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That is such a freaking joke. Personal automobiles are the worse possible thing for the environment. End cars. Let's get real public transit back. Hyperloop is

That is such a freaking joke. Personal automobiles are the worse possible thing for the environment. End cars. Let's get real public transit back. Hyperloop is a lie to kill existing public transit efforts. So many people have documented that so many things have issues. Yes electric cars are good, but not much better than Plugin Hybrids.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Entire countries have been developed around the car. It’s tone deaf to ignore that and think they’re going away anytime in the next half century, demanding public transportation replace them. Urban planning and refactoring takes significant time. The US shrugs at such an idea and keeps buying 17 million cars a year. Even Norway buys cars (although most are electric cars now). When cars are sold, they should be EVs.
Karsteski 4y ago
> End cars I guess those of us that live in rural areas should just bike 100s of km everywhere then. It's always amusing to see these hyperbolic, clearly unrealistic statements on here. I wonder what's going through the head of someone like you...
- hedora 4y ago
  Hey, that's easier than razing and rebuilding US cities that were built under the assumption everyone has a car. (Among other things, they have road topologies that make buses and bikes completely infeasible.)
  - evanfarrar 4y ago
    We already razed the cities once to build the roads.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > Among other things, they have road topologies that make buses and bikes completely infeasible If the hilly San Francisco can have lots of bikes and buses (…and cable cars and street cars and light rail and commuter rail) then so can most cities.
    - throwntoday 4y ago
      I hardly see any bikes in downtown SF, I can't imagine anyone is riding them elsewhere.
      - vineyardmike 4y ago
        You should see the rest of the country, there’s even fewer bikes in most places. But downtown doesn’t need bikes. There’s amble public transit and everything is close by. Most people I know who bike use it for longer distances, eg the base of Bernal Heights to downtown via mission+market. Or going from Caltrain to sunset.
    - hedora 4y ago
      Hills aren't the problem. Urban sprawl is, and so are irregular road grids with uniform density everywhere. SF is compact, and has a few main drags where it makes sense to have trollies / bus lines. It also has a well-defined city center, so a hub and spoke transit system mostly works there. In contrast, public transit doesn't even really make sense in South Bay. It was (mostly) laid out when public transit was common, but now there are multiple mini-downtown areas without train service, and many of the tracks have been ripped out.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  >It's always amusing to see these hyperbolic, clearly unrealistic statements on here. I wonder what's going through the head of someone like you... If the edge cases mostly only affected people you didn't like how much would you care about solving them. Exactly.
  - SantalBlush 4y ago
    Well said. It's equally hyperbolic and unrealistic to require poor people to buy and maintain an automobile, which is basically what has happened because our public transit sucks.
- sumeno 4y ago
  83% of Americans live in urban areas and 70% of annual vehicle miles are in urban areas. Rural communities are an edge case where cars would still make sense.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    17% of Americans is not an "edge case" by any stretch of the imagination. That's 57 million people.
    - kbelder 4y ago
      Not to mention the fact that a large part of those 83% would like to be able to occasionally travel outside the urban area.
      - sumeno 4y ago
        There are also planes and trains, and, if you're travelling to a remote location without access to either of those, rental cars. But most people in an urban area are primarily travelling within that urban area.
    - sumeno 4y ago
      OK? You ignore the larger point by disagreeing with the terminology I chose. Reducing car usage in the US by 70% would be an absolutely massive win
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        And Musk sending employees back to the office is the opposite of reducing single occupancy vehicle use.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    You might want to look up how the US Census Bureau defines urban. My 7,000 person town with orchards and farms is considered an urban area. This makes some sense as it's loosely part of a greater metropolitan area but it's not remotely an area that could be served to a significant degree by public transportation.
bavell 4y ago
This is satire, right?
ekianjo 4y ago
> Let's get real public transit back You forgot the tiny detail that public transit sucks bad in most countries (and you won't fix it with government and unions) and it won't get you where you need to go unless you live in the very center of a city.
rngname22 4y ago
If it's that easy to end personal automobiles and increase funding for public transit by 10000%, why don't you just wave your magic wand and do it? Getting a job at Tesla to accelerate electrification of cars is a lot more within someone's personal control than somehow enacting the political will to change legislation and funding away from personal vehicles and towards public transit. But I guess just making HN comments about it is a more feel-good easy solution.
- ericmay 4y ago
  Presumably because it's not possible to wave a magic wand and do it. I know I would if I could. It would be great to be wealthier as a country (US-centric here), have far fewer c02 emissions for mostly no good reason, have fewer people dead or harmed because of car accidents, and have healthier people because they get out move around more. I'd also suggest examining your perspective. Highways and roads are also public transit. It's a non-sequitur to suggest that highways aren't public transit yet something like bikes or bike lanes are. Unfortunately we've been convinced by big government that we need highways, highway builders, giant departments of transportation, car insurance, tires, gasoline and gas stations, the actual cars themselves, oil changes, AAA, and all of these other industries at the scale that we have them now. It's just a giant jobs program. If we built medium-density, mixed use neighborhoods you wouldn't need a gasoline or electric car to walk a few blocks to a local grocery store. It's manufactured spending. That's why there are so many advertisements and BIG GOVERNMENT programs. If we cared about being efficient or cost-effective we'd just build things differently. But we don't care about that. While electric cars are "better" for c02 emissions than gasoline powered cars (and more fun to drive IMO), it's like doubling down on a solution for a problem that we can just not have by not driving so much and having cars. It's really frustrating when I read comments where people act incredulous at the idea of not spending billions and billions of dollars every year on cars and associated government programs when you could just walk down the street instead. Can you still have a car to drive to the countryside? Yea definitely. Do we literally need to design society around a gigantic SUV so you can drive to Costco and pretend you are saving money buying in bulk? No.
xnx 4y ago
In theory, public transit seems like it would have less impact on the environment, but in practice (in the US at least), public transit has all-in unsubsidized cost (and therefore environmental impact) per passenger mile often greater than private cars.
- aoeusnth1 4y ago
  If cost is equal to environmental impact, are you arguing that Tesla helps the environment?
mlindner 4y ago
Cars aren't going anywhere. This is simply delusional. Cars existed long before there were any subsidies in the form of government road development. They're not going away even if you take any kind of funding away for car infrastructure and build lots of other infrastructure. I suggest exploring outside cities and widening your horizons. You apparently don't know much about the world. Also even if implemented, hyperloop isn't for transport inside cities. It's for intermediate distances that are only a little too short to travel by plane with but too far for rapid travel on train/car. Elon was never interested in implementing hyperloop anyway. So this is a red herring.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Cars gained popularity in America with the rise of road systems that allowed for suburban life. Car companies has a huge history of damaging public transit infrastructure goals in cities to further their cars. In LA car companies literally bought rail car lines and turned them into buses. Hyper loop is absolutely an interest of Elon but yes it is a red herring. He’s doing it to distract from other goals so more people want teslas. Eg the Las Vegas tunnels that use teslas instead of train cars. https://inhabitat.com/what-happened-to-los-angeles-streetcars/ https://inhabitat.com/what-happened-to-los-angeles-streetcar... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/elon-musk-s-boring-company-to-start-full-scale-hyperloop-test-this-year/ar-AAWF5xx https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/elon-musk-s-boring-c...
  - mlindner 4y ago
    > Hyper loop is absolutely an interest of Elon but yes it is a red herring. He’s doing it to distract from other goals so more people want teslas. Eg the Las Vegas tunnels that use teslas instead of train cars. I said he had no interest in implementing it, not that it wasn't an interest. He doesn't have the time and the level of interest in his other tasks is much higher.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

