[sokoloff]

Cars are selling, despite their high economic price, because they're incredibly useful.

Make competing modes of transit at least one of more useful at no more cost or no less utility but at a lower cost and people will switch incredibly quickly. That's a tall order, because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience.

[wizofaus]

I'd only add "...because they're incredibly useful, AND government policy has consistently favoured such a mode of transport over all other alternatives". The amount spent by governments on maintaining road infrastructure dwarfs all other transport spending, the amount of land dedicated to parking and driving space is mindboggling, and of course the amount spent on ensuring the global oil industry has been able to reliably and safely deliver fuel to vehicles is beyond comprehension* (and almost certainly one of the reasons the transition to EVs will be slower than technology might otherwise allow - vested interests with billions to lose will do anything to keep their share of the spoils). Not to mention the fact that we've yet to actually start truly paying for the long term environmental and health costs of allowing our cities to be so dominated by a single mode of transport.

*) it's estimated up to 20% of the US's defence budget is spent protecting oil supplies for a start, which effectively acts as a subsidy of around 70c a gallon.

[yokem55]

You aren't wrong that government support of automotive transport is immense. But that government support comes from decades of popular electoral support for those policies from all across of the political spectrum. Why? Because cars give people more convenient and independent transportation then just about any other mode. And people push their politicians and representatives to support that kind of transportation.

If you want to undo the car centric culture and economy, you cannot just ignore the broad base of popular support it enjoys.

[ramblenode]

> Why? Because cars give people more convenient and independent transportation then just about any other mode.

This is kind of a chicken and egg problem.

The value of a car is proportional to the extent of the road network. There is no value (for most cars) in isolation.

The original push for government investment in car-friendly infrastructure and highways was from industrialists, technocrats, and military minds. It was top-down planning, not bottom-up. After those major infrastructure investments (and divestments from commuter rail), the car was an obvious choice. Everything after that was self-reinforcing: more cars -> more roads -> more cars -> more roads. Of course if you already own a car then it is a sunk cost and you will prefer the government spend more on car infrastructure to benefit you, further perpetuating the investment cycle.

If the initial circumstances had been different (maybe progress in electrification proceeded a little faster and oil refining a little slower) then public transit and urban planning might have developed differently and the car would not be as important as it is now (practically a necessity in most of the US).

[wizofaus]

Sure, there's an element of that. But the idea that government policy has been primarily driven by what would produce the "best" outcome as far as transport options go that the population actually want is a little naive. And of course what we all want is convenience and comfort for ourselves while not having to deal with the downsides (or impossibility) of providing it for everyone.

I'm happy to accept the reality that currently we have no form of alternative transport technology that offers the same comfort & convenience of the car - but I also believe we'd've been better off in the long run if public spending hadn't been so grotesquely skewed in favour of that particular option - other technologies would have had a better chance to come to the fore (e.g. why have e-bikes/e-scooters taken so long to become popular - there's no particular reason I know of they couldn't have been a big part of our transport network 20 or 30 years ago), we could have laid out our cities so we didn't need to travel such huge distances on a regular basis (vs, e.g. occasional long-distance travel between dense hubs where most facilities and services could be accessed via walking/cycling etc.), goods transportation could've been revolutionised by dedicated automated networks etc. etc. For me the most convincing argument that exists against the size (and reach) of government power that we've become accustomed to is that so many opportunities for a better balance of transportation options have been lost to a virtually single-minded focus by the powers-that-be over the last 70 or 80 years on private cars above all else.

[jeromegv]

But we also built our society to make the car more convenient. Can’t remember the ratio but the amount of parking space available per car is absolutely insane. That means a relatively cheap access to put your giant car almost anywhere you go. Most cities are built around that idea and that makes other form of transportations almost impractical.

So yes the car is convenient but we also built many things to make it more convenient. In places where subways/rapid transit are made more convenient, there’s of course less parking and less road space and naturally % of car ownership goes down

It’s a choice. It’s not naturally always based on the merit of the car.

[gdilla]

800 parking spots per car in the US.

[sokoloff]

Does "800 parking spots per car" pass the sniff test?

There's order of magnitude 1 car per US resident. Does it seem like there are 800 parking spots per US resident? A quarter of a trillion total parking spots?

I doubt my car parks in 800 unique places (including different street parking spots as unique) in a given year.

On the smaller end, call each space 16'x8'. That puts a little more than 2% of the entire land mass of the US as parking spaces (assuming I didn't get any of the exponents wrong).

[AnimalMuppet]

Source? A quick Google turns up 8 as a common number, not 800.

[wizofaus]

Perhaps if you accept that freeways function as parking spots during major traffic jams...

[carapace]

That's originally the result of a deliberate domestic propaganda campaign, cf. "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM

If we did it once for cars we could do it again agin 'em.

[feitingen]

> Because cars give people more convenient and independent transportation then just about any other mode.

In the US, this is true.

In most European cities, you can just walk instead, or take the metro or a tram.

