9 ms·

Another example of how, if you had to design a vehicle for passenger city/suburban use, you would never ever ever come up with an ICE sedan, or to be honest eve

Another example of how, if you had to design a vehicle for passenger city/suburban use, you would never ever ever come up with an ICE sedan, or to be honest even an electrical vehicle of "normal" proportions. Pretty sure the car is the most harmful invention of the 20th century. The damage it has done to the environment, our health, and social fabric is hard to grok. A couple edits for clarification: - I'm talking about using cars to transport individuals to work, school, lunch, errands, etc - Cars are very harmful to health. Most obviously, they kill a lot of people. There's over one million road deaths worldwide per year[0]. (Covid killed 4M). Less obviously, they are terrible for health. Living next to busy roadways is linked to increased dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases. This has nothing to do with CO2--it's the rubber and metal and not addressed by Teslas or whatever. - Cars make people dumber. Students who move to schools downwind of busy roads have lower test scores [1]. - Less obvious is the damage to social fabric. It's not just a distance thing: it's an estrangement thing. People in cars skip the places they move through as opposed to inhabiting them. Think about some busy thoroughfare at night near your home. Does it feel safe? - Think about Houston. Think about Mumbai. Think about Lagos. - Getting rid of cars does not mean everyone has to use public transport. In fact that was my point. You can design a vehicle that takes you quickly from a -> b that doesn't weigh 2 tons and uses 18m^2 at rest. - Getting rid of cars does not mean getting rid of ambulances ffs. But my main issue isn't how bad this all is: it's how unnecessary it is. As a species we are more than capable (as evidenced by the OP!) of building a variety of modes of transport that are better in most every way (utility, externalities, price) to cars. [0]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-04/pollution-from-traffic-harms-kids-academic-performance https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-04/pollution...

