I want my flying cars/jetpacks.
Tell them that sounds like government over reach, and ask them if they are some sort of libtard!
I live near Boston and work in Boston or Cambridge, and spent 10 years without a car, biking to work every day (except when the roads were slippery with ice.) It is totally doable, as is carrying groceries.
I now use more public transportation, and walking. I’m happy to walk 2+ miles, as it gets some of my daily exercise out of the way. A handy bike messenger bag I’ve had for the last 20 years handles both my laptop a significant amount of groceries in it, enough to cook a few meals.
Where I live, if you commute home at rush hour, it’s faster to walk the 2 miles from the subway than it is to take the bus or drive. Maybe you need to move to the northeast where it’s actually possible to not use a car, and there’s tons of high tech?
My wife and I own a car, we use it less than 5k miles a year, and that’s mostly to drive to see relatives who live far away, or drive our dogs to the woods for hikes.
If I may. An anecdote. In Brooklyn, in the mainly Orthodox communities. Bike lanes were put in.
At night the Orthodox men would either scrape the paint off or paint over the lines with black paint.
The reason?
Women wearing skimpy bike clothing were essentially against the clothing restrictions of the Orthodox community. They were showing too much skin. Thus, they figured, get rid of the bike lanes and get rid of the problem.
I shit you not.
This american life had a great podcast on the west indian american parade that goes through parts of NYC, including an Orthodox community. Imagine those guys not just seeing a female on a bike, but hundreds of people dressed like this walk by:
The best part is the orthogox guy they interview (as the parade walks by) who’s talking about how it’s such a wrong thing, but ALSO he can’t help but look because there are some very attractive people walking by his door.
Once you get out of Boston proper, Mass Transit becomes a problem. When I worked in Boston, I was a 20 minute ride to the train, and the train was a 75 minute ride. I grew up in downtown Natick, and that was easier: 20 min walk to the train, 30 min into Boston.
Where I live now, there just aren’t any transit options. I am in south Central mass on the RI/Mass border. I work in Worcester. There are no transit options in my area. It’s too bad, but I don’t know where they would serve. Even if I went to one of the nearest towns that could be a hub, by the time I got there I’d be halfway to work. I am within walking distance of the Worcester train station, but nothing to take to it.
To illustrate this point, I just checked a one-way alley near my office. The entrance at one end is no more than 2 metres. It has a contraflow bike lane.
Edit: can’t get a good Street View angle on the alley, but here’s a nearby one way street, also with contraflow lane:
Try working in corporate IT there… :)
Why all this Boston talk? No one sane wants to move to the Northeast. Vancouver has bike lanes and impressive mass transit in the city and through the suburbs. As a bonus, it also offers health coverage to every citizen and has a democratic government. All of those are improvements on anything Boston has to offer.
It’s also the most expensive city in North America, which is saying something.
Edit: Or maybe only second most now? Still.
Few in this country really have that many options. We go where the jobs are. I’ve spent the last 22+ years in Vermont not because I was jonesing to live in New England, I can tell you. Now, I’ve come to love it here (which is a far cry from Boston) but the students I teach generally feel, and I think accurately, that when they graduate they won’t have a huge amount of choice where they land. Where the jobs are is where they’ll go. So transportation fixes have to encompass everyone.
Man, I’m desperate to move back to Boston :(
Boston might be moving to North Carolina at the rate things are going.
Never understood why cars are allowed at all in bigger cities, its just madness. Is this on topic?
I grew up in Western Mass. Had fun, got the fuck out of there. Kinda would like to go back, if only to visit … but I guess that happens when you get older.
Boston is still amazing. Western Mass is still… kinda not, but it’s very much town by town, since a pretty big part of it is the same outdoorsy crunchy liberal that you commonly see a bit farther north in Vermont.
Anyways, I wasn’t aware that we were declaring war on cars. Could we? What would an actual war on cars look like? Certainly more than the half-ass measures that we see now in even the most urban and progressive cities in the US. Something like no cars below Central Park in Manhattan, or a VMT tax explicitly aimed at net-zero for road maintenance on top of a carbon tax that fully prices all of the carbon externalities, or taking two lanes of every interstate within 10-20 miles of an urban center for dedicated bus and bike highways. That’s without even really getting creative. At most, we’re skirmishing with cars.
(I live in an inside-128 suburb and the car conversation also lurks and shadow-dominates the housing crisis, for what it’s worth. The over-40s can’t conceive how anyone would be able to live here without at least two cars and often more, while the young workers and families moving here want to have one car that they use on weekends. Those expectations drive the conversation on development and housing more than anything else.)
I absolutely hate driving a car in Boston.
Housing patterns are key, for sure. In many cases, the most sane arrangement would be for the people who work at place X to live near place X. But people change jobs constantly, and many job sites are in areas that are either way too expensive (like my college in the posh downtown area of the state’s (small) main city for most people to live in (houses there cost literally three times what mine is worth), or are in East Bumble and far away from anything other than the job.
There’s a reason a lot of science fiction looks towards arcologies that bring back together work, shopping, and living spaces, as in pre-industrial society. But that sort of change would be epochal, and not every aspect of it is good.
Most people aren’t going to bike, a war on cars can only be won by more of these sexy things (and variants).
EDIT: and if you/we can afford to pay for the car usage damage, from accidents to climate change, we can afford to not run them for direct profit and rely on some appropriate, to be determined, economic multiplier.
Bike paths, pfft, there aren’t even any damn sidewalks in my neighborhood. If I want to get down the street to the corner mart without getting run over I’ve pretty much got to drive.
And yes, good lord do we need some proper rail in this country.