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> the push to replace fuel-engine vehicles with electric ones As opposed to what, replacing cars with public transit? It takes a serious amount of hubris to l

> the push to replace fuel-engine vehicles with electric ones As opposed to what, replacing cars with public transit? It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and think that we can just wave a magic wand and make public transit work in places that largely rely on cars (even in Europe, which is much denser and more friendly to public transit, there are a lot of personal cars). We will run out of oil way before we reach that sort of 'utopia', so electric cars are a far better option than just continuing to burn all the fossil fuels we can. It doesn't preclude us from also incentivizing more public transit options, either. Edit: the amount of downvotes any post that is skeptical of public transit as a global solution gets is really descriptive of how narrow the bubble is most HNers live in.

bambax 4y ago
We could make it harder and harder to use/own a car: more expensive, difficult to park, slower to use, etc. Then people would seek out other solutions by themselves, be it using a bike, public transport, or moving less (asking for more remote work options, for instance). We don't seem to even be trying to do this and it's depressing.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  This is a matter of politics. Right now the majority of the population doesn't agree with your position. That's the problem you have to solve. The real difficulty there is that people are by nature concerned more about near-term, local events. If you try too hard to make their life more expensive and difficult, they'll just vote you out of power.
  - bambax 4y ago
    Agreed.
- Xymist 4y ago
  Perhaps don't advocate making good things in life shittier in order to make comparatively shit options you happen to approve of look good by comparison? If you want public transport to be an even barely acceptable alternative to cars: - Make it door to door, no connections, no hiking to or from a station/stop/port at either end - Make it on demand, no timetables or shortages - Make it actually show up, and not be susceptible to strikes or moderately bad weather - Make a ticket cost the same as or less than the cost in petrol (or electricity) for the same journey - Make it private, without the need to be crammed into a box with strangers These aren't unreasonable requirements, or some utopia situation. They're all things that personal cars provide that trains, planes, taxis, subways, and busses frequently (perhaps generally?) do not. I don't even commute, I work entirely remotely, and your proposal would still be a massive decrease in my quality of life whether it achieved your objective or not. If you want alternatives to be more popular, make them better than the status quo for every individual rather than just waving at "the world in general" and saying it's better for that/them.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    If you want cars to be an even barely acceptable alternative to public transport: - They should not be stuck in traffic jams - They should not kill children, pedestrians and cyclists - They should be electric without heavy and polluting batteries These aren't unreasonable requirements, or some utopia situation. They're all things that trains and subways provide that cars do not. > - Make a ticket cost the same as or less than the cost in petrol (or electricity) for the same journey In your utopia, do I get a free car and only spend money on petrol for travel? It it a country that provides free car repairs and service, need no insurance, MOT checks, and has no road tax? In Britain the fixed costs of owning a car exceed £2000 a year before you've driven a single mile.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      You can solve almost all of those problems more easily by improving road design with knowledge we already have. In relative terms cars are actually amazingly safe given that we drive them trillions of miles a year. > They're all things that trains and subways provide that cars do not. Figure out how to get trains to operate everywhere instead of only on fixed routes, and then this comparison will be valid. Until then you're talking about two (more, really) different use cases with a minimal amount of overlap. So at the very least we will need buses, and a lot of them, to feed the areas where it't uneconomical or otherwise unfeasible to run rails. Do the environmental math on that -- how full does a bus need to be before the pollution per passenger is better than a compact car with one passenger? How about a compact car with four passengers? Public transit would need a fundamental change in approach. And of course this is only talking about people. Always lost in this conversation is that moving humans from place to place is just one use case.
      - ryukafalz 4y ago
        > You can solve almost all of those problems more easily by improving road design with knowledge we already have. Sure, to some extent. The knowledge we already have about how to prevent e.g. cars killing children, pedestrians, and cyclists is that you slow them down (and separate them which also typically involves taking space from cars to make room). But as seen above in this thread, that kind of thing meets opposition from people who say you're "making good things in life shittier". > the areas where it't uneconomical or otherwise unfeasible to run rails. If you've never done this, I suggest taking a look at old maps of the US's passenger rail network. We had a lot more rail in the past than we do now.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  > We could make it harder and harder to use/own a car: more expensive, difficult to park, slower to use, etc. [...] We don't seem to even be trying to do this and it's depressing. Well, because the parties who try to do that (e.g. Greens in europe) immediately get out-voted out of office once the population starts to notice the permanent traffic jams. But it's not for a lack of trying -- they put measures like reducing speed limits in cities, reducing car lanes, etc.
- nostromo123 4y ago
  Oh, "we" are trying this in Austria! Especially in Vienna, the Greens have introduced harsh parking rules for commuters, blocking of new road infrastructure projects that have already been in planning for decades, and so on. But I and many others who commute to Vienna don't want to go back to commuting by public transport. Been there, done that - in one direction, it's 1.5h by train + 2 metro lines, vs. 30-40 mins by car. It's an absolute no brainer, I will not waste 3h per day (!!) commuting. To the helpful suggestions of "finding a home closer to work", I can only say: and what do I so in some years when I change jobs? Move again? No thanks! Public transport is great if the factors align, but honestly, with the travel times that I have, I wouldn't use it even if they made it free of charge.
