No Stupid Questions

Inb4 lemmy's famous misreadings, I think we need a shitton more public transportation. But I know it's not going to be a 100% replacement.

What we need is transportation, and cars are a very sucessful form of transportation. There are a lot of factors: 1) Location, where you can go, 2) Timing, when you can go. 3) Distance, how far you can go, 4) Speed, how qulckly you can get there. 5) Door to door, or not.

Let's compare them all:

Cars: 1) Location, you can go anywhere. 2) Timing, you can go any time. 3) Distance. This is a big one why cars are very successful, they are good for any distance whether it's a short trip, medium trip, long trip, or even multiple days long trip. 4) It's fast for any length trip. Excluding certain times into say downtown they are incredibly fast. 5) It's door to door transportation. Add it all up and you have a very succesful mode of transportation.

Public transportation 1) doesn't go everywhere, you have last mile problem on both ends. So add in walking. 2) limited timing especially at night. Schedule has to fit. Involves waiting. 3) Distance means time goes up dramatically. Add in transfers and time goes up even more. I regularly had to wait 25 minutes at transfer because they missed each other by 5 minutes. 4) Slow. It just is. 5) Not door to door. Usually a good bit of walking. Inb4 lemmy's famous misreading, yes I know there are exceptions. Yes more service means more passengers which means more service and more gaps are filled, etc.

Ebikes (pedal assist electric bikes). 1) Go everywhere. 2) Go anytime. 3) Good for short and medium trips. And occasional long trip 4) Can actually be fast, especially if the route avoids lights. But not as fast as a freeway for long distances. 5) Door to door transportation. This is why I'm a big fan of ebikes, they hit almost everything. They really are the game changer. But we need a lot more infrastructure. It might not be the best on long trips and in bad weather. Side note about normal bikses: The way I compare them, normal bikes are limited to physical exertion. Ebikes are limited to time, very similar to cars. Though at the long range cars are still more comfortable.

Walking. I'm just gonna wrap this one up as most people are not gonna walk that far every day. We should have walkable cities for short walks and health and neighborhoods, but walking to downtown ain't an option for the vast vast amount of the city, either physically or time wise.

This is where I love autonomous taxis. If you can do your daily commute on public transportation and then use autonommous taxis to fill in the gaps (which there will be), that can dramatically lower car ownership levels. Normal taxis are expensive when you have to pay for the driver. Uber is basically slave labor.

You said own cars, as in personal use. But I will add there is a ton more. You have business, commercial, and industrial. Getting large amounts of commercial and industrial goods around to stores quickly and efficiently adds a ton to societal efficiency.

So what does that transportation add? Maybe this was the crux of your question and I spent too much time on the others. It's basically a lubricant for society, business, and industry. Society depends in large part on transportation (yes I'm choosing that word intentionally). If you don't have easy transportation everything is like molasses on every level.

Jobs: You wouldn't be able to get workers because they wouldn't be able to commute. I remember a documentary that London (way back when) basically maxed out on population because transporation via horses and walking had maxed out. Then trains were invented and the city was able to grow.

Industry: Getting goods around is critical to grow industry. Trains are great for moving a large amount of cargo from A to B, think coal, fertilizer, etc. Trucks are much better for getting a small amount of cargo from A to B, C, D, etc and vice versa.

Commercial goods: Stores keep getting bigger for good reason, it's cheaper to ship and operate that way.

Each mode has its place. I agree we are too reliant on cars and haven't accounted for the externalities.

Hope that helps.

Just those two things alone: freedom to hit the road & moving things are more massive than you even realize.

I have a small car, a Civic. I routinely buy beers from all over. Vast majority cannot be sold & shipped. And I don't believe for a minute the laws would change for me to shop online as easily as other stuff. And, that also includes the freedom of the road trip.

Road trips. The ability to visit National Parks.

You included hauling cargo, which opens up a whole new can of worms. Moving would be impossible. As would stocking stores and businesses, as there would be no last mile options for freight. Unless we're including horse-drawn wagons.

The freedom to come and go as you please, assuming you can afford insurance and proper maintenance.

Business schedules would be a lot more flexible when people have to rely on infrequent routes between rural clusters. It would be kinda nice really.

Buildings and zoning would different, suburbs would just be where the people who own cars live. Places where most people live would have shops close by in walking distance instead of spread out with massive parking lots.

This question is in the realm of not having electricity. Can we live without it ? Yes, but very few people would and it makes life very hard.

