14 ms·

I wish driving and owning a car started to become discouraged the same way sin taxes and bylaws are discouraging cigarette smoking. Sitting outside on a bench

• heydenberk 13y ago
  We could start be simply encouraging it less — spending less public money on roads, having more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly laws (and enforcement), and creating zoning codes that require less parking for development projects would all go a long way.
  • VLM 13y ago
    If you've heard the overused phrase "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" the obvious analogy is intentional destruction of infrastructure results in lower population, lower population density, lower property values... I don't know the specifics of the linked article, but stereotypically some outsider comes in, says "you have some nice profitable land here, and I have a plan to fix that...". If you'd like to experience anti-car infrastructure, we have plenty of semi-abandoned residential in the poorest parts of the inner city, and some vacant abandoned commercial space in the bad parts of town with limited parking. Of course the restaurant right off the interstate is doing booming business although there's always someone with a plan to "fix" that for them. "We need more customers... I know, we'll make it impossible for anyone outside walking distance to get here, that'll fix everything..." What we need is more money spent on roads and parking. Done the right way, of course. Nothing wrong with wide roads, wide sidewalks, strips of parks and trees and green spaces. Just remember where the bread is buttered, pedestrians = homeless panhandler but car = customer.
    • pyre 13y ago
      > pedestrians = homeless panhandler but car = customer. This isn't inflammatory at all... not at all...
      • VLM 13y ago
        Google claims "intended to arouse angry ... feelings." I'm trying to be informative. May not like the way things are, but pretending "most people" don't look at the world that way isn't going to produce anything useful. I also have the defense of truth. Other than downtown Manhattan or downtown Chicago, this is how it is. You make money off someone who drives to your business, not some homeless dude who needs to use your bathroom. Customers come in cars. That's just how it is.
        • saraid216 13y ago
          Customers come in cars because there's no other way to get there. Cars, being hugely inefficient uses of space, actually decreases the number of customers who can get to your store. You can take a fully-packed car and compare the space used to people on a sidewalk: that's the difference in customers you're losing out on.
          • VLM 13y ago
            Seriously? So the best way to get more people in a sports stadium would be to get rid of the parking lot, or walmart's sales would go up if they got rid of their parking lots? Or on a small scale, I'd be more likely to go to a restaurant or small retailer if I knew for certain I couldn't get there on foot and if I drove there, I wouldn't be able to park? Now I do see your point for a stereotypical neighborhood local bar where they shouldn't be driving drunk anyway, or even a small local pharmacy or convenience store/gas station. I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots?
            • thrownaway2424 13y ago
  • chrismcb 13y ago
    I live 30 miles from work, having more pedestrian and cycle friendly laws won't do one bit of good.
    • maxerickson 13y ago
      You would likely take them into account if you happened to move.
    • jonemo 13y ago
      A few more bike lanes and bike storage space on the commuter train goes a long way. I live 20 miles from work and prefer to leave the car at home.
    • cylinder 13y ago
      The problem is that you live 30 miles from work, a fact you find acceptable only because you know cars can get you there. Before the automobile era this was unheard of.
      • MrZongle2 13y ago
        How are you privy to the reason the OP lives 30 miles from work? Perhaps he has other obligations, such as family, that require him to live where he does. Or perhaps the cost of living near OP's workplace is beyond his means. You assume too much.
  • Tiktaalik 13y ago
    Some cities are doing this. Vancouver BC has a policy of not expanding its road network whatsoever, and is actively decreasing by reserving portions of it to exclusive bike and pedestrian use. The city has also engaged with communities to find portions of road that are unused enough that they could be converted to parklets.
    • katbyte 13y ago
      I think that only applies to the DT core not the GVRD / lower mainland as a whole. In the last 5 or so years we have built a new bridge to replace the albion ferry (golden ears), replaced & widened the pitt river bridge and interchange, construction of a new 10-lane Port Mann Bridge, 37 kilometres of highway widening from Vancouver to Langley & the replacement of nine highway interchanges, widened/improved 176th to the blaine truck crossing & fraser highway, construction of the south fraser perimeter road, and iirc some improvements around white rock and the airport. Translink is also considering replacing/widening the pattullo and george massy tunnels. And this is just what i know about and can remember. However we have also increased bus service in general, built a new rapid transit line from DT to the airport (canada line), are now extending the skytrain to the tri cities and hopefully soon after down the broadway corridor to UBC. DT Vancouver isn't building more roads, but theres not exactly room for any new ones. It has also converted some road space to bike lanes and is now considering removing the viaducts, but it only covers a small part of the region's transportation infrastructure.
      • Tiktaalik 13y ago
        You're right I'm only talking about Vancouver City proper. The provincial government, which controls the highway system, does not have the right approach and has been dramatically over building with the new bridges.
• notatoad 13y ago
  Sin Taxes and shaming are the wrong way to go about shifting away from car-centric cities - people still have to get where they need to go. You first need to build effective public transportation networks, bike lanes, and restructure cities to that long trips are less necessary. Once you've done all that, then you can start punishing people for driving.
