For taxing cars, you’re still leaving so much car infrastructure out there. It swallows the world. Six months ago for the first time ever I got a job where I could bike to work. The world is so much different from a bike. It becomes clear how dangerous cars are to humans, and how they chop up our cities in to little rectangles. I’m constantly at risk of being hit by cars that don’t stop. I love being on my bike. I feel like I’m part of the world. I ride rain or shine thanks to nice gear. We give up so much to have a world with cars. We could move our road budgets to trains and bike paths and have so much more space and health and life.
But I will curse at the stink of the exhaust from the crappy old motor when you ride by. Try an e-bike (you can get one built more locally surely), or an e-Vespa (or hell, make that your project to convert the vintage Vespa into a silent sleeper Vespa with crazy performance!). Electric is so, so much more fun.
Worrying about that small amount of “critical minerals” needed for a bike/Vespa is a conspiracy to distract you from the fact that oil is also extracted and has negative externalities, we just live with those already.
> Think of blue collar workers that are hungry
The what now?
> exhausted
There aren't many jobs that physically exhaust you to the point of not being able to walk (biking is no harder than walking). Especially since leg muscles are super hard to tire out.
> people getting older
Pretty much the same as above. If anything, the elderly prefer biking to walking, it's easier on the joints.
> Its fucking annoying to wait for the bus that does not show up
Less or more annoying than waiting when your car breaks down?
> Electric bikes are no solution, the minerals and energy must be produced to transport people like me.
Right, manufacturing a 30kg bike has costs, unlike manufacturing a 1500kg car.
> No new vehicle was produced, no rare earth was needed.
That's not how the economy works. Also, buying used is better than buying new if everything else is equal (it's not in this case), but whatever vehicle you bought was produced at some point.
> Fuel is produced every day for the plastics of the EV and for many other things like pharmacy and so on.
Er, what? I guess you think your vehicle is made out of grass and runs on water or something?
> Sure you are right with vegan biking, but not all folks can do it.
Not all folks can do it, so let's stick with 99% of people using cars to get around :)
Nice try with the vegan rage-bait.
I owned a car once, it was sometimes convenient, interesting & fun, but it was also often infuriating, terrifying and expensive. If I can pull it off, I'd prefer to never own one again. I don't really care if anyone else owns them, I just don't want to subsidize them or have their externalities imposed on me.
An alternative to outright bans is to make some good faith attempt at estimating externalities and internalizing them, and reducing subsidies such as free, or below market rate public land for private vehicle operation & storage. But this is difficult and it's not clear the politics of it would be much better than an outright bans. If a good faith effort determined that operating a car while not being subsidized and not inflicting externalities on others, cost a significant amount of money, then the whole effort would be castigated as limiting driving to the very rich, and probably wouldn't go very far. So it feels like we end up with either "everyone drives everywhere all the time for everything and it's the govt's job to shovel public funds & land at it" or outright bans in popular areas.
Cars, oil, and the internal combustion engine, are all tremendously useful, and we would be foolish to pretend otherwise. But all tools have their ideal uses and all tools can be misused & overused to bad ends, both for the tool user and for others.
A world of 100% gasoline car ownership where the car was simply a fun toy for kick ass weekend road trips, and cities had never been bulldozed to make room for them as substitutes for our legs, would be a pretty great world, even if it involved a bit more pollution/externalities/subsidies than some utopian car free world.
Even my most reactionary and car-loving extended family members had this opinion when they visited :)
Your conclusion that there is not “any healthy level of private cars coexisting” is heavy handed. There is a balance, but I suspect it’s more of a jealousy/equality issue. Heavily taxed and high quality requirements can surely lead to a healthy coexisting. Limiting trips to when they are truly worth the cost is an equation to be solved.