Absolutely both are needed. I struggle to understand how people think a rural area with 5 minute drives between homes could be connected to a public transit network that is timely and not astronomically expensive.
Similarly, I struggle to understand why people think paying for roads to connect houses 5 miles away from each other isn’t astronomically expensive
Not sure who's downvoting you, you're absolutely correct. Infrastructure for rural, and even suburban areas isn't even close to being paid for by the people living there. I thought this was common knowledge. It should be obvious that 5 families living in a single large building require significantly fewer resources than 5 individual homes 5 miles apart.
If left to private companies, they can’t even seem to bring internet service 5 miles down a rural road. How the heck do you even imaging the whole road being a reasonable idea
Roads in rural new England are most often publicly funded, and are connected into a network of roads and are for transit, so rural roads are in fact a public transit network. I get that you mean trains and buses, though.
Rural roads are just expensive, period. Putting electric cars on them would additionally shorten their lifespan, so I fail to see how either public transit or electric cars are supposed to help. Plus, rural folks are not major emitters, so it doesn't really make much sense to even try to find meaningful emission savings there.
Plus, rural folks are not major emitters, so it doesn’t really make much sense to even try to find meaningful emission savings there.
"On average, cities and large towns produce about four tonnes of CO2 per capita, compared with more than six tonnes elsewhere in the UK"
Very few people ought to be living that way. I think it's fine for those people to use ICE cars. I also don't care very much if the tractors use fossil fuels.
You eliminate the rural area with 5 minute drives between homes. Japan has a much higher population density more generally, granted, and they do occasionally get older, offset, single homes that are miles from anything else. But they also have extremely rural villages with maybe 2000 people that are still about as rural as you can get and still go in for farming. Many other places (I would say, basically all of them?) do this as well, and not all of them have high population density. I think, almost definitionally, the land use I'm proposing has a higher pop density, but the style of development generally, you'd be hard pressed not to classify it as rural.
The solution here is to orient the land use radially. Also probably to use less land generally, but that's a separate issue. Most land use in america looks like having 20 different farms, that are each like 3 or 4 miles across, sometimes with multiple plots, with each house being positioned as far away from the other houses as possible, usually somewhere along the edge of a plot, and then running roads out to each of them, sometimes dirt roads, sometimes paved, usually some combination of the two for higher use vs lower use vs private.
Instead of that, you do what people have been doing for centuries. You clump the 20 different houses together in one contiguous strip that's placed along some sort of rail line or higher traffic road, and then you disconnect all the plots of land from the particular houses. Ownership doesn't necessarily have to correlate with one plot of land vs another. Then you gain all of the benefits that entails, and if everything is laid out sensibly, then you're only about 3 miles from your specific plot. Utilities become cheaper to maintain, emergencies like fires, medical problems, natural disasters, become much easier to deal with, you can start building some actual infrastructure, like, say, a rail line.
That becomes much easier to justify if you only gotta send that shit to like one concentration of 20 or 30 or houses instead of sending it to those 20 or 30 houses individually, most especially if that line is just passing through before heading somewhere else, which should generally be the case. Maintenance of that rail line also becomes less problematic compared to that of a road if we're considering that this rural area is probably mostly going to be farmland that demands larger industrial equipment shipments, and is going to be shipping back and forth things like grain, bulk goods which would do much better to be shipped by train compared to most other forms of transit. Slap that together with a multi-daily passenger rail line that passes through it as a stop and you're pretty much set.
Except we already have built it wrong. Maybe if the government bought all of those houses and re-zomed the land forbidding houses but we're talking more than 10 million homes (probably WAY more) probably $4 trillion+ and that isn't even accounting for building new infrastructure. Not to mention people would refuse to leave their land. Realistically this is probably a $50 trillion undertaking.
I struggle to think how you see a generic statement about improving public transit and immediately go to "but what about the places where it cant help?"
Well shit Einstein, I suppose this is just referring to places where it does then.
Your comment does nothing to support or contradict the idea we should improve public transport...
Tiny cars is the only solution
I would unironically drive something like this. I've often wondered if I could make a street legal go cart.
Mandalorian armor suit with jetpack and climate control for me.
But what if one day five years from now you need to move 20 refrigerators at midnight and all the trains suddenly break down?
/s
Well, I would simply make 20 journeys with my Cybertruck. 10 would be pushing it. The weight of two fridges might snap the chassis.
Yeah, trains.
But then how can we turn trillions of dollars by shackling people to an expensive automobile along with its repairs and insurance costs? How can we further exploit by forcing the use of these vehicles, thus requiring the purchase of their fuels and the use of asphalt companies to pave endless highways and streets? The public yearns to be exploited- no, it needs to be.
So, I don't know if you know this or not, but a majority of people want their cars. Nobody is forcing their use. Roads exist because people want their cars, and they want to be able to get places in those cars.
As a mid-westerner, cars and driving is in my culture and DNA. For many of us, cars are our freedom machines, the only way to move on in life, the only way to get anywhere. I love to drive and I can drive almost anything. What I don't like, is having to drive to survive, having to constantly be in a hurry.
I swear this sub is the same thing repeated in different variations over and over
pragmatically we should do both. we know no matter how much we scream or wish it that cars are not going to go away but we can expand transit and we should move as many autos and such to electric.
During WWII they invented the concept of gross domestic product to quantify a country's ability to wage war. The higher the GDP, the bigger the military it could support.
GDP is a measure of how much economic activity there is. If I pay you and then you pay someone else and then that person pays me the same amount we've increased the GDP without actually doing anything. So the US, knowing this was their key performance indicator, set about increasing GDP.
So they make everyone buy a car, then gas, then service, then insurance instead of building rail infrastructure. The same goes for child care: If you make it so both parents have to work and pay someone else to watch their kids that's a much bigger boost to GDP than one or even both parents being able to stay home and raise their kids. Having everyone in a suburb have to buy their own lawnmower and trimmer and grill and stove and washer/dryer and dishwasher also boosts GDP way more than sharing things.
Plus there's the fact that cars require a lot of the same technologies and factories as a lot of war materiel. If we were ever to be in another global conflict we'd need to build all the guns and trucks and uniforms at home, and without a strong car industry we'd have to start a lot of that from scratch.
But we've got the biggest GDP in the world so I guess that's something.
Thank goodness the UN and the World Economic Forum have started talking about replacing GDP with a measure of economic activity that takes human well-being into account. That was one of the points at the Summit of the Future a could weeks ago. Better late than never.
You're kind of right that GDP is strictly a measure of economic productivity, and a lot of people look at it to represent a lot of other things like the size of the economy, the health of the economy, how well citizens are doing, etc.
However, you are dead wrong on this point:
If I pay you and then you pay someone else and then that person pays me the same amount we’ve increased the GDP without actually doing anything.
It's possible that, you've "increased the GDP without actually doing anything" if you're each not doing anything actually useful (see the broken window fallacy). However, in most case, each of those steps resulted in a useful service or product.
However, in most case, each of those steps resulted in a useful service or product.
I dunno if I'd say that, really. "useful service or product" is inferring a lot about the context in which these transactions are done, it doesn't really open up the box, there. Is gambling a useful service to have access to, for instance? What about, say, setting everyone about buying a big suburban house, a car, running out a ton of asphalt to these places, putting out utilities to them that are both financially insolvent in the abstract and also take up too many resources for what they are? Like, I dunno, if we're considering the alternatives, there, which incur much less consumption, and thus, much less trade, the alternatives that cost a whole lot less, I would say that the idea that this is a useful measurement really at all begins to totally fall apart. I dunno. I maybe wonder if, say, free healthcare might be thought to decrease the GDP of a country simply because less money is being thrown around.
If I pay you and then you pay someone else and then that person pays me the same amount we've increased the GDP without actually doing anything.
Wrong. This transfer of funds would be taxed in some form or the other. GST if u r a registered business. If u aren't, it would come under personal income tax. Therefore, it would not be profitable for you to do this money exchange without expecting something in return. If you say that you simply enjoy seeing cash change hands, then u r generating value. U r getting pleasure in return of doing this experiment. Soooo that does come under GDP.
Now of course, GDP shouldn't be the only metric you judge a country by. It's clearly very flawed in measuring stuff like quality of life per person, wealth inequality and so on. However, it doesn't mean that you should completely ditch it either. It certainly has its use case when trying to understand the economy of a country.
Wrong. Most jurisdictions have Value-Added Taxes, including I'm pretty sure all places that call their sales tax GST (Goods and Services Tax). In the given scenario, as long as the businesses were making those purchases (as business expenses), they would take the taxes paid as ITCs (Input Tax Credits), and be left will a GST bill of NIL.
Source: Here's Canada's info on ITCs. It's pretty similar in other jurisdictions.
Man I really wish all that conspiracy rambling was real. As misguided as it would be, it would show a ruling class with political direction and effectiveness. I’d be happier if that was the reality - even if everything you said was true - over the mindless chickens we have wandering around our collective political landscape.
A bunch of mindless chickens chasing GDP would have the same effect
Ah, I see that Moo Deng has infiltrated the fediverse, welcome queen
Two things can be true.
We should reduce our dependence on cars. Also, our vehicles should be Electric. Ine dos not preclude the other and so saying we shouldn't do one because of the other is a fallacy.
Hehe cute hippo
Look, I'm not about to take transportation advice from a river mammal that enjoys showering its neighbours with faeces using its helicopter tail.
That being said, he's not wrong.
Yeah, the Public Transit situation in the USA needs a total overhaul; cities are too hostile towards foot and bike traffic. By addressing the capacity needed to transport people to their destinations and altering city planning, cars will become an option instead of a necessity. I’d love for the US to get more into trains like Europe has; that would help bridge the distance for people needing to travel cross country. I’d be able to travel more as a car free person.
The entire society is designed and structured specifically so that you need a car, its a bug, not a feature.
The more cars you have, the more you require cars.
we most certainly do not need both. if we did the latter successfully, we should be getting rid of most gas cars, and replacing only the remainder. having as many cars as we have now is bad for a multitude of reasons beyond that they're mostly burning gas.
wow, i really didn't expect 'there should be less cars' to be such a divisive stance on c/fuckcars
Those still rely on gasoline.
I can find the calculations again but even if you would drive 250km a day it would still have a 4x bigger CO2e impact to eat 200gr(typical serving size per meal) less meat per day than to switch to public transit. So if you’re not plant based, being anal about what car you drive is just ignoring the
elephantfarm animal in the room.Okay but eating less meat doesn’t reduce micro plastics from tire dust if I still drive a car.
One step at a time I guess
I’m just saying, buying beans and rice is cheaper than a 60 grand electric car
No thanks, I’d rather just skip to banning cars
Someone will counter with “but the US is really a big place …” and you’ll have a completely counterproductive argument.
Or you could focus on better alternatives to cars. When that works, focus on better alternatives to more car uses. When that works, focus on whatever people keep using cars the most for
and what alternative to cars (other than ATVs and private planes) can work outside of citys?
Trains, they can be called upon and carry larger machinery than trucks
It’s inside cities that those are inefficient
