Fuckcars is made up of people with little life experience who think they have all the answers, and people who fetishize city living and think it's normal or healthy for humans to live at a density like NYC (and fuck you if you disagree). They're oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness, and handwaving away the problems.
I feel like this point is missing the big picture: people create the demand, and companies supply what the market demands. Like or hate "the free market", this is essentially what it is. If there were magically 1/10th the number of humans on the planet, we would expect those companies to have 90% less emissions. It's not that some of these companies aren't bad actors, and have actions that are at times immoral, it's that they are amoral actors in a market economy that is only responsive to consumer demand.
The example I like to give is that companies' race to the bottom on quality. They're responding to human behavior, where if an item on Amazon is $6, and another very similar item is 10 cents cheaper, the cheaper item will sell 100x more. This is a brutal, cutthroat example of human behavior and market forces. It leads to shitty products because consumers are more responsive to price and find it hard to distinguish quality, so the market supplies superficially-passable junk at the lowest possible price and (with robust competition) the lowest possible profit margin.
You can’t fill up an EV at home if you rent, most of the time. Higher wattage charging requires a charger installation.
They really aren’t. I have a couple friends with them and they can go months without buying gas.
I’m one of those people, I guess, but I’m not such a Luddite that I don’t think electric is the way forward. Had to replace a very old car recently and low-end new was better than buying used. Bought a gas car that gets great fuel economy for a variety of very good reasons, but if I could have bought a Tesla made by Toyota/Honda, with huge range for economy car prices, I would probably have an EV.
Also worth noting: owning an EV is harder if you don’t own a house you can install charging hardware in.
I’m reluctant to litigate something unpopular on the internet for the purpose of collecting downvotes, and I think there’s low probability we’ll agree on the issue, but I’ll explain my rationale:
I lived in NYC. NYC is not exactly designed for walking or bikes, but there’s a strong case to be made that it has become a city in which cars are much less feasible than transit, walking, or biking. The sidewalks are all double-wide. If you order delivery, the delivery guy is on a bike. Nobody I knew owned a car, and none of us would have been able to afford the parking if we had. We walked to get groceries. It has subways, busses, and ferries that run very frequently. The subways run 24/7/365. In terms of density, NYC should be a best-case scenario for public transit.
The fact remains that if you wanted to LEAVE the city and go somewhere green with the ability to get away from people, it was 3x as long by public transit than it would have been by car. Minimum. And those places are far away. It’s a place designed to keep you there. And that’s just my point: I don’t want to feel like a sardine in a city packed with people, I want to get out into nature where I can be the only person for miles around.
This is probably impossible in the Netherlands, which is 92% urban and has an average population density of 1/2 NYC across the entire country. By comparison, the US is 0.6% as densely populated as the Netherlands.
Amsterdam is the city I see cited most often as being the model for a /c/fuckcars-approved world, but my basic thesis is that living in a place with 13,670 people per square mile, greatly diminished personal space (densified housing), and greatly diminished personal autonomy (the ability to leave), is approximately my definition of urban hell.
I submit that the population of the Northeast Megalopolis (containing NYC, DC, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore) is the stuff of dystopian hellscapes - FIFTY MILLION PEOPLE - and with an average population density of only 6.4% the density of the Netherlands (in other words, the same as Europe). It’s really hard there to find land in its natural state, which isn’t owned by someone - the best you can do is city parks or the equivalent. And while that’s a matter of personal preference, I see a feverish, unrelenting push by the younger generations, who didn’t grow up with cars-as-personal-freedom like the Boomers/GenX/Xennials did. In the US, young Millennials, gen Z, and beyond have decided that ultradense cities are great and cars are evil. I understand how they got to that conclusion, but to me it just looks like Eco-Austerity derived from urbanization, human overpopulation, and the lack of liberating personal-vehicular-experiences as a late teen and early adult.
Edit: When I was in high school, you could buy a well-used economy car that got 35mpg for $500-1k. Gas was a buck a gallon. Traveling 100+ miles to another state to explore rural areas with <1 person per SQ mile, for $3 in gas, all in a couple of hours was empowering. Being stuck in a manmade urban jungle is confining and I think people who lacked the opportunities I had will never understand.
Hell, I believe so much in personal vehicles and the autonomy they enable, I obtained a pilot’s license – something that is overwhelmingly difficult and expensive to do in overcrowded Europe, but for the time being still remains something you can achieve as a middle-class American in some places. I can go places far away without regard for transit schedules, routes, or finding hordes of people there when I arrive. It’s a very non-European experience, and I prefer it to being just another person in an ocean of continuous human habitation.
Single-family homes vs densified housing is an adjacent topic, and I don’t want to get too sidetracked, but suffice it to say that it was the yardstick of middle-class wealth in postwar America. To have your very own land and space, that was private, green, and notionally yours forever. And now thanks to perpetually ballooning city populations and demand for land in historically-occupied places forever outstripping supply, the younger generations are idolizing what amounts to apartment living. Personally, I couldn’t get away from apartments fast enough once my income allowed it. I still don’t know whether I’ll ever own a house, but if I never share a wall or floor with someone again, it will be too soon. I’m frustrated by this newfound need to do away with the tools of our personal independence, and at some level, I fundamentally can’t understand it. It frustrates me almost daily to run into anti-car, pro-urban zealots online, and I think they’re misguided. They’re all either mega extroverts, or don’t have a clue what they’re missing through lack of personal experience.
You almost wonder if these opinions are a product of very clever propaganda. “You will own nothing and you will be happy”. No personal transportation, no public land, and rent an apartment forever to enrich corporate landlords. Stuck in the city, owning nothing of substance, with limited personal freedom because there are just too many people. Just more consumers for capitalism.
Part of using public transport is that you need to share it with the public, which is why I broadly detest it and cannot comprehend the fuck cars weirdos.
Couldn’t agree more. The anti car movement among young millennials and Gen Z is weird as hell to me. I’ve lived in a large city and taken well designed public transit for years. Compared to living in a small city and driving, it’s awful - so I left. There’s a literal loss of freedom and autonomy that comes with it, and I can’t fathom why the younger crowd wants to live in crowded apartments and post angry screeds to r/fuckcars. I like walking and hiking and biking too! I have no desire to do it in a city, so I have to drive somewhere uncrowded to do it. If public transit served those places, they would be crowded.
What's far less dense with better public transit than NYC? The most popular example of no-car city design I see is Amsterdam, which is 1/2 the density of NYC, but still 15x the density of where I'm from (not even close to a rural area). I think robust public transit at 1/15th the density of Amsterdam and 1/30th the density of NYC is a pipe dream.
In these lower density places, maybe you luck out and you're walking or biking distance to work. If you change jobs do you have to move instead of hopping in the car and commuting a bit further? In circumstances like these, transit can't possibly serve every origin and destination efficiently, and personal vehicles can offer efficient point to point.