7 ms·

Why have technical innovation at all, let's just outlaw stuff... I really don't get this desire to outlaw cars. I like walkable cities, but I also like the com

Why have technical innovation at all, let's just outlaw stuff... I really don't get this desire to outlaw cars. I like walkable cities, but I also like the comfort and privacy of car transport. I live in a place (Germany) with good public transport. I used to live in cities with very good public transport. I still don't enjoy being squeezed in with thousands of other people. Does that mean that people like me have to be reeducated and/or forced to see the error of their ways?

giomasce 7y ago
I don't think that outlawing car is a solution, but disincentivizing them maybe is: higher taxes with which pay a better public transport network, less and more expensive parking, more lanes dedicated to public or unmotorized transport, traffic lights more favourable to public or unmotorized transport, stronger presumption of fault on the side of the motorized vehicle after accidents. All of these improve the value of less impacting transport. After all, cars, especially when moving just one person, heavily overuse shared and scarce resources like space and environment. It's all too fair that they pay a higher share to public resources. Maybe you will still use your car, accepting to pay a higher price for it, but other people will switch, making the world a better place also for you.
- rimliu 7y ago
  Well, you can start by banning houses and cramming people into small apartments, which should be more efficient. Not everybody drives, but everybody needs a place to live and private houses are just abuse of the land. Jokes aside, come see gas and parking prices in Europe.
  - giomasce 7y ago
    I perfectly support house taxing being super-linear in the size of the house, if this is what you mean, in such a way that a decent house is as affordable as possible for everybody, and those who want very large houses recognize that they have an above-than-average share of a common resource, and therefore contribute to the common needs more than others. That said, I believe that road space has different rules than housing space, so it is hard to compare them directly. I am Italian and live in Belgium, in case this gives more strength to my argument. I also have a car and pay European prices for it. Of course, I try to use it as little as possible, which is good.
    - nradov 7y ago
      So if you have 7 people living in a 250m^2 house is that worse than 1 person living in a 100m^2 house? Should they pay much higher property taxes?
      - giomasce 7y ago
        Probably not. FTR, I never said they should. I didn't propose any dependency on the number of residents, but this does not imply that I think there should be none. There are probably many other variables to take into account, and I didn't want to state a complete proposal. Just one of the many criteria.
        nradov 7y ago
        That's the problem. Such proposals are totally unworkable, easy to cheat, and require excessively intrusive government.
blt 7y ago
If your desire for comfort and privacy in public is strong, don't live in a dense city.
asjw 7y ago
It's the same principle behind outlawing cigarettes, alcohol before a certain age, guns... Oh wait!
- varjag 7y ago
  None of these have any practical benefit for the vast majority of users. Unlike cars.
  - mariorossi666 7y ago
    Are you saying that drugs have no practical benefits? I think what the poster wanted to say is that cars are abused, and just like any other abuse or addiction, it should be regulated. But USA have a problem regulating dangerous stuff: gas, cars and guns. There's a climate change coming and people in USA really are still debating if it's a "personal freedom" issue? We are 7 billion, they are 300 millions, I think it's time they understand what good citizenship means...
    - mariorossi666 7y ago
      Wow, downvoted for saying that US citizens cannot ignore the climate changes because cars are more comfortable to them...
jjoonathan 7y ago
Yeah, but putting together a good solution is hard and boring, while tearing down a bad solution is easy and fun, so let's just go around tearing down bad solutions and calling it progress!
- rklaehn 7y ago
  Not sure if the boring company approach is a bad solution. For 30 years, I have heard from environmentalists that electric cars will need to have short range and shitty performance, but we have to outlaw ICE cars anyway for the greater good. There comes Tesla and builds a car that is just objectively better in every metric than an ICE car. Now my next car when my 13 year old Prius gives up the ghost will be a Model 3. For public transport it is similar. Offer me something that is better in every way than a car (on demand, point to point, with privacy), and I will happily use it instead of a car. A self-driving taxi fleet with dedicated right of way, as envisioned by the boring company, would fit the bill. If the boring company plans don't work out, a high frequency electric bus system with dedicated rights of way would fit the bill, with something like trackless trams (http://theconversation.com/why-trackless-trams-are-ready-to-replace-light-rail-103690 http://theconversation.com/why-trackless-trams-are-ready-to-...) for the very high demand parts. But don't try to sell me a tram as the best 21st century solution for transit and then try to outlaw all the alternatives...
  - bildung 7y ago
    From an environmental POV electric cars will change almost nothing. The energy per passenger mile is still terrible as you still need to move, in the case of Tesla, at least 2500kg of material to move 1 person. For meaningful energy savings the transportation model itself has to change. Here is one example for Hamburg, Germany, showing over 80% decrease in CO2 emission by shifting to public transport: http://www.mobilitaet-in-deutschland.de/pdf/infas_Vortrag_ifeuWorkshop.pdf http://www.mobilitaet-in-deutschland.de/pdf/infas_Vortrag_if... p.18)
    - rklaehn 7y ago
      What if the energy comes from solar? Then the energy consumption does not matter that much. Also, even a tesla is not 2500kg and many people with family rarely drive with a single occupant. Also, have you looked at the energy consumption of light or suburban rail? It might look somewhat attractive if you assume that the rail cars are packed, but in reality where they often drive almost empty at night and during off hours, the numbers are actually pretty bad. Electric buses are much better, but even they have the huge downside that they run according to a schedule, don't go where you want to go, and offer no privacy.
enjeyw 7y ago
Well, maybe actually. It’s reasonable to suggest that your driving is creating personal gain at the expense of others (pollution, congestion etc), and thus should be treated like many other things that fall into this category (theft, speeding) and be outlawed. Of course it’s also totally reasonable to suggest that the harm to others is so small that it doesn’t justify the erosion of personal liberty. Point being, the question warrants reasonable consideration rather than immediate dismissal.
