4 ms·

It's not even about the car lobby. It's about individual vs. collective choice. For an individual, it is better to have a car than to use public transit, but f

It's not even about the car lobby. It's about individual vs. collective choice. For an individual, it is better to have a car than to use public transit, but for society, it is worse that more public spending, resources and city design is geared towards accommodating more cars than public transit. However no one is going to sacrifice their personal well being via giving up their car. The solution is to pay people not to buy cars.

arcticbull 3y ago
> For an individual, it is better to have a car than to use public transit. Respectfully I disagree. Not only is it significantly more expensive, you have a lot less freedom. Freedom isn't the ability to drive to the middle of the desert, it's to get to where you want to go without being beholden to a metal box that's liable to kill you. We had that, and we can have it again. Not having to deal with parking, not having to deal with traffic, gas, etc, is actually great. Not having to worry about whether I can risk a drink and therefore increase the risk of murdering a family is great. It doesn't work for everyone, obviously those living in remote areas, but for most people, transit is straight up better in every way. We sacrificed our wellbeing when we bought into car culture.
- quietbritishjim 3y ago
  Despite starting with "I disagree", you are clearly in agreement with the parent comment. The fragment you quoted means it is better to each individual separately for themselves to have a car if it has no impact on what everybody else does. If everyone else already has cars, then it's better for you if you also have one because the infrastructure is geared up for that. If nobody has cars then your life is better if you (*only you*) have one – in fact it's great, there's no traffic!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - majewsky 3y ago
    If you are the only one to own a car, where do you get gas? Or replacement parts?
    - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
      The general store for gas and the blacksmith for parts/repair, obviously. Just like the early 1900s, where OPs rose-tinted glasses are trained.
    - quietbritishjim 3y ago
      That's reading my comment too literally. The details aren't important. The point is, in practice, for an individual choosing whether to take public transport or use a car, it's very often better for them to choose the car - even though that makes things a little worse for everyone else. Recognising that is an important part of making public transport work.
- Nullabillity 3y ago
  Having done both, and living in a city with a supposedly functioning public transport system, not being beholden to a time table outweighs all of that so hard that it's not even funny.
  - carlmr 3y ago
    I get what you're saying. But there are cities where you don't need to worry about a timetable, there's just a constant stream of trains coming through. I'm thinking of Tokyo, Shanghai, or Vienna for example. The rate of trains coming in in these cities is such that I rarely have to worry about a timetable. I just need to know which trains connect where. The problem is the cities in between, which is probably the majority, where public transit is not used enough to warrant such high number of trains. If the public transit system was used more, you could schedule more trains, if you had more trains it would be used more. It's kind of a chicken and egg situation where you need a lot of political will, or such density that it becomes necessity, to push for this.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - majewsky 3y ago
      I remember hearing a news report about a study where they found that the critical limit for public transit schedules is 6 minutes. Once trains or buses come more often than that, people stop looking at timetables and just go to the platform whenever they are ready to depart. This lines up with my own experience. On weekdays, trams go every 5 minutes at my stop. On weekends, they go every 7.5 minutes. And that's just enough over the edge for me that I'm tempted to check the schedule on my phone before leaving my home.
  - malermeister 3y ago
    Which city are you talking about? I don't think there's a city like that in the US. However, living in Vienna, I can't imagine ever owning a car. There's a super dense network of subways and trams - the subway goes every 2 minutes at rush hour and I can be anywhere in the city within 25 minutes.
- usernew 3y ago
