The best you can do is slowly stop subsidizing cars, parking, and roads as much. Basically slowly transition into something more like Japan. Cars will never away but you can make make it a lot easier to get by without them.
Urban planning twitter is particularly annoyed that cities seem to completely ignore all the research and just spam parking places everywhere. Those parking places aren’t free, everyone is paying for them!
I think future generations will prove you wrong. The car industry is an artificial construct, and it will take us a lot of years to pull down the false narratives that it created, but I think it is breaking down.
I live in somewhat rural PA, and right now, you need a car, but I work from home, I order things on Amazon, and could get an Uber. Things change, and car ownership could be one of them.
Dude, shit gets to you from amazon IN A CAR. Uber IS A CAR.
For now. Drones! The future.
But seriously, there is a huge difference between car ownership and freight.
The best thing about living in Japan was how convenient and quick and not at all gross the tran was… it kind of fell apart a bit in Tokyo but traveling each day was just so easy.
I had a friend who was caught in this biblical hailstorm at a Colorado zoo this week. The live video was scary, 14 people were injured and 2 animals were killed. Many cars were totalled and the structures there have destroyed roofs, windows.
But at the end point for personal deliveries to your home, it’s not really freight.
Your local UPS has a fleet of trucks, and they drive them around your neightborhood all day, every day.
Flying drones are not particularly energy efficient. And that’s ultimately the real issue. You’re using energy, which has to be produced by someone.
Electric cars don’t have emissions. The problem is just that they still use energy. But if more of that energy was being produced by non fossil fuel sources, then you’d be reducing emissions.
That being said, even with fossil fuel generated energy, you’re still better with an electric car, since even a coal plant is produce energy with a better efficiency in terms of power output vs. carbon compared to any internal combustion engine.
Regardless, it’s much more feasible that in the US we’ll just develop cleaner forms of individual transportation, not that we’ll abandon individual transportation.
I think in the near term, our use of personal transportation will be more in line with out your see in European Nations, where ownership is expensive, and other means of transportation become more practical (I’m looking at your Scooter!). The fact that the car industry cost us a lot in public transportation is a crime and a tragedy but I think that the arc of history bends towards justice and we will see a resurgence of it after the GOP becomes a minority party. Really, the US had such a robust public transit system at one time. In PA,you can walk the Rail Trail from one end of the state to the other. At one time, Trains used to run on those rails. You could get around without needing a car, but bribery and heavy lobbying costs us all that.
By the way, it’s already the case for a lot of younger people are less likely to own a car than prior generations at the same age(mostly be cause of stagnate wages and huge college debt) but I think that trend will continue. Hopefully it will be replaced by Public Transportation, but if not, a lot of services are stepping to fill the void.
All I can say is that the future can’t come fast enough. I can’t wait until I can get rid of my car, and rely on public transportation. Hell, can you think of the savings in healthcare if more people walked or used a bicycle to get to and from work or whatever?
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They could, and you can even make policy to help them change and possibly be successful. What you can’t do is make policy that assumes they have already changed and hope for any success at all. Policy has to deal with the facts to be effective. So, if you’re going to set policy to mitigate, slow, or even halt climate change, you better suit that policy to the facts.
So, you better have a better plan than ‘pretend no one needs cars’. People need cars, and will need them for the foreseeable future, and those cars are going to emit a lot of greenhouse gases. What should we do? Pretend they don’t need cars isn’t an option.
I don’t even know what this pretends to mean. What isn’t an ‘artificial construct’? Give some examples.
Before the car boom, we had great public transportation in most cities, but the car industry came in and destroyed it. Even things like Jay walking being a crime was an invention of the car industry. Roads used to be open to all manner of vehicles, but now is limited to cars because big industry lobbied governments, so that they could sell more cars.
So, maybe I should say, the myth that cars, freedom and the American way of life came up spontaneously or natural is a false narratives, and it was orchestrated by large corporations in order to sell more cars to more people, and as a result, life sucks a little bit more. That’s what I mean by artificial.