It's really convenient to just walk to where you want to go, and when the grocery store is a 10 minute walk away, you don't need to fill a car with groceries. Just go more often.

Need to go further? Clean and safe public transportation is often more convenient than having to drive yourself.

I really like being able to read a book on my way to work rather than paying attention to the road and making sure i don't kill myself or someone else.

[brewdad]

I’ve been looking at places for retirement where I can live car-free or at least very car-lite. There are very few places in the US where this will be possible in my lifetime. Absolutely, let’s more towards an EV future because that’s the best we’ll do in most people’s lifetimes but we can’t expect that change to fix what we’ve spent 100 years building. It needs to be seen as step one of many yet so many Americans are fighting against taking even that step.

[TedDoesntTalk]

I’ve had several elderly relatives live without cars in apartment buildings in major US cities.

[gdilla]

Yes it's called NYC. Cars everywhere but you don't need one. Every neighborhood has everything you need. Subway taxis and Ubers and delivery for everything else.

[TedDoesntTalk]

There are other US and Canadian cities besides NYC which have that.

[rangledangle]

Cars are only useful because America foolishly built and rebuilt around cars, instead of humans. There were even places that functioned perfectly fine with transit and walking, destroyed and replaced with infrastructure for cars.

Undoing our mistake is always an option.

[sokoloff]

If it can be demonstrated to most voters to be a mistake, presenting the full plan to undo and replace it with something better would be a good next step.

[wizofaus]

When was the plan for what we have now ever presented to voters? Clearly it's not something that can be "undone" all in one go - but every day governments make decisions about what infrastructure to build/repair/extend, how much parking should be available and how much to charge for it, and how much to continue ensuring the current car-based economy is well supported/subsidized. If those decisions gradually moved towards "let's not assume cars are the be all and end all", we could still slowly unboil the frog as it were.

[sokoloff]

It never was. But as a voter, it's what outside my window right now and what I understand.

If you want to make wholesale changes quickly, you probably need the support of voters.

Nobody put 240V center-tapped, 60 Hz AC residential electricity to the voters either, but if you wanted to change it, you're probably going to need a strategy and a communications campaign to explain why and how.

[geraldwhen]

US public transit is ruled by homeless and criminals. Constant stabbing, sexual assault, robbery, and stalking.

I will not take my kids on any transit where they might be assaulted by a naked homeless man. America will never have safe public transit because it lacks the will to handle the mentally ill and addicts.

[wizofaus]

If the city you live in has been entirely designed around private motor vehicles and lacks any decent transit network (LA being the obvious example), no amount of investment into helping the mentally ill and drug addicts is going to make transit an attractive option for more than a tiny percentage of the population.

Thankfully in Australia's biggest cities our public transport systems are generally clean and safe to use - but a) they're not always super reliable, despite some improvements in recent years b) they're often poorly interconnected, meaning I could potentially do 80% of the journey sitting in comfort on a train, but spend 3 times longer than it would take to drive trying to deal with getting to/from train stations and c) there are still huge areas of said cities that are fairly poorly served by trains, and buses will always be a second rate way of getting around. Oh and d) you can't carry v. large items or animals on most public transport (*). All solvable problems, some easier than others, but there's a distinct lack of real political will to do so.

(*) e.g. it'd be a 15 min train ride to take my dog to the beach from where I live, but she's not a service animal so wouldn't even be allowed on, despite taking up less space than a human.

[wizofaus]

(Ooh, I actually just looked it up - you are actually allowed to take dogs on trains here, though they're supposed to be muzzled. Never seen anyone do so though, and I'm quite sure they wouldn't be allowed on buses).

[maest]

> because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience.

It's also heavily subsidised and its cost does not include a signficant chunk of externalities.

Also, this has been discussed to death, but a large chunk of car usage can be replaced by other modes of transportation. However, that transition requires upfront infrastructural investment.

Sadly, arguments like yours ensure that investment won't happen. So, externalities will keep piling up, until the situation will get dire enough that 1. it can't be ignored anymore and 2. it's too late to meaningfully undo the damage.

[Tostino]

Think of how differently the 20th century would have played out if we didn't have such a demand for oil.

[ZeroGravitas]

For example if you google "why did Japan enter WW2" the summary answer is:

> "Faced with severe shortages of oil .. Japan decided to attack the United States and British forces in Asia and seize the resources of Southeast Asia."

[ffgjgf1]

It’s the other way around. They lost access to oil because they entered WW2.

Had they not decided to invade Indochina (and China before that) US wouldn’t have embargoed oil exports to Japan.

[fsckboy]

and while we're on the subject, we didn't go to war with Iraq (either time) for oil. Iraq wanted to sell us oil, and Iraqi oil on the international market would have driven oil prices lower for us. The reasons lie elsewhere.

It's OK to be against the Iraq war or all war, but it's not OK (or at least accurate) to say it was so we could get their oil, pretty much the exact opposite.

[fsckboy]

energy is what replaces human labor and also makes things possible that human labor can't even provide. Our energy desires in the future will grow even higher. It's not a defect in human nature, it's a defect in the laws of thermodynamics.

