8 ms·

That's very elitist. Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5. Even in large urban areas it's tricky to get aro

That's very elitist. Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5. Even in large urban areas it's tricky to get around past a certain time. I remember working unexpected shifts and later staring at closed metro stations, having to walk in the rain to get home. No thanks. Also, some people like cars. Deal with it, i'm not ditching for an e-bike or whatever. An electric motorcycle actually sounds nice though, if not for the battery weight.

estebank 3y ago
You've identified a problem: public transport in some places sucks. But then veered away from the obvious solution: invest in it to make it not suck.
- zzzeek 3y ago
  throwing money at urban problems does not necessarily have a great track record, and NYCTA has had lots of issues with corruption when they do have money to spend. Id be pretty skeptical that giving them a lot of money would mean you can hop on a train in 5 minutes at 2 am, it wouldnt even be cost effective to run that many trains at odd hours. Cars are terrific for this use case, however. NYC cops have like a billion dollar budget and while they are great at protecting businesses in wealthy areas they are not very popular in lower income areas as they are both blase and overly brutal at the same time, their huge budget not having helped that aspect very much.
  - estebank 3y ago
    Somehow the argument against more money for infrastructure is never levied against freeway expansions.
    - jodrellblank 3y ago
      Haha, but it is though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds-v2-qyCc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds-v2-qyCc8 "Throwing Good Money After Bad Car Infrastructure - Wonderland Road" - on the road widening project of Wonderland Road in Toronto.
      - ryukafalz 3y ago
        It is in urbanist circles; it's not by mass media and by the elected officials who can actually do something about it.
  - reocha 3y ago
    Cops and public transport are two completely different things.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    throwing money at the NYC subway seems to have a generally great track record (albeit one featuring less efficiency than throwing money at other global subway systems). NYC could not function without it.
    - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
      The 7 line extension cost over $3 billion dollars in 2023 terms to build 1.5 miles of track from Times Sq to Hudson Yards and build one new station there. I defy anyone to conclude this represented good value.
      - KennyBlanken 3y ago
        The NYC transit system costs $20BN/year to operate, serves a population of almost 9M people and pre pandemic had nearly 10 million passenger trips a day; currently 5M. Montana spends $1BN/year on roadways and receives another $3BN/year in federal funding and serves a population of 1M people. The NYC subways system moves five times the population of Montana every day and costs half as much per capita. Do go on about how subways are a waste of money.
        NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
        Subways are not a waste of money: throwing money at the NYC subway system under the current set of parameters is a waste of money. P.S. you're also comparing apples and oranges; you're only looking at the MTA operating budget; not the operating + capital budget which the Montana numbers represent.
      - tmnvix 3y ago
        It was probably good value for anyone that owned any surrounding property. Ideally the increase in property value should be captured by the public who made the investment - self funding effectively. But that's just the old LVT argument.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    NYC is one of the safest places in the US... and even with fairly poor mass transit system - it's still is incredibly good by American standards. I moved from NYC an hour north, to be more isolated than the "impersonal big cities". I barely know any of my neighbors - because there are no sidewalks and everyone is forced to drive for anything. Car dependence kills people, kills communities and reduces your QoL.
    - zzzeek 3y ago
      You should move back to the city, then. I moved out because I had enough of the crowds and awful mass transit and I'm good with it. The NYC cops were absolutely awful for us as well.
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      NYC mass transit is poor? I've never lived there, but during my extended visits, it seemed like I could get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.
      - JAlexoid 3y ago
        Relative to less dense global cities - yes, it's poor. In American terms - it's probably one of the better ones.
- cbozeman 3y ago
  Public transit does not work in a place like Montana or Wyoming. Sorry. Too large, too sparsely populated. Same reason it won't work for most of Texas either. It's fine in Dallas or Austin, parts of Fort Worth... it doesn't scale to Lubbock or New Braunfels. A lot of people have no interest in living in your concrete jungle... myself included.
