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by bryanlarsen 297 days ago
The goal isn't, or shouldn't be, fewer people owning cars. The goal should be fewer miles driven in urban areas. My cousin in Copenhagen basically only uses it for driving out to a rural area to visit her parents.

Owning a car in Denmark is incredibly expensive. That does significantly impact the ownership rate. And of course if fewer people own cars the miles driven by cars does go down. But lowering the ownership rate is a means to the end, not the end itself.
1 comments
taeric 297 days ago
Fair, but largely to my point? If you want to lower the miles driven, you are going to be going through the same general steps along the way.
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bryanlarsen 296 days ago
No, I disagree with your initial assertion.

> you get more people out of cars by making them expensive than you do with city design.

The city design is the prerequisite. If you don't have transit etc, people will own cars no matter how expensive the cars are (within reason, of course). Households in rural Denmark without access to transit own cars despite it being 2X as expensive as elsewhere.

Once you have transit, cranking the price becomes a much more effective mechanism.

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taeric 296 days ago
Ok, I take it as an obvious prerequisite that you have to have transit for people to use it. Such that, yes, it isn't enough to just tax the heck out of cars to force them to start walking long distances.

But I point to Atlanta as easy evidence that having transit cover hot spots is clearly not enough. I used it daily for over a couple of decades to get to a job where I was among the only people that used transit. Amusingly, this was among a crowd of folks that loved preaching the virtues of transit. As soon as they made enough money to afford a car, they got one.

Even in Seattle, with what seems like nicer transit to me, I see plenty of people getting a car when they can afford it.

Tokyo, famously, has strict rules on if you can register a car. Despite that, it is amusing that the silly AI answer still ends with "though car ownership remains higher in some affluent neighborhoods." Which was somewhat obvious to see when touristing the place.

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