[549362-30499]

Driving in a city with even a basic public transit system is almost always slower than taking the train anyway, so time isn't really a factor. As for comfort, I don't think all the negative externalities of having a car-centric urban area are worth that trade off - what about the comfort of bikers and pedestrians that cars disrupt?

In the US at least, we already massively subsidize road infrastructure and gasoline, I think it's fair to let people who actually live in cities enjoy them, rather than bend over backwards to accommodate suburbanites who only come in for work.

Also, cars aren't a magic ticket to mobility. Elderly people often can't drive and end up stuck in their homes. They have to be purchased or leased, and maintained, etc.

[TomMarius]

> Driving in a city with even a basic public transit system

This is not true for almost every major EU city I've been in. Yeah, many routes yes, the common ones - of course. Once you need something more specific, it can take hours to get to the other side of the city.

> what about the comfort of bikers and pedestrians that cars disrupt

This is bad planning, not a side effect of having 4 wheel road vehicles. It'd be exactly the same with only public transit if you wouldn't change how you design roads.

> Also, cars aren't a magic ticket to mobility. Elderly people often can't drive and end up stuck in their homes. They have to be purchased or leased, and maintained, etc.

Not saying they are a magical solution to everything, I'm saying they help a lot - because they do. I was ill three times this year and having a car was literally a life saver, I wouldn't even be able to buy groceries without it. My grandmother wouldn't be able to get to her cottage without a car because public transport simply doesn't go there. My parents wouldn't be able to raise 2 kids with wildly different interests at the same time because they wouldn't get them to school and then themselves to work on time without cars - actually they wouldn't be able to work at all because of how much time they'd spent in a bus (we calculated it one time).

BTW with comfort I meant this: During summer I drive car exclusively (taxi or mine) because I physically can't go inside a bus - it's so hot, humid and smelling that I start throwing up and losing consciousness almost before I go inside. Yes, I'm a particularly sensitive person but I'm not the only one.

> They have to be purchased or leased, and maintained, etc.

That would be solved with the system I proposed above. When I'm saying cars, I mean four wheel vehicles for ~4 persons, not that I'd like to maintain the entire current system as it is. I'd like to see more much optimization and

[549362-30499]

Better urban planning is not going to fix anything in cities that were constructed several hundred years ago. Plus the solution there seems to always be wider roads and separate bike lanes - once again subsidizing things for traffic at the expense of everyone else.

Prioritizing car traffic is a trade off. For your individual situation, they offer you convenience and comfort. But that's at the expense of other people, especially people who actually live in the urban core and aren't just visiting or there for work.

Your system of only allowing AI-driven electric cars is a nice compromise, but it's just speculation - we're a very long way from anything like that being realized. This is about policy changes today that create a dramatically higher quality of life for millions of urban dwellers.

[TomMarius]

Sorry but I'm pretty sure that banning cars would be much harder and take longer than implementing my idea, politics-wise. People value their individual mobility. It's a huge problem to remove a few parking places. At least in Prague.