  - Muromec 3y ago
    I though you are talking about a village with 200 residents, so I had to look it up and oops, it's quarter million city? You gotta be kidding.
    - ponector 3y ago
      Yes, that is funny to read. European cities with population less than 100k could have public transport and bicycle infrastructure while much bigger American city could not.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        There are American cities of less than 100k people that have public transport and bicycle infrastructure. However nobody knows about them.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    No one is asking you to live there or not have a vehicle. What makes it a problem is the financially unsustainable suburban sprawl(single family zoning laws or covenants with the same effect) and people's expectations of car owners being catered to primarily. I mean... why else would high density cities like Atlanta and DFW have massive X+Y lane interstates cut through the city? In so many places in the US it's straight up impossible to walk 1000ft.
    - moojd 3y ago
      > No one is asking you to live there or not have a vehicle. Several of the most upvoted comments in this very thread are advocating banning vehicles.
bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
The $20k car is not elitist but the $2k ebike is? Interesting.
- epistasis 3y ago
  It's always hilarious to me when people driving $60k vehicles ask me how much the ebike cost and say "that's expensive". The ebike costs less than they pay in insurance a year, much less maintenance, gas, etc. Some people have weird ideas about cars being "for regular people" while any money spent on a bicycle is a luxury.
  - cbozeman 3y ago
    I can't carry four other people on my ebike, along with stuffing a minimum of one duffle bag per person, and usually being able to squeeze two in, along with a cooler for drinks, snacks, and sandwiches. My Telluride can do that though. Even if I could somehow fit all that shit onto an ebike, I wonder how long it and I would be able to make it before we give trying to go the 125 miles from Fort Worth to Possum Kingdom Lake... This site infuriates me sometimes at the complete and utter lack of understanding of most of the United States.
    - webdood90 3y ago
      > This site infuriates me sometimes at the complete and utter lack of understanding of most of the United States Most of the US in what capacity? Square miles? Because the majority of the population lives in Cities. I love reading comments like yours. All throughout this thread you've vehemently argued that your perspective is the right one. It's a reminder to me that close minded people like you actually exist! You're not here to discuss, you're here to argue. That's pretty unfortunate.
      - lotsoweiners 3y ago
        Saying the majority lives in cities is pretty BS though. They aren’t all living in walkable downtowns like Manhattan but rather are living in places like Houston, Phoenix, or Denver that have a few sq miles of what many would consider walkability, very spotty public transportation, and weather for part of the year that keeps all but the insane from wanting to walk to their destination.
stouset 3y ago
> That's very elitist. No, it is a fact. That it doesn’t align with the choices you’ve made in your life doesn’t change that. > Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5. Tell me you’ve never been outside the US before without telling me you’ve never been outside the US before. Joking aside (there are plenty of other countries with transit as bad as the US), plenty of other countries have figured out how to make public transit and alternative forms of transit (bikes, scooters) widely practical. Many places have optimized themselves for car travel, and if we want any chance of a livable world 100 years from now, we need to start optimizing for a different reality. Yes, we will never get rid of cars entirely. But we must find a way to get rid of cars for the 95%+ of trips that are part of day to day life (groceries, errands, commuting). A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable planet. Deal with it, my kids aren’t ditching for Mars or TRAPPIST-1 or whatever.
- cbozeman 3y ago
  > A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable planet. No it isn't. We just haven't figured it out yet. Those aren't the same thing.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    They take up a lot of space and require a lot more energy to move around. Even if we get 100% electric vehicles with all clean power generation - it's still a massive toll on the environment. A car isn't a helicopter, they require reasonably good roads with high costs of maintenance(and a lot of other infrastructure to support roads). Also car dependent lifestyle means that population density drops, with less walkable places than ever.
- slothtrop 3y ago
