I know the demographics around here, so I know everyone’s just going to put “nothing lol”, but please understand what I’m asking first.
I’m physically incapable of driving a car. I stand to gain immeasurably from a world that didn’t assume everyone owned one. Having loved-ones with respiratory issues aggravated by car exhaust has made me very aware of the health issues surrounding the burning of fossil fuels, and having to navigate sidewalkless suburban stroads on a regular basis and juggle poorly funded public transit has made it very clear to me that pedestrians are second class citizens. I could go on and on about the mess cars have made of urban planning, and the number of jobs I couldn’t take because they required driving, but I digress.
In short, I hate cars just as much as the rest of you. But I’m also conscious that a lot of other people feel differently. What does widespread car ownership enable that would be difficult or impossible otherwise?
As an American I’m familiar with the cultural aura that surrounds the automobile. One of the early episodes of Mythbusters explained this pretty well while digging into the folklore surrounding a particular car-related urban legend. Cars represent freedom and self determination, two qualities highly prized in American society. You can go where you want when you want, without relying on schedules and routes mandated by public transit[1].
Looking at more tangible things, I suppose hauling a bunch of stuff from point A to point B would be hard without a car.
But what else am I missing?
Ignoring the fact you can only go where there are roads, and someone has to build and maintain those roads. ↩︎
So for example, last night I went to see a play with my wife in the big city we live outside. 8pm show. Our location has better options than most in the US for public transit, but still not enough to fully rely upon and it’s hard to envision that changing.
We have a regional transit rail system we could have taken. It would drop us off close enough to the theater, perhaps 2 city blocks.
But the station is 6km from our house so the problem is on this end. We live in an area that’s not quite rural, more suburban, but it is out on the open countryside a bit and this natural beauty is what we love about living here.
We do have excellent bike lanes and even a network of bike trails that are separated from the roads. Our local station is about a 20 minute ride. We can do it but we’re in our 50s and it’s not our first choice when getting dressed up for a date night to begin with 20 minutes of vigorous exercise. And we would have had to repeat that ride at 11pm on the way home, tired, with a glass of wine in our bellies.
So the problem I guess is our home location. We live in a medium-to-small sized town that’s nestled up against a state park. The only public transit I can really imagine would be a bus system and it would have to cover a very wide area with many vehicles to serve this region. And even then I can’t imagine it would be quick.
I would still prefer a world without cars. I guess I’m just telling you why cars still fit into our needs and why our options are.
In the future I’m pretty optimistic that we can change the math on busses. Autonomous vehicles would allow us to move away from large busses piloted by a human driver to many smaller ones with more comprehensive coverage and better approximation of point-to-point transit.
The appeal of this path is that it’s something car-centric areas can transition to smoothly. We can get mass autonomous bus service going without banning cars and building rail lines or other large projects.
A small country that was laid out centuries ago, before cars, has a different layout and distribution of people that makes things like rail work better. The problem is that the US is huge and was built on cars, which are excellent for spreading individuals out with no regard for central planning.
Today’s generation of Americans are stuck with cars and not always in love with them. The way our population is distributed, it’s hard for mass transit to replace them, so it really doesn’t matter how great civic rail works in Lisbon.
We might address the topic of whether it’s responsible for people to be so spread out. I would certainly have a hard time saying goodbye to my beautiful natural surroundings.
The freedom to come and go as you please, assuming you can afford insurance and proper maintenance.
Personally (city dweller) a car is a time machine. I can get where I need to go mostly on a bike or my feet, but if I’m pressed for time - and that happens plenty - a car can get me there faster.
My penultimate child was at university about 10 miles from the house. There was a bus that got within a couple blocks of the sprawling campus, so I told her take the bus, but a year in said she could use my car and I’d walk to work since my commute was so short. That gained her about 3 hours per school day and lost me about one hour. Car is a time machine.
Personally (city dweller) a car is a time machine. I can get where I need to go mostly on a bike or my feet, but if I’m pressed for time - and that happens plenty - a car can get me there faster.