adflux 5y ago
Spoken as someone who hasn't ever driven a person to a hospital, or had to travel to work by car, or had to be driven to school by a school bus etc etc etc
- nondave 5y ago
  I've had to do all of those things, and still agree that towns and cities being designed with cars as the default mode of transport is insane
  - adflux 5y ago
    I'm just curious if you grew up in a very large city and haven't been to other countries? Because public transport as a primary form of transportation simply isn't feasible in many places. And I was responding to the statement about cars being the worst invention of the 21st century...
    - zeepzeep 5y ago
      It isn't feasible because it wasn't designed as main way of transportation.
    - laumars 5y ago
      A great many European countries have proven it is practical. In fact in some cities it’s more beneficial not to drive (London and Amsterdam to give two examples of wildly different cities yet both favour public transport)
      - rorykoehler 5y ago
        Cycling is way quicker in Berlin for all sub 7km journeys
      - beardyw 5y ago
        Yes, being suburban Londoners in early 2020 we were checking the car would start periodically and contemplating getting rid of it. But then Covid struck, and us being high risk, public transport suddenly looked really unattractive. We haven't used it since. It is such a shame. We still use the car sparingly and one day hopefully have that conversation about scrapping it again.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
benrbray 5y ago
For anyone who has trouble understanding this perspective because they've lived in car-dependent hell their entire lives, I recommend the Not Just Bikes channel. He does extremely detailed comparisons of US cities vs Netherlands and other places. Here is a recent one [1]. For me, I always felt that something was wrong about American cities / suburbs but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Then, I spent a few months in Tokyo and something "clicked". It's an entirely different paradigm that forced me to reevaluate what I thought was possible. When I returned to the US, on the ride from the airport my first thought was: Everyone in this traffic jam is going the same direction, and would fit in a handful of train cars. Why are we OK with this?? People say trains are expensive, but they don't realize how much money we spend on cars. Americans spent $1.1 TRILLION on personal vehicles in 2017 [2], not including the hundreds of billions spent yearly on road maintenance. Redirecting a fraction of that money would more than pay for high-speed rail. Let's do a crude estimate. Using the chart here [3], we can expect to pay somewhere between $3-163 million USD per mile of high-speed rail. The distance from NY to LA is 2789.9 miles. At $100M/mile, which is excessive, it would still only cost $279 billion. We could build THREE transcontinental high-speed rail lines every year with the money we spend on personal automobiles. If we're as cost-effective as Japan at $2.6 M / mile, we could afford to build 384,000 miles of high speed rail every YEAR. Subway lines in a city are more expensive, around $200-400 M / mile, but of course there are fewer miles to cover, so the result is the same. New York pays an excessive $2.5 billion per mile, but my understanding is that is due more to corruption and red tape. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54 [2] https://www.itdp.org/2019/05/23/high-cost-transportation-united-states/ https://www.itdp.org/2019/05/23/high-cost-transportation-uni... [3] https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/high_speed_rail_lessons.pdf https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/high_speed_rail_...
- rraihansaputra 5y ago
  +1 on Not Just Bikes. I also like he also iterates that public transport actually is his preference above cycling, but Netherlands has such good bicycle infrastructure to make it work. I lived in Brisbane, Australia for a year. The good state of public transport there (at least for my use, commuting to/from Uni (UQ) and the city from Toowong) made car use non-essential. The sidewalks are maintained and have enough space to the road to not be alarmed by cars. To get further/certain parts of Brisbane is still a chore as it's still a car-centric infrastructure, but comparing it to Jakarta, Indonesia/metro US, it's much better. Public transport in Jakarta is an option for most, but the last-mile experience with subpar sidewalks (especially the lack of shade) make it such a chore. I felt much healthier to walk and take public transport for my daily commute, and not to mention the beautiful views on the way. The increase in my Quality of Life is very apparent. I really miss it, and looking to move to Brisbane or another city with similar/better commute/transport paradigm in the future.
Helmut10001 5y ago
Add to this list: The estrangement that happens when people drive with their SUVs. A car built like a tank entails a certain behavioral or interaction with other people that is detrimental to social cohesion and empathy.
- LightG 5y ago
  100% this. I live near a school and witnessing the quality of social interactions from Mums* , encapsulated by their SUV-tanks as if controlling a Gundam, is a sight to behold. * Sorry, it mainly is Mums in this situation. And I'm fully cognizant of ejut Dads/Men driving madly in other situations.
  - engineer_22 5y ago
    I have heard in german-speaking countries they call those style of automobiles "hausfraupanzers". For me, it evokes a silly image of a militant soccer-mom in a tank. I love it.
    - kiliantics 5y ago
      In the UK, they get referred to as Chelsea tractor, or Chelsea tank. (Chelsea being a rich part of London where they first got popular)
- htek 5y ago
  I love the freedom of bicycling, but I hate dealing with people driving cars. I sort of understand why the more militant bicyclists call them "cagers." As I remember angrily explaining to a motorist who thought nothing of fishtailing into my lane after barely passing me (I was biking in the shoulder between the white line and edge of the asphalt), "if I make a mistake, I get killed, if you make a mistake, I get killed."
usrusr 5y ago
> Less obvious is the damage to social fabric. It's not just a distance thing: it's an estrangement thing. Anecdotal data point: pre-pandemic I was insisting on going to work by subway instead of cycling despite the bike being almost twice as fast. Because on the subway, I see people, whereas on the bike I only see cars. The people on the subway I'd only ignore, hard, (being a somewhat unsociable person in a somewhat unsociable region of a somewhat unsociable country), but that's still a far more human interaction than coexisting with cars. There are people inside, but the only time you notice is when they are at being a particularly bad driver. All other times it feels more like being in a herd of large, sluggish steel beasts.