  > A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable planet. There's no reason to believe this. Unsustainability is only ever a result of perpetually growing demand, or demand growing faster than technological innovation. Global population growth rate is projected to stagnate in 100 years, so it's a moot point, and from a purely engineering perspective, emissions are a solved problem. The real issue is that emission are poised to rise in the short-run because demand is growing so fast in east Asia (and to a lesser extent through immigration to the West). This is a near-term problem, unsustainability doesn't belong in the conversaiton. The question is really whether we want to weather that strain with current trajectory, or spend and implement policies to mitigate the climate effects during that period.
notatoad 3y ago
nothing about living in a city or riding a bike instead of driving a car is "elitist". elitism is using a vehicle that has an average annual ownership cost of $12000 and takes up a parking space everywhere you want to go.
- riversflow 3y ago
  > average annual ownership cost of $12000 Lots of people buy luxury cars, driving up that figure, so it hardly matters when we are talking about marginal utility for someone, shall we say, disadvantaged. Which I’m guessing you’ve never been? My annual cost of ownership on my car is like $2500. I can sleep in my car too, and store clothes and food securely in it. Oh and get on demand heat & A/C access. If you don’t have much, having a car is a lot.
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    In "tell me you're American without telling me you're American" we have "building urban sprawl and car dependency is great because you might lose your job to at-will employment and your home to medical bills and have no social safety nets and resort to living in your car and /then/ wouldn't it be shitty if you didn't have one?". Like, maybe there's a different ... way things could be? It can go with the thread on Signal where $338k/year was not much money, but the cost of SMS messages and cellular phonecalls was outrageously expensive.
    - riversflow 3y ago
      I never said urban sprawl was good, get outta here with that. Things could be different, but they aren’t. And it’s not like any of those things you mentioned are likely to change rapidly either. I speak to the present day reality, which is that cars serve a lot of people as a capital asset and they don’t have to cost 12k/year.
  - notatoad 3y ago
    >Which I’m guessing you’ve never been? i've been poor enough that i couldn't afford a car, so any "poor people need cars, not bikes and transit" argument feels a bit hollow to me. and the immediate assumption that i'm talking from a place of privilege rather than experience is pretty rude, tbh.
TheGRS 3y ago
I haven't ever put "living in a city" together with "elitist". Living in the suburbs away from the cacophony of the city, a 5 minute drive away from all your favorite chain stores and malls seems much more elitist to me.
- cbozeman 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - icy_deadposts 3y ago
    [flagged]
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
No it's just physics. Carrying around an extra several thousand pounds of steel will always be a burden on more than just the one doing it.
jpatt 3y ago
Globally, your stance is very elitist. Only about 18% of the world has a car. https://www.pd.com.au/blogs/how-many-cars-in-the-world/ https://www.pd.com.au/blogs/how-many-cars-in-the-world/ North America is already auto-dependent and EVs are an important piece of the puzzle for that region. Their point is that EVs won’t possibly work resource or cost-wise when that 82% inevitably gets richer and asks, “what about me?”
- thehappypm 3y ago
  I wouldn’t say elitist. I think different environments have different needs. The US, for example, has roughly 1/4th the population density of the E.U., 1/0th of India’s and Japan’s, 1/5th China’s. Maybe Europe and Japan can urbanize and get connected via HSR, but, the US is much sparser. Suburban houses with yards make a lot more sense; cramming into the cities and relying on public transportation just feels stupid to a lot of people.
bobajeff 3y ago
I also don't live in a city with useable mass transit either. Bus routes take far longer to get to a place than by car and there are no train or subway lines nearby. Every place I've ever lived you needed a car to get around. That said, I would love it if I could get around this place without the need of a car. I would love it if my shopping centers were beautiful walkable areas with little shops I could get to on foot. Traffic sucks, driving sucks and my shopping center is a bunch of big box retail and grocery stores that spread out around neverending road construction far away from where I live. I don't think things will ever get better either but eventually this common design pattern will severely screw us all over.
ska 3y ago
> No thanks. Also, some people like cars. Deal with it, i'm not ditching for an e-bike or whatever. I don't think it's really about taking away peoples choices, just mostly about policy impacts. Currently car ownership and sub/exurban housing are subsidized in various direct and indirect ways. If policies changed and other things were emphasized instead, you could still choose to live in the same way, it would just be more expensive.
