How to quit cars

It’s odd to me that these anti-car polemics never talk about <i>why</i> Americans don’t want to ride public transit, while people in most other countries have zero issues adopting it wholesale. Instead they just make it into a simplistic, moralistic crusade about how the suburban car owners are evil people, told from the perspective of a righteous city-dweller.<p>Here’s a better theory: because American public transit is, when compared with the alternatives, not safe, not clean, and not convenient. Take LA, probably the most car-dependent big city in America. Riding the bus or subway in LA is not an enjoyable experience. Nor is it enjoyable to walk around the areas where the stops are. If I were trying to get more people to use public transit, I’d start by making the stations and buses&#x2F;subways beautiful, clean, safe places that are just nice urban places to hang out in. There’s no need to make it a moral crusade; just offer a better product and more people will use it.

I find this article to be too high-minded. Most Americans don&#x27;t own cars or support car-friendly policies due to some notion of car=freedom or some other culture wars nonsense.<p>Americans own cars because most of them live in single-family houses on large plots of land, and that doesn&#x27;t make public transit for daily commuting a realistic possibility. In Paris car ownership is very low, maybe 1&#x2F;3 of adults, but in rural France the car ownership rate is easily 95%+. I haven&#x27;t seen a single developed area in the world that has violated the rule that low density = high car ownership and vice versa.<p>The other rule that I have never seen violated is that the large majority of middle and upper income people do not want to live near low income people, due to crime or other reasons. In Europe, poor people live in the suburbs, so the middle income live in the city with high density housing. In the US and some other places (south asia), low income people live near the business center, so the middle income live in low density housing in the suburbs. These are for historical reasons and cannot be easily changed.

I&#x27;ve been railing against cars in the US for years and years. The thing is that today most people in the US under the age of 60 grew up in cars, usually in a suburban environment, and it&#x27;s actually impossible for them to imagine what life without a car might even look like. It&#x27;s like trying to describe a color. If we can&#x27;t even <i>visualize</i> an alternative, how are we supposed to <i>achieve</i> the alternative?<p>Only by traveling to places that were developed before cars took a chokehold on the world can people realize how <i>nice</i> it is to live without them <i>absolutely everywhere</i>.<p>Many Americans get a taste of that when they vacation to Europe. They often choose to leave their suburb and spend their 2 weeks in urban environments like Barcelona, London, Munich, Paris, Rome, etc., that where built for people and not cars, because it&#x27;s so pleasant to live like that, and because letting cities develop for people first leads to cities that people actually want to be in, with car-free streets, plazas, promenades, etc. (Yes, today those places are also full of cars. But, unlike American cities, their skeletons are people-first and cars are the invasive element.)<p>It could be argued that so many problems of American life - weight gain, loneliness, fracturing of the social fabric - stem from how we&#x27;ve isolated ourselves in unwalkable suburbs, where there&#x27;s no spontaneous social interaction because everyone&#x27;s always in a car, and where our only exercise is the walk from the parking lot to our desk.<p>What&#x27;s depressing is visiting developing countries and seeing them start to ape the worst of American car life. Places like Colombia, which I visit often, are building shopping malls, big-box stores, parking lots, suburbs, and freeways, while after almost 100 years of that type of car-first development in America we&#x27;re only just starting to realize that actually it might not be that great.

The issue of quiting cars is nowadays far from just a matter of values as the article seems to be implying.<p>Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and urban planning disaster across the world. We are stuck with them. As a mode of transport it has grown uncontrollably at the expense of all others (except the airplane) and practically everything has been shaped to accomodate it.<p>Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person. Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way.<p>In the best scenario it will be an excruciatingly long transformation (~50 yr) as car oriented cities (or city sections) get slowly deprecated and the car-free or car-lite segments become more desirable, more livable.

