[rhn_mk1]

Perhaps you need a (e-)bike. Instead of taking 15min, you'd take 30min at city speeds.

But actually, if cars disappeared, people would have an incentive to work closer to where they live. So instead of living next to a quick road connection, you could live next to a quick bus/foot/bike route. And others would do, too. And look at all the unneeded space that used to be streets and parking lots, ready to be repurposed into new houses and offices!

[HideousKojima]

>Perhaps you need a (e-)bike. Instead of taking 15min, you'd take 30min at city speeds.

My old commute, prior to switching to full time WFH, was ~25 miles and took 25-30 minutes by car depending on traffic/stoplights. It would take me an hour to an hour and a half on a typical ebike, and it would be far too cold to make the trek 3 months out if the year.

[rhn_mk1]

I guess you chose your work/housing combo to be only friendly to a car. The alternative in this case is to choose a place where they are not so far apart - hardly impossible.

[erik_seaberg]

The tech industry is scattered all around the Bay Area. I’ve had four jobs in the last sixteen years, and each of them has been at least twenty miles away from the next (San Francisco, Mountain View, Walnut Creek, Sunnyvale).

[rhn_mk1]

Place built to require X is unuseable without X unless the dependency is broken - news at 11.

[HideousKojima]

At only vastly increased housing prices, sure.

[rhn_mk1]

That is not a given, see sibling comment.

[nextlevelwizard]

That is 15 minutes at 80km/h. e-bike can only go upto 25km/h here and even then biking is not really suitable for most of the year due to ice and snow.

>people would have an incentive to work closer to where they live

Again this is easy to say for people who have already made the decision. If over night cars became illegal many people would now be stuck with basically unlivable properties since there is no public transportation or at least not good ones.

I could move closer to my office, but I would have to pay twice as much for same living space and that is now when cars still are a thing. The prices would go up by quite a bit if you literally couldn't live further away. At least this is what I hope you mean, if you mean that I should instead look for a job near me then that would just be silly.

[rhn_mk1]

Cars becoming illegal over night is about as ralistic as popping up infrastructure replacing it over night. It's a complete straw man.

In reality, cars can only disappear gradually, with less-car-dependent infrastructure replacing them as they go, and prices adjusting together with that. If you want to find reasons that no-cars can't work, you'd do much better by acknowledging that their disappearance would bring wider changes to urbanism.

(Also, it's not unheard of to choose a job based on what's in the area. Academic couples do that quite often: when one moves, the other often tries to find a job based on where they go.)