There is a significant population of folks who are car-hostile here on HN. Most will tell you that they aren't actually anti-car and they don't hate them - just everything about them.
Maybe we just aren’t willing to accept 35k deaths (insert your countries count here) a year plus countless injuries to a problem that could easily be mitigated. The high human cost absolutely does not have to be the trade off of driving considering most car violence is the result of human error (breaking pre-existing laws)
Enforcing existing traffic laws with consistency and social norming good driving behavior. Banning things never works but having people face the consequences of their actions on a consistent basis can change behavior
Pretty sure in most places traffic laws are enforced as consistently as law enforcement can. You can’t really enforce a traffic law that you don’t see broken and most LEOs I know do traffic stops on violations they see.
As an example, there are no traffic-related fatalities in the pedestrian-only streets in my city. There are also no pedestrian fatalities inside our mass-transit system.
Ahh yes, hyper-dense populated, walkable cities with good mass transit. Meanwhile where I live, we grow the food you city dwellers eat and to get to just about any store it’s at least a 10 mile trip.
Maybe I’ll take the bus…oh wait…the nearest stop is 4 miles from my door.
... Yes and? They pay the taxes that fund the development for the miles of power lines and piping that need to be placed to support non-city dwellers. We can play this game all day. Civilization is all about paying into the common good.
Ahh yes, thank you for being so generous to locate your power plants and waste treatment facilities out here and being so gracious to let us ride on your pipes and wires, while we generate the electricity you consume and clean the water you dirty. NIMBY right?
However, since my comment was about the need for automobiles in rural areas because the distances between services are not supportive of mass transit and reasonable walkable distances. Folks that live in urban areas seem to forget that the bulk of this earth doesn’t have the luxury of a bus stop or train station a block away from their home and place of employment.
You do understand that we are talking completely different things here.
Obviously farmland is not the right place to put power plants (unless their emissions can be used to benefit crops - think reusing clean CO2 to feed crops in greenhouses) or waste treatment facilities (unless they produce fertilizers that can be used to increase crop yield).
Nobody is proposing to ban cars where they are actually needed - and there are a lot of good use cases for cars, but densely populated cities ARE NOT one of them. Also, banning cars from rural areas would probably not make a dent in avoidable pedestrian deaths, as most of them happen in more densely populated areas (such as suburbs, which are kind of in the middle between rural and urban). I'd be totally fine with banning manual driving in suburban areas as soon as self-driving cars prove safer than humans.
Furthermore, we could extend the mass-transit system with self-driving cars and trucks - no need to walk to the bus stop if you can have one pick you up by your door upon request. And, since it's per request, it doesn't even need to be a bus. Many short-term car-rental companies are looking for self-driving cars to remove the issue of having to pick up and return the car at a specified spot.
For a long time I didn't have a bus stop near my door - what I did was drive (a 15-minute drive) to the subway station parking building and use my tax-deducted park+ride year-long pass to get to my office.
You do understand that you are arguing a point I didn’t make, but rather taking issue with a sarcastic remark I made because the other commenter went off to left field.
My point was, originally, that arguing for solutions that might work in a high density urban environment doesn’t work in rural communities. Mass transit needs “mass”, by definition rural communities don’t provide that.
BTW, when self driving cars are an actual thing, feel free to propose them as a solution. I suspect jet packs would also be a great way to get to the bus stop as well.
Jet packs will certainly kill fewer pedestrians in rural areas because a falling jet pack will have a much harder time finding a pedestrian to hit. Win-win scenario!
> There is a significant population of folks who are car-hostile here on HN
And there's a significant population of folks who are bike-hostile here on HN.
In fact, there's probably a significant population of folks who are X-hostile, for any value of X you can conceive of, given the size of the HN userbase.
I think the point is to poison the well. When people point out an issue with cars, it isn't because they're using evidence-based reasoning, it's because they're just a bunch of nasty car haters (and communists.)
Contrary to OP's assertions, I actually do enjoy cars, but I don't think they work well at all in the city. I think there are better solutions out there (Japan is a leading example.)
I am not trying to poison the well. I just can't help but observe how often people here post things anti-car and then ascribe all sorts of societal problems under the sun to the fact that the United States is so car-centric. I've also noticed that the car-hostile folks have a tendency to assume malice whenever someone defends the automobile. I mean right now I was just accused of poisoning the well.
The GP mentioned that people here are bike-hostile, but you don't see dozens of submissions from StrongRoads about how terrible bicycles are and how they're responsible for toxic individualism.
>you don't see dozens of submissions from StrongRoads about how terrible bicycles are and how they're responsible for toxic individualism.
I think the reason we don't see dozens of submissions about how terrible bicycles are is because they don't kill car drivers to even remotely the same degree. I mean, come on.
You absolutely see bike-hostile people; they just couch their rhetoric in "the risk is worth the reward", while usually being a driver themselves so experiencing much more of the reward than the risk. It's a well-known phenomenon that when you encounter viewpoints that oppose your own that they will stand out to you more than viewpoints that agree with you, hence why we all see opposition to our ideas everywhere we go.
Does your little observation, here, have any bearing on the article? Does it make the facts less factual? Does it make the numbers less number-y?
Hell, I tried to go back to the top-level comment to figure out what might've triggered you, but your original comment is a non sequitur as far as I can tell.
This comment is an illustration of what I am "triggered" about. I disagree with the article because of the tone it uses, the assumptions it makes, and what it ascribes to our 'culture'. So when I see yet another post that is so obviously biased and rhetorically underhanded (toxic individualism, implying a total lack of empathy) I can't help but point out this is a trend here on HN.
>"Does your little observation, here, have any bearing on the article?"
>"what might've triggered you"
My "little observation", is pretty condescending. So does the triggering comment. Again, illustrates my experience when having a dialogue with car-hostile people. You want to engage me on facts and numbers but you're using rhetorical swipes to try and discredit me.
> I disagree with the article because of the tone it uses
This is not a valid reason to disagree about the article. The feelings the tone caused may also cause you to misjudge the rest of the evidence provided and may limit your ability to form a judgement based strictly on the facts presented.
In an ideal world people would be easily able to dismiss any aspect of an article that isn't purely rational or feelings related. I believe there is something to be said for being critical about what is being presented when the authors bias is so clearly displayed. Especially when we are talking about a subject that is so multivariate and chaotic as society and how it is impacted by cars, city design, and how it impacts the economy, etc.
Hahah I don't know if you meant that sarcastically, but I think I fit into that description--I do like, even love, driving, etc., but I do hate most of the consequences of having cars around.