If your city were designed properly, that wouldn’t be true. Not that it was the most scientific thing in the world, but Top Gear famously demonstrated biking being faster than driving across London, for example.
Oh we have the worst, most starved public transportation, half the buses run only every hour, and on the bike to work - only to work - I do occasionally get there faster if there is traffic but there is no bike lane, I either use the sidewalk if no pedestrians, or the road if people are using the sidewalk. Traffic has to be pretty damn bad before I can move faster than the cars, I still have to stop at the same lights.
We have the most generous annual E bike voucher raffle in the nation, I believe, and the city is working on bike lanes, but really, the road between my house & work has no bike infrastructure at all. The public transportation problems are because that’s funded by the county not the city, the suburbs don’t want to pay for it. But inside the city we need it.
For me personally, the loss of a car means potentially the loss of certain hobbies. I like to go camping and backpacking, and that means taking a certain amount of gear out into remote areas. While I might be able to minimize the amount of gear needed, there’s no getting around the remoteness of the hobby, and that necessitates a car for transportation.
The other hobby is dog related. I enjoy doing things, including sports, with my dog. Transporting the dog, at least as it currently stands in America, requires a car. Large dogs are not allowed on public transit pretty much anywhere here. When you also consider that I may be taking jumps or poles or other larger equipment with me to train in new places, losing access to a car makes that a near impossibility.
I’d go so far as to say many outdoor recreation hobbies either require or are made easier by having a car or larger personal transport. Kayaks, boats, skis and snowboards, fishing poles and the list goes on and on. Sure you could setup rental places, but if you do a hobby a lot you ultimately want to own your gear so you can get something that suits your preferences and needs.
I’m not opposed to a less car-centric society, but eliminating personal vehicles would make many hobbies problematic or impossible.
This. I work from home so I barely use my car during weekdays but I spend most of the weekends climbing or hiking and it would be impossible without a car. Public transport is never going to take me to the middle of nowhere. Without cars we would be stuck in metropolitan areas and its surroundings. Visiting more remote places would be very time consuming.
Yep same. Work from home, have my groceries delivered and most other things I can do online. As it currently stands my car is used to take my dogs to an enrichment program twice a week, and for recreation. Without my car my hobbies would essentially completely end. There may be some places where public transit would work for hiking and backpacking, but where I live options are limited and the closest place I can legally backpack is an hour away by car, and it’s a small 4 mile loop. Anything more significant requires a multi-hour trip. Even IF public transit existed for it, I don’t want to go and leave my dog at home, bored all weekend, because he’s not allowed on a bus or train. Part of my joy in hiking and backpacking is sharing the experience with him. Right now his world is huge and full of adventures. Without a car his world becomes the size of my neighborhood, and that’s just depressing.
I live in Switzerland, and I go hiking almost every weekend without using a car. There’s plenty of places to do so accessable by public transport, and still the vast majority of journeys here are done by car. If even a quarter of those car journeys were instead taken by public transport, that would mean a doubling of public transport usage and justify huge expansions. That’s with Switzerland’s already comparatively high public transport usage, elsewhere the shift from cars wouldn’t need to be as large to multiply public transport usage.
To some extent I think you’re right, but for outdoor recreation that somewhat depends on where you live and what type of terrain your hobby requires. Switzerland as a country is full of beautiful hiking scenery and opportunities so I imagine the travel to get to it even by public transit isn’t an arduous one. In places where the terrain and landscape are more flat, barren or boring, the travel time to get to good hiking opportunities can be significant. For instance, the closest mountains to me are a 10hr drive by car; I could cross your entire country in about half that time. Unfortunately location plays a large role in the viability of using public transit for certain hobbies.
Flat terrain makes it much easier to build fast rail. If there’s another city on the way you could have a high speed rail connection, or a sleeper train.
