My favorite thing to do is visit outdoor recreation areas 30-60m outside my city and but within my metropolitan area (which is the size of rhode island)<p>If cars were suddenly unobtainable, I would be forced to move to maintain my sanity which would have other quality of life impacts such as being far from family or less job opportunity.<p>I don't see how anything short of nuking this metropolitan area and waiting for the dust to clear in order to rebuild can fix the current mess we're in here.<p>On the other hand my work is a short 8 mile bike ride along nice quiet side streets which pre-COVID i used to do 4-5 times per week. There was a shower in the gym at work I used which made the entire thing feasible. Frequently I'm nervous about the affects on my health due to the poor air quality here but the relaxation and fitness it brings seems to be a good tradeoff.<p>I would be happy to not own a car due to the outrageous expense to myself and society, but I don't see myself easily giving up the freedom that comes with it.
I suspect modern transportation infrastructure are going to be one of those things future generations mock us for.<p>We spend an insane amount of our private money on purchasing and maintaining personal vehicles, our public money on our road infrastructure, and our natural resources on building and driving the cars ( that smog has a cost even if everyone wants to pretend it does not. ).<p>They belch smog that poisons people and reduces their IQ[0]. They create trash and waste. Their production and transportation eats up our natural resources and pollutes our earth. Traffic makes cities miserable to live in. So much of the way we live in the United States has been dictated by the private vehicle.<p>0: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air-pollution-causes-huge-reduction-in-intelligence-study-reveals" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air-poll...</a>
4K video of an evening walk around Ikebukuro Station in central Tokyo. Many bicycles, minor streets with no (or limited) traffic, major streets with <i>large</i> pedestrian walkways.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/qSX4vpwlQzw" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/qSX4vpwlQzw</a>
Although I like the idea of stopping the insane susbidies given to private automobile transport I do not like the narrow, bi-directional bike lanes that this article is illustrated with.<p>When I cycle I want the option to ride side-by-side chatting with a friend or family member. I do not want to be squashed into a narrow single-occupancy lane with a concrete delimiter (or parked cars) stuck behind someone else going slowly.<p>There is a simple solution: let everyone faster than a pedestrian onto the roads; introduce presumed liability (similar to the Netherlands); lower the speed limit for cars, charge the operators a price that reflects the climate destruction (and whatever the going price for a few hundred thousand 3rd-World children blown to shit is these days).
I'm so tired of seeing this kind of nonsense over and over again. No, it doesn't take much less space to move 50 people in a bus than with cars <i>because the effing bus doesn't go where 50 random people need to go</i>. And people wouldn't be owning private cars if it wasn't convenient for them, consequently it's impossible that life would instantly improve for everyone if they had to give them up like the author claims. Then this "induced demand" nonsense that pops up all the time. It's impossible because total traffic cannot increase due to new roads since there aren't infinite people or cars to begin with. The traffic moving to new or wider roads is missing elsewhere, which is usually good.<p>But hey, go ahead, try this pipe dream in any large city. It'll work great, like that recent "summer of love" in Seattle.
I often wonder about a world where you simply aren't allowed to borrow your way into a car. It's not trivial and has a lot of edge cases, but a lot of people would start thinking more carefully about it.