You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.
The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.
Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).
In the car centric places, a few generations later they become an indelible aspect of nature. It is impossible for most people to imagine society working otherwise. And even when they do, the collective action problems are near insurmountable. The introduction of technology has irreversibly trapped us in a way of thinking we can't escape.
This is exactly the premise of the Amish religion. You must strictly control technology to create the society you want, not the other way around.
Something I recently learned about roads from Stewart Brand's new book "Maintenance" is that the first groups pushing for paved roads were cyclists:
The Good Roads Movement of the late 19th century began as a grass-roots
crusade to improve roads for bicyclists. By the 20th century, it had turned
into a national effort embraced by the automobile industry, railroad tycoons
and presidents.
The advocates of the automobile have been far, far more successful at shaping US society, laws, culture and our physical environment.
I imagine that’s also true in many other nations to a lesser extent.
“Anti-personal mobility advocates” do not exist. Transit advocates exist, and improvements in transit also massively benefit those who need to or prefer to drive.
Motorists hate anything that isn't a car and is in their way. Motorists hate Critical Mass; they hate light rail or streetcars that hog their rights-of-way; they hate pedestrians (especially when pedestrians aren't wearing the right clothes); they hate Lyft, Uber, and Waymo especially; they hate big trucks and they hate Amish people with horse-drawn buggies.
Motorists will establish coalitions to vote against public transit measures in their home towns. They have come out in City Council and other public meetings, to protest and rail, so to speak, to rail against the expansion of light rail into their neighborhoods, because not only do they hate the construction, but they hate the "type of people" that light rail brings, and ultimately they hate the gentrification that comes from a fixed-route project that will ultimately close their shitty exploitive businesses and replace them with more elevated exploitation and richer moguls.
My assertions have nothing to do with “online circles” except here where I am breaking the bad news to y’all.
I don't deny the general idea that motorists in the US tend to have a crab mentality on the road where they want and expect everyone in the road to only be other drivers. I've also been sneered at in various ways in every non car form of transit I've been in.
- People riding them on sidewalks to putting pedestrians in danger
- "Parking" them right in front of someone's gate, blocking the entrance to their house
- Obviously drunk partiers using them in lieu of getting a ride or taking the bus
- Groups of them sitting around half knocked over completely blocking a sidewalk or other pathway meant for cyclists, runners, walkers, and other pedestrians
Fair or not, you're like the kid using a razor scooter at the skate park. Nobody likes you but it doesn't mean they hate everyone at the skate park. They just hate scooter kids.
at least in England, if you use an e-scooter while under the influence of alcohol, that equates to a motoring offence whereby incurring (car) driving licence penalties, driving licence disquaifications (bans), fines, and imprisonment all apply, depending on circumstances and severity. I'm not sure if/why it would be different anywhere else
And any bike lane infrastructure would benefit e-scooters anyway, so riding them in the road at 30mph below the flow of traffic is a sad hill to die on.
This is true for any kind of transformative technology. Marketing and lobbying can only get you so far. If something has enough utility, it will be used regardless of what people say they want.
I think this is somewhat of a chicken and egg problem. Cars' utility is undeniable partially because society has twisted itself thoroughly around The Car being an assumed part of it. This societal change was both pulled (by car customers) and pushed (by car manufacturers).
The idea that cars needed all this infrastructure that other alternatives didn't just doesn't match the reality of the history of the automobile. And yes, we've leaned on those advantages in the century since, which has also created vast areas where a car is necessary to participate in society, but we only did so because the advantages and utility were so undeniable.
- We would have gotten most of the social utility of automobiles, without most of the social negatives, if personal vehicles had mostly never happened.
And implied from that, we should stop having them now.
Given the known ills of society, I think those negatives are pretty uncontroversial. To the point that personal car proponents have some burden to explain why we should keep it up.
Anyone who still even has a personal opinion at all pertaining to what the world should look like distinct from swallowing whatever 'the market' has decided to impose on them is worth listening to.
That's the most interesting thing about the situation of technology today. Most technology is banal, what's notable is that apparently now a culture needs to be in possession of 'objective truth' (no such thing exists) to defend what is, by definition, a subjective way of life.
It's not like you're living away from any people - you have 100 other neighbours living on your street!
Cars came in parallel with a lot of change.
The psychological effects of this are enormous and under discussed.
There’s no free lunch. Doesn’t matter where you are, more people = more crowds.
On the other hand, the benefits I get from that public transport are incredible - it's cheap, it's always there, it requires minimal logistics in groups (no trying to figure out who goes in what car and needs to be dropped off where at what time), it works regardless of my level of inebriation (admittedly I've not pushed that one to any sort of extreme yet), it's safe enough for children to travel independently (no dropping them off and picking them up), and it's largely accessible for people with difficulties walking or moving about.
