Cars fulfill a very self-indulgent narrative. ‘I get to decide where and when I travel’, makes people feel “free” snd “important” even when millions of them are silently coming to the same decisions-- like going downtown at 09:00 on weekdsys-- that allow huge efficiency plays.
Notice how many ads feature fantasies of open roads and trips to faraway attractions, not the real world of “I need to sit in rush hour traffic from 6:30 on to get to the Work Factory”
Maybe public transit needs to focus its message on the freedom from drudgery it offers-- you don’t have to be staring at the driver in front of you, scanning the traffic reports
Exactly! This is why I love micromobility and quality public transit so much. With micromobility like electric scooters or bikes, I can zip past traffic in the protected cycle lanes in my city. With the frequent metro service in my city, I know I can show up to the metro station at basically any time and know it’ll be a max 5-minute wait for the next train. And when I’m on the train, I can just chill and scroll on my phone or read a book instead of stressing about traffic. The freedom to think about something that isn’t traffic.
I’d say it is more about
convinceconvenience. You decide when you leave and you leave from your door. You don’t risk being late to work because you missed the train by 1 minute (baring queues, but you get the point).This can also be achieved by high frequency transit.
Yeah, if the train comes every five minutes, that’s going to be way more consistent than traffic over time.
Really depends where you live. In my town I also decide when I leave, and I don’t risk being late because I missed the train by one minute. I’ll just take the next one. More risk of being late because of car traffic.
The problem when people compare cars to public transport is that they compare the current state of public transport in their area. We need to compare what would happen if we were spending as much billions as we do on cars.
If I’m doing a short trip locally in the city, I get that convenience out of my bike. There are times I would have taken a taxi somewhere, but when the app told me how long it would take for my driver to arrive, I just end up cycling there (often rolling past some long lanes of traffic in the process). That process can be even better if a city is built with safe biking paths.
Unfortunately that’s super weather dependent and seasonal. Plus, some of us would be a sweaty mess by the time we biked to where we needed to go.
Bikes don’t have to be seasonal. Some Nordic countries have well maintained and plowed biking networks and they see significant use throughout the winter.
Because many of us live in places where you must use a car, there are no alternatives
In such places electric public transport is nothing but a pipe dream
The worrying thing here is the assumption that we can choose…
The world has 2 billions individual cars. Lithium extraction rate may not be sufficient to make 2 billions cars by 2030… and that’s assuming we don’t need lithium for computers, smartphones, but also not for batteries for the grid (because no solar cell works at night and wind farms are not on demand erther), and… not for electric trucks! Then comes the question of the other metals: copper, nickel, cobalt, …
Trains will not work everywhere for everyone, but not deploying them now and fast will be a severe issue for North America when resources will get scarce.
We need a smart mix of trains, buses, subways, tramways, shared vehicles, bikes, everything but one individual car per person. That era will come to an end because we’re closer to the bottom of our planet’s natural resources stock than the beginning.
There’s not even a real option of keeping gas cars a little while more, as cheap oil is also coming to an end.
The difference between accepting this and “choosing” individual cars is how ready countries will be when resources will get scarce. It may get ugly…
Yeah, unfortunately what people aren’t getting is that continuing car dependency – electric cars or not – is fundamentally not an option. Sure we’ll probably have electric firetrucks and tractors, but having 1 ton of lithium batteries and 2 to 3 tons of steel per person – plus mind-boggling amounts of asphalt roads and parking lots – was never going to be a sustainable option, be it environmentally, economically, or socially.
We as a society keep shoving forwards as if switching to a better transit mix is a choice. It’s not. Car dependency can never last.
I dunno what country you are from, but here in the US of A, the monopolies that own all the train infrastructure make sure to keep trains as public transportation as cost prohibitive as possible.
Cars can pick me up 10 feet from my front door(my car). No train tracks within 5 miles of me. I would love if their were tracks closer.
Yeah, that’s what the post is about.
Batteries used gives you150 ebikes for every e-car
since wen this sub is full of carbrain? like bruh.
Yeah what is going on? Seems like every other comment is full on car-brain-cars-are-freedom insanity. No enough orange pilled people here. Is the opposite of the orange pill the sad grey pill?
I am amazed as well. Did they just sub every community with the word ‘car’ in it?
no idea but its just sad. even the reddit version is beter.
Making up slurs like “carbrain” for people who think differently than your echo chamber is fuckin’ lame as shit. You look gross from the outside, FYI. Found this post by sorting my “All” feed by Hot, not a member of your echo chamber.
