7 ms·

I'd argue that cars are not more convenient in dense cities like New York. You have to find parking, you have to navigate traffic (pedestrian, car, and e-bike),

I'd argue that cars are not more convenient in dense cities like New York. You have to find parking, you have to navigate traffic (pedestrian, car, and e-bike), and then you have to find gas stations. With public transportation, you don't need any of that. The only inconvenience is that sometimes where you're going is a bit of a walk. Car insurance is expensive, because cars cause a lot of damage and are easy to get damaged.

bko 1y ago
Right, because New York is not car-centric (bike lanes, very dense, few gas stations) "Bit of a walk" is a nice way of saying it but in reality it means you are very limited with things like shopping. You're kind of stuck with the nearest walkable grocer. If you're luck enough to live by a cheap ones like Trader Joes, they are ridiculously crowded so you're paying in a different form. Or you can try your luck with Bodegas but they're often sell expired food, are overpriced and rarely have anything fresh . Then you're stuck with how much you can carry or try to use one of those granny pushers. Kids could be very difficult to wrangle as well and there are plenty of unpleasant things you have to explain to them or ignore. It's very dehumanizing My point is that having a car is nice and I want people to have nice things. They don't belong everywhere, like NY. But overall I don't understand this push to public transportation for the sake of public transportation.
- wpm 1y ago
  > ut overall I don't understand this push to public transportation for the sake of public transportation. Then you maybe haven't spent too long thinking about it. Climate change is a big one. Microplastics from tire wear. Asthma rates in children. Obesity rates. Etc etc etc. Car centric design makes us poorer, fatter, less healthy. It makes our cities and towns poorer, less resilient, and uglier. I can go on.
  - alexlesuper 1y ago
    Not mention that less cars on the road means improved travel times for those that are obligated to use their car.
  - autoexec 1y ago
    I'm not sure "lose your freedoms because it's better for you and less ugly" is a winning pitch. It'd be better to make sure that people can still access the things they want conveniently while minimizing the harms. I think it's a good thing to improve and promote public transportation by making them the more attractive option rather than just punish drivers and restrict their options until they have no choice but to settle for something less than what they have.
    - consteval 1y ago
      The idea that driving a car increases freedoms is a uniquely American ideal. It doesn’t, it does the opposite. It pushes everything further away which means you no longer have the freedom to not have a car. It, quite literally, redesigns our cities to become dependent on them. It’s like heroin. Sure, it feels good, but at what cost? How do we stop now?
      - bko 1y ago
        By this logic, not being in a wheelchair doesn't make things easier. It pushes accessibility down. Entire cities are redesigned so that you're dependent on your legs. Yes, society should help those in wheelchairs, but shouldn't we aim to give everyone use of their legs?
        consteval 1y ago
        Cars are not your legs, the analogy doesn't work. Cars are a good that you buy in order to live your life. If you could also live your life without a car, that would be better for you. Yes, you, personally. In fact everyone who drives.
        autoexec 1y ago
        > Cars are not your legs, the analogy doesn't work. Cars are a good that you buy in order to live your life. You might not know what an analogy is. If cars actually were legs that wouldn't have even been an analogy would it? > If you could also live your life without a car, that would be better for you. Yes, you, personally. In fact everyone who drives. If people could live without cars (which is to say that they were able to do everything they can do currently with cars, but without them) then yes, everyone would be better off because they'd still have all the benefits having a car gets them (the ability to quickly get to where they need to go with the things they need) without any of the downsides (costs, maintenance, pollution, giant parking lots etc) The exact same thing is true for legs though. If we could all live without legs and not miss them because we floated around or something, we'd also have all the benefits with none of the downsides (no leg diseases/injuries, no knee replacements, shorter pants, etc) but that isn't terribly helpful because right now most people in the US can't live without a car or their legs. No matter how much we might wish we didn't need our legs, as long as people still have and need their legs, we should probably design our cities to accommodate those legs. Even once we have a working alternative for legs, we should probably still design our cities to accommodate legs until the majority of people have been able to transition to not having legs. Right now most people in the US don't have an option to replace their legs with something else that works just as well for them, just like they don't have an option to replace their cars with something that works just as well for them. We should probably fix that situation before we start punishing people for having legs and/or cars.
  - bko 1y ago
    So make cars pollute less Figure out how to filter microplastics from our food and water Figure out what's causing asthma in children Not sure how obesity is related. Maybe improve the food supply? A lot of these are solved with electric cars which are increasingly more competitive. Why force people to regress towards a worse product rather than address these technical issues?
