If you confiscated my car tomorrow, I literally couldn't get to work or buy groceries. That isn't an optimization, it's a hard reality.
Once you've built timely safe replacement infrastructure that can carry me from my home to my place of employment as fast or faster than my current commute, and take me to any of the shops I frequent, and do that for all of my neighbors, and do all of the above in a way that costs less than car ownership, we can talk.
It also needs to be able to do this _literally door to door_ and without having to sit next to, speak to, or touch anyone I don't know.
Cars are a privacy bubble and a shield, not just a transport mechanism; no form of mass transit will ever be an acceptable substitute in the way that, for me, is the most important factor.
Part of existing in a society is the fact you will interact with other people. There are places - particularly rural - where this is not the case. Such places would probably never not be automobile-centric, as it makes no sense to run lines to low populous, sparce areas.
But if you live in an urban area, the "cost tradeoff" of having everything close is there's more likelihood to be around people. It's untenable to have the desire to have 10 grocery stores, 5 banks, 3 schools etc within 5 miles of you and also have no people interaction. Who runs those places? And who goes to them? The privacy cars provide is therefore mostly an illusion.
Also, I wouldn't describe an automobile as a shield, considering it's by far the thing most likely to kill you. It's a sword, if anything.
Hey, I'm the guy who is 100% against private car ownership, and I don't want to "confiscate your car" (I mean, what would I do with that?) or encourage anyone to do so (unless, of course, they're the bank and you're a delinquent, don't want to upset the apple cart too much...).
I want you to be able to reliably get transport to where-ever you need to go, an what-ever time you need to go there, without the need to keep a 1000-pound pile of junk in (semi-)public spaces at all times.
Where I live, that's pretty much a possibility already. I want everyone to have that same freedom!
"Transport to where-ever you need to go, an what-ever time you need to go there" has to functionally be pretty car-like. My question is how he wants to dispatch it on demand so it doesn't need to stay parked near us.
Buses and trams do that as well, or at least extremely close to it. If the next bus is in a minute, and it's going to the block you're going to, guess what - you can go where you want, whatever time you want.
This is the case in many areas. When I was in Romania, between buses, trams, and rail I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. There was always an option available, typically multiple overlapping options. Keep in mind this is a poor eastern European country.
Keep in mind it's also fast, like very fast. Going across the city was a 10-minute affair. Try driving across a big city like Dallas.
From Fremont, CA, the Sunnyvale office is a 40-minute wait for a 16-minute bus to a 12-minute wait for a 14-minute train to a 14-minute wait for a 48-minute bus (making 34 stops). Google estimates I could get there in two and a half hours. Getting home after 11 PM is more like four hours.
It's only 22 miles. A replacement for a car should be able to do this in about 32 minutes. But it would have to go point-to-point on demand, they can't cover the spanning tree of n^2 possible trips with any reasonable frequency (mostly because n^2 taxpayers don't exist, nor housing for them).
Right because the US is car-centric, so everything is designed to be an inefficient as possible. Things are far away not in spite of cars, but because of them.
> A replacement for a car should be able to do this in about 32 minutes
Right, again, I was able to go across the capital of Romania in maybe 10 minutes end-to-end. Because Bucharest isn't car centric. And I'm able to reach any arbitrary point in the city trivially.
Also, as a side note, your car couldn't do that in 32 minutes. There're people in CA that commute MUCH LESS than 22 miles that spend 1.5+ hours in traffic a day. Because, again, cars are the most inefficient means of transportation imaginable, so they have awful throughput and bandwidth.
This is mostly a case of US car brain. There're countless examples of places all over the world that are able to achieve this, and more, without a car. The biggest factor to remember is that distance doesn't scale like you think it does - due to the extreme inefficiency of motor vehicle infrastructure, the majority of our space is wasted on not-useful things. 22 miles in the US isn't equivalent to 22 miles somewhere else, because somewhere else those 22 miles have 10x as much stuff, so you wouldn't need to travel 22 miles in the first place.
