M. 34
I’m currently studying for the theory and then the practice for the license and I hate it… But since I’m unemployed for like half a year now maybe it will give me more chances to get hired. Still I will avoid driving as much as possible, being on a highway scares me and I’m afraid of having an accident. Plus I wear glasses and I’m not sure if my reflexes or peripheral view are good enough…
So, what’s your reason to not drive a car… money? For the environment? Are you afraid? You really don’t need to?
Unless your rural. Public transport in my area could never work. Even in 2024
OK to the person that down voted me please tell me the most rural place you’ve visited and a plan to implement public transit? In my area house can be separated by up to 9 miles. It takes a school bus 3.5 hours to pick up and drop off before and after school. So how could public transit be implemented in any meaningful way? Let’s say I worked in the city which is a 42 mile drive, now first I would need a minimum 2 hour ride from my house to the small town. Then after that I have to wait in some bus station, then its at least 1 hour before I get into the city so at a minimum I would have a 3 hour trip to and from work everyday. Now to make it worse it isn’t a perfect world because lets say my bus from home to the station and the bus into the city are off from each other, now its 4-5 hours or transport one way everyday (8-10 total)… Do you see how that couldn’t work in any meaning full way? Now if you want to say bullet trains, or trains, that is ridiculously expensive to implement and grand scale, and just like in China would end up being mostly traveled only by elites so it wouldn’t even be accessible to me.
Not to mention with only 800 people in a 50 mile radius the amount of taxes that each person would have to pay to build a public transit here would be insane.
Now if you want to go county wide, my county has a population density of 10 residents per square mile compared to the entirety of New York City which is 29,000 people per square mile.
Or even worse the country of Korea and my state are similarly sized, my entire state has a population density of 67 people per square mile, Korea has a population density of 1,000 people per square mile.
More populated areas make public transit plausible but, the US is mostly rural space and that is different from pretty much every other country.
I like to think of the people who downvote, but don’t comment, just had a small accident in the user interface. They misclicked! Or swiped to hard!
Because obviously, if they had something to contribute that contradicted you, they’d leave a comment!
But, I want the discussion lol I woke up combative this morning
Ok… Let me try.
Cars suck. Rural people who don’t work on a farm should move to a city where they don’t need a car. If they won’t move, then they better get used to biking or walking.
Horses would be better for the environment because they are a sustainable solar organic ecosystem
Cars are better for the environment than horses (I say this as so.done who’s family has a lot of horses lol)
If cow farts are bad then horse farts are bad, also it takes a lot of diesel to harvest the feed necessary for horses scale that up to the size needed for modern day populations and horses are way worse for the environment than cars.
Ps. I appreciate you humoring me lol
The USA sustained a huge horse population pre-engine. While quality of life was lower, the horse energy cycle was totally renewable.
The issue of industrial farming using oil, is a separate problem, and one that eventually will have to get addressed. Either through some innovative battery technology, or alternative fuel like hydrogen.
But even in pre-engine United States, horses weren’t one for every person, they’re relatively rare, because they’re expensive to maintain, they eat a lot of food right, they require daily upkeep, veterinary care etc huge capital investment.
I think in the right green sustainable system, people would live close enough to where they work, where they wouldn’t need to travel vast distances every day. So in the infotech economy, that means people work from home, no commute needed. Just food delivery which could be batched, buses, or even the rare horse-drawn cart for a neighborhood.
The rural population that commutes a distance to work, factories, manufacturing, those would be the hardest to adapt to a non-vehicle lifestyle. I’m not sure how you could do that without moving a lot of people.
One possible reason people don’t like rural living, is if you got all the rural people to live in a city, it would raise city housing prices, and if they were invested in property that might be to their advantage.
This isn’t co.etely inaccurate however the popation of the US has gone up dramatically and requires a different scale of horse feed production because we would have dramatically more horses for example
in 1910 which is when peak of horse population happened there where 27 million horses the works out to about 1horse per 4 people which would mean almost 100 million horses today
That is huge. But we can ignore the people living in urban areas, because they have the public transportation everybody so hot about.
So we’re only looking at double the horses. I personally don’t think horses are the solution here.
I’ve been to parts of the world where vehicles aren’t common, and there is a rural population, and the way they deal with it is their life just sucks and they don’t go anyplace and they just get by. Seems like a rude thing to force on people living in your own country.
— end devil’s advocating —
I genuinely believe people are adaptable, and no matter what happens they’re going to make a way to live. So if combustion engines go out of favor, we’ll figure something out, if vehicles themselves are become impossible we’ll figure something out. It’s just going to be very painful process.
I think public transportation makes sense with high population densities, but when you’re talking about very rarefied densities it actually makes sense to give the few people vehicles. I understand there’s a lot of sentiment in the " f*** cars " community, but if you actually talk to them, and narrow it down, it turns out they like ambulances too. So there is a space between nobody can have a vehicle, and everybody has a vehicle.
But online, people get caught up in the rhetoric, the anger, and they just downvote without nuance.
I think the best way to solve the problem is to start offering better sustainable vehicle (this doesn’t mean electric per semi) id like to see ammonia powered cars or better hydrogen cars, these are things that we generate everyday and have a clean output, also I would love to see car company’s retrofitting old cars over building completely new cars as this would dramatically lower the environmental impact of car production, which is the highest envirmontal impact of cars.
The hate for the hydrogen fuel cycle in the green communities just confounds me. In my mind it combines the best of all worlds, excess solar wind capacity hydrolyzes water bam hydrogen, portable dense fuel. Solves a lot of our problems