[Taters91]

I'd argue that cars are not more convenient in dense cities like New York. You have to find parking, you have to navigate traffic (pedestrian, car, and e-bike), and then you have to find gas stations. With public transportation, you don't need any of that. The only inconvenience is that sometimes where you're going is a bit of a walk. Car insurance is expensive, because cars cause a lot of damage and are easy to get damaged.

[bko]

Right, because New York is not car-centric (bike lanes, very dense, few gas stations)

"Bit of a walk" is a nice way of saying it but in reality it means you are very limited with things like shopping. You're kind of stuck with the nearest walkable grocer. If you're luck enough to live by a cheap ones like Trader Joes, they are ridiculously crowded so you're paying in a different form. Or you can try your luck with Bodegas but they're often sell expired food, are overpriced and rarely have anything fresh . Then you're stuck with how much you can carry or try to use one of those granny pushers. Kids could be very difficult to wrangle as well and there are plenty of unpleasant things you have to explain to them or ignore. It's very dehumanizing

My point is that having a car is nice and I want people to have nice things. They don't belong everywhere, like NY. But overall I don't understand this push to public transportation for the sake of public transportation.

[wpm]

> ut overall I don't understand this push to public transportation for the sake of public transportation.

Then you maybe haven't spent too long thinking about it.

Climate change is a big one.

Microplastics from tire wear.

Asthma rates in children.

Obesity rates.

Etc etc etc.

Car centric design makes us poorer, fatter, less healthy. It makes our cities and towns poorer, less resilient, and uglier. I can go on.

[alexlesuper]

Not mention that less cars on the road means improved travel times for those that are obligated to use their car.

[autoexec]

I'm not sure "lose your freedoms because it's better for you and less ugly" is a winning pitch.

It'd be better to make sure that people can still access the things they want conveniently while minimizing the harms. I think it's a good thing to improve and promote public transportation by making them the more attractive option rather than just punish drivers and restrict their options until they have no choice but to settle for something less than what they have.

[consteval]

The idea that driving a car increases freedoms is a uniquely American ideal.

It doesn’t, it does the opposite. It pushes everything further away which means you no longer have the freedom to not have a car. It, quite literally, redesigns our cities to become dependent on them.

It’s like heroin. Sure, it feels good, but at what cost? How do we stop now?

[autoexec]

The solution is to improve pubic transportation and other alternatives so that they are the better option. As more people take it, redesign the roads and cities around those alternatives to cars to make them even better. That's how you stop.

Give people something better and they'll line up to take it. The problem is that doing that requires a major public investment. It's a lot harder to say "We're going to spend billions to make public transport worth taking even for people who already own cars" than it is to say "We're going to punish people for using cars and take their money and make many people's lives worse, but mostly just the poorest people so you probably don't have to worry and in fact you'll have fewer cars on the road when you drive them"

The auto industry had no problems spending a fortune bribing politicians in order to make cars more attractive to people by redesigning our cities around them and hurting anyone who didn't own a car. We need to be ready to spend the money to undo what they did.

[consteval]

> The solution is to improve pubic transportation and other alternatives so that they are the better option.

Yes, and the way you do this is you siphon off funds given to car users and instead invest them in public infrastructure.

The reality is car users don't actually pay the price for anything, the costs are externalized. For example, we've spent over 25 Trillion on the interstate highway system alone. The gas tax and car sales tax doesn't even make a dent in this. Car users are paying cents on the dollar for what they're doing.

Another example, the average parking spot costs 7,000 dollars a year to maintain. But we have free parking everywhere. That cost is externalized, and paid for by you and me. And then, of course, carbon.

It's not so much a punishment, but rather a small nudge towards a fair distribution. If car users had to pay what it actually cost, they would be in an uproar. They've been on the welfare of everyone for a long time now. We're only asking them to pay closer to their own fair share. Keep in mind - they're still not paying what they should.

[bko]

By this logic, not being in a wheelchair doesn't make things easier. It pushes accessibility down. Entire cities are redesigned so that you're dependent on your legs.

Yes, society should help those in wheelchairs, but shouldn't we aim to give everyone use of their legs?

[consteval]

Cars are not your legs, the analogy doesn't work. Cars are a good that you buy in order to live your life.

If you could also live your life without a car, that would be better for you. Yes, you, personally. In fact everyone who drives.

[stouset]

Jfc, building out more public transit, encouraging alternate forms of transportation, and mildly discouraging car use through a fee isn’t “losing your freedoms”. You have completely lost touch with reality.

