It's interesting how people's positions can be so different. As a European who has lived in two (european) countries with good and affordable transport, I've always been a happy public transport user... until a couple of years ago, that is. Much of the transport is now filled with unpleasant people, dirt, delays, etc which paired with the insane prices of housing in the "walkable" parts of cities, has made me 100% invested in the myth of motorized freedom.
The car is clearly not the best way to navigate a dense city. It is impractical to have, say, tower block apartments and also have a car for each resident. It is unreasonable to build enough parking for peak time around every destination that anyone might want to go to.
On the flip side - not everyone wants to live in a dense city, and people's opinions on this change throughout their lives. It was profit maximising and also a lot of fun for me to live in the inner city in my early to mid 20's. Now that I can afford to not maximally push my career I prefer the outer parts of the city / more rural areas, and that's where the car shines.
When I lived in a major city, I went 10 years without owning a car. Should I for whatever reason need a car, I could rent one. But other than that, public transportation, walking, and biking for me. Hell, I often preferred public transportation over a car.
But as soon as I moved back home, a rural area, a car has more or less become a life necessity. I simply can't imagine living out in rural nowhere without a car, it would be such a hassle. Where I live a bus goes 3 times a day to the neighboring towns, that's it.
It really depends on where you live, and what your logistical situation looks like.
I’m curious to see how the author would react when it is two miles one-way to the crappy grocery store and eight miles to the good one.
And there is a bus shows up about once every four hours.
While cities can do a lot to improve the non-car experience, there’s a whole world outside those cities which would become inaccessible without a car. These are generally the “affordable” places to live in order to work in the city.
Focus on improving where you live, I do, but when you live in a city, recognize that improvements need to take into account those who don’t live there. The city is where they work, go to school, shop, and often interact with government functions.
Getting rid of dumb laws I can totally get behind as someone who walks daily.
You only need to move a bit towards suburbia/countryside to create your deep disbelief in public transport. Cars are everywhere, for a reason.
Public transport is great in theory only. With actual human societies - maybe the western ones, that is, except China/Japan - it just doesn't work. Corruption, laziness, bureaucracy, lack of proper planning and security makes the creation and maintenance of these projects unsustainable and so much worse compared to personal transport. This only isn't true for million+ metropolises due to physical constrains.
You may frown at the traffic jams with SUVs having a single driver, but building additional highways is easily doable around the world, while any sort of mass transit infrastructure projects seem to take decades, billions, while still end up underwhelming - if not instantly, then after the machinery ages or maintainers change.
> In the early 2000s, sitting for a driver’s license was seen as a near-universal rite of passage. By 2020, Generation Z teens were significantly less likely to get their licenses and later, when they do, it's driven by necessity rather than aspiration.
I feel like this is a naive take, and making some assumptions that may not be true.
I feel like this has less to do with preferring other modes of transportation over driving, as much as it has to do with not wanting/needing to go anywhere, particularly outside of the city. You can do most things without even needing to leave home, especially when you’re young.
You don’t need to meet in person with your friends to socialize. You can text, use social media, play only games, etc.
My young adult children both have licenses, but they have found it hard to get their friends to want to hang out. They’d rather stay home and stay on their devices.
I've lost a lot of enthusiasm about close-range public transport. In Vienna, bicycles get you nearly every twice as fast as public transport, and mostly about as fast as cars, depending on your destination. Bikes are about four times cheaper as public transport too.
Public transport ist great to connect cities, and perhaps districts. Beyound that, it quickly hits diminishing returns. It's prohibitly expensive to connect at a city block level, and even more expensive to connect rural towns. And Austria recently started doing very odd things. We are now building train stations in the middle of nowhere, not connected to any town. They are not meant to become new city centers, they are meant to be accessed via cars. They are useless for car-free people, and people with cars almost exclusively continue to commute the entire way by car.
In any case, the Netherlands is where I really got a sense of true mobility-freedom. You can get absolutely everywhere cheaply, safely and comfortably by bicycle. I've never before experienced such relaxing commutes as cycling along rivers and through meadows to work, then taking a detour through woods and parks on the way back home.
> We are now building train stations in the middle of nowhere, not connected to any town. They are not meant to become new city centers, they are meant to be accessed via cars. They are useless for car-free people, and people with cars almost exclusively continue to commute the entire way by car.