    - stouset 1y ago
      Please, please do yourself a favor and visit places that aren’t the USA. Cars are the worse product. They are extremely energy inefficient for moving a human from A to B, even if powered by electricity. They are vastly more expensive than alternatives, even if you threw caution to the wind and allowed for the cheapest possible construction. They pose astronomical externalities in the form of more and bigger roads, more and bigger road maintenance, parking, and injury and fatality through collisions. They have utility, but the only reason they even remotely compete against bicycles and trains and scooters and buses and walking is because you’ve built 95% of the things you might ever want to go to ten miles apart.
      - autoexec 1y ago
        Cars are a worse product in some ways and in a very limited number of situations, but cars are a much better product in many situations including some where public transportation is not a solution at all. The public transportation we have now is an objectively worse experience in the vast majority of places where it's available for almost every situation. Public transportation can be improved to be better than it is and cities can be redesigned to make using public transportation easier, but until both of those things start happening, people will resist replacing all the good things cars offer with something that is much worse for them. When car companies wanted to sell cars, they changed the roads and cities. The more they changed the roads and cities to make cars more attractive the more cars they sold. Cars already solved a lot of the problems people had, but car companies went even further to create many new problems that only their cars would solve. Making life worse for people without cars just to increase car sales was a dick move made by a bunch of assholes. Why is everyone so willing to make life worse for people with cars to sell public transportation now? What we have now are people selling public transportation without bothering to change the roads and cities. There is no priority on making public transportation more attractive, instead the attention is all on how to make cars more painful to use. Nobody has worked out how to get public transportation to solve the problems that only cars do currently. Nobody has addressed the problems that cause people to avoid public transportation. The entire attitude is basically "We're going to keep punishing car drivers until they put up with something far worse than what they have now so that maybe eventually we can have something better". All the discussion is "take away parking" and "narrow the streets" and "charge drivers more money" but nobody is saying "We've made our public transportation systems clean, safe, pleasant, and dependable" or "No one ever has to wait more than 7 minutes at a station" or "We've expanded service to new areas and put in stations every three blocks" It's true that in an ideal world we would be far less dependent on cars, but we'll never get there without making the alternatives more attractive and until that happens, punishing drivers is only going to piss people off and rightly so. It's a dick move.
autoexec 1y ago
> I'd argue that cars are not more convenient in dense cities like New York. I'd argue that if you were correct people would have already been using alternatives and there'd have been no need to punish people for driving. When you give people a better option they take it. NYC could have improved alternatives to make them more attractive, but they choose to make driving worse instead forcing people who can't afford it to use less convenient ways to get around.
- ARandumGuy 1y ago
  Humans are not perfectly rational actors, and will often make the "wrong" decision when better options are available. Especially when a given decision may not be bad individually, but adds up when a bunch of people make the same decision. In these cases, you have to not only incentivize the behavior you want, but disincentivize the behavior you don't want.
- mitthrowaway2 1y ago
  People were using alternatives, but you still need to penalize driving because it's a multiagent system. Here's why. The convenience of driving depends on traffic. If you're the only car on the road then it's very convenient. In gridlock, it's very inconvenient (but also takes the convenience of buses down with it). So you reach some equilibrium of traffic levels where the marginal person opts for walking / subway rather than driving in all that traffic. But if you could magically reduce traffic, then driving becomes the better option and people take it. If you want to sustain an equilibrium of lower traffic, you need to add a penalty to driving to stabilize the convenience of being the marginal driver in that equilibrium. There are knock-on benefits to doing so, including that it makes alternatives to driving such as busses more effective.
  - autoexec 1y ago
    It says a lot that most of people using public transportation are the ones who have no other choice. They can't afford a car and the associated costs. If they had the ability to not use public transportation they wouldn't use it. Road congestion is only one factor. If you ignore all the other things that keep people from wanting to use public transportation then punishing drivers is just going to piss people off. People want to do what works best for them. Make public transportation work best for them and they'll use it no matter how deserted the streets are. Better yet, as traffic dies down, roads and parking lots can be reclaimed and nobody will care. Start closing roads and parking lots without solving the problems public transportation has, and people will be upset.