I&#x27;ve purposefully chosen, and paid the higher rent for, an apartment that&#x27;s on the greenbelt in my city and close to work so that I can use my car less. As a couple we still own two cars but really only use them to transport our dog to trailheads. The exercise pays dividends, and at just over two miles from work it takes maybe three minutes longer getting to work than driving to a parking garage.<p>I feel fortunate to make enough money to easily afford the rent, but it&#x27;s insane that in most places you need a high paying job to escape needing a car. Refugee and low-income housing here is clustered around major streets like six-lane one-way transport corridors. Unless they work downtown or close to a stop on one of the few bus lines that run frequently and reliably, they need cars. Usually the cheapest they can afford, which likely means they need to spend money they don&#x27;t have to get them passing emissions tests at registration time, deal with breakdowns, high insurance premiums, etc.<p>It doesn&#x27;t help that most of the planned transit improvements seemingly are focused on greenification of buses rather than just getting more buses on the road to expand routes, make lines frequent enough to use for commuting, etc.<p>My city did pass some new zoning codes which heavily cut back on parking requirements, I&#x27;m excited to see how that (slowly) pans out. I expect more high-capacity parking structures to go up, fewer surface lots. People might need to walk further or explore other last-mile options, I have hope that will turn people&#x27;s eyes towards non-vehicle transportation improvements.

When I moved to Michigan I never realized that a suburb could not have a side walk. This is not uncommon in Michigan. That means that if you walk, or run, rollerblade, skate it has to be done in the street. Also lots of things are so much farther in Michigan than they were when I lived in Mass. In Mass I could go 3 miles in 30 minutes. In Michigan I can go 70 miles in 60 minutes

I skimmed the article and I feel like nothing really answers the question to &quot;How to quit cars&quot;, aside from pricing parking better. Personally, I&#x27;d love to be able to rely on cars less. They are kind of the epitome of tragedy of the commons. But as a lifelong suburbanite with 2 cars in a 2-person household, this is what I&#x27;d have to see to quit cars:<p>- Ability to get a vehicle on-demand (say within 5-10 minutes) 24&#x2F;7&#x2F;365, anywhere in Upstate NY, from cities to boonies.<p>- That vehicle would need to allow me to transport large goods, bulky goods (to an extent), lumber &lt;6&#x27;, flammable solvents<p>- also needs to accomodate 2 medium dogs<p>- I&#x27;d need dedicated bike lanes to the nearby shops and groceries before I could even attempt to use that as an option. There&#x27;s stores only a few miles from me but the roads to get there are treacherous<p>There&#x27;s more but those are the bare minimums, and I don&#x27;t see that changing any time soon.

Unpopular opinion: public transport fundamentally sucks.<p>I&#x27;ve spent vast amounts of time commuting on public transport and by car.<p>You can&#x27;t pay me to ever get on a bus again.<p>And not just in the US&#x2F;Canada either. Even in the dense cities of Europe, public transportation &lt;&lt; car transport. No bus can ever beat the comfort and convenience of putting a large amount of shopping &#x2F; luggage in the back, getting in your private bubble, and going directly to your destination.<p>Then there&#x27;s the people you meet on public transport. 99 &#x2F; 100 of them are just people who want to go from A to B. But then there are the trouble-makers and weirdos. Do you really want to be stuck on a bus or train, straining under shopping bags or holiday luggage, with some unpredictable idiot eyeing you?<p>Some people, like newyorker.com, have a platonic ideal of public transport where we are all happily whisked from A to B on hyper-efficient and advanced vehicles, perhaps humming kumbaya to ourselves. But the reality is that it will always be inconvenient and slow - at best - and dangerous and super unpleasant in reality.<p>The one instance where public transport works well is when you want to travel 5-10 blocks, there&#x27;s a lot of traffic, and you are carrying nothing, and there just so happens to be a subway going the right way.<p>The real way forward is to have electric cars, nuclear power plants, remote work, and maybe this new Musk tunnel thing.

Given the article&#x27;s title, I didn&#x27;t expect to find the following within:<p><pre><code> Public transit is now the cause of the reforming classes, and the car their villain. The car is the consumer economy on wheels: atomizing, competitive, inhuman—and implicitly racist, hiving people off to segregated communities—while the subway and the train are communal zendos. Good people ride bicycles and buses; bad people ride in ever-bigger cars. </code></pre> It seems like a pretty even-handed summation of the situation: the &quot;reforming classes&quot; need a target, thus &quot;Good people ride bicycles and buses; bad people ride in ever-bigger cars.&quot;<p>Another surprise:<p><pre><code> People always maintain, similarly, that the big auto manufacturers killed L.A.’s once efficient public-transit system, leaving the city at the mercy of polluting and gridlocked cars. That this is, at best, a very partial truth does not weaken its claim on our consciousness. </code></pre> (The surprising part to me is that this is claimed to be a &quot;<i>very partial</i> truth&quot;. In the multitudes of HN discussions of &quot;cars evil&quot; articles, this claim is almost always trotted out, and almost never challenged)

