[josephcsible]

> we have to make it easier for people to go to a train station or to hop onto their bicycle and/or have to make it more difficult to hop into their car.

The former is fine, since it's an improvement to society. The latter is not fine, since it's a worsening of society.

[UtopiaPunk]

I get that humans would rather have the carrot than the stick. However, there are arguably a lot of positive benefits that result from making cars a more inconvenient choice. For example, one design choice that makes cars convenient is that towns and cities in the U.S.A often prioritize parking lots. Parking lots take up a lot of valuable space. If we used that space for something else (housing, a restaurant, a park, a museum, office space, anything really), then it becomes much less convenient for cars to be in the area, but more attractive for people who do not depend on a car. If that happens at scale in area, you also get other nice benefits like less air pollution, less noise pollution, fewer traffic accidents, etc.

[bluGill]

The problem is you need to be able to get to that area before you can eliminate cars. If you are not careful you can kill an area because the people who used to drive there cannot anymore and so they just go elsewhere. If you already have a lot of people arriving by something other than cars, then you can replace the parking lot with something else and make better use of the space, but most areas don't have that advantage.

Building such places is not easy where they don't already exist. It isn't impossible, but you need to start there.

[lmm]

Currently car drivers are subsidised; vast amounts of valuable public land are turned over to them to use for free, while they're allowed to spew pollution and kill people on a scale that would get any other activity banned at a fraction of that level.

We don't need to be punitive, but we should make drivers pay their fair share of the costs they impose on the rest of us.

[chung8123]

It would be fun to see the numbers on what that fair share is. These threads never have any numbers on how much things cost. From trains, to cars, to bike paths it always amazes me we cannot put prices on things.

[Someone]

> The latter is not fine, since it's a worsening of society.

That’s an opinion, not a fact. IMO, the negative effects for society of it being easy to hop into their cars for so many are plentiful. Cities get worse, the environment is worse of and the population gets less healthy.

[yamtaddle]

> The latter is not fine, since it's a worsening of society.

Not necessarily. It's entirely possible that changing those incentives will improve things, overall.