- thereisnospork 7y ago
  > Point being, the question warrants reasonable consideration rather than immediate dismissal. Sure, but it takes quite a bit of negatives to override the obvious and glaring benefits of anyone being able to transport oneself, one's family, one's stuff, at a moments notice, to any destination, in (almost) any weather, at an average speed of 30-60miles per hour, all at an amortized cost of approximately 50cents per mile. The willingness and readiness of some people to disregard the large personal, societal, and economic benefits of having functioning automotive infrastructure - in concert with other methods of transit - quite frankly bewilders me.
  - Xylakant 7y ago
    > Sure, but it takes quite a bit of negatives to override the obvious and glaring benefits of anyone being able to transport oneself, one's family, one's stuff, at a moments notice, to any destination, in (almost) any weather, at an average speed of 30-60miles per hour, all at an amortized cost of approximately 50cents per mile. The current discussion mostly centers on banning cars in cities or large agglomerations. In no city you'll reach average speeds even approaching 30 miles an hour - something around 20km/h is a more reasonable number to expect. That's btw. easily reachable with an electric bicycle or public transport. I can call a cab or a transport for larger goods at pretty much a moments notice, there's even car sharing services that have some parked in the street. Also, you're disregarding that cars in cities have massive externalities - the current estimate for Berlin is that infrastructure for cars (roads and parking spaces) cost about 30% of the cities surface area at substantial cost to society (increased rent and building costs, maintenance etc) which is paid by the majority of people not owning a car. Not all of that could be recouped if private car usage is reduced, but substantial chunks could. Not to speak of noise and other pollution, risks of accident and injury etc. So you're overplaying the advantages and disregarding the very real cost that other people shoulder for a minority driving.
bArray 7y ago
> Why have technical innovation at all, let's just outlaw > stuff... > I really don't get this desire to outlaw cars. That's not the point, it's that in this case the infrastructure cost to clean up cities is astronomical. Forgetting air pollution, noise pollution, deaths from traffic collisions, congestion - you also have to consider the shear infrastructural costs that _already_ go into maintaining road surfaces, traffic control, policing, etc. And that's without tunnel boring. > I like walkable cities, but I also like the comfort and > privacy of car transport. I think we just have to look at the practicality of private transport in cities. > I still don't enjoy being squeezed in with thousands of > other people. Perhaps this is where public transportation can be innovated on. > Does that mean that people like me have to be reeducated > and/or forced to see the error of their ways? Most likely - it's simply the march of progress. As horses were mostly outlawed/discouraged from cities, I suspect cars will be too.
- rklaehn 7y ago
  > > Does that mean that people like me have to be reeducated and/or forced to see the error of their ways? > > Most likely - it's simply the march of progress. As horses were mostly outlawed/discouraged from cities, I suspect cars will be too. I think I will pass. If you outlaw driving in cities without a good alternative, I will just not live in a city anymore. But let me guess: you want to outlaw that too...
  - selestify 7y ago
    > If you outlaw driving in cities without a good alternative I think the point is indeed to provide good public transportation as a suitable alternative. > I will just not live in a city anymore And why not? That's an entirely legitimate choice
    - giomasce 7y ago
      > And why not? That's an entirely legitimate choice Not only, it might be considered the precise sought after effect.
vinc 7y ago
If you want to be alone in your own mode of transportation in a city, there's no real need to use a ton of metal and gasoline for that. We can put a lot of innovation to bicycles and electric bicycles or scooters to make them more attractive to more people.
- rimliu 7y ago
  Will you come to my city in the middle of January when it will be -20 Celsius outside and show how you drive your kids to school on a said electric scooter? Trying to solve some problem should start from understanding it not from the assumption what everyone has the same lifestyle as you.
  - vinc 7y ago
    Personally I live hours away from the nearest town, use only my bicycle even when it's snowing, and I don't have any heating in the house. So I quite understand that not everyone have the same lifestyle as me :) But you are right that there will not be a unique solution to the transportation problem. In warmer climate we already have (electric) cargo bikes that are nice for moving kids around in the city, but we'll need more innovation for colder climate and longer distances. And that was exactly my point.
journalctl 7y ago
> I still don't enjoy being squeezed in with thousands of other people. I still don’t enjoy the global mean temperature getting higher and causing flood and famine, but I guess your personal comfort is more important.
archi42 7y ago
Nope. If you need high-throughput transportation in high-density areas, then cars are not the technically best solution since they need a lot of space to move only a few people each, and that's both when in use (space on the road) and when not in use (parking space). With current and mid-term-future tech, high-frequency bus- and smalltrain/metro-lines are much more efficient for city-plus-suburbia-scale mass-transportation. Depending on topography and climate, add (electric) bicycles and similar to the mix. The problem is with bootstrapping: A high-frequency public transportation network is expensive, especially if the demand is low since everybody (who can afford it) is driving by car because the current public transport is bad because setting up a good high-frequency public transportation network is expensive, especially if the demand is low since... To break this circle, we have politics and law - but of course only few cities want to outlaw cars. My personal opinion: While I really like driving my nice, expensive car, I would actually prefer taking the bus; as long as (1.) it's not more expensive [easy] and (2.) doesn't affect my travel time significantly [difficult] and (3.) is as reliable as going by car. Right now getting to the office by bus takes 40m instead of max. 10m by car, is unreliable (missed connections add 15m and leave me waiting in 2 to 5 degC) and god forbid there is a chance of snow, then I'm stranded. I'm leaving out recent strikes, which shut down public transportation in my city for 2 weeks, because I think as much as people should have a good public transportation, the people WORKING in public transportation deserve a proper payment.