  - notacoward 4y ago
    Thank you for adding that perspective. If only we could hope that people will listen to others with actual experience of the solutions they so blithely propose.
titzer 4y ago
Just a reminder that all this car infrastructure is max ~100 years old, and most non-North-American cities are older than 100 years. Human civilization just might last more than 100 years, so anything done in 100 years can be undone. To put it another way, if you told people 100 years ago that we'd need to build 63,000 gas stations and 4 million miles[1] of highway in the US, they'd think you're crazy. It would seem logistically impossible. AND no one would want to pay for it. Yet tell those same people 100 years of "it's for the economy" and you end up where we are.[2] [1] That is only a conservative estimate of all the infrastructure that was built to subsidize the auto/oil industry. It's a lot more. [2] This is not me disagreeing with the article. Greening is absolutely a swindle to make money.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > Just a reminder that all this car infrastructure is max ~100 years old 100 years ago we had one third the population we have today. Undoing that kind of development in another 100 years is plausible, but I suspect the oil problem will have resolved itself around that time anyway. And installing the same size network of public transit is far more expensive than paving that many miles of roads. Vastly, incredibly, insurmountably more expensive. The real ask is for changing population patterns to become more dense, and this is a decades-long evolution.
  - titzer 4y ago
    > Vastly, incredibly, insurmountably more expensive. I don't know why you chose to exaggerate here, but rail lines are +/- the same cost per mile as interstate highway, and that's without the economies-of-scale benefit that comes from there being 100x the number of interstate miles. They're also vastly cheaper in terms of materials; the cost is mainly not materials. Concrete production is also extremely CO2 and energy intensive. Unsurprisingly, a boring 19th century technology deployed with vastly less energy and raw materials is more efficient. We're moving backwards in terms of overall system efficiency because of the economics of supporting a individualistic consumer society. And there's a phalanx of people spreading FUD to defend it from disruption.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and think that we can just wave a magic wand and make public transit work It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and not See the fact that most people never had a car and never will. Do you realise that poor people all over the world rely on public transport to survive? There are 190 countries in the world. United states has 6th highest car ownership per person. 139 countries that Less Than Half cars per person that US does. US has 0.9 cars PP, Israel has 0.4, China 0.2 India 0.06 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_... Yes, it is true that most of Europe has > 0.5 cars PP. So in a way it's a measure of wealth. More Accurate way of examining this issue, it distance driven per year per person, and I was not able to find such statistics.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > Do you realise that poor people all over the world rely on public transport to survive? I will go out on a limb here and suggest most of them actually rely on their feet. Bicycle if they can afford it. Then a motorcycle as income permits. And as soon as their lifestyle supports it, a car. The problem with public transit as a solution is that we've had a long time to prove that out. The US had better public transit in many cities ~100 years ago than today. Why did the car dominate? I don't buy into conspiracy theories. People buy, on average, whatever best meets their needs. Make the best public transit in the world today universally available, and a huge number of people will still choose cars because they are more useful. Note that the only places in which public transit dominates are places so dense that the pain of public transit is less than the pain of making a car work. This does not describe more than perhaps three cities in the United States (and only in their downtown cores) and it never will unless we put an artificial cap on creating new cities.
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    > Note that the only places in which public transit dominates are places so dense that the pain of public transit is less than the pain of making a car work. This does not describe more than perhaps three cities in the United States (and only in their downtown cores) and it never will unless we put an artificial cap on creating new cities. The "artifical cap against public transit" exists, enacting a low density urban sprawl model on most cities, preventing a alternative from cars from working.
wing-_-nuts 4y ago
What strikes me is that even in the Neatherlands, a place with the absolute best mix of public transit and bike infrastructure, there is still 1 car for every 2 people. When people make comparisons of car ownership vs public transit, they always vastly inflate the cost of ownership, and more importantly, they do not account for the value of one's time. Just to give an example, if I were to replace the driven commute to my office with public transit, my commute time would grow from 30m to 90m each way. Do not get me wrong. Public transit and especially protected bike infrastructure would be wonderful to have, but we're not going to be replacing cars any time soon. We need to be pushing EVs hard.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  I think we need both, and that will be true indefinitely. The Netherlands is a great point. Cars aren't cheap, this is true, which is a strong indicator that they provide a lot of value. Otherwise people would just stop buying them.
leetcodesucks 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

bambax 4y ago

We could make it harder and harder to use/own a car: more expensive, difficult to park, slower to use, etc. Then people would seek out other solutions by themselves, be it using a bike, public transport, or moving less (asking for more remote work options, for instance). We don't seem to even be trying to do this and it's depressing.

