13 ms·
As a German who never owned a car (have driver license 30+ years) and never will, hurray! Next: Petrol cars please. Costs for cities would decrease a lot [1],
by TheLostOne 9y ago
As a German who never owned a car (have driver license 30+ years) and never will, hurray!
Next: Petrol cars please.
Costs for cities would decrease a lot [1], room for bicycles would increase, noise would drop to a level which can't believed, ambulances would be adjusted to walking persons instead of loud cars with their stereos on and air would be wonderful.
[1] https://www.amazon.de/High-Cost-Free-Parking/dp/193236496X https://www.amazon.de/High-Cost-Free-Parking/dp/193236496X
- TomMarius 9y agoIt'd also practically stop economic growth of areas outside large cities and slow down economic growth of the city itself. Many businesses would be ruined (and thus people working on them). Many people would loose their jobs. This is a very backwards approach. Why don't we destroy our cities that have replaced the beautiful nature that used to be there instead of them?
- jonasvp 9y ago[citation needed] Cars are a net negative for societies (see e.g. https://tu-dresden.de/bu/verkehr/ivs/voeko/ressourcen/dateien/vortraege_prof_becker/EP_External-costs-car-final_UB_20121206_neu.pdf?lang=de https://tu-dresden.de/bu/verkehr/ivs/voeko/ressourcen/dateie...). Just imagine having most (80%+) of goods transported by cargo bike: lots of (local!) employment, lots of new technology needed, etc.
- TomMarius 9y agoSo let's take a different approach: Let's find a better solution for individual transportation that doesn't require human labor (e.g. pedaling) and offers the same benefits (ability to comfortably make 500 km per working day, for example - that's average daily mileage of a taxi driver).
- noelwelsh 9y agoYou seem very much in favour of cars, but also imagining that cities without cars would look much like cities with cars. Huge amounts of land are given over to roads and parking. Get rid of these and you have much denser cities without decreasing usable space per inhabitant.
- tjansen 9y agoI assume you're talking about US cities. Because IMHO most European cities are already far too dense. You can hardly see the sky.
- 72deluxe 9y agoLike sofas, armchairs, refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, flat-screen TVs and oak beds? Great idea, but how would you feasibly transport them? The deliveroo boxes are going to have to increase in size...
- bildung 9y agoBeen there, done that :) Just buy a good trailer. You get 10 top notch bikes plus trailer for the price of a car.
- majewsky 9y agoMost of these could be transported on bike trailers. The bed will probably need to be shipped in disassembled form, but then again, I've never seen beds shipped in one piece. That said, there are certainly things that you absolutely have to transport with some sort of automobile. But there's no problem with exempting such transports from a possible car ban.
- Heliosmaster 9y agoIn the Netherlands bakfiets (http://img.tweede-hands.net/pics/00/13/08/63/97/3c.jpg?d0cc3157e3 http://img.tweede-hands.net/pics/00/13/08/63/97/3c.jpg?d0cc3...) can be easily used to transport this kind of things. Also, realistically, do you need to transport these things on a daily basis? Can you not rent a (electric) truck whenever you need this kind of things?
- kazen44 9y agoHeck, a car in the netherlands is also very, very expensive. Especially if you live in the inner core of a relatively old city, which are not designed for cars and where parking space is at a premium. I'm fairly sure most people working normal office kind of jobs could easily live without a car, especially if cities use that money to make public transport available to more "remote" regions easily. My employer actually used this reasoning and has an office next to the train station, which makes traveling with public transport from other cities a breeze and prevents the company from having to pay massive fees for parking space.
- kss238 9y agoA city ban on cars would effect areas outside of cities?
- TomMarius 9y agoYes, of course. People from outside the city come to the city by car to buy goods and offer their services because mass transit is not available or not practical. It's impossible to make mass transit practical for everyone.
- kss238 9y agoSo how does that stop economic growth of areas outside of the city? Sounds like it would ignite economic growth as smaller cities have to create their own services.
- TomMarius 9y agoIf it was better to have these services in the area outside the city, they'd already exist. These areas are too sparsely populated for these services to practically exist, and the ones that already exist depend on car traffic from the cities that would cease to exist if it was impractical to own a car in the city.