It sucks that places are too reliant on cars and I agree we need to do more to help those who can't drive. But we still need cars to live modern life. Especially in semi rural areas.

First thing I'd do is tax the hell out of or outright ban massive trucks and Suvs. If you can't prove its used for work, 150% or more tax on it that goes to public transport, and your insurance costs 10x the amount of a small car, because you're a danger on the road. That right there would get us a shit ton of public transport revenue from all the douches in the US driving massive trucks they don't need that endanger us all.

I'm also involved in Motorsport which is very fun, but I'm all for less cars on the road if we could. Most people are awful at driving and really need high performance driving education to improve. Most people stare at their damn phones while driving. I love honking my horn at them when i see it, they freak out. I've followed dangerous drivers (ie, them going 80 mph in a school zone in their bro truck) so I can pull up near them and tell them to cut it the fuck out and that I've reported their plates to authorities. I don't really report them, but it hopefully scares em!

I hate cars. My wife loves them. Now I sometimes talk about my wifes medical issues and im generally talking about about her physical ones. Now I know you say most people but like it would not be impossible for her to ride public transit. Heck people in wheelchairs do it. But its a pain and additionally when she was healthier she could just not mentally handle it. If im with her she can but still does not like it. To use bike lanes they have to be completely protected and separated from the street (again she would also have to be back when she was in better health). She would walk but again with me. She needed that support. She did not need that support when driving. The car for her is safety and feedom. Its funny as its kinda opposite to me. A car means possibly being broken down at the side of the road with no way to get home whereas a transit pass makes me feel safe. When I drive I am engaging in an activity that is very disproportionally large in possibly injuring or killing someone compared to absolutely everything else I do. Now if society was filled with people like me the suburbs would disapear and we could hav a lot less cars, but for folks like my wife. So let me put it this way. I actually just got up and talked with her to really place her here. I honestly though she would choose having a car over indoor plumbing. But she draws the line at indoor plumbing. So she would exchange the internet, electricity, phones, tv, raido. She would rather live in a world with indoor plumbing and gas light/heat with a car. Than live with all our conveniences without a car. I will tell you to. She is waaaayyy moderated on this stuff having lived with me. So like I think if she was in great health and there was fantastic bike infrastructure and we could live in a safe dense urban area. I think she would go for it. But it would have to be so perfect relative to me as to be impossible for it to come to be.

This is one of those questions where you have to look to the past to really understand the possible future.

Rural America was built by railroads. You know why there's a town every 10-20 miles on a rough grid? It's because steam locomotives built during the 20th century would need to stop to refill on water every 10-20 miles. These old steam locomotives were slow usually only running up to 30-40mph. The train would need a spot to stop & refill with water so when the railroads didn't platte out towns to sell the land they just built through and increased the value of, towns would organically pop up near these stops anyways.

If we fast forward a little to the 1880s or so, electrification was going bonkers, and many electric companies would say "while we're building these power lines, what if we also ran electric trolley services too?" So the trolleys would advertise the versatility of this newfangled electricity thing while also providing a second revenue stream to electric companies. This is when electric interurban services really hit their peak. There were thousands of interurban lines across the US at this time, but many didn't survive out of the 20th century, and of those that did very few survived past the second world war, and of those, even fewer survived into being bought up by city transit agencies.

This pre-car period had most people either living in dense walkable cities or living on homesteads and walking/riding horses/carts multiple miles to go to the nearest town for the day. People didn't move around a lot during this time, and the world was much smaller and life much quieter. This is part of why circuses and fairs were so big is it was the most exciting thing happening all year.

The world has changed so much since the invention and proliferation of the automobile that it's really hard to imagine a car-lite world, but also there's aspects of modern society that simply can't exist without cars. I'm imagining a societal change pushed by something like legislation which doubles vehicle registration fees every year for a decade. Sure that $250 the first year will hurt a little, and the $500 the second will hurt a bit more, but you've got a good 3-5 years or so before it's really going to start hurting most families, and I'd imagine it would be the $4000 mark where most don't renew which is conveniently after 5 years of the registration fee doubling, and enough time for new bus services to be spun up and plenty of time for people to invest in bikes and manufacturing to adjust to the new demand patterns

The concept of road tripping becomes very different, and travel honestly gets more expensive. I was just looking at Amtrak tickets today chasing an idea of taking a couple day trip out of town during my kids spring break, and I'm immediately looking at $250 to go 200 miles, 5x the cost of just loading the family in the car and driving that distance

