I've long been saying that a ~~handicapped~~ disabled person placard[1] should be your permission to drive within city limits, and other than that, you stay out of downtown areas of any city in your car.

There are various degrees at which we can service private cars. Massive parking structures ain't it, taking over all public spaces with roads ain't it. But a path for disabled people to reach their destination directly in a car or van seems reasonable and doable, and will still allow us to reclaim most of the public space and money we spend servicing cars now.

[1] This is the correct name for it. Honestly, my bad.

I'm stuck in Houston, but we do still very occasionally succeed in implementing walkable/bikeable/mass transit improvements here and there. Whenever we do, the economy in that corner of the city balloons.

But then the state government steps in and quashes any effort to expand or improve on these developments, and we're back to spending $10B to wiggle the I-45 a bit so trucks can travel faster.

It doesn't help that so many people take "fuck cars" as literal and essentially demonize any car use. We'll always need some "cars", but let's get that number nice and low.

I've heard it said that Houston's annual transportation cost for total car-dependency is close to 20% of their budget.

NYC, which has the entire MTA plus a huge number of highways and still shocking amount of car dependency, is 10%.

Amsterdam with all of its trams and bike paths is closest to 4%.

Yet any resident of NYC or Houston will tell you it is fucking TERRIBLE driving in either of those cities. Meanwhile, Amsterdam is ranked one of the best cities for people who love to drive because its roads are maintained, safe, and aren't congested.

It's actually not possible to be 100% transit or 100% bike, outside of some weird Swiss vacation communities or Canadian island neighborhoods. But the more you invest in transit and bikeped, the more you address the actual cause of congestion and the more drivable your city gets. Even if you truly love and prefer driving, multimodal cities are still better. Downs-Thompson is inviolable.

Yes please, I love cars, I do orientation rallies, I don't like to have to drive anywhere. Motorways are boring.

I drive trains. I need to use a car, I don't like to sit in traffic after my shift, I want to get to the hotel/home asap.

I could survive without a car for my short commute but insanely enough having a shit econobox makes more sense financially than a cargo bike until it finally dies, I deduct loads from taxable income, can't with a bike. I get to sit in a warm box and all my shit is behind me. A hefty cargo bike (enough for two pieces of cabin luggage, I leave for two days and take food with me) would be more than I paid for the car. Oh and I'm not scared of much but Friday/Saturday 3 AM on a bike on dark roads? Bleh.

(I live in France, not like the US but some of the urban planning bullshit is similar)

Say this to anybody who will listen, please! I've been using it on my car guy friends, and they're receiving it loud and clear. They love the idea of having the roads all to themselves, many of the actual enthusiast types do anyways.

See, this is why I'm convinced that Americans secretly love traffic congestion. Why else would they do vehemently oppose anything that takes cars off of the streets and highways, and out of their way?

I'm not even sure that I'm joking, anymore. It's important for humans to have rituals that symbolically bind us to a larger community, like eating a big meal (usually turkey) on Thanksgiving Day, right? It feels like drivers want everybody stuck in traffic jams, so that they can feel that their own frustrating commute has some greater meaning, like this is how it is, and we're all in it together. (Like the weather.) Those of us who escape the matrix just enrage them by proving that their effort is meaningless and dumb.

Anyway, just a random musing.

Yeah, it depends on the context. Is the thread saying "we need to build out far more cycling infrastructure"? If so, no argument.

Or is the thread one of the naiive ones trying to argue about how we can completely eliminate cars? Then people start bringing up the edge cases that still require cars.

As someone who doesn’t have a license or a car, but does bike a lot - there will be solutions.

I order my groceries delivered. When I needed to get my old bed recycled, I asked the second hand store and they came and picked it up. They weren’t interested in the broken mattress for it (obviously), so I contacted a moving company and they had it recycled for $40.

Now I get that that cost might be hard to swallow for some, but keep in mind that I don’t pay for my car, its insurance, the fuel, or maintenance, and it took less than five minutes for me to be done with the entire thing. All I had to do was open my front door and two burly men came and picked it up for me. I didn’t even have to wait at the recycling station.

Those $40 paid for themselves.

It’s also worth noting that I do live in the frozen north (not Canada, further north), where we don’t see the sun for half the year. I see people biking year round.

...and they'd have a much better time of it if there were less car traffic.

Suddenly, all the north Canadians who live with snow storms 24/7 appear to comment how all the world infrastructure has to adapt to their specific needs.