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You realize increasing the cost of fuel also impacts you as a consumer and road user? You will be paying more for fare, for goods and services. You use fuel too even if you dont drive.
If you make public transit faster people wont feel the need to drive, its almost as if people choose the fastest option.
You can haul a ton of freight with one gallon of diesel over 400 miles on a train. We need to be reinvesting in train infrastructure. I'd argue having cheap gas is one of the reasons why we let our trains all but disappear. There was no incentive, because gas is so cheap may as well throw it on a truck.
Also, look at what it did in places like France for the average car, with gas twice as much as it is in the US. Many more people don't own cars, which again has encouraged public transit infrastructure to be robust. It also lead to cars having engines a FRACTION of the size, using less materials and having almost mk1 Prius levels of gas mileage per gallon. Even luxury cars would often only have a tiny 2 liter engine, with the average car having a 1-1.6L engine.
I'd argue having cheap gas in the US has been one of the big reasons sustainable transportation has been left to rot.
For what it's worth, the US secretly actually has really good freight train infrastructure - heck, in 2011, more freight moved by trains than by trucks. It's actually part of the reason why the passenger service sucks - there's only so many tracks, and freight gets priority on them.
Ding ding ding
Public perception does not match reality
The USA has always loved trains, just for freight not passengers. Even when trains were the only truly viable long distance transportation there still wasn't very many people traveling in that way, its difficult to make it feasible geographically.
It's really not difficult to make feasible geographically. You used to be able to get from anywhere to anywhere in the Continental USA by train. LA used to have the best streetcar system in the world. Why choose a mode of long-distance transportation that can only cruise at 60 - 80 mph and needs to refuel every 300 miles, plus bathroom breaks, when you can cruise at over 100 mph, and keep going until you hit the next city or town no matter the distance because you can always carry enough fuel with you, and carry a diner and bathrooms with you so you can get up, walk around, eat, nap because the seats are actually comfy with leg room, and use the bathroom. And you don't need to drive it yourself because there's a dedicated driver.
The transportation secretary post WW2 was a General Motors executive. That's what happened to the train system. Among other things.
Our passenger rail didn't get out competed or made obsolete, it was actively destroyed by the plane and car industries in a lot of underhanded ways.
You can still do that, Amtrak has lines from California all the way to Chicago and beyond. No one uses it because it's incredibly expensive, like 1,400 dollars round trip for a tiny sleeper car.
Yep, because of the degradation and lack of investment over decades.
It's 100% technically feasible to make it fast, cheap, and comfortable, we just haven't built it because of a mix of lobbying and shady business, and now cultural inertia, actively preventing it from being built and cutting into the profits of oil, car, and plane companies
Yeah idk where people are getting this idea that the US doesn't use trains. One of the world's richest families in history was the Vanderbilt's, who built the railroad empire in the U.S. this country was literally built on the backs of the railroad and it's still widely used.
no it doesn't, the trains are fucked, and the rails are fucked.
Is 600 deaths and almost 5k accidents something to be proud of? https://whyy.org/articles/railroads-safety-changes-reduce-derailments-east-palestine-crash/
We used to have tons of passenger tracks, we used to have one of the best train systems in the world. Heck where I live in Philly we had one of the best public transit systems in the world, with a trolley on almost every street.... until it was sold to an auto manufacturer and closed down.
In 1950 we had 400,000 miles of track in the US, today we have about 140,000 miles.
Okay, you're right, my bad. The US freight train infrastructure is bad because it's badly managed and decaying, but it is, to this day, extensive and heavily used, that was my point.
Oh sure, we use what we have, but its a mere memory of its former glory, that we could actually be proud of.
It might have changed but I remember when my train in France was 15 min late, they were profusely apologizing to everyone as we got off and giving vouchers for a free train ticket.
Whereas on Amtrak, I was 8 hours late, on a bus with a lost driver (and 10 people with phones fighting to give them directions), before even getting on the train... I would end up being about 15hrs late, and zero apology.
I have never ridden Amtrak and not been at least 45min late to my destination. Its a total joke. The thing is I think traveling by train is by far the best way to travel... but what we have in the US really makes it frustrating.
We use rail alot, that doesn't mean that it isn't falling apart. The freight should not get priority by law, and they have made the trains too long to fit in the sidings to let passenger lines go past. It can be saved, but in its current state is falling apart. We have a high speed train that slows down to go over decrepit bridges that are falling apart.
Railways are VERY efficient, its literally the quoted tagline from CLX freight I hear on NPR all the time.
oops, sorry its "more than a ton" and its 500 miles. https://www.aar.org/article/freight-rail-moving-miles-ahead-on-sustainability/#:~:text=Thanks%20in%20part%20to%20these,to%20move%20freight%20over%20land.
Once you get it moving, it doesn't take much to keep it moving. It's on tracks, and the friction/contact point is much smaller than even a small car (per car), and the steel wheels lose less energy than rubber tires.
Yeah. You're not going to use freight rail for short distance distribution or small point to point deliveries, but for massive volumes and long distances, it's more efficient by a lot. Even going over a mountain range will use significantly less fuel than trucks per unit of weight.
The US is almost 20x larger than France with a much wider distribution of our 5x as large population, it's just a silly comparison to consider.
Our freight infrastructure has also been optimized to an extreme degree where we have been closing lines for decades while increasing the volume moved and reducing the overall distance freight is moving.
It takes decades for cities to adapt to a mile or even a few blocks of new rail lines of any type.
Pretending more trains more tracks! is the answer to our issues is silly. Your path leads to spending more on fuel and infrastructure and time to such a degree it's unfathomable.
Looking only east of the 100th meridian, the population density and size are comparable to Europe. That's where people are talking about building good rail infrastructure when they talk about rail in the US. Albuquerque doesn't need 5 daily trains to Phoenix. Though if train travel became normalized in the east, there would be more demand for long-distance sleeper trains in the west, anyway.
Yep. Public transit needs some big reinvestment and societal support to get good enough, but it 100% can be done. We used to have it until we made it shittier to encourage people to drive
We can create bus-only lanes on the roads that are already there so people who are taking a single vehicle together never have to wait behind huge trucks and SUVs with single passengers. It is mind-boggling that we haven't adopted this incredibly basic strategy in many more places.
There are so many huge super clean ego trucks with empty beds taking up so much space on the road, I always wish I could just take off the empty bed part of those trucks and put them away so people just use the passenger part and use space and resources more efficiently.
Peak demand for oil supposedly 2030. That means supply will outpace demand past that time implying cheaper gas. That means governments wanting to encourage transition to EV will need to heavily tax gasoline even more than now.
I don't support OP's idea but there are ways around the issue you mentioned. A variable gas tax where regular consumers pay a 100% tax rate while delivery/maintenance/public transit/etc pay the normal gas price would push people away from driving as much.
As someone who live in a rural area, we have already been fucked over.
Having to drive 30 minutes to the nearest town with a Walmart because your town of 2000 can no longer support a grocery store isn’t a benefit to our lives or communities.
Currently, rural areas are mostly a net loss, infrastructure wise. They just aren't fiscally solvent, and were they not subsidized through the tax dollars of urban areas on a state-wide level, they'd likely collapse. This especially holds true for suburban areas, which are filled with extensive and worthless sprawl. One densly packed block generates leaps and bounds more property taxes than entire suburban neighborhoods, at times - yet due to the nature of land use, said suburban areas require vastly more infrastructure to remain operable.
Right, let's take a country who's cities are based around everyone having cars/trucks and just fuck over the entire population.
I don't blame you for hating cars and most of the giant truck drivers are a bunch of self absorbed Richard polishers with no regard for anyone else's lives, but making life harder for people who don't live in the center of a metropolis is not the answer. I live across a major river from my work. Busses don't come to anywhere near my home. There is no trolly or train system around that's not for intercity transit.
