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The car is not the future: On the myth of motorized freedom
66 electricant 93 9/1/2025, 4:51:14 PM blog.scaramuzza.me ↗
That's probably why they have so much ridership.
My ideal city of the future is a small walkable town with everything within a 15-20 minute walk, possibly a part of a conglomerate of towns that run trains or buses between them.
I currently live in one such historical town in Southern Europe that's protected by Unesco. The streets are so narrow that not only there's no public transport, all non-resident and non-delivery traffic is prohibited and there's no Uber even. And yet you have everything you need for life and work within a 15-20 minute walk max. More for remote work, obviously.
An ideal city of the future doesn't need to be medieval but maybe we should go back to a city planning concept that is made for humans and not cars. And you know, narrow pedestrian streets are totally fine, they are cute!
Ah yeah sure I'll just find work in a place and then buy a house there. It's not like 3+ decades of mismanagement on migration and internal policies left even places 30+ minutes by car from work unafforable by mere mortals.
Very many people, including me, want to live in a glorious walkable bijou old-town stone apartment, except they can't afford to because they stopped building them like that in about 1756 and the only jobs within walking distance of the old town are in hospitality and those do not pay the salaries to buy one of the treasured old town apartments from under an AirBnB host.
And if it's a really small, non-tourist town in the middle of nowhere, it may not even have the hospitality sector. So, yes, that bijou property may indeed only cost 50,000 euros, and yes, you can walk to the boulangerie or the confitería or whatever but you're probably going to need a car to get out of your tiny town and go to work or basically anywhere else.
There's lots of solutions.
I always sort of assume people who are into de-urbanization are also de-dev, because I don't see how or why the large-scale industrial base would be needed or could be sustained with only smaller, distributed cities, but it's interesting to hear another perspective.
That doesn't make sense to me. Medieval towns existed for centuries before industrial civilization and without it we might see a drastic increase in medieval style living...
In any case the poster is talking about their own ideal future scenario, maybe leaving out the details like the robots working in underground manufacturing facilities or fusion-powered hydroponic vertical farms etc.
...or just any kind of remote work. Still limited, not available to everyone obviously but can't be omitted.
In other words, I could not use the service in any honest sense.
Perhaps a nice future is a hybrid model of public transportation plus personal transport via bicycles and scooters, especially with battery powered options becoming so robust.
Categorically this isn't true, I easily found good and affordable public transport in smaller towns. It's definitely less common, but to bluntly say that only first and second tier cities have gold and affordable public transport is inaccurate and dismissive.
Sure, cars can also be stolen. But modern cars are now fairly theft resistant and police at least take it seriously as a crime.
Also it it me or are "just have walkable/bikeable cities people" more obnoxious than vegan speed cyclists
But anyway, I'm purposely staying away from discussing politics here since it's pointless, so I'll just share my experience as a public transport end-user, and the rest can fill in the gaps with their perspectives.
Civic and national pride makes citizens (which includes politicians and the wealthy) more likely to care about the actual state of their country. That's what national pride means, as opposed to nationalism, where they are proud without reason. Is public transit guaranteed to be one of those reasons they feel pride or shame? Not at all, but support for it is certainly more likely to come from that than a bunch of nationalists who don't actually feel any shame at failings of the country, of which public transit is currently.
The current Mayor, whilst still a proponent, likely does not use it. A quick glance at the social media that he recieves will tell you why - it would not be safe. He needs to travel with close protection officers.
The reason? He is Muslim, and Britain has become a very racist country indeed. Well, maybe always was, but the likes of Farage and Musk have so emboldened them that there is no longer a stigma.
Well, if they are living in such fear, they know what they can do.
Conversely, “public” transportation always needs flawless perfect politicians to continue to fund it
Instead you are just saying: OK, I have the resources to fix the problem for myself, so I don't give a F.
On top of that, what's your proposal? Whether I use it (and be miserable) or not doesn't move the needle either way, so I choose not to be miserable.
If there were actually a way to make it better, I'd maybe get involved. But since I see zero options, I just stay away from it. Virtue signaling doesn't work for me.
when looking at the above, most people live in a couple situation so think of it as selling one car and keeping the other - it still saves money and you get the best of both worlds. This only works though if transit is getting that money from everyone already though since you need that much before it is useful to those who would pay.
