
Opinion – I’ve Seen a Future Without Cars, and It’s Amazing - wclax04
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/opinion/sunday/ban-cars-manhattan-cities.html
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denimnerd42
My favorite thing to do is visit outdoor recreation areas 30-60m outside my
city and but within my metropolitan area (which is the size of rhode island)

If cars were suddenly unobtainable, I would be forced to move to maintain my
sanity which would have other quality of life impacts such as being far from
family or less job opportunity.

I don't see how anything short of nuking this metropolitan area and waiting
for the dust to clear in order to rebuild can fix the current mess we're in
here.

On the other hand my work is a short 8 mile bike ride along nice quiet side
streets which pre-COVID i used to do 4-5 times per week. There was a shower in
the gym at work I used which made the entire thing feasible. Frequently I'm
nervous about the affects on my health due to the poor air quality here but
the relaxation and fitness it brings seems to be a good tradeoff.

I would be happy to not own a car due to the outrageous expense to myself and
society, but I don't see myself easily giving up the freedom that comes with
it.

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honkycat
I suspect modern transportation infrastructure are going to be one of those
things future generations mock us for.

We spend an insane amount of our private money on purchasing and maintaining
personal vehicles, our public money on our road infrastructure, and our
natural resources on building and driving the cars ( that smog has a cost even
if everyone wants to pretend it does not. ).

They belch smog that poisons people and reduces their IQ[0]. They create trash
and waste. Their production and transportation eats up our natural resources
and pollutes our earth. Traffic makes cities miserable to live in. So much of
the way we live in the United States has been dictated by the private vehicle.

0: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air-
poll...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air-pollution-
causes-huge-reduction-in-intelligence-study-reveals)

~~~
ianai
We devote vast amounts of real estate to transportation too. The surface areas
of just the on/off ramps of a highway blow my mind. Then there’s the road
kill. I wish there was a better way.

~~~
bmitc
For some reason, we humans don't apply system design to all the systems we
build. If we were designing a system from scratch, no one would choose only
two primary modes of transportation, cars and planes, and then tack on the
rest. Instead, we'd choose a variety of modular, de-coupled ways with flexible
interfaces to get around: walking, biking, scooters/motorcycles, cars, buses,
subways, trains, and planes. Yes, we have all these today, but they are not
used. Cars and planes do everything from long distance to short distance
trips. Bicyclists, motorcyclists, scooters, and pedestrians are, often
literally, sidelined and treated as annoyances. Instead, we should be using
the best tools for the job and designing cities to support these variety of
ways.

In the U.S., we've given corporations such massive power and leverage that it
breaks the system design process. Corporations aren't interested in building
holistic systems. They want to build funnel systems that funnel people into
their products, just as the car companies did back in the mid-twentieth
century to kill off mass transportation methods to instead sell individuals
and families the car.

The U.S. could choose to be a world leader in this if it wanted, but it
doesn't want to.

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8bitsrule
4K video of an evening walk around Ikebukuro Station in central Tokyo. Many
bicycles, minor streets with no (or limited) traffic, major streets with
_large_ pedestrian walkways.

[https://youtu.be/qSX4vpwlQzw](https://youtu.be/qSX4vpwlQzw)

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frabbit
Although I like the idea of stopping the insane susbidies given to private
automobile transport I do not like the narrow, bi-directional bike lanes that
this article is illustrated with.

When I cycle I want the option to ride side-by-side chatting with a friend or
family member. I do not want to be squashed into a narrow single-occupancy
lane with a concrete delimiter (or parked cars) stuck behind someone else
going slowly.

There is a simple solution: let everyone faster than a pedestrian onto the
roads; introduce presumed liability (similar to the Netherlands); lower the
speed limit for cars, charge the operators a price that reflects the climate
destruction (and whatever the going price for a few hundred thousand 3rd-World
children blown to shit is these days).

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lazyjones
I'm so tired of seeing this kind of nonsense over and over again. No, it
doesn't take much less space to move 50 people in a bus than with cars
_because the effing bus doesn 't go where 50 random people need to go_. And
people wouldn't be owning private cars if it wasn't convenient for them,
consequently it's impossible that life would instantly improve for everyone if
they had to give them up like the author claims. Then this "induced demand"
nonsense that pops up all the time. It's impossible because total traffic
cannot increase due to new roads since there aren't infinite people or cars to
begin with. The traffic moving to new or wider roads is missing elsewhere,
which is usually good.

But hey, go ahead, try this pipe dream in any large city. It'll work great,
like that recent "summer of love" in Seattle.

~~~
robbyt
People own private cars in the US because the real cost of owning a car is
hidden from the car users. E.g., subsidized roads, gas, automobile industry
bailouts, and finally global warming and climate impact.

European cities have far fewer cars than similarly sized American cities. Gas
and car ownership taxes are are also more expensive in Europe compared to
America. The reason for this is that the actual cost of car ownership in the
US is being passed on to future generations.

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lazyjones
> _European cities have far fewer cars than similarly sized American cities.
> Gas and car ownership taxes are are also more expensive in Europe compared
> to America. The reason for this is that the actual cost of car ownership in
> the US is being passed on to future generations._

No, the reason for this is that European cities are much older and denser,
hence streets are narrower, garages are often impossible to build. Gas is more
expensive because most cities in Europe have to import it from far away and
because taxes are generally higher, not because we're beacons of virtue while
the USA is car owners' heaven.

Here in Austria, the average car owner pays a few 1000 $ per year in car-
related taxes plus highway tolls, gas prices are high ($8-9 per gallon) and
people are complaining just as much about the cost of car ownership being
passed on to future generations or the general public. All while our car
taxes/tolls are used to maintain highways and those are used by everyone's
cargo deliveries, bus travels and so on.

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brailsafe
I often wonder about a world where you simply aren't allowed to borrow your
way into a car. It's not trivial and has a lot of edge cases, but a lot of
people would start thinking more carefully about it.

