https://maxmautner.com/2026/10/11/how-fast-is-a-car.html
The median American worker earns $23.80/hour, or ~$19 after taxes. A used car driven the US average of ~10,900 miles a year costs ~$8,200, counting $1,700 a year for a parking space at home. That is ~430 hours of work before the car moves. A new car takes ~700 hours. A $999 e-bike ridden 3,000 miles a year takes ~25 hours.
I just want a society where people in your position, emergency vehicles, mass transit, and large families are the only ones on the road outside of special uses. A car-centric society means I’m compelled to drive when it isn’t my job, I’m too tired or sick, and every other mode of transportation is accessible to me. I end up being a totally unnecessary threat to the people who have to drive, or at the very least more congestion and pollution that make it worse for them.
See I don’t think completely eliminating them is viable because disabled people and the elderly are always going to need personal vehicles in some capacity. But I’m on board with reducing their usage as much as we can. I think the idea that we could entirely get rid of cars is also a bit urban-centric. Like as someone who lives in a rural area I use a truck to take my trash to the dump, I drive a significant distance to get supplies, have to haul heavy things like propane and water jugs, and various other uses.
So what I’d personally like to see is that we build out public transport on the level of China, and then we PLUNGE speed limits. You can drive, but its faster to take the public transport in most cases. So more people would choose not to drive, or to just ride a bike (riding a bike on a 25mph road is way easier than on a 45mph road). You could also make things like golf-cart style mini-EVs street legal. This would all go towards basically eliminating automobile deaths outside of edge cases. Reduce the mass of vehicles, reduce the speed, and you reduce the energy transfered into a human body when they crash.
There are likely at least as many elderly and disabled unable to drive as elderly and disabled who need to drive, and they just get fucked in current society and stay isolated at home because they literally can’t do anything else about it.
I didn’t say they’d be the one driving. But idk how your gonna get someone who can’t walk to the hospital without a car.
This is logistically stupid even in a rural area. A garbage truck going to every house is still going to be more efficient than whatever number of trucks going to the dump.
I guess if people who are already going to town for food in rural-enough areas are bringing their trash with them it might be cheaper than a garbage truck. The other poster is fixating on the garbage truck for some reason as if that one truck requires more maintenance than 50 cars in totality. But assuming the other things people go to town for aren’t also accounted for in a similar way to garbage trucks, say food, then yeah I could see garbage trucks just being like fast food delivery addition in resource use rather than a subtraction.
The way this conversation goes every time is they go “but I’m driving into town every day for work anyway” and then we have to explain why it’s stupid to live as if you’re a farmer or a woodsman and use artificially cheap oil infrastructure to drive into a town to work a bunch anyway as every other townie they refuse to see themselves as. They want their rural larp subsidized at all costs. People back in the day who lived rural like that would go to town like once every 2-4 weeks, once a week for church maybe or something. But they don’t seem to want that.
It’s really not. Trash trucks are huge and expensive. Trash services are expensive. There aren’t that many people out here to spread the cost around to which makes them more expensive. It costs me nothing to take a small detour when going to get groceries and throw some bags in a big trash compactor myself. So why would I pay out the ass to have a trash service? Make it cheap and I’d consider it, but I really don’t think you can do that for an area where population density is so low. Garbage trucks are designed for suburbia and cities. Think of all the materials it takes to build and maintain that massive garbage truck and to keep it gassed up. And compare that to me taking a 5 minute detour on a grocery run in a truck I already need for other things anyway.
There’s smaller garbage trucks though, you don’t have to use the ones that I’d guess pop in your mind as the average suburbian one.
This is getting circular in logic, unless all reasons to own / use a truck stop at once there’s always something you could point to as to why you’d need it anyways and therefore does not justify paying for anything that makes the truck not needed on that particular front. The current model, even if you were to shift it all to EVs, is hugely unsustainable and very much subsidized to no end though, in substantial part somebody else is just picking up the bill here.
Yup. Totally agreed. What do you expect me to do about it? I live below the poverty line. I’m gonna save money anywhere I can and won’t apologize for it. You said it yourself that it’s subsidized. I’m not the one who chose to do that. I’m just making the best out of the hand dealt to me.
