I know the demographics around here, so I know everyone’s just going to put “nothing lol”, but please understand what I’m asking first.
I’m physically incapable of driving a car. I stand to gain immeasurably from a world that didn’t assume everyone owned one. Having loved-ones with respiratory issues aggravated by car exhaust has made me very aware of the health issues surrounding the burning of fossil fuels, and having to navigate sidewalkless suburban stroads on a regular basis and juggle poorly funded public transit has made it very clear to me that pedestrians are second class citizens. I could go on and on about the mess cars have made of urban planning, and the number of jobs I couldn’t take because they required driving, but I digress.
In short, I hate cars just as much as the rest of you. But I’m also conscious that a lot of other people feel differently. What does widespread car ownership enable that would be difficult or impossible otherwise?
As an American I’m familiar with the cultural aura that surrounds the automobile. One of the early episodes of Mythbusters explained this pretty well while digging into the folklore surrounding a particular car-related urban legend. Cars represent freedom and self determination, two qualities highly prized in American society. You can go where you want when you want, without relying on schedules and routes mandated by public transit[1].
Looking at more tangible things, I suppose hauling a bunch of stuff from point A to point B would be hard without a car.
But what else am I missing?
Ignoring the fact you can only go where there are roads, and someone has to build and maintain those roads. ↩︎
I live in a rural area over 30 miles from the nearest city in a town with a population in the low thousands. The nearest place I can get any goods is over 4 miles away. I’d be completely fucked without a car.
I know that’s not everyone’s situation, but just pointing out there are people living in remote places with no other transportation options.
That’s how it is out here too.
Especially in the winter when we can easily have a foot of snow on the ground.
My property doesn’t even have paving, and trying to get the drive graveled was such a pain I just ended up slapping on all-terrain tires, both to deal with getting on and off the property slope in mud, and also because there’s country roads (dirt/sand) here and street tires suck on that in general and especially when it snows.
Especially since public transit is usually locally funded (at least in the US), in areas like this the tax base doesn’t exist to be able to functionally fund public transit. We would need to completely rethink and re-organize how public transit is funded and rolled out for this to functionally work in remote areas.
Or, you know, we could continue lettings cars be a thing for remote populations kind of like how in some far northern territories people use snowmobiles to get around part of the year because there’s simply too much snow to try to use another type of vehicle at all.
I think the latter, having specific types of transportation still be a thing in places where they’re needed, makes a lot more sense, honestly.
I kind of agree, but I’ll admit, I wouldn’t give up my car. I moved out here because I wanted out of city life and into more nature and quiet life. I only drive into town every 6 weeks for groceries and necessities in bulk and there’s no way I could haul all that on public transit. I want to be in the city as little as possible.
Well, like I said, I honestly think public transit doesn’t make very much sense for remote areas. I think it makes far more sense to give people the types of transportation that work best for their use case, and in remote areas: that’s cars.
I live in a city. I live 15 miles from where I work and I can drive it in about 20 minutes. If I wanted to take the bus, it’d take 3 hours and just as many changeovers because there’s no direct run. Not even close. I already work long hours so there’s no way in hell I’d spend 6 hours commuting, even if I could. For the record, I couldn’t even if I wanted since my office is nice enough to leave me with only an hour to get home, eat and get to bed before starting all over again. Sadly, it’s one of the failings of public transport even when it does exist.
It’s like that here. I drove 15 minutes to school . My alternator died and I had to ride the bus for a week. It took over an hour, not counting the lovely walk across a 6 lane expressway and through a WalMart parking lot to reach the bus stop! I think we need a gradient. In rural areas, we have individual vehicles, cars, bikes, motorcycles, etc. In suburban areas, we offer coupled trains where cars link together into trains and drive in sync on a guideway until they break apart for last mile connectivity. In urban areas, we ban all cars, build out public transit, bike lanes, etc. Small electric cars could be permitted for special needs and for tradesmen who carry tools. This future can’t happen in the US because they would just forget about us stuck poor’s and we’d lose all mobility.