CodeGlitch 5y ago
I hate owning a car. It's expensive, sits on my driveway 90% of the time doing nothing and takes up loads of space. However our society is built around car ownership, and the same problem, plus a few others, occurred when we all used horses. I always liked the personal transport tubes in Futurama
- yetihehe 5y ago
  It would be nice if I had other options, but for now ALL other options are more expensive when considering time or money. That is reality for too many people, so we are where we are.
trabant00 5y ago
> if you had to design a vehicle for passenger city/suburban use, you would never ever ever come up with an ICE sedan I use a motorcycle 90% of the time in the city. But there's a lot of problems with any specialized transport like this: - parking multiple vehicles per person - learning to drive multiple type of vehicles - bicycle/scooter/Twike can't be used for serious shopping - safety. From the time electric scooters caught on I have numerous examples of people getting seriously hurt with permanent quality of life affecting injuries. - taking passengers on anything other than a car is non trivial - most alternative forms of transport require good physical health and skills I'm sure I could think of more but these are enough to explain why having a do it all vehicle (even if poorly and costly) makes sense for the majority of people.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  One more, hinted at but not explicit in your list: The variation in task requirements for a vehicle is high, so it is economically efficient to buy a single vehicle suited for as many tasks as possible. If you can acquire a limited vehicle for a much lower price (including parking, safety, and other externalities) it can be useful to do so -- but the limited vehicles are generally too expensive.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  > - safety. From the time electric scooters caught on I have numerous examples of people getting seriously hurt with permanent quality of life affecting injuries. Do you not know anyone who has had a life-affecting injury or was killed while in a car? Not saying scooters don't have their risks, but pretending cars are a paragon of safety seems to be the result of availability bias.
eightails 5y ago
> Living next to busy roadways is linked to increased dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases. This has nothing to do with CO2--it's the rubber and metal and not addressed by Teslas or whatever. I had thought that the pathological effects from highway pollution was at least partially caused by heavy metals and various unpleasant nitrates and sulfurs and the like produced by combustion engines, not only the small particulates released from tyres and roads. Obviously combustion-based pollution would be reduced if not eliminated by EVs. See e.g. this study, which found NO2 and elemental carbon pollution to be most harmful amongst various highway pollutants: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24231417/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24231417/
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> As a species we are more than capable (as evidenced by the OP!) of building a variety of modes of transport that are better in most every way (utility, externalities, price) to cars. As a species, yes, but -and I know this sounds hokey- we are not in control of the automobile industry. Market forces are -and we don't control those, either. Like so many mythical creators, we have lost control of our creation and it's not destroying us. What's worse, we have now raised multiple generations of humans who know no other way of being and for whom any alternative is unthinkable, or ridiculous. "What, I'll go around the city pedalling my little three-wheel bike? That's stupid!". Alternatives will have to be a lot better than automobiles to be able to replace them: be much cheaper, much more comfortable, much more convenient. Is there anything like that on the horizon?
- kiliantics 5y ago
  This is a completely ahistorical take. The roads didn't all come out of nowhere and the railways that used to go everywhere didn't just magically disappear. And market forces didn't make these transformations either. Regulation is what got us into this mess and regulation can get us out. We have also regulated away many things that were favoured by markets but had negative consequences. And there are plenty examples of people who are happy to do the less convenient thing and even end up enjoying it. Including switching from cars to bikes, which has happened in a number of European countries.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Couldn't agree more. I have come to really really hate cars. One of my short term goals is to find a job I don't need to commute to by car. This is shockingly difficult in the midwestern US.
heresie-dabord 5y ago
> You can design a vehicle that takes you quickly from a -> b that doesn't weigh 2 tons and uses 18m^2 at rest. The Smart Electric and the Fiat 500e are notable examples of practical errand vehicles that use space and energy efficiently. However, they are not the answer that consumers want to hear in the transportation dystopia of US society, where every vehicle must be an armoured car that can take a family of consumers (with at least one dog) through a vast zombie-apocalypse wasteland to fill the pantry at $warehouse-sized-retailer. What most people think they need for a vehicle is often a grotesque exaggeration of their likely needs and perhaps also a masochistic acceptance of absurd network congestion called "commuting".
auxym 5y ago
>you would never ever ever come up with an ICE sedan What's worse is that even sedans are losing popularity in favor of SUVs and full size trucks. In 2021 I find this staggering. On electric cars: we've had politicians subtly suggest that EVs will be a magic solution to all our transportation problems, including traffic. EVs obviously won't fix city congestion.
matt_the_bass 5y ago
I agree with many of your points. One not though, in the state where I live, we have awful drivers (I think) and covid deaths in 2020 were ~100x average yearly motor vehicle deaths.
gumby 5y ago