No, it’s not actually. It’s pretty simple. Individuals making lifestyle changes is never going to do anything about climate change. It requires systemic changes. For this specific scenario, if you want people to use a trash service, instead of dumping their trash themselves, make it cheaper to do it that way. This like “Oh this would be better because X” argumentation is not worthwhile. That is not how the real world works. People do things because they follow the path of least resistance financially and in their schedules, not because it’s the best way to do things. If we ever want to actually solve climate change we need to make doing things the greener way the easier way. Trying to get people to willingly spend more money on greener options is just as useless as the early 2000s recycling campaigns where they tried to have people seperate their own recycling. It’s never going to happen on any meaningful scale.
Also, I might drive a truck, but I can almost guarantee my carbon footprint is smaller than most people’s. Because China actually made solar panels cheap and I got some (I don’t use much power anyway so 600W is plenty for me). And I am just generally poor. So my truck’s about the only source of carbon coming directly from me outside my own respiration. I get a decent amount of my own food from fishing and gardening/foraging depending on the season. I’ve got a bunch of vining maypops I’ll be harvesting soon for example. Me and my 30 year old truck are not the thing destroying the planet.
All of which you are arguing against here
Not at all. Let’s go Romanov some billionaires and get to work. I’m down.
What’s the end goal here as per the problems and such you mentioned about rural life? All the billionaires get merc’d, socialism instituted - how’s that look like?
that’s significantly upstream of the modern symptoms, but there’ll still be people who might be able to walk/bike/transit but have money to spend who’ll opt to take golf carts, and we’ll be back at congestion, pollution (even EVs with regenerative brakes produce tire dust), and likely even traffic deaths, though obviously on a much lower scale than currently.
There’s also the last-mile question; I take the train to my friend’s house, but it’s a mile from the station. ubiquitous bikeshares/escooters need trucks to redistribute them. all of which is to say there’s no perfect solution to retrofit cities designed around car usage to massively reduce vehicle miles traveled.
edit: as an uber (formerly amazon) driver, it’s also a huge PITA to navigate around slower drivers, though especially at speeds this low in dense urban contexts a robotaxi makes more sense for every reason, besides makework for me to afford my own mobility device.
I guess we could be imagining a postscarcity utopia where I just get one anyway, but at that point we can also imagine everywhere being a 15 minute city, a pill that makes me not disabled and agoraphobic, etc
See, this is what I mean. Everywhere can’t be a 15 minute city. 15 minute city’s are great, but for CITYS. You might not like it but it’s true that the rural communities of the world are the backbone of society, and despite the fact that people who very much DO NOT need them now drive pickup trucks and the trucks have been overbuilt to be ridiculously big in the US pickup trucks are very much a NEEDED thing in rural life. You can’t just entirely eliminate cars until you figure out a way to move a truckload of fertilizer from the store to someones farm without a pickup truck being involved, or figure out a way to not need farms anymore. There’s a reason China is pushing rural development so hard.
You don’t need every street to accommodate trucks though. For most of the places people live, you don’t need to park 30 feet from the door, and you can manage having the nearest parking lot being 100 yards away.
I’ve been a farm worker, and I’ve used both a bike and a carpool to get to the farm. The employment simply would not have made economic sense if I needed my own car for it. I suspect that’s true for most farms. Not extinguishing ourselves from ecological collapse will necessitate retrofitting the built environment, and that includes having depots and workers’ residences less than 5 miles away from farms. Actually it will probably mean getting rid of the conventional fertilizer paradigm too, but as a stand-in for miscellaneous hauling there’s still a bit of a need for pulling power.
Your point is that we need to avoid ecological collapse right? One of the worst possible things we could do for the environment would be to come in and try to rebuild all the infrastucture in the world to make it more green. We need to learn how to use what already exists in a more green way. I’m not saying none of what your talking about could work. But it would be a slow and transitionary process. We can’t just come in and rebuild everything because it would be better another way. That would be horrible for the environment. So we’d be implementing some of these things but we would still have these huge road networks made for ICE vehicles. So we have to find a way to make use of them in a way that is less unsustainable. For example smaller trucks that are more energy efficient and building things to be easily repairable so theres less waste, and looking into hydrogen fuel cell technology (something China has been advancing a lot recently).
You don’t need to tear up the ground everywhere, but there are steps you can start taking to get things moving towards the goal.
If you removed the offset from lot lines in the “International” building code, you would allow for infill that basically would double the density of the neighborhood.