Entire countries have been developed around the car. It’s tone deaf to ignore that and think they’re going away anytime in the next half century, demanding public transportation replace them. Urban planning and refactoring takes significant time. The US shrugs at such an idea and keeps buying 17 million cars a year. Even Norway buys cars (although most are electric cars now). When cars are sold, they should be EVs.

Karsteski 4y ago

> End cars I guess those of us that live in rural areas should just bike 100s of km everywhere then. It's always amusing to see these hyperbolic, clearly unrealistic statements on here. I wonder what's going through the head of someone like you...

hedora 4y ago
Hey, that's easier than razing and rebuilding US cities that were built under the assumption everyone has a car. (Among other things, they have road topologies that make buses and bikes completely infeasible.)
- evanfarrar 4y ago
  We already razed the cities once to build the roads.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > Among other things, they have road topologies that make buses and bikes completely infeasible If the hilly San Francisco can have lots of bikes and buses (…and cable cars and street cars and light rail and commuter rail) then so can most cities.
  - throwntoday 4y ago
    I hardly see any bikes in downtown SF, I can't imagine anyone is riding them elsewhere.
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      You should see the rest of the country, there’s even fewer bikes in most places. But downtown doesn’t need bikes. There’s amble public transit and everything is close by. Most people I know who bike use it for longer distances, eg the base of Bernal Heights to downtown via mission+market. Or going from Caltrain to sunset.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Hills aren't the problem. Urban sprawl is, and so are irregular road grids with uniform density everywhere. SF is compact, and has a few main drags where it makes sense to have trollies / bus lines. It also has a well-defined city center, so a hub and spoke transit system mostly works there. In contrast, public transit doesn't even really make sense in South Bay. It was (mostly) laid out when public transit was common, but now there are multiple mini-downtown areas without train service, and many of the tracks have been ripped out.
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
>It's always amusing to see these hyperbolic, clearly unrealistic statements on here. I wonder what's going through the head of someone like you... If the edge cases mostly only affected people you didn't like how much would you care about solving them. Exactly.
- SantalBlush 4y ago
  Well said. It's equally hyperbolic and unrealistic to require poor people to buy and maintain an automobile, which is basically what has happened because our public transit sucks.
sumeno 4y ago
83% of Americans live in urban areas and 70% of annual vehicle miles are in urban areas. Rural communities are an edge case where cars would still make sense.
- mlindner 4y ago
  17% of Americans is not an "edge case" by any stretch of the imagination. That's 57 million people.
  - kbelder 4y ago
    Not to mention the fact that a large part of those 83% would like to be able to occasionally travel outside the urban area.
    - sumeno 4y ago
      There are also planes and trains, and, if you're travelling to a remote location without access to either of those, rental cars. But most people in an urban area are primarily travelling within that urban area.
  - sumeno 4y ago
    OK? You ignore the larger point by disagreeing with the terminology I chose. Reducing car usage in the US by 70% would be an absolutely massive win
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      And Musk sending employees back to the office is the opposite of reducing single occupancy vehicle use.
- ghaff 4y ago
  You might want to look up how the US Census Bureau defines urban. My 7,000 person town with orchards and farms is considered an urban area. This makes some sense as it's loosely part of a greater metropolitan area but it's not remotely an area that could be served to a significant degree by public transportation.