Huh, that's interesting; those sorts of park-and-ride facilities tend to be quite popular in many places (though, sometimes too popular, of course; they fill up).
They're a slightly awkward form of infrastructure, in that they have a very specific usership at which they work; if no-one uses them, they're pointless and expensive, but if too many people use them, they're a bit of a disaster, and can cause local congestion.
In addition to what we see in the article, we've started to see the enshittification with monthly subscriptions to unlock more power or heated seats. The more this happens, the less likely I am to buy a car. A car is not freedom. It's a requirement, a loan, a monthly payment, an unexpected repair bill waiting to happen, and increasingly, a subscription fee.
Your argument makes sense if you’re talking about dense urban centers, but it doesn’t reflect the reality of millions of people who live outside of them. If you had to walk 4 miles to school every day, you would understand why a car means freedom. If the closest grocery store was 15 miles away, you would understand why a car means freedom. If you ever had to drive through a snowstorm just to get to work, you would understand why a car means freedom. If you had to take your sick child or elderly parent to the hospital in the middle of the night, you would understand why a car means freedom. If you had to balance two jobs in towns unreachable by public transit, you would understand why a car means freedom.
For millions of people, a car isn’t a trap or a luxur. It’s survival, opportunity, and dignity. Cities may be able to rethink their dependence on cars, but for everyone else, the car is still the bridge to basic participation in life.
Even in Europe as soon as you spend time outside the big cities and that you don't have heavy/bug stuff to move around, the car is pretty much mandatory (except maybe the Netherlands/Belgium?).
I also noticed that the gen z is less interested in having a car, but as far as I can see it's more a shift of attitude about independence and a lot also because it's more expensive now to have a car.
personal transportation is never going away, and insisting on what the title says will cause violence in a lot of places
does it have to be a smoke and CO² spewing 6500lb
machine going 100mph,no, there are 1.4 billion cars, with billions more personal vehicles, throw in bikes and boats, airplanes, and it's one for every two people, unless you are on the moon, and then there are three cars, but no people, my point bieng, the title is realy just trolling/click bait/virtue signaling,politics, there is no realistic possibility of eliminating cars.
personaly my life has been split, between living with cars/vans/trucks/etc, and walking/biking/bussing/trains and I cant imagine giving up ANY mode of transport
In central London where I live car use has definitely been falling largely due to public policy blocking off streets and removing parking and will take another step when they pedestrianise Oxford Street and lower Regent Street (https://youtu.be/NvJ6R-YHD1w). I think it's largely nicer as a result - more walking and cycling.
I am 63. As I look at my future, "freedom" and "walking" look more and more distant from each other.
My wife has a handicapped tag. Freedom for her doesn't look like walking.
My mother in law is over 80, and she had polio. One leg is not fully functional. Freedom for her doesn't look like walking.
My son-in-law has something that looks a lot like long covid (not diagnosed, so I can't say with certainty). Freedom for him doesn't look like walking.
Yeah, I know, everyone I mentioned is an exception. But the point is, there are a lot of exceptions. Not just rural people (who have too far to go), but also the old, the temporarily or permanently ill, the handicapped. If you live long enough, you will probably become one.
So, it's fine to want a car-less future, but recognize that it's just less cars, not no cars. Some of us legitimately need them for our freedom.
More anti-car propaganda. Cars are in fact the ultimate form of mobility. Citizens being able to travel long distances with cargo quickly, privately, and in an affordable way is a nightmare for wannabe totalitarians.
Author here. Having read the comments let me clarify that I'm not advocating for a world devoid of cars. I'd like that cars could be an option not a must. I totally see that cars are here to stay especially where really needed. But who decides when they are really needed? The owner of course! However, I think that we could perhaps shape our lives for walking/cycling and incentivize public transport whenever possible.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 48.4 ms ] threadThat's an interesting way to look at compressed horse shit with streams of human waste running over the top of it.
Bear in mind the invention of sidewalks predates the automobile by thousands of years.
The car is clearly not the best way to navigate a dense city. It is impractical to have, say, tower block apartments and also have a car for each resident. It is unreasonable to build enough parking for peak time around every destination that anyone might want to go to.