giomasce 7y ago

I don't think that outlawing car is a solution, but disincentivizing them maybe is: higher taxes with which pay a better public transport network, less and more expensive parking, more lanes dedicated to public or unmotorized transport, traffic lights more favourable to public or unmotorized transport, stronger presumption of fault on the side of the motorized vehicle after accidents. All of these improve the value of less impacting transport. After all, cars, especially when moving just one person, heavily overuse shared and scarce resources like space and environment. It's all too fair that they pay a higher share to public resources. Maybe you will still use your car, accepting to pay a higher price for it, but other people will switch, making the world a better place also for you.

rimliu 7y ago
Well, you can start by banning houses and cramming people into small apartments, which should be more efficient. Not everybody drives, but everybody needs a place to live and private houses are just abuse of the land. Jokes aside, come see gas and parking prices in Europe.
- giomasce 7y ago
  I perfectly support house taxing being super-linear in the size of the house, if this is what you mean, in such a way that a decent house is as affordable as possible for everybody, and those who want very large houses recognize that they have an above-than-average share of a common resource, and therefore contribute to the common needs more than others. That said, I believe that road space has different rules than housing space, so it is hard to compare them directly. I am Italian and live in Belgium, in case this gives more strength to my argument. I also have a car and pay European prices for it. Of course, I try to use it as little as possible, which is good.
  - nradov 7y ago
    So if you have 7 people living in a 250m^2 house is that worse than 1 person living in a 100m^2 house? Should they pay much higher property taxes?
    - giomasce 7y ago
      Probably not. FTR, I never said they should. I didn't propose any dependency on the number of residents, but this does not imply that I think there should be none. There are probably many other variables to take into account, and I didn't want to state a complete proposal. Just one of the many criteria.
      - nradov 7y ago
        That's the problem. Such proposals are totally unworkable, easy to cheat, and require excessively intrusive government.

blt 7y ago

If your desire for comfort and privacy in public is strong, don't live in a dense city.