> Pretty sure the car is the most harmful invention of the 20th century. A bit of perspective: the automobile cleaned up cities, which used to have a huge infrastructure to manage animal waste. The automobile enabled freedoms: not just freedom to travel, which the manufacturers emphasize, but freedom of association, unlocked a wider freedom to work, in particular for women, and in general, ironically, enabled the growth of cities which are themselves not only environmentally more efficient but act as crucibles of growth. This is not some pro-car screed -- I myself got rid of my cars four years ago and primarily get around on foot, bike, and train. I also recognize the malign influence of the automobile, both IC and electric. But there is an enormous literature on the sociology and economics of the automobile, and I think a blanket condemnation, especially the extreme you mention, is utterly unwarranted.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  The automobile did not clean up the streets. The personal automobile was much too expensive for that. Buses and trams and metros and transport trucks and railways and bicycles cleaned up the streets. The average person didn't own a car and use it daily until much after the streets "cleaned up".
  - gumby 5y ago
    Do you have some references for this bold statement? The development of busses, trams, metros etc increased urban traffic (much as widening highways increases traffic, and traffic jams) including animal-drawn traffic, at least in the cities where I have read up on the history of urban transportation (in particular London, Paris, and New York). The GP mentioned Mumbai, which only recently banned animal traffic. It was packed before the automobile was developed.
    - qwertygnu 5y ago
      Do you have any references for yours?
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      The automobile simply did not do it. Until the late 50s, most households in the US did not have a car : https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2013/02/was-rise-of-car-ownership-responsible.html?m=1 https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2013/02/was-rise-of-car-own... Without a car, the only solution is public transport. And public transport in early 20th century America was the dominant source of the use of animals in personal transport. The confounding factor here is transport, hence why I mentioned trucks. Go to for example Tiznit in Morocco and observe how animals are used. They're not used for personal transport - they're not efficient for that in city environment - their use is moving merchandise.
refurb 5y ago
This is a funny take as I live in a developing country and owning a car is seen as the mark of a successful person. No more waiting for public transport. No more getting soaked walking or riding a bike in the rain. Convenience, comfort, time efficient. To say a sedan would be designed today is a ridiculous take. Nobody forced cars on people, they wanted them.
- Xylakant 5y ago
  In germany, policies in the 60ies and 70ies were designed to increase car ownership. People didn’t want cars. They wanted transportation from A to B and public policies made cars the most attractive option.
  - refurb 5y ago
    I’m not against public transit. I lived in Taiwan for a while which has very good public transport. But what’s good for a single person doesn’t necessarily work for a family living outside the city. The benefits of owning a car are pretty clear there.
    - Xylakant 5y ago
      > The benefits of owning a car are pretty clear there. Today they might be, but for example the village I grew up in had light rail until an autobahn was built and the rails torn out. Today, the only way to get around is a car - but this is a deliberate choice.
  - smnrchrds 5y ago
    How is the situation in Germany today? Are cities car-dependant or not? Does an average middle class German own a car? Do they use their car for commute to work?
    - Xylakant 5y ago
      That depends. In the city of Berlin, less than 50% of all households own a car. Where I grew up, public transport has mostly been gutted. Nearly everyone owns a car.
everdrive 5y ago
I think this is a great point, and I've always been on board with the general damage done by cars. The solutions I read about are nearly always focused around the cities. Now, this makes sense, since most people live in cities, and so you can make the biggest impact there. But what about people who live in the country or rural areas? What solutions are there for those sorts of folks?
- kiliantics 5y ago
  Trains can still go into the countryside. They used to in much of the US and still do in a lot of Europe. Then there are buses too.
- benrbray 5y ago
  I've always fancied the German style of having dense clusters of houses/shops around a major train station / highway, with farmland in between. Look at satellite imagery [1] around Stuttgart, for instance. You can totally have walkable city centers in less crowded areas. Of course Germany is not the United States. I don't know anything about agriculture, or to what extent the needs of German agriculture vs US agriculture would be met by such an arrangement. But this being HN, maybe someone knowledgeable can chime in! [1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Stuttgart,+Germany/@48.6623318,9.2196241,14155m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x4799db34c1ad8fd3:0x79d5c11c7791cfe4!8m2!3d48.7758459!4d9.1829321 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Stuttgart,+Germany/@48.662...
- el_nahual 5y ago
  Even in the USA with it's massive sprawl, most (80%+) of the population is urbanized [0]. The ideal mobility framework is one of interconnected small towns/cities (ideally via rail) with non-vehicle traffic for intra town movements. People that live out in a farm can drive in (although to be honest even distances of 10 miles can be very conveniently travelled in an ebike). There's four things that prevent this sort of network from taking hold: 1. At least in the US, the inter-town rail networks have been disbanded or neuterd to a useless extent. 2. No investment for inter-town bus service. You can get to the big city by bus, but not between towns. 3. In most of the small towns in the USA, "main" street is actually a state highway routinely seeing traffic speeds of 50+mph. In other words, the town is divided right down the middle by a highway, with most commerce clustered around this area. This means that even for intra-small-town traffic biking (and sometimes even walking due to a lack of sidewalks!) is dangerous. [0]: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/ua-facts.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...