- slothtrop 3y ago
  > I don't think it's really about taking away peoples choices OP of this comment tree is explicit that it is about taking away choice. But I think it should suffice to make the alternatives more attractive. People are open to renewables, but not a drastic reduction in their quality of life. We should not demand a reduction or stagnation in quality-of-life for developing countries either as it's inhumane. Ostensibly they would be just as interested in pursuing renewable tech if it can help them grow.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    Suburban sprawl is both ecologically and financially unsustainable, with city dwellers subsidizing suburban living.
    - slothtrop 3y ago
      Trivially resolved through zoning reform. Rhetoric surrounding "banning cars" will not deter sprawl or achieve anything of note, it will just be considered fringe fanaticism. > unsustainable The global population growth rate is going to stall, and by extension, cities will cease to grow. Sustainability is a moot point.
      - JAlexoid 3y ago
        > Rhetoric surrounding "banning cars" Which I never engaged in. Banning cars is nonsense and is counter productive. > The global population growth rate is going to stall If we give every person a car to drive every day, today - that's enough to make it unsustainable. That's the whole point. We don't even have to have any growth in population.
itsoktocry 3y ago
>Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5. Even in large urban areas it's tricky to get around past a certain time. I remember working unexpected shifts and later staring at closed metro stations, having to walk in the rain to get home. These conversations are difficult to have here. You get people from large metropolitan areas who have no clue how "the deplorables" live, making calls to "ban cars". "I can walk around and talk to my neighbours and it's so quiet!". Yeah, I have all that where I live, and I own two cars.
- macNchz 3y ago
  Having grown up in a rural place, I’d say the way infrastructure is built in America arguably serves the rural poor the worst. Totally dependent on cars to go anywhere, with effectively no choice but to spend a large portion of your income on a likely old and and unreliable vehicle, to get to a job that will happily fire you for being late if you have a problem with it. Once upon a time even quite small rural towns had actual shops, trains, even trams, that people could live nearby to, but we’ve mostly gotten rid of those.
parl_match 3y ago
> Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5. Have you been to the suburbs of Japan? Or France? Towns created before cars were invented. Lots of single family homes, and a smattering of small vehicles used for work. It can work, but we've built huge car-required cities and towns and lifestyles and it's a sunk cost fallacy. And it feels "normal" to us, but it's not. It's bad for the environment, and it's bad for us. Hours spent in a car is directly related to obesity. Exhaust fumes and tire particulate matter is directly related to asthma and cancer. Your car is killing you.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Right, I'm not sure exactly what it is, but car ownership in the US seems to have been subsidized. You should be allowed to have a car if you want and not be taxed unfairly for it, but it shouldn't be that almost every job basically requires one. And to get there, I don't think we have to ban things or restrict people's lives, just build new cities less around cars and let people choose that life if they want.
  - ryukafalz 3y ago
    > just build new cities less around cars and let people choose that life if they want. New cities aren't a good solution, they almost never work out. That's effectively ceding everything that's already been built to the automobile and telling people "if you don't like it, uproot your life and go somewhere else." I would rather see the places that were originally built without cars in mind return to prioritizing walking, cycling, and transit. Let the exurbs be the exurbs, sure, but let's have our old cities and inner ring suburbs not cater to cars so much. They weren't built for cars in the first place.
  - parl_match 3y ago
    > just build new cities less around cars and let people choose that life if they want We should modify existing cities with better transit and make them hostile to cars, and then offer excellent car transfer points. If you want to use the city, use the train.
KennyBlanken 3y ago
Over 80% of the US population lives in an densely populated area and RE-establishing public transit is not even remotely an insurmountable challenge logistically. The only thing standing in the way of mass transit are congressional representatives from rural areas representing counties that have less population than one square mile of Los Angeles.
CalRobert 3y ago
It's pretty elitist to make me pay for your parking in my city.
CrispyKerosene 3y ago
It sucks, but it doesn't have to be that way. Even small towns can be sufficiently served by viable public transit options. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

