You'll probably manage just fine in a city.

Living in rural areas mass transit quickly becomes madness. Schedules are infrequent and routes are weird, and if you make them frequent and direct you suddenly drive around an empty bus while still building the exact same road you would for the few cars.

I live in a rural area over 30 miles from the nearest city in a town with a population in the low thousands. The nearest place I can get any goods is over 4 miles away. I’d be completely fucked without a car.

I know that’s not everyone’s situation, but just pointing out there are people living in remote places with no other transportation options.

Schedules matter less when you have more frequent transportation. Renting a truck, or ordering a taxi/uber xl would be lower in cost than paying for and maintaining a truck. Obviously there's a line somewhere in the middle when it makes sense to own and unfortunately it's pushed further because our Costcos are 50 miles away instead of having smaller corner shops.

Without cars there would be A LOT more people on the sidewalk. In the past, before cars, there were so many more people on the street it's not even funny. The roads were full of people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDMsHtCgnkc

As an autistic person that can barely cope with public transport (which is good in europe, obviously) and the associated density of humans without having a complete meltdown on a good day, a car greatly increases my mobility and quality of life. Not having one would also mean an increased frequency of grocery shopping (which, again, is quite a challenge most of the time, hence I try to go as rarely as possible) because neither an e-bike nor public transport offer the same carrying capacity. I could likely make do with a cargo bike, but I'd still have to relocate into a more densely populated area to have all the different shops I need (yes, I'm "picky" about what food is safe, what clothes I can bear, etc.) in bike-able distance, which would cost more money for housing and mental energy ("spoons") to handle the increased population around me. Plus it'd cost a lot of extra time. As much as I'd prefer a car-less world in theory, it's simply a fact that it's an assistive technology for me, just like noise-canceling headphones are. I do hope we can move over to decent electrical cars though, no reason to run on fossil fuels (other than cost of the vehicles, and that is rapidly coming down).

Family Road Trips.

Personally (city dweller) a car is a time machine. I can get where I need to go mostly on a bike or my feet, but if I'm pressed for time - and that happens plenty - a car can get me there faster.

My penultimate child was at university about 10 miles from the house. There was a bus that got within a couple blocks of the sprawling campus, so I told her take the bus, but a year in said she could use my car and I'd walk to work since my commute was so short. That gained her about 3 hours per school day and lost me about one hour. Car is a time machine.

I think I'd be a good person to answer this. I've lived in Houston (needless to say, extremely car-friendly) without a car for almost 2 years; currently I'm living in a city that banned cars within its city center in 2015 which resulted in very visible changes, but the rest of the country is still very pro-car and quite car-friendly

A couple of things that cars benefit everyday life that would be difficult to do without a car. There's probably more but these are the ones I can think of:

• Accessibility to places that have difficulty justifying being served by public transit. These include poorer neighborhoods that are far away from city center, semi-rural natural preserves, extreme geographical difficulties, ... Case in point, Houston has a lot of nature/green spaces that were 20-30 miles outside of the city center... good luck getting to these without a car (trust me, I tried once)
• For certain physically disabled people, driving would be easier than walking/biking/public transit... Especially in particularly hilly cities, centuries-old cities where roads were paved no better than playgrounds, or sometimes both. This can be somewhat mitigated with good infrastructure projects, but cars are usually an easier solution
• Car-free zones can get very crowded, very fast. This is usually a good thing in terms of urbanism... but some find it uncomfortable for various reasons. My current city is actually a rather extreme example: they are now considering banning bikes in the city center too, due to pedestrian injuries
• I know cars are prone to needing repair, but with how the road network functions, personal vehicles can reduce a lot of dependencies on external factors such as public transit being functional. Case in point, two months ago NL's national rail company became essentially non-operational due to extreme weather, which would be rather devastating if your only way of commuting to work relies on the train

Also I think some positive points associated with cars are doable without cars:

• Hauling stuff from point A to point B: delivery companies and car-rentals exist for a reason! This is surprisingly doable even without owning a car (you are technically using someone else's car in this case). Of course doing it without your own car will be more expensive... but we do have the logistics for it, especially if the entire society shifts to a car-free model
• Not all rural areas need cars: some are actually quite doable by walking alone due to how small they are (I have a friend who lives in a rural American town like that: yes everyone drives, but everything is also 30-minutes on foot if you don't mind walking). And there are quite a few parts of the world where rural towns are served by trains frequently
• Road trips: scenic railways exist for a reason... and unlike point 1 I made, sightseeing trains actually do make money, so there is pretty good justification for building them

Quite frankly the grand majority of things lost by a lack of car ownership could just as easily be made up by just building better infrastructure

I'm less likely to get assaulted when my parents drive me somewhere vs having to take public transport.

