Cars should be optional, not mandatory.

I've been to the US and people there just don't understand they've lost a basic personal freedom.

<<Freedom to walk.>>

Freedom from car corporations. Freedom from energy corporations.

Cars are already optional. I didn't own a car until my thirties. But the things you can do with a car are so much more expansive than the things you can do without a car.

I mean, have you ever tried to move house without one? You're either relying on friends, or you're forking out for a removalist. And that's just one small example. As long as that difference in capability exists (and it always will) we'll have a need for cars or something like them. Remember, cars only really filled the social niche that was occupied by horses, so that need was already there.

You can rent a small van for 2 days, that's it for moving. By small van I mean Fiat Doblo or similar, bigger if you have larger furniture. Super big furniture: can't move that with a car, you need a box truck anyway, you'd rent that.

Definitely cheaper than owning a car 24/7.

And horses were owned by a minority of (generally rich) people.

50% of people didn't have, nor need, horses, unlike cars now.

Cars are great, but again, they should be optional. When did the 3 teens in the suburbs "option" to have to drive everywhere? Never, they didn't, their parents chose for them.

I cant find a single image that gets close to the amount of stuff I use to hurl around on cargo bikes. The older ones take 300-400 kg worth of stuff.

This old image of a data transfer is probably appropriate.

http://www.brabantbekijken.nl/2010/01/middeleeuwse-stukken-o...

I estimate 150 to 200 folders there.

Okay, now try doing that in monsoonal rains like the ones I grew up with as a kid. Between India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Brazil, several billion people live in heavy rainfall regions close to the equator. Most people in those regions would already know the reality of having to haul goods by bicycle in the rain, and I'd put money on them choosing a car if given the choice.

And that's kind of the point. Can you do this stuff by bicycle or other modes of transport? Sure, many do. Would most people make that choice? Probably not, so you have to take it away from them once they have the means to choose a car instead. That's a tough sell.

The curse of being human is that we need to do uncomfortable things to grow and maintain ourselves all while avoiding things we enjoy but are bad for us. It's a catch 22 if you like.

Imagine how nice it is to get home after the monsoonal cargo cycling, how happy you are to see the family, how nice they are to you drenched and exhausted, how good the food tastes, the cardiovascular perks.

With a car you carry your mood wherever you go, there is no hard reset. You correct your sensitivity to register signals the monsoon would "normally" drown out until everything becomes a stress signal and you need Prozac or Valium to deal with it.

Car owners can workout too of course but it's an entirely different game if you have to fuel it with discipline in stead of necessity.

Errr... Maybe try telling this to the people in developing countries who already do this and more because they have no choice. Think of the lesson you'll have learned if you make it out with your life!

Any plan that relies on humanity to collectively go through some kind of personal growth prescribed by you, the individual, is bound for failure. You can't force people to give a shit, and you'll have a hard time convincing the guy pulling tuktuks through the rain that he actually has a better deal than the local taxi drivers. And he's not even the guy you really need to convince. We can't even convince billionaires who supposedly believe in climate change that maybe there are alternatives to private jets.

If you really want people to drive less, the only thing you can really do is provide alternatives and hope people hop on board, which is how the car originally spread in the first place. Spoiler though, they probably won't in any scalable long term capacity, because despite their flaws, cars are inherently a force multiplier. They just let you do a lot more, and as long as that remains true, people will be willing to pay the price of ownership.

Your personal freedom is actually economic slavery that you can afford but those who can’t… they’re in a really bad spot in most of USA.

I didn't own a car until I was in my thirties. If that's economic slavery, it's not a very effective system. The reality is that a car opens up doors and opportunities that aren't available without one. As long as that remains true, there will be a need for them, or something that fits the same societal niche (e.g. horses).

An argument was given as to why cars were a poor solution to the problem of personal transportation, and you've made it into an argument about personal freedom. The point is we can't design a system that optimises for both efficient personal transportation and widespread car usage (I'd argue we can't design a system for widespread car use at all, but that's by the way). So, as a society we make choices. Each choice we make impacts someone's personal freedom in some way, be that through making it harder to drive somewhere, or indeed making it harder to cycle or walk somewhere. Based on your perspective, any given change you might think is appalling or a very good thing; a curtailment of your personal freedom or a liberation.

So what should we do? My response is we should think holistically about the problem. How should most people get about most of the time? Optimise for that case, whilst allowing for the edge cases. Should is doing a lot in that previous statement, but thinking about efficiency and resource allocation is probably a good route towards establishing a reasonable "should".

Let's not get hung up on "freedom" rhetoric. It's not helpful.

Cars are, by far, the best and most universal solution to most people's transport needs. That's why they're so prolific. Because every other option has an asterisk next to it for certain use cases. If they weren't the best solution, we would be talking about something else.