- adrianN 9y agoIt is practical to offer parking at train stations at the outskirts of the city so that people can commute to the train station and leave their car outside the exclusion zones.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoThat does happen in some cities - also to provide an alternative to exorbitant inner city parking costs - but it will add a lot of overhead to your trip, so for a daily commute it becomes unfeasible unless you're okay with adding 30-60 minutes to it. Every day. (I did public transit to my assignment (working as a consultant) for five years; won't work with my current one as it's a 2 hour journey for just 60 kilometers).
- CalRobert 9y agoFor what it's worth, I'm trying to find a place that is free of cars because, well, they ruin life if you enjoy walking and cycling. So far, places that come to mind are central Ghent and Rothenburg ob der Tauber (sadly the latter allows cars but they're still very few in number). If I were there I would expect to work remote, or start my own gig. I'd shop locally. There are very few places in the world where you can live near other people and escape automobiles, and I suspect there are at least a few other people like myself.
- agmcleod 9y agoIn many cases I see cycling ruin life if you enjoy driving or walking ;). I do find places that i've seen be bike friendly in Europe do a much better job at this. But cyclists in Toronto can be pretty awful. Likewise can pedestrians and cars. Whichever way I travel, the other two are annoying me or causing me grief somehow.
- CalRobert 9y agoSome people are inconsiderate :-( . Some of those people ride bikes. I've been annoyed at bicyclists while walking along holding my helmet just after docking my Dublinbike, even. But a jerk walking is virtually certainly not going to kill me (or my kid). A jerk cycling almost certainly won't either. But a jerk driving quite possibly will - after all, where I come from there's a 9/11 on the roads every month due to drivers, and the dead are disproportionately people walking or cycling. Of course, 100 years ago the streets were for walking (or horses, bikes, early autos, whathaveyou) and it was quite a feat that auto makers convinced people that only folks inside cars deserved to use 90% of it (all of it, in much of the US), and that it was perfectly normal to leave people walking clinging on to a shred of space at the edge.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Noos 9y agoActually a jerk walking may kill you and your kid...its called "mugging" which can happen when you walk places, and which really can't happen easily if you are in a car. And there are many areas in an average city where it's completely unsafe to walk in. And keep in mind, it's a lot more dangerous for a woman to walk alone than the average HN poster, especially if they need to do so at night.
- matt4077 9y agoLiving in a densely populated city is far less resource-consuming than living in rural areas. You should be thankful for cities, especially if you enjoy living in nature. Distributing city populations evenly across the land would do serious harm to that natural beauty you claim to enjoy.
- jacquesm 9y agoAnd the German economy would crash, but never mind that. Before you ban all petrol cars you will first need something that can replace them because not everybody is in a position to use public transport both due to capacity, speed and door-to-door elements.
- madez 9y agoYou claim things without being knowledgeable of the matter. For certain businesses that require door to door contact there are exceptions. You don't know the plans with regarding alternative means of transportation.
- jacquesm 9y ago> You claim things without being knowledgeable of the matter. Oh, sorry about that, forgive me for speaking my mind in a public forum, and out of turn at that. Would you like a position paper with references? I claim things because I've been interested in transportation for a very long time and have read up on the subject from countless sources. There are a whole pile of reasons why you can't just overnight remove all traffic from cities. For one you're still going to have to supply the cities which means you will need to keep all road and other infrastructure in one piece but with a far smaller tax base available to pay for them, you will have numerous exceptions to your rule (due to for instance people with handicaps, emergency vehicles and so on), there is the small detail of a lack of public transport capability, the fact that public transport is not usually practically usable when you need to transport more than a small bag of stuff and so on. Another issue is that if the larger part of the alternative transportation methods will use electricity that we will need more grid infrastructure, charging points and generating capacity, all of which will not spring into being overnight. Simplistic solutions such as 'ban all cars' from one day to the next will have serious side effects and you're not going to win this battle by making such idiotic suggestions. Society is like a super tanker, the minimum turning radius is large and if you try to exceed that limit something will break. 'Plans with regarding alternative means of transportation' require time to be implemented and require actual alternatives. Amsterdam has been slowly but surely pushing vehicles out of the cities inner center with a combination of tax pressure, changes to infrastructure, improved public transport and so on, it's been going on for decades and the effect is very clear. If they had done this any faster there would have been too little time to adapt for all the individuals and businesses depending on mobility. It's akin to how you change a large technological system: the agile method applied to society. Large uncontrolled swings in direction will not be manageable and will result in only one of two things: some kind of disaster or a reversal. If you don't want either of those you are going to have to be a bit more patient for a proper solution.