  Freedom of yours, is not freedom of others. You don't get to define freedom for others. Freedom for others is to move to a newly built suburb an hour away from the city, and still work in the city. What happens with most of these, is light rail goes to the city for a few surrounding suburbs with 50-100k people per town. To get to that train station every morning, you need a car. No, you cannot have a bus circle the suburb for an hour to pick everyone up. No you cannot have many buses purchased by the suburb and stand still during off times - the taxes from 50k people cannot pay for that. No, no one is going to wait at a chicago suburb busstop for a bus while it's raining in October, or baking in July, or blasting -15 temp at 20mph winds, while the bus is late. No one is driving cars to the desert. They are driving it to the mall, the restaurant, the rail stop. They don't have to "deal" with parking. Towns have huge parking lots, and land is cheap. What you did is make up a strawman, where people living in the dense city don't need a car. Guess what - most people there don't have one. I'm one of those people who has had cars in little towns, and no car while I live in the city. Yes, there are two people who drive from the suburb to the city. Those are the minority. You see that traffic jam into the city in the morning? That's people's choice to drive. They can instead drive 10min to the rail or bus stop in or near their town. The option of which you speak, is already there. Selecting it or not, is the freedom. No, I'm not talking about every city. Just most. And no, we didn't have that which you describe. What we had is people having to work real close to where they lived. They are still free to do exactly that. I've tried that for over a decade, and don't own a car. As a consequence of that choice, I rent and sold the house. Maybe if you have a kid in school, you don't want to move too much. Maybe you get fired too and the next job's not that close. There was no fast subway or rail going all meshed between every town. Rail trips between towns were a thing you packed and dressed for. They were not a thing you took to work and back every morning. That thing, was the light rail to the city, is still there, and many people use it.
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    > What happens with most of these, is light rail goes to the city for a few surrounding suburbs with 50-100k people per town. To get to that train station every morning, you need a car. No, you cannot have a bus circle the suburb for an hour to pick everyone up. If the suburb is designed to be walkable then the bus is not needed in the first place: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 Each individual community or neighbourhood can be fairly self-contained with regards to daily needs, and travel between them is done on rail or whatever. One could have all-day, frequent (e.g., every 5 minutes) service with trams (or buses) with-in an area, where you can travel with-in it, but also have connections to commuter rail to go to the Big City if the need arises: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commuter_rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commuter_rail This is how things were generally built post-railway, pre-WW2. (Pre-railroad things were generally all walkable, but long distances being done on horses or boats.)
- laratied 3y ago
  Could you be more hyperbolic?
  - coldtea 3y ago
    I find their point quite to the point. It's just that we seldom sit and think the effects furthers from the basic first-level 'I have car, I can go where I want'.
ETH_start 3y ago
"The solution is to pay people not to buy cars." The solution, IMHO, is to tax car use, based on its areal footprint, its weight, and how much time it spends on roads. That directly addresses the dangers and costs cars pose and incur, respectively, and counteracts the negative sum arms race whereby people buy increasingly large cars to make themselves safer from other people's increasingly large cars.
- heavenlyblue 3y ago
  What you are describing is basically petrol tax. Larger more frequently used cars use more petrol.
  - fineIllregister 3y ago
    Damage to the road scales with weight to the fourth power. Fuel use does not go up that fast with weight. Also, it does nothing for the incredibly large and heavy electric vehicles coming out like Rivian and Hummer.
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      Yeah you really need a weight-mile tax to pay for roads. This opens a bit of a can of worms: people don’t want the government tracking where they go, but you kind of need that info to collect the tax. Or at least enough info to know how many driven miles were in which taxing jurisdiction.
      - ETH_start 3y ago
        You can use zero knowledge proofs to anonymize tracking and payments.
        kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
        Sure, but nobody would. The value of having that data is far too great.
Neil44 3y ago
You're talking in a city centric way so you need to make sure your solutions are targeted. Plenty of people don't live in cities and their whole way of life is enabled by the automobile in a way that isn't experienced by city dwellers.
- jackvalentine 3y ago
  Let them choose their way of life for themselves then. People in the city shouldn’t have their built form dictated to them by the people in rural or suburban area’s transport needs.
FridayoLeary 3y ago
i.e. subsidising public transport which is already being done.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  Unfortunately we subsidize driving way more than public transport, so I’m not sure how well this works.
agumonkey 3y ago
There's geography at play too. USA and very large countries have longer average distances. In dense areas you can go by foot or bike. But above 10 miles it gets tiresome too often.

