10 ms·

We need more such subsidies rather than subsidizing expensive luxury cars like Tesla. Also why is this thread getting flagged?

robertlagrant 4y ago
People need cars to do things. Bikes are great (I live somewhere more expensive partly so I can cycle to work) but they don't replace the incredible general utility of a car. It's possible with a very different lifestyle, a lot of a luck or a very decent income to structure your life in a way that allows zero car usage, but for most people a better car is the best option.
- ScarZy 4y ago
  This is a design choice by urban planners for the past 60 years. This has statistically lead to detrimental aspects of every day living, and additionally cars are often not an attainable mode of transport for the poor, and the poor are often living in areas that have to deal with the by-product of pollution. The incidental-exercise aspects that are positively impacting mental health health and obesity. We need to build better places for people, not cars, and this is something that's been ingrained over legislation from the automotive industry for the past century. Cars are part of the puzzle, and shared cars could be exceptional. They are not sustainable to produce or operate and never will be. One company of interest for me at least is Culdesac: https://culdesac.com/ https://culdesac.com/
- batiudrami 4y ago
  It's quite possible in many cities for a family to have one car rather than the accepted standard of two, however. You don't need to give up both cars.
- techtalkacc 4y ago
  Not if you have decent public transportation. This is probably a novel concept in America, but in most other parts of the developed world a decent public transportation allows one to live car-free. I use my car so rarely that I am considering selling it.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Possibly. I don't live in America.
  - qsort 4y ago
    In most of Europe, many people (and especially many among the poorest) don't live in big city centers that are well served by public transport. If you can do without, more power to you, but most people need cars. Not ebikes, not scooters, none of that electric hip stuff. They need cars.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      Well then I suggest they don't replace their car with an ebike and let people who don't need their car use this subsidy instead.
      - qsort 4y ago
        I'm contesting the claim that "in most parts of the world one can live car-free". It isn't the case, even more so in the case of the poorer constituency this subsidy is aimed to.
    - Xylakant 4y ago
      Most people need cars may be true now, but it's not a law of nature. These things affect each other. The village I was raised has about 8000 inhabitants. That sounds like sparsely populated and indeed, it has no good public transport connection - the closest light rail station is 5 km and there's no bus. But within a 10 km circle, you'll find 14 towns and villages, with a combined citizenship of ~60 000 people. And within 20 km, you'll find 6 actual cites with a combined citizenship of > 500 000 people. You could run an actual public transport network there. But outside the cities and some light rail, it doesn't really exist - there's just a few bus lines that run every hour or so. Why? Because people have cars. When they tried to set up a bus line for that 5km to the light rail (which runs every 15 minutes, until late night), nobody would take it. People took the cars because they were used to it and didn't want to rely on public transport - especially since that was explicitly branded as "trial" - why change habits? And now, that bus no longer runs and people have to take the car. Public transport thrives of network effects, but these are hard to establish. I believe it can be done, but only if you have an actual plan and the will to pull it through. It's a marathon, not a sprint as they always say. If you're getting into regions where public transport is really hard to provide, then you're very quickly away from "most people need cars", because these regions may be large, but very few people actually live there. Let them use cars. Go for the large chunk that should not need cars.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  In the US, people need cars because of how cities are designed. In almost any European city you can live with just a bike just fine. Maybe get a rental or carsharing once a year for a trip to IKEA. Even in more rural places it can be an option if your workplace is close enough.
  - rtlfe 4y ago
    > In the US, people need cars because of how cities are designed. There are plenty of places in the US where this isn't true, and the number is growing.
    - baby 4y ago
      Like where? Besides Chicago and New york I’m not sure.