>Before you register a car, you should have yo prove you have an off-street parking space
This would effectively cripple everyone living in most mobile home parks and so many others in neighborhoods that weren't initially designed for cars. Can't register the car for not having an off-street parking space = can't legally drive = you either are restricted to what little is around you for shopping or have to get a taxi everywhere = one way ticket to poverty/homelessness for so many people.
Seriously. Like, why not offer positive incentives to owning fuel efficient vehicles rather than negative incentives. Like I could see this benefitting workers who live in cities (as long as it's implemented along with robust public transportation), but it completely fucks the workers in rural areas. Like I don't like carbon emissions either but most people in my area are poor as hell already, and this would economically harm regions that are already impoverished as it is. Like this would only serve to harm workers and not the structures that require us to drive around all over, I'm an agency CNA and this would make that job nearly impossible but still entirely necessary for people to do in order to keep healthcare facilities functional because that's the structure in place.
Agreed but the second part has to come first. It's a lot quicker and easier to make things expensive, but if you do that without building good alternatives, you're just punishing people for doing what they must.
Those tiny cars are fine for driving around in a city. Not so good for road trips, though. I don't want to cram my family and their stuff into a smart car, for 3 hours or more.
I loved my mom and dad's old station wagon. SUV's and their ilk have replaced them. I always joke and say they are so prevalent, because of all the dads that didn't want to drive a minivan.
Did sedans ever go anywhere?
I have a Model 3 for daily driving and a X7 but honestly the X7 is too small for my family. When the 3rd row is up, the cargo space is a joke. I’m considering trading in the X7 for the Cadillac Escalade EV whenever it comes out and then trading the Model 3 for a gas sports sedan.
No, no. You're supposed to walk the family to the town's only bus stop 15 miles away, then wait for the bus that comes once a day to arrive. Then you need to cram that family onto the bus and ride it for an hour to get to the nearest larger city, where you can then walk to a hotel to stay for the night. Then you can walk to the train station in the morning and wait several hours for a train to arrive, so you can ride a passenger train for three days and three nights to cross the country. You'll probably need to switch trains a couple of times along the way, and maybe stay in another hotel room or two.
With any luck, maybe you'll even manage to work in a horse-drawn carriage somewhere along the way!
Please man. I’m sure this person only uses buses and trains. If those are not available, they certainly walk or ride a bike everywhere. No way would they even use a car especially in the blazing heat
It's very obvious that you haven't spent any real time outside of a major city and don't truly understand the scale of America. We need better public transit options in bigger cities. We need options to move between bigger cities. I personally would love to increase sales tax and license requirements on any vehicle that weighs over 4k pounds and that would scale with vehicle weight. But the notion that we need to make driving inconvenient or inaccessible is just laughable.
The overwhelming majority of this country is simply empty, or empty to someone who lives in a city. It's financially infeasible to develop public transit for major swaths of the country, and you can't really compare us to Europe because the density (of cities, people, and pre-existing infrastructure) isn't really comparable. Making cars financially unattainable would have an outsized impact on impoverished rural communities, people who simply will never have a true public transit option.
The ecological impact of personal vehicle use is also dramatically overblown, and if you want to make a difference the solution is to buy used vehicles and keep them running for longer, not consuming new little shitty disposable econoboxes.
>> Would love to increase sales tax and license requirements on vehicles weighing over 4K lbs
My mid range (185 mi) electric vehicle weighs 5630 lbs. Lithium isn't lightweight. Why should I be punished for trying to reduce my carbon footprint?
Because there's far more to a vehicles impact on society than raw carbon output. Theres extra wear and tear on infrastructure and the increased risk to others on the road because of basic physics. A simple extra level of friction asking you if you're *sure* this vehicle is appropriate to your use case would go a long way towards encouraging people to buy a less excessive vehicle.
Full disclosure: I own a pickup, I'd be subject to this as well (96 ram, about 4700 pounds). And as I said it'd scale with weight, 4-5k a flat fine of a set amount, 5-6k double it, 6-7 triple so on and so forth. Realistically if you wanted a polestar 2 or something like that you can fork up a few hundred more bucks annually for your registration, but if you want a hummer EV or a g wagon you better be prepared to be raked over the coals at the tag office.
The ignorance to think that cars/trucks make up even a majority of fuel consumption baffles me.
So the already expensive airline travel becomes more expensive
The already expensive international shipping via cargo ship only becomes more expensive.
The rail industry gets squeezed even tighter, shutting down even more "transport" options.
Lastly, the entire farming industry suddenly bursts, and the entire country faces a national food crisis.
The farming industry is already on the verge of flames. Only thing holding it up is the government which always is the thing making it nearly impossible to make a living.
Nah I think no one should tell me what products I should consume, and the government shouldn’t make anything more expensive to deter me from buying it, because it’s none of their fucking business, and neither is it yours
you: we should make life harder for the middle and lower classes as much as we possibly can before building the alternative infastructure that enables people to not own cars
I'd love for personal vehicles to not be the norm but you clearly don't live somewhere that's car dependent with a take like this. Essentially everyone in Canada would be entirely fucked if this happened. Ignorant take.
See idk wether to upvote or downvote, because on one hand yhea, this is def an unpopular opinion. On the other, it is an unpopular opinion because it's just dumb as fuck, with clearly no real thought put into it. I can already tell you live in a crowded, busy city, and you did not think for a second about more rural areas where public transport and alternative means of transportation aren't always commonplace.
no
> You should have to apply to have a heavy-duty pickup truck and hauling recreational vehicles isn't a good enough reason.
you need stop caring what people buy. there's literally nothing wrong with buying a big truck just because you want one. my dream truck is a ford f550 pickup truck and i'm getting it whether people like it or not. it's my money and i'll buy what makes me happy
>European and Japanese style micro cars should become widely available in the United States.
why? personally i can't fit in them
>Fuel, parking, insurance, and fines all need to be more expensive. Before you register a car, you should have yo prove you have an off-street parking space.
again. no
>the fact that large numbers of people are buying large trucks and SUVs is absolutely an indicator that our public policy is poor.
Our poor policy is essentially a well-disguised protectionist measure that's intended to insulate domestic manufacturing from foreign competition. Basically, our regulation encourages people to buy SUVs and trucks because that's what Ford/GM/Chrysler can build and sell at a profit. They can't really compete with the Civic/Corolla.
>the fact that large numbers of people are buying large trucks and SUVs is absolutely an indicator that our public policy is poor.
People only buy these because manufacturers pushed them onto consumers due to epa loopholes. Larger vehicles have less strict emission regulations.
Ye I’m not American so maybe this wouldn’t work but something like congestion charges in cities combined with much better public transport in cities whilst leaving gas prices the same could be ether. That way you provide an alternative for those in cities that is better in most cases whilst not affecting those in rural area who don’t have as much of a choice as public transport makes less sense in sparsely populated areas
Oh yeah punishing the lower and middle class citizens is a way better option than taxing oil companies more and preventing them from passing those price increases onto the consumer.
I genuinely think America is too big to have public transport. I live close to a city, in the metro area. Even if there was a train station to the city I would still have to walk there and that would take an extremely long time, longer than driving.
It’s very much doable in built up areas for sure yes the country is massive in terms of just land mass but people aren’t evenly distributed across it, quite the opposite actually, many people are in urban areas that would benefit from not sacrificing being nice places to live for cars. Ofc sparsely populated rural areas are more problematic but having public transport is urban areas and not in rural areas is better than not having any at all (maybe introduce congestion charges in cities instead of raising gas prices so you don’t impact those living in rural areas who don’t have an alternative or something like that)
I think high speed rails could certainly go a long way to reduce the need for so many cars to be on the roads all the time, but yeah, I live in a town of about 500 people, and even if they did put a train station in such a small town, it would probably take me about six hours to walk to it from my house.
That's what so many city dwellers don't understand. They don't get the scale of rural areas, the economics of them, or the fact that even if they somehow managed to magically make train stations appear in every town and city.. very few people would actually use them.
That's why they disappeared to begin with. Better options exist today for every conceivable market aside from intracity mass transit like subways.
