OK Ford Prefect, just keep that thumb pointed up.
That Ford Prefect is one Hoopy Frood that really knows where their towel is!
I live in an area where I need to own a car, but it’s a tool I use, nothing more. Would you say we’re subservient to other tools and infrastructure? Bikes, knives, fire, water treatment plants, trains, etc.
Can you point to another tool whose required infrastructure occupies the same amount of space, we spend as much time and money on, where those who won’t or can’t spend that time or money are treated as second-class citizens, that directly kills as many people, that we fight wars over to ensure we have the needed fuel, that people define their entire identities around, and that causes as much environmental destruction as the automobile?
Think it through, and I’m sure you can see what makes cars different from any other any other tool. Most societies on earth are completely warped around maximizing the use of the car everywhere and for everything, at any cost. It is truly an obsession.
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A multiuse path (based on local data) costs 10% the cost of one lane of road.
I’ve been trying to gather momentum to implement 0.5km of path built for every 1km of road. Construction costs only go up 5% and it would add massive amounts of mobility. Paths don’t necessarily need to be near where the roads are.
It’s also a tool that would force road and infrastructure planners to think about how people move around not in cars.
I’d be in favor of something like this, provided those multi use paths are in places that are useful and the city doesn’t just pave more and more areas of a park to check off a box.
There was a time when I spent more on Petrol than I did on food for myself. Yes, rent was more expensive, but putting that aside, adding up the on-road costs like insurance and registration, and I was well and truly spending more on my car than I was on myself. That’s without taking my taxes going to roads or my rent being higher because cars are monopolising more space. Society relies on cars today to the extent that we are faced with cars having life destroying potential in this planet and most of us look the other way most of the time. We need cars and we let them walk all over us.
Transport is not an obsession, it’s a basic necessity. It’s a huge deal regardless of what mode. But I think your point with cars is that there are alternatives that don’t cause as much harm. I can think of a few other similar examples.
Housing - Suburban housing. It’s worse than cars in many of the ways you outlined. Typically cars and suburbs come as a double punch.
Food - Meat. At least as damaging to the environment as cars, causes huge amounts of suffering, and it’s also pointless because there are great alternatives.
Cooking - Gas stoves. Fairly minor, but there’s no good reason they should still exist. Same story with gas heaters instead of heat pumps.
Suburban sprawl I would consider to be part of the same issue—it’s development that is warped around the primacy of the automobile.
Meat is a good example of something that comes close though. Certainly a lot of problems associated with meat production. But I think I would say that is a condemnation of meat culture, not a defense of car culture.
Gas appliances are a problem but so much more minor than the car. And we’re far from having the same obsession with them as we do with cars. I think they will disappear in coming years and few people will even miss them.
In terms of gas, the cooking experience on a gas stove is vastly superior to a traditional electric range. Induction has helped to close that gap, but requires compatible pots and pans, and are still more expensive. I think there is also a lack of awareness around it. The gas industry put a lot of effort into marketing gas ranges when they first came out, and when compared to something like a wood stove, it’s basically better in every way. I haven’t seen the same marketing push for induction. When most people think electric, they think of the coils that heat up. I have on like that currently, as does Everton know with electric. They suck, to the point that I don’t even want to use it. I might use it once a month, if I had gas or induction I’d likely use it significantly more, as it wouldn’t require the same level of baby sitting. Few people will upgrade a working stove, so this will take a long time to change without a compelling reason. I plan to buy a stove with an induction cooktop sometime in the next 6 months, because traditional electric suck so hard and I have 0 tolerance for it. My sister has gas at home and she gets extremely frustrated trying to use electric cooktops at the homes of friends or family. They are just so slow to respond to change. You can’t simply turn a boil down to a simmer, you have to stand there and fuck with it for 10+ minutes to keep things from boiling over. I admit I’m not the best cook, but with tools like that, I don’t know how anyone can have the patience to learn, or deal with having more than one things going at a time.
Heat pumps can work well for many climates, but when moving into extreme cold, they can’t handle the job as well as gas. Improvements in heat pump technology have made them better so they can service more areas, but you can’t expect everyone to go through the hassle and expense of swapping out a gas furnace, which will last for decades, for a heat pump which may leave them in the cold a few days per year still. With continued improvements and awareness, people may swap out for a heat pump when their furnace is at end of life, provided their isn’t significant cost in making they change vs simply getting a new furnace. This will take decades, as people don’t buy a new furnace very often. Depending on when it fails, they may opt for gas just to get something installed and quickly as easily as possible, as it becomes a safety issue in the middle of winter, and there is also the risk of pipes freezing which causes a lot of damage.
