10 ms·

What happens if you have the same amount of horses like cars? Aren't they wasteful and need a lot of space and at night a heated parking spot? :)

hannasanarion 6y ago
Yes, which is why I didn't say anything about horses. Opposition to cars, like opposition to bitcoin, isn't rustic ludditism. There are modern solutions to transportation that are superior to cars, like rail, frequent busses, and bike infrastructure, but lose out in funding and hype because they're not prestigious and utopian like cars are. Likewise, Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve, but it gets all the attention because it's flashy and new and utopian. And if you think cars aren't utopian, tell me the last time you've seen an automobile ad that showed somebody being stuck in gridlocked traffic in the lincoln tunnel inhaling gas fumes for over half an hour. I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > There are modern solutions to transportation that are superior to cars, like rail, frequent busses, and bike infrastructure, Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior. > Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve, How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
  - heterodoxxed 6y ago
    | How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation? A deflationary distributed ledger has yet to prove itself as having any kind of real utility in the first place.
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      Its got utility to the people who use it, which is what matters.
      - heterodoxxed 6y ago
        A speculative store of value is not utility. Everybody gave up on it as a currency years ago.
        solveit 6y ago
        A speculative store of value that everyone has coordinated upon is utility, and this has little to do with the quality of the underlying technology. The fact remains that I can pay merchants of varying degreees of shadiness in BTC much easier than I can send them a wire transfer. Now, you might not think this is good for the world, but it certainly is utility.
        heterodoxxed 6y ago
        | pay merchants of varying degreees of shadiness Why use BTC instead of an anonymized crypto like Monero?
        solveit 6y ago
        Because BTC is what they take. The coordination is more important than the tech. Granted, this is only because I don't patronize the super illegal Go To Jail Go Directly To Jail Do Not Pass Go type of merchants, but the point stands. If you just need unfreezable funds and pseudonymity, not total cryptographically secured anonymity, you'll use Bitcoin instead of a dozen better methods (which are all crypto anyway, so wouldn't really count as a point against crypto, just BTC) because everyone else is using it.
        heterodoxxed 6y ago
        So it's utility is for sketchy (but not too sketchy!) merchants in which a much cheaper wire transfer or free visa/mc payment would be unacceptable, but not illegal because it's a permanent public record of the transaction. Got it.
  - hannasanarion 6y ago
    >Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers My e-cargo bike with a trailer can hold more stuff than my sedan ever could. Did an Ikea trip with it last year, carried home a filing cabinet, a desk frame, and a small table. > mass transit is less flexible frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning. > distributed multi-node database. Done. > resistant to inflation Not something that sane people should want. Economies grow from commerce and reinvestment, not people jealously hogging every dollar they can find so that they can stash it under a bed to be used at higher value later.
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      > Not something that sane people should want Thats uncharitable, and in my opinion ignorant. Inflation distorts the signals people use to make investments, leading to misallocation of assets.
      - hannasanarion 6y ago
        And deflation, where the value of your cash increases constantly if you do literally nothing with it, leads to good allocation of assets? There have been two major periods of deflation in the history of the US dollar. 1930-1933, and 2007-2008. When the value of money increases, people don't spend it, they hoard it, commerce stops, and the economy grinds to a halt. Just look at your beloved bitcoin, who is actually using it to buy and sell anything (besides illegal goods and money laundering)? The price is entirely propped up by speculation and fake Tethers, and because it is increasing, everyone who has any knows they would be a fool to use it, which is the whole point of currency.
    - Twirrim 6y ago
      > frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning. I never once missed my car when I lived in London. Pop along to the end of the street for a bus every 5-10 minutes, or just a little bit further away and I was at a tube station where I could be on a train within 10 minutes that took me right across London far faster than any car could. The one or two occasions I needed a car, I could rent one, and still be better off than if I'd been paying the month-to-month expenses of keeping a car on the road (insurance, MOT etc.) Car rentals are even easier these days than they were back then.
  - troycarlson 6y ago
    Move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake?
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      *proof of waste.