I think a big part of the issue is that people have tried out poor public transport infrastructure and recognised - often correctly - that their car is way better for them. But good public infrastructure can often be far more convenient than cars, it just requires people to be motivated enough to build and finance it. A neighbour of mine didn't notice his car had been towed for a week because he used public transport so much and so rarely touched his car. When he'd parked his car it was fine, but then they needed to block of the street to do some work somewhere, and he didn't notice they'd confiscated all the cars there. That's the sort of effect that good public transport can have - so comfortable that you can forget you even have a car.
In order for someone else to have those benefits, they also need a car.
If as a society, if we could feel the same way about public transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, that you do about your own personal vehicle - we'd be better off.
It’s not like they’re the doctors guild that purposefully restricts the number of new doctors per year.
Yes, obviously there are many negative externalities to a car-driven culture, but just like we can easily become blind to the diffuse societal costs of a piece of technology, I think a culture of nay-saying makes it very easy to be blind to the diffuse value of a piece of technology too.
Loud stinky cities full of pollution and climate change are obviously horrible.
But we easily take for granted how amazing it is to be able to drive to a mountain and go for a hike, or call an ambulance, or go to a restaurant when it's raining out, or safely travel in a city without risking being assaulted, etc.
Internal combustion engines are amazing and horrible.
Many of the scenarios you mentoned aren't even that big of a deal for many. I have walked in the rain many times and somehow I was still ok. You could argue that car culture has made us soft in some ways.
Nevertheless, if we reduced our emphasis on cars in society and the design of our cities to the point where cars were mainly used for those specific cases where cars truly are by far the best options (like ambulances) we would have more livable and walkable cities and ironically cities where it is nicer for those who really really want/need to drive since everyone and their mom wouldn't be driving because they aren't forced to drive to everything. Fewer people clogging the roads like my co-worker who would watch Netflix while she drove to work. Obviously she didn't have a passion for driving but was forced to because she lived in a sprawling metro with terrible transit options.
Yes, you could say that, though I'm not sure who would actually say that seriously.
Say what you will about the ills of the car, but it takes a lot of specific context for them to emerge as the worst option of transport from an individual perspective. Really most of the cars ills are from their collective harms, something most can't appreciate as a tragedy of the commons sort of failing.
If I believed there is a crisis of isolation in the United States and degradation of community, I would first focus on more recent technologies, say ones introduced around 2007, than on technologies introduced in the early 1900s.
In my grandfather's day, one income was enough to support a household, and there was less free work being done on the job, which meant fewer hours and being less drained at the end of the day. And yes, people spent less time commuting, meaning they had more time and energy for socializing after work. But communities were also more decentralized, and population centers had fewer people in general. A big part of the problem is that modern cities can be massive, and invariably funnel people to a handful of work districts, which just doesn't scale. When you double the distance to the CBD, you quadruple the number of people coming in (give or take, it's not exact because we tend to increase density close to the CBD as a response to this). Take it from someone who's lived in a place where cars aren't really necessary, the logistics of urbanization are still a crap experience when you're crammed into a train carriage during rush hour. It's common for people to commute for 90 minutes on public transport in Asian megacities, for example.
I'm also not sure that anyone was claiming automobile technology itself was bad, just that in many places at many times it has been used in suboptimal and harmful ways.
> The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.
other than as a claim we should not have personal automobiles.
You might be only talking about personal cars, but you've got to remember that trucks share the same infrastructure cars use. Modern city wealth wouldn't be possible without engined vehicles driving on roads (maybe if you went really crazy with rail that could be exception). You take away personal cars and either the infrastructure stays or your city wouldn't be possible anymore either.
But even beyond that - personal cars provide a level of freedom and capability to the general population that no other technology can match. Trains suck, buses suck, passenger ships suck, planes are uncomfortable (but otherwise pretty good). Bikes don't work with long distances, multiple people, the infirm, winter (riding in the winter is a great way to get injured, two-wheeled vehicles don't do well with ice), bad weather, if you need to be presentable when you arrive. Oh, and bikes get stolen. Constantly.
You can implement all kinds of transport badly. Trains can suck if they don't take you where you want to go, bicycles suck if wherever you live doesn't provide acceptable parking methods.
Cars are great in a vacuum, but once a city decides it's going all in on cars and bulldozes the place, they provide problems for anyone else. Buses will suck because they're stuck in traffic and walking will suck when you're getting around on the side of 3 lane highways or vast surface parking lots. Most importantly, driving will suck, because everyone has to drive everywhere, and that creates more traffic for the rest of us. You get in a doom loop where you build more lanes, which drives more vehicle traffic. If you make the alternatives more viable, people take up those alternatives and vehicle traffic eases.
