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> The solution is to make non-car transportation more available, more useful, cheaper, etc, and slowly make car use itself more painful. I disagree with the la
by a4a4a4a4 4y ago
> The solution is to make non-car transportation more available, more useful, cheaper, etc, and slowly make car use itself more painful.
I disagree with the last part on a philosophical level. Society should push forward, and that doesn't mean we need to take convenient things and make them less convenient, so that alternatives seem more attractive in comparison. We need to make the alternatives better in-and-of themselves, otherwise there will be more pushback from people who currently only use cars, as opposed to a more positive "oh, we can use our car for X and then use this other thing for Y because it offers Z advantage vs the car"
- red_trumpet 4y agoPhilosophically I agree that this would be pretty nice. Realistically though I don't see how to make bike travel safer and more convenient in an already packed city, without taking away road space from cars. Same for bus lanes.
- a4a4a4a4 4y agoI don't mean that improving other means of transit shouldn't negatively affect car travel, just that we shouldn't go out of our way to make car travel more painful. e.g. maybe we don't need to remove a car lane from every street in the city to replace it with a bike lane, but rather restructure flow so that every other block is car/bike/car/bike, or something similar.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoThere is nothing harder to change in this world than culture. Sometimes you can't just make the alternatives better. Sometimes they already are better, and still nothing changes. People are stubborn, interests are entrenched. Sometimes you have to force society to change. It's not ideal, but we don't live in an ideal world.
- nebula8804 4y agoI don't see how you are going to make this stick. Suppose some politician adds a meat tax or something like that. He will just be voted out enmass in the next election and the ruling will be quickly reversed. Furthermore with the way these things go in a country like the US, that successor will not only roll back and tax he will then tax vegetables to help subsidize the meat eaters.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoThat's what everybody says about every kind of dis-incentive program, but we have hundreds of them on the books. It would be one thing if it were just trying to correct people's health, but the issue is far greater, spanning ecological impact, water rights, feedstock, farm subsidies, animal treatment, land use, etc. We will one day reduce our use of meat, if only because eventually it won't be feasible to keep farming it at scale. But the sooner we start, the better.