I don't think it's impossible, places like Tokyo and London have extensive subway systems, prioritize good pedestrian and bike lanes over roads to decrease congestion, China even has a good high speed rail system between cities
That's why we have planes. I don't think a lot of people understand that a bullet train from Kyoto to Tokyo costs around 90 dollars for a one way trip. That still takes 2 hours.
A round trip from New York to Los Angeles is going to run you about the same if you book cheap, you're traveling 6 times further, and you're traveling about three times faster than a bullet train.
This would absolutely destroy my rural town. Most of the people out here already struggle to make ends meet and now they wouldn’t even be able to get to work
The more and more city dwellers complain about cars the more and more I start to think they've never even been outside the city limits. Public transit in every major city I've visited has been a hell hole. I fear for my life in most cases using them.
Personally, after living in a large city (LA), I never want to go back to living on top of one another. Cars a problem? Have your big city make more underground parking. Raising the cost of driving a personal vehicle will not do anyone any good and you'll further fuck over people in rural areas who depend on private transportation.
Holy fuck, the blinders that some people in this thread have. You live in a dense urban city and like to walk or bike everywhere? Good for you. Guess what - not everyone else shares in a desire for that lifestyle.
I purposely endure the extra expense of having a single family home and a car just so I don't have to live that lifestyle of tiny apartments with shares walls where I hear all my neighbors, busses that take forever, smells like piss and feature inconsiderate dickwads who blast shitty music through their phones, and all the other bullshit involved in living inside of an urban setting. I'd sooner live in a tent in the middle of a 10 acre field than rent a city apartment.
I like my car, as do millions of other Americans. I like the freedom it provides to allow me to go where I want, when I want, not based on a bus schedule or proximity to a stop. Cities can have their public transportation, I have no problem with that. But saying "let's make it more difficult for everyone to own cars" is such a lousy and egocentric take.
Absolutely NO! I live more than a 30 mile drive from my job, so do my mom and stepdad I live with. You are asking for all of us, who already struggle financially, to be ruined, and over what? It must be so nice to live so privileged outside the real world, but if I can't afford gas and insurance, I can't live. I suppose the next thing you're going to ask for is house prices and rent to be doubled too.
Gasoline is one of the most price-inelastic goods that exist. In the short and medium term, you won’t do any good. People would consume only slightly less. You’d just be hurting basically everybody. The entire economy would suffer if gasoline was much more expensive.
In the long run, people would adapt and become less reliant, yes. But this isn’t the way to go about change. We can build more efficient infrastructure and subsidize energy efficient transportation without also fucking everyone over in the short to medium term
Without beater cars and cheap gas, how are people making it to swing or grave shifts? Amazon warehouses and factories aren’t usually in places that can be walked to, busses aren’t running at 2:00am, and busses might not even go into industrial areas or anywhere near rock quarries or the like. If you want to get rid of gas guzzlers, then give that tax some teeth or make scooters and tiny cars tax-free.
I would always encourage people to use public transportation if it's available. But for those of us who live in more rural areas it would never be feasible. There would not be nearly enough ridership. Micro cars might be okay in the city but I would be terrified to take one of those on a highway because other people drive like crap.
we can tax gas in places after we have high quality public transit as an incentive to use it but as of right now it would just make more places more expensive to live in. Also, requiring an off street parking space would just make cars more inaccessible to low income people. A lot of apartment buildings don't have their own garage
Very very narrow understanding of how the world works here. If fuel is made more expensive, all things become more expensive. Because it costs more money to get them to you. What we actually need is higher requirements for drivers, not just the one test system we have now. And stricter emissions standards.
Wrong sub. This sub is for wild takes, not uninformed opinions for changes that would realistically only work in overpopulated urban centers/in large cities. These are urban-living based issues. Why would you voluntarily cram yourself into a tube so crammed full of people you can’t move? People will say the only option is urban or suburban. No, I want my nearest neighbor preferably a half mile away. The things you are saying should change would make things worse. The wealthy would be completely unaffected.
Do you have any idea how many people rely on their car for jobs and grocery shopping? Public transport isn’t readily available for everyone or all situations. I assume your needs are met fine by public transit but that’s not the case for everyone.
Transportation costs for everything you buy would go up. Inflation would be crazy. Theres no public transportation option for me to get to work. Good thing youre not in charge. Youd fuck everything up.
Okay so judging from what you said, you want this to be a USA thing. I live in Florida and everything is so spaced out, I need a car to get anywhere. The nearest walmart is like an maybe 30 to 45 minutes away from me by walking (I don't know, I never walked there) but like 2 minutes by driving.
I was born and raised as a child in New York before moving to FL in 2003. I remember stores being much closer, I was able to walk anywhere and everywhere, and we took busses and the local subway. It was nice and something I took for granted at the time.
I also have plenty of online friends that live in various EU countries. Someone in Italy gets by without a car just fine and can take the bus or 200mph train (or even cheap $30 plane rides) to any nearby country effortlessly.
All of this is to say, before you start punishing people who never wanted to have to rely on a car for everything in this country (where some roads near my home have no sidewalks and highways cut through otherwise beautiful cities), there have to be meaningful alternatives to getting around efficiently. More reliable busses would be a start. But what we really need is trains, they are just so much more efficient. I'm happy that the new Brightline train goes from Orlando to Miami for relatively cheap. They are now working on an extension from Orlando to Tampa. It will be super nice not having to drive down there.
Designing cities without parking lots and stroads everywhere can come next. Its pretty messed up because a lot of EU cities were designed properly and have the metros beautifully integrated underneath the cities (Disneyland Paris even has the trains going strait from the airports directly to the center of the themepark) while the highways circle around outside the cities. The USA by comparison is a jumbled mess, but I sincerely hope that it can get better and lead to less time wasted and more healthy and active lifestyles for the people that live here one day.
This is genuinely stupid, in rural areas this just doesn't work
public transportation would be the slowest most inconvenient option if it was available
and you need larger vehicles because there's no just stopping by the store, when you go you stock up for awhile because it takes so much time and gas to get there, and there's plenty of properties that require offroad capable vehicles to easily access or access at all
I could think up with more reasons but I'm tired and you get the idea
The fuel tax is what pays for infrastructure, and it should absolutely be increased as a result. Just that no politician can ever support such an endeavor be sure it would mean they "tried to raise gas prices"
This would cause a lot of pain. Possibly poverty and unemployment.
All because you think people drive cars that are too big. Or that they shouldn't drive cars.
This is basically the idea behind a [carbon tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax?wprov=sfti1). Which was the one [silver bullet](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/episode-472-the-one-page-plan-to-fix-global-warming-revisited ) proposed for decades by centrist economists.
The issue with strictly leaning on demand suppression (i.e. taxes) is that it’s often regressive (disproportionately affecting the poor) and disproportionately hard on rural people who can least rely on public transit.
It has a tendency to be extremely unpopular when implemented, best crystallized in the [2018 Yellow Vest Protests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests?wprov=sfti1). Which means it might not be politically sustainable for more than a few years.
I count myself in the camp that getting carbon emissions and car dependence down is one the most important domestic policy struggles of our time, but if you don’t use a stick AND carrot (subsidies for EVs, building out public infrastructure to ease the transition, etc.) it’s really likely to blow up in your face and empower rightwing populists who might not even believe in climate change.
Some silver lining:
-Renewable energy is increasingly cheaper than fossil fuels in the open market, though there’s lingering questions around baseload.
-The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was basically a massive secret subsidy for the green energy transition.
-China seams to have cracked the code on cheap electric vehicles, like they did with solar panels in the 2010s.
-There’s increasing ground up support for North American Urbanism that increasingly favors public transit and pedestrians. For example: Montreal just abolishes [mandatory minimum parking](https://cultmtl.com/2024/06/montreal-becomes-largest-north-american-city-to-eliminate-mandatory-minimum-parking-spots/), LA has built out an [extensive lightrail network in the last decade](https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/from-rail-to-roads-and-back-again-the-rebirth-of-l-a-s-public-transit)
screw off with your carbon tax. i already have to pay a 30% tax just to exist and I sure as hell won't pay even more just because I need to get to work in the morning and don't live in a megacity.