Parking is one of the biggest upsides of bikes IMO.
Bikes are great, I ride mine whenever I can. But most places lack secure bike parking and the police don't take bike theft seriously. So sometimes I drive my car even to places where I could easily ride a bike just because I'm confident the car will still be there when I get out.
Replacing the bike is actually a lot easier than getting the windows fixed IME.
If I can't find a good spot to actually lock up the bike though I will just bring it in to wherever I'm going. Shops or restaurants don't seem to care if a bike is parked in the corner and you can thread your ulock through the wheels and make it useless to ride off with.
This doesn't scale to wider bike adoption, though.
I think that's true at the moment, but only because there's so little demand for it. You can always find a sign post or something because no one else is snatching them up.
At the end of the day bikes are still private vehicles and, though they're smaller than cars, they aren't that small and the infrastructure to secure them (which is integrated into cars) isn't small either. So you get the same problem writ small.
Heck—if you have a car & your building doesn't have parking, you're basically screwed. If you have a bike & it doesn't have a bike rack, you can just carry it up & put it on your balcony. At that point, I don't think you can really compare the two.
Buses are only workable because of cars. We build roads for cars first and trucks second. Buses are at most 3rd in the list and getting to use them is an incidental side benefit.
No one builds enough roads for buses. They have to use the roads built for cars.
We have so thoroughly remade society in the service of cars that it can be difficult to recognize any possible alternative.
Even the cited system seems to be limited and exists to connect with trains as well as buses that use normal streets. Wikipedia says that they chose buses for this expansion instead of trains specifically because there was already a strong bus system, which uses the same city streets as cars and trucks.
However, you're making my point for me. If you fail to invest in good public transport it will suck. That is downstream from designing your society around cars instead of transportation for everyone. Bikes do not work for extremely long distances (although school children here will happily pedal 10km to school and back on the daily), but those long distances are a requirement precisely because infrastructure is designed around cars. Even so you can take bicycles on trains and use them for last mile transport at your destination, or store a bicycle at your destination train station (most have lockers or guarded storage) if it's a commute.
Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either, and lethality is orders of magnitude higher. Generally though people here ride bike paths that are shovelled and brined just as the roadways are.
Bikes have their own infrastructure that they do not share with trucks. It is for human beings only.
Here's some reasons to hate cars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umgi-CbaSRU
This is a big claim with no justification.
Cars have dynamic traction control, internal temperature control, etc. You may get frost bite on your bicycle, but almost certainly not in your car. Having four wide wheels makes the vehicle radically more stable.
Add seat belts, air bags, etc. cars have far more safety features than a bike can.
Of course, cars go faster and going faster increases lethality at the limit. No argument there, far more people die in cars in general. But specifically concerning weather, cars allow people to do many things that a bicycle cannot.
Not to mention general comfort. Being in a bike in a snow storm is very unpleasant!
Maybe a severe enough snow storm? Even then we’re in Goldilocks territory for the storm to be unsafe for bikes but safe(ish) for cars.
The biggest factor is that people simply will not get on their bikes in severe enough weather. At least not in most places. Maybe in the Netherlands they’ll bike in a blizzard.
Any weather where the wind is >15mph will be safer in a car. Hail. 100 F days. Thunderstorms. I love walking and public transportation but holy hell the thought of biking in some of our Texas weather is horrifying.
Not to mention that my 6yo and 9yo are much safer in my car than cycling through inclement weather! Not everyone is a single individual with no children! Holy hell, the trip from a kid's bday party to my house two weekends ago would've been deadly for my kids, but in a car, the weather wasn't an issue.
Hail comes to mind. Lightning possibly (I believe cars are much better insulated against lighting strikes). High winds could easily push bikes around / knock them over where cars just keep going.
We drove our van through a forest fire (Cedar Creek Fire - a BIG one) and got a bit of smoke, but otherwise, just fine. No way would I have attempted that on a bike - the increased aerobic activity alone (to say nothing of embers / ashes / etc) would have probably caused crazy amounts of smoke inhalation / death.
And there is a reason drivers hate SOME bikers - here in CA, many simply refuse to follow the rules of the road. My light turns green, and 5 seconds later, some biker comes rolling along in the perpendicular direction - I almost hit him. This kind of stuff happens over and over. I am very fond of bikers when they follow the rules - I bike sometimes too.
Riding a bicycle while wearing an unpowered respirator/face mask is surprisingly easy, especially if it has an exhalation value. It does restrict breathing somewhat, but breathing isn't usually the bottleneck when you're cycling. This might even be the optimal way to escape a fire if the roads are congested.
