Between EV's that are much, much heavier than ICE cars and SUVs/Trucks that are much larger than they need to be, vehicles themselves, despite having more safety features than ever, are also better at killing that they've been at a long time too.
We really need to get serious about improving our transportation infrastructure.
Better yet, we really need to consider urbanization. That way everything you need is right there by your own two feet. No need for any extra special transportation at all.
It seems people have a burning desire to live the rural lifestyle, though, even in so-called cities. I'm not sure we can actually overcome that pressure.
I just want like... to not be stacked like a sardine for $3500/mo. I would gladly take a rural lifestyle if I could find a job that would support it.
That being said, to be clear, I don't think we need to make driving illegal or whatever. I think a TON of people would happily not be saddled with the expense of owning a car or the task of driving if there were reasonable alternatives on offer, which in the few pockets of the US that actually have decent mass transit, is broadly the case.
Yes, these are the rural areas of which we speak. Everything gets spread out and then you're stuck travelling long distances to do anything, just like those who live in actual rural areas. There is no question that transportation is necessary in a rural area.
A proper urban environment, however, puts everything right there in a short distance. No need to ever travel beyond where your feet can take you. That's the whole reason for living so close to other people.
But it's clear that people want to live in (or pretend to live in) rural areas. It seems to be in our nature. As such, there is a lot of pressure to maintain the way things are. Hence the ill-conceived cries for better transportation to maintain the rural way of life instead of actually embracing urbanity.
They're not a great solution to transportation at scale, but they're pretty good at small volume point to point traffic.
There's not enough people going my way on most of my trips to make transportation at scale worthwhile. Ferries work well for part of many of my trips, but I can take a car on the ferry to deal with the lack of scale on either side.
I could sometimes take a bus to the ferry, walk to light rail and take light rail to the airport. But the bus only runs during commute times, so that impacts viable flight times, and the walk to the light rail got pretty sketchy in the past several years and light rail itself can be sketchy too.
Most of my cars run fine any time of day, although peak traffic is annoying, and I'm dealing with lighting issues on one so I can't take it out unless I know I'll be home before dusk.
And like, same. That's also me.
But the problem is the actual costs of that style of home are incredibly, heavily subsidized by the cities they surround and indeed even the rural areas they border, because suburbs are just... a bad goddamn way to house people. They're incredibly inefficient, basically require your own personal car, require the most infrastructure build-out for the smallest population, require the largest footprint of services over the largest area to serve the smallest number of people, etc. etc.
And like, I don't think it's unreasonable to say if you want to live this way, that's fine, but then you need to actually pay for it. Your property taxes need to reflect how much it actually costs to serve your property, to build the huge number of roads needed to access it, to maintain those roads, to maintain the electrical grids, to maintain the water and sewage services, to bus kids to schools, etc. etc. etc.
And yeah that's going to make suburbs WAY less appealing because they're going to be fucking expensive but like, the alternative is, again, everyone wanting that, and not paying for it. The dense urban centers they surround absolutely hemorrhage money supporting the suburbs around them.
If cars simply didn't exist, our cities would not, could never have, been designed the way they are, in any way.
1. Time. For example, my commute is 25 minutes, but 2 hours ride and three mile walk by public transport.
2. Safety, intimately tied to the homeless problem.
3. Cleanliness. In my experience, related to #2, and the fact that government institutions are incapable of caring about user experience, because they get funding regardless. Matted, stained fabric seat cushions, and dried whatever caked on the floor.
There's nothing better or remotely alluring about public transportation for the vast majority of people (as shown by gridlock traffic).
Back in the day, before cars were widespread, everything had to be close by.
You don't even have to sacrifice the backyard for that, you can have a city layout that puts the houses themselves fairly close to each other, and the yards can radiate outwards. Then you connect each cluster's main street with the other ones, but unlike suburbs, you make each "subdivision" mixed-use and you allow public transit , pedestrians and cyclists to cut across subdivisions for easy access everywhere.
If anything, small towns should be urbanism done right, because they don't (shouldn't?) have the money for sprawl and they don't have all the pressures for increasing density a lot, that big cities have.
Nah. Many cities long predate the car. They absolutely were designed in the same way they are still found now, aside from what are now roads were squares for people to walk in. Return the road back to being a square and nobody would be able to recognize that there was a car era. But, so long as the people want to live a rural lifestyle, good luck…
As for safety, you’re orders of magnitude more likely to get into a car crash than have anything happen to you on the NYC subway. Yes, incidents happen but they’re dramatically inflated in the public consciousness.
Your objection (and most of the others I see) aren’t objections to the fundamental nature of public transit, rather they’re objections to shit public transit or to urban life in general (whole lotta city car parks that aren’t clean!). Which is entirely understandable. But there are plenty of examples of functional public transit serving millions of people in cities across the world. Those people aren’t all secretly wishing they were in a car.
There is no technical reason we can't have livable, quiet and spacious apartments, where multiple apartment buildings share a huge, enclosed backyard (almost park-like, even), a setup with tons of small shops, pharmacies, easy access to everything, etc.
Plus you can also have access to large parks, in a suburb you'd never have access to those, just your limited backyard.
But most places will never have that...
Sure if I said public transport is strictly superior because I drive a car that breaks down constantly, you’d see the problems not cars, yeah?
My grandparents, and their parents and grandparents before them, all grew up on farms (as did the majority of Americans during that time).
No, everything did not have to be close by.
They certainly did appreciate cars when they became affordable though.
Urbanization decreases some costs and increases others.
https://thedriven.io/2024/05/03/are-evs-really-much-heavier-...
> full electric versions are only around 10% to 15% heavier than their direct ICE equivalent
I don’t think “much, much” should be used when we are talking 10-15%. This will mislead people. There are outliers of course.
We have the tech for this, we could have literal multi-bike sheds/parking garages and all that's needed is 1 (ONE) water source with a hose inside. As I said, failure on the part of our species :-)
In my city there are actually a few public bike washing stations, so the game plan in this case would be just to bike that way before coming home.
In most of the world villages have at least a cluster of homes nearby, since having other humans close is super handy when shit hits the fan.