Check out the excellent "Not Just Bikes" and "Strong Towns" YT channels to know how dependant we are on cars (spoiler: a lot, unless you live in exceptional places like the Netherlands) and to see how we are still in time to build a better future.
How far in the future are we talking? It seems unlikely that we’ll manage to rebuild our infrastructure so that cars are no longer required in less than two generations.
Cars are necessary in modern society. Furze's stunts are not. We might reach a point in the far future where we are no longer reliant on cars, but we're not there yet.
I like the thinking. I visited the Netherlands, and some of the last mile vehicles I saw there are amazing. Think electrified cargo bikes - stunning and moz def the future :)
Most people still don’t own cars. Far from it. The key must be to ensure that billions of people don’t need to pass through the 1950-2000 infrastructure dead-end that e.g the US took, by betting on the car as the transportation mode of choice.
I should clarify: if it is our future, our future is grim.
I'm optimistic that anti car efforts will win out in the end as our message spreads and people's quality of life decreases hand in hand with even further trafficization of their lives.
What other times? People did not live in car centric societies before the 20th century. This is a relatively new problem, why do you think there were multiple attempts at solving it that did not work? The US has only gotten into this mess the last couple of generations.
And we can point to societies that were following a similar path, like the Netherlands, and then decided to stop and focus on a less car dependant society. It appears to be working over there.
Fascinating that your perspective and 'common sense' is to be the complete opposite to mine.
It is high time americans see the great future that is non-car focused but people orientated.
Or it's from a POV of a supper car dependent person living in a supper car dependent area where that seems like something which will happen if humanity has a "good" future.
> Can we challenge the assumption we need as many cars delivered in the future as we do now?
Personal transportation is a key driver of economic growth and prosperity. We should leverage technology to ensure that the cars that people need become ever more clean,
environmentally sustainable, and affordable.
Cars were fast, in the sixties and seventies. There was space on roads. I used to enjoy the "freedom of the open road". Miles of twisty roads with just a few roadblocks to navigate around. Even better on a motorbike...
Not any more. Now a car is an expensive pain in the ass and aside from in the early hours, roads are pretty much constantly full. Full enough that even a motorcycle isn't quite the fun or freedom it was when I passed my test 40 years ago.
Anything that reverses the trend to a car (self-driven or not) being a necessity is good in my book. I'd far rather have an infrastructure that promotes public transport and cycling like the Netherlands does.
The sooner we get back to streets safe for children to play in, the better.
I won't play tit-for-tat with equally emotive and useless links to stories about people having watches and wallets lifted at lights etc.
These are the sort of topics where the US-ness of HN really shines through. Though it’s true that if the alternatives to driving require infrastructure that does not exist in many places then they’re not really short-term solutions.
In fact I’d even say that people didn’t need cars but that cars created so much opportunities of extending human cities that once we got there, we made ourselves dependent of cars.
And in retrospection, it was hardly a good direction to take for our future.
So, well, it seems plausible that what people really needed was just better bikes and trains but that they all bought into the car "freedom" marketing.
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