5 ms·

Typical hackernews to have threads full of well meaning but ultimately misguided people saying ah we have some technological solution for this. The solution to

• rough-sea 3y ago
  Yet another misguided comment. We cannot simply stop driving anymore than we can stop using an increasing amount energy. There are huge portions of humanity that live in places that depend on cars. It’s a non-solution to say people should just stop driving - billions cannot.
  • nicoburns 3y ago
    It's unreasonable to expect individuals to unilaterally stop driving. But on a societal scale, it's entirely reasonable to expect our governments to build infrastructure that allows (many of) us to stop driving. That isn't simple, but neither is it an intractable problem.
• beedeebeedee 3y ago
  And changing to mixed-use zoning- that is the number one issue in fixing our transport system
• paddy_m 3y ago
  Not driving requires even less. It requires the local and state governments to stop making it illegal to build the type of dense walkable neighborhoods that we built until the 1930s. Let landowners build what they deem fit on their own land. That's it (or a large part of it)
• TeMPOraL 3y ago
  In other words: you're proposing to replace a set of possible, if difficult, technological solutions, with an near-impossible social solution. I'd call that misguided. Technological solutions tend to be discussed because they can be implemented. Social solutions may work better, but only in imaginary la-la land where they can actually be put into practice. In the real world, you can't "just" get people to not drive.
  • hyperhopper 3y ago
    It's not impossible, much of the world operates without 99.9% car usage like the USA. Every major European city metro area can be traversed without a car. Hell I went through 18 countries and 35+ cities in Europe without renting a car and only using a bus or plane maybe 4-5 times. This is an entirely self-made problem. A world not reliant on cars is not la-la land. It's a land where a car isn't treated as more important than a human, which should be the norm and is known to work in many other first world countries.
    • SoftTalker 3y ago
      The USA is a lot more spread out than Europe. In places where it isn't (NYC, Chicago) you can get around without a car pretty well. Guess what, in small towns in Europe and in rural areas, most people have cars too, and they drive to get their groceries.
      • enragedcacti 3y ago
        The northeast corridor is practically as dense as western Europe and we have a number of car-dependent cities denser than major transit-rich European cities. > Guess what, in small towns in Europe and in rural areas, most people have cars too, and they drive to get their groceries. That's fine! lets get our intra and intercity transit solved and small town people can keep doing what they've been doing.
  • mplewis 3y ago
    Trains aren’t difficult technical solutions.
• ilyt 3y ago
  And that still solves not all that much because you still have to feed the city by fleet of trucks, and still need to have a fleet of vans to deliver all of that to the stores you now walk or cycle to.
  • hyperhopper 3y ago
    Are you insinuating a single truck carrying supplies for _thousands_ to a store is even remotely comparable to _thousands_ of cars driving to the store? You're comment can be distilled to "well the solution is many orders of magnitude better than the status quo, but it's not perfect so it's equally bad"
  • anlsh 3y ago
    Not much? Do you drive? Do you see the number of consumer vehicles on the road versus the number of trucks/delivery vehicles? If we could work towards a huge reduction in consumer vehicles on the road, even if we just replaced them all with busses, that'd be a huge improvement in gas consumption, traffic, (sub)urban sprawl, and more.
• throwaway920102 3y ago
  Or you know we could just all kill ourselves and that would solve the problem too but people like realistic solutions. Natural rubber exists and we don't have to use synthetic compounds in tires, we can just have shittier tires. Why do you propose no driving rather than shittier, more expensive driving?
  • mplewis 3y ago
    No one suggested you kill yourself. Just that we build more trains you can take.
• avalys 3y ago
  Not driving is not a solution. The reason zoning in the US requires developments to take cars into account, is that people in the US want cars. And if someone builds a new residential or commercial development that doesn't recognize this reality, it creates problems for everyone as people have nowhere to put the cars that they definitely want to use. Yes, there are some people who live in cities and are happy to have the entirety of their life limited to the region they can walk to, or the places where government-organized mass transportation can deliver them like cattle. But those people are the vast minority. Everyone else wants a car.
  • d0gbread 3y ago
    Chicken and the egg. You can't really make people not want cars without better alternatives, which requires investments that aren't being made. I want a car, because I need a car. But put in a few bullet trains and offshoots, a business model for vehicles that enables access to a $100/month consumer fleet of shared vehicles so I can grab a truck, minivan, whatever as needed, and I will happily skip ownership.
    • avalys 3y ago
      This is a fantasy. In general, people don't want a shared vehicle. If they did, everyone would own a 5-year-old Toyota Camry, and not luxury pickup trucks, sports cars, Mercedes and BMWs, etc. The idea that these people are just sheep blinded by marketing is ludicrous. You might spend $5 on a beer instead of $4 because of marketing. You buy a $60,000 new vehicle over a $15,000 used one because it's a good product that you actually want.
      • afuchs 3y ago
        To contribute some rough anecdotal evidence, when I look out the window next to where I'm sitting this exact moment I see a mix of newer and older Honda Civics, Toyota Corollas, and some older SUVs. Judging from the age of those cars, I'm going to guess that most of their current owners bought them used and not new. I do not see a single pickup truck. I'm not going to debate that the Ford F150 dominates new vehicle sales in north America, but that's only accounting for the preferences of people who are buying new vehicles and doesn't track what the used market would buy if given unlimited options. As for the marketing argument, there's plenty of discourse surrounding it. Most new pickups are sold with short beds and extra features which make them impractical for use by many commercial trades that do use pickup trucks. There's a question of whether the F150s popularity is because of the truck's utility or because of the aesthetic desires of purchasers.
• savanaly 3y ago
  No, the typical hackernews comment is yours. Take a very complicated issue, present your favored simple solution without evidence, then say "period" as if that somehow settles the issue.
  • noobermin 3y ago
    This is backwards, social solutions are actually harder than a tech fix, because any tech fix won't be an actual fix. It will just be a band-aid that won't solve the underlying social issue. Imagine, for example, thinking the solution to male loneliness or alternative patriarchy is just a better bumble/tinder. Social problems cannot be solved by better technology simply, the problem is much more complicated than that.
• noobermin 3y ago
  I hate to minimod, but this comment absolutely does not deserve to be flagged. It's not flaming or baiting, it isn't violating guidelines or spam or anything. It's not trolling. The downvote is for disagreement. Do not flag to downvote, please. FFS let's keep up the standards here and not devolve into reddit.