      - fredfoobar 6y ago
        This comment is a proof of waste of my time reading your replies. Also, hey! we meet again!
        arcticbull 6y ago
        Is proof of waste not a suitable name? It's proof a huge quantity of resources were wasted on deriving some random garbage you can append to a piece of data to obtain a certain number of leading zeroes on a SHA lol. 600kWh per transaction. Horrifying. And of course, always a pleasure haha.
        fredfoobar 6y ago
        I'm sorry you are horrified
        arcticbull 6y ago
        I'm sorry you're not :) you have however failed to address to substance of the comment in a meaningful way.
        fredfoobar 6y ago
        I'm sorry, but how is you being "horrified" an objective measure of goodness? You described the process and just said it's horrifying, what do you expect me to respond with?
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    > Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior. Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable. You build cities around transit, walking and biking instead of giant chasms between buildings. This is not a problem that exists in Europe. You don't have to get rid of all cars, just most of them. And the best way to start is by getting rid of free parking, which is a regressive tax on the poor. > How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation? That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter. Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets. So long as wages keep pace with inflation, which they do, this is not an issue. In fact if you purchase your necessities on a credit card the 0% APR until your bill comes due makes inflation work for you.
    - kenniskrag 6y ago
      >> How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation? > That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter. The distributed ledger isn't even secure. Just look where the cheap electricity is, create a network partition and all the other transaction will vanish after the network partition doesn't exist anymore.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Bitcoin isn't exactly running rampant in North Korea heh
      - ric2b 6y ago
        What makes you think you alone will find that cheap electricity, that is so much cheaper than anywhere else that it allows you to beat everyone else that is also mining?
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      > Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable. Thats a good demonstration of ignoring the interests of everyone who doesn’t share your opinion, but it’s not how representative government is supposed to work. > That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter. Then you can go back to ignoring bitcoin. > Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets. Again, this is not an answer for the problem, and pretending it is just ignores the reality that billions of people live with every day.
  - nutshell89 6y ago
    There are cargo bikes (https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/12/03/breaking-city-to-announce-cargo-bike-delivery-pilot-with-amazon-others/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/12/03/breaking-city-to-anno...) A single car lane can move 600-1600 people per hour while a two way bike lane of the same size can transport 7500 people per hour (https://nyc25x25.org/#report https://nyc25x25.org/#report)
- jyrkesh 6y ago
  But do you think we ever could have gotten to electric cars if we hadn't used gas-powered cars as a stepping stone? I'd probably agree with you if you were to say that it's taken too long, but I'd argue that the crappy fuel-burning stuff is a necessary milestone on the transition to something better. I see Bitcoin as the Model T of new currency models. Decentralization is the future of currency and contracts, even if Bitcoin itself is wasteful and inefficient as a v1 product.
  - hannasanarion 6y ago
    The fact that cars burn gas is one of the least harmful parts of them. Electric cars are just as bad as any other car. The real harm of cars is in how they forced cities to spread out, putting miles of asphalty moonscape between every destination, forcing people to spend thousands of dollars a year on vehicles that they shouldn't need, driving greenfill development that doesn't raise enough revenue to support itself, forcing cities to develop ever more automobile suburbs for the immediate revenue to fulfil their maintenance obligations on the old ones, going into massive debt to keep up appearances on what is effectively a ponzi scheme, not to mention the human cost of traffic violence. --- Decentralization is not an advantage for currency and contracts. The problems that decentralization "solves" were never problems in the first place. Nobody was asking for a new way to store their money that doesn't have any identity verification besides a single digital key, which doesn't have the ability to dispute or undo transactions, and which takes multiple minutes to clear transactions. To quote Kai Stinchcombe > There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve that problem, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast. ... > Nobody went out and did a survey about whether most credit card users would be willing to give up their frequent flyer miles in return for also losing the ability to dispute a transaction.
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      > The fact that cars burn gas is one of the least harmful parts of them. Air pollution is still a significant harm, even if the space wasting harms also exist.
    - 6y ago
- hossbeast 6y ago
  The real problem you're going to run into with this argument is that people like cars, like to drive them, and want to own them.
  - SCUSKU 6y ago
    That may be the case for some car fanatics, but by and large the average person simply wants easy and flexible transportation. If public transportation were better, lots of people would opt to take the local train/bus/ride share because it would be a fraction of the cost, with ideally only slightly more friction as a passenger.
    - bugzz 6y ago
      For commuting to work, sure. But if you are going to get groceries for your family or buy anything large (furniture, TV, lumber, etc), it's very nice to use car.