arcticbull 3y ago

> For an individual, it is better to have a car than to use public transit. Respectfully I disagree. Not only is it significantly more expensive, you have a lot less freedom. Freedom isn't the ability to drive to the middle of the desert, it's to get to where you want to go without being beholden to a metal box that's liable to kill you. We had that, and we can have it again. Not having to deal with parking, not having to deal with traffic, gas, etc, is actually great. Not having to worry about whether I can risk a drink and therefore increase the risk of murdering a family is great. It doesn't work for everyone, obviously those living in remote areas, but for most people, transit is straight up better in every way. We sacrificed our wellbeing when we bought into car culture.

quietbritishjim 3y ago
Despite starting with "I disagree", you are clearly in agreement with the parent comment. The fragment you quoted means it is better to each individual separately for themselves to have a car if it has no impact on what everybody else does. If everyone else already has cars, then it's better for you if you also have one because the infrastructure is geared up for that. If nobody has cars then your life is better if you (*only you*) have one – in fact it's great, there's no traffic!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- majewsky 3y ago
  If you are the only one to own a car, where do you get gas? Or replacement parts?
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
    The general store for gas and the blacksmith for parts/repair, obviously. Just like the early 1900s, where OPs rose-tinted glasses are trained.
  - quietbritishjim 3y ago
    That's reading my comment too literally. The details aren't important. The point is, in practice, for an individual choosing whether to take public transport or use a car, it's very often better for them to choose the car - even though that makes things a little worse for everyone else. Recognising that is an important part of making public transport work.
Nullabillity 3y ago
Having done both, and living in a city with a supposedly functioning public transport system, not being beholden to a time table outweighs all of that so hard that it's not even funny.
- carlmr 3y ago
  I get what you're saying. But there are cities where you don't need to worry about a timetable, there's just a constant stream of trains coming through. I'm thinking of Tokyo, Shanghai, or Vienna for example. The rate of trains coming in in these cities is such that I rarely have to worry about a timetable. I just need to know which trains connect where. The problem is the cities in between, which is probably the majority, where public transit is not used enough to warrant such high number of trains. If the public transit system was used more, you could schedule more trains, if you had more trains it would be used more. It's kind of a chicken and egg situation where you need a lot of political will, or such density that it becomes necessity, to push for this.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - majewsky 3y ago
    I remember hearing a news report about a study where they found that the critical limit for public transit schedules is 6 minutes. Once trains or buses come more often than that, people stop looking at timetables and just go to the platform whenever they are ready to depart. This lines up with my own experience. On weekdays, trams go every 5 minutes at my stop. On weekends, they go every 7.5 minutes. And that's just enough over the edge for me that I'm tempted to check the schedule on my phone before leaving my home.
- malermeister 3y ago
  Which city are you talking about? I don't think there's a city like that in the US. However, living in Vienna, I can't imagine ever owning a car. There's a super dense network of subways and trams - the subway goes every 2 minutes at rush hour and I can be anywhere in the city within 25 minutes.
usernew 3y ago
Freedom of yours, is not freedom of others. You don't get to define freedom for others. Freedom for others is to move to a newly built suburb an hour away from the city, and still work in the city. What happens with most of these, is light rail goes to the city for a few surrounding suburbs with 50-100k people per town. To get to that train station every morning, you need a car. No, you cannot have a bus circle the suburb for an hour to pick everyone up. No you cannot have many buses purchased by the suburb and stand still during off times - the taxes from 50k people cannot pay for that. No, no one is going to wait at a chicago suburb busstop for a bus while it's raining in October, or baking in July, or blasting -15 temp at 20mph winds, while the bus is late. No one is driving cars to the desert. They are driving it to the mall, the restaurant, the rail stop. They don't have to "deal" with parking. Towns have huge parking lots, and land is cheap. What you did is make up a strawman, where people living in the dense city don't need a car. Guess what - most people there don't have one. I'm one of those people who has had cars in little towns, and no car while I live in the city. Yes, there are two people who drive from the suburb to the city. Those are the minority. You see that traffic jam into the city in the morning? That's people's choice to drive. They can instead drive 10min to the rail or bus stop in or near their town. The option of which you speak, is already there. Selecting it or not, is the freedom. No, I'm not talking about every city. Just most. And no, we didn't have that which you describe. What we had is people having to work real close to where they lived. They are still free to do exactly that. I've tried that for over a decade, and don't own a car. As a consequence of that choice, I rent and sold the house. Maybe if you have a kid in school, you don't want to move too much. Maybe you get fired too and the next job's not that close. There was no fast subway or rail going all meshed between every town. Rail trips between towns were a thing you packed and dressed for. They were not a thing you took to work and back every morning. That thing, was the light rail to the city, is still there, and many people use it.
- throw0101b 3y ago
  > What happens with most of these, is light rail goes to the city for a few surrounding suburbs with 50-100k people per town. To get to that train station every morning, you need a car. No, you cannot have a bus circle the suburb for an hour to pick everyone up. If the suburb is designed to be walkable then the bus is not needed in the first place: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 Each individual community or neighbourhood can be fairly self-contained with regards to daily needs, and travel between them is done on rail or whatever. One could have all-day, frequent (e.g., every 5 minutes) service with trams (or buses) with-in an area, where you can travel with-in it, but also have connections to commuter rail to go to the Big City if the need arises: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commuter_rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commuter_rail This is how things were generally built post-railway, pre-WW2. (Pre-railroad things were generally all walkable, but long distances being done on horses or boats.)
laratied 3y ago
Could you be more hyperbolic?
- coldtea 3y ago
  I find their point quite to the point. It's just that we seldom sit and think the effects furthers from the basic first-level 'I have car, I can go where I want'.