      - rtlfe 4y ago
        There are plenty of mid-sized cities with decent bus service and bikeability, where living car-free may not be the easiest option but is totally possible and preferred by many people. Austin, Seattle, Portland OR, Boston, DC...
        panick21_ 4y ago
        Those are all gigantic cities, Portland is about as big as the largest city in my country. There are far, far more cities below 200k and in those its very hard from what I understand. Even some large cities with 500k people have really bad public transport and bad bike infrastructure. And to live a car free live, you need to live reasonably close to the center where housing is very expensive. From what I understand, the places that are best to live for walk-ability are usually the most expensive.
        baby 4y ago
        I've been to Austin and while you can definitely live without a car I don't think it's going to be ideal. It's definitely a grid city that's optimized for cars. I'm not sure about Boston, it's pretty spread out as well but it's enjoyable to walk in, I still wouldn't compare that to any city in Europe.
- puszczyk 4y ago
  I think this is aimed to reduce the number of cars in a household, say from 2 -> 1. Not necessarily from 1 to 0.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    I guess it works for both, but as a European living in a city, I know far more households with 0 cars than with 2 (and indeed, more with 0 than 1 for that matter).
- Gigachad 4y ago
  People didn’t need cars for the thousands of years humans existed before their invention. We structured society to depend on cars. That was largely a mistake, and one that can be solved.
  - sempron64 4y ago
    You know that before cars people used horses, which are wildly more inefficient than a car, and disgusting en masse, to the point where there were concerns in the 1800s that London streets would be entirely rivers of horse manure. Bring back the beasts of burden! An ass for every home!
    - mellavora 4y ago
      Hearing what you are saying, and asking myself which has closer form-factor to a horse: a car, or an e-bike? Also, your (valid!) point that a horse is "wildly more inefficient than a car", how does a car stack up to an ebike, in daily use, in total lifecycle (including disposal), and in land usage?
    - rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
      How many horses per person at that time? How did that compare to cars, nowadays?
    - rtlfe 4y ago
      I'm no expert on 1800s London, but I'd expect the average person couldn't afford to own a horse and instead walked everywhere.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      Modern bicycles on modern roads have better range and are far faster than horses. The problem in 1800s London was that bicycles weren't invented yet and the roads weren't asphalt. Vulcanization was only invented in 1839. The Pony Express for example averaged to 10 miles per hour and had stations every couple of miles.
      - 4y ago
- citizenkeen 4y ago
  We need to stop framing this issue as "car" versus "no car". It's "cars" versus "fewer cars". I live in the suburbs of a HCOL city in the US. My wife and I could absolutely afford two cars. We have one. I don't think we could go down to zero cars any time soon, but the transition to one car was a lot easier than we thought it would be.
  - rtlfe 4y ago
    > I don't think we could go down to zero cars any time soon Of course I have no idea the specifics of where you live, but I think many suburbs could make this possible within 5-10 years by: -zoning an area to be the suburb's "downtown", i.e. a few blocks of small apartment buildings with ground floor retail including a grocery store and restaurants -building high-quality bike lanes to get to the new downtown -subsidizing a service like car2go to make it easy to access cars on-demand when you need to go somewhere farther
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      In any existing suburb, you won't get widespread purchase and demolition of existing buildings, rebuilding in a new footprint, and occupancy by businesses in a 10-year timeframe.
      - rtlfe 4y ago
        That's just not true at all. With the current nationwide housing shortage and sky-high rents, developers will jump on any opportunity immediately. All you need to do is set the right zoning code and streamline the approval process. Check out this tweet series for many examples: https://twitter.com/search?q=turns%20into%20(from%3Amnolangray)&src=typed_query&f=top https://twitter.com/search?q=turns%20into%20(from%3Amnolangr...
        sokoloff 4y ago
        That tweet series shows a bunch of individual parcels developed over a typically 6-11 year timeframe. That's necessary, but not sufficient, to generate an entirely "new downtown" widespread redevelopment all happening simultaneously over a 10-year timeframe.
- rtlfe 4y ago
  > People need cars to do things. Some people need cars to do some things. For many of them it's easier and cheaper to use taxis and rentals than to own a car. As more people give up car ownership it becomes easier for others to follow.
  - smileysteve 4y ago
    Some of the time. With wfh, it's normal that I leave walking distance twice every week. Taxis, uber, or a rental car for a trip would definitely be cheaper.
