My desire not to inhale brake & tire particulate, not to be killed while walking to the store, and not to subsidize others expensive lifestyles, is not rooted in jealousy.
I owned a car once, it was sometimes convenient, interesting & fun, but it was also often infuriating, terrifying and expensive. If I can pull it off, I'd prefer to never own one again. I don't really care if anyone else owns them, I just don't want to subsidize them or have their externalities imposed on me.
An alternative to outright bans is to make some good faith attempt at estimating externalities and internalizing them, and reducing subsidies such as free, or below market rate public land for private vehicle operation & storage. But this is difficult and it's not clear the politics of it would be much better than an outright bans. If a good faith effort determined that operating a car while not being subsidized and not inflicting externalities on others, cost a significant amount of money, then the whole effort would be castigated as limiting driving to the very rich, and probably wouldn't go very far. So it feels like we end up with either "everyone drives everywhere all the time for everything and it's the govt's job to shovel public funds & land at it" or outright bans in popular areas.
Cars, oil, and the internal combustion engine, are all tremendously useful, and we would be foolish to pretend otherwise. But all tools have their ideal uses and all tools can be misused & overused to bad ends, both for the tool user and for others.
A world of 100% gasoline car ownership where the car was simply a fun toy for kick ass weekend road trips, and cities had never been bulldozed to make room for them as substitutes for our legs, would be a pretty great world, even if it involved a bit more pollution/externalities/subsidies than some utopian car free world.
I owned a car once, it was sometimes convenient, interesting & fun, but it was also often infuriating, terrifying and expensive. If I can pull it off, I'd prefer to never own one again. I don't really care if anyone else owns them, I just don't want to subsidize them or have their externalities imposed on me.
An alternative to outright bans is to make some good faith attempt at estimating externalities and internalizing them, and reducing subsidies such as free, or below market rate public land for private vehicle operation & storage. But this is difficult and it's not clear the politics of it would be much better than an outright bans. If a good faith effort determined that operating a car while not being subsidized and not inflicting externalities on others, cost a significant amount of money, then the whole effort would be castigated as limiting driving to the very rich, and probably wouldn't go very far. So it feels like we end up with either "everyone drives everywhere all the time for everything and it's the govt's job to shovel public funds & land at it" or outright bans in popular areas.
Cars, oil, and the internal combustion engine, are all tremendously useful, and we would be foolish to pretend otherwise. But all tools have their ideal uses and all tools can be misused & overused to bad ends, both for the tool user and for others.
A world of 100% gasoline car ownership where the car was simply a fun toy for kick ass weekend road trips, and cities had never been bulldozed to make room for them as substitutes for our legs, would be a pretty great world, even if it involved a bit more pollution/externalities/subsidies than some utopian car free world.