bavell 4y ago

This is satire, right?

ekianjo 4y ago

> Let's get real public transit back You forgot the tiny detail that public transit sucks bad in most countries (and you won't fix it with government and unions) and it won't get you where you need to go unless you live in the very center of a city.

rngname22 4y ago

If it's that easy to end personal automobiles and increase funding for public transit by 10000%, why don't you just wave your magic wand and do it? Getting a job at Tesla to accelerate electrification of cars is a lot more within someone's personal control than somehow enacting the political will to change legislation and funding away from personal vehicles and towards public transit. But I guess just making HN comments about it is a more feel-good easy solution.

ericmay 4y ago
Presumably because it's not possible to wave a magic wand and do it. I know I would if I could. It would be great to be wealthier as a country (US-centric here), have far fewer c02 emissions for mostly no good reason, have fewer people dead or harmed because of car accidents, and have healthier people because they get out move around more. I'd also suggest examining your perspective. Highways and roads are also public transit. It's a non-sequitur to suggest that highways aren't public transit yet something like bikes or bike lanes are. Unfortunately we've been convinced by big government that we need highways, highway builders, giant departments of transportation, car insurance, tires, gasoline and gas stations, the actual cars themselves, oil changes, AAA, and all of these other industries at the scale that we have them now. It's just a giant jobs program. If we built medium-density, mixed use neighborhoods you wouldn't need a gasoline or electric car to walk a few blocks to a local grocery store. It's manufactured spending. That's why there are so many advertisements and BIG GOVERNMENT programs. If we cared about being efficient or cost-effective we'd just build things differently. But we don't care about that. While electric cars are "better" for c02 emissions than gasoline powered cars (and more fun to drive IMO), it's like doubling down on a solution for a problem that we can just not have by not driving so much and having cars. It's really frustrating when I read comments where people act incredulous at the idea of not spending billions and billions of dollars every year on cars and associated government programs when you could just walk down the street instead. Can you still have a car to drive to the countryside? Yea definitely. Do we literally need to design society around a gigantic SUV so you can drive to Costco and pretend you are saving money buying in bulk? No.

xnx 4y ago

In theory, public transit seems like it would have less impact on the environment, but in practice (in the US at least), public transit has all-in unsubsidized cost (and therefore environmental impact) per passenger mile often greater than private cars.

aoeusnth1 4y ago
If cost is equal to environmental impact, are you arguing that Tesla helps the environment?

mlindner 4y ago

Cars aren't going anywhere. This is simply delusional. Cars existed long before there were any subsidies in the form of government road development. They're not going away even if you take any kind of funding away for car infrastructure and build lots of other infrastructure. I suggest exploring outside cities and widening your horizons. You apparently don't know much about the world. Also even if implemented, hyperloop isn't for transport inside cities. It's for intermediate distances that are only a little too short to travel by plane with but too far for rapid travel on train/car. Elon was never interested in implementing hyperloop anyway. So this is a red herring.

vineyardmike 4y ago
Cars gained popularity in America with the rise of road systems that allowed for suburban life. Car companies has a huge history of damaging public transit infrastructure goals in cities to further their cars. In LA car companies literally bought rail car lines and turned them into buses. Hyper loop is absolutely an interest of Elon but yes it is a red herring. He’s doing it to distract from other goals so more people want teslas. Eg the Las Vegas tunnels that use teslas instead of train cars. https://inhabitat.com/what-happened-to-los-angeles-streetcars/ https://inhabitat.com/what-happened-to-los-angeles-streetcar... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/elon-musk-s-boring-company-to-start-full-scale-hyperloop-test-this-year/ar-AAWF5xx https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/elon-musk-s-boring-c...
- mlindner 4y ago
  > Hyper loop is absolutely an interest of Elon but yes it is a red herring. He’s doing it to distract from other goals so more people want teslas. Eg the Las Vegas tunnels that use teslas instead of train cars. I said he had no interest in implementing it, not that it wasn't an interest. He doesn't have the time and the level of interest in his other tasks is much higher.