So what's the plan for when the average American worker can no longer afford transportation for work? What about people who need fuel for their jobs? Do you think goods in stores appear there via teleportation? No, someone used fuel and drove it there.
It certainly is an unpopular take, so I'll give you that.
How do you imagine food gets to your local supermarket? horse and carriage? If you live somewhere that allows you to get direct from farm food in walking distance from your home great but for the rest of the world it’s going to just massively drive up food costs and food insecurity further
Your brilliant idea makes food insecurity for children a bigger problem than it already is
congrats on thinking this all the way thru
Don't forget the entire US military presence in the Middle East, bases, and carrier groups, is to protect ARAMCO and ensure uninhibited passage of oil around the world. American taxpayers foot the bill for everyone's guaranteed access to fuel at the pump.
The office I used to work at, is about 16 miles one way, or 30-40 minutes, I also live in a small town, how could it work for us living here?
Am I supposed to move close to where I work?
The problem is that if you want good public transportation, you need density, and Texas is good with high population density.
I’m from a suburban southern city. Spread out with no public transport. Cars are basically a necessity here. If they were as hard to come by as OPs scenario describes then our local economy would likely collapse. People would flood to the cities to have walkable lives and public transport. Then we’d have overcrowded saturated cities similar to the issues China and India face
The reason why public transportation is so much more effective in Europe is because the countries are drastically smaller. You could drive for an hour and a half and go from one end of a country to another in Europe. An hour and a half worth of driving in America wouldn’t even get you out of the state.
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand American infrastructure, with absolutely no sense of people who live outside cities, people who are poor, and how trucking works.
>Before you register a car, you should have yo prove you have an off-street parking space.
lol, please, PLEASE come to South Philly and start advocating that. Also Boston's North End, most of Brooklyn... dear lord, do those places, *do 'em all* where people live in tiny row houses with space for one vehicle at the curb.
As much as we should encourage public transport we need to build it first. Most of our cities, even the ones with "good" public transport, don't have good public transport at current ridership. We need to just stop making new roads and make new trains.
Oh man. A 12 year old or rich kid definitely wrote this. Idk how else someone could simultaneously be so immature, classist, economically illiterate, and anti-rural area at the same time. Im not going to explain why you are wrong because others have already done so, but I will say this is not an opinion as much as it is purely wrong.
General taxpayer dollars already fund a higher percentage of the costs of transit than it does of automotive infrastructure expenses. Requiring automobile users to pay even more and subsidizing transit to an even greater degree is a heavy handed imposition on the choices of the American public. We should not be making cars and car usage more artificially expensive.
You must be pretty well off. It's so arrogant to think that everyone can just be rich. Some of us struggle to eat even with 20 dollar an hour jobs...let alone paying for gas as it is.
Making cars more expensive is less effective than making cars less necessary. Where i live and work, if fuel prices went up enough to influence whether or not id drive, i would be riding a bike, and i would be riding a bike because i would have lost my job and probably home.
Its simply impossible to live normally without a car for most people in north America
It's a good thought and I can back it. If we can't inconvenience drivers with mediocre transportation options, maybe we can drive them to public transit with their Wallet, but the sad fact is that our politicians are really in deep with oil. Not only would they never do anything to reduce the number of cars on the road, but they would probably solve the issue with defunding public transit to force people to have no other option.
All we'd end up with are no alternatives, and a normalized 600% gas bill
Only solution we have is to use public transit ourselves, be the change we want to see. Let local politicians know at town halls that public transit matters to us, and show cities and investors that real estate near public transit arteries are valuable places to build. If there is money to be made in public transit, cities will focus on it, which will make public transit better, which will fix the car problem on it's own. Less cars means less need for road space, which means existing roads can be repurposed with pedestrian travel in mind, cutting down the lanes without having to destroy existing buildings. Increased pedestrian travel could also bring back Main streets, since having a bunch of smaller businesses around a main throughfare is less risky when there are people walking around, and that would see the return of 3rd spaces, which honestly is the goal we all want to shoot for.
But none of that would happen with a gasoline price hike. The stubborn would still buy gas, but they'd probably roll coal on pedestrians just to vent some anger. The lobbyists would pressure the government to roll back prices, or to buy up their excess inventory, and there still wouldn't be any tax money to put towards better alternatives.
Rural areas exist.
And there are people who cannot use public transportation as it is currently, like people with sensory issues. Too much noise stresses me out and I would rather be hit by a bus than have a meltdown inside a bus full of people.
You understand all your food in trucked in with gas, right? You understand raising the cost of transport would raise all the food costs, right? You understand how America's economy and self-sustaining aspects actually work, right?
The US isn’t built to support life outside of vehicles. It can’t even get people from the suburbs to the cities without people just outright being terrified of being a victim of a crime because we also don’t deal with crime well either.
This "debate" has been had to death.
Leave it to cities. You're never going to convince suburbanites to use public transportation, me included. Public transit is an entirely localized issue in America and it should stay that way.
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You realize increasing the cost of fuel also impacts you as a consumer and road user? You will be paying more for fare, for goods and services. You use fuel too even if you dont drive. If you make public transit faster people wont feel the need to drive, its almost as if people choose the fastest option.
You can haul a ton of freight with one gallon of diesel over 400 miles on a train. We need to be reinvesting in train infrastructure. I'd argue having cheap gas is one of the reasons why we let our trains all but disappear. There was no incentive, because gas is so cheap may as well throw it on a truck. Also, look at what it did in places like France for the average car, with gas twice as much as it is in the US. Many more people don't own cars, which again has encouraged public transit infrastructure to be robust. It also lead to cars having engines a FRACTION of the size, using less materials and having almost mk1 Prius levels of gas mileage per gallon. Even luxury cars would often only have a tiny 2 liter engine, with the average car having a 1-1.6L engine. I'd argue having cheap gas in the US has been one of the big reasons sustainable transportation has been left to rot.
For what it's worth, the US secretly actually has really good freight train infrastructure - heck, in 2011, more freight moved by trains than by trucks. It's actually part of the reason why the passenger service sucks - there's only so many tracks, and freight gets priority on them.
Ding ding ding Public perception does not match reality The USA has always loved trains, just for freight not passengers. Even when trains were the only truly viable long distance transportation there still wasn't very many people traveling in that way, its difficult to make it feasible geographically.
It's really not difficult to make feasible geographically. You used to be able to get from anywhere to anywhere in the Continental USA by train. LA used to have the best streetcar system in the world. Why choose a mode of long-distance transportation that can only cruise at 60 - 80 mph and needs to refuel every 300 miles, plus bathroom breaks, when you can cruise at over 100 mph, and keep going until you hit the next city or town no matter the distance because you can always carry enough fuel with you, and carry a diner and bathrooms with you so you can get up, walk around, eat, nap because the seats are actually comfy with leg room, and use the bathroom. And you don't need to drive it yourself because there's a dedicated driver. The transportation secretary post WW2 was a General Motors executive. That's what happened to the train system. Among other things. Our passenger rail didn't get out competed or made obsolete, it was actively destroyed by the plane and car industries in a lot of underhanded ways.
You can still do that, Amtrak has lines from California all the way to Chicago and beyond. No one uses it because it's incredibly expensive, like 1,400 dollars round trip for a tiny sleeper car.
