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by consteval 449 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.

> 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.