A million people are killed directly every year by cars. Many more are seriously injured and disabled. Another million indirectly due to air pollution. They are also the number one cause of micro plastics around waterways. Billions are spent on hospitals, doctors, nurses, ambulances, police to support all this death.

Much more is spent covering our countryside on roads, that kill millions of animals every year.

And encouraging urban sprawl means cities take up more space, destroying wild life habitat.

This is just some of the awful things cars have bought to our world, not mentioned are wars, major spills, toppled governments, bribery, etc...

"Producing a medium-sized new car costing £24,000 may generate more than 17 tonnes of CO2e – almost as much as three years' worth of gas and electricity in the typical UK home."[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...

This was discussed recently here on HN, I'll try to find the conversation.

Edit: here's the conversation, with link to source:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24716921

It's about 50,000 to 112,00km depending on the source of electricity used to charge the electric car.

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/are-electric-cars-worse-for-the...

> ... compared to most gasoline-powered cars, an electric car should become carbon neutral in less than 3 years of driving.

— Mister Gotcha (https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/)

That was not what he said. He was quite clear in making a personal decision. There was no force on anyone to make that same decision. That you are reading that into it might say more about the way you think :)

What's the point in saying: "But you do some unrelated thing???"

Is the argument that there's no point in making a small difference, it's only worth it if you're 100% ideologically pure?

Because I don't see where road deaths and microplastics in local rivers come into owning a computer.

The reality is almost all of modern technology, materials, tools, and life have huge externalities. Us being alive consuming resources and emitting green house gases further pushes us towards terrible climate changes, while taking away space from nature before us.

It just feels very arbitrary to stop at personal car ownership but maintain the benefits of all other externalities. Perhaps the OP also has many other resists to modern life under ethical guise. The computer is the one known exception here.

Yes, it's incredibly arbitrary because cars don't suffer from low density development patterns. They don't cause pollution. They also don't cost a significant amount of money and this also doesn't force less well off people to get expensive leases because everyone buys low end cars. The tax burden of suburbia is absolutely insignificant. The fact that you have more roads per resident decreases the tax burden significantly. Their only fatal flaw is that new developments aren't funded by the federal government and private developers. Thanks to cars and suburbia municipalities are swimming in cash and never have to worry about their finances.

We should ban bicycles and pedestrian paths. Everyone should drive, even children. This is the future.

Making a choice not to buy a car makes a measurable impact.

It's not a gotcha to say that they partake in society.

By your logic, it'd be arbitrary to safely dispose of motor oil instead of conveniently dumping it into the local park's pond.

It stops feeling like that once you replace assumptions with numbers.

When I was in US I drove to nearest big box store, loaded my pickup and drove to my place. Easy, unfortunately no other country I've found such convenience and this makes me wanna go back to US.

People who need it barely once or twice a year for home take an estate car, rent one for a taxi, borrow a trailer off a friend, or get the store to deliver - because owning your own van or pickup just for that reason would be considered completely insane.

For the rare occasions when that wouldn't be feasible, they'll deliver for a moderate charge. It would make no sense to pay all the costs of keeping an extra vehicle (or a much larger one than I generally need) just to avoid a couple of deliveries per year.

You do this like once every 10 years? I wouldn't choose a car on this.

OTOH, in 41 years I had exactly 0 times needed large MDF boards or wood planks or steel pipes...

A couple of years ago I did maintenance to my garden. I ordered planks and bags of cement from Amazon for next day delivery because I couldn't even be bothered to order from a specialist store.

But if I wanted to, there's a store with bulk construction supplies literally at the bottom of my road, and a more retail oriented one 20 minutes away.

But I don't even have a drivers license. Never felt worth the time.

In the UK we have the Ford Transit van and people that can do things for you. You get stuff delivered or collected. The guy with the Transit van gets a high level of utilisation out of it. People can therefore have normal cars and SUVs. Or a bicycle.

We don't have those man size trucks with dual tyres in the UK and certainly not at US prices. You can buy Ranger and Hilux size trucks and those are a bit too large for UK roads. In the US these would be toys, not man size at all.

In the UK you can play a game watching cars and counting how many have more than one person in them. In the US you can count how many trucks are hauling stuff. They ain't.

[looks at personally-owned half-acre of forest] [looks at car]

I own a car so I CAN own & preserve substantial undeveloped natural land. You get more city space by me not being there at all.

Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem.

Unfortunately, highways require a certain minimum vehicle size. The best you could possibly do is have a short coupe with 2 seats. It wouldn't significantly influence the size of the vehicle but waste more resources for the few times where you need a 3-4 person vehicle. The savings to be had are way too slim. However, driving a pick up truck for your commute is absolutely a waste of resources because there are smaller and more aerodynamic cars that are commute worthy.

>Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem.

It's the only solution. Building a von Neuman architecture style city is absolutely stupid for society since the world is inherently parallel. There is no logical reason to have massive central work place districts. Each office building is a cpu core and each residential building is a memory chip in its own right. We don't need to put all the cpu cores next to each other and put the memory somewhere else. A distributed development pattern is significantly more efficient since data and computation are next to each other.

Rejecting the car for ethical reasons should be accompanied by rejecting most of the modern society & infrastructure as well.

"Outsourcing" would be if his decision not to drive a car required him to pay people to drive cars on his behalf. That's the definition of the word "outsourcing". But you're talking about transportation that occurs whether he drives a car or not. The groceries you get at the store are driven there also. Him choosing not to drive a car literally has 0 impact on the transportation infrastructure of the supply chain. That is not outsourcing.

But just because that part of the logistic chain involves ICE vehicles does not mean that every part has to involve ICE vehicles nor does it mean that people not using a car to do their shopping are "outsourcing" anything: The large-scale logistics happen regardless of how people get to the grocer, people getting there by foot/bicycle/public transport have literally zero influence on that end of the logistics.