[autoexec]

You've lost touch with the context. "building out more public transit, encouraging alternate forms of transportation, and mildly discouraging car use through a fee" wasn't at issue

The claim was: "The only inconvenience [of not having a car and only using public transportation in a dense city] is that sometimes where you're going is a bit of a walk."

This was refuted with examples of other sources of inconvenience like: "Bit of a walk" is a nice way of saying it but in reality it means you are very limited with things like shopping. You're kind of stuck with the nearest walkable grocer." which was followed by "My point is that having a car is nice and I want people to have nice things." and that pushing public transportation for the sake of public transportation (ignoring the limitations it would bring to people's lives) doesn't make sense, which brought us to "lose your freedoms because it's better for you and less ugly"

Having a car means being able to go where you want, when you want, how you want. It means you can shop at stores that are out of walking range. It means you can pile your two Mastiffs into a car to take them to the vet. It means you can go to visit a loved one at times when public transportation doesn't run, travel to places it doesn't reach, and avoid adding large amounts of travel time (either waiting or walking) to your trips.

Giving up cars would very obviously mean a huge loss in people's freedom, and introduce large impositions on their time. That's a hard sell when the argument is just "it'll be better for your health, less harmful to the environment, and cities will look prettier"

Public health and environmental concerns are good things to address, but cars solve a lot of problems too, including many that public transportation doesn't solve, and public transportation introduces other problems that cars don't have. If you care about encouraging the use of public transportation it'd be very worthwhile to acknowledge those things and take them into account.

[bko]

So make cars pollute less

Figure out how to filter microplastics from our food and water

Figure out what's causing asthma in children

Not sure how obesity is related. Maybe improve the food supply?

A lot of these are solved with electric cars which are increasingly more competitive.

Why force people to regress towards a worse product rather than address these technical issues?

[Mawr]

> So make cars pollute less

Physically impossible to have them pollute less than methods of mass transportation. Mathematically, even. Just divide the number of people carried per pollution caused by cars vs trains, bikes, or even buses. There's nothing you can do to make cars competitive.

> Figure out how to filter microplastics from our food and water

"Just figure it out", ok. But even then, an ounce of prevention is worth the pound of a cure.

> Figure out what's causing asthma in children

A little random but ok. I'm guessing grinding up rubber and metal particles into the air right next to where said children live isn't the best for their lungs.

> Not sure how obesity is related. Maybe improve the food supply?

1. Wake up

2. Walk 30 feet to your car

3. Sit as you drive to work

4. Spend 8 hours at your desk

5. Walk 30 feet to your car

6. Sleep

7. Why am I fat?! Maybe improve the food supply?!

> A lot of these are solved with electric cars which are increasingly more competitive.

Virtually none are, an electric car is still a car, see point 1.

> Why force people to regress towards a worse product rather than address these technical issues?

Highly dependent on your definition of worse; I'd argue the sort of streets and environments you can find in the Netherlands [1][2][3] are way better than in the US.

Not everything is a technical issue that can simply be solved by better engineering.

[1]: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?t=862

[2]: https://youtu.be/bMJaMy-0ChA?t=268

[3]: https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54?t=454

[stouset]

Please, please do yourself a favor and visit places that aren’t the USA.

Cars are the worse product. They are extremely energy inefficient for moving a human from A to B, even if powered by electricity. They are vastly more expensive than alternatives, even if you threw caution to the wind and allowed for the cheapest possible construction. They pose astronomical externalities in the form of more and bigger roads, more and bigger road maintenance, parking, and injury and fatality through collisions.

They have utility, but the only reason they even remotely compete against bicycles and trains and scooters and buses and walking is because you’ve built 95% of the things you might ever want to go to ten miles apart.

[autoexec]

Cars are a worse product in some ways and in a very limited number of situations, but cars are a much better product in many situations including some where public transportation is not a solution at all. The public transportation we have now is an objectively worse experience in the vast majority of places where it's available for almost every situation.

Public transportation can be improved to be better than it is and cities can be redesigned to make using public transportation easier, but until both of those things start happening, people will resist replacing all the good things cars offer with something that is much worse for them.

When car companies wanted to sell cars, they changed the roads and cities. The more they changed the roads and cities to make cars more attractive the more cars they sold. Cars already solved a lot of the problems people had, but car companies went even further to create many new problems that only their cars would solve. Making life worse for people without cars just to increase car sales was a dick move made by a bunch of assholes. Why is everyone so willing to make life worse for people with cars to sell public transportation now?