I know about all the trade offs you mentioned. Personally I’m happy with my coil electric stove because a bit more difficulty cooking is a good trade off to avoid cancer and climate change, but that argument has been moot for decades anyway because induction stoves are better than gas in every way.
Modern heat pumps work fine at the vast majority of locations where humans live. If you happen to live at the north pole, you can supplement your heat pump with electric resistive heaters or even, god forbid, gas, and still come out far more energy efficient.
You’re absolutely right that people won’t do the right thing voluntarily, as seen with all these examples. That’s why we need governments to encourage them. That could be through regulation, taxes, subsidies, and building the right infrastructure to make it easy to do the right thing.
“Doing the right thing” needs to be easy and obvious. Doing it through regulation and taxes mostly pisses people off and leads to common sense things turning into political issues.
If replacing a gas furnace with a heat pump is cheaper than getting a new furnace, that’s a common sense reason to do that and there should be more awareness around that, so people can factor it into their buying decisions. I’ve seen a single heat pump on my block, and I’m guessing the people who live there are into that stuff, because the unit outside is right next to a compost barrel. I bet if I asked everyone on my block if they knew what a heat pump was, most would say they don’t know. Also, if supplemental heat sources are still needed on the coldest days, then they still need a furnace and things get more complex and expensive, so the pay off on an individual level isn’t there. Where I live it can reach over 100F in the summer and can reach -20F in the winter. For places without such extremes on both ends I can see where heat pumps have probably made sense for quite some time, so people may be more aware in those regions.
I think a lot of these things are marketing issues. Heat pumps only recently got decent for colder climates. Induction is still relatively new to a lot of people. If the first time people hear about a new technology is from a government mandate or tax, there will be a lot of opposition.
We’re talking about a couple of things that last a long time and aren’t cheap. People are already struggling with inflation. No one is going to voluntarily replace a functional furnace or stove when they are struggling to make ends meet as is, especially when they act in isolation won’t actually stop global warming. There are likely other, cheaper, actions an individual can take that would have a similar impact, and then once their stuff breaks, they can upgrade to the “right thing”… if the marketers have done their job to create the awareness that these things exist, solve the problem the old thing was solving, but doing it better/cheaper.
Cars are not living organisms, are not species, and they serve us in every way, not the other way around.
Braindead take.
You are an extremely literal person, aren’t you.
In your corner of the planet maybe.
There is more parking sqf per American car than there is housing sqf per American citizen.
While I’m sure underground parking decks are expensive, they sure would solve a lot of the insane parking lot requirements for retail spaces.
Or we could, you know, just not have these ridiculous requirements that are unbased in any kind of science. They were just guessed at by politicians 60 years ago, and then copied from municipality to municipality.
While the current regulations can be very stupid, not having anything in place would also be a nightmare. Nothing like having shops and restaurants close down because people have no way to get there or park when they do.
Even with the regulations there are place I want to go, but don’t because parking looks like it sucks. Other places I want to bike, but bike parking sucks, so I drive. It isn’t something we can just ignore and hope it takes care of itself.
Why would a business invest millions of dollars into building a storefront in a situation where parking is required, and not build any parking? Why does the state, apparently in your opinion, know better what the business’s parking needs are than the business does? And if they DO go out of business because of their bad planning, what problem is that of yours and mine?
It’s a potential problem, but it’s not as great as the ACTUAL problems that we are presently dealing with. It might not be ideal to have no regulations, but it’s certainly better than the status quo, which exists due to the intense historical influence of General Motors. Ie, political corruption and regulatory capture. It’s garbage, it’s hurting us.
What about all the businesses that presently cannot exist because the financial overhead of parking requirements makes them nonviable?
Ghere comes to mind a Man who travelled from beteigeuze and mistook Cars for the dominant species. So he took the inconspicuous name of Ford Prefect.
uh actually im pretty sure ants or beetles or whatever are dominant
Nice format
It’s not just the car, it’s the whole system from the oil well upstream, through the car up to the malls and road system that need oil and subsidize it downstream: it’s all infected with car brain, interdependent and self-reinforcing with a feedback loop. It’s only going to stop when something breaks.
National Film Board short on the same topic
- Still funny in a bleak way. Canadians can be like that.
OK, but have you heard of smartphones?
I’m pretty sure there are fewer cars than people. However, I do know for sure that there are a lot more chickens than people by some multiple.
Cats?
what about the direction of making cars better?
> biodegradable / resuable components
> carpooling
> more efficient energy usage
add more? cars are here,so can we make better use of them?
For within cities, I think epectrified public transit + micromobility + walking is a far better option, because cars are just insanely space-inefficient, which is why traffic is an unavoidable beast in any city that reaches a certain size. But for rural areas, things like this I think are a move in the right direction: https://aptera.us/
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