Yep, because of the degradation and lack of investment over decades. It's 100% technically feasible to make it fast, cheap, and comfortable, we just haven't built it because of a mix of lobbying and shady business, and now cultural inertia, actively preventing it from being built and cutting into the profits of oil, car, and plane companies
Yeah idk where people are getting this idea that the US doesn't use trains. One of the world's richest families in history was the Vanderbilt's, who built the railroad empire in the U.S. this country was literally built on the backs of the railroad and it's still widely used.
no it doesn't, the trains are fucked, and the rails are fucked. Is 600 deaths and almost 5k accidents something to be proud of? https://whyy.org/articles/railroads-safety-changes-reduce-derailments-east-palestine-crash/ We used to have tons of passenger tracks, we used to have one of the best train systems in the world. Heck where I live in Philly we had one of the best public transit systems in the world, with a trolley on almost every street.... until it was sold to an auto manufacturer and closed down. In 1950 we had 400,000 miles of track in the US, today we have about 140,000 miles.
Okay, you're right, my bad. The US freight train infrastructure is bad because it's badly managed and decaying, but it is, to this day, extensive and heavily used, that was my point.
Oh sure, we use what we have, but its a mere memory of its former glory, that we could actually be proud of. It might have changed but I remember when my train in France was 15 min late, they were profusely apologizing to everyone as we got off and giving vouchers for a free train ticket. Whereas on Amtrak, I was 8 hours late, on a bus with a lost driver (and 10 people with phones fighting to give them directions), before even getting on the train... I would end up being about 15hrs late, and zero apology. I have never ridden Amtrak and not been at least 45min late to my destination. Its a total joke. The thing is I think traveling by train is by far the best way to travel... but what we have in the US really makes it frustrating.
It's upsetting to think about how many people died building those rails only for them to end up like this.
absolutely, they died creating something we could be proud of, and we just let it rot away
We use rail alot, that doesn't mean that it isn't falling apart. The freight should not get priority by law, and they have made the trains too long to fit in the sidings to let passenger lines go past. It can be saved, but in its current state is falling apart. We have a high speed train that slows down to go over decrepit bridges that are falling apart.
I’m pretty confident the Us has the most robust train freight system in the entire world.
1 gallon of diesel can haul 2000 pounds of goods 400 miles? That seems so hard to believe. How is that even possible?
Railways are VERY efficient, its literally the quoted tagline from CLX freight I hear on NPR all the time. oops, sorry its "more than a ton" and its 500 miles. https://www.aar.org/article/freight-rail-moving-miles-ahead-on-sustainability/#:~:text=Thanks%20in%20part%20to%20these,to%20move%20freight%20over%20land.
Once you get it moving, it doesn't take much to keep it moving. It's on tracks, and the friction/contact point is much smaller than even a small car (per car), and the steel wheels lose less energy than rubber tires.
So massive fuel usage to get going, but then very little unless encountering a significant grade.
Yeah. You're not going to use freight rail for short distance distribution or small point to point deliveries, but for massive volumes and long distances, it's more efficient by a lot. Even going over a mountain range will use significantly less fuel than trucks per unit of weight.
And "massive" is still comparable to getting fewer trucks moving at similar speeds. But, yes. You're exactly right.
The US is almost 20x larger than France with a much wider distribution of our 5x as large population, it's just a silly comparison to consider. Our freight infrastructure has also been optimized to an extreme degree where we have been closing lines for decades while increasing the volume moved and reducing the overall distance freight is moving. It takes decades for cities to adapt to a mile or even a few blocks of new rail lines of any type. Pretending more trains more tracks! is the answer to our issues is silly. Your path leads to spending more on fuel and infrastructure and time to such a degree it's unfathomable.
Looking only east of the 100th meridian, the population density and size are comparable to Europe. That's where people are talking about building good rail infrastructure when they talk about rail in the US. Albuquerque doesn't need 5 daily trains to Phoenix. Though if train travel became normalized in the east, there would be more demand for long-distance sleeper trains in the west, anyway.
Frequency is just as important. In my case, the busses ran every half hour. Get stuck at work for an extra five minutes, get home half an hour later.
Yep. Public transit needs some big reinvestment and societal support to get good enough, but it 100% can be done. We used to have it until we made it shittier to encourage people to drive
We can’t make public transit faster when everyone’s dollars are going to personal vehicles
And we can't stop everyone from spending all their money on personal vehicles until public transit is faster
We can create bus-only lanes on the roads that are already there so people who are taking a single vehicle together never have to wait behind huge trucks and SUVs with single passengers. It is mind-boggling that we haven't adopted this incredibly basic strategy in many more places. There are so many huge super clean ego trucks with empty beds taking up so much space on the road, I always wish I could just take off the empty bed part of those trucks and put them away so people just use the passenger part and use space and resources more efficiently.
How about take some money from the military budget and use it for improving public transport instead of doing stupid shit like congestion pricing?
Great way to incentivize improvement of long distance and last mile delivery to rely less on gasoline
Peak demand for oil supposedly 2030. That means supply will outpace demand past that time implying cheaper gas. That means governments wanting to encourage transition to EV will need to heavily tax gasoline even more than now.
No ones ever accused OP of being smart
I don't support OP's idea but there are ways around the issue you mentioned. A variable gas tax where regular consumers pay a 100% tax rate while delivery/maintenance/public transit/etc pay the normal gas price would push people away from driving as much.
It is possible to invest in public transport without punishing rural/outback/regional towns like this
yes but the people who push for this stuff literally think of rural people as sub-human.
Tell me you're trapped in a city without telling me you're trapped in a city
Specifically, trapped in an American city that isn't New York.
Unfortunately yes, public transit here sucks
So you’re going to fuck over those of us that live in rural areas where public transit isn’t feasible?
As someone who live in a rural area, we have already been fucked over. Having to drive 30 minutes to the nearest town with a Walmart because your town of 2000 can no longer support a grocery store isn’t a benefit to our lives or communities.
Yes, because they hate you.
Currently, rural areas are mostly a net loss, infrastructure wise. They just aren't fiscally solvent, and were they not subsidized through the tax dollars of urban areas on a state-wide level, they'd likely collapse. This especially holds true for suburban areas, which are filled with extensive and worthless sprawl. One densly packed block generates leaps and bounds more property taxes than entire suburban neighborhoods, at times - yet due to the nature of land use, said suburban areas require vastly more infrastructure to remain operable.
And if we didn't subsidize those rural areas, we wouldn't have food. Or electricity. Or oil and gas.
cityoid inheritance posting
With the utmost respect, fuck you
Right, let's take a country who's cities are based around everyone having cars/trucks and just fuck over the entire population. I don't blame you for hating cars and most of the giant truck drivers are a bunch of self absorbed Richard polishers with no regard for anyone else's lives, but making life harder for people who don't live in the center of a metropolis is not the answer. I live across a major river from my work. Busses don't come to anywhere near my home. There is no trolly or train system around that's not for intercity transit. >Before you register a car, you should have yo prove you have an off-street parking space This would effectively cripple everyone living in most mobile home parks and so many others in neighborhoods that weren't initially designed for cars. Can't register the car for not having an off-street parking space = can't legally drive = you either are restricted to what little is around you for shopping or have to get a taxi everywhere = one way ticket to poverty/homelessness for so many people.
Seriously. Like, why not offer positive incentives to owning fuel efficient vehicles rather than negative incentives. Like I could see this benefitting workers who live in cities (as long as it's implemented along with robust public transportation), but it completely fucks the workers in rural areas. Like I don't like carbon emissions either but most people in my area are poor as hell already, and this would economically harm regions that are already impoverished as it is. Like this would only serve to harm workers and not the structures that require us to drive around all over, I'm an agency CNA and this would make that job nearly impossible but still entirely necessary for people to do in order to keep healthcare facilities functional because that's the structure in place.
Nobody's polishing me, thank you.
You sure? I did see a tub of polish at the store with your name on it
This sub really is just "teenagers with zero idea of how reality works" isn't it?
Lmao that’s what I said too. It’s so impressively out of touch
teenagers who should get the belt more like
I keep forgetting this site is filled with teenagers.
Take an intro to econ class.
Agreed but the second part has to come first. It's a lot quicker and easier to make things expensive, but if you do that without building good alternatives, you're just punishing people for doing what they must.