What does this mean? This feels a bit like a distinction without a difference, as the infrastructure built is shared by both.
> although school children here will happily pedal 10km to school and back on the daily
How flat is it there? I can’t imagine a typical kid biking 10km each way around me. I feel like the average kid at my kids’ school would take 45 minutes or more to bike that distance.
I guess I wasn't clear in implying my doubts as to whether that's a hard requirement. Trucks are much larger and heavier which takes its toll on the road surface itself. They don't need access to suburban environments. Even in the inner city here trucks are banned outside of loading and unloading hours to foster a walk-able environment. So yes, in part they do, but it's not that black and white.
>How flat is it there? I can’t imagine a typical kid biking 10km each way around me. I feel like the average kid at my kids’ school would take 45 minutes or more to bike that distance.
Famously pretty flat, but with e-bikes gaining ground, elevation changes don't make much of a difference anymore. And yeah a 45 minute commute by bike is not unusual, but remember, we have the safe infrastructure for it. Kids bike in from villages surrounding towns and cites.
How are suburban environments stocked then? Surely village grocery stores are not stocked with milk one bike load at a time.
> Even in the inner city here trucks are banned outside of loading and unloading hours to foster a walk-able environment.
Sure. But they use the same infrastructure. The fact that the vehicles are built for different purposes and may have different regulations doesn’t mean the cost of infrastructure isn’t shared. Pervasiveness of roads makes it easy for cars, trucks, ambulances, buses, and even bikes to get around more easily.
Just like the pervasiveness of the Internet make it easy to scroll TikTok, purchase goods from Amazon, and read books through Project Gutenberg, even though those are very different use cases.
Extreme hot weather and pollution are both a much bigger health risk for bikes than cars.
To blithely state that nobody could make such a claim seriously is an attitude which actually has a really fitting term: carbrained.
"I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that stone applied to fibrous asphalt is not a fine roofing material"
"I do not know anyone who seriously thinks that 4000kcal/day is healthy in normal circumstances"
"I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that women are incapable of working outside the home"
"I do not know anyone who seriously thinks a bright red suit is appropriate for a funeral"
And on and on and on.
But we both already knew that. So if you're gonna be obtuse and not understand it I'm gonna be obtuse and explain it.
> living in dense inner-city areas did not carry the highest depression risks. Rather, after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, the highest risk was among sprawling suburbs
another interesting tack: how long did we have cars before we started talking about a widespread mental health crisis? is there a more parimonious explanation, like a different event that is located closer to it in time? perhaps smartphones or the internet?
Another thing about "this mental health crisis" is that it has been ongoing for many decades before we noticed it and before it was brought to the forefront. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was out and then President Reagan approved the mass closure of asylums. What happened was that massive numbers of citizens had been condemned and committed by their relatives and "put away" in homes, facilities, and institutions, and then Reagan shut 'em all down.
Today, the mentally ill live among us. Either their families care for them, or they live in jails/prisons because they became criminals and were convicted, or they live independently/on the streets. The mentally ill live now in "virtual institutions" where their chains and restraints consist of drugs. The drugs are what keep them connected to their home clinics and their psychiatrists. The drugs keep them coming back for more, month after month, to their pharmacies and clinics. The drugs they are convinced they cannot live without, making them compliant and unsure of what is really going on in their lives.
The non-criminal mentally ill are mostly encouraged to integrate and socialize, to seek employment and try to simulate functional human beings in society. So they live among us and they are causing more noticeable issues when they interact with people possessed of more sanity. The mentally ill are probably less likely to drive or own a vehicle, and more likely to rely on public transit, so you know where to find them.
But the mentally ill who live independently, and live with these "virtual restraints" are likewise living in fragmented neighborhoods that are not walkable and require a lot of effort to overcome the sheer distances that separate them from services and their employers. They're living among immigrants, foreigners, heathens and infidels, and on every corner is a moral trap such as easy alcohol, easy sex, easy gluttony, easy gambling that can ensnare even the sanest city dweller. These traps are, of course, legitimate businesses that cannot be shut down by a mere vice-squad raid.
So "this mental health crisis" in 2026 can perhaps be partly traced to the advent of personal motor vehicles, but I feel there are several causes that have brought it to the forefront.
EDIT: missed your other reply a few mins earlier alluding to smartphones already
The idea is that teen mental health got dramatically worse in the early 2010s at the same time as social media began to become ubiquitous, but this is likely a coincidence. The underlying metrics we're tracking here are self-harm hospitalizations, and concerns about teen self-harm were already growing in the early 2000s. This leads to a bunch of new guidance getting published which increases teen mental health screening, tracks mental health status as a cause of injuries, and forces insurance companies to cover associated costs.