&gt; The downtown-centered city that we yearn for is, perhaps, an archaic model, and Americans have voted against it with their feet or at least with their accelerators. Those of us who live in and love New York have a hard time with this argument, but it is not without merit. Los Angeles is a different kind of city producing a different kind of civilization, and its symbol, that vast horizontal network of lights dotting the hills in the night, is as affectionately viewed as its polar opposite, the vertical rise of the New York skyline.<p>Surprisingly good article, thank you for posting it.<p>I got the sense that Gopnik is aware there may be places in the country outside of New York and Los Angeles — that he has a vague awareness about a sort of middle area where people might not live in apartments or be within a fifteen minute walk of everything in their life. Now, he never actually <i>mentions</i> this liminal space between the coasts, but it seems like he&#x27;s inferred its existence based on the persistent popularity of cars. I appreciate someone with that kind of perspective writing for the New Yorker.

There are many different environments in the U.S. I grew up on an isolated farm in the midwest, where the nearest neighbors were miles away and the closest shopping some thirty miles. Access to cars gave me, compared to the horse era of my great-grandparents, access to wide swathes of urban culture, not to mention mind-expanding forays to locations in adjacent states beyond any alternative transportation. Without the auto, I would have lived a much more conscripted life, likely never leaving my home state for a life spent roaming around the world. The situation for the current generation in my home town has not changed at all.<p>On the other hand I lived more than a decade in sites in East Asia, including a long stint in Seoul, and never drove once. The public transportation there largely suffices to meet the needs of the majority of the population, although personal automobiles became increasingly popular in Korea from the 1990s. Within the confines of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong or Singapore cars are absolutely less necessary, and I would be content not driving.<p>Different environments require varied means of transportation, and among them the personal automobile has its own valued place.

&gt; The fact that it takes six hours to get from Baltimore to Boston, when a faster train can cover the longer distance between Paris and Marseille in four, does not move us to protest the obvious failure of ambition.<p>Paris &gt; Marseille by train is 3:08, not 4:00.<p>Nice writup, thanks for sharing.

Man people talk... a lot. Complain about cars, postulate on 15 minutes cities, clamor for railways... Meanwhile I&#x27;ve owned three cars in my life, maybe driven 1-2 years total. I lived on the Oregon Coast and then moved to the Treasure Valley in Idaho and the last car I owned was in maybe 2010? Be the change you want to see in the world. It&#x27;s that simple. If I can do it where I&#x27;ve lived then I have a hard time believing others can&#x27;t or that they need regulations or specific infrastructure or something else from the top down. These days with rideshares, smart phones, electric personal transport, etc it is MUCH easier now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. So what exactly is stopping anyone? The situation is never gonna be conducive to your exact wants and needs but you can and should make at least a small carless change today or even if it&#x27;s just skipping the car to the next trip to the grocery store.

I moved 20 years ago into an apartment 5 minutes walking distance from work. It was simple, I like it, and saved tonnes of CO2. I don&#x27;t even need to use public transporation on a daily basis. Oh, and I don&#x27;t use much artificial light. I also refuse to use elevators if the target floor is not above 6. I know nobody who beats my energy consumption... Besides, I have acquired these traits long before the &quot;Last Generation&quot; was even BORN! But stil, if I mention that, people get jealous and start to either downplay or outright ridicule me. Well, a good chance to learn something about other people. They like talking, almost nobody likes doing.

