>How can it be that private property – the car – occupies the public space?
Regardless of what you think of this policy, this is the level of reasoning of a 14 year old.
Regardless of what you think of this policy, this is the level of reasoning of a 14 year old.
I read this as more that we can't just default to subsidising private cars in a public space. Roads, parking and other infrastructure that de facto subsidize and encourage private car usage but which often are considered "free".
We finance the baseline of education/transportation infrastructure from public funds because we believe that improves productivity, and performance of civic duties in a democracy across the board. Purely privately owned education/transportation is politically contentious for various reasons, right? Enclosure of the commons, economic inequality, limited avenues for upward mobility and all that, right?
Lastly, a pedestrian on city-founded sidewalks is "a private citizen occupying public space" just as well. There's no moral qualitative difference between an individual pedestrian, an individual on a bicycle, an individual in a car [1], or a group of individuals in a tram or bus. We can argue about occupancy and all that, but that's just quantitative difference of maybe an order of magnitude at worst. The use of public space should should primarily support the main activities of the general public.
[1] pollution from ICEs aside, but we're on track to fix that permanently.
A simple requirement would be a strict upper limit of 1m²/passenger at all times for vehicles and pedestrians. Trivial to fulfil for considerate means of transportation and quite impossible if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you.
I beg to differ - this doesn't gracefully handles special cases. Both my disabled neighbor or my friend taken by ambulance to the hospital (made up examples) would fare far worse than in the current system.
We already have have a better system to divide that among people - those who care highly about particular issue can reserve more space or whatever with small green tokens.
>if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you
An easy snark, but this two tonnes[1] reliably brings home a week worth of groceries, drives me 2hrs to meet family, and occasionally delivers tools and materials to various points. All that on the cheap, and with easily calculable costs. Prohibiting it by governmental fiat would surely give us various nice well understood savings, but would cause a lot of loss, both direct and via lost opportunities. I'd be much more reliant on service providers - typically large companies - that would provide the service at the time, cost and quality level I would have little to no control over.
Thanks, but no thanks; I don't want to be any more dependent on goodwill of businesses than I already am.
[1] 1090kg in my case, to be exact.
All the talk of banning cars seems to come from people so privileged that other people invisibly provide all the services of the road network to them, delivering their stuff and so on. I mean if a person’s entire life is based on Netflix and Amazon and Uber Eats in an apartment full of stuff that just magically appeared sure they don’t need a car, and no one is forcing them to buy one. But they are so vocal that everyone who hasn’t chosen that lifestyle should be penalised, and they can’t even clearly articulate the alternatives. An hour outside London “public transport” is one bus in the morning and another in the afternoon. But yeah, let’s all get self-driving trams or something on every B-road...
Right now I enjoy the perks of having everything near by in the city center, but if my city went pedestrian-first, I would move to the countryside and simply drive to customers when the need occasionally be. But that's feasible only because after all those years, only since I'm in senior technical position in knowledge based sector, and could easily work remotely, and also could work 20hrs-week and earn well enough.
But that's not possible for everybody right now.
No such luck for young people who are just launching their careers, or who are for whatever reason having local responsibilities like, for example, a sick parent. Doubly no such luck for people in service economy "gigs", working for peanuts and by necessity having to perform labor at their workplaces.
Truly, a perspective of privilege.
Taxes on fuel raise £50Bn/year for the exchequer, which is double the amount spent by the government on all transportation of all kinds. No one considers it to be “free”, and in fact drivers subsidise everything else.
How many lives has the road system saved, by the way? What do ambulances drive on? Or even ordinary drivers taking sick or injured relatives to the hospital themselves?
Which it is fine.
But unless you are totally naked, your body (not your private property) is covered by your private property and/or carries it.
It is clear that a car occupies a lot more space than your clothes and carry-on belongings, but as said earlier that is only quantitative and not qualitative.
And cars don't kill people (yet), their drivers may.
Of course, I would say that this is an excellent use of public space as opposed to infrastructure dedicated to cars.