- sbergot 4y ago
  This is a wrong and harmful point of view. - electric cargo bikes can replace cars for a lot of use cases (bringing children to school, etc) - when you need to transport heavy load like furniture, you can rent a car or a van - trains and/or car rental for longer trips - bikes for short distances with lighter loads I know a few people (low to medium incomes) in rural areas that are doing this and they are not activists or anything.
  - msrenee 4y ago
    So, where I'm at, there's at least 2 months a year where it would be miserably hot to ride a bike for any distance. At least 3 weeks this summer, it's been dangerously hot. We get about 1.5 months total of days at or below freezing. Another 1.5 where you'd really have to bundle up. Then add in days when it's snowing or icy. Then add in days when it's pouring rain. It would probably be possible to get away with a bike around here if you lived near everything you needed and really planned things out as far as getting places early in the summer and having an emergency plan if something happened and you were stuck somewhere in the freezing cold. At least you have some time in a vehicle cab before the temperature drops dangerously low. There's definitely places where an ebike can replace a car. There's a lot of places where it would really limit your ability to get anywhere outside of walking distance.
    - blackoil 4y ago
      dangerously hot on an ebike!! I live in an extremely hot place, it may be mightily inconvenient, or gross reaching all sweated to office, but not dangerous.
    - snovv_crash 4y ago
      Riding bikes in winter is normal in Scandinavia. If its too cold, you're wearing the wrong clothes. Too hot, well, people are riding bikes in India. I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. Too far? That's an urban design problem. Nobody is suggesting rural people change their cars for bikes, although I do know some people who are loving their ebikes for property inspection...
- Mashimo 4y ago
  > very decent income to structure your life in a way that allows zero car usage Why do you need very decent income for that?
  - rtlfe 4y ago
    In the US it's because the least car-dependent cities all enacting zoning ordinances in the mid-1900s that prevented housing supply from keeping up with demand and made it very expensive to live there.
- baby 4y ago
  I’m not sure I understand the car message here because almost none of my friends in France have a car. Hell, I only got my driver license at 31 because I moved to SF and I found it crippling there (for the first time in my life) not to have a car.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  You absolutely don’t need a car if you live in a French city or in the suburb of the largest ones. Locally public transports are great. Nationally the railway works fine. I haven’t had a car for a decade. I rent a vehicle once or twice a year when I need to transport things. Economically it’s a lot cheaper than owning a car.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Have you consider that this is the case because it was designed like that, and that it could change if you just stopped constantly doubling down on cars? Like, its perfectly reasonable in many places to live without a car. In fact, its the opposite of what you suggest, its possible LESS INCOME then having to own a car. Compare the total cost of living and transportation when living a car centric lifestyle, compare to a bike/public transport one. I personally don't even use a bike, walking and public transport are perfectly fine in most even small (50k) European cities. Now of course, sadly in many places in the US, living and work is often so far separated and so badly connected that the car is the only viable option. But that is exactly what needs to change.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I live in Oxford, which was definitely mostly designed pre-car. People with kids pretty much still need cars, unless they want to buy a £1m+ house located in the perfect spot.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Sure if you have young kids, spezially more then one. But that the minority of people.
      - iggldiggl 4y ago
        People who have young kids right now might be a minority, but people who have had kids a some point are a far larger fraction of the population. If the expectation is that all parents of young kids need a car, then there's a high likelihood that they just continue using a car afterwards, too.
        panick21_ 4y ago
        Just because you need a car at some point doesn't mean you always want a car forever. And as soon as kids are old enough to ride bicycles or public transport themselves you live situation changes and you can very likely get rid of your car. And if you actually look into places like Netherlands you will see that lots of people don't have cars even with small kids. The 'Soccor mom with SUV' cliche in the US, is replaced in the Netherlands by the 'Bicycle mom' who brings here kids in on bicycles.
Rebelgecko 4y ago
I think the problem in the US is that the car companies have significantly bigger lobbying budgets than the bike industry. That's why I can use my tax deductible commuter benefits for parking fees at work but not for bike costs. Or why the new "Electric Vehicle" tax credit in the climate/inflation bill can't be used to buy ebikes, only cars. Even though an e-bike is significantly better for the environment than a new Tesla.