What we have now are people selling public transportation without bothering to change the roads and cities. There is no priority on making public transportation more attractive, instead the attention is all on how to make cars more painful to use.

Nobody has worked out how to get public transportation to solve the problems that only cars do currently. Nobody has addressed the problems that cause people to avoid public transportation. The entire attitude is basically "We're going to keep punishing car drivers until they put up with something far worse than what they have now so that maybe eventually we can have something better".

All the discussion is "take away parking" and "narrow the streets" and "charge drivers more money" but nobody is saying "We've made our public transportation systems clean, safe, pleasant, and dependable" or "No one ever has to wait more than 7 minutes at a station" or "We've expanded service to new areas and put in stations every three blocks"

It's true that in an ideal world we would be far less dependent on cars, but we'll never get there without making the alternatives more attractive and until that happens, punishing drivers is only going to piss people off and rightly so. It's a dick move.

[autoexec]

> I'd argue that cars are not more convenient in dense cities like New York.

I'd argue that if you were correct people would have already been using alternatives and there'd have been no need to punish people for driving. When you give people a better option they take it.

NYC could have improved alternatives to make them more attractive, but they choose to make driving worse instead forcing people who can't afford it to use less convenient ways to get around.

[mitthrowaway2]

People were using alternatives, but you still need to penalize driving because it's a multiagent system. Here's why.

The convenience of driving depends on traffic. If you're the only car on the road then it's very convenient. In gridlock, it's very inconvenient (but also takes the convenience of buses down with it).

So you reach some equilibrium of traffic levels where the marginal person opts for walking / subway rather than driving in all that traffic. But if you could magically reduce traffic, then driving becomes the better option and people take it.

If you want to sustain an equilibrium of lower traffic, you need to add a penalty to driving to stabilize the convenience of being the marginal driver in that equilibrium.

There are knock-on benefits to doing so, including that it makes alternatives to driving such as busses more effective.

[autoexec]

It says a lot that most of people using public transportation are the ones who have no other choice. They can't afford a car and the associated costs. If they had the ability to not use public transportation they wouldn't use it.

Road congestion is only one factor. If you ignore all the other things that keep people from wanting to use public transportation then punishing drivers is just going to piss people off.

People want to do what works best for them. Make public transportation work best for them and they'll use it no matter how deserted the streets are. Better yet, as traffic dies down, roads and parking lots can be reclaimed and nobody will care. Start closing roads and parking lots without solving the problems public transportation has, and people will be upset.

[mitthrowaway2]

But reducing traffic directly solves one of the major problems with public transportation, because it reduces commute times for buses and lets them keep a schedule more predictably, improving transfer times and reducing waits.

Increased ridership (as people are pushed to alternatives from cars) also leads to increased bus frequency, which also greatly improves the experience for all riders.

So it's actually a big step towards solving some of the major problems with public transit, but of course not exclusive with other steps being taken too.

Plus, reduced car traffic directly increases comfort and safety for walking and cycling as well.

[autoexec]

I agree, it's a good goal. It should come by giving people a reason to choose public transportation first though. You'd still get all the benefits, without pissing off people who understandably don't want their lives to be worse so that eventually public transportation can get better.

Punishing drivers until they have no choice but to accept that their lives will be worse is not a good way to promote public transportation, even if you pinkie promise that the pain will lessen over years/decades.

It's not necessary to strong arm people into using alternatives to cars if you make those alternatives genuinely better for more and more people in an increasing number of situations. As people naturally choose the path of least resistance, everything just gets better for everyone.

[mitthrowaway2]

I'm not sure that's possible. The space of policies that improve car alternatives without a perception of negatively impacting drivers is very narrow. That rules out bus priority lanes, protected bike lanes, gas and parking surcharges to fund transit, modal filters, advance walk signals...

Even when those policies actually improve the driving experience by getting more people out of cars and reducing congestion for the remaining drivers, many drivers don't tend to compare against the counterfactual where those road users become car traffic blocking their way when evaluating the impact of those policies on their drive. They just see bike and bus lanes being prioritized and react like it's a war against cars.

So how do you imagine that transit can be improved, without drivers reacting like they're being punished?

[ARandumGuy]

Humans are not perfectly rational actors, and will often make the "wrong" decision when better options are available. Especially when a given decision may not be bad individually, but adds up when a bunch of people make the same decision. In these cases, you have to not only incentivize the behavior you want, but disincentivize the behavior you don't want.