asjw 7y ago

It's the same principle behind outlawing cigarettes, alcohol before a certain age, guns... Oh wait!

varjag 7y ago
None of these have any practical benefit for the vast majority of users. Unlike cars.
- mariorossi666 7y ago
  Are you saying that drugs have no practical benefits? I think what the poster wanted to say is that cars are abused, and just like any other abuse or addiction, it should be regulated. But USA have a problem regulating dangerous stuff: gas, cars and guns. There's a climate change coming and people in USA really are still debating if it's a "personal freedom" issue? We are 7 billion, they are 300 millions, I think it's time they understand what good citizenship means...
  - mariorossi666 7y ago
    Wow, downvoted for saying that US citizens cannot ignore the climate changes because cars are more comfortable to them...

jjoonathan 7y ago

Yeah, but putting together a good solution is hard and boring, while tearing down a bad solution is easy and fun, so let's just go around tearing down bad solutions and calling it progress!

rklaehn 7y ago
Not sure if the boring company approach is a bad solution. For 30 years, I have heard from environmentalists that electric cars will need to have short range and shitty performance, but we have to outlaw ICE cars anyway for the greater good. There comes Tesla and builds a car that is just objectively better in every metric than an ICE car. Now my next car when my 13 year old Prius gives up the ghost will be a Model 3. For public transport it is similar. Offer me something that is better in every way than a car (on demand, point to point, with privacy), and I will happily use it instead of a car. A self-driving taxi fleet with dedicated right of way, as envisioned by the boring company, would fit the bill. If the boring company plans don't work out, a high frequency electric bus system with dedicated rights of way would fit the bill, with something like trackless trams (http://theconversation.com/why-trackless-trams-are-ready-to-replace-light-rail-103690 http://theconversation.com/why-trackless-trams-are-ready-to-...) for the very high demand parts. But don't try to sell me a tram as the best 21st century solution for transit and then try to outlaw all the alternatives...
- bildung 7y ago
  From an environmental POV electric cars will change almost nothing. The energy per passenger mile is still terrible as you still need to move, in the case of Tesla, at least 2500kg of material to move 1 person. For meaningful energy savings the transportation model itself has to change. Here is one example for Hamburg, Germany, showing over 80% decrease in CO2 emission by shifting to public transport: http://www.mobilitaet-in-deutschland.de/pdf/infas_Vortrag_ifeuWorkshop.pdf http://www.mobilitaet-in-deutschland.de/pdf/infas_Vortrag_if... p.18)
  - rklaehn 7y ago
    What if the energy comes from solar? Then the energy consumption does not matter that much. Also, even a tesla is not 2500kg and many people with family rarely drive with a single occupant. Also, have you looked at the energy consumption of light or suburban rail? It might look somewhat attractive if you assume that the rail cars are packed, but in reality where they often drive almost empty at night and during off hours, the numbers are actually pretty bad. Electric buses are much better, but even they have the huge downside that they run according to a schedule, don't go where you want to go, and offer no privacy.

enjeyw 7y ago

Well, maybe actually. It’s reasonable to suggest that your driving is creating personal gain at the expense of others (pollution, congestion etc), and thus should be treated like many other things that fall into this category (theft, speeding) and be outlawed. Of course it’s also totally reasonable to suggest that the harm to others is so small that it doesn’t justify the erosion of personal liberty. Point being, the question warrants reasonable consideration rather than immediate dismissal.

thereisnospork 7y ago
> Point being, the question warrants reasonable consideration rather than immediate dismissal. Sure, but it takes quite a bit of negatives to override the obvious and glaring benefits of anyone being able to transport oneself, one's family, one's stuff, at a moments notice, to any destination, in (almost) any weather, at an average speed of 30-60miles per hour, all at an amortized cost of approximately 50cents per mile. The willingness and readiness of some people to disregard the large personal, societal, and economic benefits of having functioning automotive infrastructure - in concert with other methods of transit - quite frankly bewilders me.
- Xylakant 7y ago
  > Sure, but it takes quite a bit of negatives to override the obvious and glaring benefits of anyone being able to transport oneself, one's family, one's stuff, at a moments notice, to any destination, in (almost) any weather, at an average speed of 30-60miles per hour, all at an amortized cost of approximately 50cents per mile. The current discussion mostly centers on banning cars in cities or large agglomerations. In no city you'll reach average speeds even approaching 30 miles an hour - something around 20km/h is a more reasonable number to expect. That's btw. easily reachable with an electric bicycle or public transport. I can call a cab or a transport for larger goods at pretty much a moments notice, there's even car sharing services that have some parked in the street. Also, you're disregarding that cars in cities have massive externalities - the current estimate for Berlin is that infrastructure for cars (roads and parking spaces) cost about 30% of the cities surface area at substantial cost to society (increased rent and building costs, maintenance etc) which is paid by the majority of people not owning a car. Not all of that could be recouped if private car usage is reduced, but substantial chunks could. Not to speak of noise and other pollution, risks of accident and injury etc. So you're overplaying the advantages and disregarding the very real cost that other people shoulder for a minority driving.