The world we live in, with the priority and need to own a car is an invention of the car industry, and it’s a bad one at that. By removing public transit and making limiting sections of our nation to only cars, and making rules that benefit car ownership, we have become reliant on it. It will take time and effort reverse the car trend, but already is. More areas are rebuilding public transit, and more people are doing without a car.
Ok, I don’t disagree with much of that, but the fact is that a substantial part of the country was built based on cars, and two hundred million people now live and work in places with very little mass transit capability and are almost entirely dependent on cars. They’re not going away soon, and any policy you make better account for that or it will fail.
It isn’t even a question of building mass transit. Mass transit works in New York because New York is compact. You can’t build an effective mass transit system for LA, or Phoenix, etc, because they are sprawl. You have to basically start over, redesign the country around compact urban centers. That shit is not happening anytime soon, probably not in your lifetime.
Fortunately, global warming may soon render those cities uninhabitable, so we’ll be forced to start over! #silverlining #optimism
Most people never went more than a few miles from their house in their entire lives back then either.
Times have changed.
You can’t put that genie back in the bottle.
Moving from midtown Memphis to suburban Phoenix was an eye opener for me. Everywhere I went I had to get on the freeway and I hated it.
I got rid of my car when I left Phoenix and getting around has been a breeze. Praise be unto my ORCA card and Seattle mass transit.
When empires collapse, societies return to hyper-local tribalism so climate change is just like a really violent local-vore movement. Hopefully your local king won’t be a cannibal!
Anyway, folks dreaming about the end of car culture before the collapse of society must live in cities or dense suburbs. There is almost no public transportation in most of New England once you get outside the cities.
I grew up outside of New York and anything more then a town or two away may as well have been on Mars even if it was a fifteen minute drive. Everything you needed was within walking or biking distance and public transportation was abundant. By contrast, when my wife and I bought our first house together in New Hampshire, I convinced her we should buy something within walking distance of our small college town’s downtown because when I was raising my son in rural Vermont, I literally spent hours a day in the car getting him to after school activities, doctor’s appointments, family visits etc. I have what is considered around here to be a reasonable commute and it’s 44 miles round trip by car.
All of which illustrates, I guess, that cities are more environmentally friendly in many ways. But rural America is not going away and there is no sustainable public transportation model to replace cars in most of the country.
Yeah, I was without a car when I first went to school in the States. We do have a local business system, which got me to work, on an a rare occasion, got me to my girlfriend’s town.
Actually, now that I think about it, the local Rabbit Transist does run through out the county, althoughnot very often and outside of the York City itself, doesn’t stop many places. If you do live in York PA, you can take it to both Harrisburg and Baltimore so not horrible for commuters, provide you were near a line.
And Philly has a decent system for people working in the surrounding areas. I used to commute to Camden by Train every day from Lindenwald, 45 minutes out.
Sure, it sucked to plan all of it, and it was a huge time sink, but it was all there.
Very likely. A lot of us have to drive 30+ miles to get many services.
Driving 60+ isn’t remotely uncommon, it’s something people often do once a week or so.
Ultimately AGW might be a self-correcting problem** - fewer people from population die off means less greenhouse gas emissions. #optimism
Reducing meat consumption can probably help as much as reducing vehicle use.
“Our studies are showing that the Mediterranean diet — which is rich in nuts and beans and has a lot of fish, maybe chicken once a week, maybe red meat only once a month — if everyone were to move toward it, it’s the equivalent of taking about a billion or more cars of pollution out of the planet every year,” said Houlton.
(**Although all the other shit unleashed from it will take the planet a long, long time to repair. But if the planet recovered from being entirely encased in ice for a few million years, or suffered through a few million years of massive volcanic eruptions, it’ll go back to its equilibrium.
If human don’t go extinct expect the pattern to repeat itself all over again.
Because humans are dumb.#pessimsim )