    - wonderwonder 6y ago
      I really don't this this, I think the average person really wants a good reliable car. Cars are pretty nice to have. Travelled to an Airbnb 3 hours away with my dogs and kids last weekend. No way I could have done that in 3 hours with public transportation. Even if I took a train that allowed my pets, you still face the issue of the last mile or 5 from the terminal. There are also no crazy people in my car and I don't have to worry about someone sitting next to me coughing. If anything this pandemic has made me appreciate cars all the more so. Without a car, everything transportation related has to be planned and weighed.
      - jamesknelson 6y ago
        Coming from someone who grew up in a car culture city, learned to drive at 18, bought my first car at 19, and drove most days of the week... I'm much happier without a car. I don't want to have to own one again. In hindsight, car culture feels like a jail that I didn't realize I was born into. I moved to Tokyo 5 years ago. If I want to get somewhere, I walk to one of three train stations within a 10 minute walk, hop on the train, and am there in – usually – about 30 minutes. There's always the option to take a taxi, but they're often no faster than train. I can still drive out to the mountains if there's no train to the one I want to climb, because there are more car rental shops within walking distance than there are train stations. Sure, there are cars in this city. They're useful tools that make a lot of sense for many people to own. But the average person chooses to live without one, because in a city designed for people instead of cars, life can actually be better that way.
- mr_cyborg 6y ago
  > And if you think cars aren't utopian, tell me the last time you've seen an automobile ad that showed somebody being stuck in gridlocked traffic in the lincoln tunnel inhaling gas fumes for over half an hour. I don’t think this is as ubiquitous as is suggested here - there aren’t really any tunnels in a lot of places, and New York has one of the best park and ride systems around if you have to make that trip regularly and want to avoid this scenario on the daily. > I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting. I think it all depends on where one lives and their lifestyle. There are plenty of places, urban or otherwise, in America at least, where the picture painted preceding this quote is not a regular experience for people. I would venture to suggest the urban traffic grind is probably not the experience for a large majority of people. A ton of people drive in rural or suburban areas and run local errands and things as is depicted in many car ads. Overall, I understand the importance of alternative means of transportation, but cars are one of the most personally efficient modes to get from Point A to Point B directly.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I need to haul an old kitchen oven to my dad's house so he can cook dinner, since his failed. Dad lives deep in the mountains at the end of a dirt road, far from any train station. I've got a 20 foot fishing boat sitting in my backyard. I want to take it out on the lake. I'd like to visit my in-laws who live on a farm in a rural town without bus service, 200 miles away. The temperature is a few degrees above freezing and it's raining. I can't use a car, either owned or rented. What superior transportation solutions exist that allow me to do them?
  - makeworld 6y ago
    There are still genuine uses for cars, and I doubt OP would disagree. But in urban areas your example situations aren't relevant. The point is that cars are inefficient in most if not all urban cases.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      The anti-car brigade's argument always hinges on assuming everyone lives in urban areas, and only has to go to urban areas. If you constrain the problem space that much, then yea, nobody needs cars. In the rest of the universe, they are indispensable.
      - hannasanarion 6y ago
        The "anti car brigade" is trying to ban cars in Manhattan, not Montana.
  - lmm 6y ago
    No-one's arguing for an outright ban on cars everywhere in all circumstances. I'm pretty extremist but all I want to see is an end to using public space for private car storage, zero-parking buildings as a norm where land costs warrant it, single-vehicle-width shared streets (Americans would probably perceive them as alleyways) as a norm in cities where land costs warrant it...
  - andrepd 6y ago
    The vast majority of trips in a car aren't for transportation of kitchen ovens to houses deep in the mountains at the end of a dirt road guarded by an eldritch Being.
hisham_hm 6y ago
The whole "horses vs. cars" argument is based on a false dichotomy: the are not only these two options for transportation.
markogresak 6y ago
Horses are well adapted to living in very cold weather. How do you think they survived in the wild? It’s only because we decided to close them inside that they need to have a cosy spot and blanket when they go out. When they live outside, they get a thick coat, which is very good at isolation. Even if they get wet from rain, the water is repelled so it does not get to their skin. A good indication of this isolation is that snow will not immediately melt as it hits their fur. The only thing they need is enough to eat, as they still expend more energy to keep warm. Source: my SO and I have 2 horses at home and they live in the open all the time. Their only shelter is a small roof as an extension to the barn, so there’s a dry place for the food.