4 miles is nothing on a bike, 30 isn’t too crazy either. I think people misunderstand just how far you can travel on a bicycle. Having the infrastructure to do it is another matter though, there’s some super dangerous country roads where it’s 50+mph with no shoulders.
As I noted to the person who recommended the horse, I can’t carry 6 weeks of groceries 30-odd miles on a bike. The local store has basics but is far from everything I’d need, and generally at a hefty mark-up for a lot of things not produced locally (it’s how they can stay in business, I’m not judging).
If I just needed to travel somewhere that would be fine, but when I leaves home it’s generally not for a joyride.
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Edit - also, as with the horse, it’s illegal to ride a bike on interstate highways, and I wouldn’t want to with posted speed limits being 75 mph with the average speed being over 80 mph through most of the trip. There’s literally no other road leading into town, so otherwise the entire trip would involve off-roading through rolling hills and rough terrain.
I’m not saying it would be practical in your case, but you could definitely carry 6 weeks of groceries on a cargo bike (electric would be better given the load though).
Hell, you might even be able to do that on a regular bike. I can fit at least 60 liters of groceries into my Portola (a compact folding e-bike), and that isn’t even including the top rear cargo rack. In an actual mid-sized cargo bike, you could probably fit like 2+ months of groceries.
If you don’t have a safe path to get there though, it doesn’t really matter how much you can fit onto any bike. In your case, you’d need a motorcycle.
You’ll probably manage just fine in a city.
Living in rural areas mass transit quickly becomes madness. Schedules are infrequent and routes are weird, and if you make them frequent and direct you suddenly drive around an empty bus while still building the exact same road you would for the few cars.
I’m less likely to get assaulted when my parents drive me somewhere vs having to take public transport.
I’m Asian American and I still have anxiety about the post-covid racism.
Car safety is a big thing. I’m damn glad I’m in my metal and glass cage when i drive through big cities. I sure as hell wouldn’t be walking through one. I’ve had people jump out in the road to try to get me to stop so they can rob me. Swerve and floor it. Walking is not a solution in dangerous cities.
Big reason I’d never do public transport myself. Clean up the streets and maybe I’ll try it. But being among a bunch of tweakers who may stab me with a needle for my 5 dollar bill, no thanks.
Is that sort of thing relevant? I take the bus all the time and have never felt in danger (except for one time when the driver went off on another bus driver, but I just noped off the bus before it could escalate). Yes there are interesting characters, but if public transit were more common perhaps the crazies would become less predominant.
Around here there is a whole police department dedicated to monitoring public transit.
I’m sure it’s very location specific. Chicago and Boston public transit seem safe to me. Minneapolis always seems real bad. Memphis or Portland, heeellll no
Stupid take. Cars are still a problem. And so is poverty and relegation of poor people to expensive and underserved transit. The problem is not cities.
Maybe, but its a problem now, and one likely to not be solved.
Personally (city dweller) a car is a time machine. I can get where I need to go mostly on a bike or my feet, but if I’m pressed for time - and that happens plenty - a car can get me there faster.
My penultimate child was at university about 10 miles from the house. There was a bus that got within a couple blocks of the sprawling campus, so I told her take the bus, but a year in said she could use my car and I’d walk to work since my commute was so short. That gained her about 3 hours per school day and lost me about one hour. Car is a time machine.
Personally (city dweller) a car is a time machine. I can get where I need to go mostly on a bike or my feet, but if I’m pressed for time - and that happens plenty - a car can get me there faster.
If your city were designed properly, that wouldn’t be true. Not that it was the most scientific thing in the world, but Top Gear famously demonstrated biking being faster than driving across London, for example.
Oh we have the worst, most starved public transportation, half the buses run only every hour, and on the bike to work - only to work - I do occasionally get there faster if there is traffic but there is no bike lane, I either use the sidewalk if no pedestrians, or the road if people are using the sidewalk. Traffic has to be pretty damn bad before I can move faster than the cars, I still have to stop at the same lights.
