The future of the individual car
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As we switch to walking, cycling and sustainable collective transportation systems, only a tiny minority might be able to afford the occasional lift in a Tesla or a Lamborghini.
Maybe fuel depletion will in fact bring second hand car prices so low, that some might be able to get a shiny Jaguar to keep in their garage as a curiosity. If you lose your house to economic hardship, you can always sleep in your Jaguar, homeless, provided you manage push it out of your garage.
Individual cars might soon become a memory from the crazy years when humankind had managed to convince itself that oil would last forever.
I always thought I'd like to drive a Lamborghini at least once in my life, now I am not so sure which model would be best. The one on the right looks more robust. Also, you can use it to grow plenty of vegetables. The one on the left seems to have a massive leakage problem.
I thought that parking my amphibian van nearby a garlic farm would keep trolls away. I was mistaken, it only works with vampires. I am now being tortured night and day by this inexpugnable question: if trolls were to be spotted in the Troll Lounge, where to retreat to?
Note to self: not being able to get irony really is the saddest thing on this flat planet. I am dreaming of a spherical Earth, were it would always be possible to get one step further without falling in the abyss of triviality.
Laurie Anderson sang a lovely song about that. Or more precisely, as is her way, she spoke a lovely song about it.
>"You're walking. And you don't always realize it
But you're always falling
With each step, you fall forward slightly
And then catch yourself from falling
Over and over, you're falling
And then catching yourself from falling
And this is how you can be walking and falling
At the same time"
I've been walking and bicycle riding for six days a week for about 8-9 years now. My small truck usually gets started up at some point each weekend. This weekend I'll be helping a friend and his wife and baby move into a house.
I don't want any fancy sports cars. As long as we still drive occasionally, I want to keep my small truck. It's very utilitarian. We've been together for 10 years now. It's the second longest relationship of my life, next to my wife.
> I don't want any fancy sports cars.
Really? What about all these Ferraris then? You just said the other day that you cannot fit them all, even in your extended garages. Maybe you could try to fit the extra ones into one of those magic manila envelopes of yours, if you have any left, and it would return as a cabbage harvester.
That said, I never understood why people would buy a so-called "sports car" for daily transportation needs. In fact, why would any car be called a "sports" cars? Driving is no sport. Each time I had to drive to travel, I wished I was sitting in a train instead, and able to read, or rest, or simply meditate, instead of being stuck like forever behind that driving wheel, at the mercy of careless people, and possibly of my own mistakes. Car racing is no sport either, none of them pilots ever looks relaxed. Some die, too. It is at best a dangerous hobby.
I also like small trucks, although we might not be talking about the same thing. Did you mean a pickup? Surely these can be used as a shared resource, so not everyone in a given neighborhood needs to get one. Although I do realize this sounds a bit like a utopian dream. I might still stick to the small farming utility, like this one below, which you can also use to help people moving in, including into remote cabins across the fields, where no iris recognition device will ever track them.
Yes, my extended family and friends and friendly neighbors know they can borrow my pickup truck whenever they need it. So it's kind of a shared resource in that way. What really happens though is they say "can I borrow your truck", and 90% of the time they
actually mean "can you run some errands for me in your truck?" Which is usually fine.
That garden dump truck looks a bit too much like a sports car for my tastes.
So your community is living my utopian dream. It already makes me feel better about it, because it instantly dispels the utopian side of it.
> That garden dump truck looks a bit too much like a sports car for my tastes.
I must admit it has quite an impressive top speed, especially on rough terrain. Hence the extra lights at the top.
Teach them to deliver the fertilizer right on the front door step of your customer's houses - you'll be the most popular delivery service in town. Soon you'll rival Amazon.
Agreed. I do think we stand a chance, although Amazons are of course a couple of millenia ahead of us. Not sure how they managed to command clouds so rain would fall at the right place, at the right time. A gardener's wet dream.
I meant amphibian. Although this can also be seen as milieu hybridization.
> amphibian
If amphibian trolls were to be spotted in the Troll Lounge, where to retreat to?
Not everyone seems to be aware that the only way to get rid of trolls is not to feed them. I have been fasting for a while now, and I can already feel the difference.
No wonder troll eaters have been in high demand these days. Which, given the Australian experience involving rabbits, sheep and dingoes, begs the question: who will eat those juicy troll eaters once they start proliferating?
Good old Uncle Bobba was wise enough to retire before things went awry.
He always said that a balanced diet should always include one or two bites of fresh troll a day.
Similarly, trolls should never be overfed or they might burst and leave a horrible mess - not to mention the stench.
In fact, I have started building a reasonably large arch, based on the above concepts.
Nomadic and amphibian is the way to go. Not sure how to reconcile it with tininess, though.
I wish we would transition away from individual cars as the primary method of transportation in the US but there's too much opposition from the highway lobby.
A progressive society should not force its people to buy cars.
Agreed, these are collective problems that can only be solved by collective action. Local individual or small group solutions are fine too, but can only marginally help.