My car can take me from my front door to anywhere else in the country that I want to. Often cheaper and&#x2F;or faster than public transport can in the UK, as well.<p>My family live a 30 minute drive away, however there are no buses that go directly there. No trains, either.<p>I would appreciate more public transport, for sure, we absolutely need that as well. More, higher-quality public transport that is ideally available 24 hours.<p>But nobody is ever going to build that from my front door to my family&#x27;s. The best I can hope for is to reduce the number of changes I have to make. Right now it would take a bus to the nearest town, another bus to another town in sort of the right direction, another bus to the town center nearest to my family, and then another bus to get me to a street 15 minutes walk away. Even if that drops to two buses, my car will still simply be faster &amp; more convenient.<p>Quitting cars in cities is a fine goal -- when commuting into cities I tend to get a bus or a train rather than drive, but for everybody that doesn&#x27;t live in a city, or travels outside of cities, it&#x27;s simply not possible to get rid of cars. Sheltered personal transport, which largely comes in the form of cars, is not going to go anywhere.

Having an independent media is essential to quitting cars. I&#x27;ve never heard a discussion on quitting cars on the nightly news, but on YouTube this discussion is made possible. YouTube de-ranking independent media in favor of traditional media could really limit the growth of the &quot;fuck cars&quot; movement.

Here&#x27;s a radical idea: disband and shutdown the public bus system. Before you reply with an angry post, read the rest of the plan. These systems take hundreds of millions of public funds and are completely ineffective in suburban areas (most of the country). Take that money and give a &quot;rideshare card&quot; with funds automatically filled every month (lower income will get more free funds). Either work with Uber&#x2F;Lyft or start a similar government rideshare service. Something like this will actually get people to consider giving up their cars.<p>After a while, certain high usage routes will be noticed in the rideshare data. It will become obvious which streets and destinations could be optimally served with high capacity buses. Now is the time to bring in bus routes. Setup these bus routes and offer a discount for using them.<p>The current system isn&#x27;t working, we need to try something different.

One interesting thing I think I&#x27;ve noticed is that public buses in general in the U.S. kind of suck compared to elsewhere. The reason why I <i>think</i> I&#x27;ve hit on is that they kind of don&#x27;t have a place to go, and so most bus routes kind of meander around their local areas going nowhere in particular. It turns short, as-the-crow-flies, trips into long ones. Anecdotally, I&#x27;ve lived in places where it&#x27;s literally faster to walk slowly between two locations than take the bus -- the car alternative was less than 1&#x2F;5th of the bus time.<p>However, once an area builds real transit, like lightrail, or a subway or something, there&#x27;s pressure to integrate the systems, and suddenly bus routes will optimize to connect people with those systems.<p>This is completely anecdotal, but I&#x27;ve noticed massive bus route redesigns in a couple places where transit comes on-line. A 45 minute meandering bus &quot;loop&quot; turning into a 15 minute direct route to the local transit station, which also works well for commuting as offices tend to be in high-density commercial zones near transit so the total commute time is within spitting distance of just driving.

If people want to live in cities and want to have a car-free lifestyle, then more power to you.<p>Cities are becoming increasingly unaffordable and increasingly violent. I think that we are past “peak metro” and that the absolute refusal of many people to return to office work is going to result in an acceleration of out-migration from cities. This in turn will exacerbate other urban problems as the revenue base dries up and low wage employees become ever more difficult to find in urban areas.

Can someone explain where this recent flurry (last 2 years or so) of anti-car evangelism has come from?<p>I can&#x27;t help but feel that many people who now work remote and therefore don&#x27;t need to commute suddenly are all for moving to mass transportation...that other people will use to get to work.

I have never had a car. I never grew up with easy access to a vehicle throughout my entire life and even now I do not have one.<p>This addiction is wholly alien to me. Cars are luxuries to me. I live in a city 1.5M people and the city is not a walking city imo, and takes 2h+ to get across the city.<p>I do not travel the entire city unless necessary, and instead I spend most of my time in 1&#x2F;4 of the city. I bike, scooter, walk, skateboard and generally I don&#x27;t miss the vehicle.<p>there are two exceptions. Moving into a new house, and going camping or hiking. Cars are unnecessary for the rest of my lifestyle.<p>it would only be a negative in many ways - with the costs, the insurance, the parking, the maintenance, the oil changes, the collisions etc. again...going out of the city ...and moving.

