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Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

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Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#71

Post by read_wharf »

v21 wrote: post #35
read_wharf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those are your measures. But a car can very easily beat a bicycle on time efficiency, assuming you're going more than half a mile. A car can also beat a bicycle on opportunity exposure. Both statements are illustrated by mine and many others' commutes. I drive 40 minutes each way, because I couldn't find a job here, but I could find a job there. I'd love to have found a job here, but at the moment my job is there.…

And that's the case in large part because your environment is optimized for driving. For me to get a car, I'd have to pay a fair bit more in rent to have somewhere to park, and I still wouldn't be able to drive to work (there's nowhere to park). And even if I could I'd have to pay £9 a day to enter the city. (Congestion charge zone, in London). But all of central, and lots of not-so-central London is within an hour's…

I envy you your tube, and I'd be up in that every day if we had one.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#72

Post by 7952 »

kposehn wrote: post #32

This article, while well written and trying to think ahead, forgets something very important: cars are such a symbol because they appeal to one of the core aspects of human nature. The freedom of movement, the ability to choose where you go, the notion of being unrestricted and able to move about freely. Being herded on a bus is not in our nature. Furthermore, to some degree, cars are actually more efficient from a p…

>> The freedom of movement, the ability to choose where you go, the notion of being unrestricted and able to move about freely. Being herded on a bus is not in our nature.

This feeling is becoming less and less possible in a lot of places. You end up having to herd millions of cars causing massive inconvenience to people who don't have cars; who in turn have to buy cars to make life liveable. If you want a constant sense of freedom buy a bicycle.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#73

Post by 7952 »

markessien wrote: post #26

What we need are electricity powered flying cars. Then we can have green, walk-able cities and can use all that open space above us for transportation. We'll need some new kind of flying technology though, cos nobody wants to hear the loud noise of wind blades or deal with all the air pushing downwards. Perhaps hover "paths" where grass is below and not tarmac?

Flying buses would be much better than flying cars. Make a type of aeroplane that can do short flights (<20 miles between towns). Use capacitors that can be recharged between flights, and have an idling conventional engine in case of emergency. Even at relatively low speeds this could dramatically improve commute times.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#76

Post by rayiner »

uvdiv wrote: post #13

Let's built a future with 300mph self-driving supercars and mach 20 spaceplanes -- addressing the actual desires and wants of most users (mobility, convenience) rather than imposing personal ethics of asceticism (mass transit, anti-urbanization). The author brings up a lot of valid problems with contemporary car travel (and notably none of its revolutionary advantages), but most of these orthogonal to the personal-vs…

I don't see the anti-car position as asceticism. Rather, I see it as a recognition of the basic fact that peoples' expressed preferences are hard to separate from government policy in this particular domain.

The current state of affairs is not an expression of how people really want to live. It's an expression of the enormous subsidies we have given to a particular lifestyle. Our governments fund suburban schools much better than urban ones. They spend enormous amount of money on constant road construction and barely spend anything improving public transit. We allow the huge costs incurred by fossil fuel use to be externalized, making car use seem much cheaper than it actually is. We penalize renters and subsidize home owners by allowing tax deductions for mortgage interest. Police spend large amounts of money, on a per capita basis, enforcing uniquely suburban concerns like drunk driving, compared to how much is spent on run of the mill urban crime fighting.

It is almost certain that without these massive explicit and implicit subsidies, peoples' expressed "desires and wants" would look very different than what we have now.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#77

Post by rayiner »

api wrote: post #15

It's always important to consider the dark side. We didn't do much of that when we built car culture in the first place, so let's do it now. So try: "Let's build an unaffordable future where the super-rich live in hyper-inflated city real estate and the poor are consigned to unreachable rural pockets of cultural stagnation or to over-crowded ghettoes." How will we create livable walkable cities where real estate does…

The cost of real estate is a problem in certain walkable cities (New York, San Francisco) but not so much in others (Chicago, Portland, etc).

The other issue is that a lot of the price advantage of living outside the city is fictional, being the result of government policy. If government wasn't out there building highways to these suburban outreaches, subsidizing home ownership, preferentially funding suburban schools, keeping car use artificially cheap by allowing externalization of the costs of fossil fuels, the cost-benefit balance would look quite different than it does now.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#78

Post by rayiner »

oconnore wrote: post #43
api wrote: post #15

It's always important to consider the dark side. We didn't do much of that when we built car culture in the first place, so let's do it now. So try: "Let's build an unaffordable future where the super-rich live in hyper-inflated city real estate and the poor are consigned to unreachable rural pockets of cultural stagnation or to over-crowded ghettoes." How will we create livable walkable cities where real estate does…

Livable, walkable, affordable cities are dense. That is the primary factor in whether or not you can afford to live within walking/biking/subway distance. The rich people that want to live close to work are going to get first dibs on usable housing, and unless you build more than that, middle class residents don't stand a chance. So much of that "hyper inflated city real estate" is not especially dense. So you get lo…

Zoning is a huge problem in New York. Manhattan is completely ridiculous with how many 4-6 floor "historic" buildings there are wasting some of the most expensive real estate on earth. Chicago, in comparison, has a high-rise culture in its city center that makes for a lot more available housing stock and keeps prices down.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#79

Post by ken »

exue wrote: post #49

Problem 1: This article is a giant anti-car rant with a few points of rational debate baked in that might help public policy. It's no more objectively helpful than reading a spiel from BimmerForums or ClubWRX on why they love their 300hp sports cars and would never give them up to be herded in a big, crowded, smelly bus. Problem 2: Cars are currently the best solution to the problems we have. That's why they are #1 i…

> Cars are currently the best solution to the problems we have. That's why they are #1 in the US.

Granted -- so long as you take the legislative and tax situation into account. That's part of the "problem" to which cars are currently the best solution for most people, but it's not unchangeable.

Or from a different perspective, you could say: the "problem" is that people want to live in places (like suburbs) to which there is no great transportation solution yet, so part of the "solution" has to include a tax system that hides the true cost of the most acceptable solution.

Would cars still be so appealing if the true costs were not hidden? People seem to complain a lot about $4+/gal gasoline, but the tax on it doesn't come close to covering the maintenance needs of the roads they drive on. Couldn't almost any technology be the "best", given the right financial incentive?

I agree that for the next 10 years, hybrid electric cars are the solid bet. They have the ear of the lawmakers, it seems, and so not only are they 'cool', but they've got massive tax incentives helping them. I'm completely in favor of more efficient cars, of course, but it does seem odd to offer so many benefits based not on efficiency, but on one particular technology used to achieve efficiency.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#80

Post by dalke »

jQueryIsAwesome wrote: post #24

Cars are one of the worst inventions by human kind. Aside from the points mentioned in the article there is also many deaths by cars (traffic accidents) and the huge amount of cars now days tend to saturate the roads and make mobilization a really slow process. My solution would be to get rid of cars all together an use only electrical trains driven by few professionals who are less likely to cause accidents; with fi…

Before cars became commonplace, we used horses to help transport goods and people inside cities. Horses dump manure. A lot of it. Quoting from http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-th... :

"A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure. This in turn attracted huge numbers of flies, and the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of." ... "Of course, urban civilization was not buried in manure. The great crisis vanished when millions of horses were replaced by motor vehicles. "

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