Unfortunately due to poor urban planning it is not feasible for most Americans to live without a car. The few places that are walkable and have decent public transportation tend to be unaffordable.
Depends on how you live your life. I'm a member of bikeforums.net, and we have many many people who are car free, and who ride their bicycle 30 miles, even 50 miles each way to work each day. They lived in every state and every rural and urban area. One of the hardest areas was around Houston, but we had members that were car free there too.
For a couple of years, I rode my bike 17 miles to work each day. The only reason I don't do it now is that I work from home.
People who are not willing to transform their lives to a more healthy one are unable to live without a car. For those who are willing to put in the effort, living without a car is not only possible, it's preferable.
Where I live now, the area is fantastic for living without a car. I have my pickup truck in the garage, but as I said, I go 6 days a week without driving. I live about 2 miles from a train station where I can ride all over a huge area for $3 a day. And the bicycling is great, the weather is great. If I didn't enjoy owning my pickup truck I wouldn't need a car or truck for anything.
That is great! But I would be scared to bike on the roads in places without bicycle infrastructure (Houston and other Sunbelt cities sound like a nightmare), I've heard too many stories of accidents.
Personally I am car-free though. I recently moved to a major city for grad school and I'm a 10 minute walk from campus, grocery stores, etc.
>"That is great! But I would be scared to bike on the roads in places without bicycle infrastructure (Houston and other Sunbelt cities sound like a nightmare)"
Serious 50+ mile-per-day bicyclists do not usually like "bicycle infrastructure" in my experience - they like "taking the lane". Most of them I've talked to despise bike lanes and avoid them as a safety hazard. And they are capable of taking their lane very well and safely, if you watch their videos.
That's not like me - I am a shoulder-of-the-road rider, but the guys that are going 30+ miles one way to work are usually taking the whole lane and making cars deal with them like another vehicle. Most people like you and me are not going to do it. But I have in the past ridden in traffic a bit - you can get used to it and get better at it over time. It takes proper gear and a proper attitude.
If 300 million people were biking, it wouldn't be a problem, as the only vehicles on the road would be the delivery trucks, and the truck drivers would be facing loss of job and serious prison time for flattening a bicyclist.
When I first started visiting South China about 20 years ago, most of the cities I was visiting were on bicycle or riding buses. Today, they are all in cars, and bicycles aren't allowed on the big roads at all. And South China didn't used to have hardly any fat people - but now they have an obesity epidemic. Things can change for large populations very quickly. It's all about state of mind, I guess.
That's interesting, it seems that the painted bike lanes are useless. But countries like the Netherlands, where cycling is widespread, do have a lot of separate bike paths. So that's probably what we need for mass adoption. Then there is the obesity crisis, of course.
They aren't useless - they are useful for people like you and me on relatively short trips probably. But if you were seriously biking hundreds of miles a week, you probably wouldn't want to be plodding along inside the painted lines. Also, they are a bit dangerous, because car traffic has to weave in and out of them, often at odd angles.
You want to see some wild stuff, there's thousands of videos online of bicycle messengers and others playing in heavy traffic. Here's a really good example from New York City. I get scared just watching it: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=yWHdkK5j4yk
After you watch it for a few minutes, you find out he doesn't even have brakes or gears!!
> he doesn't even have brakes or gears!!
Cannot play the video for some reason, but I'd bet he's riding a fixie.
He is riding a fixie. The videos of these crazy street riders is illegal in a lot of countries - Big Brother tyrannical governments do not want people getting crazy ideas about how they should be riding their bikes. Keep them in their cars where Big Brother can keep them under control.
If you can't see it, that should tell you something about how your government thinks about you.
Indeed. However, in this very case, the culprit was more probably our goggly friend, who cares much less about actual content than about how well it allows them to track you, as we all know here.
I used to ride my rusty six gear bike to work every day some years ago, but even in the relatively small city where I was living, too many drivers were skilled in transforming cars into erratically moving objects from a cyclist's perspective. So I took to walking instead, which largely doubled commuting time but had the added benefit of being doable with minor adjustments even during the regular summer heat waves and the occasional winter freezing wave.
I tend to agree with you that many people have simply forgotten that they could walk, ride their bike or take a train or a bus, although some of us commoners really have no choice because of permanent under-investment in collective transportation systems.
Sometimes you also have to deal with assholes like this: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/transportation/article/Bicyclists-angry-weekend-crash-that-injured-six-16490562.php.
Before Covid, I used to go to work by bike, 10km one way. It is a dense urban area. In my experience, pedestrians and other bicycles are an even bigger danger than cars.
When there is a bicycle path physically separated from cars and with no obstacle to seeing pedestrians, or with difficult access for pedestrians, it is very good. Also, even though rain makes the road more slippery, it has a nice side effect: far less pedestrians on bicycle paths.
That sounds plausible in a dense urban area such as the one I currently live in. However, in my hometown (a suburb/rural area) there are basically no pedestrians outside residential areas, and high speed limits. During the pandemic I had some time to explore the area on foot and many of the roads have basically no shoulder, and often steep dropoffs.
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