Why Do We Allow Cars?

People perceive their cars as status symbols, rather than simply the means of getting from point A to point B. It's a mindset in most - not all - countries and one that you can't simply legislate away.

Migrating to electric vehicles will help a lot with localised pollution and health damage that comes with it, and with all pollution once the grid is finally powered by renewables predominantly or even exclusively. Some cities in Germany are banning diesel cars from city centres, and some all ICE cars entirely. So that's a good first step. Second step would be to stop the trillions in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.

Also, ridesharing, carpooling... whatever you want to call it, all help. I doubt people in the US will switch to using public transit en masse soon, as it would require huge public investment to improve it first. But you can only do that when enough people are using it already, in order to justify that investment. It's a vicious cycle.

Well, ya see OP, teleportation has been invented yet and people have to get around. Cars beat walking and horses and sedan chairs.

Because people have to get around, so there's that.

Because jobs. Have to get to them somehow, duh.

People got around and got to jobs before the invention of the internal combustion engine. At the very least, we need to charge huge rates for parking on public streets. There's no other personal possession I can think of that cities allow to be stored free of charge in public.

[quote]Why don't we ban them, or at the very lease,

Oh, dear!

I agree with OP. The world was a much nicer place when we had dirt roads that turned to mud mixed with horseshit streets when it rained.

Much nicer smell. And probably healthier, too.

Oh how we long for the old days.

There’s always trains and buses

Are you trolling us, OP? The future is renewable based electric cars. Maybe you've heard about this amazing new technology in your town, too.

And don't get OP started on indoor plumbing or bathing more than once a year.

R9 Renewable ? Where do you think the electricity comes from ? Fossil fuel

R11 is an idiot. Proves a "little knowledge" is a dangerous thing.

R12=Elon Musk

because our whole way of life is geared around cars. Our housing nation wide is built around the automobile...the suburbs etc. Its too late to change and we dont have the money in the USA to devote to the massive infrastructure resources needed to build trains, subways, etc. Besides, trying tro convert to mass transportation and phase out the automobile would still result in massive amts of natural resources used to build all the infrastructure and release just as much co2 in the atmosphere anyway and push us just as fast into unstoppable global warming. Deal with it.

electric cars..what a joke..think it thru.. You still have to expend the massive resource to build electric cars, thus shoving continous co2 into the atmosphere. Electric cars still depend on steel, metal and all the other things that go into building a car, including shipping various components around the world to the mfg plant. Once the electric car is built you still have to generate the electricity to run the electric cars. Installing a million windmills and solar panels everywhere simply isnt enuf to power the worlds electric grid. So the increased needs to generate electricty has to come either by nuclear reactors or coal. Additionally you have to mfg and build the solar power components and the windmill parts. I live in the midwest near a large mfg plant for electic wind turbines. When driving on interstates in the area the roads are just packed with huge semis delivering all these wind turbines. How much of our natural resources are being consumed doing all this?? Electric cars are simply a subsitute for the gas engine and isnt an answer to our climate change problems.We are an industrial society and are completely dependant on oil and there is no way we can reduce significantly the co2 being pumped into the atmosphere slowly cooking the planet to its inevitable extinction.

Big idiot @ r15

OP=idiot

Because they're the most useful invention of all time dumbass! What a stupid question!

Ever heard of hydro, R11?

OP is AOC

Gee let’s just outlaw trucks as well. Then we would all starve to death because whatever you see in the store a truck brought it to you. And let’s outlaw these HUGE cargo ships while we’re at it!

And freight trains too, let's get rid of those too.

If e-cars are running on electricity produced by burning dirty fossil fuels, climate benefits are limited. Because of the complex batteries they use, it currently takes more energy to produce an electric car than a conventional one

I was hoping this was a take down of the Disney movie.

[quote]And don't get OP started on indoor plumbing or bathing more than once a year.

We done had our bath in May.

OP you really need to get out of the city every now and then, it is a whole different world out there.

[quote] There's no other personal possession I can think of that cities allow to be stored free of charge in public.

Apparently R5 can't think of bikes, motorcycles, Semi Trucks, buses, motor homes, trash cans, newspaper vending machine, food trucks, street vendors, Federal Express boxes.