Thinking about it you’re right. Technically I would be able to go hiking or even climbing using public transport. I just would have to spend way more time to get there and carefully plan my trips not to miss some connection and get stranded. In the end it’s all about flexibility. Where I live it’s 30 minutes drive to a climbing spot. I can do it any day after work. If I would go by public transport I would need 2.5h hours to get there. That’s 4 hours more, mostly spend walking. It means I would only be able to do it during weekends and would have to dedicate whole day to this trip and would be able to dedicate less time to other hobbies. During summer it’s only possible to climb in the morning and it would be impossible to catch a bus at 5AM to get there on time. So summer would be also gone. So yes, technically is possible but not as often and with way more effort. I guess you can say this about anything. It’s not that without a car things are impossible, they are just way more difficult.
Again, it doesn’t have to be more difficult, if most people don’t own a car there will be a lot more demand for public transport, and the services can be expanded to accommodate this much more easily. I can go hiking and usually not worry about getting home because the trains are hourly at the worst and connections are easy. It’s only more difficult because we’ve built a world around making things as convenient as possible for cars.
Without cars there would be A LOT more people on the sidewalk. In the past, before cars, there were so many more people on the street it’s not even funny.
I live in a rural area over 30 miles from the nearest city in a town with a population in the low thousands. The nearest place I can get any goods is over 4 miles away. I’d be completely fucked without a car.
I know that’s not everyone’s situation, but just pointing out there are people living in remote places with no other transportation options.
4 miles is nothing on a bike, 30 isn’t too crazy either. I think people misunderstand just how far you can travel on a bicycle. Having the infrastructure to do it is another matter though, there’s some super dangerous country roads where it’s 50+mph with no shoulders.
As I noted to the person who recommended the horse, I can’t carry 6 weeks of groceries 30-odd miles on a bike. The local store has basics but is far from everything I’d need, and generally at a hefty mark-up for a lot of things not produced locally (it’s how they can stay in business, I’m not judging).
If I just needed to travel somewhere that would be fine, but when I leaves home it’s generally not for a joyride.
That’s how it is out here too.
Especially in the winter when we can easily have a foot of snow on the ground.
My property doesn’t even have paving, and trying to get the drive graveled was such a pain I just ended up slapping on all-terrain tires, both to deal with getting on and off the property slope in mud, and also because there’s country roads (dirt/sand) here and street tires stuck on that or when it snows.
Especially since public transit is usually locally funded (at least in the US), in areas like this the tax base doesn’t exist to be able to functionally fund public transit. We could need to completely rethink and re-organize how public transit is funded and rolled out for this to functionally work in remote areas.
Or, you know, we could continue lettings cars be a thing for remote populations kind of like how in some far northern territories people use snowmobiles to get around part of the year because there’s simply too much snow to try to use another type of vehicle at all.
I think the latter, having specific types of transportation still be a thing in places where they’re needed makes a lot more sense, honestly.
I kind of agree, but I’ll admit, I wouldn’t give up my car. I moved out here because I wanted out of city life and into more nature and quiet life. I only drive into town every 6 weeks for groceries and necessities in bulk and there’s no way I could haul all that on public transit. I want to be in the city as little as possible.
Well, like I said, I honestly think public transit doesn’t make very much sense for remote areas. I think it makes far more sense to give people the types of transportation that work best for their use case, and in remote areas: that’s cars.
Get a horse
A horse would be even more expensive than a car, and would have way more emissions compared to my driving habits.
Plus, my car is already paid off, and a horse wouldn’t be able to carry a CUV’s worth of groceries and goods, let alone if I need to get tools or lumber.
Oh, and I probably can’t ride a horse down 35 miles of interstate highway without being arrested, let alone sheltered from the elements. Actually the more I think about this suggestion the worse it gets.
Of course it’s a terrible suggestion. It was meant sarcastically. People used horses before cars were invented and it’s no surprise that once they were, cars became the dominant mode of transportation because they are far superior.
I live in a city. I live 15 miles from where I work and I can drive it in about 20 minutes. If I wanted to take the bus, it’d take 3 hours and just as many changeovers because there’s no direct run. Not even close. I already work long hours so there’s no way in hell I’d spend 6 hours commuting, even if I could. For the record, I couldn’t even if I wanted since my office is nice enough to leave me with only an hour to get home, eat and get to bed before starting all over again. Sadly, it’s one of the failings of public transport even when it does exist.