&gt; <i>The fact that it takes six hours to get from Baltimore to Boston, when a faster train can cover the longer distance between Paris and Marseille in four...</i><p>The TGV (high speed train) between Paris and Marseille takes 3 hours and ten minutes, not four hours. The distance is 780 km or 480 miles. The distance between Baltimore and Boston is ~410 miles (660 km).

I quit cars for ~11 years while living abroad, and just got one when my wife was 7 months pregnant. Once the kid is high school, I might be able to quit them again, but kids with their activities make it hard in the states.

&gt; The fact that it takes six hours to get from Baltimore to Boston, when a faster train can cover the longer distance between Paris and Marseille in four, does not move us to protest the obvious failure of ambition.<p>By this logic, since planes can cover longer distances in shorter times than trains, should we quit trains in favor of planes?

Wow the first sentence was the most Gopnik sentence ever - even before the em dash!<p>I don&#x27;t typically check the byline before I start reading, but Gopnik always gives himself away. This one set a record.

The cultural aspect is so, so huge and as a person unable to drive due to my visual disability I’ve felt it very acutely ever since I was a teenager.<p>Getting your first car is&#x2F;was essentially a rite of passage into adulthood, not just a way to get around. All the movies and ads told you that. Pick a girl up to take her somewhere? Nope, can’t do that. Are you even dateable if you can’t drive? Watching all your friends get their license and feeling like you missed out on graduating to adulthood? It’s painful. Want to use buses and trains? That’s cool but be careful of all those ‘bad people’ that want to rob you and don’t travel too late at night or too early in the morning, it’s unsafe!<p>A car is a symbol of freedom, independence and safety for many people. Freedom to roam about wherever you want, whenever you want as you please, without having to rely on your parents. I don’t blame anyone for thinking this way, it’s what we’ve been fed by culture for as long as I can remember.<p>Not that these perceptions are accurate when I look back on it, they’re as much to do with my own insecurity as a disabled person as they are to do with general society. It’s nice to know that this isn’t a thing everywhere in the world.<p>FWIW I don’t hate cars (I think I’m as much of a fan as anyone that grew up with gear-head mates) and over the years I’ve come to terms with never driving and quite like the financial convenience of not owning a car, but still. As others here have alluded to, giving up cars is a huge societal zeitgeist change, not just a change to do with infrastructure.

I have absolutely 0 desire to live in a city though...<p>Too noisy, cramped, expensive, more dangerous, etc.<p>I want space, a yard, isolation, privacy, etc. Living more out in the countryside is much more ideal to me.

As an European who went to Ohio State for a six months exchange it was crazy.<p>I&#x27;ve witnessed things I just don&#x27;t see on tv like people going to the post office and actually delivering mail with a giant vacuum.<p>Even more striking was just how an absurdly huge amount of ghettization and poverty lack of public transport leads to. Columbus was full of jobs and yet people living in suburbs had like no ways to get there unless they had a car.

My car stays in my garage 80% of the week, I only use it when visiting other cities on the weekends. I chose a relatively dense Brazilian city and I do everything here by bike or on foot (about 6-8mi per day). People have started noticing that I&#x27;m looking healthier, fitter. It&#x27;d be very very hard to do the same in any American city other than New York, you people are trapped.

I wish some ideas from South East Asia taken in western countries<p>1. More common driving scooter<p>+ in Thailand &#x2F; Vietnam &#x2F; Indonesia driving scooter is very common even for teenagers<p>+ easy to find (free) parking place and doesn&#x27;t require so much space<p>+ they don&#x27;t consume much fuel<p>+ still can have 2nd passenger<p>+ cheap, mass produced and easy available<p>+ easy to lock and more heavy so less likely to get stolen than bikes<p>+ have some (small) trunk space for storage (helmet, groceries, etc.)<p>+ in taiwan you have electric scooters that easy to swap batteries<p>+ you can still move forward in traffic jam<p>E-bicycles on the other hand:<p>- feel less safe when driving &gt;20km&#x2F;h (small wheels)<p>- doesn&#x27;t have indicators, mirrors, lights out of the box<p>- feel like too fast for sidewalks and too slow for roads (unless have dedicated bicycle lanes)<p>- much more expensive, most cannot swap battery or replace it<p>- much less places to park<p>- easier to steal (and because they are more expensive they are better target)<p>- no space for groceries or storing helmet&#x2F;gears<p>2. Shared taxi. Thailand has kind of public transport called Songthaew [0] (pickup car with 2 benches of seats) that you stop, pay small fee and it distribute people that go along the same direction. Similarly angkot in indonesia. With some modern app this could be probably even better optimized<p>3. Motorbike taxi - e.g. gojek in Indonesia, grab bike in Thailand<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Songthaew" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Songthaew</a>