estebank 3y ago

You've identified a problem: public transport in some places sucks. But then veered away from the obvious solution: invest in it to make it not suck.

zzzeek 3y ago
throwing money at urban problems does not necessarily have a great track record, and NYCTA has had lots of issues with corruption when they do have money to spend. Id be pretty skeptical that giving them a lot of money would mean you can hop on a train in 5 minutes at 2 am, it wouldnt even be cost effective to run that many trains at odd hours. Cars are terrific for this use case, however. NYC cops have like a billion dollar budget and while they are great at protecting businesses in wealthy areas they are not very popular in lower income areas as they are both blase and overly brutal at the same time, their huge budget not having helped that aspect very much.
- estebank 3y ago
  Somehow the argument against more money for infrastructure is never levied against freeway expansions.
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    Haha, but it is though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds-v2-qyCc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds-v2-qyCc8 "Throwing Good Money After Bad Car Infrastructure - Wonderland Road" - on the road widening project of Wonderland Road in Toronto.
    - ryukafalz 3y ago
      It is in urbanist circles; it's not by mass media and by the elected officials who can actually do something about it.
- reocha 3y ago
  Cops and public transport are two completely different things.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  throwing money at the NYC subway seems to have a generally great track record (albeit one featuring less efficiency than throwing money at other global subway systems). NYC could not function without it.
  - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
    The 7 line extension cost over $3 billion dollars in 2023 terms to build 1.5 miles of track from Times Sq to Hudson Yards and build one new station there. I defy anyone to conclude this represented good value.
    - KennyBlanken 3y ago
      The NYC transit system costs $20BN/year to operate, serves a population of almost 9M people and pre pandemic had nearly 10 million passenger trips a day; currently 5M. Montana spends $1BN/year on roadways and receives another $3BN/year in federal funding and serves a population of 1M people. The NYC subways system moves five times the population of Montana every day and costs half as much per capita. Do go on about how subways are a waste of money.
      - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
        Subways are not a waste of money: throwing money at the NYC subway system under the current set of parameters is a waste of money. P.S. you're also comparing apples and oranges; you're only looking at the MTA operating budget; not the operating + capital budget which the Montana numbers represent.
    - tmnvix 3y ago
      It was probably good value for anyone that owned any surrounding property. Ideally the increase in property value should be captured by the public who made the investment - self funding effectively. But that's just the old LVT argument.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  NYC is one of the safest places in the US... and even with fairly poor mass transit system - it's still is incredibly good by American standards. I moved from NYC an hour north, to be more isolated than the "impersonal big cities". I barely know any of my neighbors - because there are no sidewalks and everyone is forced to drive for anything. Car dependence kills people, kills communities and reduces your QoL.
  - zzzeek 3y ago
    You should move back to the city, then. I moved out because I had enough of the crowds and awful mass transit and I'm good with it. The NYC cops were absolutely awful for us as well.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    NYC mass transit is poor? I've never lived there, but during my extended visits, it seemed like I could get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.
    - JAlexoid 3y ago
      Relative to less dense global cities - yes, it's poor. In American terms - it's probably one of the better ones.
cbozeman 3y ago
Public transit does not work in a place like Montana or Wyoming. Sorry. Too large, too sparsely populated. Same reason it won't work for most of Texas either. It's fine in Dallas or Austin, parts of Fort Worth... it doesn't scale to Lubbock or New Braunfels. A lot of people have no interest in living in your concrete jungle... myself included.
- Muromec 3y ago
  I though you are talking about a village with 200 residents, so I had to look it up and oops, it's quarter million city? You gotta be kidding.
  - ponector 3y ago
    Yes, that is funny to read. European cities with population less than 100k could have public transport and bicycle infrastructure while much bigger American city could not.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      There are American cities of less than 100k people that have public transport and bicycle infrastructure. However nobody knows about them.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  No one is asking you to live there or not have a vehicle. What makes it a problem is the financially unsustainable suburban sprawl(single family zoning laws or covenants with the same effect) and people's expectations of car owners being catered to primarily. I mean... why else would high density cities like Atlanta and DFW have massive X+Y lane interstates cut through the city? In so many places in the US it's straight up impossible to walk 1000ft.
  - moojd 3y ago
    > No one is asking you to live there or not have a vehicle. Several of the most upvoted comments in this very thread are advocating banning vehicles.