  • jchrisa 13y ago
    Realistically, just removing the outsize subsidies driving has had for generations would be seen as an "attack" on the American way of life. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
  • scoofy 13y ago
    Right, i disagree with you wholeheartedly. The probably is the how do we get from here to there. We have transportation infrastructure. It's roads, the roads are mostly designed for car and light truck traffic primarily. Now my question to you is, how do you justify, politically, the proposal to add a bunch of extremely expensive, and unpleasant to build (2nd ave subway made 2nd ave horrifically ugly for a couple years) infrastructure. Without a billionaire (thus fairly incorruptible) mayor in his last term, i really don't think it's going to happen. People have invested in the car infrastucture, they have bought certain houses, in certain neighborhoods because of it, they have planned their lives around it. You can't just say, "okay, we're all going to take light rail now, so we need to remove all the street parking on your street, sorry, 1/4 of this town is going to have to deal with dramatic changes in infrastructure. No, the way to do it is sin taxes. Why? Firstly, because the pain is felt by everyone. This prevents NIMBY's from getting their ammunition. Everyone feels the pain, everyone must adjust. Secondly, it provides a gradual path to a low-car environment. Slow is good, fast is politically untenable for most cities. As traffic decreases, you can add BRT lines with little objection. You can switch current infrastructure from private vehicles to public. You don't have to dig a bunch of holes in the ground, you just have to re-purpose. Thirdly, you've just funded your public transit projects. If we want to make public transit in america. I honestly thing the best way to do it is build a better bus. A bus that feels like a subway car. A bus that i would want to ride, even when it's packed.
• pix64 13y ago
  What exactly is the alternative to cars?
  • eddieroger 13y ago
    Oh, easy - bikes and/or public transportation, of course. /s The idea of abandoning a car is silly at this point because it's just not going to happen. Maybe if urban sprawl wasn't a thing we could figure something out. On my team, I live the closest to work at 6 miles, with many of my coworkers commuting 40+ minutes. There's no complete replacement for that. Even when I was a public transportation commuter at a previous job in a different city, I had to drive a few miles on a highway to get to the bus depot. The anti-car sentiment seem to me to be localized in tighter packed cities with better public transit, which is a minority of the cities in America (sorry for being so US-centric, I haven't lived or worked outside of the States).
    • saraid216 13y ago
      Dealing with urban sprawl is effectively the first step. There are ongoing movements to reinvent suburbs into communities, which could theoretically attract localized businesses to reduce the amount that people need to commute. It's important to recognize that the long commutes came about because of cars. Because it was possible to take the open road to get to work, sprawl was a reasonable option. And then everyone joined in on the fun and the open road vanished. It's a bait-and-switch. This doesn't mean that getting rid of cars will automatically fix things, but deliberately removing our dependence on them will absolutely help because part of that action is fixing things.
      • eddieroger 13y ago
        Long commutes are enabled by cars, but I don't think they're the direct cause - sprawl was a thing before cars as we know them came about. It's a natural phenomenon to move away from the civic center, we are just able to move father away because of cars. Before that, it was horses and carriages. Cars let us move further our, sure. Specifically in my case, the company I work for is located in my city (despite recent sale to an SF-based one). They chose a prestigious address over being near where the already sparse urban living was, and even that is geared at singles and young couples. I couldn't live near work if I wanted to. Personally I don't think cars are a bad thing and I don't want to trade mine for a bike or the bus. I like the freedom a car gives me. I don't have to plan my route to work on anything or anyone. I can leave when I want. I can go to lunch farther away from my office. Yes, it's contributing to climate change, and we need to solve that problem, but I don't think the solution is removing dependance on cars.
• henrikschroder 13y ago
  When I visited Hawaii for the first time I noticed that something was very different compared to similar vacation destinations in for example south-east asia. It's the same climate. It's the same relaxed atmosphere. It's the same hotels. People come there for the same reasons. People wear the same kind of clothes. But the major difference is that all hotels in Hawaii have huge parking garages. It's a ten-minute drive from Honolulu airport to Waikiki, there's excellent public transportation, hotel shuttles, and taxis, but people still just rent cars, because american tourists rent cars out of habit, not necessity. It's so deeply ingrained, it's gonna take a long while to dispel it.
  • mcrider 13y ago
    I've lived in Honolulu for a couple years, and IMO its a shining example of bad infrastructure. The public transport is quite a bad actually and efforts to build a rail system have been constantly delayed by corruption, NIMBYs, and bureaucracy. People rent cars so they can access the rest of the island because otherwise its impossible. Its not just American tourists either, a huge portion of the tourist population is Japanese or Canadian. But at the same time the locals seem to really love driving. Every household has at least one car and traffic is often rated as bad or worse than LA. For a place that you would think would be ecologically responsible (and a great test bed for transportation technology, as its such a well-isolated location), the car culture hear is so ingrained that I think it would take some major deterrents to get people to stop driving.
  • PakG1 13y ago
    Parking is the primary reason why I'm so excited about self-driving cars. A much more efficient usage of cars and roads when you basically have an automated version of Uber's heatmaps. It would truly provide for everyone's transportation at a very personal and granular level ( the problem with public transportation being that it doesn't take you to exactly where you need to go) while freeing up all that real estate all over the place for better things. Bet you traffic congestion and per capita pollution levels get nicer too as the traffic becomes more efficient.