I'm Asian American and I still have anxiety about the post-covid racism.

For me personally, the loss of a car means potentially the loss of certain hobbies. I like to go camping and backpacking, and that means taking a certain amount of gear out into remote areas. While I might be able to minimize the amount of gear needed, there's no getting around the remoteness of the hobby, and that necessitates a car for transportation.

The other hobby is dog related. I enjoy doing things, including sports, with my dog. Transporting the dog, at least as it currently stands in America, requires a car. Large dogs are not allowed on public transit pretty much anywhere here. When you also consider that I may be taking jumps or poles or other larger equipment with me to train in new places, losing access to a car makes that a near impossibility.

I'd go so far as to say many outdoor recreation hobbies either require or are made easier by having a car or larger personal transport. Kayaks, boats, skis and snowboards, fishing poles and the list goes on and on. Sure you could setup rental places, but if you do a hobby a lot you ultimately want to own your gear so you can get something that suits your preferences and needs.

I'm not opposed to a less car-centric society, but eliminating personal vehicles would make many hobbies problematic or impossible.

I just want to say, I absolutely love this kind of question because it forces you to imagine realistically what a car-lite world would look like, and it completely changes the line of thinking from problem identification to problem solving, and in a way that truly will change the world for the better

Well in Australia's context where I live, you need a car to get anywhere (depending on where you live). The way QLD was built where i grew up, everything is spaced out. 30 mins to the cafe, 45 mins to the shops etc. Our country has public transport but really only in major areas.

Where i grew up, which wasnt anywhere remote and was 1 hour away from a major CBD, i was fucked if i didnt have a car. Going anywhere meant walking for ages under the Aussie sun or wait for a bus that comes every 30 minutes to take you a quarter of the distance.

It wasnt really a sense of freedom (which i 100% agree with) but having a car meant i could go directly to places.

Without a car, it would have taken me ages to get anywhere.

The car-centric culture of many places (especially the US, but it does apply in basically all of the industrialised world to varying degrees) is due to infrastructural factors. If a country is designed to be navigated by car, then you need a car to participate in that society. That's why people want cars.

Things like the freedom of having a car are also from social factors. A lot of people learn to drive as teenagers, and want to escape the patriarchal environment of the family, hence a car provides freedom. In a world where children are socially raised and the family is abolished, teenagers don't seek to escape from the family. And, of course, a car can be a way of providing freedom because other means of freedom of movement don't exist—a lack of accommodation for disabled people to get around, a lack of public transport and safe cycle routes, etc.

Most people wouldn't want to give up their car for those reasons. If we just got rid of all cars without addressing any of these issues, I'm sure most people would be unhappy about it. So if that's what you're suggesting, plenty of people do stand to lose. But if we address the issues that make cars the only option for a lot of people, I don't think the average person would care. Car enthusiasts can still have their cars, but it becomes a hobby or lifestyle choice, like people who have a boat. And car haters would most certainly be a lot happier too.

Saab 900 Turbo never exists and I'm sorry Mother Gaia but that's not a world I want to live in

You are missing that a lot of people do not live in cities. In a city, access to public transport is basically anytime, anywhere. Outside of city centers, public transport is very, very limited, even in Europe. Without a car, you are basically lost.

I genuinely love vanity plates. I think they’re a really fun way to express youself and the plate goes with you regardless of context: you’ve got the same plate in the office parking lot and at the hobby group.

I’ve seen hobby and interest references, from LAXBRO to NCC1701. I’ve seen meta plates, from the VW Beetle with SCARAB to the Nissan Cube with RUBIKS. I’ve seen professional references, BONEMAN (a podiatrist) to CSHFLO (somebody I knew who worked in finance).

And I’ve once seen SQRTRGY which I can only imagine means “squirt orgy” but I’ll never know.

I know it’s a little thing, but I think it’s fun. (Doesn’t make up the pollution and danger of cars, tho.)

This is one of those questions where you have to look to the past to really understand the possible future.