If I had control we would warn everyone in advance that their car would be confiscated on a certain date, and when that date came a series of gigantic magnets would be suspended over the earth from low-orbiting satellites, and would instantly scoop up all the cars on the earth and they would then be consolidated into another satellite, a second moon, this one made by man to remind man of man's selfishness and self-destruction. Abolish all cars!

I'm with you OP. Things are changing. Take rideshare to help bring about their near-end.

There are uneven and unequal kinds of public transportation options in the US cities. For example in some cities in the DFW area you have to drive to get to a public transit stop. They may be working on making it better, but my experience is there is no reliable public transport or network that connects the cities around Dallas to Dallas or even each other. .

That is a HUGE problem, r30, that infrastructure is essential, and it's totally missing across most of the USA

OP = AOC

YI assume this is a parody of the smoking troll.

[quote] Why Do We Allow Cars?

For the same reason we have cheap suburban development and urban sprawl, so that people who don't have as much net worth as they think they do can (a) feel that they are rich or upper middle class and (b) feel separate from The Poors.

It sounds like something that affects just them, until you factor in the ridiculous amounts of roads, highways and bridges that must be sustained so that Joe Trumper can get to work 8 minutes sooner than over city streets.

Yeah let’s just pack everyone into apartment buildings like sardines. R34 has it all planned out for us—he’ll be in charge of rounding us up and herding us into cities for our new digs in these swanky capsule pods. Then we can all be the same. We can all finally be equal.

The cars aren't inherently bad, it's the DRIVING them that's the problem.

When someone like AOC preaches about the environment, I always wonder: does she ride in a car? does she use driveup windows? Does she heat and air condition her home? Does she fly in a plane?

If she really wanted my support, she needs to tone it down from eliminating, to doing things differently so that cars get used less, or improve their efficiency. Like make the damn traffic engineers in towns get the traffic lights timed so that the pollution that goes into the air is moving the car instead of idling at a stop light. Tax the hell out of businesses that insist that a start time of 8:00 am lunch at 12:00 pm and done at 1:00 pm and a quit time of 5:00 pm is the ONLY way to run a business. If the lights are properly timed, they can issue tickets to cars stopped at stop lights because if they were stopped, it means they were driving the incorrect speed. The fastest and most fuel efficient way between two points is to not stop. Instead of red light cameras, they need to have merge lane cameras to issue tickets to the idiot that made the bad merge that caused the freeway to turn into a parking lot.

Gas should probably be rationed. It's one thing to charge more, but then rich people would keep living their lives with no sacrifices other than spending more money they don't even need. My one friend is well off so he drives home and right by his gym. Takes a nap, and then gets back in his car and does an additional 10 miles round trip to go back to his gym.

There's so much that can be done to get the same work done with less fuel short of vilifying the automobile.

I always try to ride the bus. My theory is that bus is going to be spewing pollutants into the air whether I'm on it or not, and if I use my car, then I'm just adding to the problem. Then there's my mother that thinks that riding the bus is low class, and she just refuses to do it, and it pisses me off. She'll drop $40 on a cab or Uber when she can take a bus to the airport for $1.20.

Honey try living in Grand Prarie, TX (which has no bus system) with a job in Plano. You'll understand

Using public transport in LA is dangerous! That’s a major reason why I don’t do it.

America is capitalist country. We do not like paying taxes to the government and would rather use that money to buy our own individual transportation. So our public transit will always be overworked, underfunded, and not quite sufficient. Same with our airports.

We need to raise the gasoline tax. The Federal tax on gasoline haven’t been changed in decades. If you adjust for inflation, you find that Gas is incredibly cheap these days.

If it had been up to OP, then the cavemen would never have discovered fire.

It's a 20th Century thing. No way can we sustain this. Maybe in little hick towns, but the cities are becoming nightmares.

[quote]When someone like AOC preaches about the environment, I always wonder: does she ride in a car? does she use driveup windows? Does she heat and air condition her home? Does she fly in a plane?