robertlagrant 4y ago

People need cars to do things. Bikes are great (I live somewhere more expensive partly so I can cycle to work) but they don't replace the incredible general utility of a car. It's possible with a very different lifestyle, a lot of a luck or a very decent income to structure your life in a way that allows zero car usage, but for most people a better car is the best option.

ScarZy 4y ago
This is a design choice by urban planners for the past 60 years. This has statistically lead to detrimental aspects of every day living, and additionally cars are often not an attainable mode of transport for the poor, and the poor are often living in areas that have to deal with the by-product of pollution. The incidental-exercise aspects that are positively impacting mental health health and obesity. We need to build better places for people, not cars, and this is something that's been ingrained over legislation from the automotive industry for the past century. Cars are part of the puzzle, and shared cars could be exceptional. They are not sustainable to produce or operate and never will be. One company of interest for me at least is Culdesac: https://culdesac.com/ https://culdesac.com/
batiudrami 4y ago
It's quite possible in many cities for a family to have one car rather than the accepted standard of two, however. You don't need to give up both cars.
techtalkacc 4y ago
Not if you have decent public transportation. This is probably a novel concept in America, but in most other parts of the developed world a decent public transportation allows one to live car-free. I use my car so rarely that I am considering selling it.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Possibly. I don't live in America.
- qsort 4y ago
  In most of Europe, many people (and especially many among the poorest) don't live in big city centers that are well served by public transport. If you can do without, more power to you, but most people need cars. Not ebikes, not scooters, none of that electric hip stuff. They need cars.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Well then I suggest they don't replace their car with an ebike and let people who don't need their car use this subsidy instead.
    - qsort 4y ago
      I'm contesting the claim that "in most parts of the world one can live car-free". It isn't the case, even more so in the case of the poorer constituency this subsidy is aimed to.
  - Xylakant 4y ago
    Most people need cars may be true now, but it's not a law of nature. These things affect each other. The village I was raised has about 8000 inhabitants. That sounds like sparsely populated and indeed, it has no good public transport connection - the closest light rail station is 5 km and there's no bus. But within a 10 km circle, you'll find 14 towns and villages, with a combined citizenship of ~60 000 people. And within 20 km, you'll find 6 actual cites with a combined citizenship of > 500 000 people. You could run an actual public transport network there. But outside the cities and some light rail, it doesn't really exist - there's just a few bus lines that run every hour or so. Why? Because people have cars. When they tried to set up a bus line for that 5km to the light rail (which runs every 15 minutes, until late night), nobody would take it. People took the cars because they were used to it and didn't want to rely on public transport - especially since that was explicitly branded as "trial" - why change habits? And now, that bus no longer runs and people have to take the car. Public transport thrives of network effects, but these are hard to establish. I believe it can be done, but only if you have an actual plan and the will to pull it through. It's a marathon, not a sprint as they always say. If you're getting into regions where public transport is really hard to provide, then you're very quickly away from "most people need cars", because these regions may be large, but very few people actually live there. Let them use cars. Go for the large chunk that should not need cars.
wongarsu 4y ago
In the US, people need cars because of how cities are designed. In almost any European city you can live with just a bike just fine. Maybe get a rental or carsharing once a year for a trip to IKEA. Even in more rural places it can be an option if your workplace is close enough.
- rtlfe 4y ago
  > In the US, people need cars because of how cities are designed. There are plenty of places in the US where this isn't true, and the number is growing.
  - baby 4y ago
    Like where? Besides Chicago and New york I’m not sure.
    - rtlfe 4y ago
      There are plenty of mid-sized cities with decent bus service and bikeability, where living car-free may not be the easiest option but is totally possible and preferred by many people. Austin, Seattle, Portland OR, Boston, DC...
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        Those are all gigantic cities, Portland is about as big as the largest city in my country. There are far, far more cities below 200k and in those its very hard from what I understand. Even some large cities with 500k people have really bad public transport and bad bike infrastructure. And to live a car free live, you need to live reasonably close to the center where housing is very expensive. From what I understand, the places that are best to live for walk-ability are usually the most expensive.
