Cars != all weather mobility
And if you really want a car get ready to pay 4x current prices because that's what they actually cost without subsidies and free externalities
Btw: CO2 emission taxes, road taxes and congestion charges are a great idea.
Sorry but getting rained on a bit is least of our troubles. Imagine there are places like Netherlands where it rains all the time and people (including very old ones) bike around the city…
if you want to shape the behaviors of the world's people as you suggest, you'll need fascism. hard sell when there are already two paths to clean energy abundance, two paths to sustainable driving, and many paths to damage control competing in the public discourse.
People biking are just happily chugging along. They are not the fascists.
I'm also unsure what the proposed solution to Bob being 10 miles away is. Should I only make friends with people who work at the same place?
Use public transport, take a cab if you need to or use a car club (shared vehicles use less resources than owning a car), ride a bike, walk the 10 miles. Infrastructure helps to reduce personal car use.
“But my quality of life!”
An umbrella solves that at minimal cost.
For the record, I don't think all car use is wrong, but the example of visiting a friend 10 miles away isn't a very good one. Someone shouldn't be expected to buy a car and its associated maintenance, tax, and externalities, just to visit someone that nearby.
I want to say here that this comment sounds extremely alien to me, to the point that out of context I would have taken it as satirical.
I know you're serious, but there's probably a big portion of people to whom discussing the problem of walking in the rain to the bus stop sounds completely ridiculous, in any context, and as as something we must consider when talking about climate change policy, well, even more ridiculous.
I've lived in rainy places, and you just wear a raincoat, boots, maybe an umbrella (not always), and carry on.
This kind of disproportionate weight assigned to even the smallest levels of personal discomfort, when discussing these problems, is what most people are denouncing here. And this bias might be what pushes people towards techno-solutionism that doesn't have a chance of actually solving our problems in the time frame that we need.
- you wait until it stops raining
- you bring an umbrella
- you bring a change of clothing
- you bike or walk
- you ask Bob to meet you halfway
Kids here in NL do this every day, sometimes across even longer distances (when they're high school age and live in rural parts of the country).
(That comment must be satire)
I do agree there should be more options in the housing market, but in the end there is some percentage of the market which will prefer to not live in flats and rowhouses.
Ah, now you're understanding why US cities are so sprawled. Those SFH's are remote, and a good chunk of the people living there want it that way. Those people want a large yard away from a large city while still having things like some stores and a large airport within an hour or so. These people reject the thought of living in a place like New York or Amsterdam or London or other dense cities. They actively vote against expansion or creation of public transit options.
I know there's a lot of media online about people being anti-suburbia, and yeah that's a growing percentage of America. But there's still a massive chunk of the population that will continue to just move out further from the city as you densify or actively fight densification.
As I suggested, those zoning laws aren't writing themselves. They're not being handed down by some far away dictator. They're being written and continued by popularity elected local politicians. Democracy at work.
I've absolutely seen densification efforts massively fought by the people who currently live there. I know people who purposefully moved further out from the city. I've seen neighborhood after neighborhood that seem like nightmares to me get built way out in the middle of nowhere with people clamoring to buy into them even if there are similar purchase-price denser options further in the city. Because, they want a large yard, they want a three car garage, they want five bedrooms and a study and a theater room and a wine humidor closet.
Which buying way out there, it's cheap to have some massive house because the $/sqft for just the lot alone is massively higher in the city. A massive chunk of the value of the home in a city is the land it's on not the structure itself, unless it's a really fancy structure.
Vancouver is 80% SFHs because of zoning. Recently the government allowed multiplexes in SFH zones, and suddenly every new construction is a multiplex, and families are looking at rebuilding their houses to maximize value.
If there was no artificial zoning, then Vancouver would be a lot denser and current SFHs would be a lot more expensive (and they're already expensive, 2M on average). This is true across most NA cities.
My argument is not that nobody wants SFHs. I'm sure they do, but desires are not fixed. If you had to choose between an SFH 1 hour away from the city, and a row house 15 minutes away, you might go with the row house.