bko 1y ago

Right, because New York is not car-centric (bike lanes, very dense, few gas stations) "Bit of a walk" is a nice way of saying it but in reality it means you are very limited with things like shopping. You're kind of stuck with the nearest walkable grocer. If you're luck enough to live by a cheap ones like Trader Joes, they are ridiculously crowded so you're paying in a different form. Or you can try your luck with Bodegas but they're often sell expired food, are overpriced and rarely have anything fresh . Then you're stuck with how much you can carry or try to use one of those granny pushers. Kids could be very difficult to wrangle as well and there are plenty of unpleasant things you have to explain to them or ignore. It's very dehumanizing My point is that having a car is nice and I want people to have nice things. They don't belong everywhere, like NY. But overall I don't understand this push to public transportation for the sake of public transportation.

wpm 1y ago
> ut overall I don't understand this push to public transportation for the sake of public transportation. Then you maybe haven't spent too long thinking about it. Climate change is a big one. Microplastics from tire wear. Asthma rates in children. Obesity rates. Etc etc etc. Car centric design makes us poorer, fatter, less healthy. It makes our cities and towns poorer, less resilient, and uglier. I can go on.
- alexlesuper 1y ago
  Not mention that less cars on the road means improved travel times for those that are obligated to use their car.
- autoexec 1y ago
  I'm not sure "lose your freedoms because it's better for you and less ugly" is a winning pitch. It'd be better to make sure that people can still access the things they want conveniently while minimizing the harms. I think it's a good thing to improve and promote public transportation by making them the more attractive option rather than just punish drivers and restrict their options until they have no choice but to settle for something less than what they have.
  - consteval 1y ago
    The idea that driving a car increases freedoms is a uniquely American ideal. It doesn’t, it does the opposite. It pushes everything further away which means you no longer have the freedom to not have a car. It, quite literally, redesigns our cities to become dependent on them. It’s like heroin. Sure, it feels good, but at what cost? How do we stop now?
    - bko 1y ago
      By this logic, not being in a wheelchair doesn't make things easier. It pushes accessibility down. Entire cities are redesigned so that you're dependent on your legs. Yes, society should help those in wheelchairs, but shouldn't we aim to give everyone use of their legs?
      - consteval 1y ago
        Cars are not your legs, the analogy doesn't work. Cars are a good that you buy in order to live your life. If you could also live your life without a car, that would be better for you. Yes, you, personally. In fact everyone who drives.
        autoexec 1y ago
        > Cars are not your legs, the analogy doesn't work. Cars are a good that you buy in order to live your life. You might not know what an analogy is. If cars actually were legs that wouldn't have even been an analogy would it? > If you could also live your life without a car, that would be better for you. Yes, you, personally. In fact everyone who drives. If people could live without cars (which is to say that they were able to do everything they can do currently with cars, but without them) then yes, everyone would be better off because they'd still have all the benefits having a car gets them (the ability to quickly get to where they need to go with the things they need) without any of the downsides (costs, maintenance, pollution, giant parking lots etc) The exact same thing is true for legs though. If we could all live without legs and not miss them because we floated around or something, we'd also have all the benefits with none of the downsides (no leg diseases/injuries, no knee replacements, shorter pants, etc) but that isn't terribly helpful because right now most people in the US can't live without a car or their legs. No matter how much we might wish we didn't need our legs, as long as people still have and need their legs, we should probably design our cities to accommodate those legs. Even once we have a working alternative for legs, we should probably still design our cities to accommodate legs until the majority of people have been able to transition to not having legs. Right now most people in the US don't have an option to replace their legs with something else that works just as well for them, just like they don't have an option to replace their cars with something that works just as well for them. We should probably fix that situation before we start punishing people for having legs and/or cars.
- bko 1y ago
  So make cars pollute less Figure out how to filter microplastics from our food and water Figure out what's causing asthma in children Not sure how obesity is related. Maybe improve the food supply? A lot of these are solved with electric cars which are increasingly more competitive. Why force people to regress towards a worse product rather than address these technical issues?
  - stouset 1y ago
    Please, please do yourself a favor and visit places that aren’t the USA. Cars are the worse product. They are extremely energy inefficient for moving a human from A to B, even if powered by electricity. They are vastly more expensive than alternatives, even if you threw caution to the wind and allowed for the cheapest possible construction. They pose astronomical externalities in the form of more and bigger roads, more and bigger road maintenance, parking, and injury and fatality through collisions. They have utility, but the only reason they even remotely compete against bicycles and trains and scooters and buses and walking is because you’ve built 95% of the things you might ever want to go to ten miles apart.
    - autoexec 1y ago
      Cars are a worse product in some ways and in a very limited number of situations, but cars are a much better product in many situations including some where public transportation is not a solution at all. The public transportation we have now is an objectively worse experience in the vast majority of places where it's available for almost every situation. Public transportation can be improved to be better than it is and cities can be redesigned to make using public transportation easier, but until both of those things start happening, people will resist replacing all the good things cars offer with something that is much worse for them. When car companies wanted to sell cars, they changed the roads and cities. The more they changed the roads and cities to make cars more attractive the more cars they sold. Cars already solved a lot of the problems people had, but car companies went even further to create many new problems that only their cars would solve. Making life worse for people without cars just to increase car sales was a dick move made by a bunch of assholes. Why is everyone so willing to make life worse for people with cars to sell public transportation now? What we have now are people selling public transportation without bothering to change the roads and cities. There is no priority on making public transportation more attractive, instead the attention is all on how to make cars more painful to use. Nobody has worked out how to get public transportation to solve the problems that only cars do currently. Nobody has addressed the problems that cause people to avoid public transportation. The entire attitude is basically "We're going to keep punishing car drivers until they put up with something far worse than what they have now so that maybe eventually we can have something better". All the discussion is "take away parking" and "narrow the streets" and "charge drivers more money" but nobody is saying "We've made our public transportation systems clean, safe, pleasant, and dependable" or "No one ever has to wait more than 7 minutes at a station" or "We've expanded service to new areas and put in stations every three blocks" It's true that in an ideal world we would be far less dependent on cars, but we'll never get there without making the alternatives more attractive and until that happens, punishing drivers is only going to piss people off and rightly so. It's a dick move.