ive been living without a car on my own for 9 years now. The biggest thing about not having a car is the culture expects it, so youre mildly judged for not having&#x2F;using one. That impact is bigger when dating too.

Archived: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;asq7z" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;asq7z</a>

Cars have an effect on culture that is very similar to software in that cars have evolved from being a technological symbol of innovation in the industrial era to a cargo cult of exploitation ironed into the social fabric by commercial and social forces in barely a hundred years:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alexanderrea.com&#x2F;project&#x2F;mcdonalds-happy-world&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alexanderrea.com&#x2F;project&#x2F;mcdonalds-happy-world&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s difficult to summarize the impact of commercial and social collusion while understanding the impact on daily decision making as easily as that.<p>Of course, all the beautiful people ride around in electric cars with their brains being told indirectly to consume the diet of Mr. Creosote by a conspiracy of corporations that have neither their best interests nor well-being at heart.<p>Two things provide hope. Young people who, when given the choice, choose not to get a driver&#x27;s license, and old people who&#x27;ve become accustomed to cars but choose to abstain from car transport moving forward and have the freedom, health, and wisdom to choose other alternatives such as 2 feet, 2 wheels, or mass transit instead.<p>These choices arise from the fact that time (as in slow-* culture) and health are the new wealth for those who have the privilege to recognize and realize such beliefs as differentiators in the life they seek, not yesteryear&#x27;s symbols of innovation.

From the article: &quot;The electric car is a chimera, producing more pollution in its construction than its existence justifies, and the dream of a driverless car can never be realized.&quot;

This is a long winded way to say you can only have agreement on what ought to be if you&#x27;ve already established agreement on a system of values to judge it.

Individual transportation has been a staple of civilization for the last few thousand years. As people all have individual ideas on where to go and when, individual transportation is a close to perfect solution to the problem. The question is more: does it need to be SUVs and pickup trucks? I had a Renault Twingo (non electric, current model) once and it dawned on me that this is the maximum size a normal person would need on 99% of the days. Offer them with a slightly enlarged trunk and it would be good 100% of the time for a family of 4. Those cars take half the space of an SUV and still provide the same basic benefit of getting to places on your own schedule.<p>Another related topic: we should not change cars all 3 years. Why not drive them 20-30? Get replacement parts when needed, get the interior freshed up every 15 years and be happy. With the rising of electric cars, the only really critical part has become the batteries (and they seem to last longer than what we all thought).

I am going hiking in New Mexico next week. I am taking the train there.<p>After looking at the excellent public transportation in the Santa Fe area, I decided to make the whole vacation car-free.<p>I’m from Kansas City, and public transportation is pretty much a joke. They have buses and a street car, but you just can’t get around town that way. It would take me an entire day to do things that would take a 1&#x2F;2 hour in a car.<p>In Santa Fe, as long as I have a few bus schedules on hand, there is not much to worry about. I’m even couchsurfing with someone that lives 15 miles out of town, and there’s a bus that will get me within a mile.<p>What’s the worst is where I live now, the ‘burbs. Not quite the freedom and nature of the country, not quite the dazzle and immediacy of the city. At least it’s bike-able.<p>Anyway, I’m really excited about my trip and getting around in a different way.

I would love to make more trips on a bike rather than a car. Especially for trips less than 5 mile radius. But the city where I live (Los Angeles) has very few protected bike lanes. I&#x27;m glad things are gradually moving in the right direction, but boy do we have a long way to go.