      - baby 4y ago
        I've been to Austin and while you can definitely live without a car I don't think it's going to be ideal. It's definitely a grid city that's optimized for cars. I'm not sure about Boston, it's pretty spread out as well but it's enjoyable to walk in, I still wouldn't compare that to any city in Europe.
puszczyk 4y ago
I think this is aimed to reduce the number of cars in a household, say from 2 -> 1. Not necessarily from 1 to 0.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  I guess it works for both, but as a European living in a city, I know far more households with 0 cars than with 2 (and indeed, more with 0 than 1 for that matter).
Gigachad 4y ago
People didn’t need cars for the thousands of years humans existed before their invention. We structured society to depend on cars. That was largely a mistake, and one that can be solved.
- sempron64 4y ago
  You know that before cars people used horses, which are wildly more inefficient than a car, and disgusting en masse, to the point where there were concerns in the 1800s that London streets would be entirely rivers of horse manure. Bring back the beasts of burden! An ass for every home!
  - mellavora 4y ago
    Hearing what you are saying, and asking myself which has closer form-factor to a horse: a car, or an e-bike? Also, your (valid!) point that a horse is "wildly more inefficient than a car", how does a car stack up to an ebike, in daily use, in total lifecycle (including disposal), and in land usage?
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
    How many horses per person at that time? How did that compare to cars, nowadays?
  - rtlfe 4y ago
    I'm no expert on 1800s London, but I'd expect the average person couldn't afford to own a horse and instead walked everywhere.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Modern bicycles on modern roads have better range and are far faster than horses. The problem in 1800s London was that bicycles weren't invented yet and the roads weren't asphalt. Vulcanization was only invented in 1839. The Pony Express for example averaged to 10 miles per hour and had stations every couple of miles.
    - 4y ago
citizenkeen 4y ago
We need to stop framing this issue as "car" versus "no car". It's "cars" versus "fewer cars". I live in the suburbs of a HCOL city in the US. My wife and I could absolutely afford two cars. We have one. I don't think we could go down to zero cars any time soon, but the transition to one car was a lot easier than we thought it would be.
- rtlfe 4y ago
  > I don't think we could go down to zero cars any time soon Of course I have no idea the specifics of where you live, but I think many suburbs could make this possible within 5-10 years by: -zoning an area to be the suburb's "downtown", i.e. a few blocks of small apartment buildings with ground floor retail including a grocery store and restaurants -building high-quality bike lanes to get to the new downtown -subsidizing a service like car2go to make it easy to access cars on-demand when you need to go somewhere farther
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    In any existing suburb, you won't get widespread purchase and demolition of existing buildings, rebuilding in a new footprint, and occupancy by businesses in a 10-year timeframe.
    - rtlfe 4y ago
      That's just not true at all. With the current nationwide housing shortage and sky-high rents, developers will jump on any opportunity immediately. All you need to do is set the right zoning code and streamline the approval process. Check out this tweet series for many examples: https://twitter.com/search?q=turns%20into%20(from%3Amnolangray)&src=typed_query&f=top https://twitter.com/search?q=turns%20into%20(from%3Amnolangr...
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        That tweet series shows a bunch of individual parcels developed over a typically 6-11 year timeframe. That's necessary, but not sufficient, to generate an entirely "new downtown" widespread redevelopment all happening simultaneously over a 10-year timeframe.
rtlfe 4y ago
> People need cars to do things. Some people need cars to do some things. For many of them it's easier and cheaper to use taxis and rentals than to own a car. As more people give up car ownership it becomes easier for others to follow.
- smileysteve 4y ago
  Some of the time. With wfh, it's normal that I leave walking distance twice every week. Taxis, uber, or a rental car for a trip would definitely be cheaper.
sbergot 4y ago
This is a wrong and harmful point of view. - electric cargo bikes can replace cars for a lot of use cases (bringing children to school, etc) - when you need to transport heavy load like furniture, you can rent a car or a van - trains and/or car rental for longer trips - bikes for short distances with lighter loads I know a few people (low to medium incomes) in rural areas that are doing this and they are not activists or anything.