Thus: more resources go towards those places with insane house prices, leaving everyone and everything else behind. The problem isn't public transit, it's the wealthy.
Public transport ist great to connect cities, and perhaps districts. Beyound that, it quickly hits diminishing returns. It's prohibitly expensive to connect at a city block level, and even more expensive to connect rural towns. And Austria recently started doing very odd things. We are now building train stations in the middle of nowhere, not connected to any town. They are not meant to become new city centers, they are meant to be accessed via cars. They are useless for car-free people, and people with cars almost exclusively continue to commute the entire way by car.
In any case, the Netherlands is where I really got a sense of true mobility-freedom. You can get absolutely everywhere cheaply, safely and comfortably by bicycle. I've never before experienced such relaxing commutes as cycling along rivers and through meadows to work, then taking a detour through woods and parks on the way back home.
Bicycling is a great solution for some people in some cities, but it's not going to work as well everywhere or for everyone. Public transit, cars, walking, etc. will all have to continue being part of the mix.
Air pollution is the same in a car or outside, no? Most cars don't have HEPA filters. At least on a bike you're getting exercise
When I lived in a major city, I went 10 years without owning a car. Should I for whatever reason need a car, I could rent one. But other than that, public transportation, walking, and biking for me. Hell, I often preferred public transportation over a car.
But as soon as I moved back home, a rural area, a car has more or less become a life necessity. I simply can't imagine living out in rural nowhere without a car, it would be such a hassle. Where I live a bus goes 3 times a day to the neighboring towns, that's it.
It really depends on where you live, and what your logistical situation looks like.
But most of the US this is impossible by design. Where I grew up you might live right next to a grocery store- but it is a mile walk because of the wall and road design. Nuts.
But the transport infrastructure isn't an immutable property of the land, it's collectively-planned-and-built infrastructure. So the most convenient mode of transportation will settle into an equilibrium as the initial investment begets convenience, begetting more people choosing that method, begetting more investment and planning of towns and cities to accommodate that transportation method.
Then there are two to four months in a year when there is no transport except a single emergency services hoverboat while the ice settles or melts. Depending if it didn't break down, there isn't any emergency elsewhere, and a host of lesser things, like hovercraft travel isn't exactly cheap or fuel-efficient.
And then snowmobiles in winter. But also cars, if you're not afraid enough to test the ice thickness by driving on it.
That is an immutable property of the land.
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And there is a bus shows up about once every four hours.
While cities can do a lot to improve the non-car experience, there’s a whole world outside those cities which would become inaccessible without a car. These are generally the “affordable” places to live in order to work in the city.
Focus on improving where you live, I do, but when you live in a city, recognize that improvements need to take into account those who don’t live there. The city is where they work, go to school, shop, and often interact with government functions.
Getting rid of dumb laws I can totally get behind as someone who walks daily.
Feel free to keep arguing how things radically changed just for cars. But they didn't.
- parking mandates that push everything very far apart because parking takes up a lot of space
- zoning restrictions that necessitate distant travel because your home is in a different sector of the city as your place of work, the grocery store, and places of leisure
- the disassembly of public transport systems after the war
- street design that makes it simply dangerous to travel on foot or on a bicycle, and extremely slow, because cars receive priority at all junctions
etc. etc.
etc. etc.
You and others in this thread are arguing about _where I live_. Don't you find that a tad silly? I haven't even named the town, you have no ability to research it, and the historical docs are all located at the local library and history museum.
This is a great place to be a ped and driving is a requirement. Maybe this is the golden holy land of mixed-use roads, or something.
It's a bedroom community, there are approximately 1000 jobs in total most of which reside within the school district. The purpose of the town as it stands is to raise kids and retire. Commuting to work is a requirement.
Times change, requirements change, and needs change. This isn't the 1880s, but the physical layout of the town is largely the same with the same roads. There was no "planning" for the Model T [cars] as you're attempting to argue -- it was already laid out like it is for the horse, cart, and carriage.
It's also possible to have rural areas accessible by transit. If you ever visit Japan or Switzerland, you'll find a robust and convenient bus and train network that will take you all the way into very small towns.
