Yes, obviously with how things are currently it’s not always practical to live without a car, but I don’t think it means we should be defeatist about it and assume that that’s the way things have to be. Yes, change will have to be gradual, but I think it’s reasonable to look into changing zoning laws so suburbs don’t have to be barren wastelands without any nearby shops. Yes, biking to get groceries is a little less convenient, but realistically many people and families can manage this just fine (especially with a bike trailer), and a 3 mile bike ride is like… 10 or 15 minutes?

Obviously things need to improve for these to be more reliable options for more people, and there will be inconveniences along the way, but I kind of think it’s worth thinking about shifting things in this direction, instead of cementing things the way they are? Like, walkable neighbourhoods are great, and having good public transit and biking infrastructure makes a city more accessible and gives people more freedoms and makes it so not having a driver’s license or car (e.g., due to disability or finances) isn’t a death sentence… And it’s probably better for the environment and people’s happiness and safety too. I’m really just kind of tired by how much money and effort is spent on catering to cars, which in my opinion makes our public spaces so much worse.

And if I have my car when I get to the city, why would I park it to then take mass transit?

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have to do this? From an individual perspective it’s obviously better to just be able to drive everywhere and park near your destination, I can totally empathize with you there… But there’s plenty of situations where you end up with sub-optimal solutions when everybody tries to follow their own self-interests. When everybody drives into the city all of the time that’s more carbon, more vehicles, more pollution, more noise, you need more infrastructure, more maintenance, and more parking… Things have to get further and further apart to support all of this infrastructure, and there’s more traffic and congestion which makes everything less efficient.

I mean, to be clear, I’m not saying this always makes sense… And I don’t want to see you suddenly have a 3 hour commute either. I want you to have good options for getting into the city… But I also don’t want you to be trapped in the suburb unable to come to work if you lose the ability to drive all of a sudden either, and I don’t want you to have to deal with finding parking or sitting in traffic either.

I get that these are unpopular opinions — people like their cars and they’re convenient for many things, and the thought of transitioning away from needing them as much seems scary because cars are basically people’s life blood at the moment… But I kind of feel like cars are killing us (often literally) with how expensive they are, how they limit access for people, how they shape our cities and make communities more isolated, and how they damage the environment.

Let’s go one further and just… basically ban all cars. Almost nobody should be driving all of the time in a city, and when you start to think about how many problems and how much of a nuisance cars are it seems painfully obvious.

Yes, there’s problems that we’d need to solve in order to do this, and some things would just be a little less convenient… But cities would be so much safer, quieter, and have much better air quality if fewer people were driving. Bikes are very effective for getting around for most people (especially if you don’t have to worry about cars murdering you), e-bikes make it a little more accessible, and you can’t tell me we couldn’t have an absolutely bitching public transit system if 1) we didn’t have to account for so many cars, and 2) even a small fraction of what everybody spends on their own personal motor vehicles went towards public transit infrastructure.

Sometimes we need cars to haul stuff, it totally makes sense to have motor vehicles for emergency situations and stuff, but pretty much nobody needs a giant SUV to commute to an office job by themselves. The amount of huge cars you see driving around with only one person is super depressing when you start looking for it.

Yeah, exactly. Legal protections only really seem to work if you’re already a big enough corporation to afford it, so it doesn’t seem like parents and copyright really support independent creators as much as we would maybe like. It seems more often than not to be weaponized against progress for the sake of personal gains… and that just sucks. The only potential argument for these protections is that people wouldn’t invent or create things without them… Because all things being equal they benefit a select few people (rights holders), and otherwise serve no benefit to anybody else, often leading to stifled innovation and less competition.

Maybe I’m just naive, but I feel like it doesn’t really make sense particularly in the internet era. I can understand the argument that patents and copyright can allow people to profit off of their ideas and all, and maybe it would actually discourage anybody from making anything otherwise… But I just don’t really buy that? It seems like patents and rights often end up being held by large corporations instead of creators anyway, and they have incentive to iterate anyway? I dunno.

But in some sense copyright and patents only benefit the owner of them and everybody else suffers as a result. Technically speaking it’s better if everybody can have free access to books and knowledge and works of art, and it’s beneficial for everybody in society if anybody can create things based on other designs and works. Like I don’t really benefit at all from E-ink having patents which stifles innovation in the field just so that they can turn a profit for years before anybody else can… Maybe you can argue that they wouldn’t have invented it unless they were incentivized by being able to weaponize the legal system as a result of their patent findings, but I kind of doubt that… They’d still have a good product that people would want anyway? Maybe I’m just being idealistic, but it seems a huge shame that we can’t imagine that humans would want to create and better the lives of ourselves and others without profit motives, you know? It’d be nice if we could just support each other and work on making cool and better things.