Two of my grandparents drove everywhere for decades, retired, still drove everywhere, then had huge trouble with their joints etc. When my grandmother lost her license (worsening eyesight), she was very isolated.
My other grandparents had nice cars, but also made good use of their pensioner's discount/free transport pass. My grandma would take the train across a large English city to visit her sister or friends. She's in her late 80s, and still very mobile, although no longer independent.
I prefer a ban, as it's fairer to everyone. There are externalities that are very difficult to price (pollution, accident risk), and just being rich doesn't give people extra rights to poison the air and kill/injure people. It also ensures rich people use public transport, so they have some incentive to make sure the service is good.
I feel that if people are used to moving around their lives, they can continue to do so even in old age, like taking stairs every day on a 4th story walk-up with bags of groceries and goods.
Anecdotally, I feel the rise of the automobile coincided with the fall of general health and mobility of senior citizens.
You need a system which has at least a rational level of support for people who are elderly, infirm, or otherwise physically disabled.
We already exempt them from various driving rules, such as parking restrictions. We already have special transport services just for them. No one is suggesting removing these.
That's a fair argument. I think a car-less future for urban centers is a good goal, but you need a huge transit infrastructure that I don't think most (any?) cities have right now to support it. Permitting is a transitional tool to enable a gradual phase out while letting the polluters/accident-causers etc. pay for the costs they're putting on the rest of us.
But turn around and do anything to take into account that SOVs are the most space-inefficient form of transit, and you are immediately labelled anti-car. Congestion charges or adding tolls? Anti-car. Parking restrictions? Anti-car (especially because people complain there's not enough parking spaces as is). Charge residents for parking permits? Anti-car. Add bus or HOV lanes? Anti-car. Spend a dime on improving public transit? Anti-car (why are you wasting money on public transit no one uses instead of the congested highways).
Yes, banning cars outright is one of the most extreme options. But the sheer sense of entitlement among drivers means that all the other options that have been suggested have been resisted with as much force. The only acceptable compromise is to cater specifically to their whims, and maybe in tandem help public transit at the same time. Of course, if there's any budget overrun on such a joint project, all of the transit improvements are the first things to get axed.
Even still, the extent to which our society has become subservient to automobiles simply blows my mind.
Nah, I'm not anti-car. I'm anti-car entitlement and think the expectation that others should bear the external costs of an automobile friendly society is silly.
Edit: I did, in fact, say "anti-car".
A tiny proportion of any US metro area's real estate supports this lifestyle. Usually either the most expensive, or the most hurt by gentrification and displacement. It's not a generalizable strategy without huge changes in zoning, public housing finance, and public transit infrastructure. I think we should make those changes, I vote for every pro-housing candidate and every transportation funding measure, but they are prerequisites. You can't turn off the old system before the new one is ready.
Somebody posting under your username did:
Lot of anti-car folks on here.
HOV - high occupancy vehicle
"Banning cars outright seems to be a heavy-handed move and overly restrictive of individual choice"
Allowing cars is overly restrictive of my individual choice to cycle safely, breath clean air and have my children grow up in a world without climate change.
There are obviously alternatives that do not involve banning cars outright - like barriers between cars and bikes, and electric vehicles.
Here are a few options that would restrict individual choice to reduce air pollution.
- banning air travel more than 3 times per year (turns out propelling giant hunks of metal through the sky releases a lot of CO2)
- insisting all new cars be electric
- banning cars in cities
- limiting the purchase of meat to a low amount per person per week
- a limit on consumptive spending (buying newly manufactured goods) annually
That's technically true but frames the conversation in a biased way.
Anyone that arrives at the argument without already drawn that conclusion is woefully misinformed.
If you'll accept that conclusion as granted, then we can begin to have an intelligent discussion about how the issue should be addressed. In the absence of that, getting greeted with hyperbole seems most likely.
Those are three of the major issues with cars and if you're happy with them, I mean ... yeah, lucky you.
Per your other posts, you don't support it because it "restricts individual choice", yet you support increasing prices as if that doesn't.
By increasing prices you do restrict individual choice, except that you do it in a discriminatory way. For example, in many countries instead of banning smoking, its price has been marked up and increased 10-50x. This does restrict individual choice for people who can no longer afford it.
I think in certain cases (such as smoking), it's fine because we want to discourage it, but banning it outright isn't worth it, and it's something that people can and should be able to live without.
Incidentally, I agree with your original assessment that banning cars outright is too much in the short term, and would have other negative consequences that most likely outweigh the positive. But increasing prices has overall similar effects for people who don't have alternatives available.
I think your "restriction of individual choice" rule is highly misguided. For one thing, because your freedom ends where others' begin, and it's becoming pretty clear that car usage today is in fact encroaching on other people's freedoms. But also because in the cases where individual freedom is a requirement, price should not be a factor. This is similar to why (in the US and some other countries) "if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you", for example.
Being discriminatorily restrictive is fine, in my opinion. If you can't afford to pay the costs for your action, you shouldn't do it. The smoking example is a tough one, because if it gives someone else cancer due to second-hand smoke I don't think you can put a price on that.
But let's say in the car case we are okay with a certain level of pollution (we must be), and we have a floating congestion and pollution tax that was assessed hourly (like surge pricing), based on both how many cars were on the road, and the global air quality level (just an impractical example). When roads are particularly busy, and a lot of CO2 has been released, let's say the cost of driving into the city that day spikes to $1000. In that case, if a rich guy wants to pay $1000 to drive into the city, that's just fine. That $1000 goes to building public transit infrastructure and environment cleanup or whatever else. Poor people will be restricted, but they're already restricted. They can't fly private jets, or helicopters, or drive Ferrari's that have 12 cylinder engines and 500 horsepower. Restricting the options down the level that everyone can afford is impractical in a market economy.