So society has already made that choice, which is why it's the status quo. It's not perfect, but it's what we have. This discussion amounts to a relatively privileged minority decreeing that what the rest of society has settled on is, in fact, not the best solution, based on a fairly narrow set of criteria that doesn't take other people's circumstances into account.

If you don't want people driving cars as often, alternative transport solutions can take some of the load off. But take it from a guy who's lived in Asian megacities and didn't own a car until his thirties, people still own cars in those places because they either have responsibilities that mandate it, or because they don't want their movement dictated to them by where the train line ends.

>Because every other option has an asterisk next to it for certain use cases. If they weren't the best solution, we would be talking about something else.

This is the most North-american thing I've read today.

Where I live cars are probably the least useful thing for most people's transport need, we take the tram here.

>So society has already made that choice, which is why it's the status quo.

Same as above.

And yet I'd be willing to bet that cars are still commonplace where you live. I also live somewhere that has trams, and even used them myself for many years. They're still not a replacement for a car. And again, this isn't really a point that needs to be defended, because odds are you saw plenty of cars driving around today. Even if you yourself don't use one, you're relying on other people to do so for you. If you're not picking someone up from the airport yourself, you're paying someone else to do so. In a car. Or you're having your goods delivered to you, by car. I think you get my drift.

Cars allow us to do things that wouldn't be possible in their absence. The only real argument here is to what degree we can minimize the need for cars so that more people can opt to go without, but I think that's a losing battle. People vote with their wallets. Not only have they overwhelmingly voted for cars, but global urban density is actually decreasing, and is likely to do so for the next three decades. Trying to take away the freedom that a car provides is going to be a losing battle outside of notable exceptions (Singapore, HK, etc.).

The point isn't that cars aren't useful. The point is we shouldn't optimise for cars. People's individual choices are a poor guide for transport policy decisions. See Braess's paradox, and Downs-Thomson paradox (neither of which are actual paradoxes, just a noting of how individual rational decisions result in a net reduction in utility for all, including the individual).

It's not self-evident to me that we shouldn't optimize for cars. Again, global urban density has been falling for decades, and is likely to keep falling for decades further. There are many, many reasons for this, but at least one of them is that when push comes to shove, many people decide that owning a car is a worthwhile investment, and that additional mobility allows them to live further out. In order to nudge more people into forgoing car ownership, you would need to make cars less useful and less worthwhile, because as long as that advantage is present, people will want them, utilize them, and demand infrastructure for them.

I live a mile from the local school complex. There are zero road crossings to get there (ped tunnel and nice paths) and people still drive. It’s stupid.

Airport pick-ups can be done with car share, taxi, or rentals.

What you’ve argued is freedom to spend a fortune on a car and drive everywhere outweighs freedom to not do so and freedom to walk or cycle. There’s a balance but right now we’re very much on the car side.

These comments are quite revealing. The things I see every day are not as obvious as I thought they were.

It is probably awesome to drive around in a well paved place build specifically for mass car use but if you get out of the car its just asphalt everywhere. It's not very exciting when not driving?

If I can't cycle it from the hardware store I have it delivered. The hardware store doesn't have 99.99% of things and its expensive.

People without cars [usually] don't get groceries for a whole week. I did hear people do it but it doesn't sound very appealing/appetizing/healthy/fresh. Someone calculated that if one does 20 min worth of exercise per day the life expectancy goes up by about the same. I live near a store, perhaps I chose to, perhaps we have enough cyclists to make it worth it - I don't know.

Be it Groceries or lawn mowers, just have it delivered.

I've never had to send a package so large but you can just schedule a parcel collection with UPS.

> When I need to go more than 3 miles quickly, a bike doesn't work.

I always point to the (mind blowing) 24 hour cycling distance record: 1026.21 km or 637.66 miles. He didn't just get off the sofa and did that of course. It took quite a bit of conditioning. Could he really be 1000 times more fit? I can't imagine.

I see bike trailers full of babies the year round. I just see a bike with one on the front, one on the back and 2 tiny humans on their own bike in front of it.

People go camping on their bike, there are trailers for your surf board.

kids cycle themselves to school.

There is no need to pick parents up from the airport, if you just let them stand there then they will figure out how to get home themselves in no time. Rent a car, take a taxi/uber?

I suppose it would be cool to own your own airstrip and aircraft and fly the parents wherever they want to go. Of course it would be noisy and take up a huge amount of space. Other peoples personal freedom would have to step aside.

I wonder at what age kids can safely be allowed outside in the destruction derby meat grinder that is car traffic. You cant drive a mile without guts spilled all over the road. Globally we are killing something like one person every 25 seconds and god knows how many animals. In the Netherlands roughly the same amount of drivers, cyclists and pedestrians die in traffic accidents but they are all killed by cars. The odd part to me is that 2/3 of those must be in the city where cars are the least useful.

It probably needs 2 documentary films to show cycling countries how things work in car countries and the other way around. I hear people drive down their driveway to get the mail. Sounds surreal to me.