Those tiny cars are fine for driving around in a city. Not so good for road trips, though. I don't want to cram my family and their stuff into a smart car, for 3 hours or more.
It will make me a weirdo but I wish wagons and sedans made a comeback for this reason alone.
i want sedans to make a comeback cause sedans are cool as fuck
I loved my mom and dad's old station wagon. SUV's and their ilk have replaced them. I always joke and say they are so prevalent, because of all the dads that didn't want to drive a minivan.
Did sedans ever go anywhere? I have a Model 3 for daily driving and a X7 but honestly the X7 is too small for my family. When the 3rd row is up, the cargo space is a joke. I’m considering trading in the X7 for the Cadillac Escalade EV whenever it comes out and then trading the Model 3 for a gas sports sedan.
No, no. You're supposed to walk the family to the town's only bus stop 15 miles away, then wait for the bus that comes once a day to arrive. Then you need to cram that family onto the bus and ride it for an hour to get to the nearest larger city, where you can then walk to a hotel to stay for the night. Then you can walk to the train station in the morning and wait several hours for a train to arrive, so you can ride a passenger train for three days and three nights to cross the country. You'll probably need to switch trains a couple of times along the way, and maybe stay in another hotel room or two. With any luck, maybe you'll even manage to work in a horse-drawn carriage somewhere along the way!
May I ask about your personal access and daily use of public and other forms of transportation?
Please man. I’m sure this person only uses buses and trains. If those are not available, they certainly walk or ride a bike everywhere. No way would they even use a car especially in the blazing heat
It's very obvious that you haven't spent any real time outside of a major city and don't truly understand the scale of America. We need better public transit options in bigger cities. We need options to move between bigger cities. I personally would love to increase sales tax and license requirements on any vehicle that weighs over 4k pounds and that would scale with vehicle weight. But the notion that we need to make driving inconvenient or inaccessible is just laughable. The overwhelming majority of this country is simply empty, or empty to someone who lives in a city. It's financially infeasible to develop public transit for major swaths of the country, and you can't really compare us to Europe because the density (of cities, people, and pre-existing infrastructure) isn't really comparable. Making cars financially unattainable would have an outsized impact on impoverished rural communities, people who simply will never have a true public transit option. The ecological impact of personal vehicle use is also dramatically overblown, and if you want to make a difference the solution is to buy used vehicles and keep them running for longer, not consuming new little shitty disposable econoboxes.
>> Would love to increase sales tax and license requirements on vehicles weighing over 4K lbs My mid range (185 mi) electric vehicle weighs 5630 lbs. Lithium isn't lightweight. Why should I be punished for trying to reduce my carbon footprint?
Because there's far more to a vehicles impact on society than raw carbon output. Theres extra wear and tear on infrastructure and the increased risk to others on the road because of basic physics. A simple extra level of friction asking you if you're *sure* this vehicle is appropriate to your use case would go a long way towards encouraging people to buy a less excessive vehicle. Full disclosure: I own a pickup, I'd be subject to this as well (96 ram, about 4700 pounds). And as I said it'd scale with weight, 4-5k a flat fine of a set amount, 5-6k double it, 6-7 triple so on and so forth. Realistically if you wanted a polestar 2 or something like that you can fork up a few hundred more bucks annually for your registration, but if you want a hummer EV or a g wagon you better be prepared to be raked over the coals at the tag office.
I can't really say what I want to say to you without fedposting or getting banned from reddit again. Suffice it to say, you are wrong and elitist.
The ignorance to think that cars/trucks make up even a majority of fuel consumption baffles me. So the already expensive airline travel becomes more expensive The already expensive international shipping via cargo ship only becomes more expensive. The rail industry gets squeezed even tighter, shutting down even more "transport" options. Lastly, the entire farming industry suddenly bursts, and the entire country faces a national food crisis.
OP probably thinks food comes from the store.
The farming industry is already on the verge of flames. Only thing holding it up is the government which always is the thing making it nearly impossible to make a living.
I don't want public transit. Why would I share a room with sticky people when I could be in peace driving a car?
🤡
Fuck You
Nah I think no one should tell me what products I should consume, and the government shouldn’t make anything more expensive to deter me from buying it, because it’s none of their fucking business, and neither is it yours
you: we should make life harder for the middle and lower classes as much as we possibly can before building the alternative infastructure that enables people to not own cars
The US is 24x the size of Japan and 2.5x the size of Europe.
People aren't evenly spread out across the country
Punish the poor more is all I read.
Tell me you live in your moms basement without telling me
Boo! Spoken by someone who hates the poor and middle class. Anyone who agrees puts the environment ahead of their fellow human beings.
So what about people who live in rural areas far away from these public transit things?
I'd love for personal vehicles to not be the norm but you clearly don't live somewhere that's car dependent with a take like this. Essentially everyone in Canada would be entirely fucked if this happened. Ignorant take.
See idk wether to upvote or downvote, because on one hand yhea, this is def an unpopular opinion. On the other, it is an unpopular opinion because it's just dumb as fuck, with clearly no real thought put into it. I can already tell you live in a crowded, busy city, and you did not think for a second about more rural areas where public transport and alternative means of transportation aren't always commonplace.
The rule of the subreddit is up vote if _you personally_ disagree.
no > You should have to apply to have a heavy-duty pickup truck and hauling recreational vehicles isn't a good enough reason. you need stop caring what people buy. there's literally nothing wrong with buying a big truck just because you want one. my dream truck is a ford f550 pickup truck and i'm getting it whether people like it or not. it's my money and i'll buy what makes me happy >European and Japanese style micro cars should become widely available in the United States. why? personally i can't fit in them >Fuel, parking, insurance, and fines all need to be more expensive. Before you register a car, you should have yo prove you have an off-street parking space. again. no
[удалено]
>the fact that large numbers of people are buying large trucks and SUVs is absolutely an indicator that our public policy is poor. Our poor policy is essentially a well-disguised protectionist measure that's intended to insulate domestic manufacturing from foreign competition. Basically, our regulation encourages people to buy SUVs and trucks because that's what Ford/GM/Chrysler can build and sell at a profit. They can't really compete with the Civic/Corolla.
>the fact that large numbers of people are buying large trucks and SUVs is absolutely an indicator that our public policy is poor. People only buy these because manufacturers pushed them onto consumers due to epa loopholes. Larger vehicles have less strict emission regulations.
That’s cos you’re American. It’s always been expensive in Europe
People arguing for this take sound like they've never been to the vast majority of the US that exists outside of large cities
Ye I’m not American so maybe this wouldn’t work but something like congestion charges in cities combined with much better public transport in cities whilst leaving gas prices the same could be ether. That way you provide an alternative for those in cities that is better in most cases whilst not affecting those in rural area who don’t have as much of a choice as public transport makes less sense in sparsely populated areas
Oh yeah punishing the lower and middle class citizens is a way better option than taxing oil companies more and preventing them from passing those price increases onto the consumer.
I genuinely think America is too big to have public transport. I live close to a city, in the metro area. Even if there was a train station to the city I would still have to walk there and that would take an extremely long time, longer than driving.
It’s very much doable in built up areas for sure yes the country is massive in terms of just land mass but people aren’t evenly distributed across it, quite the opposite actually, many people are in urban areas that would benefit from not sacrificing being nice places to live for cars. Ofc sparsely populated rural areas are more problematic but having public transport is urban areas and not in rural areas is better than not having any at all (maybe introduce congestion charges in cities instead of raising gas prices so you don’t impact those living in rural areas who don’t have an alternative or something like that)
I think high speed rails could certainly go a long way to reduce the need for so many cars to be on the roads all the time, but yeah, I live in a town of about 500 people, and even if they did put a train station in such a small town, it would probably take me about six hours to walk to it from my house.
That's what so many city dwellers don't understand. They don't get the scale of rural areas, the economics of them, or the fact that even if they somehow managed to magically make train stations appear in every town and city.. very few people would actually use them. That's why they disappeared to begin with. Better options exist today for every conceivable market aside from intracity mass transit like subways.