> for people who don't have alternatives available
Well, I've also said repeatedly that in order to restrict car usage you first have to build a robust (affordable) public transit infrastructure. My main opposition to an outright ban is most cities don't have sufficient transit to support it. A good way to fund such a project, in my opinion, is with the aforementioned taxes from rich people who want to drive private cars. However, I also think if the costs are appropriately priced, that everyone benefits from the individual who wants to drive a private car, as society gets the income to offset those costs, and he or she gets to drive a car. I may be in the minority here, but I don't see a future where there are no private cars as practical, or desirable.
> because your freedom ends where others' begin, and it's becoming pretty clear that car usage today is in fact encroaching on other people's freedoms
I don't know if that's that clear. Maybe we have a different understanding of freedom.
I'm not sure what the practical difference is between second-hand smoke and city pollution, in terms of how much it restricts rights and freedoms, to be honest.
Nicotine is literally an addiction for a lot of people. They are dependant on it. So taking it away entirely, without an appropriate alternative, is similarly bad as taking cars away entirely.
I think car-free zones are fine though, for the record. As I mentioned it just seems like you'd need a transitional period where you build up good alternatives. As an example, I ride BART daily, but I meet a lot of people who don't because they think it's dirty, smelly, and dangerous (in their perception). That has to be fixed before you ban cars entering San Francisco.
I bet this will be something interesting to read about on future history books...
I don't think most Americans - who grew up driving since age 16 - realize just how weird that is for most foreigners. I was surprised the first time I tried to walk into a strip mall and I had to walk 200 meters to find a pedestrian path. It was also weird walking around places like San Jose and Sacramento where you don't see people walking on the streets.
I don't see how it's odd. It's the biggest problem with solving climate change - how much do you restrict everyone, and how do you properly balance the conflicting individual choices with people's ability to live their lives? Collective choices aren't really a thing. We approximate it with democracy, but obviously not everyone gets what they want (see Trump being in office).
Also, almost 90% of Americans own cars, so I'm not sure who "everyone else" is, but what restrictions do you mean?
But "everyone else" doesn't necessarily exclude car owners. Car owners are also residents who need to breathe, sleep, play and walk. Owning a car isn't the same as using it all the time. And using a car occasionally doesn't mean you have to own it.
The restrictions are pretty obvious if you open your eyes, ears and nose. Large parts of our cities have become effectively and legally unusable for anything other than driving.
And that's not just because of polution levels that kill tens of thousands in the UK alone, it's also because of government enforced bans on using that space between buildings called roads for anything else.
If my choice were to do so much as walk on a road or use a bicycle on a motorway, I would be penalised and forcibly removed. Large swaths of the city are dedicated exclusively to road traffic in spite of a desperate lack of land for home building.
These government enforced rules and restrictions are what I call collective choice.
Really though, public transit is vastly better from a heath, independence, financial, and safety standpoint for the elderly than driving.
Given that won't work that well in a large city, but even then it's still better to be under people than sitting alone in your car.
A. Continue driving past the point they they are safely able to.
B. Become shut-ins due to lack of transportation, accelerating physical and mental decline.
People live in high density areas. The residents should have higher priority than folks from the suburbs who choose to drive rather than taking public transit. That means having usable and human-focused urban design.
I generally am very much for pricing in externalities, as you say. But when it comes to cars in very dense areas, there is a significant discontinuity in social cost between zero cars (pedestrians can freely use the streets, no traffic lights, etc) and a few cars (like in congestion pricing schemes). With even a few cars, walking becomes far more inconvenient, and there is much less public space.
In dense urban cores, a huge proportion of the land area is essentially vacant, only used by a small minority that choose to drive. It is really a bizarre way of doing things.
In my experience that's not quite the case. I lived in Barcelona's old town for about a year, and while it was technically legal to drive on many of the narrow, medieval-era streets, in practice it was enough of a pain that drivers rarely did.
Because of the high volume of pedestrians, the few cars that did come through were forced to travel very slowly and the burden was on them to avoid hitting anyone, not the other way around. So I don't think you have to go all the way down to 0 cars to get most of the safety benefits – there's a tipping point somewhere earlier.
Turning some areas into woonerfs might be a solution. It's also worth pointing out that many pedestrianized areas still allow delivery vehicles.
This is straight-up regressive: the dense areas are most premium, with transit-connected suburbs a close second, and car-oriented suburbs the only places affordable to the masses.
Banning cars from a city is a straight-up transfer of quality of life from the suburban masses to the richest in the center.
Drastically increasing high-rise housing supply in the center is a much more meaningful step.
What are you going to do with all those extra cars?
Traffic is irrelevant for trains
Not for trolleys!
Trolleys are just buses with fewer degrees of freedom.
In short: public transit alternatives to the Bay Bridge are already too popular. Shifting SF<->Oakland car trips to public transport is physically impossible in the short and medium terms. BART does not have space to accomodate the 270,000 daily Bay Bridge drivers, and there's a 0% chance of making that space in the next decade.
However, I work in downtown San Francisco and live in Oakland, and I would NEVER drive my car over the bridge into the city, because of congestion. Banning cars outright seems to be a heavy-handed move and overly restrictive of individual choice, and you should just "price in the externalities" as the economists say. High tolls or expensive city driving permits for non-residents seems a better move to ease the transition as well as fund public transit options. They have to build up really, really good public transit infrastructure if they're going to make it more attractive than driving.
To me the plethora of rules reads overwrought and complex, and "occasional visitors" seems ridiculous.