bobbylarrybobby 3y ago

The $20k car is not elitist but the $2k ebike is? Interesting.

epistasis 3y ago
It's always hilarious to me when people driving $60k vehicles ask me how much the ebike cost and say "that's expensive". The ebike costs less than they pay in insurance a year, much less maintenance, gas, etc. Some people have weird ideas about cars being "for regular people" while any money spent on a bicycle is a luxury.
- cbozeman 3y ago
  I can't carry four other people on my ebike, along with stuffing a minimum of one duffle bag per person, and usually being able to squeeze two in, along with a cooler for drinks, snacks, and sandwiches. My Telluride can do that though. Even if I could somehow fit all that shit onto an ebike, I wonder how long it and I would be able to make it before we give trying to go the 125 miles from Fort Worth to Possum Kingdom Lake... This site infuriates me sometimes at the complete and utter lack of understanding of most of the United States.
  - webdood90 3y ago
    > This site infuriates me sometimes at the complete and utter lack of understanding of most of the United States Most of the US in what capacity? Square miles? Because the majority of the population lives in Cities. I love reading comments like yours. All throughout this thread you've vehemently argued that your perspective is the right one. It's a reminder to me that close minded people like you actually exist! You're not here to discuss, you're here to argue. That's pretty unfortunate.
    - lotsoweiners 3y ago
      Saying the majority lives in cities is pretty BS though. They aren’t all living in walkable downtowns like Manhattan but rather are living in places like Houston, Phoenix, or Denver that have a few sq miles of what many would consider walkability, very spotty public transportation, and weather for part of the year that keeps all but the insane from wanting to walk to their destination.

stouset 3y ago

> That's very elitist. No, it is a fact. That it doesn’t align with the choices you’ve made in your life doesn’t change that. > Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5. Tell me you’ve never been outside the US before without telling me you’ve never been outside the US before. Joking aside (there are plenty of other countries with transit as bad as the US), plenty of other countries have figured out how to make public transit and alternative forms of transit (bikes, scooters) widely practical. Many places have optimized themselves for car travel, and if we want any chance of a livable world 100 years from now, we need to start optimizing for a different reality. Yes, we will never get rid of cars entirely. But we must find a way to get rid of cars for the 95%+ of trips that are part of day to day life (groceries, errands, commuting). A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable planet. Deal with it, my kids aren’t ditching for Mars or TRAPPIST-1 or whatever.

cbozeman 3y ago
> A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable planet. No it isn't. We just haven't figured it out yet. Those aren't the same thing.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  They take up a lot of space and require a lot more energy to move around. Even if we get 100% electric vehicles with all clean power generation - it's still a massive toll on the environment. A car isn't a helicopter, they require reasonably good roads with high costs of maintenance(and a lot of other infrastructure to support roads). Also car dependent lifestyle means that population density drops, with less walkable places than ever.
slothtrop 3y ago
> A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable planet. There's no reason to believe this. Unsustainability is only ever a result of perpetually growing demand, or demand growing faster than technological innovation. Global population growth rate is projected to stagnate in 100 years, so it's a moot point, and from a purely engineering perspective, emissions are a solved problem. The real issue is that emission are poised to rise in the short-run because demand is growing so fast in east Asia (and to a lesser extent through immigration to the West). This is a near-term problem, unsustainability doesn't belong in the conversaiton. The question is really whether we want to weather that strain with current trajectory, or spend and implement policies to mitigate the climate effects during that period.