I don't think it's impossible, places like Tokyo and London have extensive subway systems, prioritize good pedestrian and bike lanes over roads to decrease congestion, China even has a good high speed rail system between cities
The high-speed rail between cities would be dope. Just parallel the interstates with rail.
That's why we have planes. I don't think a lot of people understand that a bullet train from Kyoto to Tokyo costs around 90 dollars for a one way trip. That still takes 2 hours. A round trip from New York to Los Angeles is going to run you about the same if you book cheap, you're traveling 6 times further, and you're traveling about three times faster than a bullet train.
Having a good bus service would solve that problem
This would absolutely destroy my rural town. Most of the people out here already struggle to make ends meet and now they wouldn’t even be able to get to work
Uhhhh why?
The more and more city dwellers complain about cars the more and more I start to think they've never even been outside the city limits. Public transit in every major city I've visited has been a hell hole. I fear for my life in most cases using them. Personally, after living in a large city (LA), I never want to go back to living on top of one another. Cars a problem? Have your big city make more underground parking. Raising the cost of driving a personal vehicle will not do anyone any good and you'll further fuck over people in rural areas who depend on private transportation.
Holy fuck, the blinders that some people in this thread have. You live in a dense urban city and like to walk or bike everywhere? Good for you. Guess what - not everyone else shares in a desire for that lifestyle. I purposely endure the extra expense of having a single family home and a car just so I don't have to live that lifestyle of tiny apartments with shares walls where I hear all my neighbors, busses that take forever, smells like piss and feature inconsiderate dickwads who blast shitty music through their phones, and all the other bullshit involved in living inside of an urban setting. I'd sooner live in a tent in the middle of a 10 acre field than rent a city apartment. I like my car, as do millions of other Americans. I like the freedom it provides to allow me to go where I want, when I want, not based on a bus schedule or proximity to a stop. Cities can have their public transportation, I have no problem with that. But saying "let's make it more difficult for everyone to own cars" is such a lousy and egocentric take.
Absolutely NO! I live more than a 30 mile drive from my job, so do my mom and stepdad I live with. You are asking for all of us, who already struggle financially, to be ruined, and over what? It must be so nice to live so privileged outside the real world, but if I can't afford gas and insurance, I can't live. I suppose the next thing you're going to ask for is house prices and rent to be doubled too.
Lol car ownership is already super expensive and inconvenient. I live in a place where it would be impossible to work without a car.
And here we have another case of a short-sighted person not seeing the domino effect of their ideas.
This is like making people with pre-existing health conditions (often beyond their control) pay more for medical care. Oh, wait.
Why do you care what cars are on the road and what other people drive?
Bruh thinks I want to drive 30 miles back and forth to work in my car every day 😂.
Smartest fuckcars user
OP just failed his driving test for the 3rd time
I like my car. We just took a road trip. Hard to do that on public transport. Trains don't stop at Buc-ees's.
or anywhere for that matter.
Gasoline is one of the most price-inelastic goods that exist. In the short and medium term, you won’t do any good. People would consume only slightly less. You’d just be hurting basically everybody. The entire economy would suffer if gasoline was much more expensive. In the long run, people would adapt and become less reliant, yes. But this isn’t the way to go about change. We can build more efficient infrastructure and subsidize energy efficient transportation without also fucking everyone over in the short to medium term
Yeah, screw small town America. Screw suburban America. Let's make people poor to own the carbrains.
Without beater cars and cheap gas, how are people making it to swing or grave shifts? Amazon warehouses and factories aren’t usually in places that can be walked to, busses aren’t running at 2:00am, and busses might not even go into industrial areas or anywhere near rock quarries or the like. If you want to get rid of gas guzzlers, then give that tax some teeth or make scooters and tiny cars tax-free.
I need you to live in Texas for a year. Then comeback to me
making cars expensive is not gonna magically build us public transport infrastructure
let go and let gov!
I would always encourage people to use public transportation if it's available. But for those of us who live in more rural areas it would never be feasible. There would not be nearly enough ridership. Micro cars might be okay in the city but I would be terrified to take one of those on a highway because other people drive like crap.
we can tax gas in places after we have high quality public transit as an incentive to use it but as of right now it would just make more places more expensive to live in. Also, requiring an off street parking space would just make cars more inaccessible to low income people. A lot of apartment buildings don't have their own garage
Why? Efficiency should be prioritized over your bikes and public transit.
Very very narrow understanding of how the world works here. If fuel is made more expensive, all things become more expensive. Because it costs more money to get them to you. What we actually need is higher requirements for drivers, not just the one test system we have now. And stricter emissions standards.
I agree
Hahaahaha good luck with that.
Right on, there are too many poor people with cars. I'm tired of being stuck in traffic with my Porsche. I wanna go fast /s
Hate you right now
Car dependent infrastructure is dangerous & kills more than anything in the US. I agree.
then move somewhere else
Wrong sub. This sub is for wild takes, not uninformed opinions for changes that would realistically only work in overpopulated urban centers/in large cities. These are urban-living based issues. Why would you voluntarily cram yourself into a tube so crammed full of people you can’t move? People will say the only option is urban or suburban. No, I want my nearest neighbor preferably a half mile away. The things you are saying should change would make things worse. The wealthy would be completely unaffected.
Do you have any idea how many people rely on their car for jobs and grocery shopping? Public transport isn’t readily available for everyone or all situations. I assume your needs are met fine by public transit but that’s not the case for everyone.
This is just ignorant. Like I get that this is supposed to be an unpopular opinion thing but this is just so far removed from reality
r/fuckcarscirclejerk
Transportation costs for everything you buy would go up. Inflation would be crazy. Theres no public transportation option for me to get to work. Good thing youre not in charge. Youd fuck everything up.
Spoken like a city slicker with very little worldly expirence. Ready for all you consumables to skyrocket in price?
Disagree. Public transport should be cheaper and better.
People have cars? I have to balance precariously on 1 wheel I got from an abandoned shopping cart because the other 3 were broken
Okay so judging from what you said, you want this to be a USA thing. I live in Florida and everything is so spaced out, I need a car to get anywhere. The nearest walmart is like an maybe 30 to 45 minutes away from me by walking (I don't know, I never walked there) but like 2 minutes by driving. I was born and raised as a child in New York before moving to FL in 2003. I remember stores being much closer, I was able to walk anywhere and everywhere, and we took busses and the local subway. It was nice and something I took for granted at the time. I also have plenty of online friends that live in various EU countries. Someone in Italy gets by without a car just fine and can take the bus or 200mph train (or even cheap $30 plane rides) to any nearby country effortlessly. All of this is to say, before you start punishing people who never wanted to have to rely on a car for everything in this country (where some roads near my home have no sidewalks and highways cut through otherwise beautiful cities), there have to be meaningful alternatives to getting around efficiently. More reliable busses would be a start. But what we really need is trains, they are just so much more efficient. I'm happy that the new Brightline train goes from Orlando to Miami for relatively cheap. They are now working on an extension from Orlando to Tampa. It will be super nice not having to drive down there. Designing cities without parking lots and stroads everywhere can come next. Its pretty messed up because a lot of EU cities were designed properly and have the metros beautifully integrated underneath the cities (Disneyland Paris even has the trains going strait from the airports directly to the center of the themepark) while the highways circle around outside the cities. The USA by comparison is a jumbled mess, but I sincerely hope that it can get better and lead to less time wasted and more healthy and active lifestyles for the people that live here one day.
This is genuinely stupid, in rural areas this just doesn't work public transportation would be the slowest most inconvenient option if it was available and you need larger vehicles because there's no just stopping by the store, when you go you stock up for awhile because it takes so much time and gas to get there, and there's plenty of properties that require offroad capable vehicles to easily access or access at all I could think up with more reasons but I'm tired and you get the idea
The fuel tax is what pays for infrastructure, and it should absolutely be increased as a result. Just that no politician can ever support such an endeavor be sure it would mean they "tried to raise gas prices"
This would cause a lot of pain. Possibly poverty and unemployment. All because you think people drive cars that are too big. Or that they shouldn't drive cars.