bArray 7y ago

> Why have technical innovation at all, let's just outlaw > stuff... > I really don't get this desire to outlaw cars. That's not the point, it's that in this case the infrastructure cost to clean up cities is astronomical. Forgetting air pollution, noise pollution, deaths from traffic collisions, congestion - you also have to consider the shear infrastructural costs that _already_ go into maintaining road surfaces, traffic control, policing, etc. And that's without tunnel boring. > I like walkable cities, but I also like the comfort and > privacy of car transport. I think we just have to look at the practicality of private transport in cities. > I still don't enjoy being squeezed in with thousands of > other people. Perhaps this is where public transportation can be innovated on. > Does that mean that people like me have to be reeducated > and/or forced to see the error of their ways? Most likely - it's simply the march of progress. As horses were mostly outlawed/discouraged from cities, I suspect cars will be too.

rklaehn 7y ago
> > Does that mean that people like me have to be reeducated and/or forced to see the error of their ways? > > Most likely - it's simply the march of progress. As horses were mostly outlawed/discouraged from cities, I suspect cars will be too. I think I will pass. If you outlaw driving in cities without a good alternative, I will just not live in a city anymore. But let me guess: you want to outlaw that too...
- selestify 7y ago
  > If you outlaw driving in cities without a good alternative I think the point is indeed to provide good public transportation as a suitable alternative. > I will just not live in a city anymore And why not? That's an entirely legitimate choice
  - giomasce 7y ago
    > And why not? That's an entirely legitimate choice Not only, it might be considered the precise sought after effect.

vinc 7y ago

If you want to be alone in your own mode of transportation in a city, there's no real need to use a ton of metal and gasoline for that. We can put a lot of innovation to bicycles and electric bicycles or scooters to make them more attractive to more people.

rimliu 7y ago
Will you come to my city in the middle of January when it will be -20 Celsius outside and show how you drive your kids to school on a said electric scooter? Trying to solve some problem should start from understanding it not from the assumption what everyone has the same lifestyle as you.
- vinc 7y ago
  Personally I live hours away from the nearest town, use only my bicycle even when it's snowing, and I don't have any heating in the house. So I quite understand that not everyone have the same lifestyle as me :) But you are right that there will not be a unique solution to the transportation problem. In warmer climate we already have (electric) cargo bikes that are nice for moving kids around in the city, but we'll need more innovation for colder climate and longer distances. And that was exactly my point.

journalctl 7y ago

> I still don't enjoy being squeezed in with thousands of other people. I still don’t enjoy the global mean temperature getting higher and causing flood and famine, but I guess your personal comfort is more important.

archi42 7y ago

Nope. If you need high-throughput transportation in high-density areas, then cars are not the technically best solution since they need a lot of space to move only a few people each, and that's both when in use (space on the road) and when not in use (parking space). With current and mid-term-future tech, high-frequency bus- and smalltrain/metro-lines are much more efficient for city-plus-suburbia-scale mass-transportation. Depending on topography and climate, add (electric) bicycles and similar to the mix. The problem is with bootstrapping: A high-frequency public transportation network is expensive, especially if the demand is low since everybody (who can afford it) is driving by car because the current public transport is bad because setting up a good high-frequency public transportation network is expensive, especially if the demand is low since... To break this circle, we have politics and law - but of course only few cities want to outlaw cars. My personal opinion: While I really like driving my nice, expensive car, I would actually prefer taking the bus; as long as (1.) it's not more expensive [easy] and (2.) doesn't affect my travel time significantly [difficult] and (3.) is as reliable as going by car. Right now getting to the office by bus takes 40m instead of max. 10m by car, is unreliable (missed connections add 15m and leave me waiting in 2 to 5 degC) and god forbid there is a chance of snow, then I'm stranded. I'm leaving out recent strikes, which shut down public transportation in my city for 2 weeks, because I think as much as people should have a good public transportation, the people WORKING in public transportation deserve a proper payment.