While some meat eating being required for nice food is subjective, I'm struggling to see what the suggested alternative to cars for all weather personal mobility is. I want to go to visit my friend Bob who lives 10 miles away but the rain is pouring down. What do I do in a carless world?
Btw: CO2 emission taxes, road taxes and congestion charges are a great idea.
This is what OP means by changing the way we live.
Sorry but getting rained on a bit is least of our troubles. Imagine there are places like Netherlands where it rains all the time and people (including very old ones) bike around the city…
the mode share of cycling has gone down in the netherlands over the last 30 years. 12% of average income households are car-free; it's 25% overall and 6% for the wealthy. this is despite the mode share of cycling in amsterdam increasing 50% in the same period. even with a cycling network fully connecting the southern half of the country, decent connectivity in the north, road design in the major cities that is intentionally hostile to intra-city car commutes, and an ostensibly pro-cycling commuter culture, people don't want to bike more than a couple miles if they can afford not to.
if you want to shape the behaviors of the world's people as you suggest, you'll need fascism. hard sell when there are already two paths to clean energy abundance, two paths to sustainable driving, and many paths to damage control competing in the public discourse.
Its exactly those type of people who call biking fascism who (once it will get tough) will bring fascism as only viable solution. Handmaids tale style.
People biking are just happily chugging along. They are not the fascists.
> Public transportation still requires you to go to the bus stop in the rain.
I want to say here that this comment sounds extremely alien to me, to the point that out of context I would have taken it as satirical.
I know you're serious, but there's probably a big portion of people to whom discussing the problem of walking in the rain to the bus stop sounds completely ridiculous, in any context, and as as something we must consider when talking about climate change policy, well, even more ridiculous.
I've lived in rainy places, and you just wear a raincoat, boots, maybe an umbrella (not always), and carry on.
This kind of disproportionate weight assigned to even the smallest levels of personal discomfort, when discussing these problems, is what most people are denouncing here. And this bias might be what pushes people towards techno-solutionism that doesn't have a chance of actually solving our problems in the time frame that we need.
If rain were a major impediment to functioning Ireland and NL should be abandoned. But it isn't. Rain is a minor nuisance. As for your friendships: in the past people would usually be good friends with people living close to them because they lacked transport. I have friends all over the world on account of the internet and I'm well aware that going to visit them is in many cases out of the question. That's much easier to decide when they are 100's (or even 1000's) of km away but the principle remains.
If a bit of rain would stop you then that says a lot. I bike thousands of km per year and get caught in the rain frequently, it doesn't even factor into the decision of whether or not I will go because when you bike a longer distance in NL the chances of getting rained on approach certainty.
i don't think a disinterest in cycling for 45 minutes in the rain each way says anything negative about me. i have a bike and use it when it makes sense. that doesn't make sense
10 miles is fine, you can have friends everywhere and you can’t expect everyone you know to live in the same urban sprawl.
Use public transport, take a cab if you need to or use a car club (shared vehicles use less resources than owning a car), ride a bike, walk the 10 miles. Infrastructure helps to reduce personal car use.
This isn't right. 10 miles is a fine distance. I met up with friends 13 miles away today. As long as there's good public transport it's not a big deal.
> Public transportation still requires you to go to the bus stop in the rain.
An umbrella solves that at minimal cost.
For the record, I don't think all car use is wrong, but the example of visiting a friend 10 miles away isn't a very good one. Someone shouldn't be expected to buy a car and its associated maintenance, tax, and externalities, just to visit someone that nearby.
A lot of people replied to you and stuff, but I don't agree with them all so I want to answer you personally.
I live in Tokyo. As I'm replying to you, I'm coming back from meeting my friends that live 13 miles away. This isn't uncommon. One of my best friends, I see her almost every week, lives 15 miles away from me.
Here's what I did: I cycled 5 minutes to the train station; I got on the train; I ran into a friend in the train, and we chatted the whole way; I got to the station, went to our meeting spot, and we hung out for hours, drank a bunch, had fun, until last train; then we all went back to the station, rode the train for 45 minutes, and now I'm home.
