The problem is that it's a classic large-scale prisoner's dilemma. Living in a walking city is nicer than living in a driving city. But living in a walking city with a car is even nicer!
The only way to fix it is by passing taxes or other restrictive legislation, which has so far been extremely difficult because most voters choose "let's make things a bit easier for you today" over "we should all sacrifice now to make things probably better later".
How I see it is that it's not that people own cars, it's that they drive them absolutely everywhere. I think there is a happy medium where you still have a car to get you places where you can't walk, but essential services are walking distance from where you live.
The apartment I moved into last year is in a neighborhood with grocery stores, some restaurants and a gym. It's not the epitome of walkability but it gets the job done. While at my old place I found myself getting into my car every day to go places, now I find myself only using it 1-2 times per week.
Also weather is a major factor. When I visited my friend in Florida last month I decided to walk to McDonalds one morning. By the time I got back I was drenched in sweat from the humidity. By comparison I make a similar length walk almost every morning and don't think anything of it. There even if the place was super walkable, folks would still drive because of the heat and humidity.
I think a key difference here is building your cities to be more walkable; if there are humidity and heat problems: plant more trees for shade, provide more cover in general for people
I can't imagine that the current way of building cities with massive multi-lane stretches is going to be good for reducing experienced suffering to those who walk (it's just not a priority...)
Of course, any of that requires that you actually prioritise these features as opposed to extending highways/motorways with ever more lanes causing more and more induced demand, which... American cities don't seem to, generally...?
The usual shilling of "Not Just Bikes" should go here, where he talks in depth about what's wrong with American car-dependent cities and how they build...
> But living in a walking city with a car is even nicer!
I think that's fine. Most over time will realize they don't need 2 or more cars if they're living in a true walking city because driving will be more inconvenient than walking, and eventually either paying for or building a garage (or having it used up by 2 cars that are seldom used) or paying for street parking or other things will cause people to change habits. It just takes time if you have a walkable city.
Personally I think the sweet spot is one crossover SUV, highly walkable and bikeable city, and probably street cars that run up and down main commerce arteries. At that point you really do cover almost every conceivable local transit need or chore that you might have to undertake.
One is yea there's a certain level of cultural idiocy and laziness. I live in front of a bus stop and see it. But I also see lots of parents walking to pick up their kids, so I'm not sure what the breakdown is (this is in the suburbs in Ohio with the bad weather and all of that).
The other is that we don't really have a lot (any at all?) of examples where you have a true walkable neighborhood with desirable schools. Most walkable neighborhoods that I've seen were built before automobile traffic became prevalent, which puts them close to cities which tend to have the worst schools. So I'm not actually sure what parents would do if they had the combo of schools and neighborhood that we'd be talking about here, but I bet they'd walk because in those neighborhoods it just wouldn't be possible for all or most parents to drive their kid to school at the same time.
It's really hard to break out of thinking about things in terms of the suburbs and convenience because most use that as their starting frame of reference. How will I go to Costco if XYZ, well you wouldn't. How will my kids get to school? They'd walk or ride their bikes. "But it's dangerous" ok then make it safe. Participate in your community and your government. That's half the reason we have the problems we have now. For better or worse though economic physics is going to win. We'll either all perish in war over resources or these activities will just become too expensive. EVs won't save us either, and this is particularly true given the underinvestment in nuclear energy that has occurred world wide.
Kind of. It's a chicken-egg thing. When you design your society around cars and car infrastructure people take their cars everywhere and watch the news and get scared and all that. We can think back to earlier times where this wasn't the case.
I am living the life (in the us) of your last paragraph and it’s not that plug and play. Add kids to that equation and that goes out the window. Not saying it’s not possible, saying that my wife who is absolutely not accustomed to that will not be giving up her pampered life and I know many of my friends in the same boat.
> But living in a walking city with a car is even nicer!
Not necessarily, because it is significantly more expensive (depending on how you implement it). But one way to get people off their cars and onto public transport could be make people pay for their cars. Nowadays, people do pay quite a lot for their cars (insurance, registration fees, vehicle tax, etc), but the payments pale in comparison to the overall costs of having cars as a primary mean of mobility. Putting that cost burden onto the people that produce those costs would lead to many people reconsidering their need for a car.
That’s why it’s important to help people understand that’s it’s not about eliminating cars entirely, but about substituting significant numbers of trips.
The YouTube channel NotJustBikes has gained a lot of notoriety over the last couple of years, and he made an interesting point that driving is more pleasant in Amsterdam. [0]
The issue is mainly car dependency not cars per se.
>> Living in a walking city is nicer than living in a driving city. But living in a walking city with a car is even nicer!
You know what is even nicer than that, Living in a Rural area with a population density of less than 500 people per sq mile (310 people per sq km)
>The only way to fix it is by passing taxes or other restrictive legislation
That is far from the only way to fix it, and it is very regressive, making the burden fall upon poor people, and often the elderly.
Using tax code to affect behavior is one of the most unethical things government does, and I always find it odd that the same people that complain about the rich, and how we should do more for the poor are the ones that also want to impose these heavily regressive tax schemes because "they know best"
> Using tax code to affect behavior is one of the most unethical things
I am not sure I understand. Those producing externalities should pay for them, and taxation is a basic way for that. Gasoline (etc.) pollutes, hence it should be taxed, on one side to collect the funds for attempted compensation, but also to limit the phenomenon and put it in the framework of "you will invest your resources where you deem them best invested".
>Those producing externalities should pay for them, and taxation is a basic way for that.
very are rarely those proposing taxing externalities doing so to cover the costs of mitigating those externalities, instead the money goes in to the government's general fund, or some other unrelated pet project. Also rarely the tax enough to the level that it would actually curb the desired behavior enough to effect the harm caused by the externality
So all you end up doing is making is harder for poor people to put food on the table while doing nothing to curb the externality
No: epistemologically, that is the indicator justifying a growing suspect.
Ineffectiveness should be determined by a logical and technical argument over the method, proposed as a possible solution, itself. You should identify what has it go wrong in practice. And you have in part already done it: that taxes are not earmarked (on compensation) and that the discouragement factor is insufficient. That is not necessary, it is not intrinsic to the method.
Nearby I commented on the infernal noise from electric cars. That is not necessary, not intrinsic: it just happens that people think it acceptable that some drive around with loudspeakers transmitting the screams of torture chambers. A potential solution becomes a problem because of external (non intrinsic) factors. It would be much, much easier to fix the external factors of the taxation problem than those of the "broken cybernetics" problem.
This smacks of a combination of "Real socialism has never been tried" in combination with the axiom of "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results"
The factor you are not considering is the omnipresence of corruption. Power Corrupts, and the more power you give government the more corrupt it becomes, this is born out time and time again, yet humanity refuses to learn this lesson.
The second you give government the powers you are advocating for, the people in government start thinking of all the different ways they can "help society", this amount of power is incredibly corrupting and can not be resisted, thus it always ends badly. ALWAYS
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again /under the same conditions/ expecting different results.
The «lesson» you talk about is again not a deduction but an induction. Engineer your system properly, and it will have to work.
If at first you don't succeed, call a hacker. They must be somewhere.
Incidentally, going to the context: the issue is, as you indicate, that "said people cannot resist corruption", well, stop giving power to "«people»" then - to those embarrassing liabilities I hear about. (They probably terrorize me more than you.) Which by the way, is one of the actual codified ways to tackle the problem (since at least 3800 years).
The only way to fix it is by passing taxes or other restrictive legislation, which has so far been extremely difficult because most voters choose "let's make things a bit easier for you today" over "we should all sacrifice now to make things probably better later".