It’s like that here. I drove 15 minutes to school . My alternator died and I had to ride the bus for a week. It took over an hour, not counting the lovely walk across a 6 lane expressway and through a WalMart parking lot to reach the bus stop! I think we need a gradient. In rural areas, we have individual vehicles, cars, bikes, motorcycles, etc. In suburban areas, we offer coupled trains where cars link together into trains and drive in sync on a guideway until they break apart for last mile connectivity. In urban areas, we ban all cars, build out public transit, bike lanes, etc. Small electric cars could be permitted for special needs and for tradesmen who carry tools. This future can’t happen in the US because they would just forget about us stuck poor’s and we’d lose all mobility.
Sure and that’s absolutely awful, those remote areas deserve acess to fast and reliable public transportation as well. Specifically small towns should have commuter rail linking them to the nearest city, infrastructure that prioritizes walking and micro mobility, along with just better infrastructure.
The late 19th century USAmerican colonization of Native American land shows that you don’t need cars to make an industrial rural society. Trains will work just fine. This means you build towns to be walkable and centered around a train station, with agriculture surrounding each town. Modern heavily mechanized agriculture might make population densities so low that even this is not viable, but the products still need to be transported, so you can have trains that stop at each megafarm which can also carry passengers if necessary. When I was in Queensland a few years ago, I saw mechanized agriculture use a bespoke railway network to supply a factory, so clearly even now despite all the fossil fuel and car subsidies it’s economically viable.
Though as you may know, industrial agriculture is dumb and unsustainable. Desertification due to requiring too much water, climate change due to fertilizer consumption, industrial pollution that kills millions of people per year and destroys ecosystems, lack of genetic diversity causing crop blights that risk famines or global shortages, insecticides that cause cancer and destroy ecosystems, most of it being wasted on the meat industry and on maintaining massive surpluses and exports to ensure western global domination, etc.
If we want to do agriculture right, we want to do food forests. It’s more labor per calorie, but it’s resilient, local, and it doesn’t make the planet uninhabitable by the next century. Food forests are more compact too, which means that a rural population tending food forests can have a much higher population density, or can consist of large villages separated by rewilded natural landscape (and/or low density food forests for migratory communties). This makes trains even more convenient to get around because they can run more frequently.
Meanwhile if you want to live in the wilderness away from these towns, then an absence of car roads means you can live far away while only being a couple kilometers away. So you still don’t need a car because you can just hike along a trail to get to town in under an hour. Need to carry a lot of stuff? Use a Chinese wheelbarrow. Maybe a battery-powered one with stability and steering assistance if you don’t feel like getting exercise. They carry more than a modern American SUV and they don’t murder children either.
Some of these responses are crazy. Just because it’s the rurals doesn’t mean I don’t have a full time job, responsibilities, and limited free time, particularly in daytime hours. I need a reasonable means to haul things and go places, and to do it within reasonable time frames.
I got people suggesting horse, bikes, and now Chinese wheelbarrows for getting groceries every few weeks going around 65 miles round trip, y’all are killing me. 🤣
Please actually read my comment, thank you.
19th century rural life consisted of you and your family living on barely more than subsistence farming and not seeing or interacting with anyone outside your family or immediate neighbors for months at a time.