This kind of thinking is so out-of-date.<p>Cars are rapidly going electric, silent, and intelligent. The first two improvements will remove the problems with pollution and noise. The idea that the production of an electric car produces a vast amount of waste and pollution is nonsense, big oil propaganda.<p>The added intelligence will provide benefits further down the road, some of which we don&#x27;t even know yet. Once cars are smart it promises to radically improve safety, with smart cars able to avoid most accidents, drive drunk people home in the back seat, able to drop the owner at their office door and then find somewhere to park on their own, either in a more spaced-out area or an automated dense public garage.

I&#x27;m really surprised this article is gaining any sort of traction on this site, as it hardly talks of anything to do with the headline, yet that hasn&#x27;t dissuaded hundreds of comments discussing their own ideas to answering the question.

I’m baffled by the ideas in the article’s intro that in the 50’s, cars were somehow the realm of hipsters and bohemians. If anything, cars became more popular with the growing (mostly white) middle class which moved to the newly built and expanded suburbs in the post WW2 years. The GI bill, home financing and other incentives helped growing families (baby boom) move into their new lives. Car ads promoted “All This and Victory Too”. After years of wartime rationing, people were eager to buy new shiny bulbous vehicles to drive on the new Eisenhower-era interstate system.

The infra has to be there. I&#x27;ve lived in places where of course you have a car and I&#x27;ve lived in places where of course you don&#x27;t have a car.<p>The person wasn&#x27;t the difference

1. Sell children 2. Sell single family home and move to within walking distance of public transportation 3. Allocate additional time to running errands

I have no intention of ever using public transport again. It is inherently unsatisfactory. It is slow, dangerous, expensive, and uncomfortable (one cannot always find a seat). I apologize, but I will never trade the comfort of my Mercedes Benz or the speed of my electric scooter for my daily commute.

&gt; Public transit is now the cause of the reforming classes, and the car their villain.<p>I wonder if this would have been the case had cars stayed as diminutive as they were becoming in the mid 70&#x27;s.

How to quit vim

As an American living in Germany I bike to work every day, even in the snow in winter. There are dedicated bicycle paths which are free from obstruction where I can commute, get groceries (I have a special trailer for heavy items), and enjoy a weekend with the family. I can cycle between cities, all the way to the Netherlands, which has even better dedicated cycling routes.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.radroutenplaner-deutschland.de&#x2F;veraDNetz_EN.asp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.radroutenplaner-deutschland.de&#x2F;veraDNetz_EN.asp</a><p>Should I choose public transport, it is ubiquitous and very cheap (even free for some people). Fast and slow trains, streetcars, some subways and buses, but most importantly frequent and <i>with total coverage by law</i> if I remember correctly, no one can be more than 500m from a public transport stop. Even in the countryside you can take public transport everywhere: I have visited rural areas entirely by train and even a farmhouse by bus with a short walk. This is typical European lifestyle at least for the wealthier northern continental countries.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.german-way.com&#x2F;travel-and-tourism&#x2F;public-transport-in-germany&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.german-way.com&#x2F;travel-and-tourism&#x2F;public-transpo...</a><p>There is a downside, however. Everyone - that is everyone except the very rich and those in the countryside - lives in an apartment. An apartment which, even by lower class American standards, is tiny, dark, grungy, often ridden with mold, and with non-existent amenities. For the price I pay in rent, including exorbitant utility costs, I could get a much nicer place anywhere outside the coastal elite urban cores. My fellow software developers, who are paid far above average for German engineers (or even doctors here) are in the same boat. Tiny and grimy is the norm:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.immobilienscout24.de&#x2F;Suche&#x2F;de&#x2F;berlin&#x2F;berlin&#x2F;wohnung-mieten?pricetype=rentpermonth&amp;sorting=4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.immobilienscout24.de&#x2F;Suche&#x2F;de&#x2F;berlin&#x2F;berlin&#x2F;wohn...</a><p>What I wish I saw less of in the car&#x2F;transit debate was moralizing, and what I wish I saw more of was engineering tradeoffs. You can try to have cars and houses and transit and high salaries and (relatively) low taxes and what you get is NYC or SF - a playground for the rich and a dystopian hellscape for the average middle class worker. If you make transit ubiquitous and affordable with affordable housing and restrictions on cars you get everyone in tiny accommodations, the kind of mass single family home communities and even NYC townhomes and billionaire skyscrapers would never be approved by German town planners. Engineering tradeoffs, which can mean many tiny cars you never see sold in the USA:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lowres.cartooncollections.com&#x2F;shopping-auto_dealer-car_dealer-car_dealership-auto_dealerships-transport-CC119024_low.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lowres.cartooncollections.com&#x2F;shopping-auto_dealer-c...</a><p>Let&#x27;s have more discussion on the tradeoffs, and maybe we can find solutions of which Larry David would say:<p>&quot;You&#x27;re unhappy. I&#x27;m unhappy too. Have you heard of Henry Clay? He was the Great Compromiser. A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied, and I think that&#x27;s what we have here.&quot;