- gwbas1c 9y agoOne thing I've quickly realized from driving an electric car: gas (petrol) cars smell really, really bad. We're just so used to it we don't notice.
- lilbobbytables 9y agos/bad/good/g
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ams6110 9y agoNothing like the cars from the '70s or earlier. Every once in a while driving, I'll pass a restored car from the 60s or 70s going the other way, and can smell the exhaust for about a mile. And that's one car.
- jacquesm 9y agoNothing like a two-stroke moped. Those are the worst by far.
- foobarian 9y agoThat reminds me of the Wartburg [1]. Our neighbor had one where I grew up, and us kids used to call it the "Atom bomb" due to the mushroom cloud of blue smoke it generated when it started up or pulled in. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartburg_353 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartburg_353
- jacquesm 9y agoBetween those, the Trabants and the Serenas a morning in the former Eastblock would always look like fog. Heavy, worn out diesel engines of trucks and buses didn't help either. The situation is now much better than when I lived there but even so Poland still has a huge smog problem.
- tjansen 9y agoPlease no bicylces, they are terrible for pedestrians. I'd rather deal with cars than bikes.
- biswaroop 9y agoUm, cars kill astronomically more pedestrians than do bikes.
- tjansen 9y agoThere are two differences: a) It's something that I can control, as long as I stay on the sidewalk and the cars stay on the street. But I have no control over bicycles on the sidewalks (even if there is a bike lane and it's illegal, many cyclists just take the shortest path, because they can). b) it's a problem than can mostly be solved by technology. I would like to see automatic pedestrian braking being required for new cars. I doubt we'll see bicycles with any kind of emergency braking system in the next decades.
- IkmoIkmo 9y agoSure, in isolation I would prefer a car staying in its car-lane to a bicycle driving all over the sidewalk. But then, this change doesn't have to happen in isolation. The Netherlands is a great example of a decades-long investment in pedestrian-first & cyclist-first infrastructure over cars. Cycles have their own dedicated lanes, increasingly not just painted on the car-lanes but separated from both the car lanes and sidewalks with elevations. And as they're ubiquitous and well-kept, cyclists have no real reason to drive on the sidewalk. Cycling on the sidewalk just isn't a problem of any significance anymore in most places in the Netherlands. But when I went to Berlin and cycled there, I often found myself on the sidewalk by way of convenience and safety. The solution isn't to say no to bikes and have cars instead because cars have dedicated infrastructure they stick to, the solution is dedicated infrastructure for bicycles and incentives + enforcement to make them stick to it. It works very well in the Netherlands, which was actually, at one time, a country with tons of development geared towards cars.
- IshKebab 9y ago
- 1337biz 9y agoWhat do you think about the idea that this is a hidden stimulation for the German car industry, ie. If you can find a reason to ban all cars that are painted blue, you create massive demands for other colors.
- tjansen 9y agoIn my case it does. I am driving a Euro5 Diesel car and live in one of those cities where they may be banned. So, yes, I need to buy a new one. Which is quite difficult, or at least expensive, because it's quite possible that cars with the newer Euro6 Diesel emission standard may also be banned in the mid-term, and the latest standard Euro6d is brand new.
- matt4077 9y agoThis lawsuit was between cities trying to ban diesel cars and their respective states. The two states are openly supportive of their local car industry, while the cities were motivated to improve local air quality by looming EU fines. The court, being the highest administrative court in the country, is also unlikely to be in the car industry's pocket: any backroom communication with industry lobbyists would be a major scandal. To draw an analogy to the US Supreme Court: judges may bring all sorts of personal biases to the bench. But they are unlikely to risk the social prestige of their role for whatever bribe is on offer. After all, they could have chosen much more lucrative careers in the private sector long ago if money was their motivation. As a factual matter, i. e. "unexpected consequences", your idea might become true. But it's a risky strategy to hope that premature obsolescence of your product will result in consumers coming back for more. With the VW diesel scandal in the background, it's also possible that the industry will end up having to shoulder a major part of the monetary burdens. It's much more likely that the loss to their brands, and the very public failure of their diesel strategy, will far outweigh any gains from some turnover in cars. Some diesel cars may also be retrofitted with cleaner technology, and others can probably be sold abroad, making the losses not quite as large as one might expect.
- harperlee 9y ago> ambulances would be adjusted to walking persons instead of loud cars with their stereos on German ambulances and firetrucks have an unbelievable siren volume! It is piercing - I have to literally cover my ears if I'm a bystander. I have never heard anything like that in other European countries or the US. So I suspect that you can already lower their volume if you German people were willing to, seeing that it works fine in other places...