It's one of those situations where our stats about a problem increased as we became better at tracking it. Teen suicidality is actually WAY down over the past ~30 years.
Qualitative data is, of course, much harder to work with than hospitalization numbers, but the data we do have suggests a weak correlation, if any, between phone use and poor mental health— see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/, which suggests phones can explain at most 0.4% of variance in well-being among teens. [1]
It feels like common sense that social media is bad for you, and sure, there's plenty of work to be done in understanding how and why social media can cause harm. But the idea that there's some big crisis just doesn't pan out.
Info drawn from https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-anxious-generation...
[1]: In fairness, Haidt published a response to this article featuring a new, bespoke set of controls for the data. His analysis suggests that the impact of social media use on mental health is nearly twice as large as that of being sexually assaulted and four times larger than hard drug use (which itself has a slightly larger effect size than wearing glasses). Personally, I don't find these conclusions plausible at all. Maybe Haidt's been p-hacking, or maybe the data set is worthless. I couldn't say. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000169182...
Today I find myself in an urban hellscape without owning a vehicle. Nothing is walkable. I am crammed in, thanks to Equal Housing, with immigrants and people of utterly alien races and cultures (I consider myself the minority.) If I expect to find people like me or shop within my demographic, nothing is adjacent and it’s all several miles worth of transportation.
Car culture and forced integration has fragmented every possible family unit that could have been cohesive or collectivist. If I am celebrating a religious or cultural festival, I can count on none of my neighbors sharing that celebration, or in fact raising conflicts on the days most sacred to me.
Anywhere I may choose to walk, or even if I drive, I am trudging through vast empty parking lots of asphalt because of cars. The roads are laid out for cars. A cop told me yesterday I shouldn’t drive my e-scooter at 17mph in the street but on the sidewalk. Every motorist also hates those scooters, whether in motion or properly parked. Every motorist also hates the light rail train and hate for Waymo is fomented by motorist and pedestrian alike.
There is no place I could move to or live that would change this equation in any useful way. I do not hate cars, but I hate what they have done to our lives and our landscape.
We can argue about whether this is a good trade off, but the claim that cars make everyone's life better is straightforwardly false.
I wonder how the Uber driver feels about not being considered a full time employee and unable to have affordable healthcare and a nonexistent retirement plan. Hopefully they don't think too hard about it or that would be incredibly selfish of them.
The only way you receive food (except from your backyard inner-city garden?) is through people DRIVING. The way you receive packages is by DRIVING. They city infrastructure you enjoy is maintained through skilled laborers and tradespeople DRIVING.
What? Of course it is, you can easily impose rules that apply to personal vehicles that don't apply to public transport, logistical vehicles or emergency vehicles.
As an example in my neighborhood in the Netherlands, there's basically no streets around me where personal vehicles are allowed, but there are no restrictions to buses, delivery vehicles, moving vans, or ambulances.
> Any regulation that tries to ban the one while allowing the other would be a huuuge clusterfuck
How? You don't even have to go fancy with specialized license plates or anything like that, it's literally just common sense.
if that is lacking (often is) $50,000 fine per incident will take care of it
I mean sure, they both have engines and wheels, but they're already distinguishable in the eyes of the law. Commercial and personal vehicles are registered separately
Anyway, I don't think anyone is proposing banning cars. Just would be good to provide alternatives
Following the conversation, the subject has not ever been a yes/no referendum on cars.
It was if there has been a moral net positive/net negative for vehicular technology (as a comparable technology to AI)...which has consistently been walked back to a nebulous "personal vehicles are a net negative because of how they make people think". That's eerily close to the views on AI today.
Cars? Waaaay less clear they're net-beneficial.
I was skeptical too the first time I read this kind of argument. I ran the numbers for my case, which was sitting around the median (commute duration) or significantly better than the median (household income, car cost) for relevant numbers, for my car-dependent middling-costs US city, and it was still roughly break-even without even factoring in not being able to make commutes double as exercise time.
I had to have a car. My life would have fallen apart without it, that's how big a benefit it apparently was. Yet if I actually examined what was going on, it wasn't providing any real benefit to me at all, just negating harm done by designing my city around cars. That's how the numbers worked out, much to my surprise. For most residents of that city it was worse, the city being designed for cars was making their lives worse.
Denser, less car-centric areas are more economically productive than less dense areas. Car infrastructure prevents density. So I would argue that, at least in some cases, cars decrease economic efficiency
The development of cities caused by unrestricted, broad private car ownership without lots of careful coordination on that development, is in the reverse situation: it's fairly hard to argue it's net-beneficial, because it's so incredibly expensive in all-told money, time(!), liberty(!!), and, if we'll allow consideration of such things in a basically-economic analysis, pleasantness of environments for humans to exist in.
