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You are conflating multiple issues which only shows that you care about eliminating cars for a different agenda. If climate-change-induced-by-cars is a "runawa

You are conflating multiple issues which only shows that you care about eliminating cars for a different agenda. If climate-change-induced-by-cars is a "runaway locomotive", you can solve that differently (eg. electric vehicles). Eliminating them from cities will probably not solve the climate-change effect they have either (most distance travelled is outside cities, including in Germany), but only the local pollution they cause. If you care about cyclist and pedestrian experience, you can solve that in another way (dedicated lanes and better road design, driver education...). Finally, congestion is a symptom and not a cause: it's the effect of people needing to get from a bunch of places into another set of places. Anyone who's ever travelled on public transport during rush hour anywhere heavily populated has experienced the same thing (eg. can't get into a subway train due to it being over-crowded). You also seem to ignore the "fringe" 10% of the population (I made that number up, obviously, to indicate a small proportion, but even in Germany, that would make it millions of people) that currently has no access to public transport in a way they need (if they need to switch 5 transportation vehicles to get to work in 2h with this "painless" switch, it's not very "painless"). This is why I mention "relocation" in my previous post because that may be the only viable option to not make them spend 12h outside their homes for work purposes, and costs of relocation can be prohibitive. Basically, you are either being purposely ignorant of the issues at hand or simply have the overconfidence of someone clueless jumping into a legacy project. None of it is painless, or it would have been done ages ago. I admit that we sometimes do need overconfident, clueless people to enact a change, but sometimes we do not.

pasabagi 5y ago
It's not conflation so much as a plain assessment that cars sit at the nexus of a lot of interrelated problems: congestion, local pollution, global warming, public space usage, and access to transport. If I'm ignoring a '10%' of the population, it is probably that portion (in reality, much more than 10%) that cannot drive, for medical, age, or economic reasons, who gain absolutely nothing from cars, but nonetheless subsidize their usage (taxes to maintain roads, etc). The root of the problem is physical: moving about a ton of metal, glass and plastic for every passenger is extremely inefficient. Having a single engine for every passenger is extremely inefficient. Taking several square meters of road space for every passenger is extremely inefficient. These inefficiencies are at the root of why they produce a lot of CO2, a lot of local pollution, and yes, a lot of congestion. Using road space inefficiently obviously causes more congestion. Obviously, it would take a concerted effort to bring public transport to the level where it could replace cars for all users. That said, if we imagine the intense social changes that cars brought about (the building of the suburbs, clearing people off the streets, etc) I think it would be comparatively mild, and compared to cars in cost, just going by the rule of thumb that inefficiencies ultimately cost money, it should be cheaper.
- necovek 5y ago
  It's funny how you are ignoring the fact that they do one thing extremely well: they decentralize transport. I, for one, like that: some inefficiencies ensure better resistance to systemic failure: for instance, I'd love to have my own solar/wind power generation locally even if it's not the most optimal way to generate electricity. Did you never hit an U/S-bahn line stoppage due to one broken train? I am with you that cars are maybe an avoidable convenience, especially in urban areas. But congestion happens without them too (if defined liberally, overcrowded trains you cannot get into are exactly the same as congestion, or at least have the same delaying effect for your trip), and cars can be used outside of congested hours and routes too. So they are not at the nexus of that problem. But roads where I am at usually detoriate faster where buses go (bus lanes need reconstruction more often), so while we'd need fewer roads if we switched exclusively to heavy vehicles, they'd need more maintenance: I am not convinced it would save on road maintenance just from throwing empty claims (neither yours nor mine) around on the internet. We've rehashed this already and I guess we need to agree to disagree: I see both benefits and drawbacks to cars, and while you claim to back the underprivileged by (almost) demanding car bans, I believe they'd be hardest hit outside urban areas instead.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    Aside from all the rehashing, my thought process is based on a few principles: 1. Capitalism is already centralized. Jobs tend to be concentrated in certain areas. That's why people commute. 2. The suburban-commuter lifestyle is based on very high fossil fuel usage, since it is more energy-intensive, both in terms of transport, but also service provision. There are no economies of scale anywhere in the system (e.g for heating and insulation). It's obviously possible to electrify all the cars, insulate all the houses, and continue this faux-decentralized sprawling approach to living, but it would be an uphill struggle, and far more difficult than just recognizing that, as a lifestyle, it should be expensive, because it has expensive externalities and requires a lot of expensive energy inputs. If you priced in carbon costs to the suburban lifestyle, instead of subsidizing it in a thousand subtle ways, almost nobody would be able to afford it. Even if you simply stopped subsidizing it, it would probably decline as a culture[0]. And it should decline, because it is wasteful and implicitly damaging to nature[1]. Other stuff that's on the table for fighting climate change (decarbonizing steel, electrifying everything, decarbonizing concrete, etc) is just way more drastic and expensive than just discouraging a style of living that necessitates an enormous amount of resource usage. What's more, all the drastic changes require frontloading CO2 emissions - and because global temperatures are a positive feedback loop, that's way worse than releasing CO2 later. [0]: E.g. Service provision costs more when density goes down, because you have to lay more cables, hire more police, run more pipe, etc. If they pay the same taxes as everybody else, that is a subsidy. There are a lot of examples like that. [1]: The simple presence of so many humans and their pets is a driver of declining biodiversity, sans any considerations of all the hummers. PS: If you're wondering how I would 'discourage' suburban living, I'd just do the same thing they did to cities in the post-new-deal US. Cut service provision. Cut police presence. Don't repair the roads. Make the suburbs subsidize the inner city, instead of the other way around.