The world outside cities is inaccessible without a car only because we've built it that way. It doesn't have to be built that way! It's not a law of nature. There are other ways to build it!
If the cars weren't there, gangs of bandits would be. Bandits were a common threat to people living outside cities. If you didn't carry a gun or a sword out in the country, you were practically on your own against a possibly large number of criminals.
Public transport is great in theory only. With actual human societies - maybe the western ones, that is, except China/Japan - it just doesn't work. Corruption, laziness, bureaucracy, lack of proper planning and security makes the creation and maintenance of these projects unsustainable and so much worse compared to personal transport. This only isn't true for million+ metropolises due to physical constrains.
You may frown at the traffic jams with SUVs having a single driver, but building additional highways is easily doable around the world, while any sort of mass transit infrastructure projects seem to take decades, billions, while still end up underwhelming - if not instantly, then after the machinery ages or maintainers change.
I never felt the need to have a car in most of Europe, so didn’t even bother to get a driving license. Urban population is 75% on average, so reaching rural or uninhabited areas is almost an edge case (at least for me). So it is not theoretical, it works great, even if it is not reaching the perfection of Japan. Looking at two of my favorite cities, Berlin and Moscow, I find that they are spending reasonably on expanding networks (and the most recent highway project in Berlin — extension of A100 — was very expensive and stupid, looking at the traffic jams there).
I feel like this is a naive take, and making some assumptions that may not be true.
I feel like this has less to do with preferring other modes of transportation over driving, as much as it has to do with not wanting/needing to go anywhere, particularly outside of the city. You can do most things without even needing to leave home, especially when you’re young.
You don’t need to meet in person with your friends to socialize. You can text, use social media, play only games, etc.
My young adult children both have licenses, but they have found it hard to get their friends to want to hang out. They’d rather stay home and stay on their devices.
I also noticed that the gen z is less interested in having a car, but as far as I can see it's more a shift of attitude about independence and a lot also because it's more expensive now to have a car.
It depends. My favorite destinations on German Baltic coast have enough bus and local train coverage to get in nearly every interesting location. You only need to know the schedule and plan accordingly, and it’s not bad experience traveling like that.
My wife has a handicapped tag. Freedom for her doesn't look like walking.
My mother in law is over 80, and she had polio. One leg is not fully functional. Freedom for her doesn't look like walking.
My son-in-law has something that looks a lot like long covid (not diagnosed, so I can't say with certainty). Freedom for him doesn't look like walking.
Yeah, I know, everyone I mentioned is an exception. But the point is, there are a lot of exceptions. Not just rural people (who have too far to go), but also the old, the temporarily or permanently ill, the handicapped. If you live long enough, you will probably become one.
So, it's fine to want a car-less future, but recognize that it's just less cars, not no cars. Some of us legitimately need them for our freedom.
One could certainly argue "but it's not convenient in my area; the train doesn't have level boarding, the bus comes too infrequently and gets stuck in the same traffic jams, the stations don't have bathrooms". That's a symptom of low investment, which is a symptom of low ridership, which is a symptom of car dependency, and so on.
For millions of people, a car isn’t a trap or a luxur. It’s survival, opportunity, and dignity. Cities may be able to rethink their dependence on cars, but for everyone else, the car is still the bridge to basic participation in life.
That's an interesting way to look at compressed horse shit with streams of human waste running over the top of it.
Bear in mind the invention of sidewalks predates the automobile by thousands of years.
The car is clearly not the best way to navigate a dense city. It is impractical to have, say, tower block apartments and also have a car for each resident. It is unreasonable to build enough parking for peak time around every destination that anyone might want to go to.
On the flip side - not everyone wants to live in a dense city, and people's opinions on this change throughout their lives. It was profit maximising and also a lot of fun for me to live in the inner city in my early to mid 20's. Now that I can afford to not maximally push my career I prefer the outer parts of the city / more rural areas, and that's where the car shines.
If you look at the cost of living in an urban area it’s clear there is a lot of demand. Rural is cheaper because most people don’t want a long commute.
There is more money available to chase housing in urban areas because it's where most of the jobs are due to network effects, so if you are a labourer you gravitate towards that (as you say, it's a commute thing).
It's not necessarily intrinsically more desirable. If you gave the average person 5 million quid I don't think they would choose to live in Central London.