hannasanarion 6y ago

Yes, which is why I didn't say anything about horses. Opposition to cars, like opposition to bitcoin, isn't rustic ludditism. There are modern solutions to transportation that are superior to cars, like rail, frequent busses, and bike infrastructure, but lose out in funding and hype because they're not prestigious and utopian like cars are. Likewise, Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve, but it gets all the attention because it's flashy and new and utopian. And if you think cars aren't utopian, tell me the last time you've seen an automobile ad that showed somebody being stuck in gridlocked traffic in the lincoln tunnel inhaling gas fumes for over half an hour. I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> There are modern solutions to transportation that are superior to cars, like rail, frequent busses, and bike infrastructure, Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior. > Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve, How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
- heterodoxxed 6y ago
  | How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation? A deflationary distributed ledger has yet to prove itself as having any kind of real utility in the first place.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    Its got utility to the people who use it, which is what matters.
    - heterodoxxed 6y ago
      A speculative store of value is not utility. Everybody gave up on it as a currency years ago.
      - solveit 6y ago
        A speculative store of value that everyone has coordinated upon is utility, and this has little to do with the quality of the underlying technology. The fact remains that I can pay merchants of varying degreees of shadiness in BTC much easier than I can send them a wire transfer. Now, you might not think this is good for the world, but it certainly is utility.
        heterodoxxed 6y ago
        | pay merchants of varying degreees of shadiness Why use BTC instead of an anonymized crypto like Monero?
        solveit 6y ago
        Because BTC is what they take. The coordination is more important than the tech. Granted, this is only because I don't patronize the super illegal Go To Jail Go Directly To Jail Do Not Pass Go type of merchants, but the point stands. If you just need unfreezable funds and pseudonymity, not total cryptographically secured anonymity, you'll use Bitcoin instead of a dozen better methods (which are all crypto anyway, so wouldn't really count as a point against crypto, just BTC) because everyone else is using it.
        heterodoxxed 6y ago
        So it's utility is for sketchy (but not too sketchy!) merchants in which a much cheaper wire transfer or free visa/mc payment would be unacceptable, but not illegal because it's a permanent public record of the transaction. Got it.
- hannasanarion 6y ago
  >Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers My e-cargo bike with a trailer can hold more stuff than my sedan ever could. Did an Ikea trip with it last year, carried home a filing cabinet, a desk frame, and a small table. > mass transit is less flexible frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning. > distributed multi-node database. Done. > resistant to inflation Not something that sane people should want. Economies grow from commerce and reinvestment, not people jealously hogging every dollar they can find so that they can stash it under a bed to be used at higher value later.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > Not something that sane people should want Thats uncharitable, and in my opinion ignorant. Inflation distorts the signals people use to make investments, leading to misallocation of assets.
    - hannasanarion 6y ago
      And deflation, where the value of your cash increases constantly if you do literally nothing with it, leads to good allocation of assets? There have been two major periods of deflation in the history of the US dollar. 1930-1933, and 2007-2008. When the value of money increases, people don't spend it, they hoard it, commerce stops, and the economy grinds to a halt. Just look at your beloved bitcoin, who is actually using it to buy and sell anything (besides illegal goods and money laundering)? The price is entirely propped up by speculation and fake Tethers, and because it is increasing, everyone who has any knows they would be a fool to use it, which is the whole point of currency.
  - Twirrim 6y ago
    > frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning. I never once missed my car when I lived in London. Pop along to the end of the street for a bus every 5-10 minutes, or just a little bit further away and I was at a tube station where I could be on a train within 10 minutes that took me right across London far faster than any car could. The one or two occasions I needed a car, I could rent one, and still be better off than if I'd been paying the month-to-month expenses of keeping a car on the road (insurance, MOT etc.) Car rentals are even easier these days than they were back then.
- troycarlson 6y ago
  Move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake?
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    *proof of waste.
    - fredfoobar 6y ago
      This comment is a proof of waste of my time reading your replies. Also, hey! we meet again!
