[masfuerte]

I've always lived in walkable cities. I don't own a car and with pollution, congestion, accident risk, pavement obstruction, etc. other people's cars unequivocally make my life worse.

We can argue about whether this is a good trade off, but the claim that cars make everyone's life better is straightforwardly false.

[ctoth]

I live in a walkable city. I cannot drive because I am blind. Cars make my life better. Uber exists. I use it to get many places that I otherwise wouldn't go to.

[shimman]

Yes it's a widely known fact that prior to cars blind people only stayed in a single room for their entire lives. It was only due to the motorized auto carriage could blind people finally ride around and experience the world! Pretty cool!

I wonder how the Uber driver feels about not being considered a full time employee and unable to have affordable healthcare and a nonexistent retirement plan. Hopefully they don't think too hard about it or that would be incredibly selfish of them.

[lazyasciiart]

This doesn’t contradict or respond to the comment you are replying to in any way.

[TaupeRanger]

Troll post? No, they do not "unequivocally" make your life worse. "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous.

The only way you receive food (except from your backyard inner-city garden?) is through people DRIVING. The way you receive packages is by DRIVING. They city infrastructure you enjoy is maintained through skilled laborers and tradespeople DRIVING.

[eloisius]

There's a difference between personal vehicles and special purpose vehicles like ambulances and delivery trucks. I don't think anyone in this thread is saying all automobiles are bad, but car-centric development is definitely bad. You don't have to theorize from first principles about this. There are many places around the world that aren't as locked into the personal car as the US is, and they are still functioning societies where you can receive food, packages, medicine, workers maintain infrastructure, etc.

[lossyalgo]

In fact, the cities which are repeatedly rated as having the highest quality of life are almost all not car-centric.

[tpmoney]

But is that a function of the cars or a function of the urban density? One imagines that the suburban and rural areas that are rated highest quality of life are almost all car-centric

[lossyalgo]

Cities have existed for much longer than automobiles have and have somehow prospered since millenia. I don't think the recent invention of automobiles has anything to do with proper functioning of cities.

[tpmoney]

I agree, so it's a good thing I wasn't arguing anything of the sort. Just pushing back on the idea that just because "cities" with the highest quality of life ratings are non-car-centric that we can infer anything useful about whether cars in general and personal autos in particular are generally good or bad. It seems entirely possible that cars could be a net good up to a certain population density.

[TaupeRanger]

People travel to ALL of the jobs you just described in...wait for it...personal vehicles. And sure...there are places in the US that are not as car dependent, and places around the world that are just as car dependent as many US cities. The post I replied to said that other peoples' cars are "unequivocally" making their life worse, which, as I pointed out, is complete nonsense.

[PsylentKnight]

Troll post? You state that "other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living, then go on to talk about things that trucks do, not personal vehicles

[Marha01]

I don't think it's possible to clearly separate personal vehicles from commercial ones. The technology is the same. Any regulation that tries to ban the one while allowing the other would be a huuuge clusterfuck.

[pocksuppet]

You, personally, can't tell the difference between someone's car and a delivery truck?

[panzagl]

Maybe it's only this way in my suburban US area, but no.

[PsylentKnight]

> The technology is the same

I mean sure, they both have engines and wheels, but they're already distinguishable in the eyes of the law. Commercial and personal vehicles are registered separately

Anyway, I don't think anyone is proposing banning cars. Just would be good to provide alternatives

[Supermancho]

> Anyway, I don't think anyone is proposing banning cars.

Following the conversation, the subject has not ever been a yes/no referendum on cars.

It was if there has been a moral net positive/net negative for vehicular technology (as a comparable technology to AI)...which has consistently been walked back to a nebulous "personal vehicles are a net negative because of how they make people think". That's eerily close to the views on AI today.

[sensanaty]

> I don't think it's possible to clearly separate personal vehicles from commercial ones

What? Of course it is, you can easily impose rules that apply to personal vehicles that don't apply to public transport, logistical vehicles or emergency vehicles.

As an example in my neighborhood in the Netherlands, there's basically no streets around me where personal vehicles are allowed, but there are no restrictions to buses, delivery vehicles, moving vans, or ambulances.

> Any regulation that tries to ban the one while allowing the other would be a huuuge clusterfuck

How? You don't even have to go fancy with specialized license plates or anything like that, it's literally just common sense.

[bdangubic]

> it's literally just common sense.

if that is lacking (often is) $50,000 fine per incident will take care of it

[masfuerte]

I said cars not driving. Yes, the supermarket needs trucks to deliver the food. It doesn't need cars.