Without cars anyone living in rural areas is immediately stranded. Most of rural America has been rebuilt around cars because rural America was the first place cars were able to sell successfully (in fact car companies had to engage in conspiracies to force sales in cities once everyone who wanted a car had already bought one) there's many houses which are multiple miles from the nearest store of any kind, and many small towns lack any kind of grocery store. Many business and public schools in rural areas are located miles outside of any town and require people to drive or take the school bus just to get there. With about a century for rural America to rebuild into the car centric life that it is and most of the railroad tracks gone, it's pretty impossibls for rural America to de-car

Suburbs are similarly challenged to rural areas, but at least have the benefit of being close enough to their cities and hubs of commerce that biking and biking to/from public stops remains very viable. Exurbs where they aren't connected to the urban fabric but are entirely reliant on easy vehicle access to it are absolutely fucked though, and would probably spin up new Intercity bus services to compensate, but needing to transfer bus services to get to anything rapidly makes these already undesirable exurbs become far more undesirable

Small towns that never had the population growth to spawl are even better off. Many of these small towns are super walkable and bikable today with limited infrastructure changes that might be desired. Stroads built to serve big box stores or industries would be the only major challenge, but generally all that needs is a road diet and/or a dedicated parallel greenway

Shopping will definitely look different. For one thing single use plastic bags become completely nonviable since they carry so little per bag even compared to just paper bags, and it's difficult to carry more than about 3 plastic bags of groceries at once. We'd also definitely see a reversal from fewer larger stores which are further away back to many more smaller stores that are closer to people's homes. Parking lots will be quickly realized to be unneeded, likely to be torn up with new housing, stores and bus terminals built where those parking lots once stood.

The average road and street will also change dramatically. With people mostly walking, biking and taking public transit, suddenly the minimum acceptable street changes a lot, where right now it's relatively smooth pavement with relatively good drainage, in a world where people primarily walk, bike and take transit they will instead demand trees and narrower paved areas, bringing it down to human scale. A "narrow" 40 foot wide suburban street will rapidly become much too large and many will be rebuilt to be more pleasant for cyclists and pedestrians (I'm imagining 10-15 foot wide medians with trees, benches, water fointains and a nice greenway in the center, maintaining a pair of 10-12 foot wide lanes on either side for deliveries, emergency services and buses, or the inverse, with the road space narrowed significantly to 16-20 feet to allow for careful passing potentially with a parrelel greenway depending on traffic, again with trees, benches and water fountains)

As a Norwegian I've lived in several parts of the country but never owned a car. I rent a big car for moving, a small car for shopping trips to Sweden, and take the buss one stop short or extra to stop by a store on my way home from work, and walk the 100-ish meters with the groceries for the next couple of days. With frequent enough public transport, a schedule is never an issue. And where I live now, it isn't even that frequent in evenings and weekends, but buses and trains are aligned to make transit rather seamless. And it is better to be able to read a book while commuting rather than sitting behind the wheel.

Note that I've never lived too rural or northern, as that would require a car to make life work. Rural frequent public transport is sadly not economically viable.

Lots of weight and heart disease I bet.

On a related note, I rode my bike to work today and it was great.

While I'm here, I guess I should plug !micromobility@lemmy.world

Highly depend on where you live. In the US especially, we had a lot of post-wwii growth designed around cars so a lot of places make anything else a challenge.

Cars may represent freedom and self determination, but can seem awfully limiting in a city with good walkability and transit, even in the US. When I lived in Boston, it was so much more freeing to walk out my front door and have the entire city accessible. More than that, since Acela and the airport were also accessible.

I never gave up my car though, between things like shopping and visiting people outside the city. But now that we have options like delivery, ride share, e-bikes, and hourly car rentals, those would be much easier.

But now I live in a suburb, and even here I walk a lot more than typical Americans. The key is older towns built out before cars. I live in the first ring of single family houses less than a mile from the town center. We have a “Main Street” shopping and restaurant area, a common, and train station. There’s also a trail Along the River and a rail trail through town that are easily accessible. Over pandemic my family started a tradition where every weekend we walked down to our favorite Pakistani restaurant, grabbed takeout, and ate dinner on benches on the town common.

It would be ridiculously expensive for every rural and suburban area to have frequent reliable public transport.