Simple thing: I own a car and when the route I want to go has a public transport or e-bike AND the time is acceptable, i usually take it. If not then I take car.<p>E.g. to my office I commute by bicycle because it&#x27;s much faster than stand in jam. But on winter I must not take bicycle, or I&#x27;ll get fully sick and lose 10-14 days. Then I take tram which is second in terms of time.<p>However when I get my kids to music school, tram is so slow and rare, I have to take car, or I would need to leave 20mins earlier. That&#x27;s this simple.<p>So govt, please stop planning how to prevent me from driving my car. Just do your duties, better as you did, and make pub transport better

heres the archive.org link for those just loking to read the article, cheers:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20230519170640&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;22&#x2F;carmageddon-daniel-knowles-book-review-paved-paradise-henry-grabar" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20230519170640&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyo...</a>

I bought a car just to avoid some type of people in public transport. I had a weekly encounter with either a homeless person with very bad odor, or somebody aggressive that was usually kicked out by a bus driver or by police.<p>It was acceptable when I was riding alone but now I have a kid and there&#x27;s no way I will bring him to this environment.<p>Unfortunately, our cities are not dealing with these issues adequately.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;asq7z" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;asq7z</a>

every one of these culture stories is about imposing urban norms on suburban and rural communities

&gt; They crowd streets, belch carbon, bifurcate communities, and destroy the urban fabric. Will we ever overcome our addiction?<p>Betteridge&#x27;s law of headlines says no.<p>Even extremely well-planned and progressive cities like Portland (which has been expanding light rail for 30 years straight) haven&#x27;t budged above 15% commuting by public transportation. No city outside SF and NYC have meaningfully addressed this. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.census.gov&#x2F;library&#x2F;visualizations&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;public-transport.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.census.gov&#x2F;library&#x2F;visualizations&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;pu...</a><p>This is why electrification is so important. North American civilization is dependent on cars and trucking and will always be so when our countries are continental at scale.

Dogs aren&#x27;t allowed on buses.

Go ahead and quit cars and live in your &quot;you will own nothing&quot; apartments crammed together like livestock in a factory farm. That&#x27;s what propaganda pieces like this are trying to push you towards.<p>The rest of us will keep our cars, all of our other property, and stay the hell away from and fight against that emerging authoritarian socialist dystopia as much as possible.<p>Clearly, the rabidly anti-car fanatics have never experienced the pleasures of driving a comfortable and powerful car on a long highway trip.

&gt; How to quit cars<p>Step 0: Start watching Not Just Bikes - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@NotJustBikes&#x2F;videos">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@NotJustBikes&#x2F;videos</a><p>Step 0.5: Browse through r&#x2F;FuckCars - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;fuckcars&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;fuckcars&#x2F;</a>

Having lived in a place where I don&#x27;t need a car, I purposefully moved to a location where I can drive my car.<p>I had to go to the doctor. Punch in address and drive there, park the car and walk in. No need to check at what time public transport shows up, or if it does at all.<p>While I live at the foothills with direct access to hiking trails, I don&#x27;t need to drive through 45 minutes of urban unplanned jungle before I can jump on a congested freeway in the case I want to visit another place. No, the freeway is right there.<p>I want to go do my weekly Costco run. Couldn&#x27;t do that before. Took too long, so I was stuck paying the inflated prices at Pavilions around the corner.<p>All of this, plus the fact that I don&#x27;t need to worry to have a to step over a homeless guy to walk to work, or dodge shit, or being awoken by police 3 times per night make me REALLY happy to be where I am.<p>Far away from civilization.