notatoad 3y ago

nothing about living in a city or riding a bike instead of driving a car is "elitist". elitism is using a vehicle that has an average annual ownership cost of $12000 and takes up a parking space everywhere you want to go.

riversflow 3y ago
> average annual ownership cost of $12000 Lots of people buy luxury cars, driving up that figure, so it hardly matters when we are talking about marginal utility for someone, shall we say, disadvantaged. Which I’m guessing you’ve never been? My annual cost of ownership on my car is like $2500. I can sleep in my car too, and store clothes and food securely in it. Oh and get on demand heat & A/C access. If you don’t have much, having a car is a lot.
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  In "tell me you're American without telling me you're American" we have "building urban sprawl and car dependency is great because you might lose your job to at-will employment and your home to medical bills and have no social safety nets and resort to living in your car and /then/ wouldn't it be shitty if you didn't have one?". Like, maybe there's a different ... way things could be? It can go with the thread on Signal where $338k/year was not much money, but the cost of SMS messages and cellular phonecalls was outrageously expensive.
  - riversflow 3y ago
    I never said urban sprawl was good, get outta here with that. Things could be different, but they aren’t. And it’s not like any of those things you mentioned are likely to change rapidly either. I speak to the present day reality, which is that cars serve a lot of people as a capital asset and they don’t have to cost 12k/year.
- notatoad 3y ago
  >Which I’m guessing you’ve never been? i've been poor enough that i couldn't afford a car, so any "poor people need cars, not bikes and transit" argument feels a bit hollow to me. and the immediate assumption that i'm talking from a place of privilege rather than experience is pretty rude, tbh.

TheGRS 3y ago

I haven't ever put "living in a city" together with "elitist". Living in the suburbs away from the cacophony of the city, a 5 minute drive away from all your favorite chain stores and malls seems much more elitist to me.

cbozeman 3y ago
[flagged]
- icy_deadposts 3y ago
  [flagged]

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

No it's just physics. Carrying around an extra several thousand pounds of steel will always be a burden on more than just the one doing it.

jpatt 3y ago

Globally, your stance is very elitist. Only about 18% of the world has a car. https://www.pd.com.au/blogs/how-many-cars-in-the-world/ https://www.pd.com.au/blogs/how-many-cars-in-the-world/ North America is already auto-dependent and EVs are an important piece of the puzzle for that region. Their point is that EVs won’t possibly work resource or cost-wise when that 82% inevitably gets richer and asks, “what about me?”

thehappypm 3y ago
I wouldn’t say elitist. I think different environments have different needs. The US, for example, has roughly 1/4th the population density of the E.U., 1/0th of India’s and Japan’s, 1/5th China’s. Maybe Europe and Japan can urbanize and get connected via HSR, but, the US is much sparser. Suburban houses with yards make a lot more sense; cramming into the cities and relying on public transportation just feels stupid to a lot of people.

bobajeff 3y ago

I also don't live in a city with useable mass transit either. Bus routes take far longer to get to a place than by car and there are no train or subway lines nearby. Every place I've ever lived you needed a car to get around. That said, I would love it if I could get around this place without the need of a car. I would love it if my shopping centers were beautiful walkable areas with little shops I could get to on foot. Traffic sucks, driving sucks and my shopping center is a bunch of big box retail and grocery stores that spread out around neverending road construction far away from where I live. I don't think things will ever get better either but eventually this common design pattern will severely screw us all over.

ska 3y ago

> No thanks. Also, some people like cars. Deal with it, i'm not ditching for an e-bike or whatever. I don't think it's really about taking away peoples choices, just mostly about policy impacts. Currently car ownership and sub/exurban housing are subsidized in various direct and indirect ways. If policies changed and other things were emphasized instead, you could still choose to live in the same way, it would just be more expensive.