rootusrootus 4y ago
This is a matter of politics. Right now the majority of the population doesn't agree with your position. That's the problem you have to solve. The real difficulty there is that people are by nature concerned more about near-term, local events. If you try too hard to make their life more expensive and difficult, they'll just vote you out of power.
- bambax 4y ago
  Agreed.
Xymist 4y ago
Perhaps don't advocate making good things in life shittier in order to make comparatively shit options you happen to approve of look good by comparison? If you want public transport to be an even barely acceptable alternative to cars: - Make it door to door, no connections, no hiking to or from a station/stop/port at either end - Make it on demand, no timetables or shortages - Make it actually show up, and not be susceptible to strikes or moderately bad weather - Make a ticket cost the same as or less than the cost in petrol (or electricity) for the same journey - Make it private, without the need to be crammed into a box with strangers These aren't unreasonable requirements, or some utopia situation. They're all things that personal cars provide that trains, planes, taxis, subways, and busses frequently (perhaps generally?) do not. I don't even commute, I work entirely remotely, and your proposal would still be a massive decrease in my quality of life whether it achieved your objective or not. If you want alternatives to be more popular, make them better than the status quo for every individual rather than just waving at "the world in general" and saying it's better for that/them.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  If you want cars to be an even barely acceptable alternative to public transport: - They should not be stuck in traffic jams - They should not kill children, pedestrians and cyclists - They should be electric without heavy and polluting batteries These aren't unreasonable requirements, or some utopia situation. They're all things that trains and subways provide that cars do not. > - Make a ticket cost the same as or less than the cost in petrol (or electricity) for the same journey In your utopia, do I get a free car and only spend money on petrol for travel? It it a country that provides free car repairs and service, need no insurance, MOT checks, and has no road tax? In Britain the fixed costs of owning a car exceed £2000 a year before you've driven a single mile.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    You can solve almost all of those problems more easily by improving road design with knowledge we already have. In relative terms cars are actually amazingly safe given that we drive them trillions of miles a year. > They're all things that trains and subways provide that cars do not. Figure out how to get trains to operate everywhere instead of only on fixed routes, and then this comparison will be valid. Until then you're talking about two (more, really) different use cases with a minimal amount of overlap. So at the very least we will need buses, and a lot of them, to feed the areas where it't uneconomical or otherwise unfeasible to run rails. Do the environmental math on that -- how full does a bus need to be before the pollution per passenger is better than a compact car with one passenger? How about a compact car with four passengers? Public transit would need a fundamental change in approach. And of course this is only talking about people. Always lost in this conversation is that moving humans from place to place is just one use case.
    - ryukafalz 4y ago
      > You can solve almost all of those problems more easily by improving road design with knowledge we already have. Sure, to some extent. The knowledge we already have about how to prevent e.g. cars killing children, pedestrians, and cyclists is that you slow them down (and separate them which also typically involves taking space from cars to make room). But as seen above in this thread, that kind of thing meets opposition from people who say you're "making good things in life shittier". > the areas where it't uneconomical or otherwise unfeasible to run rails. If you've never done this, I suggest taking a look at old maps of the US's passenger rail network. We had a lot more rail in the past than we do now.
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
> We could make it harder and harder to use/own a car: more expensive, difficult to park, slower to use, etc. [...] We don't seem to even be trying to do this and it's depressing. Well, because the parties who try to do that (e.g. Greens in europe) immediately get out-voted out of office once the population starts to notice the permanent traffic jams. But it's not for a lack of trying -- they put measures like reducing speed limits in cities, reducing car lanes, etc.
nostromo123 4y ago
Oh, "we" are trying this in Austria! Especially in Vienna, the Greens have introduced harsh parking rules for commuters, blocking of new road infrastructure projects that have already been in planning for decades, and so on. But I and many others who commute to Vienna don't want to go back to commuting by public transport. Been there, done that - in one direction, it's 1.5h by train + 2 metro lines, vs. 30-40 mins by car. It's an absolute no brainer, I will not waste 3h per day (!!) commuting. To the helpful suggestions of "finding a home closer to work", I can only say: and what do I so in some years when I change jobs? Move again? No thanks! Public transport is great if the factors align, but honestly, with the travel times that I have, I wouldn't use it even if they made it free of charge.
- notacoward 4y ago
  Thank you for adding that perspective. If only we could hope that people will listen to others with actual experience of the solutions they so blithely propose.