adflux 5y ago

Spoken as someone who hasn't ever driven a person to a hospital, or had to travel to work by car, or had to be driven to school by a school bus etc etc etc

nondave 5y ago
I've had to do all of those things, and still agree that towns and cities being designed with cars as the default mode of transport is insane
- adflux 5y ago
  I'm just curious if you grew up in a very large city and haven't been to other countries? Because public transport as a primary form of transportation simply isn't feasible in many places. And I was responding to the statement about cars being the worst invention of the 21st century...
  - zeepzeep 5y ago
    It isn't feasible because it wasn't designed as main way of transportation.
  - laumars 5y ago
    A great many European countries have proven it is practical. In fact in some cities it’s more beneficial not to drive (London and Amsterdam to give two examples of wildly different cities yet both favour public transport)
    - rorykoehler 5y ago
      Cycling is way quicker in Berlin for all sub 7km journeys
    - beardyw 5y ago
      Yes, being suburban Londoners in early 2020 we were checking the car would start periodically and contemplating getting rid of it. But then Covid struck, and us being high risk, public transport suddenly looked really unattractive. We haven't used it since. It is such a shame. We still use the car sparingly and one day hopefully have that conversation about scrapping it again.
  - user-the-name 5y ago

benrbray 5y ago

For anyone who has trouble understanding this perspective because they've lived in car-dependent hell their entire lives, I recommend the Not Just Bikes channel. He does extremely detailed comparisons of US cities vs Netherlands and other places. Here is a recent one [1]. For me, I always felt that something was wrong about American cities / suburbs but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Then, I spent a few months in Tokyo and something "clicked". It's an entirely different paradigm that forced me to reevaluate what I thought was possible. When I returned to the US, on the ride from the airport my first thought was: Everyone in this traffic jam is going the same direction, and would fit in a handful of train cars. Why are we OK with this?? People say trains are expensive, but they don't realize how much money we spend on cars. Americans spent $1.1 TRILLION on personal vehicles in 2017 [2], not including the hundreds of billions spent yearly on road maintenance. Redirecting a fraction of that money would more than pay for high-speed rail. Let's do a crude estimate. Using the chart here [3], we can expect to pay somewhere between $3-163 million USD per mile of high-speed rail. The distance from NY to LA is 2789.9 miles. At $100M/mile, which is excessive, it would still only cost $279 billion. We could build THREE transcontinental high-speed rail lines every year with the money we spend on personal automobiles. If we're as cost-effective as Japan at $2.6 M / mile, we could afford to build 384,000 miles of high speed rail every YEAR. Subway lines in a city are more expensive, around $200-400 M / mile, but of course there are fewer miles to cover, so the result is the same. New York pays an excessive $2.5 billion per mile, but my understanding is that is due more to corruption and red tape. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54 [2] https://www.itdp.org/2019/05/23/high-cost-transportation-united-states/ https://www.itdp.org/2019/05/23/high-cost-transportation-uni... [3] https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/high_speed_rail_lessons.pdf https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/high_speed_rail_...