Stop fighting it, you're wasting energy.

[efreak]

Taking the bus is inconvenient, especially in Los Angeles. We do not have a great public transit system. However, it is far cheaper than car insurance. One bus ride is $1.75 these days, which is quite a bit--but it also includes transfers up to at least an hour after you get on. I usually get a ride to work, and I take the bus home daily, except on the rare occasion I manage to get a ride home with someone at work. *I pay $0 in car insurance, gas, maintenance*. I pay $1.75 for the bus on most days, while others might have to pay $3.5/day; A day pass is $5 if you need to make a third trip during the day, or go backwards for shopping (taking the same line in the opposite direction doesn't count for a transfer)

[adrianN]

If you spend a hundred years optimizing your infrastructure for one mode of transport while disregarding all others, it's not surprising that it's the most convenient, or indeed the only possible, mode of transport for a majority of people.

[midasuni]

Cars have such a low price because the cost of them is not born by the person purchasing them.

[listenallyall]

Are there any large-scale public transportation systems that aren't reliant on huge government subsidies?

London: 3.6b pounds https://www.google.com/search?q=london+tube+government+subsi...

New York: $7.2 billion https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics

Amsterdam: 370m euros for 3 months service https://www.railjournal.com/financial/dutch-government-provi....

Ok, Hong Kong appears to turn a profit.

[woodruffw]

This is the wrong question: the right question is whether public transit is more subsidized per passenger-mile (or freight mile) than our road networks.

(Even more abstractly, it doesn’t matter whether or not public transit is highly subsidized, so long as the positive externalities of that subsidization are deemed worth it. You don’t get to the size and density (and corresponding economic output) of cities like NYC by allocating personal parking space for every resident.)

[dukeyukey]

Not many, especially if you include car travel - very few roads are privately built, compared to what the government does.

[graywh]

We've also engineered our society to make cars too convenient and necessary.

[jh00ker]

One application of (EV) cars is the robotaxi. Once this solution reaches critical mass, car ownership as we see it today will drop off.

If I can send my car out to be a robotaxi while I'm at work and/or :^) asleep, then how much do I care that MY specific vehicle return to bring ME home, when I could just use any other robotaxi available? So then I don't own a car at all and ownership elsewhere falls and the number of total cars drops to the number needed to handle only the maximum number of simultaneous rides.

[bmitc]

Robotaxis don't have anything to do with and certainly aren't dependent upon EVs. I highly doubt robotaxis ever make it. And at that point, why not invest in other infrastructure. It's pointless to have big vehicles carrying one or two people.

[abecedarius]

Once cars start being designed for robotaxi use, it makes economic sense to be much smaller: most rides are one-passenger. (Though who knows what crazy outcomes you end up with under the regulators.)

[michaelmrose]

This is an excellent point here are a few more.

EVs are usually designed for consumers convenience insofar as being able to travel a substantial distance between charges to accommodate a minority of actual use when user may need to travel further than the average commute inside the city. A company that operates a fleet of taxis can purchase a very large number of short jaunt single/dual passenger EV and a much smaller number of large vehicles and task the former with the majority of rides either charging frequently when unused or hot swapping batteries when theirs get low. Therefore weight and ergo tire dust might be decreased even more so than one might imagine from size alone due to the reduced battery needs.

One might also suppose that in exclusively urban environments it might make sense to provide harder tires designed to produce less dust and less aggressive driving than human drivers to the same end.

[xmcqdpt2]

Most car trips today are single person and yet cars are enormous and getting bigger all the time. It's not the regulators, it's the consumers that want the crazy outcomes.

[abecedarius]

https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-ar...

[bmitc]

I doubt that's the case. And how would that work?

If we look at the economics of Uber and Uber Eats, we see that they have shifted to ride sharing and also delivery sharing. In that, it makes more sense to bundle up multiple people and deliveries into one. Doesn't that sound a whole lot like buses?

[abecedarius]

Uber has drivers. There's probably some reason to customize car design for taxis, I'm not sure, but that's a modest difference relative to no driver and the greater expected scale of supplanting most human driving in time.

https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/design-change.html is very old and there are newer discussions, but I'm too lazy to find them for you. Also michaelmrose's answer.

[bmitc]

Whether Uber has drivers or had automated drivers doesn't really matter. I think they show that there isn't much business in point-to-point "automated" car rides.

[cutemonster]

> Cars ... incredibly useful

Not where I live, in north western Europe. Here the subways are fast, and not many use cars inside the city. Many buses and bike lanes too.

Here, cars are slow: traffic queues, finding a parking lot. But the subway never runs into any traffic queues.

And the subway is many times cheaper than a car's monthly cost. And I can read HN on the subway

[walleeee]

this framing, in making no reference to the thermodynamics of transportation, or of the human economy in general, mistakes mythology for reality

pursuit of convenience and immediate utility with scarcely a thought for consequences propels us toward hard physical limits at speed