I think I’d be a good person to answer this. I’ve lived in Houston (needless to say, extremely car-friendly) without a car for almost 2 years; currently I’m living in a city that banned cars within its city center in 2015 which resulted in very visible changes, but the rest of the country is still very pro-car and quite car-friendly
A couple of things that cars benefit everyday life that would be difficult to do without a car. There’s probably more but these are the ones I can think of:
- Accessibility to places that have difficulty justifying being served by public transit. These include poorer neighborhoods that are far away from city center, semi-rural natural preserves, extreme geographical difficulties, … Case in point, Houston has a lot of nature/green spaces that were 20-30 miles outside of the city center… good luck getting to these without a car (trust me, I tried once)
- For certain physically disabled people, driving would be easier than walking/biking/public transit… Especially in particularly hilly cities, centuries-old cities where roads were paved no better than playgrounds, or sometimes both. This can be somewhat mitigated with good infrastructure projects, but cars are usually an easier solution
- Car-free zones can get very crowded, very fast. This is usually a good thing in terms of urbanism… but some find it uncomfortable for various reasons. My current city is actually a rather extreme example: they are now considering banning bikes in the city center too, due to pedestrian injuries
- I know cars are prone to needing repair, but with how the road network functions, personal vehicles can reduce a lot of dependencies on external factors such as public transit being functional. Case in point, two months ago NL’s national rail company became essentially non-operational due to extreme weather, which would be rather devastating if your only way of commuting to work relies on the train
Also I think these two positive points associated with cars are actually quite doable without cars:
- Hauling stuff from point A to point B: delivery companies and car-rentals exist for a reason! This is surprisingly doable even without owning a car (you are technically using someone else’s car in this case). Of course doing it without your own car will be more expensive… but we do have the logistics for it, especially if the entire society shifts to a car-free model
- Not all rural areas need cars: some are actually quite doable by walking alone due to how small they are (I have a friend who lives in a rural American town like that: yes everyone drives, but everything is also 30-minutes on foot if you don’t mind walking). And there are quite a few parts of the world where rural towns are served by trains frequently
- Road trips: scenic railways exist for a reason… and unlike point 1 I made, sightseeing trains actually do make money, so there is pretty good justification for building them
NL’s national rail company became essentially non-operational
Don’t forget the Internet and ability for some of us to work from home, which is a relatively recent change. If I depended on rail service and there was an outage, it would be no big deal since I can work from home
You’ll probably manage just fine in a city.
Living in rural areas mass transit quickly becomes madness. Schedules are infrequent and routes are weird, and if you make them frequent and direct you suddenly drive around an empty bus while still building the exact same road you would for the few cars.
Saab 900 Turbo never exists and I’m sorry Mother Gaia but that’s not a world I want to live in
Whole sections of the country that are zoned for suburban single family housing would not exist as they are today. Not because they’d be illegal or anything, but they’d be incredibly unpopular if most people didn’t own a car, which is needed to basically get to or from a suburban neighborhood.
I understand the question to be something like: what happens if a majority of people are unwilling/unable to own a private automobile. And I think the immediate answer is that suburban neighborhoods cease to exist, at least at the current density levels. Either a neighborhood must densify so that transit options make sense, or they must aim to become rural living. This also means that things like suburban schools either turn into walkable urban schools, or into small one-room rural schools.
I don’t actually think rural living will go away, because the fact is that the grand majority of people – USA and abroad – do not prefer rural living. The 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st Century trends are that people tend towards urban areas, where services and jobs exist. There will always be people that want to live in the hills on 20 acres, and therefore need an automobile. But that has never been the majority, so if a majority of people refuse owning an automobile, they will also mostly refuse rural and suburban living.
There is no plausible situation where over 50% of people willing decide to: 1) not own a car, and 2) live in a suburb or rural area. This is from the fact that all other modes of transport into a suburb or rural area are either: 1) nonexistent (ie metro rail), or 2) ludicrously expensive (ie Lyft, or transit with 15% fairbox recovery) if the cost was borne by the people living there (as opposed to being subsidized heavily by other taxpayers… Ahem, America).
Family Road Trips.
You could rent a car for those
What about all the family on the train, watching the scenery?
Just those two things alone: freedom to hit the road & moving things are more massive than you even realize.
I have a small car, a Civic. I routinely buy beers from all over. Vast majority cannot be sold & shipped. And I don’t believe for a minute the laws would change for me to shop online as easily as other stuff. And, that also includes the freedom of the road trip.
Just a heads up, The USPS will not ship liquids, but UPS and FedEx will if you pack them in plenty of bubble wrap.
And?
That doesn’t help me at all. I buy beer direct from micro breweries that I visit in my “Freedom” road trips.