THIS! I am shocked that some people don't realize that modern civilization and our modern quality of life depends on cars to a huge degree, even for people don't personally drive. Such a lack of knowledge about modern industry and logistics..
In aggregate, benefits of cars outweight the cons for 99% of people. Perhaps if you live right next to a busy highway, you might the the exception..
I'm more shocked that somebody thinks that modern civilization and logistics depend on personal cars. Can ypu expand on your statement that modern industry and logistic depend on persobal cars?
Many car haters constantly play this motte-and-bailey game where they insinuate that cars are evil and should be eliminated, then they pull back and say “oh no, we don’t want to ban them” when confronted. But it’s clear that some subset really would prefer to eliminate civilian vehicles.
I like smart urbanism and pedestrian-centric development, but the anti-car culture annoys me to no end. It is self-defeating. The average person in the US has a car, and likes having a car, so you should start every argument with that assumption. We made a lot of progress on improving pedestrian access in the early 2000s by focusing on a positive message. But I guess there’s no room for non-adversarial messaging anymore.
The problem is we are numb to it. 40,000+ people are killed in car accidents every year in just the USA. Wars are started over oil and accepted by the people so they can keep paying less at the pump. Microplastics entering the environment each day along with particulate from brakes, and exhaust. Speaking of exhaust: global warming. Even going electric just shifts the problems as we need to dig up lithium, the new oil. We still have to drill for oil for plastics and metal refining, recycling and fabrication.
Self driving cars would make this massively cheaper and remove most of the reasons to own a car. It would make about as much sense as owning a train for most people.
If I bought and sold a house every time I needed somewhere to stay on holiday, renting would be massively cheaper.
I’ve already done the math and uber occasionally is cheaper than owning a car. Self driving electric will be even cheaper.
It's not fine if that choice denies other people the choice not to.
And there seems to be a lot of the latter.
For example, when shopping facilities or hospitals are built so as to be, de-facto, only accessible by automobile, that locks people out of the choice to say no thanks.
Where I live every new development must build out sidewalks as a condition of permitting.
Suburbs/car-dependecy is a classic case of "worse is better". Its simpler to build and the worst-case suburban sprawl is tolerable, so it proliferates.
No, because no such somewhere has been built in the country in question (US) in the past ~60 years, because the default is car-centric. So you're left with a few uber dense, old, predating automobiles, places. Which are extremely expensive, because they simply do not have the capacity for everyone who wants to live in them.
I'm not sure what the alternative would be. Maybe everyone lives in giant 10 million+ population cities that are all connected to each other by rail (and rail connects all airports, harbors, etc.) and then you have to show up at rail station to get your groceries or whatever else?
Yes cars/trucks/busses are still useful overall and are an incredible last-mile solution for freight.
But on a personal level, it means we all must live far apart and maintain our own individual vehicles, along with the average total costs of $11,500/year PER CAR. [0]
I’m not saying they should’ve even been banned for personal use - owning a car and living in a rural suburb should still be an option, but it is very expensive to choose that lifestyle.
However the auto companies on the early to mid 1900s had heavy influence on policy, even buying and shutting down their public transit competitors, converting cities into “car cities”. This is where it drove into “negatives outweigh the positives” territory. Everything before that was more positive, but this was a massive negative on society and continues to handicap cities today, making them expensive and even just dangerous to walk around (due to high speed roads and limited sidewalks)
[0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/auto-loans/learn/total-cost-ownin...
Once you start really marking how much nothing you're driving by even in many cities, where that "nothing" is one or another use of land that exists solely because of cars, it's a bit of a shock. "Wait, work would only be 8 miles away instead of 15 if not for the effects of widespread private car ownership? The grocery store could be 1 mile instead of 3? And I spend how much time a week bicycling to nowhere in particular to make up for sitting all day long? And this car & gas & insurance costs me how many of my work-hours per week, just to pay for it? Hm... am I... losing time to cars!?"
I guess what I don't understand is, given the current state, 1) what do you want? 2) how much will it cost? (and how will we pay for it?) and 3) what are the tradeoffs?
On a related note, it seems like a lot of the anti-car/urban planning wonks have a belief that everyone really wants to walk, ride bikes, or take mass transit everywhere, and I think they're wrong. Most people want to drive personal vehicles.
Maybe if we lived in a world where mass transit had very strictly enforced behavioral norms, more would consider it. But even then, I still think most people prefer the many conveniences afforded by personal vehicles.
Our world would be better without being completely dependent on cars. You can see this in a few select cities or neighborhoods that have avoided the worst of car dependency. There are still suburbs, but they’re a bit more dense and you can easily bike to a grocery store in 10 minutes. There are still rural suburbs, but it’s much more expensive to live there due to the extra effort to get where you need to go.