pasabagi 5y ago

It's not conflation so much as a plain assessment that cars sit at the nexus of a lot of interrelated problems: congestion, local pollution, global warming, public space usage, and access to transport. If I'm ignoring a '10%' of the population, it is probably that portion (in reality, much more than 10%) that cannot drive, for medical, age, or economic reasons, who gain absolutely nothing from cars, but nonetheless subsidize their usage (taxes to maintain roads, etc). The root of the problem is physical: moving about a ton of metal, glass and plastic for every passenger is extremely inefficient. Having a single engine for every passenger is extremely inefficient. Taking several square meters of road space for every passenger is extremely inefficient. These inefficiencies are at the root of why they produce a lot of CO2, a lot of local pollution, and yes, a lot of congestion. Using road space inefficiently obviously causes more congestion. Obviously, it would take a concerted effort to bring public transport to the level where it could replace cars for all users. That said, if we imagine the intense social changes that cars brought about (the building of the suburbs, clearing people off the streets, etc) I think it would be comparatively mild, and compared to cars in cost, just going by the rule of thumb that inefficiencies ultimately cost money, it should be cheaper.

necovek 5y ago
It's funny how you are ignoring the fact that they do one thing extremely well: they decentralize transport. I, for one, like that: some inefficiencies ensure better resistance to systemic failure: for instance, I'd love to have my own solar/wind power generation locally even if it's not the most optimal way to generate electricity. Did you never hit an U/S-bahn line stoppage due to one broken train? I am with you that cars are maybe an avoidable convenience, especially in urban areas. But congestion happens without them too (if defined liberally, overcrowded trains you cannot get into are exactly the same as congestion, or at least have the same delaying effect for your trip), and cars can be used outside of congested hours and routes too. So they are not at the nexus of that problem. But roads where I am at usually detoriate faster where buses go (bus lanes need reconstruction more often), so while we'd need fewer roads if we switched exclusively to heavy vehicles, they'd need more maintenance: I am not convinced it would save on road maintenance just from throwing empty claims (neither yours nor mine) around on the internet. We've rehashed this already and I guess we need to agree to disagree: I see both benefits and drawbacks to cars, and while you claim to back the underprivileged by (almost) demanding car bans, I believe they'd be hardest hit outside urban areas instead.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  Aside from all the rehashing, my thought process is based on a few principles: 1. Capitalism is already centralized. Jobs tend to be concentrated in certain areas. That's why people commute. 2. The suburban-commuter lifestyle is based on very high fossil fuel usage, since it is more energy-intensive, both in terms of transport, but also service provision. There are no economies of scale anywhere in the system (e.g for heating and insulation). It's obviously possible to electrify all the cars, insulate all the houses, and continue this faux-decentralized sprawling approach to living, but it would be an uphill struggle, and far more difficult than just recognizing that, as a lifestyle, it should be expensive, because it has expensive externalities and requires a lot of expensive energy inputs. If you priced in carbon costs to the suburban lifestyle, instead of subsidizing it in a thousand subtle ways, almost nobody would be able to afford it. Even if you simply stopped subsidizing it, it would probably decline as a culture[0]. And it should decline, because it is wasteful and implicitly damaging to nature[1]. Other stuff that's on the table for fighting climate change (decarbonizing steel, electrifying everything, decarbonizing concrete, etc) is just way more drastic and expensive than just discouraging a style of living that necessitates an enormous amount of resource usage. What's more, all the drastic changes require frontloading CO2 emissions - and because global temperatures are a positive feedback loop, that's way worse than releasing CO2 later. [0]: E.g. Service provision costs more when density goes down, because you have to lay more cables, hire more police, run more pipe, etc. If they pay the same taxes as everybody else, that is a subsidy. There are a lot of examples like that. [1]: The simple presence of so many humans and their pets is a driver of declining biodiversity, sans any considerations of all the hummers. PS: If you're wondering how I would 'discourage' suburban living, I'd just do the same thing they did to cities in the post-new-deal US. Cut service provision. Cut police presence. Don't repair the roads. Make the suburbs subsidize the inner city, instead of the other way around.