A City Without Cars Is Already Here, and It’s Idyllic
If a city does not overbuild and reach high density beyond the capacity of infrastructure, then cars remain by far the best mode of transport. They are point to point, with no wait times, no schedules, no stops, with higher travel speeds, and can take you outside of the city core to other destinations. The time saved and ability to take people and things directly to any destination leads to a far richer life than we could live otherwise.<p>The negatives of cars seem exaggerated by articles like this and urbanist activists in general. I live in a city with mostly cars and don’t notice either the pollution or noise. Modern cars have very little pollution simply due to regulation, and I certainly don’t smell any pollution when I ride in bike lanes on busy streets. The noise is also pretty negligent unless you live right next to the highway, which most people don’t. Cars today are also incredibly safe, with only around 1 fatality per 100 million miles traveled, and provide far more utility back to society than this minor cost. Additionally with driver assistance technologies becoming standard, their safety will increase dramatically. Cars bring more communities together because neighborhoods are more accessible to each other.<p>These daily articles pushing an anti-car sentiment ultimately seem very one sided and childishly idealistic. For example this particular article doesn’t mention what the trade offs are in Slovenia. It claims residents adapted but has no data to establish if they are happy or unhappy with changes, if they are even the same residents as before, if living within a 15 minute radius has limited their choices, if how they spend time has changed for the worse, and so on. It similarly lacks data for those who live outside this core area but used to visit it regularly before the changes. It’s hard to draw any useful conclusion from such a simplistic and biased take.