ETH_start 3y ago

"The solution is to pay people not to buy cars." The solution, IMHO, is to tax car use, based on its areal footprint, its weight, and how much time it spends on roads. That directly addresses the dangers and costs cars pose and incur, respectively, and counteracts the negative sum arms race whereby people buy increasingly large cars to make themselves safer from other people's increasingly large cars.

heavenlyblue 3y ago
What you are describing is basically petrol tax. Larger more frequently used cars use more petrol.
- fineIllregister 3y ago
  Damage to the road scales with weight to the fourth power. Fuel use does not go up that fast with weight. Also, it does nothing for the incredibly large and heavy electric vehicles coming out like Rivian and Hummer.
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    Yeah you really need a weight-mile tax to pay for roads. This opens a bit of a can of worms: people don’t want the government tracking where they go, but you kind of need that info to collect the tax. Or at least enough info to know how many driven miles were in which taxing jurisdiction.
    - ETH_start 3y ago
      You can use zero knowledge proofs to anonymize tracking and payments.
      - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
        Sure, but nobody would. The value of having that data is far too great.

Neil44 3y ago

You're talking in a city centric way so you need to make sure your solutions are targeted. Plenty of people don't live in cities and their whole way of life is enabled by the automobile in a way that isn't experienced by city dwellers.

jackvalentine 3y ago
Let them choose their way of life for themselves then. People in the city shouldn’t have their built form dictated to them by the people in rural or suburban area’s transport needs.

FridayoLeary 3y ago

i.e. subsidising public transport which is already being done.

amanaplanacanal 3y ago
Unfortunately we subsidize driving way more than public transport, so I’m not sure how well this works.

agumonkey 3y ago

There's geography at play too. USA and very large countries have longer average distances. In dense areas you can go by foot or bike. But above 10 miles it gets tiresome too often.