You'll see plenty of complaining online about DC's transit system, but to me it is an example of what can be done.
Vienna metro station is ~13 miles as the crow flies outside the city center. It gets trains every 8 minutes and 12 minutes during rush hour. Compare to Boston where train stations at the same distance out have service every half hour during rush hour and once an hour outside of rush hour. Add to it that if you continue along I-66 much past Vienna, you enter HOT-3 lanes, where you either have 3 passengers in a car or pay a toll.
Guess what the result is? People in the DC area take the metro at Vienna because there is frequency of service and are disincentivized from driving. People in Boston drive in. It isn't a primitive state or a postmodern crowded dystopia. The people commuting from Vienna mostly live a suburban life with yards. The infrastructure is just there to encourage taking the train.
Today the train is every twenty minutes, and every run is half to completely full.
Why? Because on average people have to wait 20 minutes if they just missed the train, and if they just randomly arrive they often do not have to wait more than 10 minutes for a train.
Result, people use the train more often and for more than just work since the train is available so often.
Seeing 14 car 300 km/h capable shinkansens arrive on the same track in ~4 minute intervals in Hiroshima station (and elsewhere) is something to behold.
And the commuter system is sometimes ever crazier, with many lines running parallel in the city center, large stations having dozens of lines, together providing huge capacity. No wonder around 8 million people commute to central Tokyo, 1.3 million of them through a single station (Shinjuku).
1. Denser cities, like the centre of Paris or London rather than Los Angeles.
2. Walking, busses, metro systems, and cycle infrastructure for journeys within the city; high speed rail between cities.
3. Carbon taxes that cover the cost of recapturing the carbon. So ships and factories and things can keep operating, they've just got to plant some trees or whatever.
4. Nuclear power, alongside wind; solar; and a worldwide power grid to average out differences in production.
5. Remote working.
Ideas less popular with the HN community, but that you'll hear elsewhere include:
6. An end to endless growth.
7. Vegetarianism for everyone.
8. Total bans on certain polluting activities, where taxes would unfairly impact the poor and not the rich.
I'm sure you're aware of the political problems with all of these.
2. Good where possible. Where cars are better suited, the cars should be electric.
4. Those will be EVs even better.
6. What does this entail?
Large heavy utility diesel trucks like garbage trucks have huge engines, extreme start-stop patterns, lots of shifting. Those are loud by themselves. Also, they are low production volume and are only noise insulated in as far as regulation requires them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/americas-bes...
I know from the hybrid buses in Boston that they are a massive reduction in noise for the passengers. When you're at a stop, it is great to not have that engine idling. Electric will only be better in that regard.
The garbage trucks though seem to make a shit load of brake noise though. And noise from trash dumping on top of trash and being compacted.
We could probably revert back to a 1920-1930 level of car without being in a "primitive" state.
That means less individual car ownership, and more bicycles, public transportation and more local factories/shops.
(But that was already 25 millions of car sold in the decade for about 100 millions inhabitant in the US, so it does not mean no car at all)
The most limiting factor is that since the 1930s all our infrastructure or civilization organization is based on having cheap oil and cars, so even if technically feasible, the path to get there is not so easy...
Reducing urban car ownership rates is a good thing, if nothing else it'll result in cleaner city air.
It becomes more complicated when it comes to the modern forestry and agricultural industries, not to mention mining and a lot of other raw material extraction, which are all completely dependant on fossil fuel for powering machinery, bulk transports, backup power and so on. Replacing all that equipment will take many decades no matter how it's done, and we need to start looking at stuff like ethanol/bio-fuels/E-diesel and such right away.
That would solve a large part of the problem the author describes as well -- it would be a nice interim solution while we renew the existing infrastructure.
Maybe not if ownership is just replaced with higher Uber/Lyft usage.
https://www.volvobuses.com/en-en/our-offering/buses/e-mobili...
Furthermore, I'm not really sure what the author thinks we should do? How can we maintain modern civilisation without factories etc.? Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable.