I’m getting a lot of ‘but my car is more convenient’ arguments lately, and I’m struggling to convey why that doesn’t make sense.

Specifically how to explain to people that: Sure, if you are able to drive, and can afford it, and your city is designed to, and subsidizes making it easy to drive and park, then it’s convenient. But if everyone does it then it quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons situation.

I thought of one analogy that is: It would be ‘more convenient’ if I just threw my trash out the window, but if we all started doing that then we’d quickly end up in a mess.

But I feel like that doesn’t quite get at the essence of it. Any other ideas?

  • Traister101
    link
    fedilink
    English
    19 months ago

    Congrats you have discovered what’s called a systemic issue

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      19 months ago

      The fact remains that “resolve the infrastructure” can’t work in a lot of the places where infrastructure doesn’t yet exist without mass forced relocations. So sure, the distribution of people and likely destinations may be a “systemic problem”, but one for which “build more infrastructure” is an inadequate answer.

      Also, for a lot of places, the problematic scale of cars doesn’t come into play, so you don’t need to fix those. Energy is best spent identifying where the scale of cars does present an issue, refining that infrastructure, with a plan that includes how people transition between “car land”, “mass transit”, and “walkable”. In a place where it’s rural, then instead of a particular 25 mile trip being 2 or 3 people in a car, it would hypothetically become 2 or 3 people in an otherwise vacant bus, likely having to waste energy stopping at empty stops just in case, to stay on schedule. This is way worse than a car when so lightly loaded (particularly since the circuit may have the busses driving around vacant).