Ah yes, the strawman argument in which the subject's position is willfully misstated to make the subject look hypocritical. I'm not gonna go to bat for AOC here, but instead state the simple truth of the matter: nobody wants to take away anyone's SUV. We just want to build them to run on renewables, and accrue all of the benefits of moving technology forward for the United States (instead of letting China be first to market so that they can have a middle class). I'm America-first that way. The future is renewable energy, and we can either get with the program now and benefit ourselves, or wait for our many nemeses to do it (and treat us the way we've treated them for the last hundred years).

What's needed is a moon shot type of program in order to realign the US' energy production and use. But in doing so, we'll renew the middle class and in reality could return to the prosperity of the 60s. We had the will then to do big things; why can't we come up with the way forward and work towards it collectively? I don't mean that average people will have to work actively in the industry any more than average people worked in the space program. The public just needs to be willing to adopt new technology and — the key — pay for it.

[quote] Why Do We Allow Cars?

Why did your parents decide to have you? I bet they regret that

OP, IIRC, early US auto manufacturers lobbied to get LA and other cities to limit or discontinue mass transit lines like subways and bus companies, so as to boost car sales. Today, you need a car in a lot of places.

Mass transit, my ass. People are busy. They have shit that needs doing, and riding filthy public transport with rude, dirty, confrontational, and/or unsanitary thugs, criminals, and variously assorted crazies isn't exactly what most people would consider living the Dream.

And public transport do not have restrooms! What do people do? I could not handle that.

r40, raising the gas tax is regressive. You punish the poor, and the rich can right on doing what they do. You have to be fair. Everyone should get to spew the same amount of pollutants into the air, not just those with money to burn.

r43, it's not a straw man. She wants 100% renewables. She's made her position clear, and she is not living by example. What, because she doesn't live in a world without 100% renewables that means she gets to do whatever she wants until it happens? At first, I didn't know how she was getting around, but apparently someone checked and reported it. She needs to take a physics and finance class.

Here in Mexico city riding the subway or whatever is only possible for people living in the center of the city, for those in the periferies you need to own a car to get to a subway station first. In the US is probably just as bad. I would honestly prefer to own a car but I can't afford it.

Peripheries

Cars have become so much more fuel efficient, I have heard they are actually less polluting than trains/buses?

R50 I had to make an important grammar mistake so that people would acusse me of being a russian troll and this thread could get derailed into insanity...

Because freedom.

I wonder if people drove subcompacts instead of so many big SUVs. trucks how much pollution would be eliminated.

Why do we allow fire?

IT KILLS MILLIONS OF PEOPLE EACH YEAR!

Fire should be banned.

We allow them specifically to annoy you, OP.

We shouldn't allow fizzy water either because it tingles your nose, funny girl?

r51, when you have 1 person per car, and 50 cars on the road and you multiply the pollutants, and compare that to 1 bus with 50 people on it that took 50 cars off the road or is going to be on the road anyway, it's pretty clear that you don't know how to make proper comparisons.

Food must be banned because it can spoil, and there are more than 38 million cases of food poisoning every year, and that's only in the USA.

Let’s ban cows too. They produce an awful lot of gas.

150 years ago, every big city in the US and Europe had a horrific problem: they were literally buried under increasing amounts of horse poop. Google it. It was literally a crisis. There were studies projecting that by 1950, cities like New York & London would perpetually have ankle-deep poop on main roads, and side streets would become impassable if poop-removal were disrupted for even a single day.

Obviously, that didn't happen... because cars made horses obsolete as an urban transportation mode, and the "poop problem" solved itself by the early 1900s.

And yes, this includes London, which had the most extensive & advanced subway network on earth in the late 1800s.... Because even in Victorian London, people didn't want to walk 4 blocks to the subway station (especially not when it meant wading through ankle-deep horseshit), so they took horse-drawn taxis to and from the station.

Cars were viewed as a modern MIRACLE, because next to pervasive poop, exhaust fumes are a minor nuisance.

Keep in mind, too, that the populations of cities like London and New York are now several times larger than they were circa 1870. In 1870, the population of the entire US was smaller than the population of Canada today. London's population today is approximately 4 times what it was in 1870 (approx 1 million in 1800, ~2 million during Queen Victoria's reign, ~9 million today).

[quote]Because jobs. Have to get to them somehow, duh.