Carbrain can be pretty succinctly defined as thinking this tiny little online community is the echo chamber, and not your entire car-default existence in your car-default country with your car-default parents neighbors teachers transit networks and policies
OK sure, you’re the majority. Let me know when you succeed in remodeling all the metropolitan areas of America with your great influence.
Until then, I’ll be happily driving around to wherever I please in my cars or on my motorcycle.
Yeah, I’m not sure you read that correctly, but you did switch from ‘oh no I’m being bullied’ to ‘haha nobody cares nerd’ so maybe you did figure it out. Anyway, nobody cares that you have a car, it wasn’t even your choice to get one.
haha nobody cares nerd
Because North Americans were tricked by the oil and car companies in the 50s to think that car ownership was part of being human, and now we’re addicted to sitting in traffic, breathing fumes, and killing pedestrians in the name of muh freedom.
Not only that, but it was American to own a car.
I love trains
Trains: live super densely, it’s great. Cars: chill bro
Removed by mod
Muskrat is one of the biggest ones to blame.
Because trains aren’t economically viable for the vast majority of the US, and where they are economically they are the topic of conversation.
As far as why the conversation would center around the US, that’s just the regular American-centric tilt english conversations generally lean towards. Most of Europe has their shit together in some topics like this (public transportation, for instance) and the US is a huge consumer of automobiles and no one if building mass transit between the middle of nowhere to the other middle of nowhere where we could ‘efficiently’ move individually insignificant numbers of people at a time.
Vast majority of the US in terms of people or dirt? Cause they’re viable for a vast majority of people.
Mostly dirt, but that dirt is also something that has to be travelled over to get between the people…and the scale of the US means there’s a lot more of it to span.
Inside a city electric trains make more sense, but unlike the EU there are very few places in the US between population centers that could economically support the infrastructure needed for high speed rail.
For example, Texas is roughly the size of France, but with only a third of the population, and hundreds of miles between population centers, none of which could expect to see the amount of travel needed to justify that much rail line.
Basically, take Europe and their economically viable rail line, get rid of 3/4 of the population and 3/4 of the cities so each stop is 3 to 4 times further away from each other and ask the people running the trains if they would still be profitable considering they’re still having to cover the same distances with a 1/4 of the income.
Too big in scale? Not so. Around 60% of car trips in the U.S. are under 6 miles. Nobody drives across the Great Plains to go to the grocery store. People live most of their lives in close proximity to home, and it’s irrelevant the size of the rest of the country. And that’s with our sprawling, car-dominated landscape. A human-oriented city could be considerably more compact, and each trip a lot shorter. In fact, a recent study in Wisconsin found that many of its small towns are still quite walkable. (Wausau looks and feels almost exactly nothing like Manhattan, so we can dispense with the usual density canard.)
Furthermore, around 95% of car trips are 30 miles or less. Electric trains don’t have to be a viable option to reconnect old, isolated railroad towns, like e.g. Laramie. By far the greatest need for them is exactly where they excel, the medium distance trips around population centers. That’s where the vast majority of travel actually happens.
By the way, why the demand that trains be profitable? Wouldn’t it be enough that subsidizing them be economically viable? I mean, that’s better than highways, which we always knew were not profitable, and which we’re slowly learning aren’t economically viable, either.
Well if you’re arguing that walking replace cars, your 5 mile radius thing doesn’t work any better than trains. And economically viable is still relevant even if you are talking taxes and subsidies. I’m 100% in favor of trains and public transport, but that 5 and 30 mile radius is only meaningful when people are grouped in close proximity…if I only share my 30 miles with 10,000 other people, and that 30 miles is even vaguely diffuse, you cant draw up a map where a train schedule works without making have of the 10,000 people employees of the train station.
Move half of the rural population into more rural areas and you get closer to that ideal, but how do you ‘move’ people in a free country? We have a shitload of land, and a significant number of people living spread out in a way that mass transit just doesn’t make sense because not enough of them are going in the same direction at the same time to make it make sense. Even at the subsidy point, you can’t raise taxes to pay for something that doesn’t raise enough taxes to pay for itself. Just throw a dart at a map in the US and come up with a way to make a passenger train make any kind of sense within a thirty mile radius of the dart. Then, after throwing the dart a thousand times and realizing most of your hits don’t contain even 1000 people, eliminate all those areas and start throwing the dart again. Then, after a thousand hits and realizing that even then you aren’t hitting places where more than 10 people are all traveling in the same direction from the same place more than once or twice a day, maybe you’ll realize the futility of trains solving problems in most of the US.
That being said, the places where it does make sense, I’m 100% in support of exploring all kinds of ways to reduce usage of individual cars, electric or otherwise.
