No Stupid Questions

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.

I'm going to assume that in such a world, every city including the bullshit ones have reliable transportation that's good enough to not be much more time consuming than driving. Because it would be too easy and lame to say "well taking the bus to work takes 4 hours and driving takes 45 minutes so I literally could not survive that".

You would be losing the ability to drive to the nearest legal state and smuggle back weed. 🤷 I mean, the Flock cameras basically were invented to catch people doing this anyway. So maybe we would lose nothing after all.

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.

You are missing that a lot of people do not live in cities. In a city, access to public transport is basically anytime, anywhere. Outside of city centers, public transport is very, very limited, even in Europe. Without a car, you are basically lost.

I hate cars. My wife loves them. Now I sometimes talk about my wifes medical issues and im generally talking about about her physical ones. Now I know you say most people but like it would not be impossible for her to ride public transit. Heck people in wheelchairs do it. But its a pain and additionally when she was healthier she could just not mentally handle it. If im with her she can but still does not like it. To use bike lanes they have to be completely protected and separated from the street (again she would also have to be back when she was in better health). She would walk but again with me. She needed that support. She did not need that support when driving. The car for her is safety and feedom. Its funny as its kinda opposite to me. A car means possibly being broken down at the side of the road with no way to get home whereas a transit pass makes me feel safe. When I drive I am engaging in an activity that is very disproportionally large in possibly injuring or killing someone compared to absolutely everything else I do. Now if society was filled with people like me the suburbs would disapear and we could hav a lot less cars, but for folks like my wife. So let me put it this way. I actually just got up and talked with her to really place her here. I honestly though she would choose having a car over indoor plumbing. But she draws the line at indoor plumbing. So she would exchange the internet, electricity, phones, tv, raido. She would rather live in a world with indoor plumbing and gas light/heat with a car. Than live with all our conveniences without a car. I will tell you to. She is waaaayyy moderated on this stuff having lived with me. So like I think if she was in great health and there was fantastic bike infrastructure and we could live in a safe dense urban area. I think she would go for it. But it would have to be so perfect relative to me as to be impossible for it to come to be.

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 some positive points associated with cars are 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

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.

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.

Quite frankly the grand majority of things lost by a lack of car ownership could just as easily be made up by just building better infrastructure

Highly depend on where you live. In the US especially, we had a lot of post-wwii growth designed around cars so a lot of places make anything else a challenge.

Cars may represent freedom and self determination, but can seem awfully limiting in a city with good walkability and transit, even in the US. When I lived in Boston, it was so much more freeing to walk out my front door and have the entire city accessible. More than that, since Acela and the airport were also accessible.

I never gave up my car though, between things like shopping and visiting people outside the city. But now that we have options like delivery, ride share, e-bikes, and hourly car rentals, those would be much easier.

But now I live in a suburb, and even here I walk a lot more than typical Americans. The key is older towns built out before cars. I live in the first ring of single family houses less than a mile from the town center. We have a “Main Street” shopping and restaurant area, a common, and train station. There’s also a trail Along the River and a rail trail through town that are easily accessible. Over pandemic my family started a tradition where every weekend we walked down to our favorite Pakistani restaurant, grabbed takeout, and ate dinner on benches on the town common.

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.

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.

Schedules matter less when you have more frequent transportation. Renting a truck, or ordering a taxi/uber xl would be lower in cost than paying for and maintaining a truck. Obviously there's a line somewhere in the middle when it makes sense to own and unfortunately it's pushed further because our Costcos are 50 miles away instead of having smaller corner shops.