  • sliverstorm 13y ago
    Well, it's habit for a reason. Not every locale they visit is like Honolulu & Waikiki.
• chrismcb 13y ago
  You can't just discourage the use of cars, without providing an alternative.
• DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  Surely you've noticed that huge hunk of land over next to you on the maps called the mainland, haven't you? Lots of folks over here, like me, live 20 miles from town or more. Without a car, we'd starve. Sure, it'd be great if we all lived in cities and sat on park benches fretting over the absolutely terrible state of aesthetics the cities have gotten into with so many cars -- wouldn't bikes and walking just spruce up the place immensely? -- but that's just not reality for us.
  • mcrider 13y ago
    Thanks for being patronizing, however I grew up in the country outside of (coincidentally) Philadelphia and understand owning and driving automobiles is necessary e.g. when you live on a farm. I don't think anyone would ever be against that considering there are no other options. It was pretty clear that I was talking about cities, and why would you not want your environment to be beautiful and healthy?
    • DanielBMarkham 13y ago
      I would love for my environment to be pretty. Thanks for asking. The only reason I replied to you at all was that I get concerned when I see people present aesthetic arguments that don't seem very well thought-out. Because it's not that we have a different definition of pretty. It's much more that I'm willing to see the ugliness and think of how far we've come from island natives having a life span of 33 and you're more likely to think of how much the view would be better without all the concrete in the way.
      • mcrider 13y ago
        Well why can't we go further? We have the technology for self-driving cars, and public transportation that doesn't suck, but for a multitude of reasons we don't utilize this. And beautiful living spaces really is a superficial reason to want cars to go away -- definitely secondary to (if you reread my OP) the financial, environmental, and mental burdens of driving, as well as the countless deaths caused by drivers every year.
  • 13y ago
• msellout 13y ago
  Remember how rapidly the general opinion on smoking changed? It wasn't that long ago that smoking was cool. I think we are seeing the beginning of a similar shift for personal automobiles in urban areas. It wasn't the taxes that drove away smoking, it was the frowns and glares. The shift will take longer. So much of our society is structured around vehicles. Government identification is mostly through driver's licenses. Whole chunks of the judicial and police systems are dedicated to traffic violations.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• Spooky23 13y ago
  Everyone, literally everyone who I know who advocated this type of position became silent when they had children. Unless you have a parent in the household who isn't working, life gets pretty crappy without a car. The person who doesn't work spends half the day running errands that would take 45m in a car. If both parents work, You pay 2x for diapers at CVS vs Target, spend half your evening on the bus to pick up your kid from daycare and huff groceries home for dinner, etc.
  • artsrc 13y ago
    People would work it out... In Sydney, we have always had daycare next to home or work, in San Francisco I put the kids in a bike trailer. The number one thing that worries me about my 9 and 12 year old getting to and from school are the cars. The 12 year old could bike to school if it were not for cars. The 9 year old walks, as did the 12 year old before starting high school and catching the bus. Cars can be handy for carrying stuff. On the other hand I like strollers as a shopping trolly that goes all the way home. In my family the person who does not work does not drive at all... And disposable diapers (nappies) are cheap delivered. And you can use re-usable ones with a service that comes to your house.
    • alexeisadeski3 13y ago
      artsrc, Your post here is pretty hilarious. Note that the message you were responding to started off with this: > Unless you have a parent in the household who isn't working, life gets pretty crappy without a car. And your response contains this: > In my family the person who does not work does not drive at all. It's as if the person you respond to had already accounted for your response!
    • bane 13y ago
      Heaven help you if you ever live in a place with moderately bad weather for even part of the year. Neither Sydney nor SF are even remotely good places to model transport policy on.
  • vacri 13y ago
    My housemates were public transport fanatics, public transport "does everything we need, you just need to harden up a bit, there really is no need for a car", and one of them was a moderate cyclist. I went away for three months during which they had free use of my car. On return: "We're getting a car".
• blueskin_ 13y ago
  They would need to build proper public transport first. Most of the US is far, far behind other countries there, but many other first world countries are still completely impractical to travel by public transport too. e.g the UK, where while trains go most places, they are notoriously slow, unreliable and expensive and do not run in the very early morning. Even countries people might expect to have good transportation (e.g. Germany) see the same problem to a lesser extent, rendering its day to day use impractical. The real answer is to have guided taxi-style individual vehicles that people can book, take to whereever, which then leave to pick someone else up, giving the privacy, speed and convenience benefits without the parking and traffic problems, but the technology isn't there yet to implement them in a real city.
  • brandnewlow 13y ago
    I've started trying out UberX in SF and it's been a revelation. The "public transportation needs to be better" argument goes away in a future when large swaths of urban professionals switch over to on-demand transportation, which will eventually be automated.
    • briandon 13y ago
      It sounds awesome, so long as there's always excess supply of on-demand transportation. When there's a bump in demand (rainy day, major sporting/tourist/whatever event) and on-demand transport services are fully utilized, leaving many waiting or unable to get a vehicle, not so much.