this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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EVs, Hydrogen Cells, Vegetable Oil, all these alternatives are here to save one thing; The Car Industry. Sounds like the problem might be mode of transport rather than fuel.
Oh, come on, I live in Copenhagen and cycle daily, but even there, cars are not going anywhere. Smelly-smokey cars, yes, but not cars in general.
Cars aren't being eliminated completely, but we can significantly reduce their usage if we look to your home city as an example. In Copenhagen, only 44% of commutes are made by car. In the Bay Area, probably the least car-centric area of California, 85% of commutes are by car (I removed the 33% WFH, so 58/67=85%).
Yes, it does work, and it feels nice there. Though a large part of it is not about improving other ways of transportation, but about creating problems for car-owners.
So, "greater good" and all, but the situation is far from perfect even here, and people have a long way ahead, to create infrastructures where people also feel good, but not because someone is "getting punished for bad behaviour"
I dunno, man. I think it's about time Copenhagen takes a good look at how The Netherlands has been doing things the past decade. Cycling infrastructure can do with a serious upgrade around here, and The Netherlands has proven that, yes, you totally can reduce the number of cars on the street.
As a Dutch resident, I seriously disagree here. We are just coming out of a 15 year long neoliberal period that has caused the following:
All these things are having the effect of pushing people IN cars, because the alternative is getting more expensive for reduced service. Heck, road congestion is significantly up from pre-pandemic levels and that's with the neoliberals investing billions upon billions in new asphalt.
Not Just Bikes is in a bubble, and it's seriously irritating to have foreigners believe we're this utopia.
I'm Dutch/Danish. Not so much a foreigner as you think. And the prices for public transport are increasing over here as well. Has to do with market inflation... Or so I've been told by my roommate who works for DSB's IT department.
The alternatives are bicycles, not cars. If people are choosing cars instead, despite living in a flat country with bike lanes everywhere, then the problem isn't the infrastructure.
It's not the time to brag that The Netherlands have a better cycling infrastructure (that is actually debatable), the comment was about cars "going away completely".
Yes, I don't have a personal car, but recently I needed to haul a dining table and 6 chairs into my apartment. It took a Berlingo and two hours, and it would be a complete circus number even with a cargobike.
What is the argument here? Cars are here to stay forever and ever? Most daily commuters could get used to a train. It is possible for most people to live without a car, your city was just designed in a way that requires you to.
It's definitely not "most". You have to live and work near a train station for that to be viable option. It's not about "getting used to" trains, it's just for most commutes a train simply takes too long - because they don't go directly to your destination.
In Denmark, which has one of the best transit networks in the world, only 13% of commuting is by public transport. 20% is by bicycle. Cars are 60%.
That's the point, we can't exactly just resign a city from the ground up to work with public transit especially when it's not being pushed for by the majority
Yes but what is the alternative? Can civilians all have their own car when 10 million live in a city? What about 30 million? 100? It stops making sense the more people you have. And on top of that suppliers and transportation services use the same road, too. It is already like flying through the death star out here with half the road being eaten by transportation companies.
The higher the density of the city, the better public transit works. You can live in Tokyo or London and get by without a car, but everyone in the world can't (or won't) live in Tokyo-dense cities. It doesn't make any financial sense building a subway in a city of only 100,000.
Well with the way the birthrates are going, I think population is going to stabilize.
Then you're not looking.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/birth-rate
It is still going up just much more slowly. To say we shouldn't worry about efficiency cause there will never be that many people disregards the benefits of unloading all of these personal costs to individuals. Vehicles are expensive on top of everything.
You know that link proves my point? It shows a steady decline in population so we're actually going to have LESS people.
It shows it slowing. Line still go up.
So what's more practical, slowly replacing all ICE cars or completely redesigning entire cities, bulldozing large metro blocks to reconfigure and rebuild?
A little column A, a little column B. Mostly, we can have gentle changes to our cities, like removing Single-Family Home and other exclusionary zoning, removing mandatory parking minimums, as well other initiatives to encourage higher density, mixed-use buildings, and active transportation usage.
As I just commented. How many individuals can drive cars before congestion makes it impossible? 10 million people? 20? 30? The I-10 and 101 stack interchange is already a fucken mess that can't be expanded. How do you handle exponentially more drivers on the road each year?
Edit: you don't even have to answer cause we already know from California, you don't. The rich people just pay pilots to fly them and the plebs get stuck in 2+ hour traffic to go 20 miles.
It's impossible to answer that - there are just too many other variables, such as how far are people travelling each day on average, how many of them are going to the same destination, how many roads are there (not how many lanes, how many roads), etc etc.