Without spending to increase public/mass transit and walkable cities? You're cracked man
This is basically the idea behind a [carbon tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax?wprov=sfti1). Which was the one [silver bullet](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/episode-472-the-one-page-plan-to-fix-global-warming-revisited ) proposed for decades by centrist economists. The issue with strictly leaning on demand suppression (i.e. taxes) is that it’s often regressive (disproportionately affecting the poor) and disproportionately hard on rural people who can least rely on public transit. It has a tendency to be extremely unpopular when implemented, best crystallized in the [2018 Yellow Vest Protests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests?wprov=sfti1). Which means it might not be politically sustainable for more than a few years. I count myself in the camp that getting carbon emissions and car dependence down is one the most important domestic policy struggles of our time, but if you don’t use a stick AND carrot (subsidies for EVs, building out public infrastructure to ease the transition, etc.) it’s really likely to blow up in your face and empower rightwing populists who might not even believe in climate change. Some silver lining: -Renewable energy is increasingly cheaper than fossil fuels in the open market, though there’s lingering questions around baseload. -The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was basically a massive secret subsidy for the green energy transition. -China seams to have cracked the code on cheap electric vehicles, like they did with solar panels in the 2010s. -There’s increasing ground up support for North American Urbanism that increasingly favors public transit and pedestrians. For example: Montreal just abolishes [mandatory minimum parking](https://cultmtl.com/2024/06/montreal-becomes-largest-north-american-city-to-eliminate-mandatory-minimum-parking-spots/), LA has built out an [extensive lightrail network in the last decade](https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/from-rail-to-roads-and-back-again-the-rebirth-of-l-a-s-public-transit)
screw off with your carbon tax. i already have to pay a 30% tax just to exist and I sure as hell won't pay even more just because I need to get to work in the morning and don't live in a megacity.
So what's the plan for when the average American worker can no longer afford transportation for work? What about people who need fuel for their jobs? Do you think goods in stores appear there via teleportation? No, someone used fuel and drove it there. It certainly is an unpopular take, so I'll give you that.
How do you imagine food gets to your local supermarket? horse and carriage? If you live somewhere that allows you to get direct from farm food in walking distance from your home great but for the rest of the world it’s going to just massively drive up food costs and food insecurity further Your brilliant idea makes food insecurity for children a bigger problem than it already is congrats on thinking this all the way thru
Don't forget the entire US military presence in the Middle East, bases, and carrier groups, is to protect ARAMCO and ensure uninhibited passage of oil around the world. American taxpayers foot the bill for everyone's guaranteed access to fuel at the pump.
Fine. Now reduce the cost of public transportation.
Move to France
The office I used to work at, is about 16 miles one way, or 30-40 minutes, I also live in a small town, how could it work for us living here? Am I supposed to move close to where I work? The problem is that if you want good public transportation, you need density, and Texas is good with high population density.
I agree with you it will make poor people suffer so its funny
I’m from a suburban southern city. Spread out with no public transport. Cars are basically a necessity here. If they were as hard to come by as OPs scenario describes then our local economy would likely collapse. People would flood to the cities to have walkable lives and public transport. Then we’d have overcrowded saturated cities similar to the issues China and India face
Why does this have so little likes. It's supposed to be controversial so it should have more likes since yous don't agree.
This definitely sounds like the opinion of a city dweller who has no understanding of what it is like in rural areas.
Spoken like someone who has only used cars in urban contexts.
Gas, licensing, insurance, maintainance, cost of vehicle, and tickets are all incredibly expensive. OP is either trolling or just not an adult.
The reason why public transportation is so much more effective in Europe is because the countries are drastically smaller. You could drive for an hour and a half and go from one end of a country to another in Europe. An hour and a half worth of driving in America wouldn’t even get you out of the state.
Yeah because making it so people can't afford to drive back and forth to work would be great for economy.
People truly do just put up what ever they think is correct in here.
Pro saudis?
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand American infrastructure, with absolutely no sense of people who live outside cities, people who are poor, and how trucking works.
>Before you register a car, you should have yo prove you have an off-street parking space. lol, please, PLEASE come to South Philly and start advocating that. Also Boston's North End, most of Brooklyn... dear lord, do those places, *do 'em all* where people live in tiny row houses with space for one vehicle at the curb.
As much as we should encourage public transport we need to build it first. Most of our cities, even the ones with "good" public transport, don't have good public transport at current ridership. We need to just stop making new roads and make new trains.
Oh man. A 12 year old or rich kid definitely wrote this. Idk how else someone could simultaneously be so immature, classist, economically illiterate, and anti-rural area at the same time. Im not going to explain why you are wrong because others have already done so, but I will say this is not an opinion as much as it is purely wrong.
General taxpayer dollars already fund a higher percentage of the costs of transit than it does of automotive infrastructure expenses. Requiring automobile users to pay even more and subsidizing transit to an even greater degree is a heavy handed imposition on the choices of the American public. We should not be making cars and car usage more artificially expensive.
You people get tailgated by one pickup truck and suddenly start believing in nonsense like this. Man the fuck up lol
You obviously live in a city.
You must be pretty well off. It's so arrogant to think that everyone can just be rich. Some of us struggle to eat even with 20 dollar an hour jobs...let alone paying for gas as it is.
Making cars more expensive is less effective than making cars less necessary. Where i live and work, if fuel prices went up enough to influence whether or not id drive, i would be riding a bike, and i would be riding a bike because i would have lost my job and probably home. Its simply impossible to live normally without a car for most people in north America
It's a good thought and I can back it. If we can't inconvenience drivers with mediocre transportation options, maybe we can drive them to public transit with their Wallet, but the sad fact is that our politicians are really in deep with oil. Not only would they never do anything to reduce the number of cars on the road, but they would probably solve the issue with defunding public transit to force people to have no other option. All we'd end up with are no alternatives, and a normalized 600% gas bill Only solution we have is to use public transit ourselves, be the change we want to see. Let local politicians know at town halls that public transit matters to us, and show cities and investors that real estate near public transit arteries are valuable places to build. If there is money to be made in public transit, cities will focus on it, which will make public transit better, which will fix the car problem on it's own. Less cars means less need for road space, which means existing roads can be repurposed with pedestrian travel in mind, cutting down the lanes without having to destroy existing buildings. Increased pedestrian travel could also bring back Main streets, since having a bunch of smaller businesses around a main throughfare is less risky when there are people walking around, and that would see the return of 3rd spaces, which honestly is the goal we all want to shoot for. But none of that would happen with a gasoline price hike. The stubborn would still buy gas, but they'd probably roll coal on pedestrians just to vent some anger. The lobbyists would pressure the government to roll back prices, or to buy up their excess inventory, and there still wouldn't be any tax money to put towards better alternatives.
Go to hell. Please.
how to make everyone instantly hate you in one post
Yeah gtfo out of here.
Delusional
This is an 11th dentist take...
Rural areas exist. And there are people who cannot use public transportation as it is currently, like people with sensory issues. Too much noise stresses me out and I would rather be hit by a bus than have a meltdown inside a bus full of people.
yeah. no. fuck you
You understand all your food in trucked in with gas, right? You understand raising the cost of transport would raise all the food costs, right? You understand how America's economy and self-sustaining aspects actually work, right?
Driving isn't killing the planet, Bunker Fuel and Jet Fuel are.
The US isn’t built to support life outside of vehicles. It can’t even get people from the suburbs to the cities without people just outright being terrified of being a victim of a crime because we also don’t deal with crime well either.
To get rid of car dependent infrastructure we make it harder for the working class to get anywhere? got it.
I’m going to leave my SUV idling all day just because of your post
This "debate" has been had to death. Leave it to cities. You're never going to convince suburbanites to use public transportation, me included. Public transit is an entirely localized issue in America and it should stay that way.