The position of most people in this community is usually “Cars should cease to be the primary means of transportation for North Americans as soon as possible”. There are cases where cars and trucks are the only logical option, like rural communities, but in cities we should be aggressively against cars as a primary means of transportation. Nothing solves the the problems cars cause like replacing them with a train or bus or cycling
Even living in a European city with good bike and public transit options, I run into cases where a car is the only logical option.
Which is why I rent them a few times and year which basically comes down to sharing a handful of cars between a few hundred neighbours. Every single person having one or multiple cars is insanity, especially when you consider traffic conditions.
Part of the issue here is that if you own a car, it’s often cheaper to take the car than public transport, because most of the car expenses are paid independent of the immediate usage.
Car value deprecation, taxes, maintainance, all of that cost you money no matter whether you drive into town today or use some other means of transport.
I think it would be much better to put all taxes onto the fuel price. If you pay €5 for a litre of fuel, instead of the ~€1.5/l that we are currently paying, it would make more sense to take public transport some times.
I think this is the huge balancing point at which cars rely on. You saw a lot more small cars and less of these huge monster trucks roaming around North America back when gas had hit $5/gallon. Now gas is $3 but accounting for inflation, it’s probably at one of the cheapest points it’s ever been.
Even though I argue many times for cars in these posts, I long for a day when gas is $10/gallon so that these 3-5 ton behemoths aren’t on the road carrying a single person. I’m fine with this causing an artificial limitation on people to pick and choose when they use their personal transportation. Granted, we’ve also seen that this results in the economy slowing down overall as people choose to go fewer places and thus spend less money overall.
The position of most people in this community is usually “Cars should cease to be the primary means of transportation for North Americans as soon as possible”. There are cases where cars and trucks are the only logical option, like rural communities, but in cities we should be aggressively against cars as a primary means of transportation. Nothing solves the the problems cars cause like replacing them with a train or bus or cycling
Even living in a European city with good bike and public transit options, I run into cases where a car is the only logical option.
Which is why I rent them a few times and year which basically comes down to sharing a handful of cars between a few hundred neighbours. Every single person having one or multiple cars is insanity, especially when you consider traffic conditions.
Part of the issue here is that if you own a car, it’s often cheaper to take the car than public transport, because most of the car expenses are paid independent of the immediate usage.
Car value deprecation, taxes, maintainance, all of that cost you money no matter whether you drive into town today or use some other means of transport.
I think it would be much better to put all taxes onto the fuel price. If you pay €5 for a litre of fuel, instead of the ~€1.5/l that we are currently paying, it would make more sense to take public transport some times.
I think this is the huge balancing point at which cars rely on. You saw a lot more small cars and less of these huge monster trucks roaming around North America back when gas had hit $5/gallon. Now gas is $3 but accounting for inflation, it’s probably at one of the cheapest points it’s ever been.
Even though I argue many times for cars in these posts, I long for a day when gas is $10/gallon so that these 3-5 ton behemoths aren’t on the road carrying a single person. I’m fine with this causing an artificial limitation on people to pick and choose when they use their personal transportation. Granted, we’ve also seen that this results in the economy slowing down overall as people choose to go fewer places and thus spend less money overall.