More anti-car rhetoric from the globalist academics... No thanks, I'd rather live a life I enjoy than what they think, even if it's more dangerous. Large-scale personal autonomy is precisely what they are most afraid of.
Personal autonomy? The car is your ball and chain. It's pretty common to hear about people wholly avoiding parts of town because the parking is annoying for example. Now everywhere you go in live you have to find a spot to legally keep this huge hunk of metal. Meanwhile, with a bike, I'm finding its often the fastest vehicle in town when there's any surface street gridlocking going on. I can filter past all the traffic to the front of the intersection, I'm always going the same speed no matter traffic and don't have to plan for it at all. I can park wherever for free and sometimes can even just bring the bike inside.
I can't mind-read the motivations of the academics here, but I do think the concept of the plebs having great personal mobility has been strangely under disfavor in recent years. As just one example, we saw during the biggest hysteria periods during Covid that people weren't allowed to leave too far from their homes.
The personal mobility and freedom for all you claim to love looks like a Renault Twizy or a 5kW electric motorbike or a velomobile with a 500W motor as well as walking, bikes and a functional transit system.
SUVs and 'Trucks' are just a danger and direct harm to your neighbors and subsidizing them imposes a massive burden on the people paying for the vast swathes of asphalt, inflation of infrastructure costs and medical care they entail. They limit mobility rather than enabling it because they require any spaces which they dominate to be made impassible without a giant protective metal shell They're so destructive and awful to be near that entire neighborhoods need to be redesigned to get them away from the residents as quickly as possible when in use. This results in requiring any worthwhile destination to be removed so that cars do not come towards residences.
The personal mobility and freedom for all you claim to love looks like a Renault Twizy or a 5kW electric motorbike or a velomobile with a 500W motor as well as walking, bikes and a functional transit system.
A cross country trip in a velo with 500W for the hills and no cars to run me over would be great. There are some rather indirect trails around me that are really nice out to about 300km, but they stop just short of the most interesting destinations.
If the extra 40% or so vs a velo or 25% vs a LEV of time on a very long trip matters then it sounds like a high speed train would save significantly more. Either option sounds better than a car which might travel slower than a velo's average unassisted speed due to traffic so you have to budget the time anyway and then be stressed the whole way.
I'd invite clarification, if you care to respond. I'm not sure if you're making an argument against the concept of car ownership in general, or instead advocating to deemphasize their importance in peoples' lives and redesigning transit and neighborhoods to be better and more pleasant without cars (a general goal which I think most people would aspire towards).
The end goal should be allowing people to not have cars if they wish to live that lifestyle, and not taxing (either directly or via things like parking minimums and other externalities) non car owners for cars that make their lives worse.
It is impossible for everyone in an urban environment to drive (you wind up with the katy freeway if you try and it still doesn't work), so just make the bare minimum concessions of space and priority to allow those people who don't want to be in a car to get out of your way, and pay the whole costs of your driving (which are presently on the order of a dollar a mile, but would also go down with more equal use).
Just my 2 cents, but with some of the posts in this thread you're actually advocating a position that I think many/most people would largely agree with you on and then snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by making it sound awful with your overall tone and persuasion.
For instance, you might not love them, but there's good roles that SUVs and trucks can fulfill to enrich peoples' lives. They're tools that can help you do good things like build a garden or deck, move or pull the supplies needed to enjoy an extended camping trip, or many other nice things that cannot be done on a scooter or moped.
To your last paragraph, you can actually rent a substantial work truck from Home Depot.
I think a lot of the argument comes down to the idea of using the right tool for the job. Look around at the people sitting in traffic with you. Some are filling their truck beds with stuff, sure, but plenty of others are not, and are driving with one occupant. Suddently you don't need all those seats or that towing capacity to pick up a bag of coffee, like you don't need an octocore processor to run your hello world script. Maybe you can get away with an ebike and a cargo rack, and orders of magnitude less energy spent to do the same work of you getting that bag of coffee.
You'd put even less wear on your other vehicles, like that work truck you really need once or twice a month by not using them every day for all other tasks you do in life. Maybe that work truck you own can now last 10x as long in your hands with the lightened use it now sees. That means you can now own a work truck while consuming 1/10th the resources it takes to keep up a steady supply of work trucks for yourself from the environment. That's huge.
The response is the same no matter how polite you are, so I'd rather normalise ridiculing ridiculous positions like the apparent absolute necessity of being able to move a piece of plywood no matter when and no matter where you are at any cost including trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives each year.