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Is proof of waste not a suitable name? It's proof a huge quantity of resources were wasted on deriving some random garbage you can append to a piece of data to obtain a certain number of leading zeroes on a SHA lol. 600kWh per transaction. Horrifying. And of course, always a pleasure haha.
        fredfoobar 6y ago
        I'm sorry you are horrified
        arcticbull 6y ago
        I'm sorry you're not :) you have however failed to address to substance of the comment in a meaningful way.
        fredfoobar 6y ago
        I'm sorry, but how is you being "horrified" an objective measure of goodness? You described the process and just said it's horrifying, what do you expect me to respond with?
- arcticbull 6y ago
  > Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior. Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable. You build cities around transit, walking and biking instead of giant chasms between buildings. This is not a problem that exists in Europe. You don't have to get rid of all cars, just most of them. And the best way to start is by getting rid of free parking, which is a regressive tax on the poor. > How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation? That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter. Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets. So long as wages keep pace with inflation, which they do, this is not an issue. In fact if you purchase your necessities on a credit card the 0% APR until your bill comes due makes inflation work for you.
  - kenniskrag 6y ago
    >> How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation? > That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter. The distributed ledger isn't even secure. Just look where the cheap electricity is, create a network partition and all the other transaction will vanish after the network partition doesn't exist anymore.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Bitcoin isn't exactly running rampant in North Korea heh
    - ric2b 6y ago
      What makes you think you alone will find that cheap electricity, that is so much cheaper than anywhere else that it allows you to beat everyone else that is also mining?
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable. Thats a good demonstration of ignoring the interests of everyone who doesn’t share your opinion, but it’s not how representative government is supposed to work. > That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter. Then you can go back to ignoring bitcoin. > Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets. Again, this is not an answer for the problem, and pretending it is just ignores the reality that billions of people live with every day.
- nutshell89 6y ago
  There are cargo bikes (https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/12/03/breaking-city-to-announce-cargo-bike-delivery-pilot-with-amazon-others/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/12/03/breaking-city-to-anno...) A single car lane can move 600-1600 people per hour while a two way bike lane of the same size can transport 7500 people per hour (https://nyc25x25.org/#report https://nyc25x25.org/#report)
jyrkesh 6y ago
But do you think we ever could have gotten to electric cars if we hadn't used gas-powered cars as a stepping stone? I'd probably agree with you if you were to say that it's taken too long, but I'd argue that the crappy fuel-burning stuff is a necessary milestone on the transition to something better. I see Bitcoin as the Model T of new currency models. Decentralization is the future of currency and contracts, even if Bitcoin itself is wasteful and inefficient as a v1 product.
- hannasanarion 6y ago
  The fact that cars burn gas is one of the least harmful parts of them. Electric cars are just as bad as any other car. The real harm of cars is in how they forced cities to spread out, putting miles of asphalty moonscape between every destination, forcing people to spend thousands of dollars a year on vehicles that they shouldn't need, driving greenfill development that doesn't raise enough revenue to support itself, forcing cities to develop ever more automobile suburbs for the immediate revenue to fulfil their maintenance obligations on the old ones, going into massive debt to keep up appearances on what is effectively a ponzi scheme, not to mention the human cost of traffic violence. --- Decentralization is not an advantage for currency and contracts. The problems that decentralization "solves" were never problems in the first place. Nobody was asking for a new way to store their money that doesn't have any identity verification besides a single digital key, which doesn't have the ability to dispute or undo transactions, and which takes multiple minutes to clear transactions. To quote Kai Stinchcombe > There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve that problem, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast. ... > Nobody went out and did a survey about whether most credit card users would be willing to give up their frequent flyer miles in return for also losing the ability to dispute a transaction.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    > The fact that cars burn gas is one of the least harmful parts of them. Air pollution is still a significant harm, even if the space wasting harms also exist.
  - 6y ago
hossbeast 6y ago
The real problem you're going to run into with this argument is that people like cars, like to drive them, and want to own them.
- SCUSKU 6y ago
  That may be the case for some car fanatics, but by and large the average person simply wants easy and flexible transportation. If public transportation were better, lots of people would opt to take the local train/bus/ride share because it would be a fraction of the cost, with ideally only slightly more friction as a passenger.
  - bugzz 6y ago
    For commuting to work, sure. But if you are going to get groceries for your family or buy anything large (furniture, TV, lumber, etc), it's very nice to use car.