Rural America was built by railroads. You know why there's a town every 10-20 miles on a rough grid? It's because steam locomotives built during the 20th century would need to stop to refill on water every 10-20 miles. These old steam locomotives were slow usually only running up to 30-40mph. The train would need a spot to stop & refill with water so when the railroads didn't platte out towns to sell the land they just built through and increased the value of, towns would organically pop up near these stops anyways.

If we fast forward a little to the 1880s or so, electrification was going bonkers, and many electric companies would say "while we're building these power lines, what if we also ran electric trolley services too?" So the trolleys would advertise the versatility of this newfangled electricity thing while also providing a second revenue stream to electric companies. This is when electric interurban services really hit their peak. There were thousands of interurban lines across the US at this time, but many didn't survive out of the 20th century, and of those that did very few survived past the second world war, and of those, even fewer survived into being bought up by city transit agencies.

This pre-car period had most people either living in dense walkable cities or living on homesteads and walking/riding horses/carts multiple miles to go to the nearest town for the day. People didn't move around a lot during this time, and the world was much smaller and life much quieter. This is part of why circuses and fairs were so big is it was the most exciting thing happening all year.

The world has changed so much since the invention and proliferation of the automobile that it's really hard to imagine a car-lite world, but also there's aspects of modern society that simply can't exist without cars. I'm imagining a societal change pushed by something like legislation which doubles vehicle registration fees every year for a decade. Sure that $250 the first year will hurt a little, and the $500 the second will hurt a bit more, but you've got a good 3-5 years or so before it's really going to start hurting most families, and I'd imagine it would be the $4000 mark where most don't renew which is conveniently after 5 years of the registration fee doubling, and enough time for new bus services to be spun up and plenty of time for people to invest in bikes and manufacturing to adjust to the new demand patterns

The concept of road tripping becomes very different, and travel honestly gets more expensive. I was just looking at Amtrak tickets today chasing an idea of taking a couple day trip out of town during my kids spring break, and I'm immediately looking at $250 to go 200 miles, 5x the cost of just loading the family in the car and driving that distance

Without cars anyone living in rural areas is immediately stranded. Most of rural America has been rebuilt around cars because rural America was the first place cars were able to sell successfully (in fact car companies had to engage in conspiracies to force sales in cities once everyone who wanted a car had already bought one) there's many houses which are multiple miles from the nearest store of any kind, and many small towns lack any kind of grocery store. Many business and public schools in rural areas are located miles outside of any town and require people to drive or take the school bus just to get there. With about a century for rural America to rebuild into the car centric life that it is and most of the railroad tracks gone, it's pretty impossibls for rural America to de-car

Suburbs are similarly challenged to rural areas, but at least have the benefit of being close enough to their cities and hubs of commerce that biking and biking to/from public stops remains very viable. Exurbs where they aren't connected to the urban fabric but are entirely reliant on easy vehicle access to it are absolutely fucked though, and would probably spin up new Intercity bus services to compensate, but needing to transfer bus services to get to anything rapidly makes these already undesirable exurbs become far more undesirable

Small towns that never had the population growth to spawl are even better off. Many of these small towns are super walkable and bikable today with limited infrastructure changes that might be desired. Stroads built to serve big box stores or industries would be the only major challenge, but generally all that needs is a road diet and/or a dedicated parallel greenway

Shopping will definitely look different. For one thing single use plastic bags become completely nonviable since they carry so little per bag even compared to just paper bags, and it's difficult to carry more than about 3 plastic bags of groceries at once. We'd also definitely see a reversal from fewer larger stores which are further away back to many more smaller stores that are closer to people's homes. Parking lots will be quickly realized to be unneeded, likely to be torn up with new housing, stores and bus terminals built where those parking lots once stood.

The average road and street will also change dramatically. With people mostly walking, biking and taking public transit, suddenly the minimum acceptable street changes a lot, where right now it's relatively smooth pavement with relatively good drainage, in a world where people primarily walk, bike and take transit they will instead demand trees and narrower paved areas, bringing it down to human scale. A "narrow" 40 foot wide suburban street will rapidly become much too large and many will be rebuilt to be more pleasant for cyclists and pedestrians (I'm imagining 10-15 foot wide medians with trees, benches, water fointains and a nice greenway in the center, maintaining a pair of 10-12 foot wide lanes on either side for deliveries, emergency services and buses, or the inverse, with the road space narrowed significantly to 16-20 feet to allow for careful passing potentially with a parrelel greenway depending on traffic, again with trees, benches and water fountains)

So for example, last night I went to see a play with my wife in the big city we live outside. 8pm show. Our location has better options than most in the US for public transit, but still not enough to fully rely upon and it’s hard to envision that changing.

