LogFAQs > #956920152

LurkerFAQs, Active DB, DB1, DB2, DB3, DB4, DB5, DB6, DB7, DB8, Database 9 ( 09.28.2021-02-17-2022 ), DB10, DB11, DB12, Clear

Topic List	Page List: 1
Topic	Does society need to eliminate driving?
ParanoidObsessive 08/09/21 11:38:27 AM #19:	faramir77 posted... Modern cities, especially in North America, are designed around car ownership. It's one of the biggest mismanagement of resources in human history. Correcting it either requires a huge increase in buses (as well as an increase in comfort and quality on those buses, God I'm glad my 40 foot limo days are over) or completely redesigning cities (not even possible). This, very much. But even worse than cities, the entire concept of the suburbs revolves almost entirely around cars. There are plenty of places in the US where you will pretty much die without a car of your own. To change that, you would have to radically restructure both the infrastructure and economy of the world in ways that are borderline impossible without causing a dynamic crisis. People act like the last year and a half were the worst thing any human has ever had to endure. There's pretty much zero chance those people would be willing to endure the sort of radical lifestyle changes necessarily to eliminate cars. It's part of why even pro-driverless car advocates have admitted in the past that a full driverless future is probably unlikely (at least in our lifetimes), and that the more likely scenario is a focus on driverless public transport. A slow incremental changeover would probably take decades to get to the point of eliminating personal transport entirely, but it's also about the only way it would ever feasibly work. faramir77 posted... Let's just hope we can get a clean, reliable, abundant, and affordable way of producing individual vehicles that run on a renewable power source. Even if they were completely equal in other ways, this would still be the far more important factor than whether or not cars are driverless, because the environmental impact of driverless cars would still be fairly significant. And most people who advocate for scaled back car usage don't really consider the major impact of product transport and delivery - planes, trains, boats, and trucks are more or less in constant motion in the modern world, using resources and producing waste. You'd have to start converting all of those over to clean energy alternatives as well, not just people's personal vehicles. But even if we were able to completely convert every vehicle in the world to clean alternatives and every transport and personal vehicle was completely automated, then you'd have the added problem of all the people who used to drive for a living now out of work. Which is where you start getting into discussions about things like universal basic income. People who think problems are easy to solve and advocate for the easiest, most obvious solution usually just create new problems for the next batch of people to have to fix. Especially in the modern world, most big problems are more a tangled mess of integrated systems rather than a single point of failure, and require far more thinking and complex solutions than people are willing to commit to. --- "Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76 "POwned again." --- blight family <cite>ParanoidObsessive posted [p:956920152] in Does socie... [t:79605592]...</cite> <quote><cite>faramir77 posted...</cite> <quote>Modern cities, especially in North America, are designed around car ownership. It's one of the biggest mismanagement of resources in human history. Correcting it either requires a huge increase in buses (as well as an increase in comfort and quality on those buses, God I'm glad my 40 foot limo days are over) or completely redesigning cities (not even possible).</quote> This, very much. But even worse than cities, the entire concept of the suburbs revolves almost entirely around cars. There are plenty of places in the US where you will pretty much die without a car of your own. To change that, you would have to radically restructure both the infrastructure and economy of the world in ways that are borderline impossible without causing a dynamic crisis. People act like the last year and a half were the worst thing any human has ever had to endure. There's pretty much zero chance those people would be willing to endure the sort of radical lifestyle changes necessarily to eliminate cars. It's part of why even pro-driverless car advocates have admitted in the past that a full driverless future is probably unlikely (at least in our lifetimes), and that the more likely scenario is a focus on driverless public transport. A slow incremental changeover would probably take decades to get to the point of eliminating personal transport entirely, but it's also about the only way it would ever feasibly work. <cite>faramir77 posted...</cite> <quote>Let's just hope we can get a clean, reliable, abundant, and affordable way of producing individual vehicles that run on a renewable power source. </quote> Even if they were completely equal in other ways, this would still be the far more important factor than whether or not cars are driverless, because the environmental impact of driverless cars would still be fairly significant. And most people who advocate for scaled back car usage don't really consider the major impact of product transport and delivery - planes, trains, boats, and trucks are more or less in constant motion in the modern world, using resources and producing waste. You'd have to start converting all of those over to clean energy alternatives as well, not just people's personal vehicles. But even if we were able to completely convert every vehicle in the world to clean alternatives and every transport and personal vehicle was completely automated, then you'd have the added problem of all the people who used to drive for a living now out of work. Which is where you start getting into discussions about things like universal basic income. People who think problems are easy to solve and advocate for the easiest, most obvious solution usually just create new problems for the next batch of people to have to fix. Especially in the modern world, most big problems are more a tangled mess of integrated systems rather than a single point of failure, and require far more thinking and complex solutions than people are willing to commit to. --- "Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76 "POwned again." --- blight family</quote> ... Copied to Clipboard!
Topic List	Page List: 1