We have the most generous annual E bike voucher raffle in the nation, I believe, and the city is working on bike lanes, but really, the road between my house & work has no bike infrastructure at all. The public transportation problems are because that’s funded by the county not the city, the suburbs don’t want to pay for it. But inside the city we need it.
I think I’d be a good person to answer this. I’ve lived in Houston (needless to say, extremely car-friendly) without a car for almost 2 years; currently I’m living in a city that banned cars within its city center in 2015 which resulted in very visible changes, but the rest of the country is still very pro-car and quite car-friendly
A couple of things that cars benefit everyday life that would be difficult to do without a car. There’s probably more but these are the ones I can think of:
- Accessibility to places that have difficulty justifying being served by public transit. These include poorer neighborhoods that are far away from city center, semi-rural natural preserves, extreme geographical difficulties, … Case in point, Houston has a lot of nature/green spaces that were 20-30 miles outside of the city center… good luck getting to these without a car (trust me, I tried once)
- For certain physically disabled people, driving would be easier than walking/biking/public transit… Especially in particularly hilly cities, centuries-old cities where roads were paved no better than playgrounds, or sometimes both. This can be somewhat mitigated with good infrastructure projects, but cars are usually an easier solution
- Car-free zones can get very crowded, very fast. This is usually a good thing in terms of urbanism… but some find it uncomfortable for various reasons. My current city is actually a rather extreme example: they are now considering banning bikes in the city center too, due to pedestrian injuries
- I know cars are prone to needing repair, but with how the road network functions, personal vehicles can reduce a lot of dependencies on external factors such as public transit being functional. Case in point, two months ago NL’s national rail company became essentially non-operational due to extreme weather, which would be rather devastating if your only way of commuting to work relies on the train
Also I think some positive points associated with cars are doable without cars:
- Hauling stuff from point A to point B: delivery companies and car-rentals exist for a reason! This is surprisingly doable even without owning a car (you are technically using someone else’s car in this case). Of course doing it without your own car will be more expensive… but we do have the logistics for it, especially if the entire society shifts to a car-free model
- Not all rural areas need cars: some are actually quite doable by walking alone due to how small they are (I have a friend who lives in a rural American town like that: yes everyone drives, but everything is also 30-minutes on foot if you don’t mind walking). And there are quite a few parts of the world where rural towns are served by trains frequently
- Road trips: scenic railways exist for a reason… and unlike point 1 I made, sightseeing trains actually do make money, so there is pretty good justification for building them
NL’s national rail company became essentially non-operational
Don’t forget the Internet and ability for some of us to work from home, which is a relatively recent change. If I depended on rail service and there was an outage, it would be no big deal since I can work from home
Saab 900 Turbo never exists and I’m sorry Mother Gaia but that’s not a world I want to live in
You are missing that a lot of people do not live in cities. In a city, access to public transport is basically anytime, anywhere. Outside of city centers, public transport is very, very limited, even in Europe. Without a car, you are basically lost.
public transit for outer suburban and rural areas is also a major economic loser. the ridership is too low to basically fund the service and it must be run at massive losses.
this same problem is affecting rural healthcare and other community resources. most rural people are far better off commuting 2hrs+ to a urban hospital that is better staffed.
Without cars there would be A LOT more people on the sidewalk. In the past, before cars, there were so many more people on the street it’s not even funny. The roads were full of people.
Whole sections of the country that are zoned for suburban single family housing would not exist as they are today. Not because they’d be illegal or anything, but they’d be incredibly unpopular if most people didn’t own a car, which is needed to basically get to or from a suburban neighborhood.
I understand the question to be something like: what happens if a majority of people are absolutely dead-set unwilling/unable to own a private automobile. And I think the immediate answer is that suburban neighborhoods cease to exist, at least at the current density levels. Either a neighborhood must densify so that transit options make sense, or they must aim to become rural living. This also means that things like suburban schools either turn into walkable urban schools, or into small one-room rural schools.
I don’t actually think rural living will go away, because the fact is that the grand majority of people – USA and abroad – do not prefer rural living. The 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st Century trends are that people tend towards urban areas, where services and jobs exist. That said, there will always be people that want to live in the hills on 20 acres, and therefore need an automobile. And it’s certainly sounds appealing to some, myself included. But that has never been the majority, so if a majority of people refuse owning an automobile, they will also mostly refuse rural and suburban living.
