zlacker

>>amathe+(OP)
The issue of quiting cars is nowadays far from just a matter of values as the article seems to be implying.

Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and urban planning disaster across the world. We are stuck with them. As a mode of transport it has grown uncontrollably at the expense of all others (except the airplane) and practically everything has been shaped to accomodate it.

Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person. Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way.

In the best scenario it will be an excruciatingly long transformation (~50 yr) as car oriented cities (or city sections) get slowly deprecated and the car-free or car-lite segments become more desirable, more livable.

>>nologi+Mz1
I didn't own a car for about 7 years while I lived in different countries. I can't say sometimes I didn't miss it, but I managed just fine.

Last year we moved to the US, and we couldn't last 6 months without a car. I mean, technically we could, but it made life so extremely inconvenient as to not be worth it. Also, the alternative was to use tons of Ubers, which I'm not entirely convinced counts as ditching the car.

>>angarg+u92
Yes indeed, but there's no reason even in the U.S. that we need to stick with private car ownership. We could easily get by and accomplish everything we need, even with the current awful car-dependent situation by actually sharing cars more.

Uber is not the answer really as is, but some form of fewer cars used more often with much less parking needed — that would be an improvement.

If we can then get rid of half the parking lots and fill them in with a mix of medium-density mixed-use development and green space, that could set us up for enough walking/biking/transit contexts that we can take the next step away from car dependency.

>>quadra+ub2
I've always suspected that you could do something interesting with a moderate density apartment complex where renting the apartment comes with the ability to use any of the X vehicles the complex owns.

It would be some bit of legal/liability wrangling and maybe some accounting to do it, but imagine if you had 50 families in a building, and ten vehicles available ranging from a small car to a pickup truck to a van to a moving truck. Tune it a bit and there you go!