rraihansaputra 5y ago
+1 on Not Just Bikes. I also like he also iterates that public transport actually is his preference above cycling, but Netherlands has such good bicycle infrastructure to make it work. I lived in Brisbane, Australia for a year. The good state of public transport there (at least for my use, commuting to/from Uni (UQ) and the city from Toowong) made car use non-essential. The sidewalks are maintained and have enough space to the road to not be alarmed by cars. To get further/certain parts of Brisbane is still a chore as it's still a car-centric infrastructure, but comparing it to Jakarta, Indonesia/metro US, it's much better. Public transport in Jakarta is an option for most, but the last-mile experience with subpar sidewalks (especially the lack of shade) make it such a chore. I felt much healthier to walk and take public transport for my daily commute, and not to mention the beautiful views on the way. The increase in my Quality of Life is very apparent. I really miss it, and looking to move to Brisbane or another city with similar/better commute/transport paradigm in the future.

Helmut10001 5y ago

Add to this list: The estrangement that happens when people drive with their SUVs. A car built like a tank entails a certain behavioral or interaction with other people that is detrimental to social cohesion and empathy.

LightG 5y ago
100% this. I live near a school and witnessing the quality of social interactions from Mums* , encapsulated by their SUV-tanks as if controlling a Gundam, is a sight to behold. * Sorry, it mainly is Mums in this situation. And I'm fully cognizant of ejut Dads/Men driving madly in other situations.
- engineer_22 5y ago
  I have heard in german-speaking countries they call those style of automobiles "hausfraupanzers". For me, it evokes a silly image of a militant soccer-mom in a tank. I love it.
  - kiliantics 5y ago
    In the UK, they get referred to as Chelsea tractor, or Chelsea tank. (Chelsea being a rich part of London where they first got popular)
htek 5y ago
I love the freedom of bicycling, but I hate dealing with people driving cars. I sort of understand why the more militant bicyclists call them "cagers." As I remember angrily explaining to a motorist who thought nothing of fishtailing into my lane after barely passing me (I was biking in the shoulder between the white line and edge of the asphalt), "if I make a mistake, I get killed, if you make a mistake, I get killed."

usrusr 5y ago

> Less obvious is the damage to social fabric. It's not just a distance thing: it's an estrangement thing. Anecdotal data point: pre-pandemic I was insisting on going to work by subway instead of cycling despite the bike being almost twice as fast. Because on the subway, I see people, whereas on the bike I only see cars. The people on the subway I'd only ignore, hard, (being a somewhat unsociable person in a somewhat unsociable region of a somewhat unsociable country), but that's still a far more human interaction than coexisting with cars. There are people inside, but the only time you notice is when they are at being a particularly bad driver. All other times it feels more like being in a herd of large, sluggish steel beasts.

CodeGlitch 5y ago

I hate owning a car. It's expensive, sits on my driveway 90% of the time doing nothing and takes up loads of space. However our society is built around car ownership, and the same problem, plus a few others, occurred when we all used horses. I always liked the personal transport tubes in Futurama

yetihehe 5y ago
It would be nice if I had other options, but for now ALL other options are more expensive when considering time or money. That is reality for too many people, so we are where we are.

trabant00 5y ago

> if you had to design a vehicle for passenger city/suburban use, you would never ever ever come up with an ICE sedan I use a motorcycle 90% of the time in the city. But there's a lot of problems with any specialized transport like this: - parking multiple vehicles per person - learning to drive multiple type of vehicles - bicycle/scooter/Twike can't be used for serious shopping - safety. From the time electric scooters caught on I have numerous examples of people getting seriously hurt with permanent quality of life affecting injuries. - taking passengers on anything other than a car is non trivial - most alternative forms of transport require good physical health and skills I'm sure I could think of more but these are enough to explain why having a do it all vehicle (even if poorly and costly) makes sense for the majority of people.

dsr_ 5y ago
One more, hinted at but not explicit in your list: The variation in task requirements for a vehicle is high, so it is economically efficient to buy a single vehicle suited for as many tasks as possible. If you can acquire a limited vehicle for a much lower price (including parking, safety, and other externalities) it can be useful to do so -- but the limited vehicles are generally too expensive.
InitialLastName 5y ago
> - safety. From the time electric scooters caught on I have numerous examples of people getting seriously hurt with permanent quality of life affecting injuries. Do you not know anyone who has had a life-affecting injury or was killed while in a car? Not saying scooters don't have their risks, but pretending cars are a paragon of safety seems to be the result of availability bias.