We have a regional transit rail system we could have taken. It would drop us off close enough to the theater, perhaps 2 city blocks.

But the station is 6km from our house so the problem is on this end. We live in an area that’s not quite rural, more suburban, but it is out on the open countryside a bit and this natural beauty is what we love about living here.

We do have excellent bike lanes and even a network of bike trails that are separated from the roads. Our local station is about a 20 minute ride. We can do it but we’re in our 50s and it’s not our first choice when getting dressed up for a date night to begin with 20 minutes of vigorous exercise. And we would have had to repeat that ride at 11pm on the way home, tired, with a glass of wine in our bellies.

So the problem I guess is our home location. We live in a medium-to-small sized town that’s nestled up against a state park. The only public transit I can really imagine would be a bus system and it would have to cover a very wide area with many vehicles to serve this region. And even then I can’t imagine it would be quick.

I would still prefer a world without cars. I guess I’m just telling you why cars still fit into our needs and why our options are.

In the future I’m pretty optimistic that we can change the math on busses. Autonomous vehicles would allow us to move away from large busses piloted by a human driver to many smaller ones with more comprehensive coverage and better approximation of point-to-point transit.

The appeal of this path is that it’s something car-centric areas can transition to smoothly. We can get mass autonomous bus service going without banning cars and building rail lines or other large projects.

A small country that was laid out centuries ago, before cars, has a different layout and distribution of people that makes things like rail work better. The problem is that the US is huge and was built on cars, which are excellent for spreading individuals out with no regard for central planning.

Today’s generation of Americans are stuck with cars and not always in love with them. The way our population is distributed, it’s hard for mass transit to replace them, so it really doesn’t matter how great civic rail works in Lisbon.

We might address the topic of whether it’s responsible for people to be so spread out. I would certainly have a hard time saying goodbye to my beautiful natural surroundings.

I'm going to assume that in such a world, every city including the bullshit ones have reliable transportation that's good enough to not be much more time consuming than driving. Because it would be too easy and lame to say "well taking the bus to work takes 4 hours and driving takes 45 minutes so I literally could not survive that".

You would be losing the ability to drive to the nearest legal state and smuggle back weed. 🤷 I mean, the Flock cameras basically were invented to catch people doing this anyway. So maybe we would lose nothing after all.

Inb4 lemmy's famous misreadings, I think we need a shitton more public transportation. But I know it's not going to be a 100% replacement.

What we need is transportation, and cars are a very sucessful form of transportation. There are a lot of factors: 1) Location, where you can go, 2) Timing, when you can go. 3) Distance, how far you can go, 4) Speed, how qulckly you can get there. 5) Door to door, or not.

Let's compare them all:

Cars: 1) Location, you can go anywhere. 2) Timing, you can go any time. 3) Distance. This is a big one why cars are very successful, they are good for any distance whether it's a short trip, medium trip, long trip, or even multiple days long trip. 4) It's fast for any length trip. Excluding certain times into say downtown they are incredibly fast. 5) It's door to door transportation. Add it all up and you have a very succesful mode of transportation.

Public transportation 1) doesn't go everywhere, you have last mile problem on both ends. So add in walking. 2) limited timing especially at night. Schedule has to fit. Involves waiting. 3) Distance means time goes up dramatically. Add in transfers and time goes up even more. I regularly had to wait 25 minutes at transfer because they missed each other by 5 minutes. 4) Slow. It just is. 5) Not door to door. Usually a good bit of walking. Inb4 lemmy's famous misreading, yes I know there are exceptions. Yes more service means more passengers which means more service and more gaps are filled, etc.

Ebikes (pedal assist electric bikes). 1) Go everywhere. 2) Go anytime. 3) Good for short and medium trips. And occasional long trip 4) Can actually be fast, especially if the route avoids lights. But not as fast as a freeway for long distances. 5) Door to door transportation. This is why I'm a big fan of ebikes, they hit almost everything. They really are the game changer. But we need a lot more infrastructure. It might not be the best on long trips and in bad weather. Side note about normal bikses: The way I compare them, normal bikes are limited to physical exertion. Ebikes are limited to time, very similar to cars. Though at the long range cars are still more comfortable.