On the flip side - not everyone wants to live in a dense city, and people's opinions on this change throughout their lives. It was profit maximising and also a lot of fun for me to live in the inner city in my early to mid 20's. Now that I can afford to not maximally push my career I prefer the outer parts of the city / more rural areas, and that's where the car shines.
When I lived in a major city, I went 10 years without owning a car. Should I for whatever reason need a car, I could rent one. But other than that, public transportation, walking, and biking for me. Hell, I often preferred public transportation over a car.
But as soon as I moved back home, a rural area, a car has more or less become a life necessity. I simply can't imagine living out in rural nowhere without a car, it would be such a hassle. Where I live a bus goes 3 times a day to the neighboring towns, that's it.
It really depends on where you live, and what your logistical situation looks like.
And there is a bus shows up about once every four hours.
While cities can do a lot to improve the non-car experience, there’s a whole world outside those cities which would become inaccessible without a car. These are generally the “affordable” places to live in order to work in the city.
Focus on improving where you live, I do, but when you live in a city, recognize that improvements need to take into account those who don’t live there. The city is where they work, go to school, shop, and often interact with government functions.
Getting rid of dumb laws I can totally get behind as someone who walks daily.
Public transport is great in theory only. With actual human societies - maybe the western ones, that is, except China/Japan - it just doesn't work. Corruption, laziness, bureaucracy, lack of proper planning and security makes the creation and maintenance of these projects unsustainable and so much worse compared to personal transport. This only isn't true for million+ metropolises due to physical constrains.
You may frown at the traffic jams with SUVs having a single driver, but building additional highways is easily doable around the world, while any sort of mass transit infrastructure projects seem to take decades, billions, while still end up underwhelming - if not instantly, then after the machinery ages or maintainers change.
Just one more lane, bro.
I feel like this is a naive take, and making some assumptions that may not be true.
I feel like this has less to do with preferring other modes of transportation over driving, as much as it has to do with not wanting/needing to go anywhere, particularly outside of the city. You can do most things without even needing to leave home, especially when you’re young.
You don’t need to meet in person with your friends to socialize. You can text, use social media, play only games, etc.
My young adult children both have licenses, but they have found it hard to get their friends to want to hang out. They’d rather stay home and stay on their devices.
Public transport ist great to connect cities, and perhaps districts. Beyound that, it quickly hits diminishing returns. It's prohibitly expensive to connect at a city block level, and even more expensive to connect rural towns. And Austria recently started doing very odd things. We are now building train stations in the middle of nowhere, not connected to any town. They are not meant to become new city centers, they are meant to be accessed via cars. They are useless for car-free people, and people with cars almost exclusively continue to commute the entire way by car.
In any case, the Netherlands is where I really got a sense of true mobility-freedom. You can get absolutely everywhere cheaply, safely and comfortably by bicycle. I've never before experienced such relaxing commutes as cycling along rivers and through meadows to work, then taking a detour through woods and parks on the way back home.
Huh, that's interesting; those sorts of park-and-ride facilities tend to be quite popular in many places (though, sometimes too popular, of course; they fill up).
They're a slightly awkward form of infrastructure, in that they have a very specific usership at which they work; if no-one uses them, they're pointless and expensive, but if too many people use them, they're a bit of a disaster, and can cause local congestion.
For millions of people, a car isn’t a trap or a luxur. It’s survival, opportunity, and dignity. Cities may be able to rethink their dependence on cars, but for everyone else, the car is still the bridge to basic participation in life.
I also noticed that the gen z is less interested in having a car, but as far as I can see it's more a shift of attitude about independence and a lot also because it's more expensive now to have a car.
My wife has a handicapped tag. Freedom for her doesn't look like walking.
My mother in law is over 80, and she had polio. One leg is not fully functional. Freedom for her doesn't look like walking.
My son-in-law has something that looks a lot like long covid (not diagnosed, so I can't say with certainty). Freedom for him doesn't look like walking.
Yeah, I know, everyone I mentioned is an exception. But the point is, there are a lot of exceptions. Not just rural people (who have too far to go), but also the old, the temporarily or permanently ill, the handicapped. If you live long enough, you will probably become one.
So, it's fine to want a car-less future, but recognize that it's just less cars, not no cars. Some of us legitimately need them for our freedom.