Why can’t you telecommute, telephone, teleport, take public transport or something? Do your part!

OP has obviously smoked much, too much weed.

Maybe if car owners had to actually pay the real price for the convenience they enjoy and being protected from the hoi polloi, it'd seem less insane.

So R27 wants us to believe that semis and buses and motor homes and big trucks get parked on the street like cars do? Where do you live?

Food trucks are generally licensed by the city and have to pay a fee to be where they are and cannot occupy the space indefinitely, like cars can. Garbage cans are required by zoning codes, generally, and don't sit on the street permanently, but on the sidewalk and are out for only a night a week or two.

We give over huge swaths of real estate to car storage and it's insane. I get that you want to keep getting your free stuff but maybe the rest of us are sick of subsidizing you.

R14: I've read extensively about electric vehicles - it's said by 2023 they will outsell IC engined cars. Imagine that. And you do realize in the renewable column there's fission which doesn't emit greenhouse gases but there is the little radioactive waste problem - easily solve if you take a tack like France which reprocesses spent nuclear fuel and burns it again and again. And the ITER project is plugging along - by 2030 or so they'll have sustainable fusion of deuterium and tritium. In essence the ITER project is a big test bed. We already have achieved fusion, all be it for a few seconds at a time but ITER is designed to run for 10-15 minutes just to prove you can generate power with fusion.

[quote]And public transport do not have restrooms! What do people do? I could not handle that.

Your car has a restroom?

If American roads were in the same state as American public transit, there'd be a revolution in this country. America is perfectly capable of creating and maintaining decent infrastructure. It just depends on what kind. The kind used mainly by wealthy (usually white) property owners in the suburbs gets lavish attention from the government while the type used by poorer, usually browner, city dwellers goes neglected.

OP... If we allowed rickshaws would you bitch about those as well?

Mass used of rickshaws isn't going to cook the world, so sure.

R35 You can do whatever the hell you want.

What you DON'T get to do is not pay for it. And most fat cow suburbanites have cars, parking lots because gawd forbid they have to waddle more than 50 steps to their Golden Corral, and get roads everywhere. All paid with money that disproportionately goes to dumb shit like that and not sensible, sustainable stuff.

If you want to live on a country estate and have a half acre of land, do it. If you can afford it. But you don't get to suck all the investment money for infrastructure. You and the other people who thought it was a fine fucking idea to live 45 minutes from where you work can all pitch in and make that fucking road yourselves.

Some of us want shared transit because we don't want to choke the earth due to our selfishness.

Read and learn, bitches.

"I just drove in from Granite Falls, and boy are my feet tired!"

Angry old men will be with us for a long, long time, The only shame is that there's no war we can declare that will thin their ranks,

OP is an idiot.

No, just a whole lot of ostriches with their heads in the sand.....unwilling to see what's coming.

Car enthusiasts live in this bubble of socialism they don't even acknowledge and yet think of themselves as hard-headed realists. Further, they think the people who are pointing out that their existence is incredibly precarious are dreamy hippies who live in fairy land. It's quite a racket they've got going.

R77 exactly!

How quickly they forget, R61,

Lest we forget...

I have an Aunt who is disabled on SSDI and lives in a low income apartment complex. She doesn't own a car and she hasn't left the city she lives in in over 10 years. She takes the bus and she tells me that sometimes weirdos hassle her. Her biggest complaint is she can't buy things from more than one store on a bus trip because she can't bring her things from one store into another store. She also can't buy more than she can carry in her hands.

Now that online shopping has become popular she says it's wonderful that she can have her stuff delivered from Amazon/Walmart/Target. She sometimes takes Uber or Lyft now too. I sometimes envy her because she lives downtown in a city. But she says it sucks being so close to people like bees in a hive. She says sharing public transportation, sharing a laundry room, and not owning your own house/land is for poor, disabled and elderly people. She told me isolation from other humans is a luxury.

Well the problem is that the middle-class socialism of the US government has afforded that luxury of isolation to people who couldn't *actually afford it. And they've come to expect it as a birthright and rage like spoiled toddlers at the idea that some small piece of it is going away, even if it is to help stop the entire planet from being cooked.