eightails 5y ago

> Living next to busy roadways is linked to increased dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases. This has nothing to do with CO2--it's the rubber and metal and not addressed by Teslas or whatever. I had thought that the pathological effects from highway pollution was at least partially caused by heavy metals and various unpleasant nitrates and sulfurs and the like produced by combustion engines, not only the small particulates released from tyres and roads. Obviously combustion-based pollution would be reduced if not eliminated by EVs. See e.g. this study, which found NO2 and elemental carbon pollution to be most harmful amongst various highway pollutants: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24231417/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24231417/

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

>> As a species we are more than capable (as evidenced by the OP!) of building a variety of modes of transport that are better in most every way (utility, externalities, price) to cars. As a species, yes, but -and I know this sounds hokey- we are not in control of the automobile industry. Market forces are -and we don't control those, either. Like so many mythical creators, we have lost control of our creation and it's not destroying us. What's worse, we have now raised multiple generations of humans who know no other way of being and for whom any alternative is unthinkable, or ridiculous. "What, I'll go around the city pedalling my little three-wheel bike? That's stupid!". Alternatives will have to be a lot better than automobiles to be able to replace them: be much cheaper, much more comfortable, much more convenient. Is there anything like that on the horizon?

kiliantics 5y ago
This is a completely ahistorical take. The roads didn't all come out of nowhere and the railways that used to go everywhere didn't just magically disappear. And market forces didn't make these transformations either. Regulation is what got us into this mess and regulation can get us out. We have also regulated away many things that were favoured by markets but had negative consequences. And there are plenty examples of people who are happy to do the less convenient thing and even end up enjoying it. Including switching from cars to bikes, which has happened in a number of European countries.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

Couldn't agree more. I have come to really really hate cars. One of my short term goals is to find a job I don't need to commute to by car. This is shockingly difficult in the midwestern US.

heresie-dabord 5y ago

> You can design a vehicle that takes you quickly from a -> b that doesn't weigh 2 tons and uses 18m^2 at rest. The Smart Electric and the Fiat 500e are notable examples of practical errand vehicles that use space and energy efficiently. However, they are not the answer that consumers want to hear in the transportation dystopia of US society, where every vehicle must be an armoured car that can take a family of consumers (with at least one dog) through a vast zombie-apocalypse wasteland to fill the pantry at $warehouse-sized-retailer. What most people think they need for a vehicle is often a grotesque exaggeration of their likely needs and perhaps also a masochistic acceptance of absurd network congestion called "commuting".

auxym 5y ago

>you would never ever ever come up with an ICE sedan What's worse is that even sedans are losing popularity in favor of SUVs and full size trucks. In 2021 I find this staggering. On electric cars: we've had politicians subtly suggest that EVs will be a magic solution to all our transportation problems, including traffic. EVs obviously won't fix city congestion.

matt_the_bass 5y ago

I agree with many of your points. One not though, in the state where I live, we have awful drivers (I think) and covid deaths in 2020 were ~100x average yearly motor vehicle deaths.

gumby 5y ago

> Pretty sure the car is the most harmful invention of the 20th century. A bit of perspective: the automobile cleaned up cities, which used to have a huge infrastructure to manage animal waste. The automobile enabled freedoms: not just freedom to travel, which the manufacturers emphasize, but freedom of association, unlocked a wider freedom to work, in particular for women, and in general, ironically, enabled the growth of cities which are themselves not only environmentally more efficient but act as crucibles of growth. This is not some pro-car screed -- I myself got rid of my cars four years ago and primarily get around on foot, bike, and train. I also recognize the malign influence of the automobile, both IC and electric. But there is an enormous literature on the sociology and economics of the automobile, and I think a blanket condemnation, especially the extreme you mention, is utterly unwarranted.

