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.
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.
It’s pretty easy to say we’d do a “one-time reorganization of society” when you don’t think about what that would actually entail. We’re talking about rebuilding every piece of transportation infrastucture on the planet. From the ground up. That’s not a simple one-time reorganization. It’s a decades long, maybe a century long, transition plan. I’m 100% on board with getting there eventually, but this is not the time. We haven’t even dismantled capitalism yet. How do you expect us to pull that off right now? And how exactly do you expect the everyday average person to react if your opening argument is “cars are bad and we should get rid of them”? Focus on the first steps. Expand rail infrastucture. Stop feature creep and make cars simpler, more reliable, and cheaper again. Reduce maximum speed limits on roads, forcing things to be built closer together again, and making it safer for pedestrians to walk on sidewalks. Bring back street cars and trolleys. Expand bus routes. etc.
You’re exaggerating the scope of the changes needed. Not every road needs to be dug up. Feet and bikes work on roads built for cars. And as China has shown, you can build out a massive HSR network fairly quickly if resources are focused there and not on rolling out ever-larger child crushers.
And none of this is going to happen under capitalism; neither my plan that fixes things within my lifetime nor yours the takes a century we’re unlikely to have if we keep cooking the planet. We’re both discussing things that are not going to happen without a revolution first. And if we have a revolution, we’re not giving car-brained reactionaries veto power over the transportation system.