[tfrutuoso]

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.

[jpatt]

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/

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]

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.

[TheGRS]

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.

[estebank]

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]

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.

[cbozeman]

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.

[parl_match]

> 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]

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.

[ska]

> 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]

> 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.

[notatoad]

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]

> 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.

[cvoss]

I don't think GP claimed living in a city or riding a bike was elitist. I think the claim was that imposing solutions that only work in cities as if they work for everybody is elitist. And, speaking for myself now, it's important to remember that, in many contexts, living in the city is a luxury that many cannot afford without greatly diminishing their current standard of living. Outside the city, housing is cheap. You have to be very wealthy or else give up a lot to move into a city.

[bobajeff]

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.

[bobbylarrybobby]

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

[epistasis]

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.

[KennyBlanken]

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.

[__MatrixMan__]

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.

[itsoktocry]

>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]

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.

[CalRobert]

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

[stouset]

> 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.

[slothtrop]

> 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.

[cbozeman]

> 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.

[CrispyKerosene]

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