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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

Great idea but not going to work. Even in Japan, ~70% of households own a car. They serve a vital component of transportation that is not easily substituted for.

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Ownership and use are two totally different things though. I lived with a wealthy family in Hamburg and they owned 2 cars and a vacation home in Southern Germany… and they seldom drove except to the house in the South (sometimes) and, maybe, once a month for a big grocery run. The kids rode bikes to school, the couple took the U-Bahn to work. I saw the same things in Spain and Switzerland. Obviously these are just anecdotes, but the fact is that the super-majority of developed countries do a much better job at creating infrastructure to avoid car-use than the US. I would wager Japan is similar. I quick google search tells me the average Japanese car owner drives about 3,700 miles vs the average American driving over 13,000 miles a year.

Yep. I own a car and a fuel tank ladts 2-3 months. Berlin has great public transportation and is quite bikeable.

I would like to add to that, that this is not true for the country side. At least in Germany. Public transport is pretty much non existent there, e.g. (anecdotal) a part of my family lives in a village with ~4000 inhabitants. To get to the next bigger city there is one bus that goes in the morning and one that goes back in the afternoon. That is it. If you want to go to dinner or visit someone after that, you need a car or go by bike 15km one way.

Japan has a car to household ratio of 1.06, compared to America's 1.88 average per household.

South Korea has even fewer. Let's set the first goal at one car per household, and supplement everything beyond that with transit and electric bikes.

One car per family is doable, even in the US. We did it for a while and then got ourselves a Golf.

Even after we moved to the suburbs, and the Golf was in the shop (deer) for a month (supply chain), it wasnt so bad.

The secret?

My other car is a 7 seater SUV with a 3.3L V6 that can tow 5000 lb. Its big enough that it can do anything I might need it to do.

Getting the golf, ironically, lowered our fuel consumption because the golf can do 70% of what we'd use the SUV for. But, because of that remaining 30%, I'm keeping the SUV.

So its not obvious that simply lowering average numbers of cars per household improves anything.

Btw, replacing my Golf with an F150 hybrid would probably lower my fuel usage.

US is clearly the outlier in automobile dependency, no argument there.

What does car per household have to do with anything? I can have 12 cars and never drive, one car and be on the road 24/7.

A drop in the average to one car per household implies a significant reduction in the number of cars on the road. Right now, it's not uncommon to have two family members commute by car every day.

Yes, there will always be outliers, but I care about the average case.

if you don't care about outliers, then don't quote data that does. Outliers are everything, and without them being stripped the data is meaningless.

I would venture to say there is a higher correlation between wealth to cars, than driving to cars. I would futher venture that if you have 4+ cars, you do less driving than the average person who only has one car per household.

I have 17 Tesla's that i rent out on Eturo. I work remotely in downtown chicago and i literally never drive.

You are arguing with a strawman. I don't care about any individual. Your business might own 17 cars, fine.

But like, the world in which the average cars per household is 1.0 is one where there are a lot fewer cars on the road. I'm not sure why that's controversial to you?

What are the means by which a team of 150 can make progress over two years towards that goal?

Such a team can work on improving EC technology. It cannot meaningfully make progress on reconfiguring a city like Houston or Los Angeles or San Francisco.

Were I live there is a dire need for planners in city offices that do the paper work for opening bike lanes and improving public transport. I think there are only a dozen or two for the whole city. 150 people doing that absolutely would make a difference.

I stand corrected. It would be good to make things like this more widely known.

Look at Google's Environmental Insight Explorer. I'm sure that's less than 150 people and it's doing incredible work to help cities with legislation, transportation, and energy. https://insights.sustainability.google/

Electric bikes are more akin to scooters and mopeds. A quick look at Asian cities and comparing them to Copenhagen and Amsterdam shows the difference between the two. Riding old-fashioned bicycles would do most Americans some much needed good.

Electric bikes still require pedaling and have been demonstrated to be aerobic exercise. If Americans rode e bikes everywhere, we'd have a huge improvement in health.

Why not both?

Many folks on here have hobbies that just are not public-transit friendly, e.g. windsurfing for me. However, I would love it if I didn't have to drive between my urban area and an adjacent one because of the dearth of public transit options (besides the even worse option of teensy flights).

Tons of people in Japan own cars and don't drive them very much; they're for weekend trips to the mountains, going to Costco, etc., not for going to work every day. 1/3 of the population lives in the greater Tokyo metro area, and there simply isn't very much parking anywhere in the city. But single-family houses usually have a tiny garage underneath.

> Even in Japan, ~70% of households own a car.

I'd recommend looking up the average japanese car vs the average american car

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