- inetknght 9y agoI hear it all the time in Houston. I'm pretty sure it's because of high noise plus most modern vehicles trying to reduce or eliminate outside noise. Emergency vehicles need to punch through all that noise reduction.
- Torwald 9y ago> ambulances would be adjusted to walking persons What about death? I mean, wouldn't this take too long to reach people and to bring them into hospital if needed? (We already have cases were people die on the way to the hospital as things stand.)
- lultimouomo 9y agoI think he meant the loudness of the ambulance siren.
- mem0r1 9y agoSo what‘s with the constitutional guarantee of ownership ? I highly doubt that court decision is constitutional, I think and hope it is going to be overthrown by the German Federal Consitutional Court. I‘m so tired of the freedom hostile Green-Leftist agenda in Germany !
- dmix 9y ago> The ruling was praised by environmental groups but angered many politicians and business lobbies who said millions of drivers might end up unable to use or sell vehicles they bought in good faith. That latter part is a very serious concern. This isn't hurting big evil corporations who are killing the planet. It's hurting regular lower/middle class Germans who bought cars that they could afford just as everyone else was... electric isn't a financial option for the vast majority of people and diesel has been sold/advertised as comparable to petrol for quite some time... Like most bad policies it's based in good intentions with some highly questionable/harmful real-world implications.
- craftyguy 9y ago> unable to use or sell vehicles they bought in good faith. In Germany, there's a "right to sell"?
- ckastner 9y ago> So what‘s with the constitutional guarantee of ownership You still own the car, it's just worth less (most probably).
- bwindels 9y agoI somewhat understand your anger, but it seems misdirected. I hope VW gets sued out of existence for their reckless behaviour.
- zaroth 9y agoAs a ___ who never owned ____ I would love to see ____ completely banned. I guess I sometimes feel this way about some things, but then pretty quickly get over it and realize that other people have different utility functions than me, and that I kinda like this whole life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness thing. I much rather take the approach that externalities be accounted for properly than to ban anything that produces an externality. So it’s rather much more like; how many trees do you want me to plant to keep my car? Or more probably, enjoy the $2.50/gal I just paid your town in taxes to fill up my gas tank. Instead of, fuck off with your dirty car you’re not welcome here.
- theothertom 9y ago$2.50/gal would be a massive price cut in most of Europe. A quick glance suggests that petrol is around 1.359 €/L in Germany at the moment.
- Tuxer 9y agoHe/she meant in pure taxes
- tobltobs 9y agoYou seriously believe those $2.50/gal peanuts do account for the whole cost and damage you create with your lazy lifestyle?
- zaroth 9y agoWhat a bizarre rebuttal to see on HN. But I’ll respond despite the poor tone. I took a guess of $2.50 per gallon in total net externality. Turns out after a bit of Googling a study out of Harvard University [1] put the number at $2.10. So, yeah I do believe it, seriously! By the way, those $2.50 peanuts would add up to $360 billion per year in the US. I don’t have a problem with a gas tax that tries to fully cover the externalities of driving, as long as the money is earmarked to actually try to offset the cost. [1] - https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/m-rcbg/heep/ee-workshop_131024-25/supp/2.a%20Anderson/ParryWallsHarrington2007.pdf https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/m-rcbg/heep/ee-workshop_131024...
- krylon 9y agoAs a German who also never owned a car (also have a driver's license), I find your enthusiasm invigorating. But I do not see it happening. If the outcome was better funding for public transportation, I would be all for it. With more people using public transportation, traffic would lighten up and may get more relaxed? Everybody wins! It would be really nice if it turned out this way, but I am not overly optimistic. The car lobby has a lot of power, and the relationship people have with their cars is not very rational. (I will freely admit that my relationship to my computers is similarly irrational, but all my computers combined gobble up far less energy than a single car with its motor running in idle. Plus, a substantial amount of the electricity that drives my computers comes from renewable sources.)
- woodpanel 9y agoAs a German urbanite who has been moving in and out of cities to even rural areas I have to say: Look beyond your own nose. Not everybody lives in Berlin Kreuzberg. It's basically statements like these "Next: Petrol cars please" that deprive the clean-air activists of any credibility.
- pelasaco 9y agotypischer grüner wähler. Keine ahnung von nix :)