It wasn't raining today, but I hang out with my friends when it's raining too. We don't let that stop us. Take an umbrella or a raincoat or just walk for 5 minutes in the rain. It's not a big deal.
At the same time, I understand that this can feel very foreign to you. Our thoughts are molded by our environment. But I'm sure that if you lived in Tokyo you would also change your mind.
I don't know how to change your mind, but I can tell you that if you gave it a try you would change your mind. l
I'm not saying cars have no place, but they don't need to be the be all end all of transportation. There's very real negatives to cars, we're just blinded to them as long as we live in a car centric society.
> I can tell you that if you gave it a try you would change your mind
I've been cycling and using public transport in the south east UK as my primary means of travel for 12 years, the car is a supplement. Update your mental models accordingly.
Zoning doesn't change that a lot of people do want single family detached homes. Those zoning rules weren't handed down by some solo dictator far away they were decided by the people living in those areas.
I do agree there should be more options in the housing market, but in the end there is some percentage of the market which will prefer to not live in flats and rowhouses.
And it will be a very small amount of people because if SFHs were priced appropriately they would be unaffordably expensive or incredibly remote. At the end of the day people don't want just the SFH, they want the location too.
Ah, now you're understanding why US cities are so sprawled. Those SFH's are remote, and a good chunk of the people living there want it that way. Those people want a large yard away from a large city while still having things like some stores and a large airport within an hour or so. These people reject the thought of living in a place like New York or Amsterdam or London or other dense cities. They actively vote against expansion or creation of public transit options.
I know there's a lot of media online about people being anti-suburbia, and yeah that's a growing percentage of America. But there's still a massive chunk of the population that will continue to just move out further from the city as you densify or actively fight densification.
As I suggested, those zoning laws aren't writing themselves. They're not being handed down by some far away dictator. They're being written and continued by popularity elected local politicians. Democracy at work.
I've absolutely seen densification efforts massively fought by the people who currently live there. I know people who purposefully moved further out from the city. I've seen neighborhood after neighborhood that seem like nightmares to me get built way out in the middle of nowhere with people clamoring to buy into them even if there are similar purchase-price denser options further in the city. Because, they want a large yard, they want a three car garage, they want five bedrooms and a study and a theater room and a wine humidor closet.
Which buying way out there, it's cheap to have some massive house because the $/sqft for just the lot alone is massively higher in the city. A massive chunk of the value of the home in a city is the land it's on not the structure itself, unless it's a really fancy structure.
The sprawl is real but large swathes of cities zoned exclusively for SFHs is also real.
Vancouver is 80% SFHs because of zoning. Recently the government allowed multiplexes in SFH zones, and suddenly every new construction is a multiplex, and families are looking at rebuilding their houses to maximize value.
If there was no artificial zoning, then Vancouver would be a lot denser and current SFHs would be a lot more expensive (and they're already expensive, 2M on average). This is true across most NA cities.
My argument is not that nobody wants SFHs. I'm sure they do, but desires are not fixed. If you had to choose between an SFH 1 hour away from the city, and a row house 15 minutes away, you might go with the row house.
And yes, sometimes people want to live far. There's lots of reasons for that, and that's ok, as long as they're paying the real value of it. By the way, this would mean massive property taxes because sparse infrastructure is very expensive.
Because of opportunity cost relative to other housing options. Right now you're only allowed to build SFHs, and the market will only bear a price of 2-3M before most people are priced out, so that's what they cost.
If instead of one SFH with a large yard you build 5 row houses in the same plot, and sell each one for 1M, the SFH is only 50% efficient compared to the row houses, so its price needs to increase for it to be worth building.
It's obviously more complicated than that, but that's the underlying idea. It's the same reason you don't see SFHs in Manhattan, because the opportunity cost is too high.
Btw: CO2 emission taxes, road taxes and congestion charges are a great idea.