autoexec 1y ago

> I'd argue that cars are not more convenient in dense cities like New York. I'd argue that if you were correct people would have already been using alternatives and there'd have been no need to punish people for driving. When you give people a better option they take it. NYC could have improved alternatives to make them more attractive, but they choose to make driving worse instead forcing people who can't afford it to use less convenient ways to get around.

ARandumGuy 1y ago
Humans are not perfectly rational actors, and will often make the "wrong" decision when better options are available. Especially when a given decision may not be bad individually, but adds up when a bunch of people make the same decision. In these cases, you have to not only incentivize the behavior you want, but disincentivize the behavior you don't want.
mitthrowaway2 1y ago
People were using alternatives, but you still need to penalize driving because it's a multiagent system. Here's why. The convenience of driving depends on traffic. If you're the only car on the road then it's very convenient. In gridlock, it's very inconvenient (but also takes the convenience of buses down with it). So you reach some equilibrium of traffic levels where the marginal person opts for walking / subway rather than driving in all that traffic. But if you could magically reduce traffic, then driving becomes the better option and people take it. If you want to sustain an equilibrium of lower traffic, you need to add a penalty to driving to stabilize the convenience of being the marginal driver in that equilibrium. There are knock-on benefits to doing so, including that it makes alternatives to driving such as busses more effective.
- autoexec 1y ago
  It says a lot that most of people using public transportation are the ones who have no other choice. They can't afford a car and the associated costs. If they had the ability to not use public transportation they wouldn't use it. Road congestion is only one factor. If you ignore all the other things that keep people from wanting to use public transportation then punishing drivers is just going to piss people off. People want to do what works best for them. Make public transportation work best for them and they'll use it no matter how deserted the streets are. Better yet, as traffic dies down, roads and parking lots can be reclaimed and nobody will care. Start closing roads and parking lots without solving the problems public transportation has, and people will be upset.