[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.

[autoexec]

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

You might not know what an analogy is. If cars actually were legs that wouldn't have even been an analogy would it?

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

If people could live without cars (which is to say that they were able to do everything they can do currently with cars, but without them) then yes, everyone would be better off because they'd still have all the benefits having a car gets them (the ability to quickly get to where they need to go with the things they need) without any of the downsides (costs, maintenance, pollution, giant parking lots etc)

The exact same thing is true for legs though. If we could all live without legs and not miss them because we floated around or something, we'd also have all the benefits with none of the downsides (no leg diseases/injuries, no knee replacements, shorter pants, etc) but that isn't terribly helpful because right now most people in the US can't live without a car or their legs.

No matter how much we might wish we didn't need our legs, as long as people still have and need their legs, we should probably design our cities to accommodate those legs. Even once we have a working alternative for legs, we should probably still design our cities to accommodate legs until the majority of people have been able to transition to not having legs.

Right now most people in the US don't have an option to replace their legs with something else that works just as well for them, just like they don't have an option to replace their cars with something that works just as well for them. We should probably fix that situation before we start punishing people for having legs and/or cars.

[consteval]

> You might not know what an analogy is.

Yes, I do know what an analogy is.

It doesn't work because cutting off your legs is bad, obviously. But reducing dependence on cars is good for people who drive cars. It, quite literally, makes driving better. Less traffic, more parking, less accidents, less deaths, cleaner air.

> No matter how much we might wish we didn't need our legs, as long as people still have and need their legs, we should probably design our cities to accommodate those legs.

Our cities ARE still designed for cars. Moving away from car design is slow and painful. It took 100 years to get into this mess. There's no reason to lose our heads because of a fee, a fee mind you that still does not get anywhere close to covering the true cost of cars.

> Right now most people in the US don't have an option to replace their legs with something else that works just as well for them

You know where they do? New York City! Feel free to live in whatever suburban hellscape you like. This entire comment and ideology simply does not apply to New York City. There, car drivers are a small minority.

[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.