Taking this freedom away from people is divisive, bordering on hostile.
Ideologues in metropolitan bubbles talk a lot about getting rid of cars. They disregard, either ignorantly or willfully, the needs of everyone outside their bubble.
Car shares give people this freedom, but for less money.
Despite these "bubbles" in metropolitan areas, they are still ruined by ever present cars.
So you want a car? Great, go live in the 100% of the country that caters to your every need, by law. But please don't get in the way of others that want to build their own paradise. It doesn't concern you and you should mind your own business.
But they evidently don't, because people prefer to own cars, and that's why they own cars.
Don't condescend people by pretending you know what's best for them.
Housing expenses are a complex system including a balance/imbalance of supply and demand. If suburbs are cheaper like-for-like, that's an indication (but not proof) that there's more supply in suburbs than demand relative to a style of living that's more expensive. Housing preferences are very much multi-dimensional, of which car vs non-car mobility is but one factor. Quality of schools, availability of jobs, need/desire for large amounts of interior or private exterior space, quiet, ease of resale, and hundreds of other factors conspire to set an individual household's willingness/preference to live in a place.
Where it does conflict, it is my business and I have the same right to engage in the discussion as you do.
However it shouldn't be necessary for me to walk in a ditch along a high speed road with no sidewalk just to get to the grocery that is less than half a mile away.
Oh and by the way, I drive an electric car, so I don't produce any emissions in the residential areas I drive in (although like all goods, some one-off emissions were produced during manufacture)
The large majority of the cost of roads is a sunk cost, because regardless of whether cars are used for individual transportation, roads would still be needed for delivery trucks, buses and emergency vehicles. The incremental cost of an additional car is generally not going to be more than what the car owner is paying in fuel taxes and property taxes on it.
> or the parking, or the zoning requirements which force almost every property owner to subsidize your transportation choice.
These are both the same thing. If you live in the suburbs, you paid for the space where you park your car. The actual problem is minimum parking requirements in cities, which are stupid and should be gotten rid of, but even if you did there would still be many people who want cars and choose housing that provides parking.
> You aren’t paying for the additional healthcare required for the people who live around where you drive
Modern cars are pretty clean in terms of particulate emissions, to the point that the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air that went into the engine in some of the cities with dirtier air.
> or compensating them for the lowered quality of life
This isn't math. Are you proposing to compensate them for the lowered qualify of life of not having a car? If someone else has kids, do I get to bill them for the cost of having to compete with their kids for scarce resources? Or should I bill them for not having kids and depriving society of their contributions?
Everything everybody does affects the whole of society. At some point you either have to accept that they'll make choices you don't like and in exchange you get to make choices they don't like, or you have to embrace totalitarianism, in which one person gets to make decisions they like and if anybody else doesn't like it they can go to prison.
> or compensating for the impact your much greater carbon emissions profile has on the entire planet.
This isn't really a cars thing, it's a burning fossil fuels thing. You can perfectly well charge an electric car entirely from solar panels.
You might be unfamiliar with it but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. There’s a long academic literature around the cost of road infrastructure to the adjacent communities, and how that’s been disproportionately borne by people who are poor, undervalued minorities, etc. The average American city has a significant fraction of its area committed to car infrastructure for people who don’t live or pay taxes there, and it’s their communities divided by highways or unsafe high-speed roads, their health being lowered by the constant noise, their kids getting asthma at higher rates, and their families having to live with the consequences of fatal car crashes.
Of course living near an overpass isn't any fun. So why do they do it? Because it's cheaper. But if you got rid of the overpass, it wouldn't be cheaper anymore, some upper-middle class professionals would move in there and the poor would have to go find some place they could still afford to live, which will be at least as bad or less affordable or else they'd have already moved there as it is.
The actual problem isn't the overpass, it's the undersupply of housing that isn't next to an overpass. Build enough that they can afford to live someplace nice and they would. Meanwhile you can put industrial plants and warehouses and railroads and power lines next to the overpass instead of residential housing.
When at home I park on the driveway, which I paid a premium for when buying my house.
If that wasn't authoritarian "re-education" to make choices that /motordom/ considered better, then what was it?