  - wonderwonder 6y ago
    I really don't this this, I think the average person really wants a good reliable car. Cars are pretty nice to have. Travelled to an Airbnb 3 hours away with my dogs and kids last weekend. No way I could have done that in 3 hours with public transportation. Even if I took a train that allowed my pets, you still face the issue of the last mile or 5 from the terminal. There are also no crazy people in my car and I don't have to worry about someone sitting next to me coughing. If anything this pandemic has made me appreciate cars all the more so. Without a car, everything transportation related has to be planned and weighed.
    - jamesknelson 6y ago
      Coming from someone who grew up in a car culture city, learned to drive at 18, bought my first car at 19, and drove most days of the week... I'm much happier without a car. I don't want to have to own one again. In hindsight, car culture feels like a jail that I didn't realize I was born into. I moved to Tokyo 5 years ago. If I want to get somewhere, I walk to one of three train stations within a 10 minute walk, hop on the train, and am there in – usually – about 30 minutes. There's always the option to take a taxi, but they're often no faster than train. I can still drive out to the mountains if there's no train to the one I want to climb, because there are more car rental shops within walking distance than there are train stations. Sure, there are cars in this city. They're useful tools that make a lot of sense for many people to own. But the average person chooses to live without one, because in a city designed for people instead of cars, life can actually be better that way.
mr_cyborg 6y ago
> And if you think cars aren't utopian, tell me the last time you've seen an automobile ad that showed somebody being stuck in gridlocked traffic in the lincoln tunnel inhaling gas fumes for over half an hour. I don’t think this is as ubiquitous as is suggested here - there aren’t really any tunnels in a lot of places, and New York has one of the best park and ride systems around if you have to make that trip regularly and want to avoid this scenario on the daily. > I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting. I think it all depends on where one lives and their lifestyle. There are plenty of places, urban or otherwise, in America at least, where the picture painted preceding this quote is not a regular experience for people. I would venture to suggest the urban traffic grind is probably not the experience for a large majority of people. A ton of people drive in rural or suburban areas and run local errands and things as is depicted in many car ads. Overall, I understand the importance of alternative means of transportation, but cars are one of the most personally efficient modes to get from Point A to Point B directly.
ryandrake 6y ago
I need to haul an old kitchen oven to my dad's house so he can cook dinner, since his failed. Dad lives deep in the mountains at the end of a dirt road, far from any train station. I've got a 20 foot fishing boat sitting in my backyard. I want to take it out on the lake. I'd like to visit my in-laws who live on a farm in a rural town without bus service, 200 miles away. The temperature is a few degrees above freezing and it's raining. I can't use a car, either owned or rented. What superior transportation solutions exist that allow me to do them?
- makeworld 6y ago
  There are still genuine uses for cars, and I doubt OP would disagree. But in urban areas your example situations aren't relevant. The point is that cars are inefficient in most if not all urban cases.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    The anti-car brigade's argument always hinges on assuming everyone lives in urban areas, and only has to go to urban areas. If you constrain the problem space that much, then yea, nobody needs cars. In the rest of the universe, they are indispensable.
    - hannasanarion 6y ago
      The "anti car brigade" is trying to ban cars in Manhattan, not Montana.
- lmm 6y ago
  No-one's arguing for an outright ban on cars everywhere in all circumstances. I'm pretty extremist but all I want to see is an end to using public space for private car storage, zero-parking buildings as a norm where land costs warrant it, single-vehicle-width shared streets (Americans would probably perceive them as alleyways) as a norm in cities where land costs warrant it...
- andrepd 6y ago
  The vast majority of trips in a car aren't for transportation of kitchen ovens to houses deep in the mountains at the end of a dirt road guarded by an eldritch Being.

hisham_hm 6y ago

The whole "horses vs. cars" argument is based on a false dichotomy: the are not only these two options for transportation.

markogresak 6y ago

Horses are well adapted to living in very cold weather. How do you think they survived in the wild? It’s only because we decided to close them inside that they need to have a cosy spot and blanket when they go out. When they live outside, they get a thick coat, which is very good at isolation. Even if they get wet from rain, the water is repelled so it does not get to their skin. A good indication of this isolation is that snow will not immediately melt as it hits their fur. The only thing they need is enough to eat, as they still expend more energy to keep warm. Source: my SO and I have 2 horses at home and they live in the open all the time. Their only shelter is a small roof as an extension to the barn, so there’s a dry place for the food.