Right, Texas is great example. You don’t need to cover all of Texas when most of the state is empty land, yet most of population lives within four metro areas all relatively close to each other. We already have shitty rail on the east coast connecting cities hundreds of miles and it’s wildly successful despite it being slow af.
‘Most’ of the population in the US, or Texas, or wherever…. still leaves a significant number of people and cars. I’m all for trains, and making better trains will certainly be a good direction of encouraging train use, but just making an existing alternative a little better isn’t going to solve the car situation. ‘Most’ of the US car problem isn’t located within an area that can be well served by trains. Places that can be well served by trains, in general, are already served by trains. You can make some dents in the issue, and maybe some significant ones, by leaning into that solution really hard, but it will still be a dent rather than a solution.
Mostly dirt, but that dirt is also something that has to be travelled over to get between the people…and the scale of the US means there’s a lot more of it to span.
Inside a city electric trains make more sense, but unlike the EU there are very few places in the US between population centers that could economically support the infrastructure needed for high speed rail.
For example, Texas is roughly the size of France, but with only a third of the population, and hundreds of miles between population centers, none of which could expect to see the amount of travel needed to justify that much rail line.
Basically, take Europe and their economically viable rail line, get rid of 3/4 of the population and 3/4 of the cities so each stop is 3 to 4 times further away from each other and ask the people running the trains if they would still be profitable considering they’re still having to cover the same distances with a 1/4 of the income.
Simple - Tracks vs Road ratio.
I love good public transport. It’s great to not have to worry about parking or having to drive. Good cities, like many in Europe and New York in the US, a car isn’t really required.
But out in the countryside, a car is a must. Electric cars are massively better for the environment and way cheaper to run (like tenth the cost with a night rate).
Also, no offense here but saying NYC or European cities are good is a perspective I would not agree with. I do not want to live in a high rise apartment and there are a lot of people who do not want that.
European and NYC people are used to it, but that doesn’t make it good.
Having that many people in one place is actually not good. Some of them never experience being in nature. Living conditions aren’t great. It’s cramped and expensive.
All of this so they can say that using public transportation is good? That’s ridiculous.
Edit: Downvote me all you want. This is the truth. Cities are not good.
Depends on the city. Sure, some are high rise, which isn’t for some, but they aren’t all like that. London for example is relatively flat but has an excellent public transport system. Same with Paris and Brussels. Essen seamer good while I was there. Utrecht was great. Amsterdam too (but it’s just grim due to all the drug tourists). Most European cities are walkable and have at least a basic level of usable public transport.
NY was the only American city I’ve been to which had a decent transport system I used. Seattle I saw trams but was on business with Texan sales people, trams with out the question. Austin buses felt very much like what only poor people used and walking the 2 miles from the apartment to the office, involved some fence holes and minor trespassing to be even possible. Mostly nice river walk though.
All cities should have decent public transport and be walkable. Car based urban sprawl has got to go. Older, pre-car, cities are often the nicest.
Edit : Wuppertal, that was my German favourite. It’s like an alternative timeline city. Love its "floating tram.
hardly any european cities primarily use high rises for housing
The majority that I have been in have multistory apartments. Worse is they are incredibly small. I would never want to live my life in them.
“Multistory” isn’t the same thing as “high-rise.” A five-floor Boston walk-up like I lived in for a month back in 2013 is a “mid-rise” at most, and plenty of density can be achieved with two- or three-story townhouses or even relatively small stand-alone houses on relatively small lots.
And okay, cool. No one’s gonna make you, no matter how much you fantasize about someone trying. Literally all we argue for here in terms of housing is not having SFH be the only real option like it is in most of the US, so I’d politely request that you stop telling us wrongly what our position is.
In cities, yeah. Outside cities, impossible
But I’d love to rent autonomous electric cars to move
What they did before cars were ubiquitous was “whistle stops” the train would whistle outside of town to indicate it was coming, and would stop for anybody at the platform otherwise it would continue on without stopping, much like how most buses operate today.
Smaller interurban lines also operated “flag stops” where it would stop when flagged down by a passenger otherwise it would keep going
With EMUs (electric multiple units) and modern signalling service could be brought to small towns fairly cheaply. Most small towns in the US are about 20 miles apart, so hourly service at ~50MPH could easily be provided with a single track mainline and passing sidings only at stations by having one train in each direction every 30 minutes.
The problem is so much money is invested in road infrastructure that investing a similar amount into an equally extensive rail network is simply unfathomable
I get this. I live in Italy and we have a very complicated web of roads here with many small villages very close to each other. I’d love this though and also I’d like not to own a car. We are much less car focused here compared to America so might be easier or more complicated, not sure
![[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/11c37658-7c32-4cc2-b12c-6ced348bd09d.png){kind=link}