Effing Pennsylvania is a state to avoid then. I don’t know whether they’ve changed anything but I did that a few years back and they said they weren’t allowed to sell me more than two sixpacks. While I don’t actually drink much, beer stores well for weeks to months and I had found a brewery I liked but haven’t been to since
My GF and I made it into 21 breweries in 2.5 days in the Pittsburgh area.
Dancing Gnome, and 11th Hour were the best of the bunch. Then we enjoyed VooDoo near where we stayed. Very cool vibe. They had old wooden doors that had been painted by local artists and they were hanging flat from the ceiling. They had these rolling, caged fire pits out in the beer garden… those are a great idea!
Just thought you might want to know the loop holes to shipping beer, but fuck me, right?
Why? I’m not the person shipping beer. I’m pretty damn sure none of the breweries I would order from would use “loopholes” and risk shipping me beer.
Lots of weight and heart disease I bet.
On a related note, I rode my bike to work today and it was great.
While I’m here, I guess I should plug !micromobility@lemmy.world
I’m less likely to get assaulted when my parents drive me somewhere vs having to take public transport.
I’m Asian American and I still have anxiety about the post-covid racism.
Car safety is a big thing. I’m damn glad I’m in my metal and glass cage when i drive through big cities. I sure as hell wouldn’t be walking through one. I’ve had people jump out in the road to try to get me to stop so they can rob me. Swerve and floor it. Walking is not a solution in dangerous cities.
Big reason I’d never do public transport myself. Clean up the streets and maybe I’ll try it. But being among a bunch of tweakers who may stab me with a needle for my 5 dollar bill, no thanks.
Is that sort of thing relevant? I take the bus all the time and have never felt in danger (except for one time when the driver went off on another bus driver, but I just noped off the bus before it could escalate). Yes there are interesting characters, but if public transit were more common perhaps the crazies would become less predominant.
Around here there is a whole police department dedicated to monitoring public transit.
I’m sure it’s very location specific. Chicago and Boston public transit seem safe to me. Minneapolis always seems real bad. Memphis or Portland, heeellll no
Where the hell do you live? I’ve visited a lot of cities but have never been in a situation even remotely like that
Lives in car-brain land.
Memphis Minneapolis Portland Chicago
I named these in a comment below.
The US is really that bad, eh?
Been to Portland recently. There’s plenty of neighborhoods where you can walk around safely. There’s one small area of downtown where there’s a lot of homeless, and you probably want to stay away from the ICE building for obvious reasons, but other than that it’s like any other city.
Some people are just… irrationally afraid of the homeless. Most of them will not try to rob you or even bother you, but it is a good idea if you find yourself in an area like that, to pay attention to your surroundings and not get too close to anyone, just in case they start swinging their arms around wildly or something.
Oh ye. Not to mention anyone could get a gun at Walmart and go on a bus or train with no one stopping them.
Stupid take. Cars are still a problem. And so is poverty and relegation of poor people to expensive and underserved transit. The problem is not cities.
Maybe, but its a problem now, and one likely to not be solved.
The car-centric culture of many places (especially the US, but it does apply in basically all of the industrialised world to varying degrees) is due to infrastructural factors. If a country is designed to be navigated by car, then you need a car to participate in that society. That’s why people want cars.
Things like the freedom of having a car are also from social factors. A lot of people learn to drive as teenagers, and want to escape the patriarchal environment of the family, hence a car provides freedom. In a world where children are socially raised and the family is abolished, teenagers don’t seek to escape from the family. And, of course, a car can be a way of providing freedom because other means of freedom of movement don’t exist—a lack of accommodation for disabled people to get around, a lack of public transport and safe cycle routes, etc.
Most people wouldn’t want to give up their car for those reasons. If we just got rid of all cars without addressing any of these issues, I’m sure most people would be unhappy about it. So if that’s what you’re suggesting, plenty of people do stand to lose. But if we address the issues that make cars the only option for a lot of people, I don’t think the average person would care. Car enthusiasts can still have their cars, but it becomes a hobby or lifestyle choice, like people who have a boat. And car haters would most certainly be a lot happier too.