Walking. I'm just gonna wrap this one up as most people are not gonna walk that far every day. We should have walkable cities for short walks and health and neighborhoods, but walking to downtown ain't an option for the vast vast amount of the city, either physically or time wise.

This is where I love autonomous taxis. If you can do your daily commute on public transportation and then use autonommous taxis to fill in the gaps (which there will be), that can dramatically lower car ownership levels. Normal taxis are expensive when you have to pay for the driver. Uber is basically slave labor.

You said own cars, as in personal use. But I will add there is a ton more. You have business, commercial, and industrial. Getting large amounts of commercial and industrial goods around to stores quickly and efficiently adds a ton to societal efficiency.

So what does that transportation add? Maybe this was the crux of your question and I spent too much time on the others. It's basically a lubricant for society, business, and industry. Society depends in large part on transportation (yes I'm choosing that word intentionally). If you don't have easy transportation everything is like molasses on every level.

Jobs: You wouldn't be able to get workers because they wouldn't be able to commute. I remember a documentary that London (way back when) basically maxed out on population because transporation via horses and walking had maxed out. Then trains were invented and the city was able to grow.

Industry: Getting goods around is critical to grow industry. Trains are great for moving a large amount of cargo from A to B, think coal, fertilizer, etc. Trucks are much better for getting a small amount of cargo from A to B, C, D, etc and vice versa.

Commercial goods: Stores keep getting bigger for good reason, it's cheaper to ship and operate that way.

Each mode has its place. I agree we are too reliant on cars and haven't accounted for the externalities.

Hope that helps.

Whole sections of the country that are zoned for suburban single family housing would not exist as they are today. Not because they'd be illegal or anything, but they'd be incredibly unpopular if most people didn't own a car, which is needed to basically get to or from a suburban neighborhood.

I understand the question to be something like: what happens if a majority of people are absolutely dead-set unwilling/unable to own a private automobile. And I think the immediate answer is that suburban neighborhoods cease to exist, at least at the current density levels. Either a neighborhood must densify so that transit options make sense, or they must aim to become rural living. This also means that things like suburban schools either turn into walkable urban schools, or into small one-room rural schools.

I don't actually think rural living will go away, because the fact is that the grand majority of people -- USA and abroad -- do not prefer rural living. The 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st Century trends are that people tend towards urban areas, where services and jobs exist. That said, there will always be people that want to live in the hills on 20 acres, and therefore need an automobile. And it's certainly sounds appealing to some, myself included. But that has never been the majority, so if a majority of people refuse owning an automobile, they will also mostly refuse rural and suburban living.

There is no plausible situation where over 50% of people willingly decide to: 1) not own a car, and 2) live in a suburb or rural area. This is from the fact that all other modes of transport into a suburb or rural area are either: 1) nonexistent (eg metro rail), or 2) ludicrously expensive (eg Lyft, or transit with 15% fairbox recovery) if the cost was borne by the people living there (as opposed to being subsidized heavily by other taxpayers.... Ahem, America).

Edit: some more thoughts: standalone strip malls would also change character, because the smaller ones that aren't on a rail or bus corridor would be undesirable commercial real estate. If they still exist, they'll likely be integrated into housing, so as to become the #1 most convenient option for people living there. Captive audience, indeed.

But larger strip malls and shopping centers actually might florish: they usually have enough stores and services that transit already makes sense. Indeed, shopping malls are actually really good transit center locations. But instead of giant parking lots, there would be housing, because why not? People who reject cars have every reason to live next to, or on top of, a mall: fully pedestrianized, air conditioned, lots of stores and dining options. Some places even put schools and post offices in their shopping malls. I would also expect that dwelling soundproofing to get better, because the paper-thin walls of American homes and apartments are awful.

In this way, malls are no different than casinos, cruise ships, and downtowns: a small island of paradise to visit, and is distinct from home. Malls will still exist after cars, the same way that Las Vegas exists in the middle of a desert: it is a big enough anchor that draws people.

Just those two things alone: freedom to hit the road & moving things are more massive than you even realize.

I have a small car, a Civic. I routinely buy beers from all over. Vast majority cannot be sold & shipped. And I don't believe for a minute the laws would change for me to shop online as easily as other stuff. And, that also includes the freedom of the road trip.