA is government banning mixed zoning and every tyoe of home except single family home. It can only turn in suburban sprawl and car use.
It turns out that you can do rural spaces bad too. Rural sprawl!
https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/Settlement-patterns
In reality, the industrial revolution and especially the Green Revolution have ended the rural economy and, with that, the rural society. These places will remain unsustainable, nonviable, slowly dying as people try to move away for better lives or as they remain stuck, dependent on some corrupt local politicians and leaders.
It's a simple matter: once a couple of people with lots of cool machines and work vast tracts of land, the rest of the people in the area become useless.
Rural spaces are, currently, in a transient situation.
If the industrial economy collapses, then, yes, rural spaces will be great again.
I'm not trying to promote some false dichotomy, this is the economy and the people stuck in rural places are usually worse off - and that's for a reason. They will never be better off in this context, it is not happening.
So, instead of trying to prop up a dying place, help the people migrate. End the subsidized fantasy and end the sunk cost loop.
You're not wrong at all.
But this is basically as radical of a suggestion as banning cars lol. We'd have to have affordable housing, jobs, social services, food and resources, etc. available for those trying to migrate into cities. Most US cities don't even have those things for the people that already live there - almost always due to NIMBY regulations with some good old fashion bigotry mixed in.
We would basically have to first see a massive change in governance trends before this could be doable.
Of course, this is entirely ignoring the cultural challenges.
We would basically have to first see a massive change in governance trends before this could be doable.
I guess you can wait until the economic ponzi game ends for those places and people abandon it:
As people give in* and leave, this decay accelerates as the measly taxes cover even less of the required maintenance.
The politics people are avoiding now will be orders of magnitude worse when it comes time to do bailouts.
Pareto principle. Don't lose sight of 80% of cars for the 20% rural.
Edit: maybe I misread your point. All these rural drivers are using roads that they don't pay to build or maintain. They should be charged for their true cost of transportation instead of it being subsidized by wherever they drive.
Please don't make light of mental illness symptoms. Triggers are serious business, they're not a joke or an insult.
Caltrops is a simple solution. Banning cars seems to be where we’re having issues. So let’s start small. Ban private vehicles in dense urban cores where space is at a premium. It’s a start.
The automobiles, parking and highways vicious cycle has proven to be an indictment of capitalism and the corruption of the US. i don't think going electric for all our cas is going to be enough, and were seeing climate migration not only to the US but northward within the US.
The movie Mad Max (and its sequels) was inspired by somone observing car obsession tendencies among Australians and positing how fuel would be prioritized above its utility. Our obsession is worse here in the States, and for our love of cars and failure to change for sake of the world may see a similar apocalypse, though with fewer working vehicles and a lot more cannibalism.
I hope I'm wrong, of couse.
I completely agree but that doesn’t make immediately banning all cars a reasonable proposal. My assumption was that the meme was intended to spark discussion, which it certainly has. Though it sounds like OP is a little more serious than I thought.
I seriously think petrol cars should be 100% banned by 2028, and that it should be illegal for petrol stations to operate.
Okay well you are entitled to your opinion I guess. I thought you were being somewhat tongue in cheek. While I support a radical reduction in car dependency the unfortunate reality is that deconstructing car based infrastructure and building what will come after is going to take more than 5 years.
Also, even in a society where the car is not the default mode of transit, there will still be occasional situations where alternates aren’t viable. A small number of electric vehicles, properly contained where they can’t murder thousands of people as they do today would not be so terrible.
How would people who live in suburbs or rural areas do anything? Many Americans live in these areas. I'm serious what is the plan for all of them?
America wasn't built for public travel unfortunately.
How do we deal with the areas with no people living in them?
I'm mostly joking, but an extreme proposal like this would probably only take effect in metropolitan areas. 80%+ of Americans live in an urban setting. Electric trains and busses in the city, electric trucks in the country.
America used to have these things called streetcar suburbs, and they're awesome. The entire suburb is built around a tram station, it's walking distance from everyone and it goes on to the nearby suburbs and eventually the city. Modern zoning laws make streetcar suburbs illegal to build, but a few of them still exist, and people love living in them. The rent prices in streetcar suburbs have been raised greatly due to the high demand. If we started building streetcar suburbs instead of car suburbs, everyone would be able to afford to live in one. They're also cheaper to build in terms of land, plumbing, and utilities. The road upkeep is cheaper and the people in them are happier.
So essentially buses. That works if you live within a few miles of your destination city. But things are so spread out nowadays that there's just no way that you could have a single system of buses or streetcar. Whatever to make use of everybody's time.
I grew up in suburban America where even on bike it would take me 20 minutes to get to the nearest urban development or business. Let alone trying to get to the nearest city. And now with everybody so spread apart of where they work and how they get there. There's just no feasible way to make the system for everybody.
People used to live within a few miles of where they worked, but nowadays everything has been built for cars and to undo that would be an almost impossible effort
We need to bulldoze places like where you grew up and build sustainable developments.
Explain how we'd get around with cars. Is the realistic expectation that every city is supposed to be redesigned overnight and public transportation every inch of the city.
While I agree with the sentiment, making a plan to make changes is a very important first step. I'm still a car driver who wants better public transportation, while also acknowledging its very unlikely for my area (45 mins outside Atlanta, GA). However, if we aim for it specifically, it's always a good step, even if it's not going to be instant or 5 years.
One of the biggest issues ro change are people saying "that won't happen" and just not changing the status quo. We don't need to perfectly do it in a short time, but we do need to start making steps right away, even if they take longer than we want.
You know that I95 bridge that collapsed about 2 months ago? They are still working on fixing that, it will probably take a few more months to finish fixing it using the original design. If it takes us that long to build a bridge, do you still think we can design and build a nationwide public transport system in 60 months?
The alternative is human extinction. And that may be more realistic, but if there's any chance of survival, it has to come from hope.
Yeah, OP has no perspective on logistics for that undertaking. It’s quite comical that they actually believe that it’d be something possible in 5 years.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but we had thriving cities full of food before cars were invented
Sure, but they developed that way.
Did they?
I think we can make the transition safely over the next 5 years if everyone genuinely treats this as a #1 priority. And it is a #1 priority, because the human species is going extinct if we don't reduce our fossil fuel emissions to ZERO.
Cars aren't the real problem. The real problem is shipping cheap shit across the pacific. The top ten biggest ships pollute more than every car in the world combined. Also, fuck cruise ships, there is literally zero benefit to them, just a resort on a boat.
That’s a very compelling argument with teensy-weensy flaw of not being true. Not even close. The entire martitime cargo sector is estimated at 3-4% of CO2 emissions, whereas land transport is closer to 10%.
Yup! Source I have from 2016 has it even more unbalanced than your numbers. All shipping is 1.7% vs all road transport at 11.9%. Wish I had more recent data but their claim wouldn't be true even if those top ten ships represented the entirety of ocean emissions and was tripled afterwards.