A lot of the problem can be mitigated with zoning rules to encourage people not to travel to the inner city. Whatever reason they might have to go to the CBD should also be available elsewhere in the city if at all possible.
The fact is trains also have traffic issues and that tends to get a lot worse as you increase the number of train lines in your city. The efficiency of train travel is in part because not many people use that mode of transport. Cities that have 10% of travel by train now probably can't expand that to 80%.
Diversity is the only option. Give people access to every mode of transit, and let them pick the best one. I'm not from California so I don't know the local issues, but looking at a map I-10 has six train lines that run basically parallel to it. Trains are clearly available so why are people choosing to drive? I'm sure they have a reason. Rather than trying to add more train lines, how about figure out why people are driving that route and tackle it from that perspective? What are they heading into LA for? Can it be done somewhere else?
I was talking more about where I live. In Arizona your options are car or a slow bus. The light rail only goes to the east side and inner city. You pretty much are forced to own a car and feed into that entire complex. Its bullshit and the congestion is getting exponentially worse each year. I've been voting in local elections for my lifetime and nobody cares. Guessing by this comment section everyone is content being forced to participate in the car market. So go ahead, be forced to buy insurance, tires, gas, and vehicle maintenance. Be forced to drive on crowded roads during early morning hours with thousands of others. Everyone loves it I guess. Instead of, maybe voting for public transit that is so reliable you can count on a tram or train every 30 minutes so we don't have to spend multiple thousands of dollars on a vehicle to get to work and back.
As much as I'd like to use public transport, even with LA traffic on a Thursday (for those who don't know, Thursdays are always the worst in LA), even when the 405 is a parking lot, taking the metro / bus is still at least 2x slower than driving. Yes I tried, it's that ridiculous. There are a lot of ongoing projects to build and extend metro lines, new bike lanes, etc. but progress is very slow. As others have said, the whole metropolitan area was designed with cars, and only cars in mind.
I do keep hoping one of these will succeed though: we have many different things that move and need multiple solutions to kick our fossil fuel habit.
Walkable cities with train systems are ideal but will take decades to build out, plus at least in the US, we have predictions of people moving away from cities
Battery seems to have won best technology for personal transportation, whether scooters, bikes cars. However will take a couple decades, or more in the face of conservative resistance to change
But what about all those trucks, aircraft, construction and farming equipment, shipping, military vehicles? That’s a lot of fossil fuel usage and a lot of experiments but no solution in sight
clearly never lived in a rural setting
I'm clearly talking about cities. Where most people live.
Where most people think their food supply line is invincible.
Rural communites still use their space inefficiently. You dont need a mile between houses. Natural resource generation takes no personal freedoms into account, nor does it take human comfort. We have one pie to share until the sun explodes. Best figure out how to share it.
You ever think that maybe farm/grazing fields are the reason rural homes are spaced so far apart?
Regardless, cars definitely contribute to climate change, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to industrial pollution. It makes me wonder why there isn't the same level of hyper fixation on replacing those technologies with carbon neutral solutions as replacing personal vehicles. Let's just keep those enormous cargo ships burning bunker fuel 24/7. Hell, even large scale meat farms are quite dangerous, as methane is even worse than CO2. You'd think there'd be more of a focus on regulating and slowing down large scale meat production.
If you can't get people to drop cars, you aren't going to get them to drop meat for meat alternatives. Its just the piece of our culture that has been deemed easier to change since there are alrsady successful examples of it across the world. Meanwhile, what country has no meat industry and provides a first world standard of living? It may exist, I dont think so though.
Yes, I do think they are further apart due to farms and grazing. My family has a farm in Alabama that has been slowly shrinking because of costs. Does every house out there have its own farm? No! Some of the land plots for newer builds were sold off from my family's farm, meaning it now envelopes the newer property. Are they still spaced far enough apart that you can't even tell someone else lives on the property? Of course they are!
Either way, we'll have these conversations until you and I are rubbing elbows on the $5 per half mile ride share to the corpse starch manufactorum.
Ah yes, so all the houses people rarely visit are located close together and the farms they have to visit multiple times a day are even further away?
Deranged thinking by someone who has never considered that their food is grown in a field rather than some factory
If you design it in an asinine way, sure. All of these houses do not have personal farms. Most of them are either carved from the farm property, or already live off of it. Like my family's farm in Alabama. They cut pieces of the land directly off of the road and sold it to the workers so they can live near the farm. They rode mountain bikes to work and used their cars to go into town or groceries. Everyone acting like there is no alternative in this thread, or we already do things the best way, is in denial.
"You don't need a mile between houses."
Never lived next door to a pig farm, did you
I didn't realize every house in rural country had its own pig farm.