There isn’t an easy way back since we let the auto industry have such a huge influence in politics, they’ve shaped the world, and it would take us decades and a LOT of money to revert the damage. We can still make steps.
HOWEVER, to bring the point back, we’re still in the 1910’s auto industry with AI. Are we going to let the AI industry get heavily involved in politics and shape our world into a worse one to benefit them? We’re at a point where we can reap the benefits, like with early cars, without the damage that came later
Yes, they are in fact, the same. You cannot introduce such massively useful technology into the world and then say that it would be used only for logistics and not for personal transportation. Short of a worldwide totalitarian government, such arbitrary restriction would be completely unenforceable.
It is possible to shape things with regulation, but only to some degree. With any great technology, you have to take the good with the bad. And the good outweights the bad in any historical technology. AI will be no exception.
On public roads? No reason we'd have to license private cars for that, at least not for just any purpose.
Trying to ban all private cars while keeping our car-dependent civilization working is unrealistic, no matter how you look at it.
There's no quick fix at this point, it'd be a century-long project to undo the damage now, but a hypothetical world where we'd harnessed only the good parts of cars and not let them completely reshape the places we live down to the neighborhood level would sure be a lot nicer.
Less than a century ago, so within living memory (albeit only just), literally nowhere on Earth was car dependent.
Yes they ship people around somewhat fast. Slower than possible with other methods, and the cost is incredible - economic (much more expensive per passenger than almost any alternative), political (they inherently divide people, dehumanise and make people never really share a public space), health - they reduce lifespan by both lowering living quality as well as directly killing a staggering amount of humans per year).
And we have learned how to build better places for humans that do not need these coffins on wheels - if you visit any European capital, and most Asian ones - you will see environments built for humans, not cars - soo much nicer.
So cars as a technology have definitely not been beneficial to humanity overall, but it has been somewhat useful to some.
I think strongtowns were very good advocates of what places in America could like if you look beyond cars. I personally like the “not just bikes” channel though.
All they saw was that trips taking a day could now be done in an hour and produced no manure, and that meant suddenly you could reasonably go to many more places. What's not to like? A model T was cheap, and you didn't even need to worry about insurance or having a driver's license. Surely nobody would drive so carelessly as to crash.
*well, not technically nobody, but nobody important.
What’s really interesting is that you can find newspaper columns in the 1920s recognizing what we now call induced demand as even by then it was clear that adding road capacity simply inspired more people to drive.
Lack of alternatives + political unwillingness to provide them + lack of political pressure to provide them + the massive effort that would be needed to build a system from scratch that has already been dismantled, and infrastructure is in the way because it wasn't a factor + corruption, democratic decline, etc. = most problems around cars in the USA.
Remote work was the biggest upset to this system in generations but that's being stamped out at many organizations.
Today we have a much better understanding of the world, so we have the means to think down the line of what the negative effects of LLMs and course correct if needed.
I don't see anything positive about being forced to participate in this car-ownership game where 99% of North American cities are designed around car ownership, and if you don't own a car you're screwed. I don't WANT to own a car, I don't want to direct countless thousands of dollars to a car note, car maintenance, gas, etc. I want the freedom to exist without needing to own an absurdly expensive vehicle to get myself around. There's nothing freeing or positive about that unless all you've ever known and all you can imagine is a world in which cities are designed around cars and not people.
Really these people decades ago had a great grasp on these things. But why did they "fail" and we still have traffic? They didn't fail really, what failed was implementation not planning. Most cities you see with notorious traffic today, chances are the bottlenecks that exist were planned to be relieved by some midcentury road plan that was for whatever reason, not ever built. Comprehensive rapid transit was often also planned, several times over, but not built or at least never to the full scale of those plans. Catalytic converter was also a great success people today probably don't even think about. You can see the mountains again in California's cities thanks to the catalytic converter.
Leaded gas took longer, but I'd say the tailpipe pollution, congestion, and general capacity related issues were well understood.
Traffic gets fixed by getting most people to use some other form of transport and leaving cars to the edge case uses.
No possible way to know
Kind of like how fat and salt are good for you until you over consume. The world has massively overconsumed cars.
Cars aren't a positive in society. Transportation is the benefit, and cars are the worst possible way to transport people. A functioning public transit system is better in every possible way apart from egotistical arguments like "I don't like seeing poor people on the bus".
But any actual urine "spills" would've gotten cleaned up right quick. They simply don't tolerate that stuff. Look at any bus operator and they are tough as nails if someone tries shenanigans.