There is no plausible situation where over 50% of people willingly decide to: 1) not own a car, and 2) live in a suburb or rural area. This is from the fact that all other modes of transport into a suburb or rural area are either: 1) nonexistent (eg metro rail), or 2) ludicrously expensive (eg Lyft, or transit with 15% fairbox recovery) if the cost was borne by the people living there (as opposed to being subsidized heavily by other taxpayers… Ahem, America).
Edit: some more thoughts: standalone strip malls would also change character, because the smaller ones that aren’t on a rail or bus corridor would be undesirable commercial real estate. If they still exist, they’ll likely be integrated into housing, so as to become the #1 most convenient option for people living there. Captive audience, indeed.
But larger strip malls and shopping centers actually might florish: they usually have enough stores and services that transit already makes sense. Indeed, shopping malls are actually really good transit center locations. But instead of giant parking lots, there would be housing, because why not? People who reject cars have every reason to live next to, or on top of, a mall: fully pedestrianized, air conditioned, lots of stores and dining options. Some places even put schools and post offices in their shopping malls. I would also expect that dwelling soundproofing to get better, because the paper-thin walls of American homes and apartments are awful.
In this way, malls are no different than casinos, cruise ships, and downtowns: a small island of paradise to visit, and is distinct from home. Malls will still exist after cars, the same way that Las Vegas exists in the middle of a desert: it is a big enough anchor that draws people.
There is no plausible situation where over 50% of people willingly decide to: … 2) live in a suburb or rural area
I’ve seen urbanism streamers claim that even in the US, we’re above 70% living in urban and suburban areas dense enough that transit makes sense. It is possible we could make transit useful for most of the population. We won’t. But we could
So for example, last night I went to see a play with my wife in the big city we live outside. 8pm show. Our location has better options than most in the US for public transit, but still not enough to fully rely upon and it’s hard to envision that changing.
We have a regional transit rail system we could have taken. It would drop us off close enough to the theater, perhaps 2 city blocks.
But the station is 6km from our house so the problem is on this end. We live in an area that’s not quite rural, more suburban, but it is out on the open countryside a bit and this natural beauty is what we love about living here.
We do have excellent bike lanes and even a network of bike trails that are separated from the roads. Our local station is about a 20 minute ride. We can do it but we’re in our 50s and it’s not our first choice when getting dressed up for a date night to begin with 20 minutes of vigorous exercise. And we would have had to repeat that ride at 11pm on the way home, tired, with a glass of wine in our bellies.
So the problem I guess is our home location. We live in a medium-to-small sized town that’s nestled up against a state park. The only public transit I can really imagine would be a bus system and it would have to cover a very wide area with many vehicles to serve this region. And even then I can’t imagine it would be quick.
I would still prefer a world without cars. I guess I’m just telling you why cars still fit into our needs and why our options are.
In the future I’m pretty optimistic that we can change the math on busses. Autonomous vehicles would allow us to move away from large busses piloted by a human driver to many smaller ones with more comprehensive coverage and better approximation of point-to-point transit.
The appeal of this path is that it’s something car-centric areas can transition to smoothly. We can get mass autonomous bus service going without banning cars and building rail lines or other large projects.
A small country that was laid out centuries ago, before cars, has a different layout and distribution of people that makes things like rail work better. The problem is that the US is huge and was built on cars, which are excellent for spreading individuals out with no regard for central planning.
Today’s generation of Americans are stuck with cars and not always in love with them. The way our population is distributed, it’s hard for mass transit to replace them, so it really doesn’t matter how great civic rail works in Lisbon.
We might address the topic of whether it’s responsible for people to be so spread out. I would certainly have a hard time saying goodbye to my beautiful natural surroundings.
For me personally, the loss of a car means potentially the loss of certain hobbies. I like to go camping and backpacking, and that means taking a certain amount of gear out into remote areas. While I might be able to minimize the amount of gear needed, there’s no getting around the remoteness of the hobby, and that necessitates a car for transportation.