sudosysgen 5y ago
The automobile did not clean up the streets. The personal automobile was much too expensive for that. Buses and trams and metros and transport trucks and railways and bicycles cleaned up the streets. The average person didn't own a car and use it daily until much after the streets "cleaned up".
- gumby 5y ago
  Do you have some references for this bold statement? The development of busses, trams, metros etc increased urban traffic (much as widening highways increases traffic, and traffic jams) including animal-drawn traffic, at least in the cities where I have read up on the history of urban transportation (in particular London, Paris, and New York). The GP mentioned Mumbai, which only recently banned animal traffic. It was packed before the automobile was developed.
  - qwertygnu 5y ago
    Do you have any references for yours?
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    The automobile simply did not do it. Until the late 50s, most households in the US did not have a car : https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2013/02/was-rise-of-car-ownership-responsible.html?m=1 https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2013/02/was-rise-of-car-own... Without a car, the only solution is public transport. And public transport in early 20th century America was the dominant source of the use of animals in personal transport. The confounding factor here is transport, hence why I mentioned trucks. Go to for example Tiznit in Morocco and observe how animals are used. They're not used for personal transport - they're not efficient for that in city environment - their use is moving merchandise.

refurb 5y ago

This is a funny take as I live in a developing country and owning a car is seen as the mark of a successful person. No more waiting for public transport. No more getting soaked walking or riding a bike in the rain. Convenience, comfort, time efficient. To say a sedan would be designed today is a ridiculous take. Nobody forced cars on people, they wanted them.

Xylakant 5y ago
In germany, policies in the 60ies and 70ies were designed to increase car ownership. People didn’t want cars. They wanted transportation from A to B and public policies made cars the most attractive option.
- refurb 5y ago
  I’m not against public transit. I lived in Taiwan for a while which has very good public transport. But what’s good for a single person doesn’t necessarily work for a family living outside the city. The benefits of owning a car are pretty clear there.
  - Xylakant 5y ago
    > The benefits of owning a car are pretty clear there. Today they might be, but for example the village I grew up in had light rail until an autobahn was built and the rails torn out. Today, the only way to get around is a car - but this is a deliberate choice.
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  How is the situation in Germany today? Are cities car-dependant or not? Does an average middle class German own a car? Do they use their car for commute to work?
  - Xylakant 5y ago
    That depends. In the city of Berlin, less than 50% of all households own a car. Where I grew up, public transport has mostly been gutted. Nearly everyone owns a car.

everdrive 5y ago

I think this is a great point, and I've always been on board with the general damage done by cars. The solutions I read about are nearly always focused around the cities. Now, this makes sense, since most people live in cities, and so you can make the biggest impact there. But what about people who live in the country or rural areas? What solutions are there for those sorts of folks?

kiliantics 5y ago
Trains can still go into the countryside. They used to in much of the US and still do in a lot of Europe. Then there are buses too.
benrbray 5y ago
I've always fancied the German style of having dense clusters of houses/shops around a major train station / highway, with farmland in between. Look at satellite imagery [1] around Stuttgart, for instance. You can totally have walkable city centers in less crowded areas. Of course Germany is not the United States. I don't know anything about agriculture, or to what extent the needs of German agriculture vs US agriculture would be met by such an arrangement. But this being HN, maybe someone knowledgeable can chime in! [1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Stuttgart,+Germany/@48.6623318,9.2196241,14155m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x4799db34c1ad8fd3:0x79d5c11c7791cfe4!8m2!3d48.7758459!4d9.1829321 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Stuttgart,+Germany/@48.662...
el_nahual 5y ago
Even in the USA with it's massive sprawl, most (80%+) of the population is urbanized [0]. The ideal mobility framework is one of interconnected small towns/cities (ideally via rail) with non-vehicle traffic for intra town movements. People that live out in a farm can drive in (although to be honest even distances of 10 miles can be very conveniently travelled in an ebike). There's four things that prevent this sort of network from taking hold: 1. At least in the US, the inter-town rail networks have been disbanded or neuterd to a useless extent. 2. No investment for inter-town bus service. You can get to the big city by bus, but not between towns. 3. In most of the small towns in the USA, "main" street is actually a state highway routinely seeing traffic speeds of 50+mph. In other words, the town is divided right down the middle by a highway, with most commerce clustered around this area. This means that even for intra-small-town traffic biking (and sometimes even walking due to a lack of sidewalks!) is dangerous. [0]: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/ua-facts.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...