slothtrop 3y ago
> I don't think it's really about taking away peoples choices OP of this comment tree is explicit that it is about taking away choice. But I think it should suffice to make the alternatives more attractive. People are open to renewables, but not a drastic reduction in their quality of life. We should not demand a reduction or stagnation in quality-of-life for developing countries either as it's inhumane. Ostensibly they would be just as interested in pursuing renewable tech if it can help them grow.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  Suburban sprawl is both ecologically and financially unsustainable, with city dwellers subsidizing suburban living.
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    Trivially resolved through zoning reform. Rhetoric surrounding "banning cars" will not deter sprawl or achieve anything of note, it will just be considered fringe fanaticism. > unsustainable The global population growth rate is going to stall, and by extension, cities will cease to grow. Sustainability is a moot point.
    - JAlexoid 3y ago
      > Rhetoric surrounding "banning cars" Which I never engaged in. Banning cars is nonsense and is counter productive. > The global population growth rate is going to stall If we give every person a car to drive every day, today - that's enough to make it unsustainable. That's the whole point. We don't even have to have any growth in population.

itsoktocry 3y ago

>Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5. Even in large urban areas it's tricky to get around past a certain time. I remember working unexpected shifts and later staring at closed metro stations, having to walk in the rain to get home. These conversations are difficult to have here. You get people from large metropolitan areas who have no clue how "the deplorables" live, making calls to "ban cars". "I can walk around and talk to my neighbours and it's so quiet!". Yeah, I have all that where I live, and I own two cars.

macNchz 3y ago
Having grown up in a rural place, I’d say the way infrastructure is built in America arguably serves the rural poor the worst. Totally dependent on cars to go anywhere, with effectively no choice but to spend a large portion of your income on a likely old and and unreliable vehicle, to get to a job that will happily fire you for being late if you have a problem with it. Once upon a time even quite small rural towns had actual shops, trains, even trams, that people could live nearby to, but we’ve mostly gotten rid of those.

parl_match 3y ago

> Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5. Have you been to the suburbs of Japan? Or France? Towns created before cars were invented. Lots of single family homes, and a smattering of small vehicles used for work. It can work, but we've built huge car-required cities and towns and lifestyles and it's a sunk cost fallacy. And it feels "normal" to us, but it's not. It's bad for the environment, and it's bad for us. Hours spent in a car is directly related to obesity. Exhaust fumes and tire particulate matter is directly related to asthma and cancer. Your car is killing you.

hot_gril 3y ago
Right, I'm not sure exactly what it is, but car ownership in the US seems to have been subsidized. You should be allowed to have a car if you want and not be taxed unfairly for it, but it shouldn't be that almost every job basically requires one. And to get there, I don't think we have to ban things or restrict people's lives, just build new cities less around cars and let people choose that life if they want.
- ryukafalz 3y ago
  > just build new cities less around cars and let people choose that life if they want. New cities aren't a good solution, they almost never work out. That's effectively ceding everything that's already been built to the automobile and telling people "if you don't like it, uproot your life and go somewhere else." I would rather see the places that were originally built without cars in mind return to prioritizing walking, cycling, and transit. Let the exurbs be the exurbs, sure, but let's have our old cities and inner ring suburbs not cater to cars so much. They weren't built for cars in the first place.
- parl_match 3y ago
  > just build new cities less around cars and let people choose that life if they want We should modify existing cities with better transit and make them hostile to cars, and then offer excellent car transfer points. If you want to use the city, use the train.

KennyBlanken 3y ago

Over 80% of the US population lives in an densely populated area and RE-establishing public transit is not even remotely an insurmountable challenge logistically. The only thing standing in the way of mass transit are congressional representatives from rural areas representing counties that have less population than one square mile of Los Angeles.

CalRobert 3y ago

It's pretty elitist to make me pay for your parking in my city.

CrispyKerosene 3y ago

It sucks, but it doesn't have to be that way. Even small towns can be sufficiently served by viable public transit options. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg