No, it is a fact. That it doesn’t align with the choices you’ve made in your life doesn’t change that.
> Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5.
Tell me you’ve never been outside the US before without telling me you’ve never been outside the US before.
Joking aside (there are plenty of other countries with transit as bad as the US), plenty of other countries have figured out how to make public transit and alternative forms of transit (bikes, scooters) widely practical. Many places have optimized themselves for car travel, and if we want any chance of a livable world 100 years from now, we need to start optimizing for a different reality.
Yes, we will never get rid of cars entirely. But we must find a way to get rid of cars for the 95%+ of trips that are part of day to day life (groceries, errands, commuting).
A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable planet. Deal with it, my kids aren’t ditching for Mars or TRAPPIST-1 or whatever.
> A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable planet.
There's no reason to believe this.
Unsustainability is only ever a result of perpetually growing demand, or demand growing faster than technological innovation. Global population growth rate is projected to stagnate in 100 years, so it's a moot point, and from a purely engineering perspective, emissions are a solved problem. The real issue is that emission are poised to rise in the short-run because demand is growing so fast in east Asia (and to a lesser extent through immigration to the West).
This is a near-term problem, unsustainability doesn't belong in the conversaiton. The question is really whether we want to weather that strain with current trajectory, or spend and implement policies to mitigate the climate effects during that period.
They take up a lot of space and require a lot more energy to move around. Even if we get 100% electric vehicles with all clean power generation - it's still a massive toll on the environment.
A car isn't a helicopter, they require reasonably good roads with high costs of maintenance(and a lot of other infrastructure to support roads).
Also car dependent lifestyle means that population density drops, with less walkable places than ever.
No, it is a fact. That it doesn’t align with the choices you’ve made in your life doesn’t change that.
> Not everyone lives in large cities with whole mass transit systems or works the usual 9-5.
Tell me you’ve never been outside the US before without telling me you’ve never been outside the US before.
Joking aside (there are plenty of other countries with transit as bad as the US), plenty of other countries have figured out how to make public transit and alternative forms of transit (bikes, scooters) widely practical. Many places have optimized themselves for car travel, and if we want any chance of a livable world 100 years from now, we need to start optimizing for a different reality.
Yes, we will never get rid of cars entirely. But we must find a way to get rid of cars for the 95%+ of trips that are part of day to day life (groceries, errands, commuting).
A car-centric lifestyle is incompatible with a livable planet. Deal with it, my kids aren’t ditching for Mars or TRAPPIST-1 or whatever.