9 ms·

Opinion – I’ve Seen a Future Without Cars, and It’s Amazing

21 points by wclax04 6y ago

HOMPRO 6y ago
Todo es increíble cuando la mente humana deja de ser egoista
lazyjones 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
  - ianai 6y ago
    Gas subsidies have to be amongst the worst things we’re doing to ourselves. But we’re practically forced to them because of the secondary price effects.
  - deagle50 6y ago
    This. If the true cost of driving was passed onto the consumer, cars would get dropped faster than cable TV.
  - lazyjones 6y ago
    > 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.
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  > because the effing bus doesn't go where 50 random people need to go This would be a problem if the random destinations were uniformly distributed. They are not. They cluster. And indeed there is a feedback loop between public transport and destination desirability. > 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. It sounds like you think induced demand is an instantaneous phenomenon. It's not. It's a dynamic system with a variety of stocks and therefore, a variety of delayed effects that show up over spans of time. But you can simplify it to an abstract model: supply and demand. You can fairly say that there is a supply of car travel and a demand for car travel. If you lower the cost of something then, all things being equal, the demand rises. If you make car travel faster and more pleasant than it was previously, then demand goes up until it reaches an equilibrium again. It's easy to estimate where that equilibrium lies: around the current travel time for a road before it is expanded. But then the net cost for other uses of the space has risen, because there is less to go around. Roads are not immune from economics, just as they are not excused from geometry.
  - lazyjones 6y ago
    > If you lower the cost of something then, all things being equal, the demand rises No. Only in abstract models with potentially infinite supply and demand. If you lower the cost of plaster casts, more people won't break their legs. > Roads are not immune from economics, just as they are not excused from geometry. And economics aren't immune from ideology and disingenuous modelling.
    - jacques_chester 6y ago
      > If you lower the cost of plaster casts, more people won't break their legs. Now you're misunderstanding elasticity of demand and assuming that demand or supply curves are perfectly linear. Plaster casts are highly inelastic, but if I jacked the price to $100,000 per, demand will fall off fairly sharply. > And economics aren't immune from ideology and disingenuous modelling. My experience is that economists know more about economics than people who beat up the strawman versions. Your position, as I understand it, is that some other model correctly describes the demand for road travel. What is it? And why is road travel the exception?
- esoterica 6y ago
  > try this pipe dream in any large city Ummm, you do realize that in most large cities around the world (including NYC, although excluding many US cities), most people do not use cars as their main mode of transportation right? It's not some crazy utopian hypothetical, it's literally how most dense cities already work. > It's impossible because total traffic cannot increase due to new roads since there aren't infinite people or cars to begin with. You don't need an "infinite" number of people or cars for induced demand to apply, you just need the number of people/cars to be >>> the road/parking capacity (which is true for any dense city).
  - lazyjones 6y ago
    > It's not some crazy utopian hypothetical, it's literally how most dense cities already work. In which large city is private car ownership prohibited?
honkycat 6y ago
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-pollution-causes-huge-reduction-in-intelligence-study-reveals https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air-poll...
- ianai 6y ago
  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.
  - brailsafe 6y ago
    Don't forget parking lots outside big box stores
  - bmitc 6y ago
    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.
denimnerd42 6y ago
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.
brailsafe 6y ago
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.
frabbit 6y ago
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).
8bitsrule 6y ago
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

21 points by wclax04 6y ago

Todo es increíble cuando la mente humana deja de ser egoista

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 6y ago
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.
- ianai 6y ago
  Gas subsidies have to be amongst the worst things we’re doing to ourselves. But we’re practically forced to them because of the secondary price effects.
- deagle50 6y ago
  This. If the true cost of driving was passed onto the consumer, cars would get dropped faster than cable TV.
- lazyjones 6y ago
  > 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.
jacques_chester 6y ago
> because the effing bus doesn't go where 50 random people need to go This would be a problem if the random destinations were uniformly distributed. They are not. They cluster. And indeed there is a feedback loop between public transport and destination desirability. > 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. It sounds like you think induced demand is an instantaneous phenomenon. It's not. It's a dynamic system with a variety of stocks and therefore, a variety of delayed effects that show up over spans of time. But you can simplify it to an abstract model: supply and demand. You can fairly say that there is a supply of car travel and a demand for car travel. If you lower the cost of something then, all things being equal, the demand rises. If you make car travel faster and more pleasant than it was previously, then demand goes up until it reaches an equilibrium again. It's easy to estimate where that equilibrium lies: around the current travel time for a road before it is expanded. But then the net cost for other uses of the space has risen, because there is less to go around. Roads are not immune from economics, just as they are not excused from geometry.
- lazyjones 6y ago
  > If you lower the cost of something then, all things being equal, the demand rises No. Only in abstract models with potentially infinite supply and demand. If you lower the cost of plaster casts, more people won't break their legs. > Roads are not immune from economics, just as they are not excused from geometry. And economics aren't immune from ideology and disingenuous modelling.
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    > If you lower the cost of plaster casts, more people won't break their legs. Now you're misunderstanding elasticity of demand and assuming that demand or supply curves are perfectly linear. Plaster casts are highly inelastic, but if I jacked the price to $100,000 per, demand will fall off fairly sharply. > And economics aren't immune from ideology and disingenuous modelling. My experience is that economists know more about economics than people who beat up the strawman versions. Your position, as I understand it, is that some other model correctly describes the demand for road travel. What is it? And why is road travel the exception?
esoterica 6y ago
> try this pipe dream in any large city Ummm, you do realize that in most large cities around the world (including NYC, although excluding many US cities), most people do not use cars as their main mode of transportation right? It's not some crazy utopian hypothetical, it's literally how most dense cities already work. > It's impossible because total traffic cannot increase due to new roads since there aren't infinite people or cars to begin with. You don't need an "infinite" number of people or cars for induced demand to apply, you just need the number of people/cars to be >>> the road/parking capacity (which is true for any dense city).
- lazyjones 6y ago
  > It's not some crazy utopian hypothetical, it's literally how most dense cities already work. In which large city is private car ownership prohibited?

honkycat 6y ago

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

ianai 6y ago
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.
- brailsafe 6y ago
  Don't forget parking lots outside big box stores
- bmitc 6y ago
  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.

denimnerd42 6y ago

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.

brailsafe 6y ago

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.

frabbit 6y ago

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).

8bitsrule 6y ago

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