[lamasery]

Ambulances: good. Trucks: good. Busses, even: good.

Cars? Waaaay less clear they're net-beneficial.

[TaupeRanger]

Traveling to work in a personal car to get to the job that requires you to drive an ambulance: apparently bad? Likewise driving to your trucking job? Also bad? To the grocery store workers? Also bad? To the operations and support employees that provide your internet, your email, every app you use, the water treatment plant, your local government, the restaurants you order from, your insurance company. Yes...getting to work and allowing society to run at levels of efficiency required to support the population is very clearly beneficial.

[lamasery]

The broader effects of designing the world for car-efficiency wipe out the individual benefits, for most people. Exception for those who can afford to be driven around by others.

I was skeptical too the first time I read this kind of argument. I ran the numbers for my case, which was sitting around the median (commute duration) or significantly better than the median (household income, car cost) for relevant numbers, for my car-dependent middling-costs US city, and it was still roughly break-even without even factoring in not being able to make commutes double as exercise time.

I had to have a car. My life would have fallen apart without it, that's how big a benefit it apparently was. Yet if I actually examined what was going on, it wasn't providing any real benefit to me at all, just negating harm done by designing my city around cars. That's how the numbers worked out, much to my surprise. For most residents of that city it was worse, the city being designed for cars was making their lives worse.

[PsylentKnight]

The problem is that all the infrastructure that cars need (roads, parking lots) makes everything WAY further apart. For example, downtown Houston is literally like 25% parking lots by area. And that's not even counting other car infrastructure like roads. So to some degree, cars are just satisfying a demand for transportation that they themselves create

Denser, less car-centric areas are more economically productive than less dense areas. Car infrastructure prevents density. So I would argue that, at least in some cases, cars decrease economic efficiency

[lamasery]

Put simply: The existence of motor vehicles is good, from most perspectives. It's fairly hard to argue they're not.

The development of cities caused by unrestricted, broad private car ownership without lots of careful coordination on that development, is in the reverse situation: it's fairly hard to argue it's net-beneficial, because it's so incredibly expensive in all-told money, time(!), liberty(!!), and, if we'll allow consideration of such things in a basically-economic analysis, pleasantness of environments for humans to exist in.

[Marha01]

> "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous.

THIS! I am shocked that some people don't realize that modern civilization and our modern quality of life depends on cars to a huge degree, even for people don't personally drive. Such a lack of knowledge about modern industry and logistics..

In aggregate, benefits of cars outweight the cons for 99% of people. Perhaps if you live right next to a busy highway, you might the the exception..

[Kbelicius]

> THIS! I am shocked that some people don't realize that modern civilization and our modern quality of life depends on cars to a huge degree, even for people don't personally drive. Such a lack of knowledge about modern industry and logistics..

I'm more shocked that somebody thinks that modern civilization and logistics depend on personal cars. Can ypu expand on your statement that modern industry and logistic depend on persobal cars?

[Marha01]

The distinction between personal and commercial cars is too small to allow effectivelly banning one while keeping the other. Any country that tries to do so will inevitably overshoot in one of the directions: either the ban will be too permitting, so people will still use personal cars, just less as today, or the ban will be too broad, which would negatively affect the commercial or logistical use cases and the economy will suffer.

[lossyalgo]

I don't think anyone is arguing about banning ALL vehicles, much less all personal vehicles, but rather to simply become less car-centric. Most cities which top the list of highest quality of life worldwide all have fairly good public transportation options and/or are very walkable.

[iamnothere]

With respect, a few people are indeed making that argument.

Many car haters constantly play this motte-and-bailey game where they insinuate that cars are evil and should be eliminated, then they pull back and say “oh no, we don’t want to ban them” when confronted. But it’s clear that some subset really would prefer to eliminate civilian vehicles.

I like smart urbanism and pedestrian-centric development, but the anti-car culture annoys me to no end. It is self-defeating. The average person in the US has a car, and likes having a car, so you should start every argument with that assumption. We made a lot of progress on improving pedestrian access in the early 2000s by focusing on a positive message. But I guess there’s no room for non-adversarial messaging anymore.

[Kbelicius]

Ok, so i guess that personal caes don't play any huge role in modern civilization and its logstics so i was right to be shocked by your statement.

[TaupeRanger]

Obviously true, but apparently we're in a hornets nest of anti-car coastal folks here? Very strange comment thread overall.