And yes, sometimes people want to live far. There's lots of reasons for that, and that's ok, as long as they're paying the real value of it. By the way, this would mean massive property taxes because sparse infrastructure is very expensive.
Can you expand on why these SFH's would be more expensive if the zoning policies were different?
If people prefer the flats and rowhouse, and we expand the availability of the things they prefer, wouldn't the thing they don't prefer (SFH) fall?
If instead of one SFH with a large yard you build 5 row houses in the same plot, and sell each one for 1M, the SFH is only 50% efficient compared to the row houses, so its price needs to increase for it to be worth building.
It's obviously more complicated than that, but that's the underlying idea. It's the same reason you don't see SFHs in Manhattan, because the opportunity cost is too high.
I live in Tokyo. As I'm replying to you, I'm coming back from meeting my friends that live 13 miles away. This isn't uncommon. One of my best friends, I see her almost every week, lives 15 miles away from me.
Here's what I did: I cycled 5 minutes to the train station; I got on the train; I ran into a friend in the train, and we chatted the whole way; I got to the station, went to our meeting spot, and we hung out for hours, drank a bunch, had fun, until last train; then we all went back to the station, rode the train for 45 minutes, and now I'm home.
It wasn't raining today, but I hang out with my friends when it's raining too. We don't let that stop us. Take an umbrella or a raincoat or just walk for 5 minutes in the rain. It's not a big deal.
At the same time, I understand that this can feel very foreign to you. Our thoughts are molded by our environment. But I'm sure that if you lived in Tokyo you would also change your mind.
I don't know how to change your mind, but I can tell you that if you gave it a try you would change your mind. l
I'm not saying cars have no place, but they don't need to be the be all end all of transportation. There's very real negatives to cars, we're just blinded to them as long as we live in a car centric society.
I've been cycling and using public transport in the south east UK as my primary means of travel for 12 years, the car is a supplement. Update your mental models accordingly.
We just went through 2 weeks of heavy rain here in Germany. I am only biking (not even an E-Bike) and what I did is just looked at the rain radar with a simple app, add a bit of buffer time, packed rain clothes in my bike bag and just go. I was only once a bit wet because I was too lazy to pull out my jacket as I came back home one evening.
You will always find a good excuse to keep the apparent comfort of a car, but once you start to really bike on a regular basis, in my case, I found the bike way nicer, you bring movement in your life. It helps my health and my mood, which is a nice side effect.
The car is still incredibly useful for rainy days, visiting friends or when I really don't feel like tackling that hill to shop.
Maybe you enjoy half an hour cycling in rain that's going to last 6 hours, but I don't.
At some point, people are going to have to start preferring long term survival over short term enjoyment.
I don’t love getting rained on, and there are days that the last thing I feel like doing is getting on the bike or walking somewhere, but feeling like doing something is often not the primary reason to do it. And I realize that if I can’t/won’t make the harder decisions, I have no business encouraging others to do the same.
Societies collectively need to change habits and shift mindsets about the ways we live life. It certainly won’t be because it all feels good.
I’m not saying there is no place for cars, and clearly there are situations where a bike won’t work. But that does not mean our current car culture is acceptable either.
Two things on this: A. Electric cars are now viable. B. Even if they weren't, current climate change projections are not a threat to human survival, merely going to make life harder by a hard to quantify amount.
I sometimes worry that the pyramid of infrastructure and labour required to create that flat is not scalable
Opportunities are everywhere if one is looking and prepared.
I don't understand why so many people choose to believe things are impossible.
Public transit exists but luckily there arn’t many places to go.
If it’s not within 3 miles mostly likely you have to travel 20 miles. This helps keep the carbon footprint low because it is easy to go without.
Meets your criteria and has fiber installed. We have at least 2 neighbors that will sell you eggs and I would let you garden.
*have chosen EV charger the ev share will have to wait for full occupency.