If you were to designate every third street on the grid as an arterial, you could limit automobile traffic to those streets, then make all the others pedestrian and bike (and emergency vehicles) only. Along with this, you could take empty lots or dilapidated buildings along arterials, and turn those into aggregated parking lots. This would eliminate the need for everyone to have a driveway and/or a garage. There’s never enough street parking for all the guests you might want to have over, but with the lot that averages everyone out, there’s always extra room. Having these around town means you never need to worry about finding where to park, and you have fewer places where cars enter and exit the roadways, making them smoother and safer for everyone. Sure, you have to walk 2 blocks, but 2 minutes of walking is already assumed in larger parking lots and places where you need to hunt for a parking spot.
If you got enough empty lots in a row, you could make a little gathering point for the neighborhood, with a field and a rain shelter and a bus stop and maybe a couple storefronts like a laundromat, a coffee shop, a gym, a corner store.
Put these together and all of a sudden you have 3x3 block areas inside which it’s quieter, it’s nicer-looking, the air quality is better, you don’t need to worry about kids or pets getting hit by cars, there’s never a shortage of parking, and you see a lot more of your neighbors. Additionally, your aggregated parking lot (or garage) serves as a park-and-ride: the bus stop connects to other neighborhood hubs and transit stations. Now you can easily reach hubs all over town on a bus, and cycling/walking is nicer and safer, so you don’t have as much need for a car, thus it becomes a virtuous cycle. You end up with a neighborhood that’s nice to be in, that fits together, that feels a bit more like the places people want to go on vacations to.
There’s no reason why smaller towns couldn’t do something similar. After all, the model for many centuries prior to fossil fuels was to have all the buildings packed together in the village, with the farms within a walking distance. We can talk about how “mega-farms feed everyone”, but honestly this is bad for the soil and the biome and human nutrition and other externalities. They’re not particularly more productive per unit of area, they’re just good at churning out grain for cheaper animal products.
Highways (including state routes) aren’t going anywhere, but it would be relatively easy to phase out most car traffic in favor of bus and bicycle traffic. Making each tract have a direct pay-in for their public works (water, sewer, asphalt resurfacing, etc.) instead of putting everything under the municipality’s or county’s budget would do away with much of the incentive for sprawl.
The example of fertilizer is really interesting because we use way more of it than we need. We could decrease the fertilizer requirement by promoting nitrogen fixers and mycorrhizal fungi amidst row crops, and the remainder could be made up by regular composting and humanure toilets.
You can do a piecemeal collectivization as long as you have something usable and practical to show after each step. Every time you replace an individualized use with a collectivized/aggregated use, you economize space and resources.
fair enough. I’ve lived in urban (and had my body kept alive in suburban) areas my whole life and take a lot of stuff for granted or as universal
It’s easy to do. I’ve been guilty of it myself before. Society is just crazy complicated and its easy to see a simple solution for where you are and forget the edge cases or just not know about places where it might not work. I’m totally on board with most of what your saying I just think it’s important to note we need to be flexible and keep different lifestyles in mind.
ya fs, I also didn’t mean to imply that trucks should be removed from the road wholesale since that would also get rid of ambulances, fire trucks, delivery trucks etc which are about as good a reason to have a paved road and motor vehicles at all as you can get
Most food doesn’t come from the small-time farmer driving a pickup truck to the store for fertilizer and then returning to the store with that year’s harvest. It’s from massive industrialized operations for which a pickup truck would be a woefully inadequate supply of fertilizer unless it is to be spread one micron thick.
Well those operations use… bigger trucks. How is that contradictory to the point I was making?
You were saying that pickup trucks are all-caps needed. I’m pointing out that no, we already largely get by without them. That’s how they were able to shrink the beds until they’re only big enough for farts without doing serious damage to the economy: pickup trucks are not a pillar of society.
Just because someone can get by without one for a specific task doesn’t mean they’re not needed for other people. I certainly couldn’t get by without mine. And I’m not talking about some modern overpriced tiny bedded piece of garbage. My truck is 30 years old and has a 6 foot bed. Still gets better gas mileage than those newer things. Would society collapse without them? No. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t make a lot of poor rural peoples lives a hell of a lot harder. I don’t much give a shit about the GDP personally.
The personal car is one of the largest upward transfers of wealth around. Making it essentially mandatory, indefinitely, almost everywhere is making things way worse for larger numbers of poor people than a one-time reorganization of society away from that.