this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Fuck Cars
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Make me a climate controlled hyper-efficient one seat vehicle thats safe and I’d be so there.
Where I live, only the enthusiasts and the ones who live really close to work only have like 40 non-contiguous days a year that they can reasonably commute in anything but a car without showing up soaked with rain, sweat, or frozen boogers.
I’d love to give up my car. I work from home. I legit only need it two days a week to pick up my kid from preschool. Even when I commuted I hated that I had to take 4 empty seats and 3000 pounds with me.
Even to take the train (whose schedule is now completely incompatible with anybody’s work schedule unless they work within walking distance of a train stop thanks to a wildly underfunded subway/bus/streetcar infrastructure), I still have to drive that pile of metal to the train station, and that’s too far to reasonably walk, and too dark to safely bike thanks to poorly lit winding roads and non-existent bike lanes.
The whole system is fucked, but even scooters and unicycles aren’t filling that niche. And they won’t until they can at least protect you from the elements in some capacity, and provide some modicum of safety against every idiot with a drivers license and a pavement princess they can’t see past the hood on.
You did kind of cite the actual issue, the one we want to fix, right in your complaint. A well-funded subway/bus infrastructure tends to suit most people's needs, such that the short trip to take one of these dinky ebikes/e-unicycles to the train station (or, taking a frequent bus on its route) would rarely be so uncomfortable. The key here is that climate-controlling an individualized vehicle is going to be inefficient no matter what.
The environment will always be a potential concern. If you live in a rainy area, but vacuum-seal yourself into your hamster ball before heading to work, you'll still need an umbrella after depositing your hamster ball into the Ball Collective before going into the office building. From my point of view, it seems like you're pushing the "problems" into the wrong domain of concern, and also kind of pretending cars solve that issue 100% - which they don't.
I’ll give up climate control as long as there’s decent protection from wind and rain and some level of safety.
Carrying an umbrella for a walk a couple of blocks is no big deal. Carrying an umbrella for 10 miles while traveling 15MPH is a bit much. Especially when you’re traveling against frigid winds.
And safety. Until cars are out of the picture almost entirely, any two-wheeled vehicle that has to share space with them is almost entirely out of the picture.
Yeah, in case it's not clear, I'm definitely not suggesting carrying an umbrella in one hand on a bike; or sharing a 4-lane road with Son Unaliving Vehicles.
Rainy days would basically be when a bus is a better option, if not a straight walk to a train station.
And that’s what I’m getting at.
New York (outside of NYC)/New England is a tough place for giving up a car. Our housing just isn’t dense enough to support a decent public infrastructure.
Now, granted, my office is a good 30 miles as the crow flies from my house. I took that job because pay is sooo much better in Boston. And I took the train…for a while. Until my wife was in her third trimester, and I needed to be able to leave at the drop of a hat. And then Covid happened. And then the train schedules went to shit, and the Red and Green lines collapsed behind them (though they weren’t in terrific shape to begin with).
But if I wanted to solely take public transit into work, I’ve gotta leave my house at around 4am to walk about four miles to a bus, that drops me off at the train station 2 minutes after the inbound train leaves. So then sit at the train station for an hour until the next train. Then ride the train for an hour. Then hope to get on the first subway car, that’s now packed like a sardine can and paced out 15 minutes apart. Then walk a few more blocks.
And then repeat it, except the last bus back towards home just left 2 minutes before the train arrived. So now it’s more like 7 miles to get back home on foot or bike.
Cities are great, but if we think housing is expensive now, just wait until everyone has to be within 5 miles of where they work. I’m not an exception in traveling in to Boston from practically the RI border. Lots of people I work with commute in from NH.
Hell, my boss just moved to NH. He used to live near southern terminus of the red line, the subway that gets within a couple blocks of our office. His commute from New-fucking-Hampshire is almost as long.
Requiring CDLs for these huge monstrosities would finally put pressure on automakers to return to more reasonable car bodies and it would make sure that people who have to drive big vehicles at least are qualified to do so. Traffic tickets should also scale with the size of the vehicle since a speeding Range Rover presents different risks to the public than a speeding Smart Car.
Real investment in walkable cities and suburbs is the harder solution but the better one. If you could walk your kid to preschool that eliminates a car trip. Walking exposes you to the elements, but walking speed doesn't amplify rain, cold, or heat like biking does. Zoning laws should allow a preschool, a grocery store, a pharmacy, a community space, and a hardware store to exist within easy walking distance for you. Bike paths should connect you to the next community. Miles of uninterrupted residential-only zoning is choking our planet.
Some people do “need” their pickups for recreation, but they’re almost all GHG emitters…towing boats, carrying ATVs/dirtbikes, etc. Campers are another thing, not so bad but I wouldn’t call those glampers anything close to camping.
But then these giant pickups become their daily drivers, and because of that they’re ubiquitous. And because of that, people who have absolutely no legitimate reason for driving a pickup truck or other huge vehicle, end up buying one to feel safe.
And in a way they are right. It’s insane how many people look at me like I’m trying to kill them for backing out of a space real slow. No, there is a giant iron fucking curtain that’s blocking my view of you and any other cross traffic. That’s why I turned on my backup lights and waited a few seconds before inching out. Not because I’m an idiot or I’m trying to kill you, but because I have absolutely no other option than to blindly back out of the space.
Safety is definitely the tough part, and would probably require a new innovation in safety tech.
Maybe if you could find a way to create incredible traction between the tires and the road in emergencies you could stop faster and offset the G force when someone crashes into you.
Exterior airbags are also an option - basically just deploying a tire sized thick rubber balloon the instant before a collision, from both vehicles.
Or if the car is light enough, maybe it could jump.
Or like that table saw that stops when it hits flesh , you could have a break bar shoot down out of the bottom of the vehicle to jam into the road. Youd damage the asphalt but better some chunk of asphalt than a persons life.