titzer 4y ago

Just a reminder that all this car infrastructure is max ~100 years old, and most non-North-American cities are older than 100 years. Human civilization just might last more than 100 years, so anything done in 100 years can be undone. To put it another way, if you told people 100 years ago that we'd need to build 63,000 gas stations and 4 million miles[1] of highway in the US, they'd think you're crazy. It would seem logistically impossible. AND no one would want to pay for it. Yet tell those same people 100 years of "it's for the economy" and you end up where we are.[2] [1] That is only a conservative estimate of all the infrastructure that was built to subsidize the auto/oil industry. It's a lot more. [2] This is not me disagreeing with the article. Greening is absolutely a swindle to make money.

rootusrootus 4y ago
> Just a reminder that all this car infrastructure is max ~100 years old 100 years ago we had one third the population we have today. Undoing that kind of development in another 100 years is plausible, but I suspect the oil problem will have resolved itself around that time anyway. And installing the same size network of public transit is far more expensive than paving that many miles of roads. Vastly, incredibly, insurmountably more expensive. The real ask is for changing population patterns to become more dense, and this is a decades-long evolution.
- titzer 4y ago
  > Vastly, incredibly, insurmountably more expensive. I don't know why you chose to exaggerate here, but rail lines are +/- the same cost per mile as interstate highway, and that's without the economies-of-scale benefit that comes from there being 100x the number of interstate miles. They're also vastly cheaper in terms of materials; the cost is mainly not materials. Concrete production is also extremely CO2 and energy intensive. Unsurprisingly, a boring 19th century technology deployed with vastly less energy and raw materials is more efficient. We're moving backwards in terms of overall system efficiency because of the economics of supporting a individualistic consumer society. And there's a phalanx of people spreading FUD to defend it from disruption.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and think that we can just wave a magic wand and make public transit work It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and not See the fact that most people never had a car and never will. Do you realise that poor people all over the world rely on public transport to survive? There are 190 countries in the world. United states has 6th highest car ownership per person. 139 countries that Less Than Half cars per person that US does. US has 0.9 cars PP, Israel has 0.4, China 0.2 India 0.06 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_... Yes, it is true that most of Europe has > 0.5 cars PP. So in a way it's a measure of wealth. More Accurate way of examining this issue, it distance driven per year per person, and I was not able to find such statistics.

rootusrootus 4y ago
> Do you realise that poor people all over the world rely on public transport to survive? I will go out on a limb here and suggest most of them actually rely on their feet. Bicycle if they can afford it. Then a motorcycle as income permits. And as soon as their lifestyle supports it, a car. The problem with public transit as a solution is that we've had a long time to prove that out. The US had better public transit in many cities ~100 years ago than today. Why did the car dominate? I don't buy into conspiracy theories. People buy, on average, whatever best meets their needs. Make the best public transit in the world today universally available, and a huge number of people will still choose cars because they are more useful. Note that the only places in which public transit dominates are places so dense that the pain of public transit is less than the pain of making a car work. This does not describe more than perhaps three cities in the United States (and only in their downtown cores) and it never will unless we put an artificial cap on creating new cities.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  > Note that the only places in which public transit dominates are places so dense that the pain of public transit is less than the pain of making a car work. This does not describe more than perhaps three cities in the United States (and only in their downtown cores) and it never will unless we put an artificial cap on creating new cities. The "artifical cap against public transit" exists, enacting a low density urban sprawl model on most cities, preventing a alternative from cars from working.

wing-_-nuts 4y ago

What strikes me is that even in the Neatherlands, a place with the absolute best mix of public transit and bike infrastructure, there is still 1 car for every 2 people. When people make comparisons of car ownership vs public transit, they always vastly inflate the cost of ownership, and more importantly, they do not account for the value of one's time. Just to give an example, if I were to replace the driven commute to my office with public transit, my commute time would grow from 30m to 90m each way. Do not get me wrong. Public transit and especially protected bike infrastructure would be wonderful to have, but we're not going to be replacing cars any time soon. We need to be pushing EVs hard.

rootusrootus 4y ago
I think we need both, and that will be true indefinitely. The Netherlands is a great point. Cars aren't cheap, this is true, which is a strong indicator that they provide a lot of value. Otherwise people would just stop buying them.

leetcodesucks 4y ago

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deleted 4y ago

[deleted]