I agree good riddance, but for a different reason. I hope we can start to move towards smart cities, and getting rid of cars. It is ridiculous the reliance on cars that people in cities have.
... have you ever been to Australia? It's a big fucking place with fuck all people (compared to a lot of the rest of the developed world). The solution to society's problems is not "all get rid of our cars and live in shoe boxes 1 minute walk away from each other".
While the distances between the towns in Australia is massive, most of our population resides in a handful of urban coastal cities.
While car culture is historically dominant, the biggest cities are all seriously trending towards increased densification, and much of our substantial immigration over the past 2 decades had been from nations used to much denser living.
I leave open the question as to whether it is the answer to all societies problems, but it would be a brave man to proclaim that wasn't the way Australian cities and population hadn't been trending for the past 10 years, and we'll likely trend for at least the next 10.
Yeah, people here are ridiculously addicted to cars, even in inner city regions. Ridiculous.
> Will we have better cars that are less polluting, safer, even self driving?
Sure, whatever. Considering the huge amount of pollution that goes into just creating the car, it is silly to talk about less polluting. Safe? Yeah, that why the road toll is going up. Self driving? Can't come soon enough, since people are incapable of concentrating long enough and are too selfish to drive safely.
Private cars are a stupid idea, and have caused way more problems.
Perhaps I am overly generous in assuming that anyone talking about getting rid of cars is partaking in rhetorical hyperbole, and moreso making the point that we might be moving away from 2-3 cars for every household in the burbs, and approaching/trending towards 1-2 overall.
I will add in addition to my above post, that our high property prices are additionally feeding an additional densification trend...
I don't know where you live but everywhere I've lived, it's been 1 maybe two cars per couple, or one car if the person is single. The only exception I've seen to this is if people own a motorbike too, but then it's usually 1 shared car for the couple and a motorbike each.
Luckily the Australian census and statistics are quite targeted on these areas, so you can drill down to quite detailed area level analysis.
You can google for "Australian Census 2016 quick stats" and get this information for most places in Australia.
Where I currently live is very atypical for Aus, about 75% of households here have 1 or fewer cars, but I've lived pretty much up and down the entire east coast and have a relatively intimate knowledge of both this country and the collection of information on it.
As Russel Coight might say: "I've bend around this wide brown land, seen a thing or two..."
Looking at aust-wide and state by state, it's as I described, at most (in wa and tas) 18% with 3+ cars, but 60+% fall into 1 or 2 cars per household. The rest is no car and no answer.
Indeed, but it depends a bit on whether you feel the 2 car households should be grouped in with the 1 car households or the 3 car households.
For completeness, one also has to ask whether or why we measure or comment using the statistical concept of households or persons.
Using WA as an example, ~34% of households had 2 cars. We can say that ~56% of households responded that they had access to 2+ cars. We can also say that almost ~75% of households responded that they had with 2 or fewer cars.
However, if we want to come up with an idea of a "representative australia" (an arguably increasingly erroneous concept by the day), we have to realise that the distribution of "people" amongst households will not be uniform.
Indeed, there is likely a strong correlation between the number of people in a household and the number of cars in a household.
What this means is that although only 56% of "households" reported having 2+ cars, the number of "persons" who experience life in such a household is not proportionate to the number of households reporting each characteristic in the population.
Indeed, given that one stat is likely correlated with singles, students and dinks, and the later is likely correlated with early and extended families, you would likely find that on a population weighted basis, the 2-3 car households may need to be counted as some multiple of the single/no car households.
sounds like you live in a city with young people whereas if you are in a suburb it’s families with a bunch of cars. Both parents can have a car, and they can have a van and maybe they’ll have a car for their 16 year old kid.
Yep, and try getting the government to pay the billions required to get public transport up to standard to be able to just provide adequate transport for the majority of people in those cities.
Yes, I have lived in Brisbane, Melbourne and now Sydney. All 3 cities could do with no cars.
But people here are too addicted to them, and couldn't even imagine going down to the shops without a car. And make lots of excuses about it, such as it is too far and too big.
Let's pick common ground. Define "Melbourne"? How far from the cbd before it's not Melbourne for you, because I know you can't be suggesting people in Frankston or pakenham don't need a car.
And from personal experience I can tell you that any argument of not needing a car goes out the window as soon as someone has kids. Discussion over. Unless you're volunteering to cart around all the shit parents take with them?