- msrenee 4y ago
  So, where I'm at, there's at least 2 months a year where it would be miserably hot to ride a bike for any distance. At least 3 weeks this summer, it's been dangerously hot. We get about 1.5 months total of days at or below freezing. Another 1.5 where you'd really have to bundle up. Then add in days when it's snowing or icy. Then add in days when it's pouring rain. It would probably be possible to get away with a bike around here if you lived near everything you needed and really planned things out as far as getting places early in the summer and having an emergency plan if something happened and you were stuck somewhere in the freezing cold. At least you have some time in a vehicle cab before the temperature drops dangerously low. There's definitely places where an ebike can replace a car. There's a lot of places where it would really limit your ability to get anywhere outside of walking distance.
  - blackoil 4y ago
    dangerously hot on an ebike!! I live in an extremely hot place, it may be mightily inconvenient, or gross reaching all sweated to office, but not dangerous.
  - snovv_crash 4y ago
    Riding bikes in winter is normal in Scandinavia. If its too cold, you're wearing the wrong clothes. Too hot, well, people are riding bikes in India. I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. Too far? That's an urban design problem. Nobody is suggesting rural people change their cars for bikes, although I do know some people who are loving their ebikes for property inspection...
Mashimo 4y ago
> very decent income to structure your life in a way that allows zero car usage Why do you need very decent income for that?
- rtlfe 4y ago
  In the US it's because the least car-dependent cities all enacting zoning ordinances in the mid-1900s that prevented housing supply from keeping up with demand and made it very expensive to live there.
baby 4y ago
I’m not sure I understand the car message here because almost none of my friends in France have a car. Hell, I only got my driver license at 31 because I moved to SF and I found it crippling there (for the first time in my life) not to have a car.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
You absolutely don’t need a car if you live in a French city or in the suburb of the largest ones. Locally public transports are great. Nationally the railway works fine. I haven’t had a car for a decade. I rent a vehicle once or twice a year when I need to transport things. Economically it’s a lot cheaper than owning a car.
panick21_ 4y ago
Have you consider that this is the case because it was designed like that, and that it could change if you just stopped constantly doubling down on cars? Like, its perfectly reasonable in many places to live without a car. In fact, its the opposite of what you suggest, its possible LESS INCOME then having to own a car. Compare the total cost of living and transportation when living a car centric lifestyle, compare to a bike/public transport one. I personally don't even use a bike, walking and public transport are perfectly fine in most even small (50k) European cities. Now of course, sadly in many places in the US, living and work is often so far separated and so badly connected that the car is the only viable option. But that is exactly what needs to change.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I live in Oxford, which was definitely mostly designed pre-car. People with kids pretty much still need cars, unless they want to buy a £1m+ house located in the perfect spot.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Sure if you have young kids, spezially more then one. But that the minority of people.
    - iggldiggl 4y ago
      People who have young kids right now might be a minority, but people who have had kids a some point are a far larger fraction of the population. If the expectation is that all parents of young kids need a car, then there's a high likelihood that they just continue using a car afterwards, too.
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        Just because you need a car at some point doesn't mean you always want a car forever. And as soon as kids are old enough to ride bicycles or public transport themselves you live situation changes and you can very likely get rid of your car. And if you actually look into places like Netherlands you will see that lots of people don't have cars even with small kids. The 'Soccor mom with SUV' cliche in the US, is replaced in the Netherlands by the 'Bicycle mom' who brings here kids in on bicycles.

Rebelgecko 4y ago

I think the problem in the US is that the car companies have significantly bigger lobbying budgets than the bike industry. That's why I can use my tax deductible commuter benefits for parking fees at work but not for bike costs. Or why the new "Electric Vehicle" tax credit in the climate/inflation bill can't be used to buy ebikes, only cars. Even though an e-bike is significantly better for the environment than a new Tesla.