The other hobby is dog related. I enjoy doing things, including sports, with my dog. Transporting the dog, at least as it currently stands in America, requires a car. Large dogs are not allowed on public transit pretty much anywhere here. When you also consider that I may be taking jumps or poles or other larger equipment with me to train in new places, losing access to a car makes that a near impossibility.
I’d go so far as to say many outdoor recreation hobbies either require or are made easier by having a car or larger personal transport. Kayaks, boats, skis and snowboards, fishing poles and the list goes on and on. Sure you could setup rental places, but if you do a hobby a lot you ultimately want to own your gear so you can get something that suits your preferences and needs.
I’m not opposed to a less car-centric society, but eliminating personal vehicles would make many hobbies problematic or impossible.
Just those two things alone: freedom to hit the road & moving things are more massive than you even realize.
I have a small car, a Civic. I routinely buy beers from all over. Vast majority cannot be sold & shipped. And I don’t believe for a minute the laws would change for me to shop online as easily as other stuff. And, that also includes the freedom of the road trip.
Just a heads up, The USPS will not ship liquids, but UPS and FedEx will if you pack them in plenty of bubble wrap.
And?
That doesn’t help me at all. I buy beer direct from micro breweries that I visit in my “Freedom” road trips.
Effing Pennsylvania is a state to avoid then. I don’t know whether they’ve changed anything but I did that a few years back and they said they weren’t allowed to sell me more than two sixpacks. While I don’t actually drink much, beer stores well for weeks to months and I had found a brewery I liked but haven’t been to since
My GF and I made it into 21 breweries in 2.5 days in the Pittsburgh area.
Dancing Gnome, and 11th Hour were the best of the bunch. Then we enjoyed VooDoo near where we stayed. Very cool vibe. They had old wooden doors that had been painted by local artists and they were hanging flat from the ceiling. They had these rolling, caged fire pits out in the beer garden… those are a great idea!
Just thought you might want to know the loop holes to shipping beer, but fuck me, right?
Why? I’m not the person shipping beer. I’m pretty damn sure none of the breweries I would order from would use “loopholes” and risk shipping me beer.
Well in Australia’s context where I live, you need a car to get anywhere (depending on where you live). The way QLD was built where i grew up, everything is spaced out. 30 mins to the cafe, 45 mins to the shops etc. Our country has public transport but really only in major areas.
Where i grew up, which wasnt anywhere remote and was 1 hour away from a major CBD, i was fucked if i didnt have a car. Going anywhere meant walking for ages under the Aussie sun or wait for a bus that comes every 30 minutes to take you a quarter of the distance.
It wasnt really a sense of freedom (which i 100% agree with) but having a car meant i could go directly to places.
Without a car, it would have taken me ages to get anywhere.
Road trips. The ability to visit National Parks.
You included hauling cargo, which opens up a whole new can of worms. Moving would be impossible. As would stocking stores and businesses, as there would be no last mile options for freight. Unless we’re including horse-drawn wagons.
On the other hand, Yosemite is an example where I believe they banned cars
I genuinely love vanity plates. I think they’re a really fun way to express youself and the plate goes with you regardless of context: you’ve got the same plate in the office parking lot and at the hobby group.
I’ve seen hobby and interest references, from LAXBRO to NCC1701. I’ve seen meta plates, from the VW Beetle with SCARAB to the Nissan Cube with RUBIKS. I’ve seen professional references, BONEMAN (a podiatrist) to CSHFLO (somebody I knew who worked in finance).
And I’ve once seen SQRTRGY which I can only imagine means “squirt orgy” but I’ll never know.
I know it’s a little thing, but I think it’s fun. (Doesn’t make up the pollution and danger of cars, tho.)
When I think of vanity plates I think of the guy who registered his as “NULL” in the hopes that he could avoid traffic tickets by looking like a database error. But he ended up showing up every time anyone’s plate number was missing, so it showed him as having thousands of traffic violations.