In fact, the craziest times I've had were in ride shares and taxis. I was all dressed up for a funeral one morning, summoned a taxi, and the driver who tried to pick me up was obviously drunk. Another time, I had a medical transport that was summoned, sat at some gas station for 15+ minutes, and when he arrived at my place and I got in the back seat, it was wet and had clearly been through a hasty cleanup, and I could smell urine permeating the vehicle, and it was absolutely nuts, but I said nothing, because it probably wasn't the driver's fault. Probably.
We (or lobbyists) resist having carbon costs included in the prices we pay at the pump.
Edit: More transportation is good; I am not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, just that our accounting for costs makes things look better than they are.
It is possible to say "some things could be done better" without meaning "throw it all away."
Increased car ownership & use, and increased design of environments to cater to cars, greatly harms that freedom.
Ever checked into a hotel somewhere in city-sprawl, looked at your map to find a local shop to pick up some cable you forgot or a toothbrush or to get some dinner, and realized that despite those things being within half a mile you can't realistically walk to them because there's a highway between you and them, so you're stuck unless you pay someone with a car to drive you? Doesn't feel very free.
I've never had this happen, no. The closest I've ever gotten was in Tokyo, when I had the store I needed in eyesight across the street but had to go very far out of my way to a pedestrian bridge to get there.
You lose that freedom of movement if:
Your car breaks down
Your car gets stolen
Your car gets totaled
You lose your license
You can't afford insurance
You get too sick to drive
You lose bodily mobility
Your mental faculties decline
If you can't drive, you have to depend on whatever public options there are around you. Good luck.
Of course there is an idea of non-toxic masculinity that doesn't just equate to !masculinity. People love to bring up examples of non-toxic masculinity in media. Someone on reddit has even compiled a megalist of examples of non-toxic masculinity in film: https://www.reddit.com/r/MensLib/comments/eb0ir1/a_megalist_...
It is perfectly possible to be both masculine and non-toxic without being feminine. Refusing to allow that is toxic in itself.
Using the term "toxic" to describe things is an issue because people have an immediate negative reaction to it and go on the defence. Wording matters a lot and I'm unsure why there's such an insistence on calling things "toxic" when other words would both better describe issues and cause a less visceral reaction.
> not even an inflammatory one
I don't know how you can seriously claim this.
Society in itself is the act of exchanging some of ones individualism and freedom for a group identity.
Alligators don't have what we call a society, and they do things that we'd consider anti-social like eat the young of our own kind. The individual has ultimate freedom to do whatever they want. Humans consider these freedoms anti-social and harmful to others and restrict your behaviors in these manners by ever increasing punishment including death.
Effectively your statement boils down to a childs tantrum of "I want to do whatever I want to do and damn everyone else"
No it's not that I'm against any those things just the toxic applications of them.
> In practice, both do mean exactly that. "Nontoxic individualism" is collectivism, "nontoxic masculinity" is femininity. You're not slick, everyone gets the language games at this point
The different however is network effects. When we make a place better for cars, I make it worse for pedestrians. Your adoption of the car, and its pressure on my lived environment, has effects on me. Same as, say, people joining facebook or twitter. But do LLMs create network effects that are directly harmful, or is it just a matter of making it harder to compete, just like a mechanical watchmaker has less business now that it's so easy to have a reliable clock? Because the first case is a problem, but the second one... that's competition. It's civilization. And then it's not really a matter of cars vs pedestrians.
An analog might be the push for banning phones in schools. Setting apart times and spaces where serendipitous human interactions are encouraged by the lack of distractions.
> Now might be a good time to call your representatives.
Well, not that must-read I guess
Musks SpaceX Keynote was ridiculous, don't get me wrong, but we will be able to see AI progress in the next 5 years which will give us some kind of gut feeling were the journey can go.
Also AI solves another problem: Compute. It was clear that we want some kind of compute but its like with 4k; We have 4k for ages now but it is not the default resolution on all displays sold. We stoped pushing the boundaries because invest is not here. People do not bother too much with it.
With AI and the richest companies and people want to see what happens, pushes the envolope a lot faster, pushes us to find solutions.
This AI Compute based on ML/Neuroal Networks can also be used for physics simulation, protein folding, and everything else.
Stoping technology is not an option and not a solution. Education is. We need to educate people.
The problem is that the connectivity required for much of AI is very different than that required for classic HPC (more emphasis on bandwidth, less on super low latency small payload remote memory operations) and the numeric emphasis is very different (lots of mixed resolution and lots of ridiculously small numeric resolutions like fp8 vs almost all fp64 with some fp32).
The result is that essentially no AI computers reach the high end of the TOP500.
The converse is also true, classic frontier scale super computers don't make the most cost effective AI training platforms because they spend a lot of the budget on making HPC programs fast.