That system doesn't seem to take you to every Bucharest address in ten minutes, only popular ones. I picked a few buildings at random in Google Maps and got hour-long L-shaped trips (detours into downtown) that would have been fifteen-minute drives. I don't think any pre-scheduled routes can cover n^2 trips well.
This wasn't my experience when you cross-reference the systems (bus, tram, metro) and consider walking also works.
> would have been fifteen-minute drives
Yes, if everyone on Earth magically disappeared. If you've never driven in a dense city, it's often faster to just walk alongside the cars than be in the cars.
This is because, again, cars are so unbelievably space inefficient that the space saving of human people versus cars can make up for the multiple order of magnitude difference in speed.
Cars aren't a liberty, merely an illusion of it. Cars are the reason you can't go anywhere you want to go without paying for a hunk of steel and risking your life. True liberty would be being able to walk everywhere you need to go, but this is rare.
Hence my point; liberty is expensive. Liberty includes the liberty to risk it. There's no illusion. Cars do not rule me. They're not binding, or addictive. They're a tool that physically extend my liberty to go where I please, and I can use them or leave them as I please.
They do, that's what you're missing. They're both binding and addictive, because we have to build our entire society to revolve around them. You've lost countless liberties, as have many Americans, due to the concessions around cars.
The reason your grocery store is 5 miles away is because of cars. The reason you can't have a job without a car is because of cars. The reason you don't have a right to reasonable noise is because of cars. The reason you don't have a right to not inhale tire fumes is because of cars.
Cars have taken away your ability to do a lot of things. And no, you cannot "leave them" as you please, you are required to keep one otherwise you will most likely not have a job. Go ahead, try this out. Get rid of your car for one year, without moving, and come back.
> The reason your grocery store is 5 miles away is because of cars.
You're suggesting everyone just move to a city, or what? Because we can't just litter a grocery store every mile across the entire American continent. We know that cars are neither binding nor addictive because people regularly move to cities and sell their only car with little difficulty. The car increases my liberty, my choice to not live in a city. Have you ever actually lived outside of a city?
The way you're looking at it is upside-down. The car doesn't push opportunities away as if ridding ourselves of cars would magically make everything close, no, it increases my reach. We know this because of historical evidence. Before the car, going to town was an all-day affair in the horse drawn carriage. Now it's a 30 minute trip. Freeing up my day to do whatever else I choose to do.
Maybe you're suggesting that if we didn't have the car, there would be train tracks within walking distance everywhere? I love trains. Rather than trying to kill cars, why not attempt to build better rail infrastructure? Then I could join you.
> We know that cars are neither binding nor addictive because people regularly move to cities and sell their only car with little difficulty
Little difficulty? Is this a joke or do we have different definitions of difficulty?
There're hardly any cities in the US with adequate transportation, number 1. I live in a city; you probably do to. You REQUIRE your car, as do 99.9999% of all cities in the US. Some don't, like NYC - but even there you're pushing it. It's not London.
> as if ridding ourselves of cars would magically make everything close
That's exactly what it does, because everything is far because of the car. It's urban sprawl. We don't have more "stuff", rather we waste the majority of our spaces on infrastructure for cars. Roads, parking, etc.
> Before the car, going to town was an all-day affair in the horse drawn carriage
That's just not true. People live in the town, that's why it's a town. Are you a farmer or something? No, you live in an urban area. You're IN the town, your town is just car centric and therefore it sucks ass to navigate.
> Rather than trying to kill cars, why not attempt to build better rail infrastructure
Sigh... okay:
1. Nobody on Earth is trying to kill cars, including me.
2. The reason rail is bad and isn't getting better is BECAUSE of cars and car-centric infrastructure. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on car infrastructure. That's money not going to public transportation, despite being public funds. If we divert even a fraction of that money, we can have a huge impact. But there's blockers, people like you. In addition, to make rail effective you have to not waste miles and miles of space on urban sprawl. But people love their automobiles and 2 hour commutes.
Also "suboptimal" is a matter of opinion.