[ardy42]

> Cars are only safe in a separated car lane, so why not ban cars, remove the car lanes and transform them into bike / scooter lanes ?

Because streets were designed as car lanes, and bikes/scooters are niche transportation technologies [1] when compared to cars?

[1] Bikes and scooters are really only useful for short-distance individual transport. They do not handle long distances, groups, and cargo very well.

[megy]

Except they were not.

Cars are just too dangerous to have anywhere near people. They should be banned from cities and suburbs. 40,000 people die every year in the US because of cars. Dumbest idea ever.

[ardy42]

> Except they were not.

99% of the streets for miles and miles around me were built after the invention of the car for near-dedicated use by automobiles, and those that were not were converted to that design.

> Cars are just too dangerous to have anywhere near people. They should be banned from cities and suburbs.

You say that, but I'd like to see you move your family to new house without using an automobile to move your stuff.

[max76]

A single digit percentage of suburb and city traffic in the United States are for activities that genuinely benefit from cars. Use a commercial vehicle to move your stuff, but for day to day travel many people use trains, bikes, or legs to move their families from location to location. We should be investing our transportation budget into more efficient methods than residential vehicle usage for daily commuting.

[ardy42]

> A single digit percentage of suburb and city traffic in the United States are for activities that genuinely benefit from cars.

Citation needed. Your use of "genuinely" indicates to me that there's a large subjective component to that statistic. I'd believe that it's physically possible to replace 99% of "suburb and city traffic" with "trains, bikes, or legs." However, I'm not at all convinced that 99% does not "genuinely benefit" from cars. My guess is that such replacement probably requires a strong ideological commitment to car-disuse [1] in order to persevere in the face of real drawbacks.

[1] I know several people with such ideological commitments.

[baby]

Cars make cities bad living habitat. This is well documented and you can compare any American city center with an European city center to understand that.